The Role Of Humans In An AI-Driven World With Andy Paul
What is the role of the human as technology progresses? In this episode, Andy Paul, host of Sales Enablement Podcast, joins Chad Burmeister as they explore the role of a human being in an AI-driven world and the need to reinvent in this changing environment. As technological advancement continues at a high rate, Andy and Chad discuss the importance of becoming more human to have an impact. Get to know how human connection and relationships become your best asset and differentiator as Andy and Chad go through the motions, especially in a time of disruption. Tune in and embrace becoming intensely human and learn how you can leverage yourself for the future.
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The Role Of Humans In An AI-Driven World With Andy Paul
I've got a special guest with me. His name is Andy Paul. He is the author of two books. This was his first, Zero-Time Selling. I’ve got to tell you, it's something that everybody should be doing but aren’t. We're going to drill into that. Andy, you've joined ringDNA. Congrats on the move. What an amazing career you've had. Thanks for being here.
Thanks. That was an unexpected event to have your podcast and my podcast acquired. I get to reinvent myself for the tenth time in my career or something like that.
What a great time to reinvent. Every person in the world was forced to work out of their home for a long time.
It's been funny doing this with my wife, who has never done that and works for an organization that was decidedly against remote work. She looks at me and she goes, “You've been doing this for more than twenty years? I’ve been here for a week and I want to blow my brains out.”
I must admit, I have gone to my parents' Winter Park place a couple of times to decompress because like you, I travel every so often. Usually, in that cycle time in my life, I’m like, “Aren’t I supposed to be on a plane to Vegas now?”
I definitely had that. I split time between New York and California. I'm usually about 2/3 in New York and 1/3 in California. I was doing that every month once or twice. You get in that rhythm and suddenly, I have to admit, I miss JetBlue.
It is a disruption of the rhythm. We're going to talk about the role of humans. We're going to be talking about this side of the coin. The role of humans in an AI-driven world. As I have my Garmin watch, that is telling me how many steps I took and my sleep patterns.
“How many steps should you be taking?” It’s like, “Chad, you’re not walking enough today.” “Are you sure you want to eat that, Chad?”
Am I now supposed to be walking? That’s right. What is the role of the human being in this new AI-driven world?
I was inspired to read this book by Geoff Colvin called Humans are Underrated. Geoff is a Senior Editor at Fortune. He has written a bestselling book called Talent is Overrated, which is another excellent book. In this book, Humans are Underrated as you might expect, was about this topic as we progress and technology progresses, what is the role of the human? It's a great book, it does all the surveys about the role of technology on employment in previous eras. What he's finding through his research is people who are going to survive and thrive in an AI-driven world are those who, and he used the term, become more intensely human.
The role of empathy, connection and relationships isn't going to be devalued in the role of AI. It becomes more important because as technology assumes more of the role of perhaps selling and a guided selling environment or something of that nature, it is the human connection that becomes the differentiator. A lot of those machine-driven experiences are going to be less differentiated and how you set yourself apart is going to be the level of connection you have with someone.
It’s intensely human and we're going to demonstrate a little bit of that. If you listen to the webinars that I've done now, you'll notice that I've been investing in becoming intensely human and connecting with the presenters on the other side of the phone by asking a series of short questions. I'll call that out. We'll go through the motions but pay special attention to how I connect with Andy Paul. I've known him for more than five years. When he gave me the book that I mentioned earlier, we haven't necessarily connected on a deeper, intense human level and we're going to try to demonstrate that for you. This is going to be fun.
We're going to tell you some stories. I may cry.
You may. I hope you do it for the purposes of our audience.
We're going to get vulnerable.
Let's stay at a high level before we go deep. Do you use AI at ringDNA now?
In the ringDNA platform, one of the modules is called Conversational AI, which is a conversational intelligence tool that’s listening to recorded calls. It’s providing all sorts of data and information about the call itself, the language that's used, the intentions so on that provide this great series of information for a coach or a manager to use to coach a seller to a higher-level performance.
It will look at all of the big data. What does it do that humans can't do necessarily?
