The AI Mistakes CROs Keep Making with Jonathan Kvarfordt

Jonathan Kvarfordt: I teach an AI strategy course too, and it's usually CROs and one of the first questions they ask me before we start is what tool should I get? And I think people expect that they can just turn on a tool and all of a sudden transformation happens. They magically have, you know, 50% more pipeline as a result. It doesn't work that way. If all you're doing is giving a tool to help someone write an email faster or send them off faster, you're not going to have organizational or revenue transformation as a result. Each brand, in my opinion, has to decide what experience they want their buyers to go through and then where's the best, best place to put the humans they can be optimized the best possible way. So once they identified that, they mapped out their plan, which took a month to do, and they had two SDRs doing the same amount of pipeline gen as 15 before by month two and then by month four they had four SDRs doing 30% of pipeline gen which by the way marketing didn't slow down so they had amplified and built more pipeline as a result by blowing up what they're doing before and starting from scratch doing exactly what I'm talking about.

Eddie: Welcome to Go to Market Science. In this podcast we share are tangible, actionable playbooks from the trenches working as Go to Market Strategy and rev ops consultants for our clients here at Union Square Consulting, and candid conversations with revenue leaders in the market that have been there. Now let's get into it. All right, welcome to a new episode of Go to Market Science. Today we're going to talk about the mistakes that SEO's are making with go to market AI. Our special guest today is Jonathan Carford, VP of Marketing at OneMind recently. Soon to be. I don't know. We'll find out in a minute. Here's the little elevator pitch on this episode and what we're going to cover. So first, Jonathan has a wealth of experience in Go to Market AI. Coming off a stint as VP of Go to Market Strategy and Marketing at Momentum, an incredibly exciting AI company just acquired by Salesforce. He hosts the Go to Market AI podcast. He's the CEO and I love this title. Chief AI Nerd at the Go to Market AI Academy, an educational platform dedicated to empowering Go to Market professionals with cutting edge AI insights and strategies. Today we're going to dive into mistakes that searchers are making with AI things he's seen firsthand in his work. Across all of the things I just mentioned, as well as success stories Jonathan has seen firsthand as well. So thank you for joining me, Eddie.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: I'm a huge fan and I just want to say thank you so much for having me. And to the audience listening, thank you so much for taking a second. Are you. A busy day to listen, so just much appreciated. Very humbled to be here.

Eddie: I love that you say you're a huge fan. It's, uh, you know, massive, like imposter syndrome when I get that kind of feedback from folks like yourself. Uh, and, uh, it's, it's, it's awesome to hear. So you have a wealth of for

Jonathan Kvarfordt: real when you reach out to me, say, hey, you want to come on the podcast? Like, the Eddie wants to be on his podcast. I'm honored. Like, yeah, I was excited.

Eddie: Oh, uh, come on. Um, well, anyway, I'm excited to dive into it, so let's just like get right into it. One of the things you mentioned on our prep call was, no, um, transformational change is going to come from sending emails faster. I got a bunch of questions for you, but let's just dive into that. What did you mean when you said you're not going to have transformational change from sending emails faster?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Yeah, it's, it's both sending, um, or writing emails faster. And I say that because I, I see a lot of companies right now who throw a ChatGPT team license or a co pilot license at their team and don't provide any training and not a lot of context. Say, here's this cool AI tool, go transform yourself. And no one knows how to use it. And really what people do is they just write or send more emails without having good prompts, driving it without having context, with no training, and the tools are just not well used. Like, people expect this amazing transformation in their organizations without thinking about what they're willing to transform besides just giving a tool, you know what I mean? And it's interesting how I had a lot of people who come to me, like at the CEO level. Um, there's a community, I teach, um, um, an AI strategy course too. And it's usually CROs who come and attend. And we're talking like 20 million to 200 million plus type orgs. And one of the first questions they ask me before we start is, what tool should I get? And I always tell people like, that's not, I wouldn't say it's a bad question. It's just the wrong place to begin, you know? And I think people expect that they can just turn on a tool and all of a sudden transformation happens. They magically have, you know, 50% more pipeline as a result. It doesn't work that way. And I think that going back to the point of the question you ask, which is, if all you're doing is giving a tool to help someone write an email faster or send them off faster, you're not going to have organizational or revenue transformation as a result. You have to think differently.

Eddie: I couldn't agree with that more. And it just reminds me, and we also work with companies of that size, like typically 5, 50 to 500 million in ARR. So these are mature businesses with sizable sales teams. They've got a lot going on. And I see the same thing. And we saw this, I think, with its last iteration was with salesloft and outreach. And we had folks that are like, okay, we can now automate these email sends, we can automate voicemail drops, we can automate the outreach process. And all that did was create a race to the bottom. I mean, there are not a lot of organizations, except in the very beginning when they kind of got this arbitrage from doing this before everybody else, that have been able to show results from that. Because what you end up doing is you send that message out to, let's just say, the first thousand prospects. And the message isn't as good as it could be if you'd done it a little bit slower. And so you miss a bunch of those folks. So then you go to the next thousand and the next thousand. Before you know it, you're on, you know, the batch of, uh, you know, 200,000 plus. And those folks are just like, no matter how good your messaging is, the conversion rate is so much lower. And you've created this race to the bottom. Meanwhile, all our, uh, competitors are doing the same thing and like, inboxes are just flooded and there's not really any value that's being created from this. And it's ironic because I think those tools have their value. I personally built something like Salesforce or Outreach in my instance of Salesforce back when I was the first AE in, uh, a SaaS startup, because I needed something like this. It was rudimentary. I'm not trying to brag and say I built some amazing thing, but I saw the need for this firsthand. Um, but I think then we like, leapfrogged it and said, well, okay, like let's press the send all button. And then that should, that should magnify our results. And it did the opposite. You can even go back further and look at, like, the implementation of Salesforce and a lot of Companies are like, okay, we'll get, uh, in 100,000 leads, dump it into Salesforce, we'll tell our reps to like, start making calls. And that didn't magically generate revenue. What generates revenue is having a sound process that folks can execute consistently that produces the desired result. And I know we're going to get into this on today's show, but tell me if you disagree. I think that that's the lens we need to look through is how do we use AI to better produce this repeatable, proven process.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Yeah, we wrote, um, Momentum last year. We interviewed 30 people and we wrote and released a book called Ignite your GTM with AI. And really it was just a collection of thoughts from CROs, VP of RevOps leaders, uh, of marketing, CS around AI, that kind of thing. And the gist and what we released was a framework that we kind of put together, which is basically what you talk about. It's like you need to think about how do you build or redefine your revenue Org, not thinking AI or human, but AI and human, and where's the best place to put each one? So that's a good experience for the buyer. Does that make sense? It does go gone anyways. It's just, it was just amazing how, how many of them, like I was the one who talked to them or my CEO talked to them in the interviews. So they didn't know what the other people were saying, but we did. And the pattern kept coming up. It's like, okay, you have to balance what we did before, which is funny because this is what one mind talks about, but it's really about being willing to say, do we really have to do things the way we used to do it, or can we think of a new way to do it that might be better? Uh, hopefully would be better for the buyer and for the seller, because it's a better overall experience. But it requires you being willing to look at what currently exists and say, that doesn't work anymore or there's a better way to do it. And a lot of people are uncomfortable with that because a lot of Seattle's right now run the same playbook for four years and think it's just going to work again. You can't do that anymore. You have to be willing to think outside the box of what you've done for however many years. You know.

