SPEAKER_00: 0:10

Sustainable A scalable A2 in real life to inside outside of work. So exclusive by sportbooks, provider of bookkeeping, and accounting for businesses. Let's get started. So this podcast is all about empowering business owners to run healthy businesses. And uh AI has obviously been a hot topic and it's been a hot topic for a couple of years now since we all started using ChatGPT and GROC and Gemini and Pilot and whatever else. While AI could be a little bit scary and introduce uh some uncertainty, um, there's no doubt that it is one of the most empowering uh business tools of our lifetime, I think. And so joining me today to help demystify and help us understand how AI can be actually used by small and bent-sized businesses and the sales function is Jim Norton of sales acceleration.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09

Welcome to you. Hey, thanks, Cal. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm excited to have a good uh detailed conversation today to help some help our friends out there in the SMB space navigate the uh the uh turns and twists of AI in the sales operations.

SPEAKER_00: 1:27

So I I just kind of assume that big businesses um have invested a lot of money in AI and incorporated it. And I know you worked at SAP for a long time, a big chunk of your career. Um but we're really focused on you know, in this podcast, what small and mid-sized businesses can do to capitalize on AI as a tool. So I'm curious what you're seeing in in the marketplace these days and how you're advising clients.

SPEAKER_01: 1:52

Well, yeah, there's that's a good question because there's so much out there, as we know, with AI, right? Anybody who can look out there, there's new tools. I think there's something like 75,000 AI solutions available last uh, I think at the end of the year, and they thought, and and the thinking is that there's going to be 200,000 at the end of this year. Now that's not in sales or in a specific area, that's just across anything that tags themselves as an AI solution, right? Um, but in sales specific and aiding sales efforts for companies, I think there's probably 15 to 20,000 specifically out there, um, which makes navigating the whole world of AI solutions really treacherous and nerve-wracking for my clients, right? And probably your clients too, because what you have to think about is um, am I gonna pick the right solution? Is the solution going to do what it says it's gonna do? Is it there there, what about the potential to fail, right, in deploying the solution? Typical things that people thought about in the software world, right, when you're implementing software. And I don't think I think if you wait, you sit there and wait. So your natural inclination is someone who's gonna then probably sit and wait, see how the market develops, figure out what the solution is for a particular area you're excited to implement, the solution that's gonna come out the winner, so to speak. And that is definitely not the right thing to do because there's so much available to you today in a very cost-effective um market, I think, that you could pick and choose what areas you think you need to improve on in your sales side, in the sales side, and just start hitting, you know, doubles and triples and maybe even a home run here or there, leveraging AI today. That if you waited another year, a lot of that opportunity could be gone for you. So, what I'm telling people to do is walk before you run, think about what areas you think you're struggling with, be honest with yourself, and if you don't even want to do that, crawl a little bit. There's a there's a McKinsey survey uh from Q4 that we we cite a lot at SalesX, sales acceleration when we're talking to customers about AI implementation, and small mid-sized business owners were were part of the survey, and I think 86% of them said that they knew they needed to use leverage AI, some form of AI in their business. And then 90% of those, 86%, weren't sure where to start. And when I talk to people out there, uh business owners and and other partners I work with and my colleagues, um they'll say, yeah, that's true. And the people who do think they know where they're gonna start, none of them are gonna start in sales in their business, right? It's gonna be more, maybe more on the manufacturing floor, depending on their business, right? Or service optimization, marketing content, yeah, marketing content, they're not really thinking about sales, which I think, of course I'm biased, right? But I think that that's that's like a 180 from where it should be, right? You really look if you can drive top line and bottom line growth fairly quickly, what business, you know, especially what SMB owner or or executive wouldn't want to do that, right? So I think that's something that that gets overlooked a lot. Um you know, the areas that I see that people could there's a couple different areas. The one area with SMBs that uh I don't think any of them, you know, um really spend a lot of time or even really think about is do you or what if you don't, what would your AI policy look like? Right? Cause you know, a lot of businesses have different operational policies, behavioral policies, whatever it might be. But when you start thinking about uh artificial intelligence, a lot of people within your sales organization or in your company, they all use Chat GPT, right? Or Gemini or Grock or whatever they're using for their personal personal lives. They might even be paying 20 bucks a month, right, for a for a subscription. And then they're coming to the office or they're just they're just going to work and they're using the same instance of chat, let's just say chat for now, that they're using at home, but they might be taking contract information from a customer or information about that customer that isn't public, that maybe that is governed by an NDA that you have contracted with that customer and dropping it into chat and asking chat to craft a letter or an email or an addendum to a contract or whatever it is that they think they can do and hit and hit return. And once they do that, that information is is outside the four walls of that organization, right? That information is on the internet. And it can be accessed. I mean, not maybe by people like you and me, but people with technical degrees and the aptitude to do that sort of stuff, they can grab that data. And and if anything ever came back and said client ABC's information referenced here, that client ABC contact is going to be like, where the heck did they get this information, right? So I think what you need to do is put in place an AI policy. It could be really simple. You can find you know, contact your your legal, or there's in there's templates out there that you can you can probably uh pull in and modify for your business, or modify, you know, data privacy information that you that you leverage as an organization. Um I know that all enterprise organizations have AI policies now, usually policies. I'm not quite sure, as I said earlier, that many, if any, SMBs do. I mean the tech ones may, but that might be it. Um that's something that I think people I need to think about right away. Right away out of the shoot. Before you even talk, before you even think about tools.