Humans have a hard time listening to millions of calls and surfacing insights out of those calls that perhaps could be used to help coach performance. That's perhaps the best example. You have got all these data points. How do we use them in such a way that provides meaningful insight back to a seller to help them do a better job?
You said conversational AI. Where do you see that headed a couple of years from now? What will it do differently than it does now?
A lot of what people are looking at is you can use what you're hearing and feedback and guidance in real time to somebody on a call, whether it's in their ear or on the screen and saying, “At this moment, we've scanned the CRM record, this is what you've had done so far. Perhaps here's a suggestion of what the next question should be.” It could be based on any official record and based on our analysis of all the data of similar type customers, this is the question to ask at this time. It could be a suggestion driven to some degree. I'm still relatively new, full disclosure, so I don't have the full product map.
AI-Driven World: The people who are going to survive and thrive in an AI-driven world are those who become more intensely human.
It’s that type of thing where can you help sellers individualize, tailor and personalize the experience they're giving to the buyers? The key is people hear about these things and think, “I'm going to be saying the exact same thing at the exact same time.” No, we need to train our sellers to say, “There's the context of the situation around it.” We may make a suggestion, but what are you going to take from it and do with it in terms of asking the question to the buyer?
Think about the other side of the coin, being intensely human. Whoever is responsible for building the recommendation engine becomes more and more important because if you put in a bad and poorly written talk track discovery questions, and you use a methodology that's from 1975 versus now, I'd rather peg to Keenan’s Gap Selling, than something that might have been put out in 1975. There are things that have changed over 25 years. To your point, there are smart people to build out the strategies and methodologies in these conversations. It needs to be able to pivot over time. If we see a trend in the market, and you still stay with what worked a year ago and you don't pivot, that's a problem and the AI is probably not going to be good at understanding those pivots.
Unless you're using your own data, and that's the goal ultimately. What's been the experience of your sales team? What's worked for you and how can we feed that back to you in a way that's right for the context and gives you something to work with going forward?
It's interesting because when I asked this question in front of large audiences, and I said, “How many people are using AI in their sales motion?” Up until maybe months ago, you'd get out of a room of 500 people, maybe 10 people and you ask the question. How many people are using ringDNA? Maybe you get a handful of people that raise their hands. You're using AI? I didn’t realize that. A lot of people are using AI and they don't know they're using AI.
That's true in life in general. We talked about your phone, your watch, and the apps we use. We’re already being driven by and guided by it in so much of what we do.
I once heard a keynote speaker, Pam Didner, who happily takes on the term PDiddy now. We’ve assigned that to her. What an amazing talk and I went up and met her afterward and I said, “That was a good talk.” She goes, “You're Chad Burmeister. I read your book when I was preparing for this talk.” I was happy to hear that. Halfway through a presentation, it was a good 1.25-hour conversation. She talked about the Terminator and is AI going to take over the world. She did have an interesting point.
She said, “Will we let the AI wear the pants or not?” I had my first hint of that when it said, “You've hit 5,800 steps. Congrats. You hit your goal.” I didn't set the goal. It started at, “2,500. Good job,” and it keeps moving me to a new level. At what point does it stop? When do I get a shock that says, “You didn't hit the 5,800?” Where do I want to relinquish my control to a computer and an AI versus not? I want to be the programmer of it. I don't want to follow somebody else's AI.
When you think about how we've started because we're at the beginning stages of implementing technology and sales. Look at how many sellers are content to default to the technology. It's natural to think about as we integrate AI more and more into this and to the extent that certain sellers can sit back and let AI take the lead. They will. To the point I made earlier, they're still going to be the ones that aren't the top performers. It's the top performers and says, “How can I integrate that technology and the AI with my humanity with the empathy, the emotion and the context that AI is not good at now,” and unlikely to be for quite some time?
Let's do that. Let's move now. Let's hear about Andy Paul. You've been podcasting. You've written two books coming out with a third. How did you first get into your podcast and the line of work that you're in?
