Glenn Schmelzle - The AI Advantage: Boosting Your Top Line with Generative Tech Insights f

Speaker A: Are you ready to accelerate the growth of your business?

Speaker B: Uh.

Speaker A: Welcome to the Revenue Growth Podcast. This is the place for business owners, sales leaders and marketing professionals to get ideas and inspiration to drive exponential revenue growth. Each week you'll get actionable insights from the world's leading marketing and sales thought leaders and practitioners. Are you ready to grow? Let's join our host, Darrell Amy, author of Revenue Growth Eng Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome back to the Revenue Growth Podcast. Daryl Amy, Revenue Growth Strategist, your host. Today we are on a mission to help 10,000 purpose driven businesses double revenue so they can double impact. And we have an incredible conversation today with my friend Glenn Schmelzley and I'm going to introduce him in just a second. Get ready, put your seat belts on. We're going to have a very interesting conversation about artificial intelligence and sales and marketing and how it's impacting and can be positively impacting your business. This is going to be an incredible conversation today. Our episode is brought to you by Selling from the Heart. If you are in a highly relational industry where trust matters, you want to get to know Selling from the Heart. Selling from the Heart helps highly relational companies develop sales strategies that drive net new business and cross sell revenue through building relationships and trust. You can learn more at www.sellingfromtheheart.net and while you're there, make sure to grab a free copy of Larry Levine's book, Selling from the Heart. Well, the topic of AI has been a very hot topic. I think that is the understatement of the day. Glenn Schmeltzley, our guest, is a marketer. He's a husband, a hockey dad and local community supporter. Also a fellow Canadian. He got in early on using the Internet for marketing and brought in many fields for his employees. It troubled Glenn when he saw other businesses struggle to fill their funnels. So in 2009 he started to blog about his approach. His belief in rebooting the funnel was so strong it led Glenn to create the Marketing what's new agency in 2013 and so many initiatives like the GA Fast Forward workshops. After that he started putting out opinions under the funnel reboot name, first on Twitter and then as a podcast which I've been a guest on to widen the conversation so marketers everywhere can join in. Glenn is a wealth of information, of information, knowledge and inspiration. And a fellow Canadian, Glenn, welcome to the Revenue Growth Podcast. It's great to have you here, Darrell.

Speaker A: I am so glad to be here.

Speaker B: We're going to have fun today. This topic, I don't know if you've, uh, heard anything recently about artificial intelligence, maybe a little Chat GPT. It seems to be, uh, uh, quite a hot little topic everywhere you go

Speaker A: now, making the rounds.

Speaker B: So this is going to be a fun conversation because I know when we speak you always have interesting and innovative ideas. Why don't you set this up? And when you're thinking about technologies like Chat GPT and this generative AI technology that is rolling out rapidly in the world of sales and marketing, what's your perspective and point of view on all of this?

Speaker A: Sure. I think the best thing, you know, let's, let's all maybe do this as a group exercise. Can we just take a second and like, breathe in.

Speaker B: Ready? Breathe in. Breathe in.

Speaker A: Right. I say that half jokingly, but really there have been so many things happening. You know, you and I are speaking now in the middle of 2023, so for anybody in and around this time, there have been no shortage of stories that are doom and gloom about the disruption that AI is causing. And so I say we need to just take a breath for a second because I see there being a lot of good that can come from what happens in business when humans are twinned with artificial intelligence. So it's not humans versus AI, it's humans plus AI. And I've seen, and I'd love to share some ideas with your audience about how in the sales and marketing realm, this really works, that's great.

Speaker B: And by the way, if you're in the future, maybe 10 years from now, and you're actually either unemployed or working for an artificial intelligence sentient being, um, you'll find this conversation very interesting. There's so much drama around this. And you know, it is, it is very, it's obviously very interesting topic from a philosophical standpoint, but if you get really, really practical and you look in the worlds in which you and I live, um, revenue growth, sales and marketing, all of that. Um, so I'm curious. Let's have a practical conversation. We'll leave the philosophy, uh, for other folks today. This is a real, this is a tool. It's a tool that, um, we're all using in some capacity and, and everyone's going to continue to use. And like any tool, um, I think it's important that that tool gets used correctly and, and to its full benefit. So I'm really curious what some of your, um, ideas and, and uh, strategies are here when it comes to how do we use the latest generation of AI in sales and in marketing.

