Full AI Keynote - Shane Gibson Speaker on Sales and Sales Leadership with AI

AI Keynote Speaker Shane Gibson Full Transcript � MicroAge MSP and MSSP National Conference Hi, my name is Shane Gibson. It's a pleasure to be here at the MicroAge innovation conference in Montreal, Quebec. My session today is devoted to AI in the future of sales. AI is finding its way into everything we do, often automating and scaling many things that were done by humans manually in the past.

It's also being used creatively to impact the way we do things. For instance, this video is actually not Shane Gibson. It's an AI generated avatar of Shane Gibson created using HeyGen, an AI based sales and marketing tool. Not only can you create instant avatars of yourself with tools like this, you can also instantly speak in 30 plus languages.

For instance, I can have it speak in French for me and have it say something like, merci mi crois de mavoir invitement, Montreal, Quebec, etc. Or if I was reaching out to a client in China to talk to them about setting up a local office with all the technology they're going to require for expansion, I may say something like, so as you can see, there's many applications to this technology and this AI avatar could literally speak for hours about the benefits. But that's what Shane Gibson is here for, to do in real life.

So without further ado, please help me give Shane Gibson a warm welcome to the stage. All right, so who thought that was like, that was exciting in a good way? Anybody? Right.

All right, who also thought it was a bit unnerving and a bit creepy too. Anybody else? All right, so I think that actually describes our relationship presently with artificial intelligence and I think it will continue to be. We're quite enamored with it.

We're excited about what it can do, we're amazed by it. At the same time, it's a bit creepy and it is having us worried on many fronts about our future, our careers, our impact on us socially, politically, you name it. There's many impacts it's going to have in many aspects of governance around AI we have to think about. With that said, I'm going to talk less about governance of AI and more about it as a sales tool, which for me is about creativity and having some fun.

But this is the number one question that salespeople ask me and sales leaders ask me around AI is will AI help sellers or replace them? What's your thoughts? Help or replace? Anyone?

Help. Help. Right? And then I know some sales leaders, they're like, I figured out how to replace them, right?

So we get that sales management would be awesome if there weren't salespeople, you know, and, and so the answer is actually yes, it will help and replace sales professionals. And I think this is something to realize that even within MSPs and we think about our staff, our teams, our us, it's gonna replace us as well. It's already replacing us. Right.

It's replacing a lot of the things that we do on a day to day basis. And so it is about a decision actually as an individual, as a company, am I going to capitalize on this and leverage it and augment or am I going to be roadkill on the information highway? And it's really about me. It's about getting moving as well.

So these stats, I'm sharing them with you not just because they're compelling, but I already think they're wrong. So this came out about three years ago and they said roughly half of today's work activities, including large numbers of white collar roles, could be automated by 2025. And this was by McKinsey or 2055. Excuse me.

And my thoughts is based upon what I've seen even in the last 24 months that this is more like 2030. I think it's rapidly occurred. I did a most of us know Jillian Lee and E Channel News and Channel Next and I spoke at Channel Next back in 2018 on this topic and I gave a whole list of things that humans can do that AI will never be able to do. And then I'm going to share that list with you today because I look at it five years later and I'm like over half of these things AI is now doing.

And it kind of gives me an idea that even though I thought I was somewhat forward thinking, I missed the picture. Like the way this has disrupted things is quite incredible. So there's a dichotomy in sales in the world of selling. And these stats changed so fast I pulled them out of my slides.

But I'll give you a high level concept of it. 2021, during the pandemic, Dr. Dennis Kovia and I wrote a book called Real Results in a Virtual Economy about remote leadership. And one of the research pieces I was doing around sales in the Canadian market was like how many open jobs were there for sales professionals in Canada on platforms like indeed and LinkedIn and whatnot.

And we dug in and we found multiple sources. We found there was about 98,000 open jobs at that time in 2021. Organizations looking to hire sales professionals, only about 20% of those were in the business to business space. Fast forward today and there's only about 23,000 jobs posted available on those same platforms.

So we're seeing that there's actually less opportunities for sales professionals than there was at the peak of sort of this pandemic tech explosion, in particular in the B2B space. But what's interesting is, is there's fewer positions posted. And this kind of resonates with what I'm seeing with my clients, is that these positions are actually paying better. So there's fewer positions posted, but people are looking for sales professionals, B2B professionals, people with specific skill sets that can help really move the needle for their organization, but they're also taking longer to fill.

So these positions that before you could fill pretty quickly, I'm seeing my clients 90 to 120 days is conservative. They're spending 120 days is six months looking for the right candidate. So while we're saying, oh, there's fewer job opportunities for sales professionals yet, sales leaders and sales organizations are saying there isn't the talent to fill these gaps. And so there's a big reason why is things have changed.

So there's actually a talent and a competency. There's a talent competency and technology gap within the sales force or the sales community. Who, who here has found that looking to hire salespeople. So we're finding this.

It's frustrating. Not just sales competencies, but the capacity to speak in tech and really adapt to my environment and use the sales tech stack properly is missing. So this is one of the reasons why things have changed so quickly and our sales and marketing has needed to shift as well. So there's a study done by McKinsey every four years.

They haven't put out the 2024 study, so I did it for them. So the last set of stats I did, not quite a McKinsey study, but bear with me and I' I'll kind of walk you through it. What they found is back in 2016, your average business to business buyer or small business owner was on about five different channels. So they're on email, they're in person, they're on the phone, they're on social media.

They might go to a procurement portal to find the right solution, then move forward in 2019. And we're now in seven and a half channels. So it's almost increased by 50% the number of channels that your buyer was on looking at things. So, so you know what, now they're on mobile apps.