I remember the moment I decided to start a podcast because I was at a conference. It was an Infusionsoft and User Conference. I was in the midst of this conference when I got a call from a longtime client and I've been working for them for quite a while. They had asked me to give a quote on doing this new task or coaching their new VP of Sales. I said, “Sure. That’s great.” I got a call from the CEO and she said, “I quoted us a lower price.” I'm like, “I’m not going there.” That was a nonstarter so I’m not negotiating on that. It becomes much of the business I’m in and not only consulting for small to midsize companies and a few bigger companies. It was becoming all about price and less about the value we could provide. I thought, “That’s interesting.”
I go into this presentation with John Lee Dumas, who is a speaker and who’s got this fabulously successful podcast called Entrepreneur on Fire. I found it an inspirational way to create interesting content that connects with the audience. Also, that in and of itself is a learning experience because I've now done 770 episodes roughly and I've had the privilege of talking with over 700 smart people and learned all this new stuff as well as everything I knew before. It's so much fun.
John Dumas, the guy that wears the top hat?
Does he? I don't think so.
I thought it was Entrepreneur on Fire, maybe it was Podcast on Fire. This person teaches companies and people how to do podcasts. He's done hundreds and hundreds of these.
He does that. He’s a resource. He's got a community called Podcasters’ Paradise. We subscribe to that. My business partner is my son. When we started the podcast, we subscribed to it and we slavishly followed all the incredible videos and advice he had in there and that's how we launched it.
If you're an entrepreneur-minded person and you want to get to know people to an intensely human level, a podcast is a good way to do that. It sounds like it's taking you a long way in your career.
Given how long I've been in sales for this part of the career, yes. It couldn't have happened if I told people. When I graduated from college, I had no discernible job skills.
That's our next question. A human must have predicted what the AI had come up.
I was a History major and even back then, decades ago, that was still not a job and a profession that people are running out to hire History majors. I had an insatiable curiosity and I was hugely competitive. That's how I ended up in sales. I didn't have a vision that I could see myself running a successful company. I look back at having worked for myself for more than twenty years. I could never have imagined that.
Curiosity was one of the traits.
That's served me throughout my entire career because we were joking about it’s the 9th or 10th time, I've reinvented myself in my career. You can't do that unless you're curious about learning and committed to investing in yourself. That's been a common theme for me because I worked in tech startups for 25 years before I started my own company, and a lot of my clients were tech startups.
AI-Driven World: You can't reinvent yourself unless you're curious about learning and committed to investing in yourself.
I’ll tell you what, I've got a meeting on the calendar with a guy named Robert White. He wrote a book called Living an Extraordinary Life. I used to cut his lawn when I lived in Colorado. I still live in Colorado now but I lived in Castle Pines, Colorado. He had a house in the neighborhood, so I was his grass cutter. It's about unlocking your potential for success, joy, and fulfillment. If you read this entire book, the punchline is when you're a kid, you have a vision of what you like. Not a vision but you like what you like and don't like what you don't like.
Throughout life, we have teachers, parents and whatever influences our filters on life so we tend to lean in and comply with what society wants us. I'm having a fire pit cocktail with him soon. He was John Denver's personal mentor and coach. He ran this thing called the Winstar Foundation. He's been seeing some of my posts and the success of our company and said, “I'm in town from China. Do you want to get together and social distance somewhere?” I was like, “How about a fire pit with a glass of scotch?”
I’ve been fortunate in my career, and life in general. For me, it's always been driven by, “Where can I go to learn something interesting.” For me, it's never about the money. Even though I was in sales because at some level, I knew even when I was naïve, young, and new to it, that if I was interested, having fun and learning, the rewards were going to come. People have asked me, “How did you decide to change careers at this point? How did you decide to go to work for this company?” I was always driven by the people. I want to work for this smart guy that I met when I was interviewing him.
I'd want to do that or I felt that in this environment that there are a lot of smart people and I could learn a ton. It's a whole new field that I knew nothing about. This seems exciting. It’s those types of things that drove me forward and to some degree, it prepared me for starting my own firm. That was its own learning curve in itself. It's all about learning something new and that's probably why I started my own company. It’s to do consulting. I've been wanting to start for years and I was like, “I want variety.”
