AI Agents, False Productivity, and the Sales Team Reset with Gabe Larsen

Speaker A: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now, uh, this week, I have Gabe Larson on the show. Gabe and I go way back to the days of insidesales.com probably about 10 or 12 years ago. Uh, but the reason he's on the show right now is because I've been watching his content on Instagram, and he's been putting out some really sharp and honest takes on what his actually happening with AI in sales right now. And a lot of this resonated with me, and I've actually found myself translating his stuff to my own audience. So if you've been following me on Instagram, some of the stuff that I've been posting, it's coming from Gabe. So I reached out to him and said we needed to have this conversation out loud. Now, Gabe started as a financial analyst in New York. He was there for the 2008 crash, moved overseas to do some consulting in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Then he came back to help build InsideSales.com from about 5 million to 150 in ARR during the heyday of the sales acceleration era. From there, he went on to customer and helped build that into a $1.2 billion acquisition by Meta. Spent two years inside Meta, and then when they cut from, uh, 90,000 to about 60,000 people, he got kicked back out. Now he's building Autonom with Dave Elkington, the Original founder of InsideSales.com and they are building what they call cloud employees, which are AI agents that you hire as a salary, not as a software license. Now, during this conversation, we get into something Gabe calls pretend productivity, which is the idea that everyone is claiming AI is making them more productive, but the actual numbers are not moving. He breaks down the only four areas where AI is showing real ROI right now, which is coding, customer service, sdr, and recruiting. And we go deep on the fundamentals that got lost during the SaaS Golden Age. Why most companies need to map their processes before they buy a single AI tool, and what all of this means for the future of a sales career. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Gabe Larson. What's going on, my friend? Welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast.

Speaker B: Yeah, I've been waiting for this one, man.

Speaker A: Let's do it.

Speaker B: Let's dive in.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, this is. This is gonna be a fun one, man. We were. We should have hit record right before we got on this.

Speaker B: Just to talk about, dude that was rated X. Uh, I need to keep a PG13

Speaker A: or something here, like a therapy session for about five minutes for both of us trying to build businesses in this crazy world right now. Anyways, yeah, that's exactly how I feel. Um, but before, like, you know, I wanted to. Actually, the reason I wanted to get you on here is because, uh, you know, I saw what you're doing on Instagram, right. And the content you're putting out there and, you know, it's interesting. I'm trying to do the same thing and, uh, it, you know, I'm appealing to different audiences and I don't, I think I know what I'm doing, but I don't know what the I'm doing. I know, and, but what you were putting out there was really interesting about kind of keeping tabs on the AI market and what's really happening out there. And so I got a lot of value out of some of the stuff you're pushing. And I was like, you know what, I, I gotta get him back on the show because I think your, your career arc is an interesting one. Um, I mean, we met, I think it was InsideSales.com, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's probably been 10, 15 years, but yeah, man, back to the beginning of John Barrows.

Speaker A: Yeah, and then, and then you were, but you were over at like Gallup like you, you were in the consulting world before that, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, man. Do you. Look, I've had an interesting journey. I did. I started as a financial analyst. I did some banking stuff in New york early on 2008 crash. And was, um, sitting in New York when the mark, you know, man, that all tanked. And then I thought, what the hell, man, I need to get out of the U. S. So I moved overseas for five years, did some consulting in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, Dubai, doing, you know, who knows what. Um, Dubai, favorite city in the world, ma'. Am. But I remember I was sitting in Dubai. I thought I was going to stay there forever, but government called us, we had published something. They thought we were basically spy, you know, did some secret stuff. So they, they revoked our business license. I had 30 days to vacate the country. Talk about life changing moments, man. I had nowhere to go but back home to Salt Lake City, Utah. So I come back to Salt Lake, I meet up with a friend. And that was kind of the inside sales journey, you know, I was like, man, maybe I need to get out of consulting and jump into tech. So we had a fun run at Inside Sales. That's where we met. And it was the high volume power dialer. You know, it's funny you hear about Nooks and Aurum now, but you know, we were doing kind of that high volume dialing 2005, 2010 kind of era, trying to accelerate the. The sales acceleration world pre, you know, outreach, you know, the multi channel cadence, the ABM stuff. So we had an awesome run, man. Topped off at about 150 in ARR, man, 5 to 150. It felt like we were going through the. We were going crazy, man. We hit a little bit of a stump, but, you know, at those high numbers, Outreach and Sales Loft came in and beat us on the multi channel cadence. So we went PE and I wanted to find something else. I moved out to New York. Sorry, man, I'm just giving you the quick.

Speaker A: Oh, this is great.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I moved out to New York. I wanted to do another startup because, man, the 5 to 100 I thought was just funner than hell. And so joined a company called Customer. And we did, man, we went, we were going gangbusters pre Covid doing kind of a Zendesk knockoff, you know, customer service type thing. Meta picked us up. You got to have a little bit of luck in your life, man. This is, you know, I can't. I always boohoo. But you know, it's always first world problems. We were met as fourth largest transaction. I mean, I can't believe they, they bought us for like 1.2 billion. You have Oculus, Instagram, WhatsApp and customer, man. So, uh, you know, I thought I'd walk away with a few money. I mean, look, I'm grateful. I mean, I made a ton of money. Um, definitely kind of gave me a different perspective on the, the world. But after two years at Meta, they came to us and said, look, if you don't have ads, AI or VR in your title, you're basically, you're on the chopping block. So year of efficiency, they go from 90,000 to 60,000 people and. And um, they kick us back out. And I'm like, you know what? This AI stuff was just starting to warm up. GPT was just coming out. And I, you know, I was like, man, either you can basically be, you can eat or be eaten.

