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00:00:01
The Roadmap to AI-Driven Sales Teams w/Craig Nelson
204 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of the AI Driven Marketer, host Dan Sanchez sits down with Craig Nelson, a seasoned expert in sales enablement. Craig shares his insights on how organizations can lay the groundwork for integrating AI into their sales processes, even if they're just beginning their AI journey. The discussion covers practical steps for transitioning from AI interest to implementation, the role of marketing in supporting AI-driven sales, and how to achieve significant productivity gains with AI. Tune in to learn how AI can revolutionize your sales enablement strategies, helping you do more with less and ultimately driving better results.
Episode Timestamps:
- 00:01 - Introduction: The journey of mastering AI in 2024
- 00:25 - Introducing Craig Nelson and his new AI-driven endeavor
- 01:30 - Craig’s realization of AI’s potential and its impact on sales
- 03:00 - The current state of AI adoption in organizations
- 03:57 - Addressing fears and concerns around AI adoption
- 05:13 - Early days of AI adoption and its accelerating interest
- 07:30 - Sales teams leveraging AI: before, during, and after sales calls
- 09:22 - Custom GPTs and streamlining sales processes
- 11:30 - The importance of time and process discipline in AI adoption
- 13:05 - First steps for AI success in sales: Practical use cases
- 18:59 - Scaling AI use cases and overcoming challenges
- 27:05 - AI in sales coaching and training: Enhancing feedback loops
- 34:12 - Scaling sales teams with AI and avoiding burnout
- 36:44 - Becoming an AI-first company: What it means and why it matters
- 41:00 - The current capabilities of AI and future potential
- 44:25 - Craig’s final thoughts and where to learn more about his work
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and Goals for AI in Marketing
00:00:05
danchez
Welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez, my friends, Kami Danches. And on this show, I am attempting to master AI in 2024. That's kind of been the journey. And along the way, I'm hoping to help you, the other marketers out there, the follow along with me, learn how to leverage AI to do more with less, but yet do greater, like have a greater sense of quality of what we're doing.
00:00:29
danchez
and not just producing more commodity content or more bad results, but actually producing better results with AI.
Insights from Craig Nelson on AI in Sales Teams
00:00:36
danchez
Today, I'm excited because I'm having a friend on his name is Craig Nelson, and he was a leader in the revenue enablement space for years and is now jumping into a new endeavor using AI in order to help sales team do more with less.
00:00:52
danchez
And because marketing and sales, we always got to stay in line and try to help each other figure out what we're doing. Craig, I'm so excited to have you on in order to dive into how you're introducing AI to teams in order to help teams become more effective with AI. So welcome to the show.
00:01:08
Craig Nelson
Dan, thanks for having me and and thanks for your insight on this topic. It's been great working with you on
00:01:14
danchez
So we were jumping into the pre-call and sometimes you end up in a pre-call right before the podcast, before I tap that record where we end up talking. I'm like, I should have pushed record already. And I had one of those moments with you just now. I feel like you and I can jam about AI for hours. And I think actually between all our phone calls, I think we have jammed for a few hours at least already.
00:01:33
Craig Nelson
Yeah, probably true.
Realities of AI Adoption and Engagement Questions
00:01:34
danchez
But I'm excited, but I wanna get a little backstory from you. like when did you start like When did it start peaking for you in your mind that AI was the future and it was going to be a thing? When when did that when was that moment for you?
00:01:46
Craig Nelson
You know, I think it was about a year ago, we we were beginning to scale an organization and having to put in place some some ways of doing business. You know, how do you prepare for a sales call, execute, and then debrief from a sales call. But this time around, we didn't have the same kind of capital. In other words, we had to do more with less, you know, to your point there. And and so for us, it was, all right, let's go see what's available. Go out to YouTube. I found some of your stuff right away, went through your training classes right away.
00:02:15
Craig Nelson
So we'll call out and shout out to you on that because it really did kind of kickstart me. But but I really looked at enablement over the last couple of decades and said, what if you can automate much of the things that we've been doing to scale sales and to do all the things that we're doing? Because we we knew there was a better way of doing it specific to clients, but ti is there enough time in the day to to get it done right? And then once we start leveraging AI, we we really saw some differences.
00:02:43
danchez
I mean, I'm seeing a huge productivity just for my own personal tasks and my own projects that I have going on all the time. And I've automated a number of things. What I find that a lot of teams that I get exposed to, if I come in as a consultant, they're kind of dabbling with it. They got a few of them have it. Maybe even one of them has a paid account for chat GPT, but they don't use it very often.
00:03:03
danchez
What are you seeing where people are at with AI? And what are you usually recommending for a transition? if they're If they're pretty convinced that AI is going to be a big thing, how are you walking them from where they're at to where they should be going in a 30-day period?
00:03:17
Craig Nelson
Yeah, I think it's really early days. And you and I were just chatting just before we started the the recording here on this point. And I sat down with about eight people at an organization that's growth mode. So they're adding products, they're adding new locations.
00:03:31
Craig Nelson
and And I thought it was an excellent opportunity to come in and say, what if you could do all that, but with fewer resources, less effort time, et cetera. And and that was what would cause the meeting.
00:03:42
Craig Nelson
Got into the meeting and the the first sort of round table discussion was, what have you done with AI to date? And I was a little bit set back in that, you know, personal use, sure, chat GPT, free edition.
00:03:55
Craig Nelson
There was only one individual in the group that had the paid for edition of chat GPT for.
00:03:59
danchez
Hmm.
00:04:01
Craig Nelson
And that's fine because we then kind of launched into, why is it that you haven't gone and progressed all that far? and And Dan, I think there's a lot of worry and concern. you know Everything from the classic, is this gonna take my job? And then my response was, oh, AI is not gonna take your job, but somebody who knows AI just may. And I think that resonated with the group because that then sponsored the, all right, so we know we have to do this.
00:04:28
Craig Nelson
But, you know, and then I went around and said, what are your worries? And then then in turn, you know, what was interesting was that the concerns around, you know, this firm is in finance, so regulatory compliance and such. But then the concern was, but what if we don't? And the big, big organizations do. So the concern wasn't
Exploring AI Benefits and Productivity Gains
00:04:47
Craig Nelson
as much, you know, when we're going to do it is how fast can we get started?
