Agentic AI in Sales: What Business Leaders Need to Know

Speaker A: And every function up to the CRO now needs to rethink their role. And I'll start with my vision of the CRO. I'll throw out something a little bit controversial, but I think the starting point to that is we need to disable sales enablement. That's one of the biggest problems that we have right now is the way that we have historically enabled people. We have agents today that can actually analyze what your best sellers are doing in real time. The Great Reckoning will weed out those people that were the charlatans and they will retain the great superstar players that deserve to be on the field.

Speaker B: Welcome to the Scaling with AI podcast. I'm Alex Bacon and I'm on a journey to cut through the vendor hype and learn the real life use cases of how AI can help grow your business. Every episode I chat with scaling businesses just like yours who are leveraging AI to do more, go faster and grow bigger. Let's dive in. This week we're looking at the impact AI is having on sales and how it is transforming the sales function. Now, whether you've got a big sales team or you're a solo consultant, sales is hugely important part of all of our businesses. I'm joined by Justin Schreiber, who's the CEO from Teret and former VP in sales and marketing for LinkedIn. We talk through the impact that AI is having across sales organizations and and the impact it can really make on sales performance. Okay, welcome. Justin, do you want to start off just tell us a little bit about yourself.

Speaker A: Sure. So I am the CEO and co founder of Terat and Teret. We build agentic revenue platforms to drive sales productivity. I've been in the sales tech space for most of my career. I started off as a consultant, but after business school I dove straight in, joined a company that some old timers have heard of, I guess I'll say Siebel Systems, which was the originator of CRM and at some point was eclipsed by Salesforce, but certainly laid the groundwork and from there spent some time at great companies. Oracle. LinkedIn also had the opportunity to work at many startups that focused on the sales and marketing tech space. And over the course of my career, I've had the opportunity to build products for salespeople. But I've also been in the seat of a seller and a sales executive. So I have a lot of empathy for the challenges associated with this function. But also I get why people do it. I love sales. I know people that love sales. And the best part of my job is contributing to that community and helping people to do what they love even better.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Thank you, Justin. And so, as you said, you started your career in CRM and something that most businesses will be familiar with and, um, will have had, and in some cases probably would have gone through a bit of pain with that, uh, and the data that they're getting in and out of that. Are you seeing AI as being the same? Is it just sort of the next tool that people are going to use and become painful with, or is this different this time?

Speaker A: No, this is a transformative technology. And every function up to the CRO now needs to rethink their role. And I'll start with my vision of the CRO. I like to say that in the AI era, we need more Miles Davis and less Lenny Bernstein. And I'll explain what I mean by that. Leonard Bernstein was one of the greats, a composer, a conductor. But when you think about what he did, he basically had a polished score. When he got up on the podium, he had rehearsed with his orchestra. Every person knew their part. They'd run through it many times. And what distinguished his orchestra from many other orchestras is the level of precision that they were able to deliver at. And that's kind of how we've run sales historically. We've built a playbook. We have rehearsed that playbook. Everyone knows their part. And what distinguished in the past the great sales organization from mediocrity was the level of precision at which they could execute. The world is very different now. We don't have time to build a static playbook and execute against it. And that's why I say we need more Miles Davis. Miles Davis was a great band leader and also a, uh, jazz visionary. But when you think about what he did, he brought a group of talented musicians together. He gave them a loose framework, but he was able to move organically with the music. And I see today's Sierra's as having the same requirement. They need to bring a talented group of people together, give them a rough framework, but they need to be picking up on the signal in the marketplace and evolving in real time to deliver a sales experience that's very much in sync with the evolving needs of the customer, the competitor, and how the industry wants to do business.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Thank you. And, uh, I like the analogy and I appreciate it. How does that work in reality, where you've got a sales team that is a real mixture of experience and you've got SDRs through to existing account managers and everything in between? How do you kind of get that playbook, if you like, sort of out to them for them to be responsive? Because that's really what you're asking for them to do is to be more agile and more responsive to what they're hearing around them. But they've not necessarily got the experience to do that.