Speaker A: It's.

Speaker B: I was like, I'm gonna go start an AI company and see if I could, you know, maybe be. Maybe get ahead of this one, man. Rather than have AI take my job, maybe I'll have AI take you Know other people's jobs.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, my analogy for AI these days is it's like getting chased by a bear, right. I don't gotta be the fastest, I just gotta be faster than you. Like, that's like this bears. Because the bear is coming for all of us, whether we like it or not.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, there's a little of a joke there, but I mean, it was hot enough. And so I met up with, uh, Dave Elkington, the original founder of Inside Sales.com. brilliant guy, man, super smart, especially on the tech side of the house. Masters in machine learning. And, and we were like, man, let's create a Tottenham. So we got a little AI startup and been fighting the fight for the last year or two.

Speaker A: And it's a fight, man. So I, I want to get to that because I want to get to your perspective and I think you got a unique one. Uh, let me, let me ask you though. Back in the heyday of SAS, right, and uh, you know, 2000, I positioned 2010 to 2022 is kind of golden age of sales and, uh, especially in tech and SaaS, right? And I don't think we realized how good we had it.

Speaker B: I know, man, I know. And I'm, I should have enjoyed it more. I still had freaking anxiety attacks back then. Damn it.

Speaker A: Well, and that's what I'm trying to like. Like, for me personally, I had plenty of anxiety attacks back then, but it was, but it was. Almost everything was still up into the right. No matter.

Speaker B: I know. Why was I worried? I mean, look, like, life was good back then, man. There were great runs. I had. Did you hear that? I had two runs of like, you know, um, incredible. Like zero to 100 plus in two times in, in. In that, in that window, um, was amazing. I mean, you hearing about what's happening with SaaS companies now, they're not. Their growth rates are. They're loving 8%. I was doing 100%, you know, 50. I mean, talk about a great era, man.

Speaker A: And I guess, you know, because there's a lot of consultants and trainers that I know who, especially when it crashed, crash back in 20, 23, 24, like, there was like this, almost this, this, this therapy sessions that we had because it was like, was I really that good or was it really just the market? And I guess how much of what you think that success was was the market versus how good your product was, how good you were as a consultant? Like, I'm. Because, Because I think there, I think it's obviously both, right? The product, the Timing and everything. But I'm looking back at that and being like, man, there was a lot of false positives there with people way better, you know, looked way. Looked way better than they were. People who looked way better than they actually were. And I think we've skipped so much of the fundamentals of business. And this is why I want to get back to your consulting days, right? Of kind of the fundamental aspects of. Of what makes a good business. And were they there back then? And let's talk about now what those fundamentals look like.

Speaker B: Wow, man, that's a. That's a fascinating topic. I mean, look, I think that I don't know if we give luck enough. I mean, luck, market conditions up, uh, to the right timing, enough credit. Because, man, you hear these guys or how many people have you hired who had this up into the right motion, and all of a sudden they got no playbook. They got nothing. Like, nothing's working. And so to me, luck was a huge factor. I almost kind of say like, luck product and then go to market, you know, or the three top categories. Don't get me wrong, there were still companies who weren't doing anything. But if you, you know, up into the right, seems like we were all moving in the right direction. If you had a product that did solve a problem, man, in those market conditions. I remember visiting companies, John, where it was like, you know, I remember doing consulting and being like, despite your guys's best efforts, still you're actually growing. Like, you're so bad at go to market. I mean, you're not responding to lead for like five years. You know, people are like, I want to buy from you. And they're like, man, I didn't know we were getting lead. And, you know, the handoffs are different. Um, but despite their best, you know, the product still, like, was this problem solver, you know, like, it was. It was doing something that.

Speaker A: The salesforce is a Perfect example, right? LinkedIn. Perfect example. Yeah.

Speaker B: Jeez. Those guys, man. So look, I do think, man, especially in some of that pre Covid world, you know, I know a lot of companies who, man, they were really growing fast. And the market was just saying, hey, we got to have remote. Like think about, um, some of the, the tools. I'm trying to think of some of those companies that were doing like, virtual events or something like that, right? Some of Those companies went 0 to 100 million and just no time because again, Covid pushed her or something like that. So luck, I think, was a factor. Good product still was there. And GTM man, I don't know. I don't know how much of a factor that was in some of those days.

Speaker A: That's, that's kind of why I look back at that. And I used to be super proud of being the guy who trained Salesforce how to, you know, and I worked with their team and I was part of that rocket ship and I look back and I'm like, I almost had nothing to do with that.

Speaker B: Some dude, there's some, there's always a little bit.

Speaker A: But you know, I don't know. And I think now is, is a lot of people are having a crisis. You know, uh, they're just really trying to figure out like what do I do in this market? Because I don't know if I have the fundamentals. I don't know if those, if that time did more harm than good for individuals. I know it did more harm than good for sales reps because we taught sales reps on process and tech and we did not teach them on fundamentals. And if you hear me talk a lot about, you know, I always talk to sales as a science and an art. Right. But I think it should be a little bit more of a science than an art because the science lays the foundation for the art, blah blah, blah, the structure of the process. Yeah, but, but I think we have way over swung the pendulum to, to. We've like tried to over science our. At this point and we forgot the fundamentals.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And now you have a whole. We teach, we taught these reps how to be robots basically. And now they're getting replaced by robots. And, and, and you're in, in quite. You know, we're going to jump into what you're doing today because that's effectively what you're doing. You got, you got agents, right? Who, who SDR agent. You teach it just like an employee. And you don't charge a license fee. You actually charge a salary fee effectively because you're now you're paying for outcomes as opposed to the software license complex.

