GTM After Hours

The Role of Technology in Modern Sales with Carlos Scott

• Season 1 • Episode 12

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In this conversation, Mark Bliss and Carlos Scott discuss the role of technology, specifically generative AI, in modern sales. They explore the benefits of tools like SalesLoft and Gong, which help sales reps stay on task and provide valuable insights. They also discuss the importance of curiosity and staying up-to-date with the latest tech trends. Carlos shares examples of how generative AI can be used to transcribe meetings, create personalized emails, and even simulate conversations with a custom AI CEO.

Takeaways

  • Sales tools like SalesLoft and Gong help sales reps stay on task and provide valuable insights.
  • Curiosity and staying up-to-date with the latest tech trends are important for sales professionals.
  • Generative AI can be used to transcribe meetings, create personalized emails, and simulate conversations.
  • Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize sales processes and provide value to customers.
  • Tools like generative AI can simplify content creation, landing pages, and personalized marketing campaigns. Apply AI in a thoughtful and strategic manner, focusing on areas of your life where you want to use it.
  • Role-play with AI tools to practice conversations and improve sales skills.
  • AI can be used to personalize outreach and create a better customer experience.
  • Having empathy for customers and understanding their problems is crucial in sales and leveraging AI effectively.

Sound Bites

"It's really hard to comprehend how the world existed before"
"Generative AI is gonna be as game changing as sales loft was back in the day"
"Now I can focus more on creating value for the customer"
"Try to identify what areas of your life you actually want to apply them in so that you can better start crafting your thinking around what you're trying for the thing to do, right?"
"Use those tools and role play with them. They provide an incredible amount of value. They're being taught on the same stuff that those people that you're trying to connect with, that's where they're learning from. So using that as a coach, it's tremendous value."
"I don't think people have realized how simple leveraging AI actually is nowadays."


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Hi, and welcome to the GTM After Hours podcast, a safe space for marketers, AEs, CSMs, and everyone else in the B2B SaaS Growth hamster wheel. So grab a comfy blanket, your emotional support animal, and your go -to beverage of choice, and join me for another exciting go -to -market conversation. All right, so today I am... very excited because I'm joined with a former colleague of mine, somebody I worked with at two different companies who I believe is the epitome of a modern seller. And so we're going to talk a lot about what being a modern seller in today's day and age means. We'll talk AI, we'll talk sales enablement, we'll talk CRM. We're going to go through all the all the fun stuff. But we're also going to talk Feelings and emotions, you know, we might even get into some burnout. It's gonna be a really good conversation Carlos you want to give kind of a short Overview like your career in a nutshell so our listeners can get to know you as well as I do Yeah, I appreciate it, Mark. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me on. So yeah, I've been in sales in some form or fashion for the last seven years or so. I started out as a sales development rep under your team and then kind of went through all the different steps and iterations of what that means, right? I managed the tech staff, I managed the team, I ended up becoming an individual contributor and that's ultimately what I'm doing today. one of my turns has been growing my family, right? So that kind of determined a lot of what I've been doing lately. So again, thanks for having me. This is exciting, like having these conversations. Well, and what I think was interesting, so you were always looking for that extra bit of knowledge or the extra tool or a feature that you can leverage that would make your job and the job of every other seller a little bit easier. And so you actually, you were one of the founders of the Sales Enablement Society, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. technology is fascinating to me. That's always kind of been one of my motivating hobbies, so to speak. Every summer it seems like I pick something up that is giving me busy, but that also, that applies to a lot of the tools that are available out there. It's, you know, ever since we started using SalesLoft, for instance, It was amazing to me that all of sudden you could craft a cadence that could keep you on task and get rid of some of the more tactical things that you have to do and kind of keeping you on task so that you're more effective about what you're doing. So if you're making phone calls, it keeps you in that mode, right? Like tons and tons of research is out there that sometimes when you get, when something comes in the way of you being in the state of flow, It can take you 15 minutes to get back into it. So that was one of those things that sales love solved for me. But as you go through those different iterations of what a modern seller is, there are different tools that are out there that are fascinating that, you know, it's really hard to comprehend how the world existed before, right? Because you're like, my God, this makes my life a thousand times easier. And now I have a direct pipeline into what marketing is doing so that we can have a good conversation internally. So it's been an interesting journey for sure. Yeah. And for our listeners, that was sales loft back when Cadence was the new product. And, you know, Carlos was leveraging the beta version of that, you know, fresh out the box in the industry. And so this the