← Bald Ambition
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- [00:02]
A
Hello and welcome to the Bald Ambition podcast. I'm your still very bald host, Mookie Spitz, and the one with tons of ambition today is Mr. Jack Sainy. Welcome to the podcast.
- [00:18]
B
Thanks. Thanks for having me. By the way, if you go to my LinkedIn profile, this is all new, this hair. My LinkedIn profile is very, very short hairdo as well. So I. This is all this, this hair on top of my head is about seven, eight months old. So.
- [00:31]
A
Nice, nice.
- [00:32]
B
I'm in the bald ambition.
- [00:33]
A
Yeah.
- [00:33]
B
Amen.
- [00:33]
A
Yeah, you got that ambition too. You got a little crop top. If you're just listening on Spotify, Apple podcasts, you know, I'll put a. You, you'll be in a little thumbnail with your crop top. And if you're on YouTube, wave, say hi.
- [00:46]
B
Yeah, just enough. I just enough hair to be dangerous.
- [00:49]
A
So I'm still jelly though. You are the co founder and chief revenue officer of Front Race.
- [00:59]
B
Yes, sir.
- [01:00]
A
You're using AI, plugging it into sales. And I can't wait to hear about your value prop. Everyone's talking about AI, AI, AI. It's genuinely a revolution, whether we like it or not. A lot of changes when I. When I think sales, I think numbers. Show me the money. If you're a sales manager, if you're a selling person, it's all about the books. So data and sales have been entwined since the caveman. Tell me, tell our audience what's new now with AI and what are you doing with AI to help it out a little bit, Grease the wheels.
- [01:45]
B
What a lead in. What a lead in. I, I guess as perspective, I'd step back just a little bit and say, hey, if you in this especially, forget the tech side, I'm not, I'm not a tech. So is AI revolutionizing the tech world? Unquestionably. What it's doing in tech world today is unprecedented. It's amazing. You know, my perspective is really on the business, commercial side. And I would just say this perspective, we started or the businesses started about 40 years ago to put this tech stack in place on the commercial side. Right? CRMs and, and then call intelligence and pipeline management and, and rev Ops and now AI. And what's crazy, you don't take my opinion for it. If you put in Google or, or ChatGPT or Club, whatever and ask, are we any better today at forecasting and developing our sales teams than we were 40 years ago? The numbers, they're either the same or they're actually worse. And so that to me is such a interesting Paradigm. And so that's what we try to lean into. It's like we spent all 40 years CRM at all these systems, millions and millions of dollars, all these dashboards and KPIs and we're no better today. Public companies miss today as much or more as they did 30, 40 years ago. It's shocking that we have all this data now, but we're not much better at delivering what we say we're going to deliver. And, and, and how could that be? And so I would just one, one real world thing is somebody's led big teams. We, we've all had the moment where our dashboard, we hit all the numbers, we hit all, everything. We look great and we miss, we miss for the month of the quarter and then we had the month where we miss everything and we're 30% over, right? And then inevitably the board or the CEO walks in your office, he's like, what happened? Or she walks, you know what happened. And you're like, I don't. You start juggling, you know, I don't know, you know, you start making stuff up. And so to me that's an amazing paradigm, amazing construct that we built so much money, so much time, so much in our tech stack and are honestly no better today at forecasting. So with that as a, is that as a premise? Whether you believe it or not, again, Google it.
- [03:50]
A
Wall street believes it because the SaaS companies have getting their ass kicked by AI. So sales all the way from Salesforce to Docusign.
- [04:00]
B
Amen.
- [04:00]
A
Yeah, they're tank because the agentic technology holds the promise of replacing the butts and chairs with autonomous agents. And to your point, a lot of these services suck. Not to be discouraging about, about Oracle, but there's tons of tech, the stack is thick and the practical application and impact to business, specifically sales team, has been uneven, has been kind of broken.