00:04:52
danchez
It's funny, is that phrase, that's not going to be AI, it takes your job. It's going to be someone who knows AI. like I've heard that phrase like at least 100 or 200 times over the last year.
00:05:00
Craig Nelson
yeah
00:05:01
danchez
If you're in the AI community or you're listening to podcasts like this one right now, you've heard that phrase before. It's nothing new to you. But it's important to know that most people have it. You're part of a select few that's actually digging into this early, and it is early days.
00:05:16
danchez
Because even when I talk to my some of my tech savvy friends, and these are people who like like to automate stuff and like digging into tech tools, it's it's fun for them.
00:05:19
Craig Nelson
Yeah. Yeah.
00:05:24
danchez
A lot of them still haven't dug in the deep end of AI yet. They're still doing the very, very basics, not very good prompts, don't get much out of AI. let alone the people who are lagging behind. Like it is still extremely early days for AI. But I think it's accelerating. Do you feel like it's like picking up a bit? I feel like there's a lot of interest and people are just now beginning to dig into it a bit.
00:05:46
Craig Nelson
I think the reason why I got a call back and then going back into this organization again in person, and and I think that's a big deal for them at the moment because you can read the room, is that once we address the elephant in the room, the whole thing about AIs are going to take my job. And then one individual's kind of funny story said, can I use that? And I'm thinking to myself, i didn't I didn't come up with that one.
00:06:09
Craig Nelson
and And so that that said, they said, why don't you come back?
00:06:09
danchez
Yeah.
00:06:12
Craig Nelson
But the reason why we want you to come back is that we want to have a core group of people that prove this out. And then their question was, what is it going to take? Is it going to take you know a couple of quarters? And I said, I don't think so. And you and I were just talking about this. You can use AI in your normal course of business and not tell people around you. They'll see they'll see the results of your work. They'll see how fast you're coming back with it, how you iterate you know in a much quicker fashion. So if you can show and demonstrate with a small team of people just the productivity gains.
00:06:44
Craig Nelson
You know, one of the topics you just talked about is, you know, in that first month, what if you had 60 to 80 hours of your time back in your day? and And there's, you know, never been a time greater than now where we spend so much time internally with our teams and our staff and our tools internal. But what if we got 60 to 80 hours back? Would that be enough with, let's say, three to five people using AI technologies? Would that be enough to cause the company to say, 2025, because it's not that far away?
00:07:14
Craig Nelson
Let's get going, right? Let's start this thing off. And and once we get into that conversation, the discussion next meeting is going to be, where do we start? You know, is the audience for this marketing? Is it sales? Is it customer success? Of course, my classic consulting kind of response was depends.
00:07:32
danchez
Yep. Yep. So what are you seeing sales team leveraging it for the most right now? Like what's the most effective places where a sales team are going and applying AI?
00:07:41
Craig Nelson
Yeah, I think that if if you look at pretty consistent use of AI with sellers that are onto this and have been onto it for last year plus, some of the latest AI models are just so good that it's their de facto standard for preparing for the call, executing the call, and then coming off of debriefing internally and then communicating with those clients.
00:08:05
Craig Nelson
So if I'm a rep that has three calls a day, maybe not sometimes five calls a day, you can imagine that my productivity win will be immediate. It'll be the first week. So I think a use case that helps me do the customer facing work faster and better. And then suddenly these clients are saying, all right, it's the end of the call. I've already got my action items. I've already gotten this case here, you know the the pain points.
00:08:31
Craig Nelson
where you're trying to verify them with me. Now imagine having that at the end of the call. And in fact, you can do that with AI today where at the end, you'll have these things understood.
00:08:41
Craig Nelson
So you're not just scheduling your next meeting. You've already got the topics for the next meeting. It's already played back to them.
00:08:46
danchez
Yep.
00:08:47
Craig Nelson
So I think before, during, and after the call is such an immediate no-brainer that that use case is the obvious one.
00:08:52
danchez
Yep. man, there's so many ways to accelerate it too.
Utilizing Custom GPTs for Sales Workflows
00:08:58
danchez
Even as you're talking about it, I'm like, oh yeah, if I were doing that, if I was having a very similarly formatted phone call where I know within a phone call, we're going to be covering A, B and C and I'm going to get different answers, but I know I'm going to be covering these topics. I'd i'd be building a custom GPT that's looking for A, B and C and then with instructions to like, okay, with this information from this phone call transcript, do this with this information, do that. And with this information, do this next thing.
00:09:24
danchez
And I want you to format it as an email with the action items and blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever I needed to it. Like every time i every time I post in a transcript, as as the I don't even need a prompt because I've built it in the GPT with the instructions and it would just immediately write the email for me. It's a one and done, it's probably like a one use case GPT, but think about how much time you have you don't even have to think about it. you just It's almost like having an assistant that goes in and does all the the busy work for you. You just have to copy and paste the transcript over.
00:09:54
Craig Nelson
So you you've you've got me smiling now, Dan, because you know as you and I go back and forth and talk about GPTs and custom GPTs and the workflow GPTs, just understand that the audiences that I've been talking to as of late, this is now you know language they're not using yet.
00:10:10
Craig Nelson
You know, they're back to, I'm not even sure what AI model I'm using, Craig. So I'm not sure why you're asking the AI model. All I know is I've got this AI assistant that some distributors sold to me and I'm getting started with it and I'm using it for planning my travel.
00:10:23
Craig Nelson
I'm using it for identifying restaurants. I mean, recipes, you name it. So it's been interesting because as you started to go into the details there, that is you know certainly level two stuff.
00:10:29
danchez
Yeah.
00:10:36
danchez
Yep.
00:10:36
Craig Nelson
And what I'm finding is that if they find value in level one stuff, they'll get to two. What we don't want them to do is to say, you know, not for me and then hand it over to somebody technical in their organization.
00:10:44
danchez
Yep.
00:10:47
Craig Nelson
Because I have seen that where they said, you know, we got this new team, you know, a younger generation team, nothing. What does that mean? Well, you know, they're more apt to use this. I'm thinking, well, Not sure how that fares for me, but I love it.
00:10:59
Craig Nelson
And you know it's easier to be a critic than a creator. So to me, it was a natural. But but I think the point there being...
