AI Revolution: How a Top Sales Leader Compressed 6-Month Projects to 10 Days

Speaker A: Welcome everybody. This is Ryan Staley and we are back. But today I have a very special guest with me today I have Brandon Taylor. Brandon is the VP of Enterprise and Partnerships over at CompanyCam, a multiple time CRO leader with three exits as well as the CRO chapter head for Pavilion. He's also scaled many SaaS businesses from startup to enterprise and multiple industries. Really excited to have you on the show today Brandon. What's going on man?

Speaker B: Not much. Ryan, thank you for inviting me, I appreciate that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this man. I love what you're doing in the A.I. uh, go to market space and so uh, want to talk to you about that and your experience because you are a multiple times CRO that's had a lot of in field experience. However, you took the insight of not being too busy to focus on this because you saw the upside. So I want to get into that in a second. But before we do, can you give us just a real quick backdrop about who you are and what you've been focused over over your previous roles and then like what do you laser focus on doing now?

Speaker B: Yeah, I have an interesting background. I, I, I uh, was fortunate enough to start a large public company and scale up, you know over an eight year period about a $350 million partnerships and alliances division. That was a good run. And then I got recruited into startup world and gosh, I didn't know if I was going to make it. I didn't realize how hard it was. Scale the company from like 7 to 75 million and then I had a couple of other runs. One from 175, from 75 to 145. And I was lucky enough to be an outsourced CRO for about four years. I stepped into 14 different companies. I would come in and I would evaluate 12 growth drivers, I would high grade the top five and then in parallel I would work on those top five and I would get it back to double digit or triple digit growth and then I would hire my backfill and then move on to the next company and that really set me up because I've got large company growth, high growth and then multiple industries. So it kind of put me in a place where um, I've seen a lot of different things but I'll tell you that in B2B 70% of the challenges in go to market are the same.

Speaker A: Sorry, I put myself on mute. There is a random ambulance decided to be awesome to go by. While you were giving your background, I was trying to mute myself A little bit. So I didn't know that about you. I didn't know about the outsourced CRO role. And that kind of parallels what I'm doing now. Right. So I'm doing the AI, uh, go to market transformation. And I've worked with, I don't know, probably 18 different companies now. So it's the same kind of thing. So I go in there and I see exactly a lot of different range of areas and how people are leveraging it and then exploring how we could implement it deeper. So what was your biggest insight that you got from that depth of experience across so many companies in a short period of time?

Speaker B: Well, the last statement around, most of the time when you step into a new company, every CEO will tell you, right, like I'll, uh, you know, we go in and assess and 70% of the challenges are the same in go to market. I mean, at the end of the day, it comes down to hiring the right people, putting the right process in place and the systems in place. But you got to kind of do it in order because if you don't have the right people, none of the other things matter. So that's what I learned real quickly. And a lot of times you step into companies, the people that are in the spot, they may have been great to get you there and they may or may not be the best people to get you to the next level and in scale, you know, the people are the ones that make the big difference and then you layer in the process in the system.

Speaker A: True, very true, ma'. Am. Yeah, I've seen that a lot. Everybody thinks they're a unique snowflake, which there are. There's elements of uniqueness. However, there's definitely patterns as well. So let's shift over to the AI side.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker A: And go to market because you're leading that right now and taking the bull by the horns for company. Cam, tell us about what you're doing, your approach with it. Obviously I've been working with you through that process, but we'd love to hear just kind of your take and thoughts and why you decided to make that a priority.