SPEAKER_00: 8:08

And so, Jim, the kinds of clients you work with, uh sales acceleration, just give us a little 40,000-foot overview of the kinds of clients that you uh you're working with these days.

SPEAKER_01: 8:18

So we're working, I'm working with um uh manufacturing, you know, light manufacturing, distribution uh business. Uh I'm also working with professional services organizations, specifically around what we're talking about today, AI selection, how to optimize their business. Um I've got a couple, because of the nature of my background, a couple software, smaller SaaS uh organizations that I'm working with. Um that's more around building out infrastructure. Some of the uh one of them already has a few AI tools that um they've already selected that I'm trying to help them better leverage. And the other one, you know, we'll get to um use leveraging a service that I have uh available to me through Salesx called AI Expert. And it's basically a 90-day sprint, if you will, to deploy one, two, or three productivity solutions for our clients' sales operations.

SPEAKER_00: 9:20

So, what's the low-hanging fruit in sales operations that can be kind of solved or improved or accelerated with AI?

SPEAKER_01: 9:28

Yeah, that's a great question. Uh I mean, some of people may already be doing it out there, right? It's it's um uh uh productivity, it's basically leveraging any transcription tools out there, right? So transcription tools I mean by like uh a Fireflies, right, or a Phantom, or if you're on a meetings call, you can use Copilot, right, to to record that and transcribe it. Um and and also a lot of these have I tend to use Fireflies because um it's just what I I've been using for a while, and it has an app. So if I go to a meeting and you and I are sitting at a coffee shop, I can put my phone down, hit the app, right? And it just records that. So you're focused on having a good discussion, not rather than taking notes. You're not taking notes, right? You're not taking notes with a pen and uh pen and paper. You're really focusing on that conversation, and then you can review it afterwards. So all these conversations that I have, and you have I, you and I have had a few of these, it comes back to me. Fireflies emails me back a summary, and then there's detail behind that. So first it summarizes everything, and then it puts all bullet points down below that. And you can find that with Fathom, uh, was another tool I think I referenced. Uh, if you're on if you're on Zoom, you know, Zoom is gonna provide something like that as well. Just pick something that you're comfortable with. If you're not doing this already, I said, you know, a lot of companies are doing it. Um, you know, you and I both know we talked to a lot of people. People have their AI assistant, right, join a lot of these calls. Um, you know, that's something you can find a lot of information out there on. The other thing that people have access to, a lot of people have access to. Um, and the ones that don't, you know, people like myself and other people can help them deploy is a CRM, like, right? Uh client relationship management solution. You know, I won't say Salesforce, but in the SMB space, there's a lot of great CRMs that are out there. Salesforce tends to be a little bit of overkill. Um, but you know, you can look at uh, you know, a HubSpot, a pipe drive, Clarity Soft. There's specific ones for industries. Somebody that I'm talking to right now, they use Monday because they're very project-oriented, and Monday.com they have a CRM component too. But a lot of those now are layering in AI in there, it could be native to their business, you know, they've developed it, or it could be specific to it could be something that they've they've developed, uh leveraging, you know, open AI or whatever it might be, or whatever tools that like that chat's built on that's helping their customers be more productive. You know, examples of that are scheduling emails. You know, you can run your whole email through your CRM. I don't know if people are aware of that. Um so you can send emails, you can schedule emails, you can build templates that are going to be edited by the use of AI in your CRM, and like I said, schedule those all leveraged around campaigns. And that is that is really cool stuff when you think about being productive and leveraging solution, a solution that you may already have in your business, right? CRM, a CRM tool. I think that when you talk about, we'll talk about it here in a few minutes, but when you talk about in in more detail, but when you talk about getting involved in leveraging AI, those two points around productivity, to answer your question back to your original question, are the lowest hanging fruit, I think.

SPEAKER_00: 13:00

I mean, I don't know what your take on that is. Yeah, I've got a good friend who basically has AI draft most of his emails, but he's gone through the process of training his AI tool. So the AI tool kind of knows his personality. They know where he's rough around the edges, they know where he needs to smooth a little bit. Um, he actually does it internally with his boss and externally with clients. Try to get AI to take into consideration the personality of his boss, the personality of the individual client opportunities he's managing so that his uh emails are drafted. Um uh I don't know what you call it, but somewhat professional manner. And you know, taking into consideration the personality of the recipient.