- [04:34]
B
It's so true. Listen. And if anyone's sitting there listening, they're like, I don't believe that or it's not true. Look, we've all had this. If you've run a sales team, you're VP of sales, CRO Director of sales. We've all had this experience, okay? You have two reps, okay? Their numbers look pretty similar. Their metrics, calls, outreach, emails, pipeline look very similar. One is out selling the other 3x, right? Susan is selling 3x. Bob, right. And so when that happens on every sales team in America, again, the CEO or board comes in and goes, can't we just, why can't we? What's Susan doing? And again, head of sales makes something up. Well, Susan just good at closing. She's a better demoer. She has a better network. We make something that's totally fake, but that happens. Today. We're no better. Today, every sales team, 80, 20, 20% of your people are crushing it. The other 80, you're on some kind of pit plan or developmental plan or some kind of how can I get them to all be Susan? And we don't know. It is. It's shocking. It's not that that happens, but the fact that we spent so much time and energy. Salesforce and HubSpot have us look at all the metrics and monitor all their stuff. And if you just look at it enough, you'll end the sidebar to that. It's like the. In sports, it's the Michael Jordan complex. Like, Michael Jordan is amazing, but you can't teach what he did, right? He's like, I was just the best player or LeBron wherever, you know. And so they can't teach it. So Susan, she's crushing it. You have her come into your sales team, do a training, and she can't explain it, right? She's like, I just do what's natural. I just. It's who I am. Right? And so the team doesn't get any better. And so that's ultimately the paradigm they
- [06:19]
A
tend to promote Susan. So, Right.
- [06:21]
B
She may not be a good manager. Right.
- [06:24]
A
She usually sucks as a manager. Because all the qualities that make Susan a great salesperson, hyper competitiveness, relentless drive, those are exactly the opposite qualities you want from a manager. You want empathy, you want team building, they're not going to do that. They're not going to teach. That's because they're out there busy kicking ass.
- [06:46]
B
I can't tell you how many times I've had the best person over 25 years try to do a training. And it's no offense to those people. They're amazing with it. They're the worst trainers. Can you just share. Share what you're doing on LinkedIn or share what you're doing to close or. And then they. They put together a little PowerPoint or, you know, whatever they do on Google Slides. It's awful. And the team. The team actually leads worse, right? They're like, I just got dumber. I'm going to try something that's out of the box, that I'm not good at, that that person happens to be very good at. And so net. Net, that's really what we lean into at front. Rage. Trying to Shine a light on what's been this black hole of sales for 40, 40 plus years, which, like, hey, what, what makes Susan so great? And that's, that's really what we're focused on.
- [07:30]
A
It's an employee development kind of HR angle on AI. And I've talked to other folks who do, who do similar kind of stuff, and the angle on that is there's tons of data. You know, another pundit called it data exhaust.
- [07:46]
B
I saw that. I saw that. One of your other shows.
- [07:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, we got a ton of data. And it, and it all gets vaporized. It's off into the ether. And if you have an opportunity to measure it, analyze it, and AI at its core is machine learning and deep learning.
- [08:04]
B
You got it. You got it 100%. That. So, so a little commercial on front race. I totally agree that you are 100 bucks after the show. Like what, what we do for companies, which is the AI I think everyone wants today. Like, like AI sidebar. We're in the first days of AI, just like aol, if you remember aol, like AOL was great. But if you were still in AOL today, you were wildly.
- [08:28]
A
You've got mail. Now it's. Now it's. You've got a bottom.
- [08:33]
B
Right? Totally. Right. So we're in the earliest, earliest days. So committing to an AI anything is, can be challenging. Right. And so what we do for companies is we say, continue doing what you're doing. Don't stop. We put a little layer on top of their tech stack which connects all the data, normalizes, as you said. And then we take AI and non AI analytics and start to tell the company, as you said, they already have a bunch of data. But the challenge is for years we haven't been able to measure, I believe the difference between the person selling 3x and the person selling 1x. It's 20 little things. It's not the big things. Everybody knows the big things. Everybody knows their pricing, the demo, the FAQs. Everyone already knows that. It's 20 little things that happen that historically we have not been able to measure. And so I'll give you some examples. Those things would be like, everyone has a sales manual. Here's our 22 steps. Like, this is how we sell. The reality is your best people typically move that all around. They're doing it backwards. They're not doing it the way whatever's in your sales manual, they're not following the sales manual typically. So what is the order that actually works? What's the order that actually creates deals Then it's not only the order of things, but how much time between those activities. It's not that you send an email. We've all had this experience. You connect with somebody on LinkedIn and like six minutes later, they're pitching you. Right. That makes you feel a certain. It makes you. It feels yucky. And so it's. It's what's done, the timing. Between it. As examples, there is the measuring, the quality of how it's done, which could be subjective, but we tie that to did they win? There is. When you bring up competition, how you bring up competition. When you brought. When you first start talking about pricing, did you move pricing? All of those variables add up to the difference between why somebody is selling 3x over somebody else. And historically, as you mentioned, we've had a ton of data. We haven't had the ability before I to measure those at a such a voluminous way. That's needed. And so that's what Frontrace does. We literally connect your data, start to provide standardization to. An Apple is an Apple is an Apple across all your systems. And then we use some analytics to give you new metrics that actually tie to success and tell you what the best next step is for each one of the deals pending.