Speaker B: Well, you know, I wish I'd had it as an outsource here, first of all. Right. Like it wasn't really a thing then, but wow, it would have been great. But I'm lucky enough to be a part of CompanyCam and CompanyCam has a wonderful culture, good leadership, great product in SMB, uh, moving into mid market enterprise and the rate of growth is exponential. And when you scale a company right Imagine if, imagine if you were going from 20 to 40, 40 to 80, 80 to 160, 160 to 250, you know, in a short amount of time. The thing with the, the exponential growth is that you can barely hire people fast enough to get you there. So the question is, is how do you accelerate growth? You got to find efficiency and effectiveness. There's, that's one of the reasons we engage with you, Ryan, is because, you know, as we look at AI go to market. When you look at an AI, uh, go to market strategy, AI crosses multiple areas. Sales enablement, M rev ops, it crosses sales, it crosses marketing, the whole end product in that level. And you look at the go to market and the go to market strategy, if it encompasses all those things, it's really hard to get all of them moving in the same direction when you have exponential growth. And the only way to really do that is find ways to be better, faster than your competition, right? Better and faster than the market and then better and faster than who you were one, two, three years ago. Because when you want to double, double, double, the only way to do that is to get faster at it. And what we found is, is like with a go to market, I mean I was amazed. First of all, you know, I remember sitting down with a guy, he's a dentist and uh, he, he rents a duplex of mine and he was like, check out this chat gbt. And I was like, nah, nah, uh, and then like two years later you and I are working together and making big things happen in go to market. But one of the reasons I adopted it was because, you know, in, when you assess go to market, like if you, you hear things on LinkedIn that says AI is going to replace salespeople or sales leaders, and the fact is it's not, but AI, uh, or salespeople with AI, uh, sales leaders, with AI leadership, uh, with AI will replace those without no doubt. They're already recruiting and expecting it in job descriptions, and that's a fact. And the rate of growth in the last two years in the AI go to market is going to be even exponentially more in the next year. There are new things coming out every day, every week, companies, new platforms, things are moving quickly. So if you have another base building, go to the base building. We went through the base building process and now we're moving up the triangle and moving up to the top because the agents are coming. They're already here.

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah, you guys have done a great job of that. And I think like we kind of talked about. The number one thing that I hear leaders say is like I don't have enough time right. Or I got too much going on, like well we'll put this a priority down the road. And it's like what's your, what's your take on that?

Speaker B: Well I, I gotta say that I, I've easily fallen into that trap. But what I found is, is that the reason why I don't have much time is because all of the things that the ag uh, go to market strategy can help with, you know like I've written job descriptions, written out 90 day plans, written out entire strategies from go to market, from going into a new market all the way down to sequences. Does it get me there? 100%? Maybe about 70 or 80%. That's enough for me to put that next 20 or 30% in and then spend more of my time executing on the strategy. That's what it's allowed me to do and it's allowed our cross functional team to do the same.

Speaker A: Yeah, totally agree man. And that's just through ChatGPT, right? No specialized agent or anything, just. You're literally just leveraging ChatGPT for that

Speaker B: use Text Blaze as well. But you know there are some, some like some layers in chat GBT that we use. But yeah, that's chat chat gbt. It's like. And if you take a. I have. I don't even know what all is out there but I'll tell you that what I'm using now is pretty awesome. And the other things I haven't even explored that I look forward to.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot happening. I, it's funny because I've been testing GPT5. It's starting to come up in my um, in my use in my module or in my instance if you will. And it's, it's pretty wild. I've also get like alpha access to like Google Gemini and some capabilities there and it's, it's getting wild. The other thing that I wanted to ask you too is like what do you like? So what's your favorite use cases that you've seen move the needle? I know you dropped a few right there but what about for you as a leader and then what about for you as your team that you're seeing like really significant results with?

Speaker B: So for me as a leader I run the mid market enterprise motion and also partnerships and alliances and we have a very strong partnerships and alliances division that didn't really have strategy layered in and we've leveraged the Chad GPT to build out our overarching strategy. First we did a SOM analysis of all of our partners. What, you know, how are we doing with them, what's the upside, which ones are strategically aligned and a mutual fit is there mid market enterprise opportunity. And we took that data and then we leveraged it and built a prompt around how to build a strategy on each one of these franchises and manufacturers and also integrations. And that enabled us to go and look at the strategy after it's developed, tweak, shine and polish it, get it exactly the way we want it, and then we build the tactical execution right behind it. And Chat GPT has been a big part of that. And now, and that's on the, that's on the leadership side. On the sales side, um, we've done so much like we've created, you know, responses for CEOs, we, we do prep. We've actually created our own little um, chat, uh, GBT that we can actually role play with. We could put, I, uh, put the strengths and weaknesses based on an assessment from OMG of our seller. We put our baseline sales process in there and then we put the Persona that we're calling Vice President of Operations and we say, okay, this is who it is. Here's a company now, let's go with a little bit of a role play. And then we can actually take the stuff from GONG and put it in there as well and say, analyze this call and tell me what you think next steps are. I mean there's so many use cases and it's for us, I mean I can point to uh, 4, 3, 4, 5 deals that it's influenced in a big way just in closing the deal in an enterprise contract.