There's an equation that I learned. There's a VP I worked for, who I wouldn't say was the best VP, he was an Oracle Enterprise Software VP. I'll couch it at that and but I always say, “Learn the best and forget the rest.” That comes from a Beachbody workout routine or something like that. What I learned from this guy is, he said, “My equation in the sales job is an OTE and a certain percentage of ownership in the company.” His number was high. He was like, “I need that equation to be $5 million a year. If I can't see between the $500,000 that I take home and the $4 million or $5 million on the back end, it doesn't make sense for me.”
I wasn't at that stage in my career. I was a field bag carrying director who had a quote of $1.2 million, I did $2.4 million. I had a good take-home year. What I learned was my equation is what's my base and my OTP? Cool. What's my equity piece? Because I don't attach my ship to somewhere where I don't have some upside but the most important to your point was learning. If you want to get to a new level past a plateau, as a CEO now, I was the CEO once for 1.5 or 2 years but I never was rubbing shoulders with other CEOs. Now I'm part of the C-Suite Network Jeff Hayzlett runs.
It’s a different crowd from the AAIs Frontline Manager crowd. You have to put yourself in other environments to be curious and to learn like what we've been talking about. Let’s go to unfiltered land. We started with, “How did you get into what you're doing?” I asked about your college, you said history and it's because I was curious and competitive. The age that most people ask this question is when you were six, what were you passionate about? A lot of people don't even remember any memory at age six, but do you remember something around that time that you were passionate about?
I read a lot. That's my biggest memory besides playing with my friends at the local pool and so on. I was an advanced reader. I remember in second grade, I got taken over and I was able to take check out books from the 4th, 5th and 6th-grade section of the school library. I was the youngest of four kids, so we had lots of books around the house. My older brother, in particular, is a big reader, so I was always consumed with a book, and my siblings used to make fun of me because I sheltered down in the basement. They called me Dracula behind my back. I was reading constantly. When I tell the story, it’s mostly true. My parents were conventional. Dad works all day, comes home precisely 5:30 on the dot and mom would have a cocktail and we'd be exiled so they could talk. I would go into the living room and we had the World Book Encyclopedia A through Z. I worked my way through almost all of them.
Is that the brown covered one? Do you remember what color?
These are white or cream covered. I learned all this stuff most of which is obsolete these days. I would sit, page through, and read the World Book Encyclopedia while they're having their cocktail. I have all these memories of reading and learning, but I was on baseball, Little League, swim team and all that too. Re00ading was the passion.
Tapping back into that line of thinking, you're probably smelling the books now. On the first day, it came to the house, you cracked it open, you're sitting there on the couch or the floor, shaggy carpet probably.
That was a shag carpet for sure and I remember getting in trouble with my mom because they were members of Book of the Month Club or whatever. I would often pick up the books, these novels, and read them before she would which sometimes had some comparatively adult themes. I remember when The Godfather came. The book came out when I was in fifth grade or something. I was cracking and reading it. She reads it afterward and there are all these explicit sex scenes in it so on. She goes, “You read this?” I’m like, “Yeah.” She’s like, “You might ask me next time before you read my books.”
It’s an intense level of curiosity is what I would call that by reading the entire encyclopedia. Shawn McLaren may have read the entire encyclopedia. He was the number one encyclopedia salesman in the country and he's the Founder of Connect. I would bet he probably read it. The difference may be he has memorized 44,000 or so of people's cell phone numbers. You might be able to ask him in the white book in Volume Two, page ten, what picture is there on that page.
Eidetic memory. No, I don't have that. I have a good head for trivia and useless information that I pull out but it’s not like that.
Think about people that are reading this, there may be 500 to 1,000 people of that there, maybe 1/5 or 1/3 who are finding themselves out of work, unemployed, at wit's end and saying, “What the heck should I do next?” You showed that you started in with a curious mind. You read an encyclopedia, you studied history in college, and now you're running an entrepreneur podcast. What would you say to people that are finding themselves in a challenging situation? If you were in that situation, as a curious mind, what would you tell yourself to do? What would you share with people on this podcast?