Speaker A: Well, I'll, uh, throw out something a little bit controversial, but I think the starting point to that is we need to disable sales enablement. That's one of the biggest problems that we have right now is the way that we have historically enabled people. If you think about it, you have an enablement team working closely with product marketing. They build the sales playbook. That could take a quarter because they're out interviewing people, they're taking notes, they're talking to customers to find out what works. At the end of the quarter, they come back and they've got this document and they say, here it is. It's like Moses coming off of Sinai with the Ten Commandments. This is how thou shalt sell. Then the next ordeal is you have to get the sellers to actually put that in their brain. So you take them out of the field, you train them, they retain about 5% of what you shared with them because they go to the bar every night after you train them and wash it all away with a few drinks. And it takes another quarter of reinforcement before the sellers actually learn the new playbook. Now you're six months into the episode, and at that point the competitive set has moved on. Customers are asking for something totally new. You're always on your heels. So I like to say that the future is what I call microenablement. And the way that microenablement works is, number one, build a playbook around what's actually working. We have agents today that can actually analyze what your best sellers are doing in real time. Extract the activity, extract the language that they're using, and literally in three minutes, they can produce a playbook. Then what the agents can do is look at each rep in the context that they're operating in. Hey, Alex, you have a meeting tomorrow. You're mid stage in a deal. The agent is going to take that playbook and it's actually going to package it up in a way that's context specific, so that 30 minutes before the call, you get a script that captures the best points of the playbook but contextualizes them. Here's what you need to share. Here's the objectives for this call, here's the objections that are going to come up and now you walk in and you've just got a bite sized kernel of information related to that playbook that needs to get applied in that moment. As soon as you hang up, you get feedback. Here's how you did, Alex. You got a, uh, nine out of ten. Here's what you did well, here's what you need to improve. And then on Friday, when you walk into that coaching meeting with your manager, she pulls up your coaching sheet, looks at all of the deals that you were engaged in that week and can tell you what you did well and what you didn't do well. So the playbook was built in three minutes. You had a micro enablement moment before you jumped on the call, after you jumped on the call and with your manager. And in that way you're able to very fluidly incorporate the best thinking and reiterate on it so that you're constantly getting better at it.

Speaker B: Perfect. And I can absolutely see that you're learning from what's working. You can hopefully feed in some of the customer voice into that as well. So it's not just what the sales rep is doing, it's actually how the customer is responding and using their language back to them. But how do you quality manage that? Because there is a danger that your bestseller is the best seller because they've gone completely off script and they're promising a product that doesn't exist at a price that doesn't exist. So how do you kind of make sure that there's that balance between what is reflective of the brand and what the organization wants to put out, versus what actually works in reality in the field?

Speaker A: Well, one of the exciting things about AI is that you're able to identify a, uh, training set based on the qualities that you find most desirable. So as I'm building a playbook, I can say look at all of the sellers that have the highest close rates, but also have the highest retention and expansion rates. So it's going to weed out those sellers that are out there selling vaporware, selling things that we don't do, and it's going to focus on the people that are selling, closing, but doing it the right way. So now I have a playbook built on the model rep that I'd like to emulate. Once the additional reps start to use that playbook, I can also put certain guideposts in place. For example, evaluate this rep based on the level of truthfulness that they're bringing into conversations and notify me if they're starting to veer off script and sell products that aren't accurate. I can actually build a leaderboard and one of the criteria that I can put into that leaderboard is how true to the products and service are they when they're in a sales motion? And if I suddenly get a red flag that's going to light up my dashboard, I'm going to get notification. Not only that that's happening, but the actual conversations and the language that's being used. And now I have a coaching moment.