Speaker A: Well, I love that on the leadership side, first you took it from like idea to execution. I think like tactical execution. I think that's huge inclusive of data. Right. I think a lot of folks don't use the PhD models like what you and your team grabbed onto. So that's, that's great from that perspective. And then yeah, the, effectively like this is the wild thing. Your team built like a custom application effectively within ChatGPT that's like super unique to exactly what you do and the stage of the journey that they're at. So that was really amazing to see them do that as well because that's not very common. And they did it where it could be for any part of the sales process. Any example, I don't know, maybe a couple years back that would have cost like 2 to like 400 grand to make and they did it literally like non technical people. They built it out completely custom and then they're like nailing deals with it. So that's one of the things that impresses me seeing that. I don't know if you ever internalize that as well, but that was one of the things that kind of blew me away.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's um, another function is the deep research. And you know what I was curious about is like if I look across our landscape of uh, where everything we serve like 57 trays, if I look across this landscape, do deep research and give me industry trends and where we fit in, put my website, everything in there and spend about 15 minutes of just kind of taking the data from multiple sites and brought it in and gave me, you know, a 30 page report of our industry. Now most people wouldn't read that, but someone like me would because I plan on working with the team to grow this company. And that type of report would also cost 50 to $75,000 probably two years ago.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you did it in 15 minutes, right?

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: I mean I remember literally we were talking to me, you're like, that would have cost 50 grand, like ripped it up, right? So um, yeah, I think so. Where do you see like the future of this going? Obviously with everything that you've experienced now you're using you know, a standardized model with the team, you have prompts, their teams building GPTs, they're even using the agents within there. So where do you see the future of, of go to markets heading specifically as it relates to AI?

Speaker B: Well you know, where we are today is like so much further than where we were just six months ago. But I could see as in little, as in maybe a year that we probably have an agent rolling us to an org chart that's actually doing work 24 7, building out enablement programs, uh, refining rev ops metrics, potentially giving us ideas on products based on usage statistics. And then when you go into marketing, there's so much you can do in marketing. I believe that if we decided we wanted to go into a new market, for example, let's say it was retail and crazy enough, you know, a lot of retail companies reach out to us, but we don't really market to them. I believe we could use this either as an agent or now and we could build out a complete go to market for a new vertical within, within a day, refine it within a week and launch it within like 10 days. And if you do that repeatedly, I believe that some markets are going to Be really good based on what we learned. Some of them may not work out, but if you can launch them that quickly, learn quickly, fail fast and then whenever you find something that's gold, go after it. I think that's where we're headed.

Speaker A: I mean speed is so critical. I've been reading up a lot on that like speed of execution, especially now. So how long would something like that taken you in the old days, right. Or like previous pre AI like to do?

Speaker B: Um, I think it's three to six months. You know, I think it's a, it's a pretty long time because you, you got to navigate does the product work exactly way for that market. You got to navigate the marketing. It's like in marketing has multiple departments. You got creative and you got demand. You've got all these departments that's got to work together in a line. Um, and then you, you look at rev ops, how are we going to track, manage and measure it? And then when you look at the sales team, how do we enable them quickly? If you look at that whole life cycle, that life cycle itself.

Speaker A: So true, ma'. Am. And I, I love that example because I've seen that in real time people doing that now and it's not all autonomous right now, but I've seen the timeframe, like the 10 day time frame and. But it's good to get your perspective in light of all the experience that you had and how long it would take in the classic version of doing it. Unfortunately though, we are up on time. So where can people find you? Where can they find out more about what you're doing? Uh, the CRO chapter and Co. Camp.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean obviously I live in Austin, Texas and you can come visit us, our CRO chair events that we have monthly. I'm on LinkedIn as well. Brandon Taylor, Texas. Austin, Texas. Um, and then I'm also@brandon taylorcompanycam.com Love it, man.

Speaker A: Well, thanks for being on the episode and we will see you for part two coming up soon. But really uh, appreciate having you on. This is a ton of fun. Love your perspective and like how specific you were uh, in terms of identifying the details. So thanks for being on Brandon.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Thank you Ron.

Speaker A: And we will see you all on the next episode.