- [10:55]
A
How do you deal with personalization?
- [10:57]
B
Oh, I love it. That's perfect.
- [10:59]
A
Norm MacDonald. Norm MacDonald made people laugh, but so does Bill burr. And Norm MacDonald had that deadpan humor. And Bill Burr is the Boston guy who's just going nuts on you.
- [11:13]
B
Amen.
- [11:14]
A
You mentioned sequencing, so you could, you could find an optimal sequence hypothetically, but it might not work for Norm MacDonald because he's Bill Burr.
- [11:26]
B
But that's the whole thing. Listen, that's the whole thing. In sales, we hire a CRO VP of sales. We say, figure it out.
- [11:34]
A
Get a system together.
- [11:35]
B
Totally go to Sandler, go to Miller hyman. Here's our 22 steps. Here's our 28 step, whatever it is.
- [11:41]
A
Objection. Handler.
- [11:43]
B
X, Y. Oh, you are preaching. So we say, hey, let's. Here's our process. Meanwhile, as you just said, every sales rep has different strengths. No doubt. And every prospect is different. They're in different verticals, they're of different sizes, they have different money, they have different number of licenses or, or different problems. And then we're like, jam these 22 steps into every single thing, and if you don't, you're fired or we're going to put you on a pip. And it's like, oh, no, that's again for 40 years. Why we're struggling. And so with that said, what's amazing about AI, it starts to enable you to do this personal, highly personal. Hey, Bob is great on the front end. Let's make sure he is mir that. But hey, when we get the demo, he might need some help. And when we close, definitely need help. Mary Horrible on the front end. Great demoer. So it lets you give everybody the things they're great at and then starting to develop where they're not and. Or get them resources where they're not. So again, we can have the best next step for each opportunity instead of saying, Everybody, do these 22 steps and if it doesn't work for you, you're fine.
- [12:55]
A
Exactly. And it also recognizes the individuality of the salesperson. If you're in sales for a nanosecond, you realize that Those stars, the 3X people, are all kind of doing their own thing.
- [13:11]
B
They are.
- [13:12]
A
Some of them might be like, hey, how you doing? They're instantly engaging and fun. You can have a beer with anybody and it's one big party all the time.
- [13:22]
B
Amen.
- [13:22]
A
But you've got salespeople. 3x salespeople are like, hey, how you doing?
- [13:28]
B
Yep.
- [13:29]
A
Can you tell me a little bit about your business? I'm really, I'm really curious about it that they're, they're both doing it their way.
- [13:38]
B
I had, listen, I had a team and our last company, I had a team of over 100 people and that we'd work in teams and then each team. So let's say we had 20 to 30 teams. They all had a miniature culture. And so we hired. It was aligning new people on the right team because as you just said, I had cutthroat New Yorkers. I had sweet Mary Poppins. I had the analytical person, I had the dry person, I had the party person, I had the social media person. And so success begets success if you align the right people. And so I, God bless, that is what we are leaning into. It'd be like, stop taking your standardized process and demanding that everyone on your team does it. And it works for every client because nothing could be farther from the truth. And so now that we have some ability to figure out what really works and share that and measure it, that's in my mind, the future of how we'll do sales much more productively.
- [14:36]
A
I see where this is going. This is rapid fire implementation too. You don't spend six months putting together a sales methodology necessarily because you're immersed in data and you're also analyzing each individual salesperson On a team.