Speaker B: That's right. That's right.

Speaker A: So where was that for you? And I know, um, I know there's some people who are trying to toe the line of like, oh, you know, humans in the loop and all this other stuff. Um, what was the decision for you? Everything that you saw with inside sales, all that stuff that you saw with like sales reps and empowering them with tools and all this. Um, and then what you were doing with the customer. Now you look at this problem. Are you. Where's your head at with where sales are. Because I'll give you my perspective. I, I think sales reps are like, I, I really do. I. Because when it. And it has nothing to do, by the way, with all these tools that are automating sales, it has everything to do with when the client wakes up and realizes they don't need us. Yeah. And that's what I'm worried about the most because I had an aha moment the other day. And uh, it was about a month and a half ago when I went from Chachi BT to Claude and then Claude cowork, right? And when I did Claude cowork and I figured out what it could do, I literally, I wrote the blog. You can see it says, I know kung fu, right? The. The matrix thing. And I looked at it and I'm like, there's nothing I can't do at this point. And, and it registered to me after a while, like, this is fascinating. But then I'm like, wait a minute. I don't think I'll ever talk to an like a. I'll probably never hire another employee. Now granted, you know, I went through some shit that jades me a little bit. But, um, but not only will I never hire, I don't think I'll ever talk to a sales rep again. And the reason is, is because Claude knows everything about me. My business, my strategy, all that stuff. And I can just go into it and ask, hey, what does this tool do? Do I need this tool? Da da, da. And if I talk to a sales rep, that sales rep better be so valuable. Or I'll talk to a customer service or an uh, engineer. And so I look at this and I say, okay, well, John, you're a one man show. You know, two people. So. Yeah, fine, right. You can break things. Security, doesn't matter. Protocols aren't that big of a deal. Whatever it is, I can break shit. So once you get into the enterprise. But I also. Pattern recognition, man. Remember when Amazon came out and. Or you know, and we started putting credit cards online and people, at first people are like, uh, are you out of your mind? Like, no way am I putting my credit card online, right? And then it was like, well, for 10 bucks, uh, for 50 bucks I bought it. Then I ended up buying a Tesla online, right?

Speaker B: So, okay, my car, shipping my car, right?

Speaker A: Then step two, uh, SaaS. Early days of SaaS. Oh, it's adorable, you know, if you look, if you don't have the money for on prem. Yeah, okay, you go to SaaS thing. It's. It's cute, right? But then all of a sudden, Salesforce signs, uh, state, um, farm for 150 million and holy SaaS is here for the enterprise. How long is it going to take for what I just said there about me and how I'll never talk to a sales rep ever again to creep into SMB, which is probably already there, even though they're, you know, laggards, mid market and enterprise. Like, where is your head at when it comes to this evolution of sales reps? And I want to get into what do we need to teach sales reps on how to evolve?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, man, look, I think, um, boy, you teed it up here. I mean, we joke about the movies, the term and stuff like that. Um, and I don't know why we won't go there. Like, you know, I know it's like, oh, no, the end of the world or something, but when you have played, I mean, I'm so neck deep in this stuff, right? And I got scars all over the place of where AI failed. So don't get me wrong, like, I've been at it two years. I thought AI could replace every single person or something. And yeah, so scars here, scars there, etc. Etc. But with that said, yeah, we went pretty hard on this concept of a digital employee because of some of the stuff you're kind of saying, like very early. Um, you know, we have this customer service example where I have this client basically call in and be like, they talk to this AI you know, cloud employee is what we call them, and they get all their questions answered. It's about a 17 minute call. And. And man, they hit everything. What are the products? You guys are upset, you know, like, I haven't heard about your newest products. And I did have one kind of tier one support question after 17 minutes and asking any question this customer has ever wanted. And the AI knew everything, every single question perfectly answered, you know, uh, at the end of the call. And again, this is just an example. It was fascinating early on. It's just like, you are so much better than talking to an hourly worker. You knew everything about this company. I'm so glad I was able to talk to you. I've been wanting to know all these different things. I just remember being like, wow, you know, like, if you could do that on scale. And this is, I think, one of the biggest challenges we're running into right now. You wouldn't believe how many people have come to me three months ago and said, gabe, I don't want to work with you. I'm Going to build my own cloud code because I can, I can, I can replace my 400 str team with Claude code. They don't come back to me three months later and say, gave my best cloud coders my worst sales rep. I put cloud code in my whole company and we can't scale it and there's no roi. That's a different conversation. But, but, but can you scale AI? Uh, yes. On an individual, it's amazing. And one person seeing some cool stuff. But, but man, when I saw that power, John, I was just like, oh my goodness, if we can bottle that up as a digital employee, how far can we go in? Is Terminator crazy? Like, you know, people, you know, someone cleaning my house. Can a sales rep, of course a sales rep, how far down the path can it go? Um, can it be SMB already 100%? Can it be mid market enterprise? Man, I don't know. You know, the, seems like the, the limits are pretty far out there and I think every week we're seeing people push the boundary and so I just don't know if there are limits right now. And so if you're a sales rep, it's going to get interesting fast.

