Revenue Isn’t Your Problem. AI Is Exposing Your Broken Systems with Ali Manki

Welcome to Scaling with People, your weekly playbook for turning chaos into compounding growth. Each week we go under the hood with battle test experts in all areas of business, from marketing to sales, operation finance, and people, plus product and leadership to unpack the plays, numbers, and systems that turn chaos into compounding growth. Learn straight from founders and experts who've done it and continue to do it successfully. There's zero fluff, just moves that you can still immediately.

This podcast is brought to you by Guide to HR, human expertise, AI-powered impact. Welcome everyone to today's Skilling with People Podcast. I'm Gwynavier Cruir, your host and CEO and founder of Guide to HR. And if you think revenue is the problem, you're already behind.

On today's episode, we sit down with Alemanke, a president club-level enterprise sales killer who spent nearly two decades blowing past commodive and building C-suite trust and scale. We're getting into the real game, how to drive top-line growth and operational efficiency without creating a machine that collapses under its own weight. Because scaling isn't about selling more. It's about building a business that can actually handle the success.

Well, welcome, Allie. I'm so excited to get today's episode started. But before we do, tell the audience just a little bit more about yourself, presidents club level. Woo-woo.

Thank you so much, Guinevere. My name's Allie Manke. I am it's my pleasure to be here. And I've met with Guinevere a couple of times and it's been an absolute blast.

My objective in life is to help small and medium-sized businesses win in life. And whether that's you know hitting their objectives for the year or driving through efficiency and growth in their business, I'm here to support that. And I've been doing it for two decades, like you mentioned. And the reason why I'm successful is because I find true alignment with their objectives, with my clients' objectives, and really figure out the right path forward based on that.

It's not coming with pre-notion, you know, preconceived notions of what they need and what they don't need. It's really listening and becoming aligned with my clients. So that's really what my superpower is: building relationships at scale is really powerful for me. And I love to do it.

It's what I live for. And I think that's why you and I align so much, because we really have a passion for the smaller, mid-sized businesses and helping them grow and succeed. But before we dive into the topic, you are a founder yourself. And as past listeners and founders on my podcast now, I'd like to put you on the hot seat.

Of course. Can you share a time, a lesson learn from your experience as a founder that someone might be able to learn and not have uh to go through the same pain points you did? Yeah, there is so many. Um but I think I think what I've used as a guiding principle for me in this could be a tangible takeaway for your for your audience as well, is I was in a president's club uh session where there was a motivational speaker, and this was like two decades ago, and it was a single mom, she was a biathlete.

And if the audience doesn't know what a biathlete is, Google it. It is absolutely insane. Like if you thought marathon runners or athletes were crazy, bi athletes are next level. And she's also uh she was also a uh mother, single mother to two twin girls.

And so when she talked about adversity and getting through that adversity, she talked about having uh a 10-day span and having that kind of context. And so what she said is that I always think of things in 10 days. Eight days are gonna be average, normal, everything run in the middle. There's one day that really, really, really sucks, and everything you do, everything you thought of turns to not great things, not great outcomes.

But then there's that tenth day. That tenth day is where you touch anything and it turns to gold. Everything that you thought, everything that you were hoping for is actually popping up, and that is what you're aiming for. So in those eight, plus that one nine ninth day that really sucks, you're really working towards that tenth day.

So it is a lesson in persistence. Um and I think that is really where I find my strength because you know, working with you know, companies and clients and and all the technology and all the rest of it, there's downs and ups, right? And I really want to make sure that my audience and your audience knows that you know there is light at the end of the tunnel and we just need to keep getting up. And every day is is gonna be, you know, another day for towards that 10th day.

Man, where was that a couple months ago? I love that. Um, I I was actually down and then I gotta share this part because I think it goes so well. Um, and I was struggling and I just felt like, man, I'm just like, I'm working hard, but I'm nothing is like happening.

And I just feel like I'm doing all this work, but there's no actual outcome. And what am I doing? I'm just wasting my time, energy, resources, etc. And I was telling one of my friends who's a great mentor of mine, and she was going to be here, stop beating yourself up.