change, mean, modern sellers today can't live without an outreach or a sales loft or, you know, some variant of that. Like there's no way. to do your job today. But back then it was it was so new and exciting and unique. Yeah, I mean, I didn't know any different, right? I came in, that was essentially my first job coming out of college. And I mean, obviously I knew what email was, but when you're starting to send out 250 emails to a bunch of people that are all somewhat alike, but not exactly, and you wanted to start making meaningful conversations and meaningful touch points, sales laws provide a lot of capabilities that I didn't even know existed. And now that I've seen kind of what the other side of the coin is like, I'm like, man, I kind of had it made over there. It's interesting, know, we went through first and foremost the, you know, the invention of the CRM, you know, prior to, I mean, especially Salesforce, but, know, prior to that, you had a lot of homegrown CRMs and you had to learn a new tool with every new job, basically. And so Salesforce A was really powerful but be allowed for some commonality as sales reps moved and progressed into new roles. But so you had that iteration and then you had, know, what I like to consider like the the X the Mar tech and sales tech explosion where that's where all of all of the tool set comes into play, you know, smaller tools. I mean, You know, hell nowadays, it's like call recording is standard, you know, in, most tech stacks for, for sellers, you have some tool that's going to do call recording and you're going to get some summarization and that's going to be linked within your CRM. but you know, that was a part of that tech explosion. These things didn't exist. And so. life before it was so different than life after it. think now you're in this new third era where there's a before and after generative AI and how people are going to use that. I think it's going to be as game changing as sales loft was back in the day and that type of a product. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, probably even more so, right? Because now you have tools to create your emails. You have tools to find out if what is getting sent to you was generated by AI. You have tools to get very introspective ideas of what's going to resonate with your customers, right? Your intent -based tools. You have the signaling tools that are telling you who's looking about what information from what organizations, and they'll even go so far as to give you geographic data so that you know that you're prospecting the correct contact. It's a bit of a double -edged, right? Because, and you see this happening all the time, you can go all the way back to the days of facts, right? When facts first came on the scene and people would be sending these blind flyers to random facts numbers, and people would get them like, I didn't know I could get paper from this other company at this price or whatever the case may be. But what's interesting is that because it's such a transformative technology, you're having a lot of folks that are also using it for similar methodologies, meaning it's not just the sellers that are leveraging it to create their content, to create their communication, but it's also the people they're trying to reach out to, or they're trying to reach out to. to understand what's out there, right? So if you go into perplexity, now you can run a generative AI powered search that goes above and beyond whatever Google can do. It'll give you all the sourcing. And now that person is even more informed than they were before, right? It was always the case that these organizations had the ability to access resources that... Not everybody had access to like a Gardner report or a Forrester report or something of that nature. But now they have the ability to run all of these searches that will go into Reddit forums and we'll see here firsthand what the user experience is like for the tool that you're looking to sell into this organization. So it's very interesting, right? There's a lot of give and take as to what generative AIs is gonna do for different leaders, whether it's sales, marketing, and the people they're trying to sell to. So I know you're just naturally curious about all things tech and you you live on Reddit and really try to understand what people are saying and what's the next thing that's gonna help you do better in your job and life and career. But for the people that don't have that innate curiosity, what is the benefit of spending even 20 minutes a week? trying to understand what tech is available and out there and experimenting with, you know, different prompt methodologies and templates. Yeah, mean, they'll require almost like a thesis to answer that question fully. If only because obviously you have to strike a balance, right? You can't just always be looking for the next best tool. It also comes down to execution. But realistically, when you look at the field and you look at all the competition, everybody has access to the same tool sets. going to really drive change and what's gonna drive meaningful results is gonna be that dedicated effort. So my curiosity is more about how will it enable me to help my customers a lot more. So if we're on a meeting and I need to transcribe it, which is something that I would have done in the past, for instance, I could spend an hour plus going through the notes, taking all the key takeaways, taking away all the brief overview that I want to share with the CIO that I want to connect to, identifying the action items, identifying the dates, identifying the people that are present, the questions they're asking, and why they're asking those questions. Now, I can go to something like a cloud or a GPT and create a custom GPT to extract all of that for me. instead of me sitting there for two hours plus, I can input that file of the transcript. It'll give me all those items that I would have identified