Speaker A: For sure.

Speaker B: For sure.

Speaker A: And I think that, so again I look at the, the, the hope that I have is, is, you know, actually the, the, the, the limitations of hardware in the sense that it's going to get real expensive real fast. Right? These data centers and all that that has.

Speaker B: Man, I don't know. You just saw like the um, the Uber COO just came out that you know, two, two quarters in, you know, they burned all their tokens for the year and the ROI isn't there. Right. So there's, there's, there's still problems for sure.

Speaker A: And we're seeing, we're seeing hiring, I mean open, open AI, for crying out. A lot is hiring SDRs. That's right. So, so there are, you know, but I, I think we're in this two year, um, transition. Right?

Speaker B: So I think that's a really good call because that's where I was going just a minute ago. It's like, uh, dude, how many people think they're using Claude to replace everybody? And, and again you got guys like this Uber COO coming back and being like it's not, we're not seeing the roi. Like we're so, we're in a weird moment. We're definitely in a weird moment.

Speaker A: Well, you talk about this, this is actually something I want to bring. So pretend productivity because, because I think we're in this where I, I, you know, there's two stages of almost any. Well, the way I'm looking at with AI right now, I think we're still in the efficiency stage of AI, not the, the, the pro, not the, the results stage of hr. Uh, AI yet.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So we're seeing all these efficiencies and, and we're saying okay, look, but it's like, okay, great, you can write an email faster, you can create a personalized cadence better. Is it producing a better result? I haven't seen it yet. I have yet to see it.

Speaker B: And then and there. Ian, man, that it's such an interesting. And now I think we're going to come out of it who are neck deep and uh, I think you can get past this kind of productivity to results oriented. But honestly man, I'm talking to boards all the time and so much CEO, there's so much frustration of we've dumped all this money in Claude. As I just said, you know, boy, everybody's saving time, everybody's a little bit more productive. But the numbers aren't moving. And if the numbers aren't moving, how can I justify the token. The token costs that are just skyrising. And so right now, man, people are scratching, scratching their heads like crazy because dude, if you're in a VC or PE game and you put a dollar in and you don't get anything out, like you can't justify that for very long.

Speaker A: So what is pretend? What are people like kidding them? Like based on what you're seeing out there, what this pretend productivity thing, like what is, what is the feel good stuff that people are like kind of telling themselves like no, this is working and this is why we should. And, and based on that, like what should they be looking at? Obviously results. Ultimately the end of the day.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: There a shift of uh, of from a KPI standpoint that we need to be, you know, SAS versus now is. Is there a difference or is it go back to the fundamentals like productivity.

Speaker B: You know, by fundamentals might be an interesting word. I mean, look, I think what, what you see is every CEO is mandated. They need everyone, everyone uses Claude. So you have all these competitions, you know, the most prompts, wins or AI adoption contests. So that's everywhere. I can name an example I talked to yesterday, my CEO said we have to use Claud. And so everyone's using it. We got a contest coming coming up. Cool. Um, what we're finding with that or what people are seeing is just that word productivity. Like they built something Cool. They built like the. It's like my kids playing, you know, some of the games they play. They build this cool world, right? So, um, they better emails. Um, they found something that can go research and give them an update every morning. Um, it goes in and says what they have on their calendar. Man, they know what they have on their calendar, John. You know, they're researching what their competitor said. Oh, yeah. And people are. And it's a scraper bot, man. And so. And. And look, I'm not saying it's. They're. They're cool little functional type things, you know, and everyone's like, oh, man, you were able to like, find four accounts that are in your icp. Yeah, dude. You know, and so every. And they're just like, you found that and you gave. You got a score on your icp, and so you, uh, know your email is better. So I could name the things and it's, it's paraded around the company. And this guy created this thing that whatever reviews email. So we've all seen it, right? And then at the end of the day, you know, then that we got to our quarterly numbers, and then the quarterly numbers aren't there, and so they're down. So, dude, it's super fundamental in the concept of like, guys, ROI is return on investment. And so if the numbers don't go up or your costs don't go down, you don't have a business case. And if you don't have a business case, you're not employed. You're not, you don't have a job, you don't have a tool. So. So that's back to the fundamental. And the problem right now is if you really want to find ROI and AI, there's only four areas where companies are actually seeing actual roi, not productivity, which I'm not saying is bad, it's fun. But real roi, Those four areas are the following. One, coding. So cursor. You know, those one, you know, programmer can do the work of two or three people. They're seeing real ROI there. There is, I think, great case studies there. That's number one. Number two is customer service. Sam Altman himself said, you know, G, you know, we probably topped off in the number of customer service reps this world have seen, you can eliminate. This is going to be a cost reduction. Customer service reps with AI. I've seen it. Sierra decagon, These companies, there's real cost reduction here. I know that's a sad word, but that's number two. Number three is in the sales, development World, you got to know that where we are. Well, I'll get to that. Just a second. But number three is sales development. There are studies outbound. Not really. If you got a team of 400 outbound sales development reps, um, going after million dollar deals, AI is doing jack shit for you right now, basically. Um, but if you have 200 or 300 inbound reps who are working SMB accounts, yeah, I could give you stories where you don't probably need all of them. You just don't. That's number three. And number four is a surprising one for people. But it's typically in recruitment, recruiting, um, you got a lot of staffing companies. I know a company who has had 30 recruiters. They're down to seven, um, because AI is now doing 200, 300 hours of recruiting for them each month. So they were able to reduce numbers. Those are real numbers, John. 30 to 7. That's not a small number when it comes to ROI. It's not productivity horseshit, it's real numbers. So those are four areas, whether you like it or not. And the reason is, is it's really typically cost reduction or revenue kind of revenue increase. Um, that's where AI is working right now. Now the thing you got to understand is just to pinpoint it where we are on that journey. Cursor, I think crossed 3 billion in revenue. There's something really going on there. Take a company like Sierra decagon and Intercom, in that world, those guys are now hitting the 30, 50, 100, 200 million, 500 million in revenue. So there's actual like gains going on there. Sdr Name the AISDR companies and their revenue, John. I'll tell you, they're in the two to three millions. They're nowhere to be found. They're tiny. That just means we're early on there. So the wins are going to be either they're tiny or they're nowhere to be found. 100 million versus 2 million in revenue. That's so much different in where we are in that journey that it's just not happening very much. And then the recruiting is almost further behind. There's M1 or 2 infants starting to move there, but it's small, small gains. So again, programing is way big revenues, customer service, SDR recruiting. So you just got to know where we are in the journey. But those are reductions that people are like, wow, that's something I can take. There's a case study. I've seen 14 million in cost savings in customer service, John. 14 million. They were they eliminated almost 400 offshore BPO reps that with using AI uh, that is something you take to your board and it's not this. I found four accounts with Claude and, and I loved it because my research bot showed me my competitors strategy. What are you talking about? This is 14 million versus a research bo. It's just, it's just not even in the same avenue, man. It's not in the same avenue.