Even in the midst of a recession, which we're undoubtedly in, there are always problems that need to be solved. Think strategically, what are the problems that we need to be solved by what companies at this time? How can you align yourself with them? What do you need to learn? Learn is the operative word but skills maybe need to acquire to be able to be a value to them during this time. Good people always are on the lookout for good people. I always was when I was running sales teams. It didn't matter what the economic environment was. If I found a good person, I was going to find a way to bring them on board.
One thing I might recommend is to go look for the hottest space that's coming out that's effective and in a positive way from what's going on and offer your services for any amount of time at a percent of revenue. Say, “I'll come in. You can hire me as a contract worker. Whatever you think is reasonable if your cost of sale is let's say 32%. Why don't you pay me 25% or 20% and let me do that and when the economy, investors or your market comes back, let me jump into the fire and prove myself?” I've had that happen multiple times and I've said yes almost every single time.
It's an interesting story because I started my company in 2007, the teeth of a bubble bursting. I had a different take on it because there was no shortage of clients that wanted me to come in and work for, basically. If you sell something, we'll pay you. I was like, “There's more value being transmitted here than that.” Because by virtue of me going out and talking to customers and helping you in some cases, build channels, or whatever we did for them. We can't control how good your product is or how good of a fit it is but we can help you get along the way there.
We deserve to be paid a certain amount. Oftentimes, it is less than what we could charge on a market rate. If we got them to agree that there's some value you're bringing anyway, they had some skin in the game and they’re going to give you the resources you need to succeed. Unfortunately, I’ve seen companies bring people on but say, “I will have to serve a free resource. I don't need to enable them in any way and if they make it, great, but if they don't, oh well.”
Be careful with that offering of, “Let me join you on a percent.”
If you've got value, get paid at least something for the value. Maybe get more equity in exchange for not taking as much upfront but get some commitment from them. Beyond that, attest to being able to say, “This is the value I bring to this. This is why you should bring me on.”
Zero-Time Selling: 10 Essential Steps To Accelerate Every Company's Sales
We've done a past look back so hopefully, that's caused an experience to say, “I was excited about that when I was a kid.” Sometimes, I think of it as straightening a rope and pulling it taut and all of a sudden you go, “I'm right where I'm supposed to be.” I've had a couple of people say, “Maybe I should be doing something different. I don't think that's happened here.” You're like, “I'm naturally curious. I've landed exactly in the right place and time,” there's no friction to what you're doing now and that's how life should be according to the book, Living an Extraordinary Life.
One of the lessons for people, and they can take us for what they will, I have from the beginning of my career either been fortunate, lucky or sheer ignorant to do things my own way. When I started selling and working for a big computer company, we got trained, we spent a lot of time in-classroom training and so on, but the recommendation of the trainers at my first training classes back to my boss was that they should fire me. They thought I was too analytical to be in sales. This is a sense of how long ago that was. they were hiring salespeople based on their extraversion, their personality, I was an introvert and I got more analytical. The methodology they're teaching didn't align with me.
I had worked for bosses so I was fortunate, they would give me the leeway to develop according to my strengths. In every place I went, I had that and developed that, “There's a way that's going to work best for me, I'm going to go that way.” I've been less than incredibly lucky throughout my career so maybe it's because I perform and people give me the freedom because I perform. To say, “This is the best way we should do it. Maybe it's not completely aligned with what the company is doing or the specific methodology but it works.”
That's true advice. If you're going to go work somewhere, ask the hiring manager, “A lot of companies have creative liberty and some companies say, ‘No, you have to do 30 calls a day and do this, this and this. Where are you on that structure as the hiring boss?’”
I am close to a high fraction of my pipeline. I was selling things that are a little different when we're transactional. The single largest deal I took was over $100 million. I don't have a lot of those in my pipeline. I made sure we won that one. Even then, when that company worked with me, I had a boss and he would come to me and say, “Don't you ever say yes to anything?” He'd give me some direction and I'd say, “Let me think about that.” Because I always say, “Interesting feedback,” but does that align with what is the best thing to do in the way I could be most effective? When he said, “Don’t you ever say yes?” My answer was, “No.” To think about that you have to take the risk. I'm sure that you and I both know, who have been extremely successful are not the rule followers. It's not that I was breaking rules but I was being the best version of myself that I could be.