You're building. There isn't going to be a took the box off, you got this done right now. You are building. And so building is so you sit in this really like space of unknown uncertainty, and not and sometimes unclear, alright?

It's not clear what's going on. And you're just like, man, and I'm like, I feel like I'm like burning the minute I know, and yet there's nothing happening. It's I'm not seeing it in the, you know, the bank account, right? That's ultimately as a business owner, that's what you want to see.

And then and I was like, yeah, okay. I just like between them and the 10 days, maybe that will help give our listeners um some reassurance. We all go through it, first of all, right? And that persistence and um to just keep going and not give up.

I love that. That's such a great, um, great tool to have. Yeah, it really helps when you have that really sucky day. So pull that.

And there's plenty of those, unfortunately, right? Yeah, I think so. And you know, like this whole journey on entrepreneurship and being a founder, it's like, you know, every day, you may not think that you're getting there, but you are, right? And you may be getting a little bit stronger every day.

You keep on getting building those muscles every day. And it's like, you know, the world is putting more weight on that bar for you to lift every day. And then you're getting stronger, right? Yeah.

So that's really the the objective. It may not feel like you're getting stronger that day, but you are getting stronger. Yeah. Kind of like going to the gym, you know, you you work out, you know, man, man, why is this not getting easier?

Oh, because you're like 10, 15, 20 pounds heavier on the machine than you were when you first started. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

It's like, oh, it's always so hard. Well, yeah, because I'm doing a lot more now. Yeah. You're showing up differently, you're getting better, you're getting stronger, you're getting more valuable to your clients.

I think all of that's true. Yeah, that's so great. So diving into the topic, you know, revenue versus reality. As founders, you know, a lot of us do chase revenue, like it's going to solve everything.

I hear a lot of times, you know, sales will solve all problems. And yes, there is some truth to that. But where does that thinking break down fastest from your perspective? Yeah, I think, you know, um, yes, sales does solve many problems, most problems.

However, the infrastructure needs to follow through as well, right? So I think when you're thinking about it as a founder, you know, just for example, you say, I want to hit a million dollars this year. This is my first year, I need to hit a million dollars. If I hit a million dollars, life will be beautiful.

That may be what you're thinking of right now. And when you do hit that million dollars, there's growing pains. It's gonna be a different kind of pain, it's gonna be a different kind of challenges, maybe even more challenges than what you're feeling right now, sitting at $10,000 a month, right? And so I think that that is really um, you know, you need to have that mindset that you're always gonna be problem solving, you're always gonna be looking for opportunities for solutions and really thinking about it in a positive light.

Like you're gonna come out on this of this thing on the other end. You're gonna be so much smarter and better. And when you talk to your friends after that, like whole journey that you've gone through, they're like, holy cow, like what is who is this person? What are they talking about?

Like, you know, they they may be amazed, your friends and family be amazed after you've gone through that type of journey and um at what you've accomplished. And you may not, you may be beating at yourself up a little bit, but you've actually done a lot. Oh, thank you. Yeah.

Well, I think as founders, as entrepreneurs, we're always pushing. We have high expectations of ourselves and we're always pushing. And um, I know for myself and I a lot of founders I work with, we don't look back and celebrate as much as we should. So I do appreciate that.

And for those listening, make sure you do stop and celebrate, even if it's the little ones, right? It's the little ones that add up and get you where you need to be. So you've seen companies grow quickly. What's the first crack that shows up when revenue outpaces infrastructure and operations as a whole?

Yeah, I think the first crack is really that you know client delivery uh fails. So a lot of the times you've had, you know, you have an NPS score of, let's say, 90%, and now you've got, you know, 10 new clients. There's a lot of demand that you haven't hired enough people or you haven't hired the right kind of people, that's where the NPS score starts to you know go down. Um, you start losing clients.

That is where the infrastructure really starts cracking. And I think, you know, one of the things that I learned from you is in the first five, you know, new founders, or when you have a founder that's hiring the first five people, those first five people are the most critical, the most important, right? And I love that. I'm like, oh, that makes so much sense.