Eddie: Fantastic segue to my next question, which is perfect. What did you mean when you said that there's too much focus. Ah. On human optimization and not enough on buyer optimization?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Oh, yeah. I could go on this one for a long time. Um, the gist is this, um, when you think about the different roles across the customer journey. So from top of funnel through the sale implementation, CS account management, there's at least seven roles that someone could experience depending on the complexity of the technology or product or service. So you have a bdr, you have an sdr, you have an ae, you have a sales engineer, you have implementation, you have cs, you have ae, you have. And all of this means handoffs and then transitions and same questions over and over again. It's not always the best experience. Like I've, I've been in a lot of companies large and small and there's very few who have this like down perfect. It's mostly rough, which is amazing. The business keeps operating as a result. Um, and um, I, it. I had, I had a long child with a guy. His name is Dr. Tom Tonkin. And all he does is you, um, thought leadership and research on the buyers, the buyer's experience versus the seller's experience. And he's just showing how the more, weirdly enough, the more that you make your sales process align to the buyer's process. So you line it to that first and it's the foundation, the better the results are in revenue, weirdly enough, you know, so, um, so it's again, it's this dichotomy thinking, okay, instead of thinking, how do I help my salesperson have more calls and do more things and auto entry CRM data, which again, that's all momentum did and I love that use case. You're still not looking at the, the core foundation of the entire sales experience, which is what is the buyer going through? You know, just because I can auto entry data into the CRM m does not mean the buyer experience is magically any better or different. It's just doing the old way faster, which again, I'm not dissing on momentum because we had a amazing business, but you have to be willing to look at both sides of it and then be willing to say, okay, is what we're doing actually beneficial for them and best for them in their buying process? And if it's not, then you need to be willing to shift that. Thank you. That help. Like for example, let me give you one example he gave me. Um, psychological safety is a huge concept in the buyer's journey that most salespeople don't spend any time on. They have to do their exit criteria of they have medpick or they have Bamft or they have whatever stuff it's Very. Like, I've never been in a pipeline meeting where someone says, how psychologically safe do you feel like this person is with you? Like, they do have that question. Because the good salespeople, in my opinion, are the ones who get people on a text basis and are sharing family pictures. And they have that safety because they build a relationship, but it's not an actual measurable exit criteria item. It's a side benefit. Does that make sense? Where to me, it's like, that's the thing you need to focus on, is how safe is that person with you? How comfortable are they with you? So you can move along the sales process. I don't know if it makes sense

Eddie: or not, but it makes perfect sense to me. I mean, like, so for background for you and for the audience, I spent the first 10 or so years of my career in finance. Uh, I dipped out into SaaS and then back into finance, then finally kind of came back into sas, joining Salesforce. And I think that I was drinking the B2B SaaS, Kool Aid while I was working at private equity. And I was thinking, why don't we have anything systematized? Why is nothing automated? Why is everything manual? Because it was so much about the relationship, about that text message, about taking folks out for steak dinners. And I got so frustrated with the mentality of that industry because everything was so slow and not automated. And like, literally, like, we'd be passing Excel sheets around, even though we had Salesforce, um, passing Excel sheets around, showing, like, who we'd met with and what stage they were, and basically pipeline reports in Excel. And then I came to Salesforce, and I saw the exact opposite end of the spectrum, where the relationship didn't matter, where everything was automated. And I started to realize, oh, this is why these folks in finance were pushing back on me. Because we would get on calls and it's like, okay, you've gone to the marketing website, you've filled out a form, then you talk to an sdr, then you talk to an AE that requalified you for a second time. Then, like, the SE comes in and they qualify you again. And it's. All of this is happening before you can even see a demo. And so when we take this back to the buyer experience, I remember I left Salesforce, and at the time, we were doing some work in private equity, since I knew that industry and these PE firms would call Salesforce and, like, can I just see Salesforce? Like, can you just show me how Salesforce can help me raise capital or, like, identify investment opportunities. And they'd get so frustrated they had to go through this whole process. And the rep would be like, well, I can't just customize Salesforce for you. So I spun up a video and I created a five minute video on YouTube and I sent it to all the AES at Salesforce that I was working with and they sent it to all their clients and it got like hundreds and hundreds of hits solely from being sent directly from AES, because their customers are like, can I just see the thing, please? And this isn't like some magical AI solution, but it goes back to your point about like optimizing the buyer journey. They don't want to go through 15 calls before they see the demo. And you could even like, you know, extend this to things like filling out forms on websites. Why do we ask folks questions that we could already find the answer to by just doing back in like data augmentation?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Yeah. You know what's funny is that, um, I feel like with AI, it's giving more of a BDC. Like we're not there yet because obviously B2B conversations of any tech, uh, or service is not the same. But it's almost like AI is making the experience of having answers quickly and things happen so fast. That B2C experience is coming more and more to the B2B world. You know what I mean? It's like people want on demand answers who want to have something friendly and personalized to them. They want to have answers faster instead of going through 12 calls to get a demo, then get pricing. It's like, it's just not a, it's not a pleasant experience. It's like, imagine if that happened with getting a coffee at Starbucks. It would be the worst experience in the world. You know, I guess they talk to this chat bot. They have to talk to a person that doesn't know anything about coffee. And then, then I go to the next person who asks me the same questions. It's just a horrible experience, you know,