- [14:55]
B
Yeah. You know, what happens is we think the process should be a certain way. Everyone's biased. Right. If you hire a new team lead or promote somebody, as you said, they come in with their biases. They're like, here's what we, here's what I like, I like, I like gong and I like to really analyze the calls and, or somebody else loves pipeline management. And what's great about humbly, what I, what we do, what Frontrace does, we, we don't care about anyone's opinion or your systems. We give you the facts of what actually is happening and you can do it that way you want. It's, it's like if you're a sports fan, the Moneyball, that movie, Moneyball and baseball that analyzes all the stats, it's telling you factually, hey, here are the things that look like winning, here are the activities that drive winning. Cause it all looks a certain way, typically within some, some bandwidth. And by the way, most people don't want to do this. Here's what losing, here's what we do when we lose. Here's some consistent traits because most people lose a deal and they get irritated and they throw it away and they're like, whatever, I don't want to talk about it. But if companies have, especially if they have some significant legacy data, we're able to analyze it. Hey, well, when you lose, here's what happens. But by the way, when you win, here's what happens. And inevitably, when we provide our first analytical report for a company, it's like they're shocked about two or three great things. They're like, oh my gosh, we need to share this with everybody. And then two or three things, they inevitably are bad and they inevitably go, that's not true. And you're like, yeah, that's true. That's, that's what's happening. Right? And so it's, it's amazing that a lot of people don't really understand their data. In fact, Larry Ellison just Kabiso, if you saw, he said, pick, pick whatever LLM you want. They're all using the same open public data, right? They're all using the same public data. The magic is in your data. The magic is in your private data. If you have legacy data of wins and losses, what activities your team has done, that's where the magic is. You need to get that data, start to mine it, because that, the answers are there. AI will help provide analytics and give you some accretive type stuff. But the magic is in your data. Not in Claude writing some generic marketing one pager for your company. That's just an aggregation of all your competitors.
- [17:10]
A
This is where big SaaS, companies like Salesforce are now getting their ass kicked too. It's not just redundancy with the agentic technology, but it's an antiquated approach to sales optimization for all the reasons that you described.
- [17:27]
B
I am shocked by the way. I love Salesforce and HubSpot. They're, they're. We work, sure, yeah, they do a lot of amazing things. But ultimately internally, you're like, again, where we started the show is, is it helping us win? More like, is it helping us? The forecast is X. We. It's shocking almost. You know, most big companies have one of those too. And you're like, we still don't get to the. We still don't reliably get to the number. Nori does your team. And no one asks, no one asks why or how. It's like you. But if you say you don't have a CRM, you're almost derelict of duty. Right? If you, you're all like, you don't have a CRM, you're fine.
- [18:07]
A
There's a strong parallel with healthcare. So I've been a digital strategist on the healthcare side, the digital outside, for quite some time. And the term that's been tossed around for decades is the quantified self. Okay? And we've got 37 trillion cells on average in a human body.
- [18:27]
B
This is good.
- [18:27]
A
And we don't. We know nothing, right? We are. They're going to look back. Star Trek tricorder years ahead, they're going to look back and we're like cavemen wearing pelts at where we're at right now.
- [18:39]
B
Amen.
- [18:40]
A
Standing. The human body and the big deficiency is data driven too, because the human body is just so complicated. It's so personal. And if, if only we could measure all of this and analyze it, we could not only manage but prevent disease, we could do all these amazing things. And you're doing something similar for a salesperson.
- [19:05]
B
Did you see, look, by the way, I commented what you said. Did you see, Elon said a couple weeks ago about aging? You know, I think he was overseas and he was talking about, hey, same with 37 million cells. And like he said, we're going to solve aging because all those cells age at the same time. He goes, your arm's not, your arm's not 90 and your face is 22. He goes, There's a trigger. He's like, we're going to figure it out. And we're going to address aging. And you're like, you know, like, so. It's so good. It's.
- [19:30]
A
What Elon is saying is I'm addressing aging because not only do I want to be the richest man on the planet, but the oldest one, too.
- [19:38]
B
Yep. I want to be alive when we get out to Saturn or something.
- [19:42]
A
I want to be the guy on Mars, so. But love him or hate him, Elon's always leading the charge.
- [19:49]
B
He's interesting to listen to. Boy, that guy. He is. There's a lot going on there.
- [19:54]
A
So spectrumy people who are changing the world for. For better or for ill. He's. He's in that. Sam Altman. Zuckerberg. Yeah.
- [20:03]
B
Amen. They're up. We were talking about before the show. There's a couple. Yeah, there's a couple.
- [20:09]
A
Hashtag awkward, but hashtag genius. It's almost like you can't have one without the other.
- [20:14]
B
It is. It's like in the entertainment field, the best singers, we all know, we're all weirdos. You know, a lot of people can sing, but if you want to become famous, you got to do crazy tour around the world, live on nothing, you know? And so a lot of people can. Can sing or rap, but you got to have the other kind of weirdo part of you. To travel and do all that stuff,
- [20:32]
A
you need an agent or a manager, you know, domesticating that stuff.
- [20:36]
B
Yeah. Amen. That's so true.
- [20:38]
A
Going back to the quantified self, you are quantifying the sales force.
- [20:43]
B
Yeah.
- [20:44]
A
And analyzed.