Now they're investing more time heading to trade shows and community events and community platforms to engage us. And then we moved sort of into 2021 right around that time frame I talked about is your average business to business buyer, according to McKinsey was on 10 different channels assessing, learning and engaging their suppliers. Fast forward today and we're really in this sort of 20+channel universe as marketers, as business owners, as sales professionals. So we look at obviously email, right, is a go to channel that we're going to assess, communicate, leverage to access information about vendors, communicate with them, communicate with peers in person.

Meetings, conferences, phone supplier websites, procurement departments, but also executive assistants, personal assistants, researchers. I get a lot in my own business. I get a lot of times the, the first line of approach with me isn't the decision makers or the committee that brings me into an organization to bring me in for a keynote. I hear from a researcher, someone who's pulling information and identifying.

That's the first point of contact, right? And peer insights, so actually connecting often through social channels, whether it's a Slack channel and it's closed or online through LinkedIn. And I'm polling my peers as to what suppliers they're using and how they're finding their solutions. Then we've got E procurement channels, but then we've got video conferencing.

Right? Now that was the great thing I think about the pandemic was that Everybody, including our 70 year old grandmother, can now use Zoom. Right? And so it's a really formal channel that we all use on a regular basis that we're adept at.

But also live web chat, many of us have this on our sites through the microage system, but also web chat AI bots. And what's interesting is that several studies have talked about the fact that a lot of business decision makers and consumers would actually rather talk to an AI based chatbot that's loaded with the right information than deal with a salesperson. They just really want a questions and answers library to give them all the information they need to the point where they decide, yeah, now I'd like to talk to a human.

Now I'd like to be part of the sales process, but until then I'd rather talk to AI then chatgpt like tools who here assessing a personal or a company vendor that's selling to you has used a tool like ChatGPT to do ground, groundwork and do some research recently, right? So now we've got about, you know, about 20%, 15% of the audience here, right? Some of my audiences, upwards of 60, 70% is doing that from the business to business space. So we're utilizing these tools.

So simple thing is if your website in the robots Txt file is blocking OpenAI from crawling your site. Just realize that when people are using ChatGPT to research suppliers, they're not going to find you, they're not going to get all the information they need on you. So some thoughts are, oh, they're going to steal my languaging and my SEO and well, yeah, but you also miss out those opportunities as these search engines become more AI driven. So then Google web search, of course, but then LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp and review sites are also the platforms that our customers are engaging us on and researching and communicating through.

And it's not about being solely online either. There's this other dichotomy where during, you know, if you go back a couple years ago, there was an in depth study done by Gartner and what they looked at was how do people want to buy? And the answer is how they want to buy is business to business buyers. This is a third of them no longer want to talk to you or a human.

They want to go to a platform, a procurement site and self prescribe a solution, right? And these purchases are, you know, upper five figure, six figure decisions they're willing to make through a portal and not talking to us as humans. A third, now another third say I want access to that type of technology platform to engage my clients or my, sorry, my vendors. But then in the final mile, I want a salesperson to hop in and I want them to make sure that I made all the right decisions and guide me and get me started and hand me over to customer success.

So there's that piece. They still want a human touch to that very digital process. And then another third, and I'm very grateful because this is how I prefer to sell if at all possible, is they want you to come to their office, they want you to show up in person, they want to see a pulse, they want to know there's a human, there's a, and they want that old school selling. And so why I think it's important to note that is as soon as people were able to go out and travel and everything else two years, three years ago here in Canada and actually go back to the way we used to sell, so to speak.

And sales leaders were like, get out there and go to conferences, get out there and knock on doors. What sales teams found out is, hey, but like a third of our customers don't want that anymore and another third want hybrid where we're going to start online, meet in person, go offline, go online again, interact through the sales process, conclude the deal in person and then serve me online again. So why bring this up is not only are we multi channel, but we have to be hybrid sellers.

We have to be comfortable in person and online. So this is a skill set. If we think about all these channels of communication plus the hybrid nature of selling, that's really changed the competency of the salesperson. And it's not about a lot of salespeople were like, oh, my boss wants us to do this and there's all this change.

And your boss isn't doing this to you, they're responding to the market. They're trying to get you ready to engage today's buyer. So one of the things we look at is this new virtual sales competency map. I'm not gonna go through the whole thing because I don't have five hours to spend you through the day on all the competencies as a sales professional.

But traditionally all you needed to do to be successful is that big piece in the middle, sales mastery. So fundamental sales skills, right? Prospecting, breaking the ice, having a great discovery conversation with, proposing the right solution, handling the objections, closing the deal, servicing the client. Those are the skills, the fundamentals that we're often hiring for.

But the reality is there's these other competencies that are stacked on. So there's virtual communications. So do I know how to use all these channels effectively and do I know that I can't cut and paste what worked in an email into a text? Which just goes down to actually virtual soft skills.

Which is the other one is that can I communicate properly with other human beings the right way in each channel. Then we have social networking, which is what you're doing here, connecting with each other and networking with other people in the community. But also of course, online capacity to leverage LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram and whatever other channels relevant for your business. And then the last two are what I'm going to spend more time on today.

Beyond AI is technology fluency and right, brain selling. And technology fluency or TQ technology intelligence is something that in many cases the whole goal with sales traditionally was just keep salespeople away from the tech stuff and get them to talk to customers. But the reality is sales is now tech driven, so they need to have that literacy. And I'll talk about some of the things we want to look for or train for.

And then right, brain selling is the safe area for humans if we want to have a long term success. And that is all the things that we do well that AI can mimic. But can't truly do well. So true empathy, true listening, true connecting, the ability to realize that this is a huge deal I'm closing and there's 10 different stakeholders involved and I'm going to work those politics within that group to close that deal.

That's a human skill, the ability to lead, the ability to break the rules. Oh, the sales process isn't working, so let's break the rules and let's close this deal a different way. So these are right brain selling skills that we actually have to really build. So empathy and creativity skills combined with technology intelligence is the future of selling.