Eddie: I mean, I'm starting to see some of that stuff in B2C too, but I don't want to spend too much time on my soapbox. I want to talk about tangible, actionable takeaways. So what have you seen, like in terms of what use cases are you most excited about that you've seen where AI can help improve this buyer experience?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Um, well, without. I'm not going to. I mean, I will mention one mind, but I'm not going to make this about a pitch. Like, I think it's more about asking the question. This is what I would give advice to is I was at Humanex last week talking about this, and I feel like more people should hear this. So I'm gonna give you the advice I give at Humanx, which is, um, friction is your friend. I know it sounds weird to say that, but friction is your friend, meaning that when you can identify friction, it's a symptom of what needs to be solved for. So the question is, have you mapped out internal friction? Like, what does your team have to go through with handoffs and data and team communication and using AI to obviously make that so much easier? Then the other side is buyer friction. Like, have you. Has anyone on this, listening to this? Have you paid someone or had someone who, like a. Like your wife or a kid or somebody, someone that you trust to go through your own buyer's experience, Go on the website, book a call, go through that process and map everything. How much time did it take? How was your experience? On a scale of 1 to 10, would you recommend this for a friend? Was it something you enjoyed? The buying experience, which is very few things you could say you enjoy, but did you enjoy it? Um, and then how long did it take you to get answers around, like pricing and demo? And have someone go through your experience and mark off the friction that you have and start to ask, okay, first question, whether it's AI human, is this friction good? Like, I don't know if any friction is really good, but, like, how can I make this less? By either automating and making sure my team is there to. To be there and help, or can I use a technology like a one mind or whatever technology you want to use so that the buying experience becomes a pleasurable experience? And I don't mean that in a. In a derogatory or inappropriate way, but genuinely a good experience, you know? Um, but most people don't map to friction. Friction is your friend. When you find the friction, it tells you where you should start fixing things.

Eddie: You know, it's so interesting. Like, I've been drinking the Alex Hormozi Kool Aid the last number of days, just like all day, every day, consuming his book, $100 million leads, or, sorry, $100 million offers. And, uh, I have, like, mixed views on him. I always wonder how much, uh, you know of what he says is real. But he actually has in his book, this exercise that you mentioned where you basically lay out, like, all the challenges that your buyer has in realizing their dream outcome, and then you translate that into solutions, and that's how you actually like, think about packaging your product or solution. Right. For us, we're talking about go to market, which like, then kind of like goes into like a whole other conversation of like, should we treat go to market like product, like product development, which I'm a big fan of. Um, but I just did this exercise this week and I have a 55 page document that Claude helped me put together on every single challenge that a CRO faces in realizing the dream outcome that we are trying to deliver. And then it makes me question, like, what can I do to reduce these challenges that stand in the way of the dream outcome that they want?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Exactly. I bet you that one thing is probably gold, because I bet you that that, um, a lot of things you talk to the hero's about are probably pretty common, you know. So when you can find a playbook, a roadmap and say, okay, regardless of your tech stack, here are some principles thought process you want to take yourself through so that you can map those out. It's really very powerful, you know, but it requires a CRO who's willing to like. I put things on a spectrum of how much you want to transform on the far. My right side is the side of major transformation and blowing things up, and the other side is just optimizing time. There's no good or wrong bad way to do it. Like, I think all of it's good, but at some point you can only optimize a human's time so much and you'll be capped. And you have to get to a point where transformation requires not just using AI, but looking at first principle thinking of what's the buyer's journey, what's the friction? Is this even what we want them to go through in the first place? Why are we doing it this way? You know, so then when you build out the process in the future, it becomes better. So I'll give example from someone, uh, who's on the podcast with sandoso. They had 15 SDRs providing 15% of pipeline. The CEO who was on the podcast with me said, we got to redo this. And so he blew it up. Now I'm going to say a little pre, pre thought here. If the SDRs were doing 80% of the pipeline, it would have been a different conversation. But since they're doing 15%, they could, they could take more risk. Make sense anyways, so they, they, they let go of a lot of the team members. They didn't feel like we're ready for the next level. They kept one person who was very AI forward thinking. And they rebuilt the entire journey of SDRs doing two things. One, asking what the buyer should go through, and two, asking, where do we want a human to have part of the experience of the buyer? Does it make sense for them? And when they map that out and they got new technology, they had the roadmap or their. Their flow.