Speaker B: Brilliant. I love it. And let's look at that then from different roles, because you kind of touched on a couple of different roles there. So for a CRO, they need to have oversight of what's going on. They need to be reportable and accountable to the board. They're going to have their CRM data, which may or may not be accurate. They've probably got some other reporting that may or may not be accurate. You're getting your reporting from that as well. There's a lot of data. How do CROs make sense of this? How do they kind of see everything that's going on and where does AI help or hinder there?

Speaker A: Well, I think that at a CRO level, reporting is fundamentally broken. And here's why. CROs and organizations have spent an inordinate amount of money to date on analytics. They're, uh, awash in data and metrics and trends, and yet they still can't answer fundamental questions like why is my win rate dropping in Europe? Why is Competitor X constantly beating me? And I find it ironic that with all the investment that they've made, they still can't get to the root cause analysis. One of the things that excites me most about the agentic, uh, era that we're moving into is you're going to continue to be able to get the data that tells you what the trends are, the what, if you will. But now you're going to get the why. I'm going to get a dashboard that says win rate in Europe is dropping. And here's why. There's four different trends that are driving that drop. Number one, your competitor just launched a new product and you don't know how to compete against it. Number two, you've got onerous legal language and that's knocking you out of the deal. Number three, your reps are doing a really bad job of establishing business pain and linking your solution to that business pain. Now, if I'm an executive, I not only have the number, but I have the why behind it. And then the third piece is the how, how do we fix it? And that's what I just walked you through. I can now push a playbook out in real time to the field that gives them that microenablement that allows them to correct the poor performance and address the underlying issues. And that closed loop system where I now know what's happening, why it's happening and how to fix it, is why we're getting more productivity out of these solutions.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Um, and how can organizations start on that journey? Because obviously what you described is almost the utopia of it, and that's going in and buying a solution like yours that can solve that. But a lot of organizations won't necessarily feel comfortable or be ready or even be big enough to justify something like that. How can they start on that journey with the tools that they've already got, the kind of the generative AI, the cool recordings. How can they start with the tools they've got?

Speaker A: Yeah, I'll actually start off by answering that question with a quote from Woody Allen. He's one of my favorites. He had an uncanny ability to kind of capture the moment in a very pithy way. And I remember at one point he said, more than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads of one path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. And I kind of feel like that captures the moment that we're in from an AI perspective. You can try to build all of this stuff yourself, but when you do, you have runaway costs, you have a nightmare of security issues, you have six to nine months of build before you even know you're going to get outcomes. The other path you can go down is off the shelf technology. And now you're spending the next couple of years force fitting yourself into a system that somebody else built that isn't designed for your organization. I want to actually propose that there's a third path. What we offer is an extensible platform, and that platform gives you an out of the box experience. So we've been able to identify core capabilities that you're going to need, whether it's conversation intelligence, or you need to script a call, or you need to build a playbook for your reps that's all out of the box. But there's also a platform that allows you to grow over time if there's a unique facet to your business, a nuance that the out of the box experience doesn't take into account. There's a very simple way to build agents and add those to the out of the box agents. I Believe that in the future, companies are going to need a platform that they can build on combined with basic capabilities that are core functionality that everybody uses. When you go with that kind of an approach, you minimize costs, you maximize the amount of value you're going to get in minimal time.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. And I'm not really suggesting that people necessarily build their own, but more about how they start on that journey. So how do they kind of almost do an MVP to prove the concept? So they're going to have some data available already. They're not going to have everything that you've described, but they're probably going to have called transcripts. They can probably put those cool transcripts into a generative AI LLM to analyze it and give them some sort of insights. How do they start on the journey? What's the kind of step one and two for them to then have the confidence to say, okay, yeah, this is something we should invest in and do more of?