SPEAKER_01: 13:44

Yeah, I think that's fair. And uh and that's the other thing that that AI can do. It's a good point, Cal, is they can look at, especially if you're managing these in your CRM, which you would be, they can look at other emails you've exchanged with this client or prospect, right? Or partner, and they can see with the tone. They can maybe sense that, oh, Mary at the customer, got back to Joe, our rep, and she seemed to be a little tweaked about our inflexibility in the terms, right? So there's suggestions that it can make to the salesperson before they hit send. The one thing I will say about all of this is you're not you're not replacing the human in the process. You're just making them much more productive. Because I encourage everybody that I talk to about this to review anything of any that you think is is of any value that you're gonna share with a customer or anybody outside your business, review it yourself too. You can have AI write it. I do that a lot, and I'll edit. I might, and you might do this too. We'll just edit it a little bit, saying, I don't know. But I like most of this, I like 90% of it, but I want to change this part of it. Make sure you do that. I mean, there's a lot of examples out there. I was at a seminar last month, and somebody told a story of the uh so it was late in the day, somebody was in a competitive situation, it's more a junior rep. They they use AI, ChatGPT all the time. So they just typed in, they say, hey, um, you know, chat knew their competitors were because it learned from the experience with this rep, right? So it he said, you know, take our five top competitors and summarize the good, the not so good, you know, and the ugly, right? And and and and include pricing around that in the marketplace. Um and compare that to what we deliver. Well, AI read it to mean, okay, I'm gonna take your five top competitors, I'm gonna take you as a six, I'm gonna put it all together, and here I'm gonna talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly, right? And it included his company. And and he was in such a hurry to just get out the door, and he just fired that out. He read it real quick and fired it out. Well, in there it said that their cut their solution tends to be the most expensive in the industry. So he's right there created an obstacle that just through you know, kind of if I if I was this manager, I would have said, hey, you were a little lazy here, right? I mean, if you did you have to get it out before you left the office, could you have waited till the morning? But those are situations that I that just reinforce, you know, what I'd say to people is just make sure you get some eyes on it, you know, some human eyes on it, if it has tremendous, if it has a lot of importance to your organization, right? And that was a six-figure deal that they all of a sudden they threw in significant risk because of what happened, which didn't have to happen.

SPEAKER_00: 16:41

Yeah, you mentioned CRM tools are incorporating AI. I mean, I'm almost 50, and I assume you are as well. Um and I remember when the CRM was really just a tool to report on the sales pipeline years ago, and salespeople had to manually enter all kinds of information. It was like a battle to get salespeople to use the CRM. But um, these days the CRM is actually easier to use and actually making the life better for salespeople, right? So can you talk a little bit about you know some how how some of the popular CRM products in the marketplace are using AI now to make the lives of salespeople easier?

SPEAKER_01: 17:22

Yeah, I mean, sure. Uh we've there's uh like I use a solution even for my practice, right? Which, you know, uh for lack of a better term, and I'm a solopreneur. I mean, I'm part of uh sales acceleration, but I run my own business. You know, I'm a licensee, but I run my own business. Um, build my customers and everything else. So I I need to track opportunities and contacts and things like that. So, you know, I use a solution called Pipe Drive, and pipe drive's kind of cool in that, and I'm sure others do this too. Um, and what the thing that I like that it does, or I've seen it do, um, is take opportunities in the pipeline and remember, and say you had a decent opportunity and it stalled out in your in your this is in your dashboard or your forecast report and it stole out or you lost it six months ago or whatever, and it was at a significantly advanced stage, maybe a 75% chance of closing, whatever that category was. Uh it'll once that reaches a certain aging point, it'll flag it and say, hey, take a look at this opportunity link, because this opportunity is similar, the same industry, right? Same industry, same dollar size, um, same problems that you're trying to solve, right? In terms of where your value prop is. And this one was worked its way up to 75% and then died on the bond. So, or it went to another vendor. So it basically is saying is forcing management and the rep to be more proactive. Just that little tweak in there. So it knows what's out there, what's what's out there in your clothes not one opportunities in this particular example, and it knows that you're also, you know, that you may be at risk here, even though you're not, you don't think you're at risk quite yet. So anything where you can see the light in the tunnel before anybody else can, I think is very valuable. Those are tools I would have I would have loved to have, right? Back when I was managing, you know, national teams at SAP Concur uh and and in other organizations because you know I used to upset some of my reps a little bit, I think, in our forecast calls, because I always I always if if they tended to be glass half full in in talking about their deals, I tried to offset that by being a little glass half empty. And I think tools like this are just a great example of how it allows you to be much more proactive and it allows you to coach, and we'll get into coaching a little bit here in a few minutes with AI, but it allows you to coach your reps up you know much earlier with and and making sure that they're looking around the corner to see what could potentially disrupt their deal. Yeah, I thought that was really cool. And I've used to be your point, I've used Salesforce almost exclusively in my career, you know, when I was in the corporate world. And you're right, I used it had so much power. I think at Concur, we used it for everything. I think we used it for every module they came out with. But um what we didn't um what we didn't really advance in sales is using it for more than forecasting and contact management. That's what we used it for. So we paid a lot of money in the sales side, we paid a lot of money for a solution that we really didn't get the full bank for the buck with. But our professional services organization was using it, our client support organization was using it. So at least they were getting more bang for their buck in other areas of the business.

SPEAKER_00: 21:06

So if I'm a small business owner and say we've got a small sales team, maybe two salespeople, you know, what are some of the tools that I should be thinking about, or what are some of the problems I should be trying to solve with AI?