Eddie: Sorry, what was the second part? Like, where a human is part of the buying experience. Meaning, like, what part of the buying experience is AI and what is human?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Yes. It's trying to figure out, like, each brand, in my opinion, has to decide where do they. What experience they want to make for the buyer. Like, do we want to have all AI, do I have all human or AI plus human? And if that's the case, where do you put each thing? Right. So for them, they're looking at, okay, if this is what we want somebody to go through, through like email sequencing or going to an event or whatever, their pipeline is, what experience they want their buyers to go through, and then where's the best place to put the humans so they can be optimized the best possible way? So, um, so once they identified that, they mapped out their plan, which took a month to do, and by month two, they had two SDRs doing the same amount of pipeline gen as 15 before. By month two, which is crazy. And then by month four, they had four SDRs doing 30% of pipeline gen, which, by the way, marketing didn't slow down, so they had amplified and built more pipeline as a result by blowing up what they're doing before and starting from scratch, doing exactly what I'm talking about. It's not easy. You do slow down when you're in the slowdown mode. You feel like you're going behind, but as soon as you get it in line, you slingshot and you go past where you were before. It happens every single time. It's just hard because in the moment, for that quarter where you're catching up, it's tough because you don't have the results to show. You know what I mean? But once you actually upswing the other side, like, you catch up really quick where you were before.

Eddie: And I want to press you on this for some tangible examples before, but before. I do. Like, the thing that always runs through my mind as a founder, CEO, entrepreneur, is it is just drilled into my head that I have to work on my business and not just in the business. But it does seem that CROs fall into this trap where, you know, they were a successful salesperson by hustling and making calls and Setting up meetings and closing deals and then that mentality and uh, that like ethos carries forward into the CRO role and they're under so much pressure to close deals and hire reps and train reps. Um, it's hard to take a step back, but it's hard as an entrepreneur to do that as well. But you cannot like build a better business if you are just constantly working in it.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: I agree, totally agree.

Eddie: So let me press you on some specifics. Like what were some of the specific things that they uncovered in this process?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: One was they realized that they didn't want to have the experience of they were using a lot of kind of classic tech sequencing tools and they realized they didn't want to do that. Um, they also started to use, I think they were using one, uh, usergems, if I remember correctly. And again, I'm not saying that, so I love the usergems team. Um, but they wanted to do something that was more data focused so that when they had information come in that the STR wasn't just blasting out to everyone who had the title of their icp, but it was definitely more data enriched, reach out on a very, um, narrow message because they knew if the certain signals were there from both first party and third party data, the message would cut through better versus just blasting everybody no matter what the data was. Does it make sense? So one of it was, how do we know what our buyer's going through when they're not talking to us and how do we get those intent signals or third party signals or whatever the case is? And we're talking beyond just job changes, like what is it for their company? What, what are the things that they have seen in their own data that's proprietary to them and then let that be reflected in the AI process for outbound so it can be informed when they do outbounding, does that make sense? Hopefully. So a lot of it was trying to make sure, like let's take the data from our customers, the information we have from the conversations there, and then move it towards the top of funnel and mix that with the uh, third party data so that the AI was doing things and signaling things that was actually relevant and not just saying, hey, you have a new CMO title, let's go after this person. Does that make sense? Therefore the messaging was more relevant and the experience was better because it was actually relevant to the buyer. Does that make sense?

Eddie: Hopefully, uh, it makes perfect sense. This is actually something I've been talking a lot about and I want to bounce this off of you. So first, when I think about the absolute most impactful thing that you can do in go to market, especially as it pertains to new business, although this also applies to NRR as well, is just identifying the right targets and then by extent, like meaning that there is a target out there, be it an individual or a company or a set of individuals in a company that whatever your messaging is, is going to convert at 10x higher than another company that is not as much of a fit for you. This is the basic premise of icp. We all know this. But how do we maximize this? Right? And it's exactly what you described, which is we have our firmographic and technographic data, we have the data that we can pull from Zoom Info and Clay, and then there's other proprietary databases that are specific to one industry. And we take all of this data together and that's sort of our uh, you know, our firmographic and technographic data. We've got our intent data, we've got our, our, our, our third party intent data. I mean to say we have our first party intent data being our marketing data and we have all of this data together. And then we also have like some of this data is somewhat static. Like this person is in this job and they work at this company and some of this thing is a trigger. Like they just raised a round of funding or they just uh, like announced a new hire on their website. And how do you take all that data, aggregate it, and then you ultimately end up with a scored account list that is Dynamically being updated, that is saying, hey Mr. Ms. Sales Rep, here are 100 accounts. And by the way, we couple this with capacity, how many accounts can that rep actually work by following the right process over the right period of time? Let's say it's 100. Well, what are the absolute 100 best accounts that we can identify that they can go after? And how do we stack rank them? And that's a hard thing to build. But that for me is sort of like the penultimate gold standard of like if I can put that in front of a team of salespeople, which includes our inbound leads and our outbound prospects, possibly even our existing customers, and just stack rank it and say these are the best folks for you to go after, then I can't imagine something that would improve our conversion rates and our revenue more.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Yeah, there's a concept in the book that is from Jordan Crawford actually. So I can't take credit for this because this is all him, but he talks about how um, when you have conversations with your customers and you start to ask them, like, what if you're paying 50k for a technology? And you ask them saying, what is the thing about our product or service that is 10 times the worth of what you're paying and what's not? Like, where is the true value? And you start to find patterns between, um, what people actually get or not out of things. Um, and then you also start to find, like, because not every customer will get a 10 times value back from what they're paying, some people will be like, ah, eh, it's like double. It's okay. And some people say it's about the same value of what I'm paying. So you want to find the differences between when someone says, I'm getting the same amount of value that I'm paying versus that same title, but someone different might say I'm getting 10 times value because of this. Like, there's a pattern in between those two things. Even if the title and the size is the same, something situationally is going on inside that company so that this person is getting 10x and this person is getting 1x. So that makes sense. So when you find those patterns, you find your inner champions, obviously, because other ones who geek out on your tech or service, but it also tells you, like, okay, if they're going through this situation that gave that much value, then my marketing and my outbound needs to match that messaging so I can match it to other people who are just like this person who don't know who the heck I am. That makes sense, hopefully.