00:11:04
danchez
Sometimes I've had a lot of, I mean, i've had all I've had a lot, I've had mixed ages on this podcast and I've often had, I don't know, like people that aren't millennials actually crushing it when it comes to marketing automation and AI use on this show.
00:11:06
Craig Nelson
Go ahead.
00:11:20
danchez
So, so far, it like maybe it leans younger, but I've noticed all like all all ages from Gen Z millennial and up, leveraging AI in really cool ways. At least I haven't noticed a difference.
00:11:31
danchez
I think it's almost been equal. as far as
Diverse Age Groups and AI Utilization in Business
00:11:34
danchez
AI utilization, maybe in some companies that leans differently. I don't really consider it to be an age thing, though, because I've seen it so much across the board.
00:11:44
Craig Nelson
You know, and and I'll take another quote from an individual because I don't think it is an age thing. I think anybody who wants to do better and and knows they need to do better for their clients, you know, will gravitate towards it. What I think though it is, Dan, is it's time.
00:11:57
Craig Nelson
And and an an individual, this is from a high-tech firm.
00:11:57
danchez
Yeah.
00:12:00
Craig Nelson
you know big capital raise they're going to make that run you know to to that next level so they've got so much going on in this organization they're building and selling and marketing and deploying and doing it all over again and then they start over again the next day right so these organizations are saying to me it's not a matter of you know generation it's a matter of time i just don't have the time to understand what are the high impact use cases where do i start what are the technologies
00:12:27
danchez
Yeah.
00:12:29
Craig Nelson
and And you and I are now seeing this whole new map of vendor technologies. I shared one yesterday with somebody I've worked with for years.
00:12:34
danchez
Oh, yeah.
00:12:37
Craig Nelson
And his response was, I don't know one logo on that page. So you know what are the AI technologies that I should be considering? And then in turn, you know how do I start?
00:12:49
Craig Nelson
Because I don't want to put my company at risk. So these are pretty basic and objections, but they're not any objections you can't overcome, but I think it's time.
00:12:54
danchez
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
00:12:59
Craig Nelson
If the individual doesn't have the time, the group doesn't have the time, it's gonna be a slow go.
00:13:05
danchez
So what are some of the steps you're having people take initially in order to see success? Like, where do you usually see people having their first wins?
00:13:13
Craig Nelson
I even go through, so I'm using today for the podcast today, I put together a list of my technologies. I have eight that I'm using today, Dan. Now, do I use some more than others? Sure, but I use this for my schedule now. So doing scheduling at this point is done through AI. I am doing the messaging. I take the standard sort of company master messaging doc and then I then i copy paste it and through GPT I do, you taught me this, super prompt.
00:13:45
Craig Nelson
Didn't even know that term until your video.
00:13:45
danchez
Yep.
00:13:47
Craig Nelson
and And so I use that to do the messaging for it. And I say that, just just use this to get things booked on your schedule, to get things in this case done better when you're doing them.
00:13:58
Craig Nelson
Then I pivoted a few weeks ago and I started using a prospect tool that does the outreach, not the calls, because you can't do that at the moment, cold calling, using this kind of AI technology.
00:14:09
Craig Nelson
But you can do the outreach, personalized outreach. So I've been doing that. and And this goes well beyond the, you know, do something every three days. This is well smarter than that.
00:14:20
Craig Nelson
So I'm encouraging companies to start there, get some more meetings booked, be more efficient with those meetings. it's It's a good starting point, because if I can demonstrate in that first month that you can save somebody 60, you said that might be a conservative number, 60 hours, and then at at and a bill rate of of whatever it might be, be you know, $3,500 a month,
00:14:37
danchez
Yep.
00:14:41
danchez
Yeah. For a month. Yeah. I want, if you're leveraging it, well, it's easy to do that a month. And then what I'm really shooting for is like, can you do that in a week? Which you're like, well, but there's not 60 hours in a week. Yeah. But you can do more man hours. Like you can always add more people to a project. You know, if you have 10 people on a week, you're getting to 400 hours. Can you do more in a week than a normal human can do? That's, that starts to become the game.
00:15:06
Craig Nelson
but But even then, you know, if you can introduce, I'm using Otter to to give a shout out to them for for my note taking.
00:15:10
danchez
Yep.
00:15:12
Craig Nelson
The reason being is that, you know, I've used different note taking technologies over the years, but this one's giving me insight during and after the call. And then it's helping me to do the follow up, again, integrated with, and it's fun because these technologies work together.
00:15:23
danchez
Yep.
00:15:27
Craig Nelson
It's not just one you're using it at any given time, right? You're using multiple. so So that's what I'm doing myself at this point. and I'm encouraging people, you know, show that $3,500 cost savings per person as fast as you can because that's going to rationalize the $160 to $180 a month cost.
00:15:44
Craig Nelson
And and that's you know these technologies are are more reasonable than you know the $60 to $80 per user per month. so So they are more reasonable. But but that said, you know they can add up. So you've got to make sure that there's not too much overlay. i Kind of pivoting a little bit, Dan, I want you to get your take on this. So that's a very
AI for Scaling Operations and High-Growth Companies
00:16:01
Craig Nelson
easy use case, right? Preparing and executing sales calls. What if you're a company that's in high growth mode?
00:16:06
Craig Nelson
You just took capital and you're adding people in offices. Why not use AI to do everything from doing your job description to the questions you ask to you know maybe the things you're going to expect in the first 90 days?
00:16:21
Craig Nelson
you know Can't we use AI to basically scale the company? It's kind of a leading question, sorry.
00:16:25
danchez
Yeah, I mean, of course you can.
00:16:26
Craig Nelson
But that's a great deal.
00:16:28
danchez
the question is, which parts do you want to scale? and I think, you you know, in consultant, when you go put your consultant hat on, you're like, well, but where do you start?
00:16:30
Craig Nelson
Yeah.
00:16:36
danchez
Do you just can't apply it to everywhere all at once? You're like, well, where's your biggest bottleneck? Right?
00:16:41
Craig Nelson
Yeah.
00:16:42
danchez
Where's the biggest, where's this thing slowing you down from so growing the most? Well, how can AI be leveraged to speed that up? Right? That's where you have to start asking. And AI can be used in so many different facets from even ideating and better understanding the problem.