Speaker A: Sure. So I think one of the ways that it needs to be used is in how we measure our success. And I say that because in my opinion, the promise that was made by the tools that we now have in all of our companies. I'm Speaking of the CRMs, I'm speaking of the marketing automations, and I'm speaking of all those Martech point solutions. Right. That Scott Brinker has that whatever, 10,000 plus, you know, landscape. Unbelievable, right?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: So, so we went ahead and we were given a promise that those things would further how we're acquiring customers and then make it easier for us to, um, see what's actually happening all the way through the customer lifecycle and be more responsive. I think that promise was only half fulfilled. I say that, and I'm not blaming any one vendor here, but if we look at the proliferation of tools that we got, I think what ended up happening was that we got, um, brought into the thinking that if we as the human were to dip into each one of those interfaces, like, you know, you get up in the morning, you sit down, you log into one of them, you see something and you realize, oh, okay, well, the story for that prospect kind of stops there, but it picks up in the next tool. So what do you do? You log into that tool and, you know, on and on you go. You're the cog that is, you know, in between all these different pieces. And we now are like inundated with a whole bunch of silos that is relying on us and our notoriously faulty human memories and our notoriously bad math skills to really understand how we can help that one prospect. But writ large, how we can help all of them. And what I've seen happen in the last few years is that when an AI is looking at a large set of information, they are able to do incredible things. So permit me for a quick second to say what I mean there. The, uh, Chat GPT is a perfect example. What did Chapik GPT do? It took all the words on the Internet, or almost all of them, and it looked at them all and it noticed the patterns. And when you do that and it's able to be asked a question and then it predicts the next word that should come back in the response. While it really isn't reasoning, it looks pretty darn effective at giving us the information that we need. It turned that massive, you know, the Internet. None of us is going to read the Internet, but it could and it brought it down and it did. It's, it's telling us things that are actually useful. Mhm. That same technology that is used with text can be used with data. So the. In days of old we turned to statisticians to take massive quantities of data and we put it all into databases and they would look through it and maybe find something interesting that would actually help a business. What I've seen now is that we are getting into the realm where with AI's assistance, that data that we have inside of our multiple siloed systems, if you structure it and you put it together in the right place for the AI, the AI can look at it and it can do that logging in in the morning thing. It can tell you, hey, I'm doing these things for you. Even better it can say, I noticed that you have this kind of segment which is being underserved. So I wrote up a bunch of emails that I think would be a good nurturing sequence. Would you like to look at them and run an experiment where we do it? This is the kind of thing that I imagine we should have gotten in the first place if we were really looking for that big promise that all of this technology was going to give us. And now I think we're at the, at the point where we maybe even can expect it of that technology. We're, we're getting really close.

Speaker B: I think it's really interesting uh, in all of that because when I look at, you know, just on a very high level at uh, technology like chat GPT, if I um, let's just say a very mundane um, task is saying I need to write a press release about this new product. What's interesting to me, and this is my untechnical observation about how this works, is the software knows the framework to write a good press release, knows how long it is, what the flow should look like and then over here it's got a bunch of facts. It takes those two and it marries it together with pretty good English, uh, or whatever language you're working in and puts those facts together in um, 85% usable um, format that's actually quite insightful, useful, easy to edit and put to work. Um, what I think is very fascinating about this is if you look at, let's m. Take the landscape from your business or uh, the Internet, the world, all the way down to your business. You've got a lot of facts in there about um, and this is where I think the potential is really interesting to me. You've got facts in your CRM of some, you know, you've got facts in your marketing automation platform and any of the other tools you're using in between. Um, Possibly meeting notes, capture tools and all of that. And you also have fax in your ERP system, your billing system. And to me this is really fascinating. If we looked at that landscape and said, okay, we've got some frameworks over here about how to create, um, strategies, how to create content, how to create email, and we've got facts over here from your business and the ability to marry those together. Now in essence, if we could all sit around, um, as professionals, if we had the time to log in to the erp, log in to the automation system, log into everything and synthesize all of that, we could spend hours doing that for just one client, something that technology can do in a few minutes. And to me, this is where the promise comes is if we can take facts, marry them with frameworks, and then maybe merge in some general information and trends and data from the Internet. Um, you know, this is to me a very promising, um, tool for us to be able to come up with things that are hyper relevant for our salespeople, for account based marketing strategies, um, for just one off, um, stuff at scale, um, to be able to be super effective. So I agree with you. I'm very excited about this and the prospect of what this is going to be able to do, um, for us, um, in both sales and marketing.