SPEAKER_01: 21:22

Yeah, so the biggest one that I see that people are always asking about, and you know, and talking to our partners too, our technology partners that we work with at Sales Acceleration, um, are top of funnel leads, warm leads, call them whatever you want, right? And and install deals in the funnel, and a lot of that can be solved by better leads, but it also can be solved by coaching. So the things that I like people to focus on, you know, maybe not quite as low hanging fruit as what we talked about with the productivity tools, but but being able to If you know, the thing I tell people is if you know your ideal client profile, you know, whichever you'll hear everybody call it, your ICP, you know, and the buying personas that are in that business, the ideal client profile that you have, you can take an AI tool and really leverage it, really leverage it to drive significant leads. I mean, leads is kind of a you know pretty broad term. Warm leads, whatever you want to call it. Some people just call contact at a business you're trying to sell into a lead. I wouldn't call it that. But so the areas that I think you can get the biggest bang for your buck in are is lead generation and coaching. And in lead generation, if you think about it, if you could have access, you probably do. You can go out to say a public database or a public website, maybe it's a state agency, government agency uh federal government agency, county agency. Maybe they license, they issue permits for things that you're selling, you know, to additional dwelling units, whatever, wherever you're selling into, and you can find, oh, this person just filed for a new permit. And I'm just making this up. This person just filed for a new permit. Oh, and we've got a contact information for him or her. Maybe there's an email address, right? If you could have access to all this, then the second part of it is go out and look at social media. Go out and look at you know, everybody knows people use Facebook groups extensively, right? Small businesses use it extensively, whoever your target is. Maybe even LinkedIn, maybe Instagram. The big one that I'm seeing people now throwing into the mix there is TikTok. Um, and you if you could go out there and then you can kind of AI can triangulate all that and say, hey, here's Cal. He just bought an ADU. Uh it looks like based on what he's posting or someone in his business is posting that they may need help, you know, I don't know, with the internet, um Internet of Things or whatever, and being able to wire and provide services into their business, whatever it is that you're selling, then it'll import that information. It'll score it too. The AI tools that I work with, they'll score it, and they'll basically allow you the option when you set it up. Do you want to DM? Like if you're in social media, do you want to DM this? So basically it's taking your business's Instagram and direct messaging into that business or that or that person. Now that might be getting ahead of where I'm telling people to focus on by not using AI for everything, but to have human intervention be a part of it. So what I coach people up to do is take all that information back, develop a scoring system that maybe anything over 75, you make it up and you you load that all into your tools, and then decide on whether you really want to make that um you know that that reach out happen automatically. Or if it's for you to determine, hey, I've got a uh sales development rep, you know, inside sales, whatever you want to call it, it's their job to do that. So I want this to come back in a report format every morning at nine o'clock to their desk, you know, to their email, and then they can decide if they're gonna message this person back, and they can start at the top score and work their way down. And then if you want to import, to take it another step further, Cal, if you want to import that information into your CRM, right? Your smart CRM, you can do that. You can do it automatically, or you can have somebody maybe who wears a marketing or sales ops hat, depending on the size of your organization and the talent level in your organization, they can load that into the CRM after they've reviewed it. Um, that's really cool stuff. And that's stuff that people, you know, businesses are paying big referral fees to partners just to walk me into an account that I can sell my solution and I'll kick you back 15, 20, 25%. That's great. And those are those are still going to be needed, but think about the value of a solution that's gonna give you lists like this of warm leads, uh, or just call them leads of any kind, that you can now go out and sell on your own and you don't have to worry about paying referral fees. That's huge right there. I mean, if you talk to small business executives, that is something that they are really clamoring for. Uh, and if they weren't clamoring for before they talked to talk to us, talk to me, then they're definitely looking into it after the fact. Because those are ways that, as we talked about earlier, you want to increase your bottom line significantly, take that cost sale out for some of those deals, right? For those referral fees. It's huge.

SPEAKER_00: 27:03

It's huge. What are the names of a couple of the uh examples of these services?