00:16:56
danchez
So you think you understand the problem, but I guarantee you, like if you articulate the problem to AI, it's one of my favorite things is to use the desktop app or the iPhone app for chat GPT and turn on the the microphone.
00:17:07
danchez
not for the back and forth conversation but just to record and i just start talking i'm like okay chat gbt here's the thing and then i just i just like word vomit and just like tell him tell it tell it everything like as if i was talking to a person like here's the problem Okay, here's all the context. Here's the backstory. Here's some of the constraints. here's Here's my possible solution. Is there anything I'm missing? And then bam, its ability to like come up with some other considerations you should have thought about even to solve the problem are is really handy. So it's great for ideation. It's almost it's almost at a coaching or a consulting itself.
00:17:44
danchez
If you just frame the problem well or open it up using it to automate things I think is the next I actually came up with this model to talk about AI utilization Way back earlier this year in like steps you can use to measure like how much are you using AI Because you can use it as a one-to-one basis like as an assistant do this task do that task And then you could go up a level and start automating things.
00:18:09
danchez
Every time this form gets filled out, AI does X, Y, and Z.
00:18:09
Craig Nelson
Yeah.
00:18:13
danchez
Instead of just normal marketing or sales automation, AI is put into it to be smarter, to hyper-personalize content, maybe to email. You can
Models and Long-term Benefits of AI Utilization
00:18:21
danchez
use it then to level up the map that utilization from one-to-one tasks, personal assistant, automation, you can use it for coaching. You can use it then another level up for forecasting. I think that's hard. I don't think a lot of people are doing that well yet. And then I have like one level, one last level up where I think we will be using AI to come up with the original value. Right now it's it's enhancing value, maybe personalizing value, but I don't think any anybody's create using AI to create original value within a company yet. I think it's i think there's possibilities of it though.
00:18:57
Craig Nelson
but But I think it's it's that possibility that's going to cause companies to say, you know, at the moment, we're going to put a few hours into this each week. You know, I think you really have to look at having somebody be a lead within your organization right now. So somebody that is doing the job, interacting with clients, whether it be pre or post sales, doesn't matter, but interacting with clients, have them lead the charge be because the productivity gain, no brainer.
00:19:22
Craig Nelson
That's going to happen. You're going to get that 60 to 80 hours.
00:19:23
danchez
Yep.
00:19:25
Craig Nelson
It's just a matter of you know when you're going to roll this out and and how you're going to educate your team on it and and make sure that you know there's some guidelines are around it. But what we're talking about now are the big deal items and and the conversation I had with a client that is both launching new products to to increase revenue as well as launching new offices.
00:19:44
Craig Nelson
And and you start doing that. discussion with with GPT like you're doing right now, or whatever AI model doesn't matter. The conversation can be repeated. So let's say the conversation is about hiring. This conversation is about going to market with this new product. There are lots of things you can use AI for right now, to give you that first 80%. You still need to have somebody feeding it the right stuff.
00:20:08
Craig Nelson
They have to understand the profile of who you're trying to hire, the product mix, the market in this case here that you're going to target in conjunction with AI.
00:20:11
danchez
Yep. Yep.
00:20:18
Craig Nelson
But you can do, you know, big deal use cases. I refer to them as onboarding staff, launching new products, launching new offices. All of that work could be done. And then let's say you do it once.
00:20:29
Craig Nelson
You do it for one city, for one product. Why wouldn't you repeat it the next time around?
00:20:32
danchez
yeah Yep.
00:20:34
Craig Nelson
And that's the other part, is that now this is further downstream. If if you're doing this with your internal model and it's learning, can you imagine if you, you know, no different than banks, they've grown over the years, right?
00:20:45
Craig Nelson
They're just good at consolidating and and moving forward, right?
00:20:46
danchez
Yeah. Yeah. yeah
00:20:48
Craig Nelson
But what if you were in, whether it be finance or high tech or services, And the way you launched an office or a product was repeatable. And what if AI was learning along the way with you?
00:20:56
danchez
Yeah.
00:20:59
Craig Nelson
Now, this is all internal stuff. This is the stuff you feed the model, so to speak.
00:21:01
danchez
yeah
00:21:03
Craig Nelson
Then in 12 months, it becomes this very strategic initiative. One in which you can actually look at analytics and behavior.
00:21:14
Craig Nelson
you know The tools that I'm using now, I mentioned I'm using eight different tools now. The amount of information that's going through those tools on the things that I'm doing day to day. Imagine doing that with five people, 50 people, 500 people.
00:21:28
Craig Nelson
you know Imagine how quickly this thing's gonna learn. so So the power of analytics, we've talked about this for for many years, is now gonna be realized because it's gonna be reviewing it and then making decisions off it, pretty much in real time, right?
00:21:43
Craig Nelson
But you still need somebody super smart to look at the results.
00:21:43
danchez
Yeah.
00:21:46
Craig Nelson
You you can't just take this stuff verbatim and run with it.
00:21:49
danchez
So I have a thought on the the resume builder and then another thought on training AI over time. We'll start with the resume builder.
00:21:57
Craig Nelson
Okay.
00:21:58
danchez
I love that idea because, man, building resumes is one of those things, i just or not resumes, job posts, job descriptions.
00:22:05
Craig Nelson
Job descriptions, yeah.
00:22:06
danchez
It's like one of those things like you have to do as a leader, because it's really critical. like it's It's almost like a little mini ad for the thing you're you're trying to hire, right? You need to have it well-defined, and if you don't have it well-defined, then there's a lack of clarity on what this role needs to do, and you are mad to track the wrong person with it, so it's really critical.
00:22:22
danchez
But it's a pain to write. Nobody likes writing that. But I'm like, it's not hard for AI to write. And especially if you go like, hey, AI, can you do some research on my my company? here's Here's the website. Just do a Bing search, look it up, and summarize what that company what you learn about that company below. So it summarizes it. You're like, great. Here's an example job description of what this role looks like at a different company. Rewrite it knowing what you know about my company for this role with this one important thing to keep and keep in mind. Bam, it will rewrite it. It will be at least 95% of the way there.
00:22:53
danchez
Right.
00:22:53
Craig Nelson
And then.
00:22:54
danchez
If you're using, if you're just having it, take your take my company, take this other job description for us, and rewrite it for my company.
