How AI Helps Sales and Marketing Focus on Customers That Matter

Zev Wexler: Foreign.

Fred Diamond: Thank you so much. My name is Fred diamond with the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. This is another AI and sales brief podcast. Of course, it's a sub brand of the Sales Game Changers podcast. I have my good friends Tom Snyder with, with Funnel Clarity and AI for sales expert Zev Wex, where we do this show. Every Monday morning we tackle a sales challenge and let me talk about how AI can help solve that particular problem. Uh, again, we've been bringing these solutions to companies around the globe and it is very, very exciting. I want to remind people, you could read the transcript, listen to the show sales game changerspodcast.com salesgamechangerspodcast.com or YouTube or Apple Podcasts. And gentlemen, this is, I believe, the fifth show that we've done. Again, every Monday morning we tackle a sales challenge and, uh, it's been exciting because, you know, people were beginning to listen and utilize the advice that we're giving every Monday morning. So here's one that we're going to tackle today. Um, it's a, it's a historic challenge in B2B and B2G sales. Much, of course, has been written about the eternal divide between sales and marketing. We talk about this not infrequently at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. But does the weaving together of sales science and AI do anything to finally answer and solve this conundrum? Tom, get us started.

Tom Snyder: Yeah, I, I want to talk about the problem and give more, more time to Zev on this one. So the struggle you always hear in every company, B2B, B2G is always this idea that the salespeople believe marketing doesn't produce, produce enough valuable resources or leads. And marketing believes they produce an enormous amount of valuable material and an enormous amount of leads that the salespeople don't use. Now, what's wrong there? The wrong. The, the thing that they're suffering from is the natural intersection. And the natural intersection is the understanding what is the orientation of our total addressable market around something they need to fix, accomplish or avoid. There are obviously various viewpoints of that at any given moment. Then you have this idea that producing a lead just because you have a phone number and a name is, is not adequate for a salesperson. If you can align marketing around go find me people who are either suffering a problem that they need to solve and they don't quite recognize the time as being right, or find me the people who are looking for it right now and I will celebrate marketing all day long. You can still do the branding promise. You can still do the other things. But this is what I need to do. The problem is that for a salesperson to do that on their own is arduous because you have to search all kinds of resources, you have to find all kinds of, of clues and triggers. You're not trained to do it, and it's not really something you find rewarding. You want leads, man. And so there is this war. What I have learned from Zev is this is the peace treaty of all times. Because both of those, uh, uh, um, objectives, marketing and sales, can be served and everybody can get what they want. Zeb, please take it away.

Zev Wexler: So I love both sales and marketing, but I think sales and marketing are a circle. And the problem that most companies have is they're two separate parts that don't work for one another and don't collaborate. Here there's a few solutions, number one, and the easiest one is the problem that I've heard in a lot of sales companies, uh, a lot of companies with sales people, that the, the leads that marketing is producing is not the right leads and they don't want to waste the time. And then habitually now they leave those alone. Now if those leads are, let's say, more top of the funnel or less, um, you know, they're not still there. You can have an AI figure that out and see which one actually can go to sales with, hey, this is why this is a good lead for you. So maybe the number of leads go down, but the quality of them go up. And now sales is habitually looking at these. In addition, you can use the data that AI collects from sales into marketing. And now it's not just anecdotal, it's not just, hey, this sales person said something, but I don't like him or I believe something else. Now it's facts. Now this is the data that all our clients say when they buy, when they don't buy. Let's use that into our marketing. Let's take that data, uh, and make it something that the actual buyer wants to hear. So now the salesperson knows, okay, if he said yes to this, he's interested. It's not just a phone number and an email he got through some kind of a, you know, email marketing, you know, thing. So in, in those two ways, you can do so much. And again, I believe in the end of the day, I'm a humans guy. So AI is great, but it's habits. We are habitually not trusting one another in sales and marketing. And AI can fix that. It can take the brunt of taking all these not so good leads and funneling them into good leads. And then it can take all of that data from sales and giving it to marketing to actually produce better marketing. Uh, Tom, I would love you to hear your thoughts on this. But this sold so, so many problems. And it's, it's just using data that was just hard to use before.