Like, because those five people are gonna be so influential for the rest of the business, and how the culture is, how the people are gonna be, what kind of people you're gonna be hiring, all of that is gonna be foundational based off of the five first five people that you hire. So I love your advice, and I'm I'm using it too now. Um it's in my own business because it's so powerful. And I found that you know that's really true.

Like you gotta be really, really careful about who you hire. Yeah. Um, especially in the first, you know, the first phase. Because it's it's basically you building your foundation and then building up on top of that, right?

Is that the foundation sucks, then you're not gonna have much of a building. Well, and as a founder too, I think a lot of us uh have a hard time with letting go and delegating, letting go. And you know, I always hear, oh, well, if you want it done right, do it yourself. And I think in, I think in business you really have to think about, well, I just want to get to this end state.

How the person gets there shouldn't matter as much as them getting to the end state, unless, of course, they're taking too much time, you know, making too many errors that impact relationships of vendors and clients and other employees, or um, you know, maybe it's costing you too much money. Obviously, that those things you have to take care of. But if they want to do it where where they're doing like step one, eight, nine, eleven, fifteen instead of what your process is is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, then it's fine as long as they get to that outcome that you need.

And 80% of what they produce is gonna be acceptable to keep moving the needle forward. And um, I even talked to a marketing founder one time where she was like, I was re I required my entire team to, I was the bottleneck. I required to read everything that went out of the office before it went out. And she realized she was blocking her own business scalability because nothing was going out until she proofreaded.

Well, if all she's doing is proofreading, right? Is she doing anything on the business to actually move the needle forward? So she had that epiphany. So I'd say I think that's another reason why your first five are so impactful because you really need to find people that you can trust to actually let go.

And that's I think one of the hardest things as a founder when you're starting. It is, because we all have control issues, right? We don't have a control freaks and you can find so. I think so.

I do. So, you know, it is hard, right? Yeah, yeah. For sure.

Yeah. So you've in your history have consistently hit quotas, even like you know, one, two hundred um percent more. What are you doing differently that most sales teams completely miss? Or when you come into an organization that you support, what is like something that like, ah, that's like that's a secret sauce they aren't doing right?

Yeah. So, you know, this is really what you know, before AI, but especially now with AI, I think what I do differently is deeply research the client and the company. And with that deep research and understanding of the client, the industry, and the person I'm talking with, I get a I get an idea of two or three things of where I can help right in order to help them hit their objective. And, you know, most lately I've been working with large enterprise companies which have public financial statements.

So I'm able to really pick apart, so seeing where their biggest objectives are for the business, what their CEO, CFO, the C suite has asked for. And I'm actually able to help my client deliver on that, right? So whatever the mission critical priority is of that business, I want to be aligned to that. I want to be on board with that.

I want to be helping my clients crush that, you know, that priority, right? And so that's where I really lean in. And you know, you'll hear, oh, I don't have the budget, I don't have this, I don't have that. But then if you're aligning to the right thing, guess what?

You got rainbows, you got sunshine, everything, you got all the budget in the world in, right? And so that's when things, if if you're clearly demonstrating strong ROI on what your deliverable is and it aligns to the main objective, I don't think there's a reason why people would say no. Yeah. Right.

I love that. And it is, I think, like you said, this was before AI, and now with AI, I feel like it's a lot easier to um do that deep dive and even bring in like the economic pressures those that industry is uh dealing with, right? Some of the externals as well as maybe some internals. If they're publicly traded, you might be able to get more information, but maybe not.

Yeah, I think I I I those is one example that I had with a major travel agency that I won as a deal. And you know, they had been with a competitor for decades, and we had tried to win that business over and over again prior to my time. And I had read their financial statements end to end. It was like 300 pages or 250 pages, and it was you know, it makes her eyes cry because you're reading financial statements, right?

So it took me a week or so to read through those. And when I met the CFO of this multi-billion dollar company, I was able to pick those three things in their financial statements. Uh and he, this is the driest CFO you've ever met. He did not want to meet with me.

And I said, This is the three things I picked up, and these are the three ways that we could potentially be helping you. Would you be open to having a deeper conversation? And he sat up and his dad as chair, he's like, Did you read the financial statements? Like all of it.