Speaker A: Well, I think that's a great starting point. There's a lot of rich information in call transcripts. And so I'd say one of the first use cases that you can tackle if you are recording calls is you can build a playbook based on what your most effective reps are doing. That's an exercise that you can do relatively quickly, and it also sets the stage for how you can expand from there. If you've just got call transcripts, you're going to get really good insight into what specific reps are doing. What you're not going to get is an ability to adapt that playbook to the specific deals that the reps are working on and ability to serve that up in the moment when the reps are about to jump on the call. So what we have is a staircase. Step number one, build a playbook to validate the fact that you have information already that leads to better insights into what's working and what's not. Step number two, invest in technology that allows you to adapt that playbook to the specific selling motions that your sellers are engaged in.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. And I think that's kind of allows people to go on that journey and prove it and then be able to say, yeah, okay, if we're doing this, then look what we could be doing. How about some of the other roles? So the SDR role, for example, it's a really hard job. It's always been a hard job. And I think it's still a really hard job. And I think there's probably a lot of misinformation around that because you hear the headlines of, okay, actually we can just fully automate everything and we can send out emails and we can have agents calling, and that tends to just sort of lead to a lot of mass irrelevant noise. You've then kind of GoT SDRs who feel like they should be using AI to be more targeted, more relevant to who they're talking to, more personalized, but they've not necessarily had the training or the time to be able to do that. So actually, what they kind of end up doing is just using it to write mediocre emails. What's your kind of view on where that role is and what they should be doing?

Speaker A: Well, let me lay out what I see are, uh, the three different levels of sophistication in terms of how SDRs are using AI. The lowest level is it's purely used as an automation tool to scale the organization. You're able to quickly capture the ICP and the contacts within that ICP and then broadcast email to them. That's less optimal because all you're doing is accelerating the rate at which you're destroying relationships. Generic emails sent out en masse are not well received, and so, again, you're just blowing up your contact list in less time. The second level is where you're looking at each of those contacts and making some effort to personalize it. Unfortunately, there's a lot of AI slop that you can find at this level of automation. I might get an email that says, hey, Justin, I saw that you've got a golden retriever. I love golden retrievers. Now let's talk about doing some business together. So, okay, you did find out that I have a golden retriever, but it's a complete non sequitur into the sales process, and that may get you a little bit farther along in the process. But again, people are very leery of that now and are quickly recognizing that you just had an agent write that for you. The highest level of selling is when you're able to attach to a business pain that that individual has and put together a thoughtful email that in a pithy way addresses that pain point. You're being respectful of my time because it's a short email and it's focused on something that I might care about, and then you're giving me the opportunity to respond to that at that point. If it's generated by AI, doesn't matter to me. I appreciate the fact that you're approaching me with something that I care about, and that's where you're going to get the Highest response rates.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. I love those kind of examples and analogy. How do they execute on that third level that you described there?

Speaker A: Well, I think that the phases are number one. You can use agents to understand who your ICP is. Agents do a great job of analyzing your install and coming back and saying these are the common denominators and these are the profiles. And then you can feed that into an agent that will actually pull back additional accounts that fit the bill. Secondly, they do a really good job of researching your key target customers and contacts and they can identify specific relevant pain points by analyzing any kind of activity that's going on and actually composing the emails associated with that. Interestingly enough, I find that when companies take this third level approach, they actually send fewer emails because they are spending more time and investing more time and sending the right kind of email. But their conversion rates are much higher. So at the end of the day, by doing less, they're actually generating more revenue.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's it. It's looking at quality over quantity and as you say, improving your conversion rates there, uh, what else are you seeing in the AI landscape? What are the kind of things maybe that organizations are not doing but could be as kind of starting points of using AI within sales?