one on one. And now I can share a meaningful recap of the within minutes of leaving that meeting, which is something that I never had the ability to do. So now I can focus more on creating value for the customer and, you know, back to kind of what the modern salesperson is, that's really where one can differentiate themselves. Because realistically, a lot of these folks that you're selling into, the solution they're buying, they might buy what, five, six other times in their whole careers. Whereas you as the seller, in theory, you're doing this a lot, right? So the value that you're providing for that customer is you're guiding them through the process. and making sure that everybody's doing the thing that they said they were gonna do. So by me not spending all that extra time trying to extract all of these tactical items, now I can focus more specifically on what's gonna be most helpful for this prospective customer who's gonna be buying, making an investment of not only his time and resources, but he's making somewhat of a career out of making this decision. Yeah. something like, like Gong, if that's installed throughout your entire Salesforce, that does a lot of that work for you. gives you a nice headstart of what the call summaries are. You know, it takes that transcript in there, you know, but I think, I think we, we now are given access to some phenomenal tools just in our in our day to day life that are going to make even just productivity easier. know, analyzing through five different emails and having AI prioritize them for you for which one, which follow ups. mean, there's a, there's a lot that's absolutely doable now that just wasn't before. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, you have a lot more folks that are also interacting with the greater. So like part of my curiosity is that. You know, when you go into a platform like a Reddit or LinkedIn, right, you're going to have two different versions of two different people, essentially. The fact that Reddit is mostly anonymous, you usually get a lot more honest responses. And so if you come across some of sometimes it's hard to make the the connection between what's being asked and the reason why it's being asked. I think oftentimes that's kind of another one of those values that a salesperson can bring to the table is try to identify the reason of the question. They don't necessarily want to know about the feature they're asking about, but rather they want to know about what's preventing them or what that's preventing in their day -to-day life. But leveraging something like a Reddit, Right? You can pose similar questions and now you can use something like a generative AI to probe everything within Reddit. And I'll say, why would somebody who's worried about X, Y, and Z ask this other question and base it around the context of these three email communications that you have back to back? Right? So now you have the ability to create a lot more, more of a deep connection with what that question is coming from. so you can understand more about their internal processes. I love the additional context there. And then if you were asked three different questions, so they had maybe three objections that they sent your way, you could also ask for somebody in their role with their tenure, and they've asked these three questions, what should I expect are the next questions that they'll ask me? Yep. Now imagine if you had years and years of call recordings that you can base it off of, right? I think one of the biggest concerns with generative AI right now is that it's owned by somebody, right? Whether it's Microsoft, whether it's Amazon, whether it's whoever, Anthropic. But what if you had the ability to create a custom GPT that is not as expensive as some of the generalized models? And now you just create a sales assistant for your organization that leverages all those recordings that you've created because you were an early adopter of something like a gong or something like a different implementation of Salesforce where you actually have concise data on the emails that you're sending on open rates, on click through rates, on meetings, book rates, right? So now you can create a custom GPT that is only being fed by your organizational data, that it's gonna be much cheaper than what's available out there as a generalized model. So that's kind of what excites me a lot about what's been going on recently, because a lot of the early adopters are oftentimes kind of shunned or made fun of, if you will, because you jump on a bandwagon and you get all excited and people are like, yeah, I don't get it. Like wanna send a written letter or. But now that you, I mean, you can go through LinkedIn and see all of these case studies of people who were early adopters of a lot of this technology that all of a sudden have a wealth of data that they can create internal sales assistance for their staff that is optimizing their sales process like nothing ever has before. So it's been pretty fascinating to see. yeah. And you can, you can put in your own stats and ask it to coach you on where your problem areas are, you know, like where you, you might identify an area of weakness that might've taken six to 12 months for, you know, your manager to be able to identify and help you with, whereas, you know, you can feed that into AI pretty quickly. Plus the amount of time savings. I mean, personalization takes time recap emails from calls take time and I'm I'm not advocating that you just write up a really shitty like AI email and then send it but it can get you 70 % of the way there especially if you know how to do prompts which side note I always find that the people who shit on AI content Are the people who've never learned how to write a prompt, they just like type five words into it and that's that's that's what they got. And they're like, this is terrible. I don't know why anybody would use this. Whereas the actual