So technology intelligence, some of the things that I would look for if I'm hiring salespeople or if you're in sales now and you're ramping up. And I'm kind of preaching to the choir here in many ways because this is a room full of technology professionals. So this is our home turf. But I think we've got to hire for this and train for this as well.

So we can speak in tech. We're good at prompt writing and AI use. So this is a new but very vital sales skill. Data interpretation, the ability to actually interpret data and understand it to form my decisions in my sales process systems and process design salespeople, systems and process design.

And many of you are thinking I would not let my salespeople near systems and process design design. But here's the reality. In a small business, often it's that sort of adventurous, curious salesperson that finds a new sales tool. Let's say it's Dripify and dripify, they're able to hook it up, set up a client ideal profile and it starts rolling through LinkedIn and finding that ideal client profile, connecting with them, liking their posts, sending them messages.

Well, they don't if they're in a team of five, they probably don't have a CTO and a tech team to help them evaluate that. So software and set up, they're going to figure it out. Then they have to figure out how do I plug that into my CRM and then how do I use ChatGPT to iterate on my outbound messages so that they're not all canned. And so that's actually the thinking that's needed in a lot of cases for small business sales professionals.

And even mid size is they have to be good at stringing systems together and understanding that proactive and curious problem solvers, they understand the sales tech stack. They're capable of assessing tech tools. Tools. They learn new programs and tools with ease and in essence the bottom line is there's no endpoint, only sales, evolution and innovation.

And that's who you want to hire and that's what you want to train for. In my opinion, that's the sales culture we want to build is one that rewards that and drives that. The expectation that we'll help our people. But they're self learners and they're actually driven by tech.

So according to Comptia, and this is an interesting statistic, is AI. And by the way, my slides, you're going to get a QR code at the end, you can download it and any of these underlined sections are linked to the original studies. So you can click on the PDF and find the page where it's at. But AI is expected to make 85 million jobs redundant and create 97 million new jobs by the end of 2025.

I'm looking at my watch going, that's like basically 18 months. But what's interesting, that's globally so net 12 million job growth. But I believe that those 85 million that are made redundant aren't necessarily getting some of those 97 million jobs, that it may be a very different group of people. And so I think it's important again is that decision around adapting the technology and shifting and embracing it.

So AI can be an Ironman suit for sales professionals. And I really, Gabe Larson actually years ago shared this analogy with me and it started stuck in my head because I think it's interesting because a lot of times when we're threatened by AI, it's a robot coming to get me. Robots are coming for my job. And that's the anxiety.

But the reality is with AI, it's really about strapping an Ironman suit on ourselves or our sales team. So I've got one sales team which has great sales mastery and they're exceptionally good at what they do and they're good at that right brain stuff. And they're out there prospecting and they're researching their clients who pick up the phone and they know they got to follow up and lead, nurture, and they know how to keep tabs on things and they know they need to write customized proposals for their clients to land deals to really make sure that it resonates.

They're doing all the things right, but they've got a competitor that knows that. But that competitor goes, okay, well instead of you researching, let's use a tool like Bombara combined with some other AI based tools that with a click of a button you get all the data on that client all in one panel and then I take that data and we can then convert it into business outcomes so you can just read that bulleted list instantly. So now that saves you maybe one hour per ideal prospect of research off the top.

And then I give them a tool like Fathom, which I'll share with you here, that listens to their zoom calls and then it outputs business results and what's wanted for that sales outcomes for that client in a customized way. They can take that and feed it into another AI which helps them customize their proposal. And while the first group is still figuring out their notes and trying to customize the proposal, they're onto the next deal. And so what happens when you scale this across multiple deals and multiple team members?

You're saving hundreds of hours per week that used to be cut and paste and manual activity that actually have nothing to do with selling that in person time that FaceTime is what it can maximize. And so no matter how good we are, Tony Stark is exceptionally highly motivated, courageous entrepreneur, but he put the Iron man suit on and he amplified who he was. And that's really what AI can do for us in our sales organizations and our marketing. So we talked about right brained sales skills and this skill sets.

I'm going to go through 27 of them, not in great detail and I spend a bit more time on some than I do in others. But I wanted to kind of talk about some of these skills a that we need to nurture within ourselves as business leaders, but also skill sets that I want to look for in people I hire that I'm going to combine with technology and automation. So the first one of course is rapport building. That's an incredible human skill and it's a vital part of what we do is connecting with other human beings and quickly and effectively then listening.

So listening skills are an inherently human activity that's required to create rapport, find out client needs. But with that said, this list again is 27 things I came up with five years ago around what AI will never replace. And I can tell you that number two is now highly augmented and makes me much better listener than I used to be when I didn't used to use it for. In other words, AI is actually making us better at listening.

So it's not like that we can do it. It can't. But this is an augmented skill now. Social intelligence, the ability to read your facial expressions and know whether you're interested, frustrated or what it is.

Right. And so that's that ability to read social cues and know what the appropriate response is, and when an event happens to us, how to interpret in a positive way that moves us forward instead of immobilizes us. These are some of the social intelligence skills that are vital skills that drive business success that AI is not going to do for us. Presentation skills, standing on stage, stand in front of a room, connecting with a group of people.

This is a very sales centric activity. Objection. Handling skills, coming up with answers on the fly. Some of this can now be done by AI.

Huge libraries and chatbots that can actually answer a lot of client questions before they come to the part where they actually need to engage US negotiations. So negotiations is still a very human skill. Although all of us negotiate every day with AI. When we go on to Amazon and it's changed the price of our product based upon our postal code because it knows how much we'll pay and we agree to buy it, we've actually been negotiated with by AI.

Air Canada does that to us as well. They use an AI driven system that determines what we're willing to pay and when and what region. And so we are actually being negotiated with by AI. But from a traditional sales perspective, it's still a really important skill.

Hobnobbing is a really old term. No one uses this term anymore. What's hobnobbing mean? Anybody going out for a beer?