SPEAKER_01: 27:09

Yeah, yeah. So if you it depends on what you want to do. We've got some good ones that we partner with. Um, you know, seamless.ai. Seamless.ai is good if you have a, it's great if you have a built, um, if you already have a sales organization and you've got a BDR, SDR, you've got a couple salespeople, and maybe you you you were kind of grew up in the old school school way of you bought lists, right? You bought static lists from vendors, marketing vendors, marketing analytics, data research, and you imported those into your CRM. What Seamless does is it takes all that information and it searches, it's constantly searching the internet and it enriches that data. So if Cal was a CFO over here and he's in my CRM, and now I see that Cal is the CRO of the CFO over here, guess what? It's gonna it's gonna make that update, or it's at least gonna put that into an area where you can uh validate that if you want. If you want your SDR to validate that, they can. Um so and it also searches on intent. So if I like, you know, an example of how I might use it. I'm like, look, I'm looking for uh companies, small businesses in Massachusetts that might have searched on fractional sales help or fractional marketing or something like that. And it'll come back in in the last three days, six days, whatever the frame you want. It'll come back and show me all those businesses, and then it'll research who those. And if I'm interested in it, I'll go, yeah, I'm interested in all of these. So I just click everything and it'll bring in the contact information for people within those firms who are in the ICP or the buyer persona that I've predetermined. So that's I call that, or that they call that, or the market calls that, intent to buy. And that's really cool. And these these are solutions like if you're all like Seamless has a lot of small mid-sized business clients, but they also have some enterprise clients. I think there's a division in one of the major car manufacturers that uses them. So it's a very established and enterprise-wide solution. Um, we also work with uh a company uh local here, um, or some of the people are local here in the Boston area called KnowledgeNet. KnowledgeNet has done some really cool stuff with some of our customers, um, helping build out um what they call AI Engage, which which it's start, it started as LinkedIn, like having salespeople be able to leverage LinkedIn more. It's like if people use LinkedIn Navigator, the way I described it, it's like Navigator on steroids, and it's a little, it's a lot easier to use. And it'll go out and look at your network. If you're looking to target people in this business, it'll tell you the best path for an introduction to people in that business. And it'll also make automated intros. So maybe even today, a lot of the stuff that you and I get, Cal through LinkedIn could be, well, I know it's coming through AI bots, a lot of it is, but it could be coming through something like KnowledgeNet. And again, you can determine on whether you want that to be released, right? That note, you want that to be released, or you without you looking at it, or you can proofread it. But what KnowledgeNet is also doing is now they're kind of taking it to, I guess you could say it's more custom to the customer. They're taking it out and saying, oh, your business really doesn't want your buyers, probably aren't out on LinkedIn, right? They might be on Facebook, they might be on Instagram, they might be on Airbnb, wherever they might be, who knows where they are. And if it's a public-facing site or if it's a user group, if you're talking about Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, whatever, that doesn't require a login, they can get that information for you. You know, I think I described that earlier, what they were doing. They were going out and scoring, that was that was KnowledgeNet. They were going out and scoring what they saw on social media sites, right? And bringing that back to the to the customer to have them make it a decision on whether that was gonna be created as a warm lead or how they were gonna classify it based on scoring. That's all stuff that KnowledgeNet can do. Those are really cool. We we also work with um demand sense, and demand sense is more on the marketing side, and they're gonna help with campaigns, and they're gonna they're gonna work uh probably, they're gonna work maybe with another AI lead, lead gen tool, but they're gonna help you nurture those leads and help you coach, you know, and and help get your marketing coached up on how to process those and get those sort of entering the funnel and moving down the funnel.

SPEAKER_00: 31:59

Yeah, it's funny at the uh beginning of this conversation, Jim, you said uh if you're a business owner, you're kind of sitting back and you're just gonna kind of wait and see what best products emerge a year from now. I'm starting to get a little scared because my competitors are using all these products today. Yeah, yeah.

unknown: 32:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 32:18

And there's another one out there we use called WeLevel, which is similar to demand sets. I mean, I think I think what we're doing right now, Cal at Sales Acceleration is as I said earlier, we're vetting a lot of these. It can be mind-numbing to go out, right, you know, with a few people from an organization and and put together an AI tool committee, if they even do that, right? And try to figure out. And, you know, I always say use out use an outside consultant if that if you have the budget for it, and they can help you do that. Because they can understand what really is your pain points today and solve, help you solve that problem with the right solution now, build a little momentum, and then look for that second or third tool or fourth tool that you want to deploy. You know, get the hanging, like like you said, get the low-hanging fruit done, get it in there because you're gonna start to leverage that in a bunch of uh with in a bunch of other solutions. Like when we talk about coaching, like if you record, if you use like a Fireflies or whatever, that can all feed right into your coaching platform, right? And then it can summarize it and send something over to the um to the manager, uh, either on a weekly basis or a nightly basis or whatever, and say, hey, you know, Joe talked to Mike over at whatever you know, number one customer is, you know, on that opportunity. Here's a summary of what was discussed, and here's what we think were really good points that Joe made. And here's some kind of squishy areas where where we think he probably needs to improve. So you can be as proactive as you want as the sales manager and working with them to figure out all right, what could we have done better here? What's the message that we want to make sure that that Mike's getting in the c at the customer? How should we, is it, is it important enough that we should go rectify it right now? Do you want me to reach out to them? All of this, all of this data that is right at your fingertips now that I would have loved to have had, right, when I was coaching reps, especially you know, less experienced reps and working on it. Because how many times do sales managers sit there and they're on a one-on-one or a forecast call and you say, So talk to me, how was that call that you had yesterday or last week with them since the last time we spoke? Oh, it was great. What'd they ask for? Well, they asked for this. What'd you tell them? I told them this. Well, why didn't you also mention this and this and this, right? So you're doing it all reactive, you're doing it much, much more after the fact, and you can't be as proactive as you can be if you've you're working there in the trenches using coaching tools to help you with that.

SPEAKER_00: 35:04

Yeah, I'm in um service industry, you know, we do bookkeeping and accounting and CO and X services. So we talk to our clients a lot, and often it's via email. And I was just looking at a tool that would kind of parse tone and emotion out of email and try to identify clients who were unhappy based on the words they were using in email. Um, so it's fascinating all these different tools that are out there. Some of them yeah, and can it tell if people are being passive aggressive too?