Tom Snyder: Yeah, I, I, I'm telling you, I genuinely, genuinely get so excited when we do these things to make it as quick and simple as possible. On any given moment, a snapshot in time on any given day, five different studies by five different companies have come up with the same conclusion. 3% of your total addressable market is looking for your solution, or something like it. At that moment, 56.5% of the total addressable market is completely satisfied with the solution they have, whether they should be or not. Another argument. 40.5% of the market is actually frustrated by something you can solve. Not yet looking. Uh, imagine if you could give sellers the 3% and the 40.5% with the information of how to approach them differently and then put the 56.5% in branding. And you knew you were right. You knew you were doing it right. My God. That's what Zeb, uh, AI can do. It's unbelievable. Sorry.

Zev Wexler: Absolutely. And it's not 100% right off the bat, but when you start doing it, it gets better and better and better. And the more you use it, the more data we have, the more, the better the AI becomes and the better we all get to know. Who are the 3%? Who are the 46%? Sorry for misquoting your data. And who are the 56% that m. We can just share some brand marketing and make sure that we're still in their minds. But who are the people that salespeople really need to work with and why?

Tom Snyder: I'm going to submit to you that from day one, even before it learns a lot, it's better than what's happening now from day one. It just gets better from there. Boom. Sorry, Fred.

Zev Wexler: 100%.

Fred Diamond: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, in the sell side, we, we say things like you said, Tom, at the beginning of this. Marketing given isn't giving us the right leads, the right events, whatever it might be. And one of the historic problems is that sales, I'm sorry, marketing just doesn't know. You know, there's a lot of smart people in marketing, but, you know, they know market trends or they know what the industry looks like. They don't know things at the customer level. And, you know, where customers are going, where they need to go, how they needed to be communicated to. Utilizing uh, a solution like this will definitely solve a lot of problems about getting the right information. And that 3%. Right. Getting the right or the 41%? I think 41, 45.

Tom Snyder: You guys are killing me.

Fred Diamond: No, but getting the right information to the sales professional to help communicate to the customers, et cetera.

Tom Snyder: No, you got it. And again, the exact numbers are not important. The three unequal segments of the total addressable market is really the point.

Zev Wexler: So think about this. There's a Salesforce with 200 people that has three prospect calls every week. Those are 600 calls that the AI can go through. And that's a week, take a couple of months. We're talking about thousands of calls that you can produce actual data to give to marketers who love, uh, data. And now we can actually create so much better marketing.

Fred Diamond: Yeah, specific for what the sales organization is trying to achieve. Tom. Uh, one of the things that we're most excited about at the Institute of Reflection Professional Selling is our Selling Essentials Marketplace. And we've hand selected about a dozen companies including Funnel, Clarity and ah, Wexler. You guys have come together to bring a great solution to solve a lot of these problems utilizing AI and then sales performance excellence strategies, utilizing again, uh, Zev's expertise and, and your sales performance expertise. Uh, tell us a little bit about that particular offering that we're bringing to the market now.

Tom Snyder: Yeah, um, I, uh, think having been in this industry, the industry of sales performance improvement for more than 30 years, it is absolutely the most exciting major change that has happened to my perspective in 70 years and I suspect it will be that same thing 60 years from now. Um, the whole world has heard the words sales best practice so many times, it's become quite trite. It has become sort of ho hum, ho hum. People have now heard AI is the new tool so many times that they're scrambling as fast as they can. Quick, let's implement some AI right now. If you think of those two ends of that spectrum and then you think what if, what if we really did have the scientific proof that a set of things were real? Sales best practice. This is the sales magic. So while the label may be boring, what if you really could tell wheat from chaff and what if you really could put a corporate initiative together which said, yeah, everyone's scrambling to use AI, you know, in some cases, you know, you're handing a sharp knife to a four year old, let's not do ourselves harm. So you bring these two things together. The power of AI as a corporate initiative, uh, with the reality that somewhere out there, there really is the science of sales. And now, you put those together, you have an accelerant that has never been seen in this magnitude before. And I don't say that casually, nor is that hyperbolic. That's what this offering is about. At least give yourself a break and talk to us about it. At least.

Fred Diamond: Absolutely. So, everybody listening today? Reading the transcript. Reach out to myself, Fred Diamond, Tom Snyder, or Zev, uh, Wexler. All right. Once again, this is the AI In Sales Brief podcast. Every Monday morning, we tackle a sales challenge. We appreciate you listening today. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.