Eddie: Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking of matches. I'm thinking of a concrete example right now. Like, years ago, I signed up for this virtual mailbox and it's got this cool benefit of like, I get a Park Avenue address. But, um, for me, the reason it was so important is, is that they will take my checks. I think customers used to send us checks. I don't know that they do anymore. And it would just automatically send it to my bank. It had an integration with Chase. And then on top of that, like, I moved around a lot. Like, and so for me, it was really valuable because we had a virtual office. I did not have a physical office where I could pay somebody to like, take all of our physical mail and then go deposit checks at the bank. And so, like, you think about it, it's not the fact that I'm a small business owner. It's not the fact that I'm a CEO. It's not the fact that I work in Professional services. It's this fact that like I run a remote company and move around a lot and I don't, even if I'm there in New York, I don't want to like take the check to the bank. And I think like, I pay $100 a month for this thing. Like I would pay $1,000 a month if I had to.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Right, right, exactly.

Eddie: Like the amount of time it would take me to like go to the bank, like every week, like that alone, I would pay thousands of dollars for if I had to. But it comes down to like niching down to like, who is the ideal customer that can actually fit that description. Right?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Yes, yes. And it's. And the, the challenge is that those signals are. It's not, you're not going to find it in clay. Does that make sense? It's not going to be in a third party data thing. You might be able to find it in some social media outputs, but like most of the time people are posting on LinkedIn, maybe Reddit, maybe. But like a lot of times, like I've seen a lot of posts by people saying I'm getting 10x value out of this thing unless they're being promoted to do so, which is not bad. But like that's why you need to have actual conversations with customers and say like, tell me the goods, tell me the bads or m, tell me the really, really goods. And what is that? And then you look at the aspects of that person, say, okay, is it size? What's going on internally? Why is it having 10x value? Is there any other aspects of this like technographics or firmographics or whatever that could fit along with the information around what's happening internally, you know what I mean? So it's like, it's not bad. It's just you need that little angle that you don't get from the data. Does that make sense? Hopefully. So yeah. Quick pause. Everything we talk about on this show, diagnosing, go to market ops, prioritizing projects for revenue impact, impact processes, metrics, insights, building a predictable go to market engine. We've built frameworks for all of it. They're free and ungated on our website, unionsquare consulting.com frameworks. The link will also be in the show notes, so make sure you check that out. All right, back to the episode.

Eddie: Well, let's go back to the story about the team that reduced their SDR team and then like basically 10x their SDR output. What else did they uncover in this discovery about their buyer experience that they were able to leverage to increase their output so much.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Well, besides just having the data, um, two is just realizing that they were leaning like a concept is kind of general, but they were leaning on the human doing too many things. Like for example, human had to check the email before it went out to a sequencer on sales loft or whatever the case was. Um, the human had to make sure it did these list checking and make sure that one, one list matched another list. Like they just found a lot of internal friction points where the human was responsible for a lot. So that the SDR that more than half their time was doing all the piddly doo things like you said, like you're going through an Excel file and matching that to a sales loft list and all this crap was just wasted time. So a lot of what they were doing was make sure their internal operations was streamlined. That's the, that's the internal side. And then on the buyer side just making sure that they made, they had the same. Um, it's just thinking through like if someone wants to use Sandoso, what are things they're going through and how, how do we communicate that in a way so it's actually valuable to the buyer beyond just giving a case study like what would be valuable for them. Um, and so they really fine tune the messaging. So it's really about how do we provide value that we know is relevant, that's automated and I don't want to say personalized but more of like what would be important to the person reaching out to uh, in a way that uses AI and then brings human in a loop. So it's kind of not necessarily checking every single email, but at least agree with the, the, the motion. The second part I would say is that they also, even though a lot of the things on email and LinkedIn was being done, they had the human do things like leave video messages or voice messages on LinkedIn that you can automate yet maybe in the future you can. Like they would hold up signs saying hey, I'm a human, I want to talk to you. I just dub little stuff like that that would, that is like only a human can do that. But beyond this, all the automation. So like again it was like they're looking at saying how do we want to have this experience with our brand and our, and our stuff and how do we use the product itself to be part of the experience and send people stuff that's actually nice. And also the things, it's just, it was really cool how they thought through to be innovative. But then again Just going down to the foundational basics of, like, how do we just make this better for them without making the buyer go through all these hoops to get answers once they actually say yes, you know, so, so