00:22:57
Craig Nelson
Right.
00:23:01
danchez
what you Based on what you know. and Gosh, it's such a one a great one-two punch with AI.
00:23:06
Craig Nelson
And then take that forward because I did actually with the client go through this routine you just mentioned.
00:23:12
Craig Nelson
You know, it ingested using its terms, basically their their last hiring profile, then it went against the marketing profile that was in the marketplace, combined the two.
00:23:17
danchez
Yeah.
00:23:22
Craig Nelson
we We then turned around and started doing the promotion and did it in different formats, one for LinkedIn, one for Instagram. And also obviously did cost savings there, made it more concise. We used the constraints of the different social media, telling it that, but we didn't stop there.
00:23:36
Craig Nelson
We actually then went to the next step, which was, what are the expectations? of those people that are gonna be interviewing for this job. In other words, one of the questions we should ask them, it kicked out that. We then went into, let's say they get hired and they have questions around or they're about to get hired, they have questions around, how are you gonna onboard me? Why wouldn't you do a 30, 60, 90 day plan with AI? Because it'll actually
AI in Hiring: Job Descriptions to Onboarding
00:23:59
Craig Nelson
come back and say, based on the description and the role that you're talking about here, I'll now give you the 30, 60, 90 day plan
00:24:08
Craig Nelson
And if you'd like, we went, this is the final thing we did, and we stopped here. We said, what should their progress look like in 90 days? and And on the one hand, somebody might say, well, that's a bit much. On the other hand, wouldn't you like to know expectations of the company you just went to work for, what they expect in the first 90 days? And then wouldn't you want to know, is the person getting hired, what are they going to do to create my success, right? What are they going to do to onboard me?
00:24:34
Craig Nelson
so So when I stopped at that point and looked at what work had been done in the past, it actually had been done some of this work. It was never formalized. So when a new hire, a new city came around, you start from scratch, right?
00:24:48
Craig Nelson
Or some of this work isn't done.
00:24:48
danchez
Yep.
Iterative Processes in AI-enhanced Business Functions
00:24:50
Craig Nelson
But I think that's the power because once you do what we just talked about there for hiring once, then you just repeat, right?
00:24:54
danchez
Yep.
00:24:56
Craig Nelson
For the next one, all right, it's a different role. This isn't sales, it's not marketing.
00:25:00
danchez
Yep. It's something that scales really quick. Once you do it a few times and any tweak it, cause it'll make mistakes and you're like, okay, well keep an, I don't know. I love running it because you can be like, okay, well it's, I asked it X and it gave me Y, but I really wanted Z.
00:25:15
danchez
So then you're like, okay, let's, let's go back and test the prompt again and then run it again.
00:25:15
Craig Nelson
Yeah.
00:25:19
danchez
Okay. Closer. Okay. Make a tweak, run it again. And now it's really close. You're like, okay, that's good. We're just going to start using that. I don't think people realize that with prompting sometimes like you actually have to test like test it. And if it doesn't give you back the result, you're like, okay, well, try it again. It's, it's kind of like anything. You just got to try a few times and usually you can get it down to where it's pretty good.
00:25:40
danchez
And then you can use it over and over and over and over again. If you're hiring lots of sales reps and lots of different roles, and well, you write it once, once, and then just change the inputs a little bit for each role. And it can, it can really, you can really run with it.
00:25:53
danchez
but most people don't take the time to actually, you know, go past version one. I'm like, yeah, version one's always 50, 50 per 60% of what you were wanted.
00:25:58
Craig Nelson
Yeah.
00:26:02
danchez
It takes a couple more iterations to get to 90 to get to an A level output.
00:26:06
Craig Nelson
But I think what's exciting is that you know to get to 80 to 90, if you're in HR, you can do this starting tomorrow.
00:26:10
danchez
Yeah.
00:26:13
danchez
Yeah.
00:26:13
Craig Nelson
You could really you know do a YouTube video. I don't want to you know suggest that it's incredibly easy beyond. You still have to do the YouTube video for 60 minutes. you know Learn how to do what we just mentioned.
00:26:25
Craig Nelson
But but the the first question I'm finding is, you know it does it do that? How can I do an onboarding plan? so So you really have to just tell the non-technical person you know, be in HR sales or wherever, just start, right, start with your job description, start with where you want to post it, start with what you think the onboarding could look like from the AI model, then stop, record what you just did, and then repeat.
00:26:49
Craig Nelson
You don't need a developer to do what we just said, you can automate that
00:26:53
danchez
Yep.
00:26:53
Craig Nelson
And then you and I both know with a custom GPT, you can do that in the next 15 minutes. and And that's, you know, being conservative. You could probably do it less if you know how to do it.
00:27:01
danchez
Yeah, yeah.
00:27:02
Craig Nelson
And then put the person's logo on it from their company and it's theirs.
AI-Powered Sales Training and Dynamic Playbooks
00:27:07
Craig Nelson
But then at that point, again, once you start repeating it, the analytics will mean something later. If you do everything random, the analytics don't mean it.
00:27:17
danchez
Now for sales, you've talked about how you're using AI and helping clients with AI coaching and training. How is that conversation going and what how are you leveraging AI to enhance those things?
00:27:28
Craig Nelson
Well, there's some some funny stories around people interviewing with AI sitting in the you know on the right side of their screen. my So they're being coached. Now that's probably not right. But but if you look at you know a right example, it could be, if I'm in sales and I'm selling into insurance for the very first time, and I want to know you know what agents and brokers do for a living. So let's say I'm really green in this vertical. you know Then I want to know, in this case, what challenges they're up against. In other words, compliance.
00:27:57
Craig Nelson
and regulations. And I want to know they keep mentioned CMS, it's not content management system, but actually, all these regulations around, you know, insurance and how you sell and market. So I want to know all that. You can use an AI, if if done right, to do that in real time, right? You're, you're being coached before, and then coming out of the call, you know, if you record the call, you're going to be coached during and after possibly by the model. And when I say the model, the model of your choice,
00:28:25
Craig Nelson
so So I think that's sort of the exciting part was we we for many years today myself quite a few years ago with enablement, sales enablement, we were building playbooks to do this thing.
00:28:36
danchez
Yeah.