Speaker A: Uh, and this is what um, this is what I. So I went to Rev fest last week, right. So go nimbly and you know, it's all rev ops and ah, Rev Ops is now the new darling child, right? It's enablement was kind of was cute for a little while. Now it's rev ops. But what, what was interesting to me is like I forget who it was but they stood up and they talked. They asked like hey, how many enablement people are in the room? Right? And like 20 or three hands went up because it wasn't a ton, but there was a couple of booze that came out from the crowd like oh. And I was like what the. And, and I, and I listened to these rev ops and, and the guy who was, who asked said um, yeah, you know, enablement, you know, you kind of, he didn't say you're obsolete, you're, you're unnecessary, but in the world. That's basically what he was inferring, right? And then they preached about all this wonderful stuff like you just said about all this great insight insights that they're giving to sales reps and all this, oh, look at this, this prep doc and this. And oh, we're, we're finding deals for you. And I was like you're missing the point in my opinion with this because you, we don't have the, the number. The percentage of sales reps that are equipped to be able to use that information the right way. Yeah, right. Be able to digest all the information then have a conversation like this. The percentage of sales reps that have the ability to do that that are so low in my experience that you could produce the perfect prep doc, but it's going to land like a turd because that rep is either going to read it verbatim, um, and then the client's going to be like why aren't uh, shouldn't we be having a conversation? Or they're going to ignore it and pretend like they prepared and just have their basic conversation like they've had in the past. And that's where the connective tissue is. I'm losing it, because it's like, it's just like engineering founders who think the, the product is the best and they don't need sales rep reps. You know, like every PLG company I've ever heard back in the SAS day, Dropbox box, uh, Tableau, uh, you know, all of them, oh, we don't slack. We don't need sales reps. We don't need sales reps. And then inevitably I've trained slack Tableau, you know, I've trained them all. So are like Rev Ops is. I feel like the same thing as Rev Ops is like the cool kid now and they're saying, look at all this cool we can do internally. And, and they're still like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're just going to give it to a sales rep and they're going to be able to use it. It's like, no, you're not. Like, these sales reps are not equipped to use this information.

Speaker B: That's it. And don't get me wrong, I love when I'm not the big prophesying that we need to eliminate all sales reps, but I am finding that, um, in. We all see it like, dude, you and I write social posts every day. Like, are we that much better using Claude and GPT? Like, I don't know, dude, my social posts were pretty good last year. Two years ago, without it, my PowerPoints, like, were they that much worse when they were used? Did they take that much longer? Like, yeah, I use cloud now to do a lot of my PowerPoint, but the other day I was like, I think I spending like four hours cleaning up all this stuff. Yeah, it took me four hours to do this stuff. So to your point, like the fancy prep docs, the competitive intelligence, the, the overviews, like, I can tell you it's not moving the needle and all the CEOs are seeing it. And so, you know, and I'm not saying it's the end of the world. Look, there's always kind of a crawl walk run to innovation. And so to your point earlier, maybe we're in a different phase, but that's where I've typically tried to say, hey, we need to get cloud employees who take stuff off your plate, who don't just, um, give you more to do. Because this is one of the biggest knocks right now with GPT and cloud. It's like, go do this. Hey, I brought it back for you. And it's like, oh man, I got more work to do. Go, go do research. Now it's back. And it's like, oh, damn it. I got to do. I got to, I got to talk to you again. You can annoying. Throw the thing and it comes back. Throw the bone. And it comes like, oh, I don't even. Like, I want you to go do something and just get the freaking job done, you know, like, what if I could have an agent follow up with these annoying event leads that no one wants to interact with and actually just put four appointments on my calendar? That would be nicer than me being like, who should I reach out to for my event? What. What is the icp? Can you give me four account now? Can you help me craft email? He's getting exhausting, John, working with this, this Claude. It's like an annoying dog who won't go away. That's my analogy.