Going out for a beer, right? So it is going out for a beer. And sometimes in the context of going out for a beer in maybe an environment I'm not quite comfortable, and pushing my way into a network which I'm not part of, and embedding myself. Right?

And that's, you know, how many deals have I heard of where it's changed their life or their company because they stuck their neck out and they went in and got their elbows out and they networked in an area they hadn't been before and they developed relationships that expanded their business. So that's a really great human skill. Authentic online social interaction. At least so far.

You can tell if someone's AI bot has written their LinkedIn reply versus them. But it's changing. Innovation, problem solving, detecting lies, right? Being able to see and connect and say, is this person telling me the truth?

Here's a scary one. There is a technology available, but not commercially available right now, where you can feed a video into it and the AI based upon micro expressions and a number of other gestures will tell you whether that person is telling the truth, holding something back, anxious, frustrated, stressed. So hopefully these tools aren't available to HR professionals or salespeople anytime soon, but they are out there, for instance. So then reading and adjusting for personality style.

This is something that is a very human thing, but it also can be augmented by AI. And I'll share a tool with you a little bit later on that does that. Creative prompt writing, of course, and then breaking the rules. I talked about this humor, having fun, connecting with people, giving, contributing and kindness.

That's a big part of business success in my belief. It's actually contributing to our business community and those around us. And that's a really human activity that can give us a competitive advantage. Complex selling, I talked about it.

Multiple decision makers, phone skills, picking up the phone and connecting with somebody, dealing with upset customers, so irate customers is a very human activity. Converting that upset customer back into an advocate, motivating team members, going off script, doing a really good discovery, meeting and connecting and leading a customer, a client. That's something that's a very human activity. It's probably the most important part of selling.

I believe people hire me a lot of times, you need to help my team close better. And I always feel like that's like an Olympic coach going, you need to help my team gold better. I'm like, no, you don't help people's teams gold better. You teach them how to play the game better.

And the game actually needs analysis. And discovery is having more powerful questions. It's not about closing better. It's actually about opening the conversation and the relationship better in a more deep way.

Content creation, this is something that we do as humans, but also, as you saw that video earlier, it's getting to the point where content creation, especially text based content creation, is definitely something that AI can do today if we're led. I still believe that great writing comes from great thinking. Now, I'm biased because I've written several books and I am a writer, but I do believe great writing comes from great thinking. Which means that when I use AI, typically what I'll do is I'll just dictate to my iPhone on the notepad stream of consciousness about the idea I want to get across.

And then I fire that into ChatGPT and go, keep the tone and the language style, but just correct for grammar and double space for LinkedIn. And it takes my rant and then writes it perfectly for me and I go back and change it a little bit and I post it up. And that used to take me, you know, maybe 35, 40 minutes. That now takes me five, 10 minutes.

So there's some ways that you can enhance your Writing with original thought versus asking. ChatGPT hey, write me an article about why sales leadership is important. And then you get some generic garbage with no original thought. So start with your thinking.

In my opinion, that's how you use it effectively. Networking in real life, curious prospecting. Just like finding how do I get into that company? What would I need to do?

Connect with that CEO? What's it going to take to how can I get invited to that conference where I haven't been invited to yet? It's invite only so that I can meet the right people. That curious prospecting is vital.

And then of course personal brand building and reputation building. So why I share all these 27 things? Because a lot of you are like, I thought this guy was going to talk about AI and all he's talking about is people skills. Is people skills and sales process come before artificial intelligence is that if you've ever and many of you have come into a client who wants you to automate their business and then you realize they have no business processes.

So there's not a lot to automate. Right? There's not a lot to automate. Like five different people do the job five different ways and you're like what am I going to automate?

And so what occurs is that you have to start with this highly empathetic social intelligence driven skill set plus your core steps in your sales process. Then you figure out how AI is going to drive that repeatable process. And so we need to start with sales thinking and original thought and then equip and leverage that. So let's talk about AI Salesforce.

This is the most comprehensive study I've seen being done. It's a multi year study done by Salesforce called the Generative AI Snapshot. It's 4,000 people across the United States, UK, Australia and India and they've been following them for multiple years looking at attitudes towards artificial intelligence. So what they found is a third of salespeople surveyed said they used or planned to use generative AI compared to 51% of marketers.

What that means is that those of us who are in sales are lagging behind marketers in both our enthusiasm and our use of artificial intelligence. Right. So we're actually probably making our job harder than it needs to be by kind of resisting on average more than marketers are. So 53% said they don't know how to get the most value from generated AI and just under half said they don't know how to safely or effectively use it.

So 49 and 47% respectively so almost two out of five sales professionals worry they'll lose their job as a result of AI or not adapting to it, which I think is not maybe out of whack as far as a fear goes. I think that if we don't adapt to it that our opportunities are going to shrink. So here's the challenge though, is that most sales professionals and sales leaders I've met still are lacking really the big picture in the power of AI. Because who here is in sales or considering sales in sales, right?

So most of us are. So one of the characters I find a lot of salespeople is we ask ourselves is, how do I make this easy? What's the path of least resistance? How do I do less work?

Right? And that's, I think, what makes us great because we find new and creative ways to do more with the same amount of time. Because it's always about how do I make this easy? So when salespeople look at AI, they go, oh, basic content creation, like writing a letter or doing a blog post.

That AI can do that for me. And analyzing data like, yeah, let's throw the data in and let it tell me what it means versus me trying to figure out what, what these trends mean. And then automating personalized communications for clients. That's great.

I can insert the word birthday here and I can insert the word petroleum here and change this one for construction in the next template and it automates that. Fantastic. So they're excited about getting rid of the cut and paste and not being a human API anymore, which is important, but they're missing. And then how do they think it's going to transform their roles the same way, generate sales reports, basic content creation, analyzing data.