00:28:36
Craig Nelson
Well, somebody had to create the playbook.
00:28:38
danchez
Yeah.
00:28:38
Craig Nelson
So as the company would say, you know, who's going to pay that price?
00:28:39
danchez
Yeah.
00:28:40
Craig Nelson
Is that marketing or sales or training? And I said, yes. And and then we were off to the races. Right. It depended. We had some cycles. So so now you can do this stuff more in in real time because and I think we all know in sales, you're super motivated when you're in front of a real opportunity.
00:28:58
Craig Nelson
The first question is, is it real?
00:28:58
danchez
yeah
00:29:00
Craig Nelson
But then secondly, you know if I can become pretty well versed in a vertical that maybe I didn't sell into yesterday, you know I would use this for coaching. And then coming out of that, I think management.
00:29:10
danchez
Yeah.
00:29:13
Craig Nelson
you know There's been technologies for a long time like Gong, and now some others that are doing real-time coaching for somebody who's selling. In the end, you want people not to hawk product, you want them to sell solutions. but It's fair to say, but building a a playbook from scratch, and and it's funny because I've got plenty of playbook examples where I look at it and I'm like, well, good you did the playbook, bad that it's 30 pages.
00:29:37
Craig Nelson
You know, so who's going to read 30 pages and then get on the phone with the client. So, so hopefully that helps Dan with that example because, you know, my, my discussion around selling and assurance is different than the financial sector, which is different than the high tech sector, the wild west, as I like to call it, you know, it's, it's just very different and you have to know the nuances.
00:29:41
danchez
Yep. Yeah. yeah
00:29:58
danchez
I mean, man, I got light bulbs going off in my head, Craig. I got, I'm like, wait a second. It never occurred to me. I'm like, a big part of sales training is,
00:30:09
danchez
Have it having a professional seller listen to your calls and give you feedback This is really the breakfast of champions when it comes to seller. It's it's feedback based on actual phone calls.
Rapid Feedback Systems in Sales and Education
00:30:19
danchez
The problem is Listening to phone calls is very time-consuming Which is why not nearly enough sellers get coaching right because it's time-consuming to coach It's time-consuming to either do us right all right along I could sit sitting and listening to the phone call live or listening to it at 2x speed later on and taking notes on it
00:30:27
Craig Nelson
Right.
00:30:38
danchez
but AI can do it so fast. I'm like, I can imagine if you have like 20 reps and one person doing all the coaching and listening to phone calls and following up with reps, think about how much more effectively they can give feedback if they're literally just taking the transcript from certain calls and pumping it into a custom GPT that's already pre has instructions that says, hey, here's the model here's the selling model we use. Here's the grading criteria for following the model. And here's some of the company objectives we'd like sales reps to be hitting on.
00:31:08
danchez
graded accordingly with feedback. Bam. There it is. Rep gets instant feedback after that phone call. Then it can be sent to the person who's actually can look at it all and see the trends between phone calls and actually give good weekly advice on top of the the per phone call advice AI gives. So you can actually layer on human coaching and feedback with AI coaching and feedback to really go hand in hand and give more rapid feedback so that people can actually improve at a much higher pace.
00:31:38
Craig Nelson
Yeah.
00:31:38
Craig Nelson
and and
00:31:38
danchez
that's exciting stuff because i I like I remember in grade school like you take the lesson you go home do homework you turn it in the next day it gets graded a couple of days later you get it back think about the feedback loop is three days long on a math math assignment when I did college and I did when I finally went back to school and did my
00:31:56
danchez
degree, I did a college algebra via a digital textbook. So the feedback was instant. And then it could break down my problem of where I went wrong step by step. And I like I i was, I was afraid of going back for college algebra. But that in that course, while it was hard for me.
00:32:13
danchez
I finished it in six weeks.
Efficient Scaling of Sales Teams through AI
00:32:15
danchez
It went through really fast because of rapid feedback. I didn't have to wait to get hear back what I'd done wrong or what step I'd missed. The textbook would tell me we could do the same thing for sales reps and really scale a whole organization and get more people aligned to the selling objectives so much faster with just feedback. And I'm not even talking about like the coaching on the front end. You could probably do that too, like you just said.
00:32:37
Craig Nelson
Well, what's interesting about this feedback, you know, we we encouraged a while back when loss reporting, right, as a way of not just getting better at selling, but understanding the market, understanding what we were building, understanding what people were actually using. So we were using this, but it was all manual. So so let's say you've automated that. So you don't have to do the ride along. I'm not saying you wouldn't want to do the ride along with your new team.
00:33:01
Craig Nelson
But when you go from five to 50 reps, and I've had a chance to do that, sent some great opportunity to do that. And then let's say that you go up from 50 to 500 reps. And at the same time, you're being told, all right, the alternate channel has to start selling too.
00:33:16
Craig Nelson
And you've got hundreds of partners, of which maybe 10% are producing, but you still have to service all of them.
00:33:17
danchez
Yeah.
00:33:22
Craig Nelson
So now you're in a case where you're sitting on forecast review calls for a living.
00:33:23
danchez
Yep.
00:33:26
Craig Nelson
and you're wondering, when am I going to stock with a client about what it is they're going to buy or not buy? When am I going to hear objections or maybe competitive seating in these accounts where they're setting us up? When am I going to get to the good stuff? So so now you've got that chance. and And whether you're recording a call like we're doing right now, or you do it in person, you can always have your iPhone sitting there in front of you.
00:33:48
Craig Nelson
and just tell them, you know, I'll do a better job with you coming out of this call if I record this.
00:33:49
danchez
yeah
00:33:54
Craig Nelson
So imagine having this and then doing, you know, not five ride-alongs that quarter, but now doing five ride-alongs that day. So imagine the potential. And when companies raise capital, I'll use that example, and they get excited about that IPO.
00:34:09
Craig Nelson
And, you know, it's always a question of, you know, how are you going to scale from 50 to 500 when you're already working?
00:34:12
danchez
Yeah.
00:34:14
Craig Nelson
a lot of hours a week, you really don't even know.
00:34:15
danchez
Yeah.
00:34:17
Craig Nelson
You're gonna throw bodies at it. You're thinking, well, now I gotta go higher and train them.