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, no, I, I hear you. And it's also, I don't know, for, for you, but it's also for me. It's like, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Speaker B: Some of this stuff, right? Like I said with the PowerPoints and stuff, someone threw together a PowerPoint the other day and I was just like, with Claude, I mean, you can sniff it out like a, you know, a mile away now. And I'm just like, guys, honestly. And, and, and this is also a point for you. Like you use Claude to create stuff and we're losing a little bit of that. Like, at least you and I, I've done so. I've done so many hours of cold calls that I, whether I'm using the upfront contract or whatever, framing, like, mhm. I got the concept. These guys are trying to skip it, you know, and not learn how to put. When I did consulting for 10 years, you know how many PowerPoint decks I put together? You know how I learned structured thinking by putting together 10,000 decks. Man, these kids throwing together, you know, this PowerPoint stuff. I'm like, you're not clouds getting there, but you're missing like the point. And I don't know how to explain it, but I'm like, dude, you're missing the point.

Speaker A: I'll tell you, this is in this. I talk about this a lot. You know, the, the challenge we've gone. That I think we're in right now, a lot of them, but, but you know, we've gone from this search engine to an answer engine, and that's a dangerous thing, right? So for guys like you and I who have context, who have business experience, and more importantly, who are curious, this is a superpower because it's like, ooh, tell me More how'd you get that source? Check that please. Give me a different perspective. Right, uh, ask me the questions. I don't know I should be asking like that, that stuff is gold because it's like this expedited learning thing, right? But unfortunately I think that type, that population is 10. I'm going to be generous here and use Pareto's principle, uh, 80, 20 because for 20% of us I think it's fantastic but for the rest of the people who are just lazy as shit, they're going to take that answer, copy and paste it and send and we're skipping the learning process. And this is what scares me so much is all the grind that you and I did early in our careers, right, like the cold calls, the emails, the gr. Like writing down like meeting people face to face, going to events and all that stuff that all allowed you and I to be in this conversation. We don't need a script. We can ebb and flow. We know when to call on AI, we know how to use it the right way. Right? But what happens? Like where's your head at? I mean you got, you say you're five kids, I got a daughter, 15 years old, you got a son that's five, right? Like where, if, if and by the way, give me Claude, give me Claude co work and give me any profession, any one of them and I guarantee you I can do the entry level role that, that is stated today better than any rep coming out, any kid coming out of college today. And like I don't care if it's law, I don't care if it's any, anything, right? So if all the entry level now and, and eventually all this stuff, if all the entry level stuff is being taken care of by AI or is done better with AI, I got two questions. One is where do the fundamentals come from? But more importantly what are the fundamentals anymore? Like is it just curiosity and, and, and business acumen and, and EQ oriented things? Things? And where are the kids going to get that knowledge so that they understand the output that this AI is generating for them, right? Like this two page document, that summary doc, like you could put a name of company in it gives you this perfect thing. But most reps are going to be like cool, I'm prepped.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I mean I see my, you and I share that. I got a 15 year old as well and I've caught him now already a dozen times on his homework or whatever, just you know, basically giving away his, you know, just think for, right, um, and so, man, I don't know if I've got, you know, I do think that entry level stuff, to your point is it's scary because that's the place where it really, when you start saying, you know, customer service or entry level sales or entry level this. Right. Or that, or, you know, analysis or even consulting.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: I was a consultant. I think they're seeing it a lot. These people were just doing, you know, punching numbers or crunching, you know, quick, quick pieces of information. So, um, you know, one is, I'm a believer you can't run away from stuff. So I am like trying to get my kid in it. And number two, not everyone has this luxury. But, you know, people are part of the reasons. Like, why do you start a business like Autonom? I'm like, I got a bunch of kids, I got to get them a job. I mean, entrepreneurship is one of the things that I don't know if you can like outsource, right. Um, to, to, you know, some Claude Bot. And so, you know, I'm hoping that I can, I can create an environment where I can put my kids in and teach, I control it. I can, I can teach them some of the skills. I can put them in a place I run, quote, unquote, the company. Um, and again, I know not everyone has that luxury and I don't know if I will actually without, you know, things up and down in this world. But, but my thought, no joke, was part of that. Like, look, if you don't know what to. I can't. I got to control it. And so, uh, my kids are already trying to outsource their thinking. I'm not going to run away from it. I try to sit down and talk to them about it or work through it with them and then, yeah, whether it's college or work, how do I create an environment where I can start to curate some of their interactions so that they find a way to succeed in this world that feels like it. We don't know what's going to be in the future. So.