But the reality is what they're missing is this is automate. They're missing Augment. And Augment, in my opinion, is like the most exciting part of artificial intelligence. So Augment is about using AI to actually give us better answers, make us smarter and quicker, and help us make decisions faster.

So HubSpot and both Salesforce did independent studies of AI enabled versions of their CRM where sales teams able to use it and the CRM, instead of me logging in my CRM, because I decided this six months ago and these are my five people I'm gonna reach out to today. The CRM looks at behaviors online of my clients, purchase histories of clients like theirs, what they've been up to recently, and it says these are the five people you should call. So sales teams that allowed that to happen compared to those that were Just running it old school with an old school kind of cadence.

And KPI and Callist had a 21% increase in sales acceptance rates and a 70% increase in lead conversion rates within Salesforce by enabling Einstein to coach their people to do various sales tasks. So who to contact, when and how? Sorry, that was HubSpot and Salesforce. Essentially the stats are almost identical.

28% increase in lead conversion rates and a 32% increase in productivity for sales teams. So this is about getting it to coach you to be better in real time using data. And this is I think one of the big opportunities. I was just joking, not joking, but talking to the Dallera team in the back just before I got up here about all the AI tools that have come up.

And so far right now I'm tracking there's about 500 plus SaaS tools, specifically AI for sales driven that have come onto the marketplace literally like in the last year. So it's an incredible universe. So if I wanted to cover them all today, we'd be here for six years and plus this slide would be like three point font and we'd not see them anyways. So I just picked a few out and I'm going to share a couple case studies with you of some different ways that I'm using these tools myself or I've seen my clients use.

So some of the tools I've used here today, like Heygen is the one I used to make that video. It'll actually even take a video you recorded as a human being, not an AI driven one. You throw it in, it'll convert your language for you into any language so it still looks like you. It doesn't look like a AI driven avatar, but it'll actually speak any language for you.

And the implications of that for like sales outreach on Mass, it'll actually customize like hi Fred, hi Paul, hi Sarah. And then insert company name and it'll actually automate that. And you can do like a mass outreach via email for instance. I'm not suggesting maybe you do that, but it's got the capability to do it.

So there's a lot of functionality in there. You can play with Einstein, of course, in HubSpot I talked about instantly is another tool that I've just began experimenting with, but several of my clients and connections have had good success with that. Anybody use instantly AI or try it out? So anybody do any outbound prospecting via email?

Anybody? So a few of us. So instantly AI. What it does, number one is you obviously create domains that are Similar but not exactly like your main domain name for email outreach through Google, but it essentially warms up the accounts for you, does all the legal stuff and proper stuff, but then emails for several weeks to all these other AI driven inboxes through their system so that it looks like a human.

In addition to that, it's kind of like zoom info where it's got this huge database internally as well that's got verified emails and phone numbers and then you can segment by industry and location and company size and whatnot and then plan a campaign with it. And there's some other AI assistance built in there as far as writing your cadences of emails and iterating on them and testing. So it's a really comprehensive platform and probably I don't know the number, but I think it's about 10% of the cost of a zoom info and it has that additional functionality from the inbox perspective.

Du Li, if you're a Salesforce user, is really cool. Its core functionality is a lot of us like to take notes and type into a Word document when we're talking to somebody and then we got to do something with it. Dooley it looks like that, but as you're typing and filling it out using artificial intelligence, it sticks it in the right place in Salesforce for you. Right.

So kind of. And it's got a whole sales process tracking system which is now almost a CRM within a CRM. We all know the ChatGPT icon. I'll share with you how I use that or some hacks to using it.

Fathom is an AI based note taker which I've experimented with a number of them. It's quite cost effective and very for me it's more efficient than many of them. Video AI. I'll share with you how I use it.

So this video here is of course being shot. I'll get a copy from Maria, half an hour of it. I used to watch it and then say oh I like 122 to 155. And then I would send this to my guy on Fiverr and he would cut it up and put captions on it and send it back to me.

And number one, I'd have to watch my own video, which some people accuse me of loving to do that. But I actually get tired of watching myself after a while and then it's all this time. So it takes. I would leave it.

These videos sit there forever. Now I load it into video AI, it watches it for me and it picks the sections for me and it captions it and then I can post it and it saves me hours and hours of time. There's all kinds of creative ways you can use it. Crystal is a personality profile reader which I'll share with you in a minute.

And then Bombara. Anybody use Bombara or try it out. So it's an enterprise level tool for business to business selling and it's a, it's got a lot of functionality but some of its newer functionality because it's been around for a while is an AI based sentiment analysis tool. So you put your ideal client profile in like I'll put in 20 plus salespeople in the organization, 50 million a year more in revenues, sells in the business to business.

Space is located in Calgary and Vancouver and Ottawa. And then what it'll do is it'll find organizations that meet that ICP on the Internet, but it'll look for sentiment from those organizations for keywords I put in like sales training or consulting or business growth. And so when it sees a lot of search based upon that coming from that IP block plus people downloading, plus historical behaviors of their staff, it'll tell me who within that list of 1,000 companies today is likely on the far end of the buying cycle.

So that I'm reaching. So it's using real time data and AI to find those opportunities. There is a lot of sentiment based tools out there. ZoomInfo has that built in as well, but this one's pretty smart.

So these are some tools to think about. But let me talk a little bit about how I use these tools quickly. I'm going to share three of them with you. So Fathom, who's used Fathom or tried it out.

So I know there's probably a lot of teams users in this room and so I apologize for that. But Fathom type tends to ride on Zoom. It works somewhat with teams, but teams. I think Microsoft likes to not play nice with Fathom and that's fine.

I understand why. I think that copilot is beginning to evolve to be similar to this. But it isn't quite where Fathom is yet. So that's just my opinion.

Don't throw anything at me. But that's the reality. So what Fathom does is I put it on during my Zoom meeting and it just sits in the back and I'll just say to the client, hey, I'm using an AI based note taker. It's so I don't miss anything.