SPEAKER_01: 35:35

Hopefully. Because I used to get a lot of those too. And some people would say I sent out some of those too. I I don't know. But yeah, I mean, the tone, email, I mean, one thing that we used to like to do, which which is a template that I suggested one customer deploys, and going back to the conversation about email templates with AI and your CRM or wherever, is called like a follow away letter, right? And a follow-way letter basically is like a nice breakup, right? It's sort of like, hey, I haven't heard from you. Maybe I misinterpreted what's what's going on in your business. I thought these were the issues, maybe I misread it. Um, you know, the rep can either send that or or the manager can either send that or somebody else in the organization, and that's all in a CRM. And you can just say, you know, you can be on a forecast review call with a rep and say, is it time for the following? It might be time for the following. Okay, who's gonna send it? Because what what I found that's just an example, but what that does a lot of times, right, what is that just sort of takes the tension out of, you know, no one likes to tell somebody they're not interested anymore in their solution or whatever. You know, they just want them to kind of go away. They, you know, they that's why they ghost them. And I think a lot of times, if you can just say, hey, it's okay. You know, just if you want to break up, let's break up. And you'll find a lot of times they'll come back and say, Hey, you know, thanks for reaching out. My boss has other priorities right now, but we're gonna we're gonna take this up next quarter or next year. Please reach out to me in six months if you haven't heard from me. That's gold right there. Yeah. It cuts through all the BS.

SPEAKER_00: 37:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 37:17

Yeah, just it cuts through everything and it just sort of deweaponizes any, you know, there's no tension. Everything's just like, hey, I'm glad you reached out. And those are things, or you could do an introductory email, leveraging AI, you know, where I I want you to meet, you know, hey, I want you to meet Cal, my boss. Um, he he's gonna basically interact with you and your management. Because I really coach teams up on you need to, you need to, you need to work your contacts down here, but let's make sure we have some coverage, right, as we work our way up the organization. If it's if it's a pretty tiered organization, um, those are all templates, right? That that a few clients have built out, you know, that we can help build out. Um those the productivity of AI, the productivity enhancements to AI are are endless. I mean, cow, it's just those are things that I would have spent when I was a rep, I probably spent three hours working on a really good follow letter or follow away email. I'd probably go back through my folders and email and try to find, you know, one that I really liked or one that got a good response back, or you know, one that I thought that had the response maybe I want to get back from this one. And I would tweak it, I would reread it, you know, and I'd go through it, then I'd send it to my boss, see what they thought, and then I'd send it. And you know, that was a long process. You know, that's just an example of what you can do to save time, time and effort. And, you know, the one thing I talk to people about, the other point I mentioned I always mention in AI conversations is you know, it's people, productivity, and profits. And those are the three things that can really enhance your that AI can really help enhance in your operations. Because the people are gonna feel less, if it's done right, the people are gonna feel more productive, less stressed. The whole organization is gonna be more productive. And ultimately, you know, it should it should work to increase your your bottom line, you know, the profit line.

SPEAKER_00: 39:20

Um speaking of uh profit, you know, what are you saying as a price point for some of these tools?

SPEAKER_01: 39:28

Yeah, um so if if you want I would say like let's take it I think if you wanted to get I'll talk about the high end first, if you want to get a totally customized solution, and when I say customize, I mean and you're an SMB, right? So you don't have a ton of users. I would say if you want and you address the areas that we're talking about here, so sort of it's end-to-end, you know, you know, 40, 50 grand a year all in, maybe that might be on the high end. If you if you reduce that, and and then maybe if you have five or eight users, so maybe you have fewer users, it depends on the solution and how they license it. They're all SaaS, they're all subscription-based. Um you can do it for less than a year commitment. A lot of companies uh will ask me, like, what's the commitment here? Most most solutions are gonna look for a four to six month commitment, and most are gonna look to be billed up front uh and paid up front. Now, but those are that's all negotiable. But what I will tell you, um, Cal, as we look through this, is the the things you can get something though as low, I mean, as low as I don't know, 800 a month. What's that? I mean, um, if it's only just you and a few users and 1200 a month, I I think I think the range is probably 10 grand to 50 or 60 grand. And the more custom you get with a solution and the more users you have, no matter what the solution is, I have you know, that number, that high-end number could go up. It could definitely go up. Um but as I talk to people in the example about the the referral partner um and the referral partner fees. I don't know how many, how much you're paying in referral partner fees, you know, if you could add um you know some larger deals that you were only getting from referral partners before through your new um warm lead generation through AI, isn't it worth it?

SPEAKER_00: 41:36

I mean if you could take a small team of BDRs and make them a lot more productive, you don't need to hire another BDR. Right.

SPEAKER_01: 41:43

And a lot of these, and that's a good point, a lot of these tools are used. If you look to like BDR outsource agencies, um, especially like a seamless that I mentioned before, they're used by a lot of these BDR outsourcing, right? They're they're using it. You know, people who are selling you their lead gen service, they've already migrated towards leveraging AI. Most of them have migrated towards leveraging some AI solutions to help in their business. So you might as well do that. I I don't think it's taking away in the SMB space. I don't think it's taken away from any any employment opportunities. I don't think, I mean, you always hear that, right? When people talk about AI, well, it's gonna replace jobs or it's gonna do whatever, whatever the industry is. I don't I haven't heard a lot about that. It may be it may be preventing backfilling, it may be delaying backfilling in positions, but I don't think it's driving like why in it in the SMB sales space, I don't think it's driving any sort of mass layoffs or anything like that. I you know, the only area I've heard that is is is back in the SDR space, but it was a you know 250, 300 million dollar company that took some of their VDRs, SDRs, and sort of redeployed them, and maybe a few of them were let go. But um, you know, I just don't think that that's we're there yet. You know, that's a concern, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 43:10

Yeah, I've been hearing how AI is going to put accountants and bookkeepers out of business for 10 years now. Hasn't happened yet, although I'm still nervous about it. But most of the ones that have gone out and raised tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of VC money uh have themselves gone out of business at this point.