I'm like, Yeah, I did. And again, this is before AI, right? So it it really does help for you to understand at a deeper level how you can impact a client and be innovative, be creative, right? Yeah.

I think that's really what helps you win more deals. Yeah, I love that. That's so great. So, what's one sales habit that feels productive but is actually killing deals?

I think I think that you know, a sales habit that's really feels like you're being productive but isn't, is really all about uh you know, you're you're really spinning your wheels on deals that aren't gonna ever buy, right? I think those if you're spinning your wheels on decision makers that you may think are decision makers but aren't really, I think that's where you're spinning your wheels a lot. And you know, in sales and professional sales, you always want to be going to the top of the house, right?

And building a case from that point on. And they if they push you down, they push you down. But at least they're aware of you, and at least they know that you're having a conversation within their team. I think too often people are scared to go to the top of the house.

And because of that, they get in a comfort zone dealing with the executive assistant or or someone you know way down the pipe, and that person just doesn't have the authority. They may be nice to talk to, but but that is not gonna help you move the needle on your deal. Yeah. Um, and then I the other thing that I would feel is like don't give too many options on your proposals, right?

I think when you have a confused buyer, you have a buyer that's not gonna abide. Right. So if you have given, you know, five different options on a proposal, it's not gonna help. It's gonna confuse people even more, right?

And that's not that's not ideal. I've always heard the rule do three because people tend to pick the middle one. Like the tendency. Yeah, I mean, uh, you know, it depends on the partnership and the relationship and everything else.

Like if you already know what's gonna move the needle, then yeah, just go with one. Yeah, but if you know that this person is, you know, maybe either or, then yeah, three would be fine. I like two, you know. It's and then you can hear feedback, right?

Yeah. Um if there's feedback, then you just create a new one, right? Yeah, exactly. Aligned to them.

Yeah, yeah. So founders talk about growth, but not enough about efficiencies. Where do you see companies bleeding money without even realizing it? Oh, there's so many places I call that cleanup on aisle X, right?

Like cleanup on I call cleanup on aisle AI on whatever, right? Yeah, I think you know, uh, first of all, I want to back up because you talked about growth and efficiency. And I think those are the two major topics for every single business alive because they're thinking, and they may be saying it different ways, but they're all thinking about both of those things, right? And growth and efficiency is top of mind for every founder's CEO and executive.

The growth piece we can help you solve, right? And definitely through my partnership, we can we can certainly help you with that. But with the efficiency piece, that is where I think you know, having too many tools or not enough tools, or you know, having the wrong tools, I think that's where the if inefficiency comes in. I'll give an example.

I had a major, major client that was uh a you know a company that um is a truck manufacturing company in the US, multi-billion dollar company. And they had a they had a um ERP system that was based on Oracle and their head office had an ERP system that was based on SAP. They do not talk to each other. No, competitors usually don't, yeah, right.

And so this is um a major multi-billion dollar organization that should have known better when they're making these kinds of decisions. And so even this, you know, the biggest, smartest, baddest companies out there are making inefficient decisions where they're just shooting themselves in the foot and driving inefficiency uh from absolutely, you know, maybe outside looking in, but for us it doesn't make sense. Like, why would you do that to yourself, right? Yeah.

And you had the choice. I'm guessing there was two separate decision makers that didn't talk to each other about it at some point, and that's how it happened would be kind of probably one way. Yeah. Acquisition might be another, you never know.

I I actually worked with a founder, I started working with him, and I got into his HR TechStack, and I was like, why do you have gusto and bamboo? It's the same concept, but for HR. And I was like, there are only 120 people. And and then I think the reality was is when they went international, they had to get bamboo for the international employees, but they didn't move their US employees to bamboo.

But again, it's like they don't talk. So that's two systems HR Finance and MIT have to play in. Managers internationally couldn't manage their employees because they can't get into gusto. So if their employees are US based, it was a nightmare.

Um, but and and really the subject. Is like there's so much soft costs that are not necessarily defined at the end of the day that when I came in, I was like, we gotta, we gotta scrap this and get everything more efficient and have HR Finance and IT, one of them is putting in information, and maybe even it's the employee putting in the information, right? And then the systems associated with the interaction between those three departments are interacting with each other. And we're not having a manly data input into like dozens of systems.