We're building a sales platform for content. You could go the traditional route, say, “I'm going to put it on this LMS platform.” Everybody knows it. You're one of the sheep. You have to be different, so we're putting together at Netflix for sales content that’s highly creative and different. It could crash and burn, but it's unlikely. It's going to be different.
The technology enables compliance and we need people to be less compliant or less pliable and more individuals in sales. We've got too much process and too much methodology. We're squelching creativity and passion on the part of young sellers to become the best version of themselves. We're missing that and as management, we need to look at that and say, “We’re defaulting too much to 30 or 50 calls or whatever. If someone came to me and said, “I'll do ten but I'm going to hit my number plus 25%.” That's like, “I'll give you a chance to go do that.”
I'll give people a chance 10 times out of 10. Interestingly, I attended the Rich Litvin Intensive in 2019. In 2020, it wasn’t canceled but it was moved to virtual and I thought, “Four-day physical to 21 days virtual. How could this be interactive and valuable?” It was valuable. We would have one on one coaching in a room with 200 other coaches. We're talking, but imagine a group of 200 people. For the first five minutes, you grind the gears because there are other people looking over your shoulder. Quickly, you hone in and when we start talking, you forget all those people are there. That's where sales training may be going in the new virtual world we live in. One of the exercises by a guy named David Taylor-Klaus did this exercise and he did a half-hour of exercise. I'm going to take you through the abbreviated and think about this tonight, on the weekend or whenever you have time and go through this exercise. It was eye-opening.
Imagine you walk out of your house and you go into this field. Visualize this field that you go into, and you walk into this field and there's this large bird bigger than life, big enough that you could fly on it. Walk up to this nice bird and it invites you. It looks inviting to jump onto its back. You jump onto this bird’s back. It now takes you up into the clouds slowly. You're safe and you're not going to fall. It's fine. You're in the clouds and now you realize that this bird is taking you twenty years into the future. Your hair's not blowing, it's you're in a movie almost. You start to come down. You come down from the clouds to wherever it is you're going. You're going to see your future self.
This bird takes you down and lightly drops you off at this location. Think of the location, where are you going? You're now going to the door. You go to knock on the door of this place and there you are, you come out. Take notice of what you look like. What are you wearing? How do you sound? All of it, take it all in. You go inside, you get invited in to talk to you yourself. Look around. Is it messy? Is it clean? What's on the wall? What's on the table? Is there a table? Where are you? There's one important piece of this environment. You ask, “Future self, if you could give me one gift to take back with me because I’ve got to go back to the twenty-year-old self?”
Because you've experienced the next twenty years, what's the one thing you would give the gift to your younger self? That’s it. You shake hands “It’s great to see.” You go back to the bird. The bird takes you back to the field now you're back in your life. He does that in a half-hour experience session. It was a lot of meditation, breathing, and visualization first. After, he peels it back. Where was the field? What did it look like? That's the starting point. What did the place look like? I try not to tell you that it’s a house. It could have been at church. It could have been anything. Out of curiosity, where was the field for you? Where was the house? What was the gift? What were those three things that happened to you at that time?
Starting now in twenty years?
Yeah.
I'll be in my 80s. Hopefully, it's a modern structure of some sort. I’m still living independently with my wife, still working, and doing things I enjoy. Hopefully, I have a couple of late-model bicycles there that we're still out riding. For me, I look forward to it as many of us.
What's the one gift that looking back for the twenty years, is there one thing where you go, “Wow,” or that a-ha moment for you that you wanted to tell your younger self, your today self?
I’ve discovered some of that already. One of the great things about getting older, such as they are, is a perspective. You worry less about the things that aren't turned out to be not as important. If you could give advice to your younger self is to stay on that path. We can get upset about politics or we can get upset about having to be confined to quarters but all that stuff is temporary. If you still have family and you’re enjoying what you're doing on a daily basis in fulfillment those are the important things. I was struck by this survey I'd read a few years ago, where they interviewed people 65 and over and said, “What's your biggest regret in life?” By far, the number one regret was they worried too much.
The word fulfillment comes to my mind all the time. Other people want to put their word on me and they use freedom. To me, that word doesn't have the same meaning for me. Fulfillment, which is the word you used, it’s important to me.