SPEAKER_01: 43:26

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the only thing. I mean, uh software companies, right? And you you see how the stock market reacts recently to like Salesforce and Oracle and Workday and ServiceNow, all these big enterprise wide software companies, their multiples now are as cheap as they've ever been, but people are still scared because they think that AI is going to replace the software, right? And I don't really want to be the IT person that goes out and says, I'm gonna scrap my ServiceNow contract or my Salesforce kind of track, right? And I'm going to use AI and I'm going to build it all out myself. It almost feels Kyle like, you know, I'm a little older than you, but it almost feels like I'm going back into the custom code days, right? Where people were writing their own MRP system or GL system, you know, and then what happens when that person who wrote that retires, or God forbid something worse happens, right? I think I I don't think the market's going to go back there. I don't think it's going to go back there. Um I think that those organizations, the large software organizations, are going to be able to leverage, they already are. I mean, I know people in all those organizations. They're already using AI and enhancing the service that they provide the customer or the data that's coming to the customer. Customers don't want to, and they continue to provide more um services and solution value to those customers. Um the customers don't want to leave that. I mean, the big enterprise customers don't want to leave it. And I think that the um the people who get hurt in the software space are more the small, mid-sized software vendors that serve a niche, you know. And I think a lot of people will say, like, well, I think I can get AI to write that. You know, I think AI can write that for me. And that all that does is either cause them to lose the deal or delay the deal, right? It just causes the delay. And sometimes in this small, and I've been involved with small, mid-sized software companies, sometimes just delaying deals is can be really bad if you don't have a lot of cash in the bank. Um, so that's I think I think AI has more as much risk to technology some technology providers as it does to you know employees.

SPEAKER_00: 45:50

So, Jim, you've uh shared a lot of great information about AI, but maybe uh step back a bit and uh share with the audience kind of how you work with your clients these days and what are you know what you help them try to accomplish.

SPEAKER_01: 46:06

Sure. So what what I do right in a in a fractional sales leadership role is typically you know, people who engage with me or me to come in to help them fix a problem that they know that they have and they just don't know how to address it on the sales side. So let's forget about AI for a minute. Let's just talk about sales infrastructure, right? Do they have job descriptions, right? Do they have the right training for their salespeople? Do they have the right CRM account? Do they have a CRM, right? What's the right solution for them to address that? Um and then and then just evolving from that, do they have a sales playbook? Do they do they know? These are all just questions that maybe you or I, or maybe I, because I'm in a sales role, think that there should be no brainers. Do they know who their I what their ideal client profile is? If I asked this guy in this cubicle who it is that he calls on every day, what's that ICP? It's probably a lot different than what that person sitting next to him is gonna say. Um, so what I like to tell people is you need to be consistent, you need to be clear and consistent in your message across the organization, not just sales, when you're uh when you're facing um clients and prospects, so that everybody's singing from the same hymn to sound like an old man. Make sure that they're doing that and make sure that um everybody understands all the benefits that come from your solution to the customer. And what what we'll tip what I'll typically do is say, you know, in a two or three month engagement, say, here you go, um, you know, Mrs. Business Owner, you contracted with me to do this. I interviewed everybody in the process. I put these different pieces of infrastructure in play for you. Um, you know, here's the keys to the new car, go crazy. And they'll come back and say, typically they'll say, like, yeah, okay, but the reason I hired you is I I knew I had a problem, I didn't know how to fix it. I didn't know how to do any sort of stuff. So I need you to stick around and help me get make sure that this is deployed. Because no one wants to spend good money um and have it just sit there. We've all in the corporate world anyway, in the big corporate world, we've spent a lot of money on consultants, and then they give you a book, and the book sits on your desk, and you may or may not ever open it, right? Um, I like to say I'm not really a business consultant, I'm not a sales consultant. You know, I'm more of I like to get in and roll up my sleeve and really tinker with things and help people and um really get involved in the process. So, what that evolves into, to my point, is um fractional sales leadership. Maybe they're like, well, I need you one or two days a week to help my people. Maybe it's coaching the reps, you know, now with this new forecasting process we've put in place. Maybe now it's leveraging, you know, showing them how to make sure that they're using AI as much as they can throughout the sales process. Um and that's how I help businesses. And typically, you know, a fractional engagement can be anywhere from six months to you know a couple years. You know, it depends on what's going on in the business. And sometimes people, you know, people that work with me, you know, at sales acceleration, they may end up getting a job offer and may roll off and go work back to the corporate world and work full-time. It just depends on on the situation. That's not something I'm looking to do, you know. And in a lot of situations, I like the fact that I can come in, help people. I don't loiter. I don't want to loiter. I don't want them to spend a lot of money on me just waiting for the phone to ring back from them. I'll I'm very active. I'm working on projects, I don't, you know, on my own, and maybe just through email with them. And then I'm coming back and saying, here's what we talked about last week in the meeting, here's what I've done since then. Let's talk about what I did. And if you got any things that you want to tweak or you don't agree with, let's get it on the table. I'll tweak that, and then we'll move on to what we can do this week for our next deliverable. I don't want to, I don't want to loiter. I'm I'm not sitting around waiting for waiting for my next check from the from the customer to clear.