pros who are researching this and understanding it, you know, you've got multi step prompts. And the output is so good, you know, whereas the output on on the five word guy is. you know, terrible, maybe only 10 % of the way there. The output for the person who's done the research and gotten the education to write the long and well thought out prompts, they're getting at 70 80 % of the way. And it just saves you so much time. Yeah, yeah, no, it's I mean, it's a fascinating world to be playing in. It's, you know, the whole concept of prompt engineering as a whole. It's you know, you can spend all day trying to craft a perfect prompt, but even that has been optimized, right? You can go to the GPT store and there are prompt masters. So you basically just say like, hey, help me write a prompt to create a 10 day content agenda. to cover the next quarter, right? And it'll create the prompt for you so that you can start outputting all of that stuff automatically. So you don't even have to be good at prompting. I think what's gonna set people apart is gonna be, is having the ability to modify the output to suit whatever medium you're trying to express in, right? And that's gonna be one of those skills that's gonna be gained through practice. because you're gonna start seeing the folks that are playing with it and they're like, wait a minute, right? Like different things kind of click. Where I'm seeing a big difference right now is that a lot of these generative AIs have the ability to really, so nobody really knows how they work necessarily, right? Like it's kind of a wonder that they work as well as they do, right? But the whole concept that they can predict what the theme of what you're trying to converse about, that also means that they can tell you what that person that you're trying to reach out to might think about the email that you're trying to send. So that's actually how I've been using a lot of my generative AI prompts to create more of an internal dialogue, right? So, One of the podcasts that I listened to and I'm sorry I'm blanking out on which one it was. They were basically getting ideas from the audience as to how they would use or how they're using gener AI and this is from a couple of months back. One of the ones that stuck out to me is this company. They they had a CEO that was great. However. When it came time to providing feedback, it was really hard for them to get actionable. steps. So what the marketing team did is they fed a custom GPT with writing from the CEO that dated back five years. So shareholder letters, internal communications, even just like little emails here and there. So they had like an AI CEO. So now when they put out a new idea for a marketing program, they will run it by that custom GPT to get immediate feedback from you know, what the CEO was gonna say and do and They would take some of that feedback and actually start directing their program to more suit that GPT so now when they went to the CEO they had a couple of iterations of what that conversation was gonna be like right, so now if I get an email from somebody and I have some context of our conversations in the back and I You know, I I craft my communication whatever it is that that I want to write And then I say, if you were this person, this fictitious person, what would you think about this email that I'm sending? And you're always gonna get the very proper response that although this is well crafted, if I were an IT director who cared about X, and Z, these would be my follow -up questions. And if you were able to address them, it would save me a lot of time back and forth, right? So now think about your CIOs that are getting on average 500 emails in a day. and all of a sudden you're getting an actionable email that is giving you a lot of the information that you think you might need. I mean, that's, that's shattering for somebody in this profession. and then two from a product perspective. you know, as, as new releases come out, as you have new features, as there's new elements where you need a pitch, you know, prior to that, you know, heavy reliance on product marketing, product marketing gives you your bullets, and then you decide how you're going to adopt those and finesse those for your, you know, relationships and for know, your sales style. Now, you can take that feature and get some AI help and support of how to best phrase that. Yeah. Especially, if you're targeting, like, you know, I don't even think you have to go in to the detail of creating the, you know, the fake CEO in there, but you could, you could load up here are the questions that they've asked and then really understand what would they ask about this new feature or, you know, even just getting simplified versions. You know, I, I do that a lot on the marketing side where I will take a probably 150 word paragraph and try to leverage AI to help me consistently simplify it and reduce the word countdown. And that's an incredibly great use of time, especially with, you know, how important, like LinkedIn and in mail is in the sales cycle right now, being able to reduce something to the size of an in -mail. Huge. Yeah, yeah, no, it's super fascinating. I think you know once everything starts getting connected, I think that's where you're going to start seeing a lot more stuff that's going to be kind of mind blowing, right? I think. Some of the early solutions out there where you can create like landing pages and create customized content. You know, think about how many resources went into creating something like that. You know in the past. Everything was justified because you're. You know, you're fulfilling six and seven figure orders of software and you can throw a bunch of resources, right? The account executives can reach out to marketing because sales enablement has told them that they have a content factory and these are the steps to follow and this is what you'll be able to put out, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now you can take a PDF, feed it into a tool that will put a presentation together for you. Now imagine you start extrapolating into all the different platforms that different companies are using. So like a content platform, right? Now in the past, one of the biggest barriers was that these content platforms, you would have to tag them. There was a lot of robotic process automation to try to figure out like, hey, this piece of content is great for early in the sales cycle. This piece of content is great for when you're about to sign. So now you can have AI categorize all of this. And not just that, but these platforms that have this data, they're able to leverage, hey, this person has opened up this email. They're kind of early in the cycle. However, this is the kind of content that they're interested about. So they can create a full tailored landing page, if you will, like their own personalized marketing campaign that is leveraging all of that data that they've had for years and create an actual customized information filled campaign that's going to be meaningful for them so that again, nobody wants to buy a new thing, right? They want to solve a problem and ultimately that's the salesperson's job is to help them solve that problem, right? To be able to identify how that's playing a role in the business, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So this is what's so fascinating about the tools that are out there is that it's making it easier for solutions to provide value. all the way down to the problem that is trying to be solved. So it's pretty interesting. listen to this, that's getting really excited and they're like, this is going to make my life so much easier. But they don't know where to start. What are the tips? What's the advice that you would give to that person who's looking to get started using and learning about generative AI in the sales cycle? I mean, would think, know, interact with the folks that are talking about it, because this stuff is changing every day. Try to identify what areas of your life you actually want to apply them in so that you can better start crafting your thinking around what you're trying for the thing to do, right? Because I think when people get excited about this technology, it's often because they don't want to do the hard work, but... Implementing something properly takes a lot of hard work. So it would be easy to start generating, you know, tons of emails that are very highly personalized to the point of being intrusive and start putting them into like a sales law and start sending out these hyper personalized emails. The problem is that everybody's doing the same thing, but rather try to frame it around what problem you're trying to help solve and start playing with the tools that are out there. mean, everything is free right now, basically. I pay for my subscriptions if only because they give me access to more prompting and a few other fun things. But realistically, you can go out there and start crafting a lot of different prompts that are gonna help you understand the technology, right? And you can even use it for that purpose. You can use it to learn about what generative AI can do. And then ultimately, I think a lot of the times when, especially in the world of sales, If you're making a lot of phone calls, if you're having a lot of conversations. You get a lot of those reps in right? You're getting a lot of practice with having these conversations. So for somebody that's early on in their career. Sometimes it's a bit intimidating to start having a conversation with a CIO with a a chief people officer with somebody that's been doing it for a long time. Use those tools and role play with them. They provide. an incredible amount of value. They're being taught on the same stuff that those people that you're trying to connect with, that's where they're learning from. So using that as a coach, it's tremendous value. Understanding what a person's gonna think about the thing that you're talking about ahead of time, it's huge. So playing around with generA .ai in such a way that it's like a second person and having the ability to role play is a huge value add. I don't think people have realized how simple leveraging AI actually is nowadays. think we just in general over complicate things, humans in general. And it's much simpler than you think that it is. I was talking to one of my clients the other day and You know, mentioned, you know, obviously I'm a big fan of music. Any fans of the show know that I love all things like classic rock and, I've got my vinyl and eight tracks and stuff behind me. But he was mentioning how far AI songwriting has come. And I didn't believe him. And so he bet me. If I took 20 minutes, what song would I be able to come up with? And I tell you, it was incredible. Like I wanted something that was like about Michigan summers. And I wanted to have a like seventies rock feel. I wanted it to, you know, talk about, know, putting an eight track in the, in the car and, you know, driving down the road to the beach, like. I wanted it to have those vibes. And it was funny because I listened to this, the first iteration. First of all, it's so good. Much better than I expected it to be the very first iteration it gave me. But it also sounded exactly like Bob Seeger. And I didn't say Bob Seeger, you know, I'm literally wearing a Bob Seeger shirt right now. For those who are listening only. I'm a big fan. I never use the words Bob Seeger, but the prompts, you know, the way what I was telling it to create a song about summertime in Michigan. It gave me Bob Seeger and you know, I'll tell you that what I came up with with 20 minutes was phenomenal. Like it was, it was good. I genuinely played it at the beach the other day. We had a lot of friends out. We're at the beach. And, you know, I just played it in the middle of other classic rock songs. And nobody knew the difference. And that's 20 minutes. So and with with no, no coding, no technical. It's like, yeah, give me a first verse that's this. OK, here's two variations. Which one do you like more? And then, OK, so What do we want to build into the chorus on? you're not having to do too much. Honestly, your knowledge of music and song structure is more important than your knowledge of AI. And so the barrier of entry is not, what do you know about AI? It's, what do you know about your profession? How are you as a seller? How do you personalize? How do you handle objections? because then you're gonna be able to leverage AI to its fullest. Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, that's oftentimes, back to the question of like, how do I even start? I think a lot about what some of my biggest time sucks that take me away from the customer. Because ultimately, the most value that I can provide, not only the customer, but also my organization, is to have more of those conversations with the customer. So whatever can help me get in front of them to get a meaning is usually how I leverage a lot of that technology. So when it comes to, you know, adding a lot of that social proof, you know, it, it becomes so easy now to be able to identify news articles that might be relevant, identify ideas that might be relevant and to help you tie into the overall project. Cause a lot of the times it's not even necessarily about the product that you're selling, but rather It's about showing them that you care about kind of what their world is all about. Because ultimately, you know, this this is also a job for them, right? And spending time identifying a good solution, although it's part of the job, is not their whole job, right? They have all the things they want to do and they have all the things that they care about. So now you can start crafting a better customer experience by showing them that that you do care. and sharing things that are relevant and interesting for them. you bring these use cases or maybe a feature you've identified of a tool that they were already using. How do you bring these things into the greater sales org? Because I know you're really big on if it works for you, you're willing to pass that into the larger org and help and assist the team to be able to maximize. the tool set that they have in place. Yeah, mean, you know, it's still baffling, but not every organization uses something like a sales automation platform, like a HubSpot or a SalesLoft or an outreach. But the overall concept can be kind of achieved in a kind of a backwards way. So to me, a lot of the minutiae that goes into creating good strategy for outreach, for prospecting, for instance. for sales law is the fact that it automatically puts things in a, almost like in a calendar fashion for you, right? Because now you're not thinking just about the fact that you're connecting with them the third time you'll reach out, but you're actually thinking about the fact that they might not connect with you for 17 touches. And I think that's what the industry average is now, right? It takes something like 17 touches until they actually interact with you as a person. taking a step back, Identifying how you can help the individuals create that mentality is something that can be a good use case for AI. Because now every single person is able to create a cadence of their own. Because you can craft a prop that says, hey, help me create a cadence comprised of phone calls, emails, voicemails, text messages, videos, et cetera. Whatever is at your disposal. Once you create that, you can put it into a calendar format that you can put into your own Outlook calendar so that you know what you're doing that specific day. You can also use it to help you craft a lot of those emails and make sure that those emails are actually tied into one holistic idea. I think a lot of times when, especially when you're in a campaign -based outreach, say you're reaching out to somebody that went to a trade show, if there's an overall strategy for the trade show or an overall theme for the trade show, you can start creating a lot of those emails that give you 70 % of the way there with that theme that you're trying to connect with so that the outstanding 30 % you can personalize that person. Like, hey, you either stopped at the booth or you didn't, you signed up for the webinar or you didn't, you attended, you were there half the time, et cetera, et cetera, et But now you can rely on the content that was only created for that specific campaign. collaborate with marketing more wholeheartedly to identify the key takeaways of what people were actually talking about, right? Thinking about the folks that were actually talking face to face to attendees of that conference. And you don't have to go out into your content management platform to surface the best ideas from everything that you've created for the history of time. You can actually just use one white paper and say, write seven emails. that are based around this theme, that are based on this white paper for attendees of this conference, right? So now your communication is crisp, it's relevant, it's to the point, and you don't have to spend the time that you would have in the past. And not only that, it also puts you into the mindset that reaching out to somebody who just went to a trade show also gives you a... an understanding that these people are getting a lot of phone calls, a lot of emails. And if you can get to the point of value of your solution quicker, those are the people that they're actually gonna be talking to, right? So if you're competing with 15 other MarTech tools, the person that reaches out to them with the most concise information about the trade show that they went for, those are the people that are gonna have a better chance of building rapport with the sales rep. need to take a picture of you at the booth. Like this is the thing I cannot, for the life of me, I don't understand why, why sellers aren't doing this, but you know, if you can remind them of who you are and what your booth looked like, they are more likely to reply because they're getting a hundred different emails of you dropped by our booth. A lot of those people are lying and they never actually dropped by their booth. They just got a show list or they've inferred through intent data that you were at that show. So if you can, you know, have that photo or whatever of you at the booth, or maybe you link to a LinkedIn post that you did where you were walking around the show floor and, and then ended at your booth. I know there's a lot of cool ways to go after it, but if you're using the AI to help you. with the 70 % then that gives you so much more time to really truly personalize and give them memorable recaps that allow them to want to reply to you. Amen. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, everybody's reaching out with with basically the same template, right? So adding that little bit of personalization, I mean, to this day, one of the most successful like trade show campaigns that I can remember was actually the T shirts, right? Brightly colored T shirts with memorable characters. They created a lot more conversations than somebody who gets a pen or notebook or whatever, right? Like it's a relatively low investment. And it's memorable enough that you can add that personalization touch to it. And yeah, it's funny. to you want to work your ways into both your prospect and your marketing team's hearts? When you're at that conference, go to some of the sessions that are most relevant to your ICP or at least go to go to the keynote, right? And use the recorder app on your phone. Take the transcript of what you recorded. pop it into GPT and then have AI summarize it. And what are the key points? What are the takeaways? And then that becomes a really cool email for you. Maybe you took a picture of a slide or you took a picture of the presenter up on the stage. And then you're like, you know, it really resonated with me when they said blah, blah, blah, which is simply a prompt asking for the most memorable quotes from the session. Put that in there and then it gives a nice memorable interaction. They know you were actually at the conference. They know you're not bullshitting them and you're providing some value because you've recapped that and you can take that transcript. Now you give that to your friends and marketing and they can craft a blog post for you with the image that you took and that now becomes a really great thing that you can pass along in your outbound. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I'm just thinking about all those email campaigns or multi -touch campaigns, cadences or whatever Outreach's version is. You can put a whole sleuth of content just based on that one recording alone, right? And that is valuable, right? Like maybe... maybe whoever you're reaching out to didn't have a chance to actually go to that particular presentation, but they really wanted to, right? And now you're providing that extra bit of value so that they can focus more on that conversation that you're trying to have with them. at times when the booth is not open or if you're on a break from the booth because somebody else is covering you go to two or three sessions and Record them and put the transcripts in you're gonna see yeah, you're gonna able to see common themes between them You're going to have some LinkedIn posts that you can have generated based off of those themes. Hey, I just just attended John Doe session on such and such. And I really found it valuable when he talked about this, this and this. Now you're a part of the industry. You're not selling into it. And that is so critical. Right. I think when I think modern seller, it's not only about the the technology, I think it's it's about being willing to engage in dialogue with your prospects, not just, you know, phoning in an se. You know, I think you have to understand who they are and the problems that they deal with on a day to day basis and be able to have a technical discussion. Or at least fake it. Sure. No, and I mean people can see through that, right? Like realistically you really do want to create some sort of a personal connection with. With your prospects or customers, because realistically, you know, like I said before, it's ultimately this is the job. They have lives outside of this job or they have external motivators. So being able to connect on a deeper level does. really help you provide more value, right? Like realistically, a modern seller is more of a shepherd of sorts, right? You're no longer the gatekeeper of information. What you can help them do is track down a lot of the stuff that they don't do on a daily basis, that is not necessarily in their daily job description. So if you're telling them that they need to go to security to get your security review, and capturing when that's gonna take place, who's actually going to be involved, and then send them reminders if you have good enough of a relationship where you can send them text messages and say like, hey, by the way, let me know when you get out of your meeting with your security ops. Let me know what the feedback is so that I can connect with so and so. it just, makes their day to day a lot easier. If you can basically pre -schedule. what that process is gonna look like for them without them having to actually put in the work and do all the admin work. That's a lot of the value that a modern seller will provide. And that also gives you the ability to connect on deeper level, right? Like having those conversations of saying like, you're just going through a migration into a new platform. How's that going? goes, man, it's been awful. My three year old is... you know, came down with something because it's the first week back to school and you know how it goes. We're going to