And that time and the amount of waste on the brain of the employees having to do that. I mean, it was just ridiculous. It was it's so ridiculous. Yeah.

Yeah. 100%. 100%. So what's um, you know, going back to the sales side, because I could talk your ear off about HR all the time, but what's the simplest way to identify inefficiencies in a sales process that a founder that's listening right now could go and execute today?

Wow. Okay, so here's something really operational, and I love, love, love this. Okay. It is um, you can find tools, and I have the tool as well, where it's proprietary and it's called a growth call.

It's a it's a growth call analyzer. And if you've got salespeople on your team that are making those outbound or inbound calls, we can have the transcript dumped into that analyzer and the analyzer will tell you how they're doing. And it's a wonderful, wonderful coaching tool because A, it's impartial. It's not your manager sitting over your head and listening in to that call, which is super uncomfortable.

Yep. Um this call may be recorded. Right? Right.

So and so you don't even need to do that, right? Like it's just a transcript that you're having with your client. And so you take the transcript, dump it into the AI, the AI will be able to tell you how you did on that call and will help you to improve. And as professional salespeople, if you want if you want to make more money, you want to improve, right?

So, and as a business, you want your salespeople to be improving because that is the money drive, that is the growth engine for your business. Yeah. So it is a really, really practical uh impact to your bottom line when you have tools like this. Yeah, I love that.

So uh kind of sidebar question. Um, I've seen founders pull the trigger on this too early and then too late. When it comes to billing your sales team, at what point in time do you recommend considering bringing on a sales enabler, basically like a trainer, making sure everyone's saying the same thing the same way, keeping the brand intact, working with marketing, um to just make sure that the people you're bringing on board can get ramped up as fast as possible? Because we all know no matter how short or long your sales cycle is, there's still a ramp up time for new hires to get to understand the product or services, the language, how you're representing the business when you go out.

So, what do you see is kind of like the right sweet spot of actually implementing hiring someone to be that kind of gatekeeper for the sales team? Yeah, it's a great point and a great question. I think, you know, for me, the general uh number is around three people, three salespeople. Oh, that early.

Yeah. And the reason why is again, back to your analogy, Glenavere, um, of building up the sale, you know, building out the team, you know, you at the foundation, you want to have really strong people. Same thing with the sales team, right? It has its own culture.

Yeah. And so if you've got, you know, out of those three people, you got one person that's a superstar and one person that's toxic, it's not going to be great. Yeah. And you're not going to be able to build out a great sales culture from that.

Because every organization that's built on growth needs to have a wonderful sales culture. And if they don't get that from the beginning, it's really hard to take that out because then you're taking instead of you know you you letting one person go, you're letting 10 people go. Right. And that costs the business substantially more, right?

But I feel like probably you're making it more sticky too, right? You're creating the culture, you're getting people ramped up quicker, and it's exciting for them, they're gonna want to stick around and and and be with the company a lot longer than oh my gosh, this place is a drag. I gotta find something else. Yeah, because you know, um, if you got those three people reporting to the CEO or founder, it is a different vibe altogether than having a dedicated team leader or a sales manager.

Yeah. And, you know, developing those SOPs, making sure that they're executing on what they're supposed to be executing on, driving through those uh sales funnels, right? I think that's really a sales manager's job is to help his team, his or her team to really execute. Yeah.

So if they're not doing their job, then that's a different story. But you know, yeah, I think you get get a sales leader in there really early. And someone is really good. Like you may not, you may need to pay a little bit more than you're comfortable with for that sales leader, but I think that person, if they're you know, they're worth their weight in gold.

For sure. I mean, out of all the roles in a business, sales is the easiest one to quantify whether they're worth their weight or not, right? And pretty quickly too. And I think too, another thing is that person can help with the hiring, right?

And that that also takes a lot of activities off of a founder's plate for them to focus on other things that the business needs at that point in time. I do always want to see personally, I always want to see my founders still spending time in the cells with the clients or customers and obviously spending time with investors and board, but you know, you don't need to be in it in the minutiae, right? You can you can still be kind of on the outside, be the coach at the Super Bowl game and be on the sidelines, right?