- [20:45]
B
But you know, what's happening before COVID if you had. If you had a sales team of 20 and you hired a good person. So just let's assume they're good. Forget you had a bad hire. They're good. You would say to them, hey, go follow my top three people. Right. Go shadow Bob, Mike, and Susan. And from each one of them, pick a couple of things. Right. You'd be like, get three things from John, Mike, get three things from Susan. And they would develop and evolve. And watching them, well, we can't do that anymore. Right. Every. Most people work from home. You can't say, go sit in Bob's house. You can't. You know, you can't. So we are really at a deficit of trying to. How do you develop people if you hire a good person today? What. How do you share best of. You know, you hire a good person. Like, how do I. How do I crush it? And the best I've seen is Fisher. Like, we'll go listen to his like this. Go listen to their web call. It's very, very challenging in today's day and age to become great. And so as you just said, what we're trying to do for companies is when you hire a good person, you can now share with them. Hey, here's what greatness looks like inside this company. Here are the 22 things. Here's the order of them. Here is some examples of those. You will add your flavor to it. So we will cut as AI grows. We all know this. If you have ChatGPT or Claude at your house, you know it grows as gets to know you. It starts to send you stuff.
- [22:10]
A
It starts to blow smoke up your ass.
- [22:12]
B
Oh, it always does that though. It always does that. Jack, this is the best you are.
- [22:17]
A
You are such a genius. You know what? This, this is a funny side note. I tend to be cynical and sarcastic.
- [22:24]
B
Me too. Me too.
- [22:25]
A
So my, my Chatty bro. That's my name for him. Chatty bro. I even had him as a guest on my podcast. You know, he's. He did pretty well. So my chatty bro is now throwing it back and throwing it down because that's his way of kissing my ass because he knows that that's what I like. So he's throwing me shade and giving me attitude. Isn't that two things?
- [22:48]
B
Two things. I'll say these ones. One's my soapbox one. It's so funny. If you push back, it then always tells you, you're right, you're right, we should do that. You know, he kind of never says, you're an idiot. And then, and then I little soapbox. Quick sidebar. We're going to. That's going to be an issue. People are speaking into Chat, CBT or Claude, whatever your system of choice is. That data is all being kept in mind. We think we're having a little private conversation. But it has everything about you. Like, no doubt that data is going to get mined five years from now.
- [23:21]
A
It already is. It already. I mean, they need the cap ex on this industry is absolutely insane. They're going to need to generate some revenue here now. Clot. You know, Anthropic is doing the best right now. They went from a 1 billion estimate to 20. They did 20x this year of what they forecasted they're doing pretty well. But even at that rate, they say they might be profitable in 2027, 2028.
- [23:51]
B
Well, you. It's like, it's like LinkedIn. You know, LinkedIn had us all put our resumes for years free. You're like, how's this gonna work? Everybody you know, and. And now it's the lead gen. They knew. You know, they knew years ago. I remember when LinkedIn came out, you're like, it's free to put my resume up there. What? Why is that? And then they knew the end game.
- [24:09]
A
Well, that's why Microsoft bought them because they needed a co hold in that. But LinkedIn, I'm gonna get on my soapbox. LinkedIn sucks for the same reason that Salesforce are even worse. It's terrible. It's the worst. It's the worst social media platform. Not only is everyone all boasty like I just, I want to make an announcement that I just became senior vice president of the. Don't you.
- [24:36]
B
If you go into LinkedIn, if you, if you use LinkedIn as your social media feed, you swear AI is going to end the world by this summer, everybody. And I'm just going to tell you Frontline deal with hundreds of companies every month. AI on the business side, we are so in our infancy. It is. There are so few companies that are using AI at scale on the business side. Again, the tech side, it is crushing it what it's doing on tech side. But for business operations, sales, client service retention, it is so minimal. They're like fire your whole SDR team and hire agents. Not a chance. Not a chance. At worst, not. I don't care how much you train it. I don't care how much you think you not.
- [25:22]
A
It's. It's shambolic fraud for. It's like a glorified call it out.
- [25:28]
B
It is. It's like I think one of your podcasts. It's like glorified spell check. You know, I mean it'll create verbiage, document it's but real world. Interact with somebody and. And do something strategic. No.
- [25:40]
A
Provide immediate or near term benefit in terms of. Of optimizing a salesforce or even optimizing remedial functions without that kind of human engagement oversight. It's just, it's in its infancy and people tend to gravitate from one extreme to another, which is I need to either install this little widget or I need to have Claude Meathos run my company.