Speaker A: I love how you said that. Notice that at no point did you shrug and say, we're just handing it all over to the AI. You as a human knew where you wanted to go with it and you were the one who. I love that idea of framing it right. You've got the framework, you, you know what the game plan is and now you're plugging it in to different pieces. Some of them it'll be ready for today, some we might need another 6, 12, 18 months before that. Technology is simple enough that we can use it, but if you look now you can. You know, your readiness for when we reach that point is going to be way ahead of your competitors.

Speaker B: Yeah, it is very fascinating. Of course it brings up all kinds of questions about privacy. I can see business owners going, what? We're going to put a artificial, uh, intelligence, uh, engine in our business, reading all of our sensitive business information. I mean there's a lot of legitimate, genuine questions around that. But if you look at it, uh, conceptually in being able to say, okay, we're actually going to be able to generate business intelligence and whether that's with a customer, current client, that we know about their interactions with us, we know about their account in our erp, their data in our CRM M, their email communications. We know about that, um, what could be done with that to um, crack the, to the golden goose in so many businesses I believe is cross selling. So what are we doing inside our current customer base? You don't really have to leave the confines of your business data to begin to really drive a cross sell, um, initiative through, through AI which I'm tremendously fascinated um, with the potential there. But the flip side of that is um, let's take um, prospecting out. A salesperson's got target accounts. Now I've got a call on that target account. I've got, you know, if I'm B2B, I'm six people deep and decision makers and influencers in that target account. So I've got ABC Companies chief, uh, financial officer. What in the world is important to them right now? And once, um, and to me that's exciting right, Because I can take what's going on with CFOs in general in their industry, what's going on in their business, they're launching products, moving into Singapore, whatever is going on. And I can merge that together and have some kind of indication. But it's research that I could do as a sales rep. It just might take me two hours to dig into that depth and have someone come back to me literally instantly with talking points and um, strategies to drive conversation. In an account like that, conversation still has to be driven. Um, you know, and this is where I think, I'm curious what you think my take on, on chat. Um, is. Anytime I've used it, it's gotten, it's gotten me about 80% of the way there and to the point of where if I sent, if I published or sent what was created that 20% that's not right or not. You know, it would make me look really bad. Yeah.

Speaker A: Like come off as wooden. Yeah.

Speaker B: But at the same time if I can get 80% of the way there. To me, what I like about it is not even so much the time savings because there's time involved in, in fixing it, if you will, or making it personal and right and correct. What I think is very interesting about it is it allows me to tap in and get ideas that I wouldn't have necessarily thought of in the moment. To me what I'm discovering, curious, what you're discovering as well is as I use these tools in various applications, it's sparking thought that I didn't have before because it's bringing new ideas into some of this content and strategy. And the second thing and that's making me, um, actually it's making me smarter if you will, because it's, you know, it's just like having, if I had another person in the office next to me working on the exact same task, you know, you might go, hey Darrell, have you thought about dot, dot, dot? Um, and we're able to get that in a, in a virtual assistant, uh, an AI type assistant. And I think, you know, this is in a lot of ways, um, raising the bar and it's making a role of a marketer or sales professional, um, more, less hunting um, down facts and more thinking about strategy. Yeah.