Speaker A: Well, I think that there's a huge opportunity to up level the management of reps as well. And what I like to say around the managers is I like to call them bionic managers. When I was growing up as a kid, there was this show on TV called the Bionic man and it was about this human that was augmented. He had supervision so he could see miles farther than anyone else and he had super hearing so we could hear much more. The bionic manager comes into a coaching session with that vision that they never had before and with that capability of hearing that they never had before. Why are they able to do that? Because there's an agent that's constantly monitoring the reps that they're managing and it's pulling together and synthesizing all of that information. You've also got bionic ears because that agent is a companion with you on the call and it's hearing things that the rep is saying. And after the manager can actually have a conversation with their agent. How did I do as a manager? And you'll get some feedback. You did great. But you also missed this signal and you should have really drilled into that signal. So suddenly the bionic manager moves from 21 questions just to find out what's going on, which is kind of the old way. We Used to do it to coming in with a very specific agenda. Alex, here's what you're doing. Well, here, ah, are three things where I've observed I need to improve. Let's set some specific opportunities and then as soon as that manager leaves the call, they're getting feedback too. Great job in coaching in this area. You left this opportunity on the table. You didn't hear that point and you should have drilled into that. And over time that manager gets better and better.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good use of insight and empowering the individual. And this is one of the things that I think is a trend that's coming out more and more as people talking around AI taking jobs. But actually the real value is just enhancing of doing a better job and better equipping the good people that you've already gone out and found and employed.

Speaker A: There's a really interesting story here for the CFO as well. Sellers are going to be selling more because they're having that micro enablement that allows them to be more effective. Managers are actually able to increase their surface area and manage more reps because they're now bionic managers. From a CFO perspective, you're able to actually deliver more with fewer headcount. So if I'm in a high growth phase, whereas before I might have to contemplate bringing on new sales reps and then I have to bring on a manager for every sales reps I hire now, I could potentially keep the level of sales reps the same and expand the ratio of managers to reps. And suddenly from a CFO perspective, I see my margins expanding because I'm able to achieve that revenue with fewer resource investments.

Speaker B: Yeah. And that, uh, resource actually is then going, um, into the tools to equip those people in the first place.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: And are you seeing any examples where, and you've touched on it with the kind of the mass email where there's a hype or a perception around kind of the impact that AI is going to have in sales that actually in reality is just doing more harm than good.

Speaker A: One of the pitfalls that people run into is when they allow AI to think for them. And this is something that I constantly harp on. You are in the driver's seat, you are not in the passenger seat. I can immediately tell when organizations have allowed their reps to move back to the passenger seat and they're letting the AI drive. And if you think about it, that's insane because today AI essentially has the experience of someone that's just barely Graduated from college, if that. And if you're letting them drive the car, they're going to run it into a brick wall. So what needs to happen is the rep needs to be in the driver's seat, they need to be driving the strategy, and they need to be using AI as a thought partner. Here's what I think the strategy should be. I want you to poke holes in it. Tell me what I'm not thinking about. Tell me what you disagree with. But you need to start the conversation with a well defined point of view rather than coming to the agent and saying, you give me the point of view or the opinion. That's a bad approach. And that's where companies are very quickly sliding into mediocrity and not getting the value out of the AI that they expect that they should be getting.

Speaker B: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think that's where you will end up with generic blandness. That all sounds the same instead of that authenticity and that human element. And as you say, that's really around how you interact with the tool and what you're feeding it with and what you're able to kind of put into it.

Speaker A: The analogy that I like to use, if you think about Michelangelo, obviously thought of as one of the great artists in Western civilization. He actually had a whole school of apprentices working under him. And the reason that he was so productive and prolific over the course of his career is he had these apprentices that he would pull together. He never, though, said to an apprentice, hey, I got this big project at the Sistine Chapel. Can you go figure it out and I'll just come in at the end and put a couple of dabs of paint on it. That's not how he operated. He laid the vision out. He blocked it out. He knew what all the forms needed to be. He knew what all the color palettes were. He gave very specific directions to his apprentices.

Speaker B: And.

Speaker A: And then essentially his apprentices multiplied what he was doing. When we allow AI to drive, we're essentially Michelangelo telling the apprentices to go paint the Sistine Chapel and not giving them any direction. Be the Michelangelo. Don't let the apprentice try to do the work for you.