Eddie: these are some great, great, tangible examples. So to recap, they used a lot of data to better, like to figure out how to identify better targets, also to improve the messaging, um, and then thirdly, to save their reps time so that their SDRs could get more done in a day. And this is a common theme that I'm seeing because I'm doing a lot of other interviews like this with other folks and doing CRO stories where CROs are sharing what's working in their own business. So I'm seeing these themes. But what I'm also seeing that kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier, is I think people want to cut out this human element that's actually adding a lot of value. I think it's one thing to say, take the AI and go to the website and read the K, 1, and summarize it for me so that I can have a more informed discussion. And two, just write the email for me. Because when there's that personal touch for me, it's not even about the quality of the message. As a buyer that receives this messaging for me, it's like, do you believe that you can help me enough that it justifies your own personal investment of time? Because if you don't, why would I believe that it's worth a half an hour my time? Like, when I get an email from somebody and I'm like, okay, it's clear that AI wrote this. So what you're telling me is it's not worth two minutes of your time to craft a, a personalized email? Why would I think it's worth a half an hour of my time to spend with you on a zoom call? And it's not me being egotistical. It's just like, why would I think this is a good investment of my time? And so where my head goes is how do we leverage AI to improve that interaction where the SDR or the AE comes armed with all of this information to target the right buyer with the right messaging, and there's still that personal touch that tells them, hey, you know, I'm worth your time.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Yeah, it's a very interesting discussion. Like, it's funny because, um, with one mind, like, where the product we have is. I don't know how I can describe this. Like, we're able to do a lot of things that a Human can, but yet the funny thing is we're not replacing any roles. We're doing things that humans never did in the first place. Like let me give you an example. There's no company that I know of that has five or six experts sitting on the website waiting for people to come to them, 24, seven answering questions. But one mine can't. I can do deep demos, deep pricing, all this other stuff or like the sales engineer. I don't know of any company that has one to one coverage of sales engineers to AES, you know what I mean? Um, but yet you can do that with an AI tech that can join your call and actually do everything that sales engineers could do. It's not replacing sales engineers, it's just giving more resources to more people who need it. You know, so it's like um, and what we're finding is, because my team has access to the second uses, it is that the human is all the EQ relationship trust based stuff and the AI takes care of a lot of the knowledge transfer and technical stuff. And it doesn't mean like we sell AI tech that is literally doing some crazy cool advanced things, but we still have a sales team. Like we haven't gotten rid of our sales team. You know, we're building on it because people still want to have that connection, understanding and, and that EQ trust is very important now. The world will soon come where no matter what your AI is, um, AI will start buying from AI on some level. Like there's arguments of like how much that's going to be and what industries that's going to be. But like even right now people are using OpenClaw to go do research and then help even have a threshold of budget. They can go buy stuff like that will eventually happen. But in my mind this is where I think things are going to. Businesses are going to have to decide on different paths. Do they want to be a business that says we are only humans and so when you come work with us, we only give you human attention because they could do that and I'm guessing people will do that because the buyers want to have that. Then there's going to be the human plus AI experience where AI is in the first three steps and the human's last four steps are maybe all the way through. And then there's going to be pure AI experience where the human doesn't want to talk to another human, it just wants to talk to an AI. And then the next level is AI buying from AI and businesses are going to have to be ready for each one of those scenarios. Meaning that they don't know which buyer is going to come in and say, I don't want to talk to AI, I only want to talk to a human. And that means that the quality of experience that they're going to get from a human, number one, is scarcer, because it's going to be scarcer to have that. Number two, the criteria of that's going to be higher because they're going to expect that person to be really freaking good at what they do. Does that make sense? Like, mediocrity will not be tolerated in the future. We've got to be able to be someone who are experts in the field. So, yeah.

Eddie: Oh, uh, I was just going to say I was talking to, uh, Hayes Davis about this on our podcast a while back and he had this viral post that he talked about, like, could a mid market AE close $10 million in revenue? You know, presupposing that their quota is a million, it goes 10x to 10 million. And he talked about a lot of these things, which now that podcast feels dated. Things have just moved so fast. It was like this hypothetical exercise. And now I think we're seeing like tangible success with some of this stuff. Maybe not quite 10x but some of these improvements. And the point he made is like, just because an AE can close 10 times more revenue doesn't mean that buyers will buy 10 times more. So what you may end up with is one tenth of the salespeople. Um, which is fine. I mean, that's what we saw with agriculture. Uh, I love using this comparison. Like my grandfather was a farmer. Not that I know anything about that or ever even went to this farm. But, you know, he had like, you know, the 40 acres and a mule or I think it was 100 acres and maybe like a rudimentary tractor. And now like, uh, the last time I went to a farm, uh, which is the only time I went to a farm, one, uh, guy was farming 17,000 acres. And oh, by the way, the acres produce 5x the output per acre because of all the seeding and all the technology that goes into GMO and everything like that. So I think if I did, if I remember the math, that's like an 850x increase. And we've gone from a society where 90% of the population works in agriculture to like 1% and we have more food than we had when 90% of the people were working in farming. And so as much as I love sales, it's sad to see like, that we Might have less salespeople. But I agree with your point. I think ultimately it comes down to trust. Because here's one of my issues with the whole buying from AI to AI, et cetera, is at the end of the day, like, I believe it, but for some things at the end of the day, who do I hold accountable? So even if the AI doesn't hallucinate, even if I trust everything that it says, when things go wrong, who's accountable? Who's the person? Because, like, I can say, like, even when I worked at Salesforce and I was just a cog in the wheels, some, you know, ae, that doesn't matter to anybody. When, uh, a customer called me and they were like, you screwed me over. Fix it. I felt a personal responsibility to do that.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Hm. Um, I came from the world of Franklin Covey. I used to work for Franklin Covey once upon a time, and I was certified in all of their stuff. And, um, if you don't know Franklin Covey, Ah, Stephen, ah. Covey wrote the book Seven Habits for Highly Effective People. And then his son wrote the book called Speed of Trust, which is a fascinating, um, book. And in the Speed of Trust, he talks about in order to have trust in someone. Because his argument in that book is saying when you have trust in business, everything accelerates, which is what his whole point is. And he has four things that people need to have to have trust. Two are, uh, character based and two are competency based. So one is integrity, which is beyond honesty. It's about making sure are you aligned to your values of whatever you're proposing to be. And then second, is your intent, are your motives clear? Are you trying to be shady and do something weird? So you need those two character things. The competency ones are capabilities. Like, do you have the talents, the skills, the abilities to actually get this stuff happening? And the last one is results. So for me, it's like you take those four things. I feel like the character based stuff is the human side of selling. Intent and integrity. And then you have the capabilities and results is all AI Because AI can bring the capabilities and the results, but you still need the character, the moral, the ethical, the eq, the relationship as part of the process, at least currently, that could maybe change in the future. But let's say even if you had like a, uh, AI agent robot that was your real estate agent and sold you something, you still would want to know, like, what was the intention of the person who built this fricking product to sell me a house, you know what I mean? It's like you still have these same questions because we're humans. It'd be interesting to see how that changes as we progress, you know?