00:34:19
danchez
ye oh yeah
00:34:21
Craig Nelson
so So think about scaling and think about not throwing bodies at the problem anymore, but throwing a better way of doing it. In other words, the process discipline. but One of the things I think is meaningful to kind of round out the conversation here is what if you can go from random acts, it's an old term, you know, of enabling sales and marketing to repeated,
00:34:42
Craig Nelson
prove it out, you know, save 60, 80 hours that first month per person, then go from there institutionalize it.
00:34:45
danchez
Yep. Oh, yeah.
00:34:50
Craig Nelson
We're now the company is like, all right, when's that coming to my group, we're already kind of sort of using it. But we know there's a better way, not just better technology, but better process. So then you know, institutionalized it.
00:35:02
Craig Nelson
If at that point, you layer on the coaching that you and I just talked about,
00:35:06
danchez
Yeah.
00:35:06
Craig Nelson
Now not what you're saying is, all right, so the productivity gains in, but now we got to get better at launching products. New products that we built, products that we acquired, that's always he fun.
00:35:17
Craig Nelson
You acquire a company, everybody's excited, then they realize the work. and And so how are you going to do M and&A growth?
00:35:21
danchez
Yeah.
00:35:24
Craig Nelson
So those are the use cases that I think if you could apply this to you, you have the foundation in place, you have repeatable processes, your coaching, then you can really get to that point to where you're optimizing, not based on just people, right, sales, marketing, management, executive management, but the system, the system is going to come back. And it started to do that with some of the stuff I've been working with where it says it's memorizing the work I'm doing.
00:35:51
Craig Nelson
And it'll come back and say, well, over here, you mentioned this. Now you're mentioning that. So it will learn with you. But you got to repeat processes. Otherwise, it's all just you know random acts.
00:36:03
Craig Nelson
So it's it's a bit of a maturity model, Dan.
00:36:04
danchez
and yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:36:05
Craig Nelson
I don't have the graphic yet. I've got it in my mind, but I don't have it on paper.
00:36:07
danchez
Yeah.
00:36:09
Craig Nelson
But I want to just show this in a maturity model and then run through this with clients, where they say, all right, we want to climb that, starting with three to five people. We want to get to 500. But we're not going to do that until we have your sense for how best to to leverage what we know the competition is going to leverage. i And I slid in the competition there because that's what I'm hearing. We're not sure where to get started, but we're concerned that the competition, they are.
00:36:36
danchez
step-by-step process. you don't you don't You don't run before you walk, right?
00:36:37
Craig Nelson
It is.
Competitive Edge for SMBs through AI
00:36:41
danchez
One of the last things I want to talk to you about is this idea of being an AI first company. What does that mean to you?
00:36:49
Craig Nelson
So another thing that I've heard on a podcast where the individual said, you know, we we used to be a product-led company all about the product, you know, and and we know now it's not just about, you know, building a better product. We have to have a better way of doing business. And and if we can let leverage AI to do that,
00:37:10
Craig Nelson
You know, it's not just going to be the well-heeled. There's a lot of conversation around AI and who's going to be able to leverage it. Is it just going to be the billion dollar firms that have all the resources to make it right? I think it's going to be the SMBs.
00:37:22
Craig Nelson
I think the small, medium sized companies.
00:37:24
danchez
Absolutely.
00:37:24
Craig Nelson
are gonna, once they get on this, they're gonna take off. And once they start repeating things using this step-by-step approach, right they're gonna have this competitive edge.
00:37:34
danchez
Yeah.
00:37:35
Craig Nelson
and And I think at that point, they're gonna begin to scale with just a little bit less pain initially and a lot less pain later.
00:37:44
danchez
I think you're right. I think it will be the SMBs, but it will be a select few SMBs. I think a very few, because I feel like so many small businesses never really figure out how to, they never really catch the vision for what excellent consistency looks like. Excellent, you know, like excellent consistency.
00:38:05
danchez
Like what Michael Gerber talked about eMyth, right? Coming up with a world-class business to be able to franchise it even if you don't want to franchise, right?
00:38:13
Craig Nelson
Right.
00:38:14
danchez
How do you come up with a repeatable model on all the fronts of your business from marketing to selling to fulfillment to finance and everything in between, right? How do you create a world-class system?
00:38:26
danchez
The small businesses that do figure that out become big businesses, but I think now they will not only come up with systems for it, there'll be AI-driven systems that require way less capital way and are way more consistent and yeah than could ever have been before with human human labor, because AI doesn't sleep and can execute pretty regularly the same way every time. So that's just an exciting proposition that we're gonna have all these small businesses that are doing I don't know, I feel like we'll have the first billion dollar solopreneur out there someday.
00:39:02
Craig Nelson
It'll be interesting to see because you know historically, that's the whole name of the game, is how far can the founders go with it? And their marketing, selling, and building, the founding team of these companies with these great ideas.
00:39:13
danchez
Yep.
00:39:13
Craig Nelson
But then all of a sudden, they would look to scale, and they get to five people. In other words, they they hire their their five friends that they know can sell it. But it's from five to 50, where if you're an AI lead, coming back to that term, AI first company,
00:39:28
Craig Nelson
I'll use a quote, and and I'm going to read this one verbatim. So this individual said, we know AI is the future, and our executive team are saying get to it. However, and this this person said, however, there's a big however, because we have questions, we have concerns, we don't know the market. And oh, by the way, we're already working.
00:39:45
Craig Nelson
you know, weeks that aren't 40 hours beyond 40 hours. So how are they gonna, I think it's if the company is thinking AI first they're thinking before we throw again, people and bodies at a problem. Let's look at how can we make our life easier? And then once we do that, how can we repeat it?
00:40:05
Craig Nelson
you're still gonna bring people in, right? But when you bring them in, why are we gonna be fairly AI savvy?
00:40:08
danchez
Yeah.
00:40:10
Craig Nelson
Think fast forward now, two years, people are gonna be pretty AI savvy. You'll say AI super prompting, they'll say, of course, there'll probably be tools to do it for us at that point, Dan, like but at least you'll be in a competitive position right now to do it better.
00:40:19
danchez
Oh yeah.