Speaker A: And I, I mean, that's kind of what I'm doing is I, I told my, I, I, quite frankly, I don't know if college is even going to be a thing in a couple of years. Like traditional college, like the business model doesn't make any sense to me. It never really did. I always looked at college as a social education, not an actual education, but what I've been doing or what I'm going to do. As soon as she's got a week Left in school here a week and a half. And um, after she, whether she likes it or not, she's going to do this with me. Um, when she, when she gets done with school, I'm going to sit down and show her how to vibe code, showed her how to create an app or whatever it is. Because what I told her was, look, because I don't want to freak her out about the future. Right? I think you and I are on the same page as Terminator and holy, what's going to happen here? And I don't want to put that in her head saying you're right. But um, but I, I, I told her I want her to go to college because I want her to have the college experience. I want her, the social education of college I think is, is invaluable for a kid, but I don't want her to be dependent upon that degree. Degree for a job. Yeah, same thing. I want her to, I want her to have a job. I, I want her to sit in a cubicle and know how shitty it is to sit in stupid meetings that nobody cares about and have a boss telling you what to do when you know, I want her to have that experience because I always say you have to know the rules before you break the rules type of thing. Right? So, but I don't want her to be dependent upon that job and that paycheck. So what I'm to going to do is vibe code, create an app, whatever it might be, and find a way to Instagram paid, do a YouTube thing that generates some revenue so that maybe she can generate 2, 3, $4,000 a month in cash so that that paycheck doesn't really matter. She can go get her art degree if she wants to. Right? Because I think that you, you nailed it. I actually think that the future is entrepreneurship. I really do.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Ah, I don't think any of us are going to have a full time job with a salary and you know, and all that fun stuff. I mean we can talk universal income and Terminator later, but um, I, I think we're all moving towards this. Hey, we're all going to have our own little ecosystem and we're going to plug in a specialty to certain things and maybe manage some agents based on whatever our skill set is. But I think the, the future is entrepreneurship. And, and the, the sooner we teach our kids how to create, how to, how to think. Right. That's what is scaring me about the, the critical thinking is being ripped away from, like, like from, you know, we're all taught to the test. That's why my daughter, you know, she was in Montessori school, which I love, because it's experiential learning and all that.

Speaker B: Look, that's, you know. So I did one of those calls with the college kid the other day, and he's like, man, what. What degree should I choose? And I was like, humanities. Yeah, go, go, go think. Go Learn to think. If you're just going for a. If you're really going to college for a trade, man, go back to a true trade. Do, do the plumbing, do the electrician thing. Don't go to a university and do accounting, you know, don't go to a. Do some business school. Finance, you know, like, go, go humanities. He's like, are you sure? I'm like, yeah, man, I think you got Montessori. You gotta go. Learn to think again.

Speaker A: Learn to think well. And that's why I think that the opportunity is. That's why I'm trying not to overly hype. Uh, this, the scare factor here. And, and, you know, my nephew as an example, he's 22 years old and he's. He's graduating and he's around, you know, and, and, you know, he did all right in school, but he didn't really take advantage of it. And I get on the phone with him the other day and he's, you know, he's got probably another semester left. And, um, I'm like, all right, Gabe, you know what's going on? And he's like, yeah, man, you know, I know you've been talking about AI for a while, and I know I've been avoiding it, but, you know, I'm really. Once the summer hits, I'm really going to dive into it. And he's like, I think the way I'm going to do it is by, you know, taking some of the time I play video games and start to allocate it towards that. And I was like, what? What? I go, how. How, uh, much time are you playing video games? And he was like, oh, you know, two to three hours a night. I'm like, what the. And I literally was like, I couldn't even stop. Like, usually I'm kind of like, I don't want to scare. And I'm like, what the. Are you. I'm like, three hours a night on video games. I'm like, are you me right now? I'm like, do you have any idea what is going on right now? I'm like, like, what's the job market look like? How's it looking for you, your friends getting jobs right now, because they're probably not so. So with him, I'm guiding him through like let's use it to learn.

Speaker B: Let's use it.

Speaker A: Let me show you how to use this the right way. And you've seen some light bulbs go off on him with like, ooh, I'm like, don't jump to the like, uh, so I force prompts of like learning prompts. If you're gonna do something, prep for this. Then here's how to do it and here's how to learn with it. Because it is, it is a superpower if you use the right, even for 20 something year old kids because they can leapfrog the, if you know the business acumen, the how to do things if they use it the right way.

Speaker B: And I can't stress that enough. Like from on the individual front, like back to the productivity, the way you learn, the way you understand the world, that back and forth interaction, like people have this friend and this buddy and so man, these kids in particular, if they can start to use it that way, I think it's amazing. I think again that challenge then says, how do I take that concept from the individual and scale it across 500 customer service reps? Uh, and people's blood, their minds go, I, I can't do it. Claude's not doing it. It's not scaling across 500 customer service reps. So back there are different challenges in the world but man, as you talk about the individual and some of these kids in school, can they become proficient in having, you know, Jarvis think Ironman type thing. Like, you know, the guy's down there building stuff, he's, there you go. I mean he's building cool stuff and he's asking Jarvis and Jarvis is pushing him further. And back to what you're saying with the sales rep. Like, here's my email. What did you think this is better? Here's a different idea I thought about prospecting. Is this, how would you do it differently? No, tell me, tell me I suck. Give me five reasons why this idea sucks. That's like on the individual level, I think people can really expand their thinking. The enterprise usage of, of it. We've not crossed that chasm. There's this huge gasm, right? But the individuals are starting to really feel like they're thinking better and differently and they're more advanced. So I think man, if you're a kid in school, there's an opportunity here to really be proficient, get ahead, get into entrepreneurship, start, be a builder not just to do, not just an operator. These are big words, man, for sure.

Speaker A: So let's finish up on this. You're on one end of the spectrum as far as automating SDRs and all this fun stuff. There's obviously, we're in this transition phase, and I'm sure, now I want you to put your consulting hat back on here. Um, you're sitting there talking to, you know, GDM leader, GTM leader, whatever, CRO, whoever of one of these SaaS companies that is. Right. Stuck in the middle, right? And there is an obvious argument right now to be had for rip and replace. Like, just rip out your sales team, replace it with either, you know, fundamentally, you know, native AI and native AI reps and go from there. Yeah, but we're, we're trying to transition here, right? So do you assess your existing. Like, what, where do you start? Like, if you're sitting in this mess going, my results are going this way. I have a bloated, probably a ton of reps here. I have this AI stuff. We're doing efficiencies, but I'm, um, I don't know what I'm doing here. Do you assess the tech stack first? Do you assess the skill set first? Do you, uh, try to optimize what you have right now? Now, like, what's the transition phase to get to you and what you're doing?