Eddie: Yeah. Um, so let's see, what other questions do I have here? Man, so much good stuff. Okay, so one of the things that you mentioned on our prep call was that one of the mistakes that zeros are making is not being familiar enough with AI to have realistic expectations. Can you explain that?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Yeah, I talk to Seros all the time. Both those, like, um, Kyle Norton, who's uh, obviously well versed geek into AI stuff to those who don't know a whole lot. And I think a lot of ciros are ashamed, afraid to admit they may not know a lot. So like, for example, they may see some posts on LinkedIn where someone vibe coded a CRM M like, hey, we should vibe code our own CRM and they think that it's a possible thing. And so then they, they have their geek person inside who may be the, the classic vibe coder, say, hey, make me this thing, and expect that this particular problem they want to solve can be done with AI without knowing if they actually can be done or not. Does that make sense? Um, so it's, it's, uh, it's a problem of making sure that CROs are willing to do the dirty work. At least understand the basics. Like if, if you don't understand what a SkillMD file is, if you don't know what context windows and why that's important for a harnessing process with AI agents. If you don't know that and you're trying to do AI, you're severely, ah, handicapping your team if you don't know that stuff. Because to me that's not even advanced stuff. And most people don't know what the heck I just said. You know what I mean? Um, but because that comes down to saying, it'd be kind of like saying to a human saying, hey, go lift up that truck. That's three tons of wait because they saw someone else on LinkedIn talked about Samson being a really strong person. Like, it's like saying, oh, he did it, you should go do it. It's like the unrealistic expectations of what people think is possible based off of clickbait posts, you know what I mean? And the problem is there's so much volume of that on LinkedIn that it feels like it should be the norm and it's not, it's not the norm. You know, it's kind of like how last year I told people that, um, there's this unspoken pressure to be in a certain place with AI because you have, like, the Shopify memo come out last April, and then you have Marc Benioff talk about how half the stuff's being done by AI, and then you have Duolingo, uh, talking about all this stuff. Like, there's all these people talk about transformation, and everyone's going, I don't know how the heck they're doing this. Like, all we're doing is ChatGPT. No one's sharing the juice on how to actually get it to happen, you know, so there's this pressure to push their teams to do things that they didn't even know was possible, because they're doing it based off of a very surface level understanding of what is realistic.

Eddie: And on top of that, like every LinkedIn post, and I talk to my team about this a lot, is every LinkedIn post is somebody talking about how they, like, use cloud code or cloud cowork or whatever, or Vibe coded something, and they produce this result to book like, 75 meetings in a week. And half the time I've jumped in the comments and I'm like, so how much revenue did you produce? And then, like, you get crickets in response. And these are like solopreneurs and small businesses. And even if all of the results are true, I'm like, well, what's the expectation for a $200 million software company? Are they supposed to have every AE, have Claude Code or OpenClaw running on their desktop? We need enterprise solutions that we can deploy across the entire team. But I would also push back on you. I think it's interesting what you say about the CRO needing to be familiar with all this technology. And the problem that I've seen working with technology for the last 15 or so years is not necessarily a lack of understanding of the technology, but a lack of commitment to getting the fundamental process down and producing the end result. So what I mean by that is, is that the CRO or whatever executive comes in, they're like, we need to build this AI tool. We need to implement Salesforce, what have you. And then they duck out. They delegate it to somebody that probably doesn't know what they're doing, doesn't have the power in the organization to get things done, and they come back in, like, three months later, and they're like, what's going on with this? Oh, this is a failure. And it's like, okay, this is every single failure that I've seen with, like, every Salesforce implementation for the last 15 years. And the flip side, when somebody's like, look, I don't know any. I don't know how to turn my computer on, but we're going to make this thing work. What do you need from me? I'll be in every meeting. I will talk to whoever I'll talk I need to talk to. I'll learn what I need to learn. I'll bring in every resource. I would argue that they will learn the stuff that you just mentioned, because if that's their number one priority, it's going to get done. And it might take longer and cost more than they expect. But the problem I see is thinking that it's, like, going to be, like an easy button, and then they walk away and they come back a week later and Magically we've produced $10 million of additional revenue.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Yeah. I don't know if we're saying different things. I think you're saying the same thing as doing different angles. Because, like, I'm not expecting any zero to all of a sudden become an expert prompt engineer or AI agent builder, whatever. Like. Like, I don't expect that. But, like, you do need to understand the both capabilities of your technology and people in order to push your team to the highest level of performance. Like, the only way that Kyle Norton's able to do the things he's able to do and get 4x out of his team is because he understands both what AI can do and also AI cannot. Do. You know what I mean? Because that's the problem, is that people have this false confidence that AI can do all this stuff, and they're like, no, there's a. There's a line that currently, AI can't do that. Now, would that change a month? Probably. Because AI is crazy and it, uh, advances every freaking month, which is crazy. But the point is, you need to know where the capabilities are. Then adds to the question of even if AI could do that, is that what I want my buyer to go through? Is that the best experience for them? Does that make sense? Because that should be the governing question of everything. Like, is it better for my buyer if it's not? Don't do it. Because otherwise it's going to affect your bottom line. Yeah.

Eddie: And I think maybe I was misinterpreting what you're saying. I do think that other people are saying that, like, the CRO needs to learn everything they can about AI and they need to be like, vibe coding on the weekends. And for me, I think what I'm saying is that if you say, okay, let's Take a particular use case, we want to improve how we are targeting our customers or improve our messaging. And I'm going to work with people that understand the technology. Then by definition, as a CRO, you're going to learn what you need to know about that by dedicating yourself to it and trying to produce the output you want. Right. Like, how does anybody learn anything by doing it? Um, and my view on this is always the more that we can focus and say we want to achieve this outcome, we want our buyer to experience XYZ steps and we want to figure out how we can use AI to do that better and faster. And we're committed to it and it's our top priorities and they're most likely going to succeed at that.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Yeah, I think so too. I think it's beneficial for someone to try to vibe code because really, vibe coding, even on level of clock code, it's not that difficult. Like, people make it scarier than it is, but at the same time there's other stuff to do. I, I, I do think they should get their hands dirty. Do they need to be an expert? No, not at all. They seem to play like, just try it. It's not like, uh, it's not that hard. It takes an hour. You go, oh, this is what he can do. Um, I did this survey with, uh, the academy, um, where I looked at 300 people and half of them were in C Suite, CMO, and other people. And I realized this pattern of the more that fear comes up for people, the more that was correlated or associated with people who do not have a lot of experience with AI, and the more someone has experience with AI, the fear concern goes down and the strategy goes up. But the concern is strategy, not fear. Does that make sense? So fear to me usually points, which is consistent with my experience to not understanding the technology enough. And when you do it, uh, starts to become a different conversation of fear because you know the limits of AI, you start to think, okay, now that I know AI, at least the what I need to know as a CRO, now it's a strategy conversation. Does that make sense above and beyond anything else? So, um, because like, for example, when people are saying like, AI is going to take jobs and all this other stuff, again, to me it's like it has the capability of doing that now. But what we don't know is how the buyer is going to want to have that experience or not. Like, does the buyer want to go through that? Like, for example, I could take awaymo or an Uber. But I still take Uber because I like the experience better and faster. Even though I have the option of a totally automated car ride. You know what I mean?