Speaker A: So that two hours that you mentioned earlier, let's, let's just attack that. The truth is that um, we do have a lot of, let's say we have sufficient information, um, if we're doing the right things on uh, sufficient information to be able to handle that conversation, ah, that we're going to have with that ah, targeted ah, account. Um, I say that because when we pull together our information from CRM, our information a step above, uh, from marketing automation and even more anonymous information from our website or even from the data that Google gives us for how our website is doing in search queries, um, what I have found is that um, obviously respecting privacy, let me allay people's, you know, concern about how much work this is going to be and how it can be automated. Um, the systems that are out there, they are really good at crunching down data and just making educated guesses. Um, even if there's holes in the data.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Uh, they're extremely good at kind of sensing an overall pattern and just getting to like you said that 80%. Maybe there's a bit of fuzziness, um, there's even this term, you know, that they describe as when the AI will hallucinate and kind of not correctly, you know, get the context behind something, but they'll put most of it in there. And that's actually a, that's a boon for us as cell sales and marketers. Why? Because it means that even if we have a couple of hundred customers, that information that's in our internal systems that we have for example, um, obtained the uh, client's uh, permission. You know, we have things that say to them, look, we would like to treat you like you and we don't want to give a one size fits all product or service here. If you're cool with that, you know, you know those terms, then that information can be given to an AI and when it crunches it down so that we you know, look at that conversation. I would say we're reaching the point quite quickly where instead of two hours of us hunting and pecking in systems, in two minutes, we have asked our internal AI, how should I approach this conversation? And it looks at the other customers that are like this target account, and it says, here's what I've noticed. These seem to be the things that matter. We then, as a thinking, reasoning human, look down, maybe, uh, further curated a little, and then we have that conversation and it really will get us farther than, you know. So, Bob, I see you're a golfer, right?

Speaker B: Wow, it just brought up so many. I so want to be a golfer, Glenn. I tried so hard and I just.

Speaker A: Yeah, I, I am a lousy golfer too. It's.

Speaker B: It's, um. So I digress. But if you think about all this, you know, I'm thinking now in, in terms of the, like you're talking about here, the data that's available and uh, you know, if you look at, if you're a marketer or if you're, if you lead a company and you've got marketers on your team and you have access to things like Google Analytics, for example, I mean, talk about an overwhelming amount of data. And then you just layer in all the different data sources from all the different platforms that you're in right now, and you're trying to figure out what's that old, old thing. I know 50% of my marketing is working. I just don't know which 50%. Right. Uh, and as much as that was the joke from like four decades ago, it's not that untrue. It's still true today in a lot of ways. Um, and I think part of. We went from maybe three or four decades ago having zero data to having so much data now that it can feel almost impossible to spot the trends and see what's really working. AI, I think, has potential there.

Speaker A: That's it. As a human, actually, we're beyond hope. And I'll slay a myth here that I think, um, we were brought into with, you know, the 20th century mass marketing, uh, consciousness. Um, if I'm speaking to B2B people out there, you know, they do understand that, you know, we use terms like, um, the different touches that you have with a prospect, you know, your digital marketing, mainly the fact that they may be signified as a lead and then a marketing qualified lead and a sale, sales accepted lead and a sales call non. It goes, um, the myth there is that by using these cutesy labels and trying to Simplify how someone comes to make a serious decision on behalf of themselves and their colleagues for their business by choosing your company. I'm sorry, but human beings are more complicated than just being reduced to those labels. And so we only ever use them as a model. And there's a guy named George Box that said all labels, sorry, all models are wrong, but some are useful. Mhm. So they had limited usefulness for us. But when we're trying to represent how human beings, especially in B2B, come to making, uh, make a purchase decision and then go through the experience with your company and, you know, the different points of happiness and anger that they have, you know, along that, and then truly appreciating that value that we get from them. It's, it's more than, it's way more data points than those simple little tables and dashboards can represent. But they're not beyond the ability of AI to understand what is all happening there, or at least make some much better guesses than we can about what's happening there. And that's where I'm trying to take people, is that you need to have that data for the AI to be able to tell you stuff back, but you're also going to have to let go a little bit because it's going to tell you things that will conflict with your simple linear funnel mentality. And, and this is, this is like a move from us. You know, remember in physics they had Newton and for a couple hundred years he, he kind of had some basics of how the world were in the universe worked. And then Einstein came along and, you know, was Newton wrong? Yeah, he was wrong about a number of things. And you know, Einstein, we had to get our, ourselves into a whole new reality there. And they keep coming out and telling us about the new things that we're actually discovering and how we, we have to slough off those older concepts that we had when they have ceased to serve their, their usefulness.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: The same is going to be true in sales and marketing. And we just have to, we have to go with the flow, man.