be all sick for the next, for the next couple of weeks. I'm like, man, I totally get it. Right. It starts this downward spiral. I go, well, let me know how it can help. I can reach out to whoever if procurement needs to get involved. Like that's something that where you can bring value and then you know how it goes when, when you're running a no sleep, like a lot of these little tasks just kind of go into the back burner. And you don't mean to do it, right? You're not doing it on purpose. It just kind of happens. But if you're trying to bring across the table a seven figure deal, you want to be able to also control a lot of those little things that may fall off, that may slip to the back burner. And so you're providing the value by establishing that process and then keeping everybody kind of honest around what that's going to be and then creating that deeper connection so that you can also know Mm -hmm. love that. So you're your curiosity is kind of a superpower Throwing that out there, but what what have you? What have you learned along the way? As far as channeling it goes like yeah I suppose it's probably a blessing and a curse right because if you get ultra curious about something you might burn three hours in the day Going down that rabbit hole, right? Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I mean, for me, it gives me a good way to relate because everything is so interconnected. So when you're coming across different stories and when you're coming across different pain points, you'll come across a lot of these. When I started selling for Dell, my day -to -day involved talking about data center stuff and networking stuff and storage stuff, right? One of my hobbies has been like photography. And I know it's a pain to deal with photos because they're a very specific type of data. So I cobbled together a little network at that storage. So when I'm talking to somebody who has petabytes of data, I'm like, man, this is nothing like what I have at home. I'm super proud that I have 18 terabytes of data so that I can manage my photography stack. But you get a lot of the sense that you're at least talking the same language, right? You're dealing with similar problems and you're self -deprecating to the point that, you know, my problems are nothing like yours, but I kind of know what you're talking about. So it gives you a better avenue to actually relate to what some of these folks are talking about, right? Like I got into woodworking, right? The ability to actually put a, like two pieces together that are not the same sort of wood. have to be conscious of how that wood is going to react to different communities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I brought this up in a conversation because they kind of had an approach of cobbling together a lot of different pieces of technology together. And the company had grown over the years to the point where a lot of these pieces They were never meant to fit together, but somehow they did. And now that's the problem that they have to deal with. Right. So how do you control the humidity so that these pieces of wood start behaving at least somewhat similarly? Right. So putting a lot of those stories kind of in, in context is what has helped me. Right. So being curious and understanding more of that deeper conversation has been, I think one of the biggest difference makers for me in my career. I always end these episodes with kind of the same prompt. I want you to have the last word and I want you to be able to give advice to rookie SDR Carlos coming into his career. Like, what would you tell him? What would your advice be for those folks today to help maybe alleviate some of the the challenges that you've gone through in your career. Yeah. man, that's tough. You know, it's it's a hard question because the the advice that I would give myself is not necessarily the advice that I would give everybody. I think keeping my curiosity in check has always been something that I've struggled with. So if if I were to kind of base it around that, I would just say focus on mastering one skill at a time. and being more conscientious about the time that you spend doing other adjacent things, right? Managing a technology stack, for instance, it's interesting, it's relevant, but realistically, for instance, as an SDR, mastering the art of having that quick conversation and providing value quickly on a phone call or an introductory meeting, whatever the case, that's a lot more interesting and relevant for your role, right? So become really good at your job and what you're trying to do so that you do have a little bit of extra leeway as to what you're doing with extracurriculars, whether that's mastering the art of creating a good cadence or mastering the art of extracting information from an article or if you want to become more technical, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You have that capability if you're with a good organization. to learn more about the thing that makes a difference with your prospects. understanding what the core tenant of that job is is paramount to success, right? So now as an account executive, the concept is not even that far apart than what the SDR job is, meaning you're supposed to be able to convey value quickly But as an account executive, that also means along the buying journey, you need to be able to provide value into that relationship and you have to do that quickly as well. So I think a lot of those skills kind of build upon one another. And then having empathy for the customer, right? Everybody always wants to tell their own story, but the same goes to the person on the other side. So having the empathy to connect with folks and the problems that they're dealing with and truly empathize with them, I think will give anybody an edge in understanding what's gonna be the next purchase that they make, the next value add that they make to their company and organization.