Eddie: Oh, interesting. I'm chopping a bit for Waymo. I like, I can't wait to not have to deal with the Uber driver.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: I. Well, I could tell you my reasons why, but like I. I been to San Francisco I don't know how many times and timed it. So me it's a time thing. Like Uber is faster. Funny enough. Huh. So.

Eddie: Well, that doesn't make sense. I wonder if we were going to get to a point where autonomous vehicles drive like 500 miles an hour because the entire thing.

Jonathan Kvarfordt: IRobot, right?

Eddie: Yeah, like just. Well, I actually haven't seen iRobot, but if you just think of like the entire system is, you know, interconnected, then why couldn't a car drive 500 miles per hour? Because it knows exactly when the other car is going to cross the lane, you know? Um, but anyway, let's take this back. So when you think about like particular use cases to drive sales specifically, you've shared a couple of them. Better targeting, better messaging, saving sales reps time. Are there other things that come to mind to you that if a CEO is asking, like, what can I do to move the needle most with ARR right now? Where would you point them?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Oh, gosh. The hard part about this is it really depends on the company. But I'll tell you some basic ones. Um, again, going back to friction, a lot of the times, like we did some surveys and we use data for momentum because we're just an internal operation workflow tool. Um, but we found that more than 70% of the time the things that slowed down the sales cycle the most was internal issues, not external. Like if someone had a 90 day sales cycle, 70% of the reason why it was 90 days was because of internal problems, not because of the customer. Like, uh, it would have bought faster, but the internal team was slowing them down. So, um, just that alone, when you think about the consequence of even reducing sales cycle by 20%, like that's massive. And um, so I would say again, where can you use internal friction and reduce that so that you get out of the way of someone trying to buy your fricking product? You know? Um, second is like, I do think not to pitch one mind, but I'm going to pitch one mind. Like giving people the option of having more answers readily available to them, whether it's the website or on your live calls. Like what mine does um, helps the cycle because there's research from. I was just reading this from Gardner of Forshire. I can't remember who it was, but the buyer who gets answers the fastest is more likely to buy from the person who gives answers the fastest. Does that make sense? Doesn't mean necessarily that I'm, um, obviously asked to be the right answer. But it's this interesting study. They talked about how fast does answers go to the buyer and does that affect the buyer's process? And it does, which is crazy, you know, because, like, think about how many times someone says, hey, I gotta get back to you. I don't know that central information. I got to check with my finance person about this pricing thing, blah, blah, blah, blah. And when you start to slow that down, that impacts the person buying, you know, so it's whether, whether you use a tool like Momentum to automate things internally so it helps the person do their job faster, or use a tech like One mind where AI is now actually doing some of the work for you. It's just thinking through, like, what can you do to make that one process better so people get answers better because buyers are fatigued and tired of the same old seller's journey. You know what I mean? So I would say, um, if all someone takes for this podcast is if they make the buyer's journey and process the foundation and then map the sales process to that, you will absolutely make a huge difference in, in revenue as a result. Like, you'll 2 to 3x a lot of results very quickly from just that. Because the buyer's experience sucks for most people.

Eddie: Yeah. And I mean, this resonates with the other CRO stories that we've done. I mean, Kyle Norton is one of them. We had him on the podcast and he shared about how they used AI to identify the behaviors that led to closing more deals and how they increased their win rate from 38% to 53%,

Jonathan Kvarfordt: which is insane, by the way. The 53%. That's crazy.

Eddie: It's absolutely insane. And what he uncovered, a lot of the things were how, uh, do we just make the buying journey faster? Like, how do we move quickly? You know, people want to make decisions and you get that buyer fatigue. But what I also loved about this is this wasn't hypothesis. This was real data from real call recordings and real closed one and closed lost deals. Um, and I had Ryan Milligan from quotapath on the podcast as well, and he. They use Momentum and they talked a lot about the same concept of how do we streamline the process so that the buyer has a faster, easier journey. Um, and so we are almost at time and this is a time where if you do want to plug something you can and I'll just say thank you for coming on the podcast and where can people find you or find out about you or your new company or anything that you want to plug Right now?

Jonathan Kvarfordt: Um, if people want to follow me, just LinkedIn. I consider LinkedIn my GTMAI journal. So I just post things there of my random thoughts, you know, so all the things I do from the podcast to one mind to whatever is all there. So I, I like to, I genuinely like. My intention is to generally give value. I don't like I told you like on our pre call like I don't want to come on and just pitch because that's not my style. I want to actually help people. So I generally hope this was uh, some insights that were hopefully helpful with this and all I do on my LinkedIn is to try to do the same thing. So if someone wants to follow me, that's the place to go.

Eddie: It's awesome. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for listening to the episode. If this resonated, please give us a five star rating and a follow. It helps us reach more people and you get our latest and greatest content without having to search for it. And if you're looking for hands on help in Go to Market strategy and or revops, please reach out to us. We help our clients with everything from annual planning to improving processes in Go to Market, implementing systems to support those processes and Go to Market AI. We're always happy to offer a free consultation to help you identify the best opportunities to improve your Go to Market engine with or without our help. You can find us at unionsquareconsulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.