It's just for my use. Is that okay? I've never had anybody say no, they're like actually they go, yeah, and where do I get it? That's the standard answer.

I think I've got to kind of deal with fathom. But what it does is it listens to your call, does the whole transcript, but then there's a little drop down that you click by your name right here and then it gives you one of these multiple options. Is this a candidate interview, customer success, a success call, a project update, a retrospective, a Q and A, a sales meeting, a stand up meeting. And based upon that, it will look for different types of content within that conversation.

And what it outputs in a sales meeting is like what the meeting was about, who the client was, what their core business drivers are, what their outcomes are required, what my action steps were. And it spits the document out for me. So I did this recently with a client out of India, a prospect who was going to hire me to do a remote keynote. So did this interview with them took.

And I took this summary and I cut and paste it into ChatGPT and what I said is very specific prompt is and you can steal this one is I'm going to paste two documents. The first one will be titled Doc one will be discovery call with obviously the client in India. The second document titled Doc 2 is a one page keynote seminar description. Using these two documents, write four business outcomes the client will receive from the Q keynote.

These outcomes should be in the context of what was shared in the discovery call. So if you ever sit down and want to contextualize a proposal after a meeting and you got to write it, so it sounds, it resonates with what they told you, well just spit it out for me. Here's the outcomes that you're going to get from my session connected to the keynote. So empowerment of technical sales team.

And it talks about how shift in growth mindset, why this seminar will do that for them, enhancement in sales strategy with technology and leadership, sales coaching tips. And I put this in and I sent it to the client and when I sat, because I knew they were looking at several people to hire them, they said we're going with you. And I said, why are you going with me? I'm just curious.

And they said, because you really heard us. I thought that's interesting. Right? And now the reality is I did hear them actually.

It's just the fact that this helped me be a better listener. Right. It pulled out the information. But the reality is this saved me maybe three or four hours and it was actually better than I was at listening overall.

So this is how you could use These two tools together. So then anybody know this guy? I was picking on Julian earlier. So there he is again.

So Julian Lee from Techno Planet. So I took Julian and I fed Julian into Crystal. I didn't like feed him as a human being into it, but I gave Crystal a link to his LinkedIn profile which shows how he writes in his posts and and a few of his emails and then it spit out his disc personality profile for me. So based upon his writing style and the language he uses, what is his personality profile?

And when I read it I was like, yeah, that's Julian. It basically says, hey, you and Julian are the same. Which is true. Which is also a problem when we're trying to do business together because we're big picture, we talk in generalities, we round up to the nearest thousand and so sometimes we don't get everything done right and so it gets challenging.

So the then I said, how would I sell to Julian? He says, well here's how you sell to Julian. So you'll be directing creative, they'll be the same. But Julian's more on the direct side than the creative side.

So I need to be more direct with him. And selling to Julian, know that while you're both resourceful and big picture, it'll take extra energy for you both to talk about the details, which it does take a fair bit of energy. But it also says if you discuss money with him and I'll skip to the bottom, don't give him spreadsheets, give him bar charts and graphs and pictures. Right.

And so this was really interesting cause I shared it with Julian and he laughed. He goes, thanks a lot for sharing this publicly. But he says this is totally accurate. And so I've had several clients that are now using this at the senior level with their sales teams, even coaching them, plus with reaching out to prospects where you're able to say, hey, this is a follow up from a meeting or this is a cold email or this is a collect, they owe me money.

And it actually will say here's how you write an email to this personality st that owes you money. And so it's really an effective way to help you sell better. And it uses AI to read based upon writing styles. So the last piece here is content.

So a big part of selling in these multiple channels is actually not just direct messaging people, but actually being a thought leader and sharing the right content on the right platforms. It's one of the big pieces in social selling. So LinkedIn found that social enterprises, companies that encourage their people to share content are 58% more likely to attract top talent and 20% more likely to retain them. What they also found is that content shared by staff actually has a two times better reach than content shared by the company on a follower per follower basis.

So We've got the MicroAge logo and the logo's out there and it shares out to 2,000 people a piece of content a microage employee sharing to the same number of followers, the same content will have a 2x reach usually because people buy from people they relate to those people they've connected with. And then salespeople who regularly share content are 45% more likely to exceed quota than those that don't. So from this perspective, our goal, why we want to do this is thought leadership is who likes inbound leads, we like inbound leads.

Who likes leads who've already decided they want to work with us before they call us? Right. Ok, so that's kind of a leading question, but this is what thought leadership is about is if you know the brand and you know the person and they've established and delivered value through education and insights and you see them as an industry authority, then that's a way better lead than me calling someone and they're like Shane Hu, prove to me you know what you're talking about. They're already educated on the inbound and even on outbound, if you've got the right content machine going, when people check you out, they get to consume that content.

So thought leadership as an organization or as an individual has three simple pieces. One, content creation and curation. I'm creating original content that resonates with my audience or I'm sharing content I've gotten from MicroAge, I've gotten from industry leaders, I've gotten from our vendors that resonates with my audience. Then I'm having relevant conversations.

So they call it social media, not broadcast media because it's a two way communication. When you like my update, I'm like, I don't go I'm awesome. Or you make a comment, oh, a little gold star for me. Instead what I should be doing is you make a comment, I should be replying, I should be engaging you.

I should find something that Chris has put online about sales leadership and I should be hopping in there and having a conversation with him. Because that's the idea is it's actually not just about me putting content out, it's about having actually online rapport, building opportunities. And then the last piece is I build my community. And there's two steps to building our community.

One is expanding reach, just continually adding followers and the right people. Simple enough. A lot of people are great at that. They have these huge numbers on LinkedIn, but are they contributing?