Speaker B: And does this change the skills that you should be looking for when hiring salespeople or training your existing salespeople?

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I think that there are two things that are going to set apart the salespeople of the future. The first is what I like to call the autodidact. The person that knows how to learn on their own. They don't need formal training. You don't need to send them to school to figure something out. They just have this innate curiosity and an ability to figure it out. I'll give you an example. We have a, uh, developer actually, and he speaks English, but he lives in South America. And I asked him how he learned how to speak English and he said, well, you know, I was listening to the Beatles growing up, I was a big fan and I wanted to know what they were saying. So I taught myself English. I was like, wait, you taught yourself like he was acting like it was. I taught myself how to make a sandwich. That kind of mentality though is exactly the mentality that we need moving forward. And then the second, and this is something that's been true throughout the history of humanity, you have to be a hardworking self starter. If you can combine that autodidactic quality with an inherent innate drive, that combination is dynamite. And that's what's going to allow you to succeed moving forward.

Speaker B: And how do you assess for those?

Speaker A: Well, one of my favorite questions to ask is, hey, when you were a kid, tell me something that you taught yourself. And it becomes very clear very quickly what kind of a person that you're communicating with. If they say that they learned how to tie their shoe when they were six years old, all right, but if they say they learned how to speak English because they wanted to learn how to understand the lyrics to the Beatles, you get a sense for who the person is and what their qualities are and which role.

Speaker B: When you look at kind of the sales and maybe the sales and marketing functions, which roles are impacted most do you think from AI and that might be positively or negatively? I mean that tends to. People sort of think, oh well, it's going to take their job, but it might be a positive response. But where do you think it's having the most impact?

Speaker A: I think that every role is being impacted. I think that the question is not which role is being impacted, but to what extent. And, and what I think that you're going to see moving forward is a compression of the number of people that you need in a given function to be able to perform that function effectively. I think that the greatest amount of compression is probably going to happen in roles like product marketing, you know, content, a lot of the marketing roles, content marketing, huge compression there in demand gen and growth marketing, huge compression. I think, uh, also on the revop side, we have had to historically hire a lot of resources to be able to analyze and understand the business. You're going to see Compression there as well because the agents are going to be analyzing that business to the same degree. I think that sellers there's going to be less compression because of course they're directly attached to revenue. And if you have an effective sales organization, you essentially can go out and target a wider range of customers more effectively and have revenue directly attached to that. So I think that if you're more of a cost center, you're definitely going to see reductions. If you're on the revenue center side, I think that there'll be less compression.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense. And I think there's something about dealing with a human through the sales process that can't be replaced or replicated. And in some respects it's nothing new. Is it that if you're a cost center as uh, opposed to revenue center and there's arguments and debates around kind of where does marketing sit on that, for example. But I think it's interesting because I think just touching more on the marketing side, but I think you're right, there is a trend that people are saying, well this can be replicated. But I think it does then go into the territory that we were talking around earlier of getting mediocre generic stuff as opposed to stuff that is authentic. And AI search is going to look for things that are authentic, things that are real, things that are based on real customer stories. And I think there's a danger that kind of removing some of those people from that process does mean that you end up producing something that's bland and mediocre and doesn't stand out and that ultimately makes the salesperson's job harder.

Speaker A: One caveat I'll make on the sales side. If you are in a business where you've got high transaction volumes, low ACVs, I think there's a tremendous opportunity for AI to come in and automate those systems and processes. But if we're Talking about complex B2B enterprise grade sales, I do think that the role of the human is still going to be very necessary.