- [26:09]
B
Well, I'll just say the thing right now is this Claude cowork, right. I'm gonna take everything I'm just going to put in Claude. It's going to connect all my stuff and again, I'm living it every day. I'm not a technologist living it every day. Claude God bless what it's doing. It's amazing the way you can connect data and run basic analysis. It is great. It's amazing stuff. But if you try to do.
- [26:31]
A
It's science fiction. It really is.
- [26:32]
B
But if you try to do any complex analysis, it does not work and you will lose your job. I promise you. If you put your company data in quad cowork and think, oh, I'm gonna. I'm gonna analyze my reps over the last quarter pipeline and metrics, I promise you with 100%. Certainly that will break. It'll. But it will tell you factually because it makes stuff up. It will. It will fill the screen. You will make a series of bad decisions that are based totally fake and you'll get fired because it can't do the joins. It. It can't do the analysis. It. One to one, who was my top rep last month? What? You know, how many calls. That's perfect. You get to the third or fourth level of multi, you want to do any strategy. It doesn't work. And it. It's not meant to work. It's. It's, it's. It's the data joins and how the code. It's very challenging. That's what we try to deliver for people. We. We built some technology that puts flags and hard flags in the sand so you can do someone, you can do real analysis. But without that, folks are always like, I'll just go put it in Claude and co work. You're like, all right, well, get your resume together because that's gonna not come out right. And no, no chance. By the way, forget if you get front race or not, but no chance that comes out well. So please don't do that. It's not ready.
- [27:48]
A
So we're halfway through this sales pod and you've sold me on it. All right, we've got the value prop, we've got the pain points, we've got the implicator.
- [27:59]
B
I'm gonna send you the contract. Ludy, it was signed up.
- [28:01]
A
Send me the contract now. How does this work? So, all right, Jack, you've sold front race in. I've got, let's say, a Salesforce of 100 salespeople, and I'm using Salesforce or one of the other CRMs. You know my stack from being familiar with all the different ones. Now, you mentioned you're an application, so how does this work? I'm assuming that there's a discovery process, so you learn about my people and my legacy processes, and then there's got to be a Tech integration and there needs to be some kind of UI or new dashboard or what exactly the hell do I get?
- [28:47]
B
Amen. So totally fair. So last part first it's a web interface. So you log on a webpage, it's there. So ideally you get up each day, you log into front race it'll tell you what to do today. That's the net conclusion. But to your full question, no regarding all of the. I don't, I don't want to know anything about. I don't, there's no, you know, in the old consulting world limit to a discovery phase. Let me meet Matthew Raza. So let's have a, let's have a team meeting. Let's get all your hitters in the room. We're going to spend six months deploying none of that. That's again some of the beauty of today's technology. So when we onboard a client we have, we spent a couple of years developing and and a lot of AI companies have become this APIs now these. How do you connect the data? Way easier than when you and I were younger. If somebody said it to you be like that's a six month effort. So the first thing we do is connect the data for companies. So a layer that goes on top piece of technology connects all the data that's actually in today's world. Not that hard to be honest. A lot of APIs out there. But the magic in the connecting the data. The next step is you have to normalize the data. An Apple in your Ford systems has to be an Apple. It has to be an Apple in your CRM, an Apple in your pricing and shockingly it's not for most companies. An Apple is in one system and
- [30:01]
A
aren't interoperability problem, data inconsistency.
- [30:06]
B
Right. So the two things we do for companies to start are connect the data, normalize it and so that takes about three or four days. So we'll, we'll get the data in. So again this project sometimes years ago would be like that's a three year project. So within a day or two of the APIs we'll start to normalize the data for companies. Then the second piece behind the scenes before they would log on, we apply some analytics. So there's two parts of our analytics that are really unique. There's a bunch but two that are stand out. I mentioned one earlier. One is a metric engine. So we have a series of metrics that are non traditional. We're not trying to give your company more metric but it starts to measure all the Things I mentioned earlier, all these little nuances of what's the order of things, what's the space of things? When do you mention pricing? When you mentioned competitor, how did we get the lead? Did you have a relationship with them prior? What's the professionalism score? Your tonality, was it a quality endeavor? By the way, all those things measured by did you win the deal? Because who cares what your opinion is or my opinion is, did we win the deal? And if we won the deal in some way, shape or form, it worked. So we start to measure on that. So we give folks this set of metrics. The metric engine starts to not only create these metrics, but measure them in time.