So the other piece is, am I actually giving back to that community? Whether I'm hosting an event like this in person, whether I'm doing webinars, whether I'm providing a how to guide, all these are examples of contributing to the community. So this is this wheel. But what's the biggest objection that most people have around social selling and what I've described here?

Anybody pardon Faith? Fake. Fake. Oh, it's fake.

Okay. It could come across as fake for sure. It's disingenuous. That would be one from the other end.

But I'm thinking from your end, no time, right? I have no time to do this. Content creation takes a lot of time. And so I'm going to talk share with you a little bit about how I took one piece of content and using AI, multiplied it and saved a ton of time.

And it's something that can really be scalable for us in many ways. This is just one way I've done this, but I just kind of want to open your eyes to the concept of leveraging AI to really repurpose content for multiple channels. So this is my podcast. I did a podcast called 12 Non Negotiable Sales Truths.

So I sit down and I record it in front of a video, like at home on my microphone. I'm just talking to the screen and then it gets me a video and then I just extract the audio from that. Usually I upload it and I put it on itunes and it goes away through RSS feeds to 50 other locations and I'm done. But I had this video left over.

I said, what if I took this video and I started using that too. So what I did is there's me recording my podcast in my living room. And basically after I record it, I trim the video if needed, I extract the mp3, I upload it, I upload it to YouTube, then I upload it to Video AI. And this is where it AI cuts in.

So what I do is Video AI is an AI based platform. That's the one that listens to it. For me. It decides that based upon the topics and what you said and when you decided to breathe and paused.

These are. This one came up with how many clips? 17 shorts in a 15 minute video. I think these are the ones.

And what I found is about 80% of them are usable. 20%, not really. It's kind of Missed it or it's not quite the point I want to make, but 80% are usable. So that rate there has saved me anywhere between half an hour to an hour of that just alone, just finding the clips, let alone editing them.

Then of course you can click Edit. And once you click Edit, then you can go in and actually choose what type of caption you want, where you want it to be, if you need to move the timeline a little bit, but typically it's ready to launch and then I can just say share to social networks and I can either schedule it or I can post it right away to TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube and away it goes. Right. So I did that this morning with a clip from a keynote I did a couple weeks ago and it's on five different platforms and I'm having conversations on three of them already.

And that piece of content took me five minutes to go from that looks nice to published and gone. And of course it says here the AI will write what it thinks it's about based upon the transcript. I'll often go in and write more and change it a bit for LinkedIn, for TikTok and Instagram. I don't, because most people don't read the captions to a large degree.

But the point is I get that out so it looks something like this on LinkedIn. So it pushes it out, it's well put together, content's there. Then I took the transcript afterwards on my site and I dropped it in ChatGPT and said, Write me a summary based upon these 12 sales truths. And it wrote me a blog post in my own language based upon these 12 sales truths.

I went in for about 10 minutes and edited it. So it was a 10 minute blog post, fired it up. So tons of SEO content from my original thinking. Then I took the blog post and I fed it back into ChatGPT and I said, make me small snippets of content for a LinkedIn carousel.

So this is what I said, take these 12 non negotiable sales truths and condense them to approximately 200 characters each, including titles, so they can be used on LinkedIn carousels. Then I dropped it into a canva template, fired my photo in there, which the background was removed using AI and I outputted that and that went up on LinkedIn and then I took those images and turned them back into a video reel and put some music on it and fired that back on the platforms as well. So why I share this is here's what I was able to do in two to three hours of marketing effort, which previously would probably take 20 plus hours, which I just wouldn't do.

I don't have time so. And I wouldn't pay someone to do it because if I added that at cost app weekly, it's a bit much. And the reality is I was able to create 12 video shorts and distribute it on four platforms. So 48 different pieces of content are out there.

I have a 17 minute podcast out on Spotify, Apple and 20 plus networks, one long form YouTube video, one blog post, one LinkedIn carousel, one carousel video. So 53 pieces of thought leadership content in about two to three hours. So it gives you an idea of what we can start doing. And this is just an example.

But there's different ways you can do this, right? You could take that video and then work with the content and turn it into a white paper using AI and a little bit of creative thinking, or an ebook and a downloadable lead generation tool as well if you wanted to. So bonus tool. I just found this one.

I think it's the worst branded AI tool I've heard of yet. But if you're a beginner and you wanted to try something out and it's really inexpensive is it's called EZ Peasy AI. I'm even embarrassed to say the name. But you know what I'm not embarrassed to say?

I used it because it's pretty cool. So I took a video of me speaking at Channel Next and I think it was like a five minute video and I said I was just curious. So I just gave it the YouTube link, transcribed it for me, then it wrote me a summary. Then it wrote me a Twitter thread for it.

Then in addition to that it was able to write a blog post for me and then put it in a summary newsletter format as well. So it could write a summary of that event. It could all go out with a click of a button. In addition to it, it's got an AI text to speech tool and it will clone your voice as well.

Not quite good as Heygen, but about 80% is good. So if you wanted to create an accessible document where maybe your voice is reading the document for people who can't, you know, maybe are visually impaired, really good tool for that. But you could also, if you wanted a British accent because you think it sounds more authoritative, you could do that as well. So there's a whole bunch of stuff in there to play with.

And I know there's AI based bots that you can program and build libraries for in here that's pretty fantastic too. So a great place just to play and experiment and figure out some of the things that you want to do with it. So 2024 and beyond, what are some of the trends we want to think about for our businesses? Number one, remote digital first strategy and user experience first.

So I think this is an important piece is that most of our first engagements happen with people on digital platforms. So am I really thinking about my business from a user experience digitally first personalized customer experience via AI. So think about how I'm gonna be using AI to personalize customer interactions to make me smarter, to be more contextual when I'm talking to them. AI is also gonna be ambient in the sales tech stack.

We will stop talking about it eventually. Like it's not gonna be a topic, it's gonna be a thing that exists. I had a client and said to me, really big company, multibillion dollar company and their head of sales, she's like do we use AI? She looked at me like I don't even work for a company.