Speaker B: Yeah, agreed. And we sort of started the show. I mean your background is in CRM, um, and data has historically been not great. I don't think many people disagree from that. They look at their data in their organization and it tends to be outdated, a bit messy. They can't always trust it. There's always some challenges. Are you still seeing that today? And how important factor is that as we move forward into kind of the

Speaker A: more agentic world, every company struggles with data quality. That's one of the first use cases that you can attack with AI, you are constantly capturing signal, whether it's on a recorded call or an email. All of that information now can be processed and used to auto populate CRM moving forward. I would argue humans should not be entering any information in CRM. They should simply be using it to create additional value guidance direction on the deals that they're actually running.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. And how do you think organizations kind of almost get from where they are to that state of it being cleansed and it being populated by AI?

Speaker A: Well, on the cleansing side, the reality is that there is a lot of poor data in the system and you could spend a lot of time trying to go in and clean it up, or you could simply put a stake in the ground and say moving forward the data is going to be clean. The way you get it clean again is you don't let humans put the data in. Reps are notoriously poor at doing this job. They are putting in incomplete information. It's biased data. If you are collecting it from primary sources like calls, like email, you can trust it. And there are some great tools out there. We make one of them that allows you to monitor all of the signal that's coming in and then map that to specific fields in CRM. It's kind of table stakes now, in fact.

Speaker B: Good, nice. And the foundation layer, as you said, of kind of doing everything. Are there other AI use cases that you think we haven't touched on that you think actually, uh, this is something that most sales teams should really be looking at?

Speaker A: Well, this is one of my favorite use cases. We've talked already about the sales playbooks and the micro enablement. The other part of the equation though, is how do you improve the quality of the products and services that sellers are actually delivering to customers? You know, salespeople are on the front line. They're hearing firsthand what's working and what's not working. But traditionally they haven't had a seat at the table when it comes to actually building the product. That all changes now because what you can do is you can capture all of the feedback that reps are collecting as they interact with prospects. And more importantly, you can synthesize it into key product themes and you can quantify it. Because I can see that this particular comment came up in conjunction with this deal which we lost. I'm able to add that all up and say, Alex, you're the Chief Product Officer, if you built feature Y, it would be worth $30 million to us. And here's all the evidence. These are all the deals that we lost because we didn't get that suddenly sales has a seat at the table with product. In fact, they arguably become more important than the product marketing or the product management team because they're picking up this signal in conjunction with an ability to quantify it. And that now becomes the primary input to what we build from a product perspective.

Speaker B: And are you seeing or do you expect to see any pushback or resistance of this level of analysis from the sales reps themselves? I mean, I kind of know historically in some places it's almost a running joke of kind of. They only ever lose on price or the deal died. And you don't really ever get to understand the real reason because the reps sort of protecting their reputation a little bit, whereas this potentially exposes them a little bit, which for some is fine, it's a learning opportunity, but for some, naturally they'll be a bit defensive of that. What are you seeing there?

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, I call this the moment of great reckoning. The reality is there are going to be reps that don't want to be monitored because they're not good reps. And they've done a good job of convincing their managers for whatever reason that they are good reps. But as soon as you start to get the data, you're going to realize that they're lousy reps. But honestly, you don't want those reps anyway. The reps that are coachable, that are actually delivering, that are running at a high performance, that are thirsting after feedback so that they can become better at their craft, those are the people that want this information. And honestly, those are the people that you want in your organization as well. You know, I find it ironic we don't have any trouble in a sports franchise creating game film and sitting the team down and saying, here's what you did well and here's what you need to improve. And before the next game saying, here's the defender that you're going to be up against and here's how they move. That's just how we run professional sports. And we get the very best athletes and we put the very best athletes on the field and those are the athletes that win. That's where we're moving. From a sales perspective, the great reckoning will weed out those people that were the charlatans and they will retain the great superstar players that deserve to be on the field and it will make them even better.

Speaker B: And let's talk very briefly around entry level roles. It's probably the same in the US We're Seeing a lot of headlines in the UK around youth unemployment and a lot of people struggling to get their first jobs. And also it's really difficult to hire people who haven't got experience as well because you haven't got necessarily the references and you take a bit more of a gamble. So what would be your advice for both parties in terms of new job seekers and people who are looking to bring on junior staff? What would be your advice for both those parties to make sure that it's the right fit and that they get the right people in?