Kind of thing. But yeah. All right. So as we wrap up, I have a question about AI.

Everyone talks about AI as in all aspects, but definitely in sales. And we we have even on this call, where is it actually driving results versus just creating noise? Oh, what a question. Oh my gosh.

I said the best one for last. Oh, that's a that's a doozy, I'm telling you. Okay. So I I'm a big advocate of AI in my business, and I help my clients execute with AI all day and every day.

And when I think about AI, I think that there's some tools, you know, that are just not there yet and are not the right tool just yet. But if you look reevaluate them in three to six months, it's night and day. It's amazing how fast it's changing. It is, and I and I uh subscribe to this um email.

It's called the Rundown AI agent. Oh, yeah, I'm on that too. You're on that too, right? Yeah, so it's my favorite out of all of them, I will say.

I will, yeah, me too, right? Because it tells you on a daily snapshot as to how AI is evolving on a day-to-day basis, and so it is so fast, it is so fast that I think you know it's hard for for us to even comprehend. Uh, I heard the other day that AI is now building AI. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I've heard that too. Yeah, yeah, and I don't know if that's scary or if that's cool, but it's a little bit of a big thing. I guess it's a little bit of both, as long as there's some like human interaction and checking.

And you know, you and I were talking about the fact that I was just creating an app script and I was building in a a test and you know framework that I can a human checkpoint before it actually executes on what I'm building to make sure that it's doing the right thing consistently, too, right? Because they do hallucinate. They do make yeah, they do hallucinate a lot. Yeah.

Um, so yeah, that's kind of what I would say is that you know, I'll give you an example for me. When I uh you know, when I take on a call, I used to be madly typing out notes, presenting, trying to listen, trying to talk. It was really, really, really hard. Yeah.

Even though I've been doing this for two decades, it's really hard. It's hard to stay present when you have to do all those other activities at the same time. Yeah. And so what I've done now is use AI like you're doing right now on this call, use a transcript.

And what used to take me half a day to do a follow-up email with an executive at a C level uh for a multi-billion dollar company, now it takes me literally three minutes. Yeah. Because that AI has got the transcript. I put the transcript into my LLM and I've got a system you know updated for my records and for my you know for my company.

And then I'm I'm ready to go. And I've already researched all the stuff that they need, and I've drafted up the email and it's ready to go. I love that. It took me, it took me a lot of time.

Like I don't have a creative bone in my body, so it used to take me a long time to draft up those emails and think about what I'm gonna say. Is this appropriate, is it's not, all of that. And now AI takes care of that for me. So yeah, massive, massive time saving.

I love that too, because when I'm on my pre-sales calls and and you know, pre before I get them secured, I'll go back and re-listen to it in a completely different mindset or different day and just make sure that I miss some nuance of tone or word choice that would kind of be a flag of, oh, this is a bigger issue or concern than they're letting on, especially on the HR front. A lot of times, you know, people are not gonna be forthcoming on that first or second call with you. Um, but to be able to kind of go and pick up on those nuances after the fact and maybe follow up with them.

I that's what I love too, is that it helps me with that perspective. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, totally. It's it's so powerful.

It is powerful. It is. Well, Ali, I so appreciate your time today. I know we could be talking for probably hours on end about all the things that you experience and do and help with businesses, but appreciate your time on the column for the listeners.

I hope you got some tidbits. I know I did. Um, so that was great. Always love it when I learn from my own guest.

And we hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. And we will see you on our next podcast next week. Until then, take care. Thank you so much.

Appreciate it. Thanks, Ellie. That's a wrap for today's episode of Scaling with People. If you got value from this conversation, do me a favor, share it with someone building something big.

And hey, I'd love to hear your take. Drop a comment, shoot me a message, or start a conversation. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss the bold, unfiltered strategies we drop every week. I'm Gwenbert Cruiry, founder and CEO of Guide2HR, where we help high growth companies scale smart with people for strategies and AI powered systems that don't just keep up, they lead.

If you're building fast and want your HR to move faster, head to guide2hr.com and let's talk. And remember, scale isn't just about speed, it's about people. Until next time, have a great one.