SPEAKER_00: 50:15

Yeah. So, Jim, uh, if folks want to reach out to you about AI empowerment specifically or you know, rational sales leadership, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_01: 50:25

You can reach me on LinkedIn. I mean, I can provide all that. Uh you can reach me on LinkedIn, you can reach me in my at email at just J Norton N-O-R-T-O-N at sales acceleration. No E before the X acceleration.com. Um, you know, you can text me. I mean, I can provide all that information. I don't really care. Um, you know, I've got a monthly newsletter, Cal, that's about to come out that I'm getting some help with from one of my partners. Um, so it's gonna have great data. Uh, if people want to sign up for that, you know, if they can hit me up on LinkedIn, I'll make sure they're on the list or send me an email. Uh, you know, a lot of it's gonna be focused on AI, obviously, like everybody's talking about AI, but you know, there's a lot of nuts, there'll be a lot of nuts and bolts around sales, sales management, and sales operations in there too.

SPEAKER_00: 51:16

Awesome. Yeah. Get me that information. We'll get it in the show notes so folks can get in touch with you. And I really appreciate, Jim, the time you spent digging into uh how SMBs are incorporating AI to make their sales uh functions more profitable.

SPEAKER_01: 51:33

It don't don't don't be bogged down and thinking it's overly complicated. Just focus on, as you said, right? Just get the low-hanging fruit. Sometimes you crawl, then you walk, then you run. And I think if you just stay focused on it, you can have a lot of success in deploying it.

SPEAKER_00: 51:49

Yeah, someone said to me, just start using AI for something every day and just make it a habit. And then it's easy to do.

SPEAKER_01: 51:57

Yeah, we just did one. We just did a um, my wife and I were just you know banging our heads against the wall because we're we're you know putting together a trip to Napa and Paso Road Blast, California, to see some wineries and and go to a family wedding, and we're like, you know, what where are all the wineries in Paso? Like what are what are what are the recommendations for all this? Like, and she's asking me, and I'm like, she's the wine, white person. I'm not, I'm like, I don't know, but I know who does. Let's ask ChatGPT. And I'm I'm a more I'm more uh in using it more frequently, much more frequently than she does. So I just sat she sat right next to me and I just started using it. And and the thing about chat, Cal, I tell everybody, or AI, is I took a course, online course, it's like 40 bucks a month. I had it for like five months called from Coursiva. Yep. And I did it about a year and a half ago. There's an app on your phone or the website, and it had seven AI tools, and it basically showed you how to use each one, and it's all about the prompts. The more, and you know that, right? The more specific you can be in the prompts, the better the information is that you get back. And because if you sit there, you're gonna keep typing in, right? You're gonna keep typing in, well, no, I want one in California, or no, I want one over here, or I want one that's open on Mondays. No, no, no, no, no. You just put it all into that, and you're gonna get you're gonna get it back in a lot of detail. Um, oh, the one thing I was gonna tell you when you talk about I was talking about AI policies that people need to think about, but no one thinks about is you got a website, right? Well, make it more it AI friendly, meaning AI search friendly. Um and you have to AI likes natural language, it likes a lot of FAQs, it likes the question and then the answer, it likes organization, it doesn't like a lot of fluff on the marketing side, because people will ask me, they'll say, Well, this is great, and this is how I'm gonna get information, but how do people get information on me with AI? And I'm like, you know, that's kind of out of my jurisdiction. I think if you've got a good whoever built your website, if they're still around, or I've got some names of good people in my network that you could talk to that could help you because they know, right, what AI that's the new thing. It's not now making sure you're up high on the Google rankings, you know, and Google brings back the search results. It's making sure that you've got the right terminology in your website that AI is gonna stop on, search on, make sure links aren't broken. How many websites have you gone to where oh this uh this is what I want? You click the link and it doesn't work. That freaks out at AI. I know that from talking to one of my technical colleagues. It freaks it out, freaks it out, and it doesn't, it won't even go back to that website anymore.

SPEAKER_00: 54:42

Who would have thought, right? Yes. Yeah. Well, awesome, Jim. Uh thanks so much for taking the time to share your insight with the audience. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 54:52

Yeah, I'll shoot you that information. You can share it in the show notes and I'll talk to you real soon.

SPEAKER_00: 54:57

All right. Sounds good. Thank you. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01: 55:00

Yep, bye.

SPEAKER_00: 55:01

Another episode in the books. Thank you so much for tuning in for show notes and more. Visit empoweringhealthy business.com. If you would like to have a one-on-one discussion with me or actively engage sports books to help with your business, you can do it to me at N L C A L S empoweringhealthy business.com. Or free to be a link to easy to find healthy business owners, sending us.