Speaker A: Well, I think the temptation is going to be to eliminate junior roles, because more and more we'll be able to let agents accomplish that. I think that's a mistake because there's two functions that junior roles play. One is the actual work they do, but two is the experience that they're able to garner and the fact that they go on to become senior contributors to the company. I think the smart companies will be able to identify areas where those junior folks can make contributions and they'll create a ladder of success where they can get promoted through the organization. And actually those are going to be very attractive employers that are going to pull in the best talent. I think they will also use AI as a companion to quickly onboard using best practices and provide constant feedback so that the learning curve, in terms of how long it takes a rep to become productive, a junior rep, is going to be greatly compressed and you're actually going to see those people contributing at a higher level in much less time.

Speaker B: Yeah, I like that answer. I actually wrote a LinkedIn piece the other day about that very point. And I think if you haven't got that career progression in place, then you're in danger of not getting the best people come in and apply because if they see that actually there isn't that progression because your next layer is all replaced by AI, or they don't see that progression that they used to be able to see. When you join an organization, then they're going to look elsewhere. We're going to move to the quickfire questions now. So if you weren't doing this, if you weren't running Terra, you weren't in sales, what would you be doing for your job?

Speaker A: I would be a bookbinder. I love books. I love the feel of them in my hands. I like to make things. So I actually have a hobby of bookbinding, actually. Uh, the only place you can get the tools these days is over in the UK and high quality leathers. But there's something about being able to take a really high quality piece of leather and wrap it around a book and then use tools to engrave the name on the spine, that gives you an appreciation for what's inside. There's a great quote from John Wooden, one of the great basketball coaches here in the States, and he said, the problem with the new books is they keep us from reading the old books. And I guess that process for me is a contemplative one as well, because it makes me contemplate what's inside the book that I'm binding and maybe give a little bit more time and thought to the collective wisdom that we all enjoy today.

Speaker B: Well, lovely answer. A very poetic answer and yeah, probably quite therapeutic in the modern world as well. Uh, I was going to say, what's the one job that will never be replaced by AI but actually, probably bookbinding. But when you look at a B2B organization, what's one job that you think will never be replaced by AI There

Speaker A: will always be a Michelangelo. And I still believe that Michelangelo is unique in terms of that creative spark that they possessed. And he may be surrounded or she may be surrounded by a lot of agents, but just the inception of new ideas, whether it's from a strategic perspective or what we want to build, I just believe that there will always be a Michelangelo in the organization.

Speaker B: And, um, what's one daily habit that makes you effective?

Speaker A: I gotta get up at 5:30 every morning. Because if I get up at 5:30 every morning, I'm into my routine. And some of the most productive things I do during the day happen before 8:30. Those are the areas where I invest in myself. Whether it's learning new things, thinking about what's happening, what's happened in the past, what's happening in the future, writing about it. And if I'm able to get up at 5:30, I allow myself the time to be able to go through that routine. And so actually to take one step back. I got to go to bed on time. Because if I go to bed on time, I get up on time. You know, life is not complicated. And we learn this when we're young. If you go to bed on time, life will be so much better. And we're surrounded by things like social media and lots of things that entertain us and they keep us up late and they eat into that time. That really turns us into great people. So go to bed on time and get up on time.

Speaker B: I'll play that section to my kids, I think. Justin, thank you very much. We've covered a lot of ground. Really insightful and a deep dive into AI and sales. Thank you very much for joining me, Alex.

Speaker A: It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker B: Thank you for joining us today on the Scaling with AI podcast. As always, if you enjoyed the show, please chat about it, share it on social, and don't forget to hit subscribe to get the latest updates on how you can use AI to scale your business. And, uh, please do leave us a review. It makes all the difference. I'm putting myself out there and I'd love to hear your feedback and I'd love you to help amplify the show.