Speaker B: Yeah, man. So, um, I, I'd say, number one, you gotta just be very wary of the, the spectrum here. Right? So we talked about it earlier, all these little tips and tools that are like, I can now use AI to take a zoom call and fill in fields and CRM. Wow, that's amazing. That is such bull crap. Don't go there there. No one cares. It saves three seconds. Don't buy that tool, okay? Don't be fooled with this little research bot. Like, be very conscientious on the other side of the spectrum. Don't think you're replacing everybody or your whole team, your whole SDR team like that. It's crazy. Okay, now bring you back to the center for just a second. Okay, good, we're there. The next step is. This is old school consulting, but boy, do you got to pull out the process map. You, you got to map your process. I, um, know it's annoying, but it's my consulting days at Accenture. I built thousand of them. Every client I implement right now, the very first thing I do, let me map your process. Inbound leads outbound. I want to understand it. Cradle the grave. Inbound Lead comes in, what happens? Form fix. You know, let me understand it. And you might not be able to do this, but it's not that difficult. You got to look at that. And I, I usually like to start with the systems, the process first and then the people on top of it. You want to see what those inefficiencies are. And this is classic. This is classic. Even SaaS like uh, don't buy the tool first look at the process and start to see what are those inefficiencies or where are the gaps and problems and. Sounds simple. Whether it's a tool or AI, you want to find those areas where you could start to carve out the automations. Like I said, maybe we shouldn't be having our SDR as take all these event leads or maybe we shouldn't. Maybe we should. I'm getting all these signals. I, I'm seeing in my process. I got this signal aggregation and I finally have clay kind of working and, and I'm getting all these signals but I'm getting too many in the sales team. Can't follow up on. Okay, interesting. Maybe I should only have my best signals go to my, my top BDRs and the rest of them go to an AI agent that follows up on them. You know. But with that process map you can start to see your inefficiencies.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: You plug that then number three, that's where I typically then get into the people side of it. Now that I've got the plumbing working and it's going and I'm getting my top signals to my outbound sdr, how do I coach those guys to actually work with those signals? Like what are they saying? Are they calling them? They're only emailing. Oh my goodness. We should have them call. What are they saying on the phone? So those are my three step process right now. Watch where you are on the spectrum. Don't be on the two extremes because it's crazy. I can't believe how many companies are falling for, for these stupid agents that do jack or they think they can replace. Get back to the middle, be a centralist, um, politically as well. Uh, no, be a centralist on the spectrum. Two, you gotta map a process. I want to see the whole flow end to end, how the plumbing's working. Let's talk about some inefficiencies and number three, let's get the skill set and the people working and see if we can optimize. Optimized. And honestly, if you would have talked to me when I was at Accenture 20 years ago, the partner would have said the exact same thing. He would have just said, let's understand the process, let's automate out the efficiencies and let's focus on the people. People process technology, you know, it's kind of like the old school thoughts.

Speaker A: It kind of sells. I mean, look, it goes back to fundamentals, man. It goes back to fundamentals.

Speaker B: It really is, man. It ain't a magic. AI is cool, but, man, it ain't a magic pill. And it is to really get it. I'll tell you what, having now implemented a hundred or hundreds of clients, it's work, man. It really is work to get it across a whole team to have that roi. If you're just flipping on something and you thought you could just give everybody your cloud license and it was going to be the magic bean to kind of grow the company, it's just not working. And people are starting to laugh at executive who are doing that now. They're laughing at them.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, let's end on that so we can maybe, uh, go.

Speaker B: I gotta get my coffee, man. Morning coffee. I gotta get back to my. Get back to the grind.

Speaker A: Same here. So let's so. So tell people where they can find out more information about you, what you're working on, all the fun stuff.

Speaker B: Look, I love LinkedIn, but it's so. The algorithm, I don't understand it. I'm loving Instagram, I'm loving Tik Tok. So, um, I do. I try to keep up to date on some of the happenings, what I'm finding, what I'm doing, learning on AI. So I prefer you probably find me on a channel outside of LinkedIn, find me on Instagram, find me on TikTok, interact with me there. I think there's some fun channels outside of SaaS. Typical LinkedIn that would be fun to engage with. So. And then check out a ton of man. We're building some cool, you know, digital employees that you can insert or hire into your business. So check it out. It's a fun, fun, fun idea. Love it.

Speaker A: Awesome, man. It was great catching up. Let's, uh, let's make it, uh. So let's catch up soon because I think you and I both need some therapy.

Speaker B: I can't wait for Costa Rica, bro. Good luck on that. Take care.

Speaker A: All right, but here, hold on two seconds. And everybody else, hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as much as I didn't. Like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, if you make somebody smile, you know you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much and I will see you on the other side. Hey, thanks again for listening to the show and for all your support throughout the years. This is one last reminder to check out my training programs@jbarrows.com or leave a five star our review on your favorite podcast platform or G2. If you've already gone through my training or sign up for my newsletter. Any of those will help ensure I can continue to bring you free content and great conversations like the ones you just heard without having to annoy you with sponsors. Again, let's make it happen in 2026 together.