00:40:24
Craig Nelson
But the AI first came from a podcast where I'm thinking to myself, if I'm always thinking about how I could do this, not with people, And let's face it, we burn some people out over the years where you're scaling these companies. Revenue is going up, but people are burning out. How can we use AI to prevent that from happening? you know and And profitable revenue versus revenue, there's there's a lot of big sort of business questions that I think can be asked, but but only if the company thinks about
Current Limitations and Future Capabilities of AI
00:40:49
Craig Nelson
this. It's not just you know somebody in the tech group or somebody in the marketing group thinking about it.
00:40:56
danchez
I know the future of AI is exciting, but even if we don't get to the future of AI, where AI can actually break down problems into all its components and actually become an agent, a lot of people talk about AI agents and I think it's really silly because AI is not capable of being an agent at all yet. It doesn't have the critical thinking skills to break a project down to the tasks.
00:41:19
Craig Nelson
Yeah.
00:41:20
danchez
Which is fine with me because I can break it down into tasks and then it's actually really good at delivering the tasks if you break it down for it.
00:41:26
danchez
Right now it's not, it can't do it. It's it's why agents are a silly conversation because you can rig it to do it, but it it doesn't do it naturally. Even if that never comes, because they're working on that, the open AI is going to like hopefully the next version can actually think through complex projects.
00:41:41
danchez
But even if they don't, the AI we have will still get us to where, like all the things we're talking about in helping companies upscale and go farther than they've ever been able to go before, we could do with the current tech.
00:41:55
danchez
They could stop developing AI and chat GPT-40 or Gemini or whatever your favorite model is, can deliver on these promises already.
00:42:00
Craig Nelson
Yeah.
00:42:03
danchez
That's the exciting part is we haven't even really begun to really utilize what's currently there for selling for marketing for HR for any type of any part of business. It can do way more than we think. And we're still just in the jungle exploring figuring out what's what it's capable of and new use cases are popping up a little bit here a little bit there that will become the best practices of next year or the years to come.
00:42:26
danchez
But we know AI is probably going to get better. So pretty soon you're right. You won't need a super prompt. It will prompt to you.
00:42:33
Craig Nelson
and It'll prompt you, and it'll...
00:42:33
danchez
You will be like, what's the problem? And then it it'll it'll pull the information it needs out of it, and then it'll take off and go do it.
00:42:35
Craig Nelson
itll but But I think it's it's important to to sort of land on a, in this conversation, a practical point, and that is, it's still the discipline behind all of this.
00:42:44
danchez
Yeah.
00:42:46
Craig Nelson
And that's why that that quote about, you know, are you gonna lose your job to AI?
00:42:47
danchez
For sure.
00:42:51
Craig Nelson
No, but you're gonna probably, potentially, I should say, look to lose it to somebody who knows AI and has discipline. and And so you can go out to YouTube right now and find plenty of things, right?
00:43:02
Craig Nelson
Some of the stuff you've done and and get going. But I think ultimately if this that this is a company thing and it's a, you know, AI company first thing, I think what will happen is they'll identify the greatest pain point to your point earlier.
00:43:15
Craig Nelson
It's most likely going to be a customer facing role.
00:43:15
danchez
Yep.
00:43:17
Craig Nelson
In other words, a role that makes money for us or keeps money for us. And they're going to start giving them time back in their day. And then ultimately, they're going to start building up that maturity model. And and I think the maturity model, people don't tend to like that term, but I like the term because it builds off each other.
00:43:33
Craig Nelson
But you got to put the stake in the ground to get started now.
00:43:35
danchez
That's right.
00:43:35
Craig Nelson
You know, our our biggest offering right now is just getting started with AI. Growth IQ is my company. and And what's been interesting about these conversations is they they start at the same point. Here are my concerns. Here are my questions. you know What do you think? And in it's early days. You mentioned Pioneer and our and our prep call. it's It's early days. But I think with some pretty well-heeled companies, it's not early days. I think they're well into it. and And they're going to be the first to kind of cut their teeth. But they also have know big Titanic-sized ships. I shouldn't use Titanic as the boat name. But they have these big ships that they've got to turn around. I think the the small midsize companies have a real shot here.
00:44:15
danchez
Oh yeah.
00:44:16
Craig Nelson
at a differentiator that they hadn't had in the past. I do.
00:44:19
danchez
Now I have less to lose, right? And some, some big companies have leveraged AI and they're getting sued. So it just, the big companies have more to lose. So they got to be more cautious. The small companies do not have to be as cautious and can leverage the new things before they're tried and true. and that's, that's the exciting part about being small versus big. So Craig, this has been a fantastic conversation.
00:44:40
danchez
Where can people go to learn more about what you're doing? I know you're you're about to launch or have launched recently a podcast of your own on AI, is that right?
00:44:49
Craig Nelson
Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna get going on the podcast circuit. You're my my first to sort of delve into this topic. We've been doing the topic for about 20 years and enablement of sales. But but now it's the AI driven enablement of sales. But growth IQ.ai on the site, some of the quotes that I mentioned from clients, some of the questions that clients have.
00:45:09
Craig Nelson
And then we're going to have, coming off of that, you know further discussions on how companies are maturing. you know So as they go to you know being foundational with AI, to doing institutionalized with AI, we're going to start sharing those stories there. And I hope that it'll become a community in which no different than the revenue enablement society and some of these other communities out there, where we all kind of brainstorm together. Small companies, big enterprise companies, because this market's going to accelerate at a faster and faster pace.
00:45:39
Craig Nelson
So it's an exciting time to sort of sort of be in and around this. And and that's where GrowthIQ.ai, that website's gonna and hopefully make it smart.
00:45:49
danchez
So if you're on the sales side or working on sales enablement or just need to better understand how to better collaborate with sales and especially in this AI driven world, go check out Craig and what he's doing over with his new podcast there. Thank you for listening. If this has been fascinating to you and I'd love to hear from you, please leave a review on any and any of the podcast apps where you're listening to this at.
00:46:13
danchez
and give it the star rating that you think it's worth. If you're listening on YouTube, then give it a thumbs up, leave a comment, say hey, or find me on LinkedIn at linkedin dot.com slash ion slash digital marketing Dan. I love it when i people reach out and say they liked an episode and tell me a little bit of what what they liked or what they'd like to hear about. So engage with me, find me out there. I wish there were as ways to do that better on a podcast, but limited to reviews for now. So thank you for listening until next time.