- [31:18]
A
Okay, hold on. Time out for a second. So I'm assuming that there's a delta that you're noticing right away between all the data that's on whatever platform they're using. You could API, do a plugin and slurp it up into your application, but frankly, they're not even measuring some of the things that are important to measure.
- [31:39]
B
Right, so that's a great question. So think about, as an analogy, think about if you were going to go to your calendar, I think we all have a calendar. And you see what your day is, right? You see, oh, here are my meetings every week. And there's empty spots in it, right? For when you're free or you don't have a meeting scheduled. That's how the data is. Almost every company, no one has perfect data, right? But what we start to do when we do a baseline for a company, we say, here's the data elements you have, here's the things we can speak into based upon all the data you have. Inevitably, as you just said, there's going to be three or four things they have no data on. We don't have data on texting, we don't have data on social media, we don't have data on, I don't know, after hours stuff they do on their home, whatever. So then what's great, we can just say to a company, we're unbiased. Do you want to dive into those things? Do you, do you care about knowing what, how somebody's generating leads on social media or do you not care? Right? So if they care, they say, yeah, we've got to see the text because that's part of the relationship thing. Bob sends 92 texts. Well, there's a myriad of texting programs, right? So then, okay, then let's start to monitor the text and we start to creatively fill in the open Space on someone's calendar. Does that make sense? So then they can decide because they can say, you know what? I don't care. I don't, I don't want to track the, the, the text. I don't care. You're like, oh, okay, like that's on you. Do you want to track the proposal? They sent a proposal day one, it changed 47 times. Now we're down to half the original value. Do you care about that? No. Okay, well, okay, I would want it.
- [33:16]
A
I don't. You push back, though, because more, more data is more knowledge and more knowledge, more power.
- [33:25]
B
We do. But, but what I also want to do to companies is start to give them a baseline and so they could see the holes they have. Right. And then, and then you decide that that's what's humbly. I think that's one of the great things we do. We don't tell people to go get some. Hey, what do you have today? Let's look at it. Does it answer the questions you care about? Let's strategically look at the holes you have in your data. Everybody has holes. And you, you can decide as a corporate management team, do we want to invest in this thing? Instead of buying a new AI tool that's not going to tell you anything because it's analyzing stupid wrong data. Why don't we buy a texting engine? Or why don't we buy some people don't track any of their calls. Why don't we buy a call system that can digitally. You can see your calls. Or let's do a transcription service of your web meetings. Like, let's, let's start to fill out the data. But if they don't want to, God bless, you know, so, but we, we, we get the data they have, normalize it, and then start to give them, hey, here is what we believe. Are the things really impacting your deals? Good and bad. Good and bad. Right. And then the second part of that is you said, hey, are we going to do this, Figure out what our processes. Well, no, because that's what's great about the tech today. I will. When it has all the elements, it'll start to do that on its own. I don't have to ask. Especially if that legacy data, they have data over the last two or three years. It'll tell you in a week. Here's what your sales process is. I don't, I don't need your process flowchart.
- [34:49]
A
You're measuring every touch point.
- [34:51]
B
Totally. I don't, I don't need, you know, I don't need you to tell me.
- [34:54]
A
It implicitly determines what the process and structure is that underlies it totally.
- [34:59]
B
And, and what happens in that meeting. Always the head of sales, their mind explodes because they have their process flow diagram of 22 boxes, a couple diamonds, yes or no, Right? And inevitably, every single time, whatever number of boxes they have, it's twice as many. The real world is, it's always twice as many boxes. It's steps, proposals, document, sense interactions, contacts, questions. It's twice every single company, it's twice. So to connect some dots, why the AI agents for the past year have really failed a lot of companies. Is that you, you, you have a process, you think you know, you put an agent in there, you tell the agent what to do. It's only doing half of what really results in success. So guess what? When it only does half of what drives success, it doesn't work. Then you're pissed, right? Because you're like, we didn't age. It, it didn't work. Our sales went down. And you're like, I know. Because you only told it to do this. And your best people are doing twice that.
- [36:00]
A
Yeah. And you don't know what you don't know.