Speaker B: Well, this is an interesting time to be alive. It's an interesting time to be in the whole business development side of things. And, and Glenn, this has just been a very fascinating conversation. And, and uh, I just, I want to keep this conversation going. I don't think this is the last time you and I will talk about this on the podcast, because this is moving very, very quickly. Uh, as we wrap up, I'm just curious, how can people get more of Glenn Schmeltzley in their life.

Speaker A: Thanks. I'm pretty reachable on places like LinkedIn or if they happen to use Twitter, you know, Instagram, things like that, they, uh, can look for. Hey, Glenn. S. But, uh, we'll include links for, uh, for those there on all those social platforms. And, um, I would just leave them with the parting thought that they want to be asking their teams and asking themselves, am I tracking the information that will one day, um, be needed by an AI Will be needed by systems that can tell me more of what's going on? Am I tagging the things that matter to my business that I lay awake at night going, okay, how many of those do we have? Uh, at this point, if you have that, you know, kind of repertoire of data that is nearing the point where it's all written down and it's not inside your noggin. Right. That it's being recorded in systems of some sort, then, um, you're going to be ready when you're able to bring AI fully into the picture here.

Speaker B: Fascinating conversation. Glenn, thank you so much for sharing time with us today. This has been really, really awesome.

Speaker A: Thanks, Darrell.

Speaker B: Awesome. And thank you to everybody in the Revenue Growth Podcast audience. This, uh, we've been saying this since the beginning of the podcast is this is the time for sales and marketing leaders to be on the front edge, to be paying attention to what's going on, to be innovating and driving. Uh, because the things that we're talking about here today, these topics are going to be the topics that are going to define us over the next, um, five years, ten years. And I love what Glenn's talking about. We've wondered, why are we gathering all this data that we don't seem to always be using? We can use it now, and this is time to make sure that you're gathering the things that you need to be able to take full advantage of all of this. So many, uh, fascinating questions are spinning in my mind out of this conversation. I'm sure they are in yours. So make sure to like or subscribe. We're going to keep this conversation going throughout the summer and the rest of the year. Thank you to everybody who's leaving reviews for the Revenue Growth Podcast. If you want to grab a free copy of the Revenue Growth Engine book, just go to revenuegrowthengine.com and click on Free Book. I'd love to give you instant access to the audiobook so we can continue this conversation about how do we drive revenue? We're here on a mission to help 10,000 purpose driven companies double revenue so they can double their impact. So next time we'll have more ideas for you. In the meantime, keep doing what you're doing. Keep pushing throughout the summer, and as we always say, let's get going and let's get growing. Would you like to get complimentary access to the Revenue Growth Engine audiobook? Just text the word revenue to 21,000 or go to revenuegrowthengine.com book. You'll get instant access to the audiobook so you can get ideas to help you grow your revenue so you can scale your impact. Text the word revenue to 21,000 or go to revenuegrowthengine.com book to get instant access. Thank you for listening to today's episode. I hope you found ideas to help you to drive exponential revenue growth so your business can make more of an impact. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to like or subscribe. It also helps us spread the word. If you'd be kind enough to leave a review, of course, we'd love it if you would share this with your friends. Together we are growing revenue so we can scale our impact.