I'm not sure what freedom is. We could be free from illness, so I could be physically fit and active when I’m in my 80s.
Happiness is fulfillment.
I'd like to still be learning, and that's the thing that is part of that for me. I still want to be engaged, be active and relevant.
We've gone deep. Let's come back to the surface. The first book is Zero-Time Selling. There's a whole company, InsideSales.com which is now called Xant, they created a company to do this and now one of ringDNA’s main missions is to help solve this business problem. Does a higher percentage company solve the problem or does it still exist?
It still exists. Some companies are certainly taking a look at how we use technology to help us solve this problem, get the right people calling back to the right person at the right time. Part of the basic problem, especially as companies, certainly SaaS-based and others spend more and more time trying to generate a top of funnel activity that at a certain point, you assume that a lot of us are not good because it's not as targeted as it needs to be.
The thing is sellers are still looking at these marketing-generated leads a little skeptically. It varies a lot from company to company because some companies do a better job, but marketing continues to improve and evolve and technology improves. We've got all this new user intent data and other things we can use to help reach out to prospective buyers. Companies and sellers that are smart will do this and will say, “I'm going to go through these. I'm going to have this conversation because I can't judge a book by its cover.” That was the whole point in the book is why assume anything.
An unscratched lottery ticket is what I remember.
You’re never going to win a non-scratched lottery ticket. Try it. It doesn't take a lot of time. If you're a BDR with the responsibility for responding to inbound, do it. Don't judge. Make a call, have a good conversation with somebody, make that connection, ask some good questions, and see what happens.
That's where you can start to backstop some of these problems that companies have had with technology. If the AI can send a message, wait three days, wait another seven days and say, “I thought you might be interested in this short three-minute recording from our CEO and specifically check out point 2 minutes and 7 seconds because that seems to apply to your situation.” There are a time and a place where the AI's getting good enough to be able to send out a message like that with the right person at the time.
The value of calling back quickly, though us you're still in front of the mind. They'll move on to something else but it's still within that window that if they're looking and they get this message that identifies who you are. It's like, “I’ll hit the enter key. Sure, I'll talk to them.”
That's where the dialing app and getting the lead to the person at the time. Whether you're notified on your mobile phone if you're a field rep worker. It should be as automated as possible to cause a human conversation to occur.
As you've finished the call and you put a disposition to say, “What do we do next?”
There you go. We’ve got deep. We've talked about the history and the encyclopedia. Do we still have those, the white encyclopedia?
No, that disappeared. If you think about it, that was vintage early ‘60s. At least 50% of the data is wrong at this point.
I remember the guy coming by to sell us the set. I asked you about the color because ours were the black version. You had the white one probably with gold print on it if I remember.
A little gold print on a green background on the spine.
I remember you had that one and I was like, “You've got the vintage.” I remember the guy selling that to us door-to-door.
Those people made a living doing that.
That's amazing. How do people follow you? You've got a lot of content to share. You're always learning. You read the encyclopedia from front to back. I don't think you're going to be bored by attending one of Andy Paul's blogs or podcasts.
The podcast is Sales Enablement with Andy Paul, and on iTunes, Spotify wherever you follow podcasts. You can also, if you want, check out the show note pages. You go to ringDNA.com/podcasts and you can follow me on LinkedIn. It’s the same on Twitter, @RealAndyPaul.
It's been great to catch up.
Likewise.
I do hope to see you live in Vegas sometime soon. Maybe we can catch a bird together and see our future selves. The thing that came out for me with that one was whatever happens from now over the next twenty years doesn't matter. What matters is this time that we're talking now and what matters is in twenty years, that moment in time, all you have is the time you are in. Love the skin you're in, do what you love to do, love what you do and the rest will be okay whatever happens. I appreciate you joining.
Thanks, Chad.
We'll catch you on the next AI for Sales. Signing out. Cheers.
Important Links:
Podcast – Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul
iTunes – Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul
Spotify – Sales Enablement with Podcast Andy Paul
LinkedIn – Andy Paul
@RealAndyPaul – Twitter