She goes do we use. I don't think we use AI. Like she's out there in the front charging and running and I go what CRM do you use? She goes salesforce.

I go oh yeah, yeah, tell me a bit more. And she talked to me about all the tools they use and I said yeah, you're using AI all day, you know, but it's just running in the background, right. So what we find is more and more, you know, if we've ever been pushed to Spotify playlist, that's AI helping us out and in a business to business level it's going to be more like that in the future. New sales competencies are going to change sales roles.

So think about everything we talked about here in our multi channel. Our capacity for yes, social intelligence but also tech savviness. We need to think about a new real different competency map we're hiring for and developing ourselves for. More automation and augmentation means actually more time for selling which means more time for those 27 skills that face to face stuff.

Omnichannel selling isn't going away, I think it's going to splinter even more. And so we need to build those skill sets. Hybrid buying process is dominant. It's, it's not online or offline, it is both.

And we need that fluidity and our capacity to engage clients. Emotional intelligence plus technology intelligence is success and only curious self learners need apply. I think that should go into like all of our job ads or our Recruitment materials because I think that's really important is that yeah, I'm going to give you the tools but you have to be self driven and curious in order to stay relevant as a sales professional. And then lastly go the ironman route to compete and prosper and in marketing, sales and life.

Thank you very much. So I've got like about 5 minutes here on the clock I think for Q and A. If anybody has any questions, comments, thoughts, go ahead. Very transactional question.

What do you think? Maybe just you personally or for your personal content moment, your monthly AI subscription spend. Yeah, right now that's a good question. I should be able to answer that for my accountant too.

I think my partner, Little Woo, she asked me as well, like what do you think you're spending on that right now? Because I'm also in the business of like figuring these things out. Right now I'm spending like probably 500 bucks a month on these tools. It's not a lot.

They're not that expensive most of the. Right. Until you get into like some of the real enterprise tools that plug into Salesforce then you're committing to like 18 grand a year for zoom info and stuff like that. But you know, a lot of them are a few hundred bucks.

They're, you know, the video AI is under 100 bucks and we know what ChatGPT costs and then Heygen is around the same. Heygen when you build a. This was a quick avatar I put up here. There's a more customized one where there are people go in and mess around with it for the, the day for you as well and they invest more into it and you can green screen it.

And that one's several hundred dollars a year per avatar you build and you have to pay that every year to keep using it. So it's a different model. But yeah. So those are, those are some of the costs you have to start thinking about.

I'm in audit mode soon. Like I gotta call some. Yeah. When did you start getting into?

Because I've seen you talk before. Yeah, never mentioned it before, but how long? I would say the first time I started playing with it was around 2018. I started looking at these tools and they were pretty cumbersome and very future focused.

So I was like kind of morbidly curious about where it was going, you know and I was spending a lot of time being disappointed but they were there. And I had these, you know, and I had these thoughts. I wish it would do this and I wish it would do that. And when ChatGPT of course hit the market.

It just created so much awareness and so much VC attention. I think the dollars rolling in really helped accelerate the technical capacity. You know Anybody else? More questions?

Thoughts, Concerns? Yeah. What's the role of sales training in today's busy world where we can't afford to have sales teams out in the field? Well, there's a few things right.

It's always about I believe in the gather and scatter approach. So every salesperson will tell you they don't have time to do anything other than sell. But it's like business people who don't take a day off to go to this conference to work on their business instead of in it. So part of it is the culture and psychology within the organization is yeah, it hurts a little bit to take my whole sales team offline for a day or two.

But as long as the sales training is done in a way where you're reinforcing it. So when I do a session with I don't just go and excite salespeople. Ideally I say to sales leadership, you have to be there too. And in addition to this, the day after I'm sitting down with leadership and we're having an implementation plan and then two weeks from then we're doing a zoom with your whole team and then two weeks from them we're doing another one.

And so it's hybrid again. It's like get them all together in person because there's some value for that. And then often it's a lot of hybrid follow up. But also it comes down to sales leadership and then the quality of their sales tech stack can impact their ability to sustain sales change.

That's the other one. So it's a complicated question. You know, if someone wants to hire me and do a boot camp and great, I'll come in but. And they just want it for entertainment.

Fantastic. But they want results like it is a partnership and sales training alone is not going to move the needle. You need to train people how to coach. You need to have reinforcement tool and then on demand.

So is there an on demand library of training materials of like somebody wants to figure out objection handling. Do we have a 22 minute video on objection handling. And some, you know, a sales playbook to go along with it. So there's a lot to it.

So a long answer to a short question but in today's day and age you have to keep them engaged and there has to be repetitive follow up and then just in time training because the tech is there. Why not have a repository of just in time training materials that your sales leaders don't have to wait for a trainer to show up. They go watch video 1.5, and then we're going to sit down and talk about how you're implementing it.

So that's my thoughts. I don't know what we could probably talk about later, but I'm assuming you're kind of thinking along the same lines. Is that very. That's a setup.

That's a setup. He. He lobbed me a softball to finish it on a strong note. I appreciate it.

I owe you one. All right, so final thought. Go ahead. So with all this, I said, everybody starts using this AI, where's it going to go?

Like, in place in history school when they start saying, okay, we just did something, you put out something, he just did it, something. And they all are similar. Not in the story. So back to my first comment.

As a writer, great writing comes from great thinking. So how you differentiate is you start with an original thought, a unique advantage, a unique approach, and you use AI to automate and augment the stuff that's not playing to your strengths or utilizing that creativity. And so that would be my answer. And then back to hybrid or in person becomes more powerful, and we all same sound the same on the Internet, and we're all doing great content marketing.

It still goes back to, like, who does a better coffee? That's my opinion, and that's what I'm betting on anyways, for my future is doing better coffees. All right. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you.