- [36:03]
B
Totally. Amen. Amen. So those are, that's how we go through the process. It's AI to me. Is it going to end the world? I don't know. But the one thing it will do is cause us to think different. So that thing of, hey, do I have to ask you what your process is or what you, what are you really doing? I don't care. Don't tell us anything. That's, it's like a magic show. Let it, let us have your data. We'll tell you what's actually happening versus what you think is happening. And so that typically is a really fun process to go through with companies that are open minded. Some companies get irritated, but it's like, hey, here's what's really happening factually, regardless of what your opinion is or what Miller Hyman told you or what Sandler, you know, you, whatever, here's what's, here's
- [36:48]
A
what's actually happening out of the box. And by out of the box, I mean you don't need any extra information. You're looking under the hood. And it's not from a process point of view. There's no PowerPoint slides here. It's just the raw touchpoint data. You get sales frequency, you get call duration, you get all the usual metrics.
- [37:11]
B
Yes.
- [37:12]
A
Okay. Is that sufficient as baseline to determine why Susan is 3x over Bob.
- [37:20]
B
Oh, my God. You know, I've been doing this a lot. No one's asking that question. That's amazing, right? No, the short answer is no. You know, from a. Can we replicate Susan perfectly? But what does happen immediately? It's quite obvious Susan's process is so different from the norm. And then you start to go, what, what are those empty holes? What? Like Susan's deals have. There's holes here. What, what's happening? And then when you talk to her, she's like, oh, yeah, I'm on social media, LinkedIn and da, da, da. Or hey, yeah, see my phone, look, here's my 87 text. Or Hey, I don't. I have my own private little kind of proposal app. And I analyze, you know, inevitably there's some tools there. And you're like, okay, well, she just told me, do we going to do that? So, so typically, day one, we get over 50% of like enlightenment. People are like, oh, it is totally different than what we think it is. And then for us, we really enjoy the back and forth of like, helping companies work through. Is it worth tracking the social media piece? Is it worth seeing the video?
- [38:33]
A
There's an implicit gap analysis that's taking place all the time off baseline. And then the client, him or herself, comes the realization, well, you know, we've just got our standard metrics. We see, we see some differences with Susan and duh, we know she's kicking ass, but, but wow, look, there's, there's some gaps in her touch points which were clearly missing. And these front race guys are making recommendations on how we could boost measuring more touch points, measuring them better, adding dimensionality to Susan in ways we never thought about before.
- [39:16]
B
She's typically doing the process different than the 22 steps. Right? The CRO swears this is our steps. And inevitably, you know, that she mentioned the eclectic people. It's opposite never.
- [39:27]
A
I'm, I'm in my experience, I'm sure in yours, there's no 22 step sales superstar. They don't exist.
- [39:35]
B
Well, she does it, she does it almost opposite. You know, it's like she'll. Sometimes she sends the pricing meeting too. And you know, the executive staff's like, what? What? Yeah, yeah, second meeting before she even demos, here's the price. And they're like, what? What? That? No, they don't get priced. So after the demo, she's like, no, no, no. Here, my initial email, you know, my, my second introductory email, I tell them the range of pricing based on your Size organization is between 42 and $67,000. So she already has a flag in the sand that is instrumental to her close where most of the reps don't mention clothes. So after the demo or after they, you know, they did a proof of concept. And so those things are shocking. Again, the difference between, in my world, 3x person and 1x person, it's 20 little things. It's 20 little things. And starting to day one, we provide 10. And then you're like, can we get to 11 and 12 and 13 and start to fill that gap? What is it? But it's not the big things, it's 20 little things and starting to shine a light on those so we can replicate. So, so my, my, on my team, my C players are B players. My B players can be A players. We're never, we're probably never replicating, Susan, in totality.
- [40:46]
A
Yeah. It's just optimizing. If you could get it up just a few basis points, the ROI of implementing your service is already covered.
- [40:55]
B
When you, when you do the math, I'm not a math major, but when you increase the top, we all know this in a funnel, when you increase the top 20%, the net in the bottom is 3x. I mean, it's, it's because you have such a bigger thing. It's. It's amazing. And so really trying to provide that statistically, not guesswork, not. You hired a magic manager. We hired more superstars. We had more. It's starting to put some science to something that we, we punted on for 40 years. For 40 years, we've been punting on and being like, hey, let's start to look at this black hole of sales and put some numbers to it.
- [41:28]
A
Do some of those magical personal soft skills come through in the raw matrix? Yes. And by that, I mean I was on. I was on a double date recently. And the other partner's partner, she's a top. She's a 5x Susan. Okay? She sells for pharma. And the doctors love her, right? She's got the adhd. She's like, she's got her phone, she's texting, she's doing all this. And when you look at her, she's like the Tasmanian devil's wife. Know she's involved, but she pours it on. The doctors, they love her, they know her. She goes to ad boards, she does the clinical stuff. And when you ask her about the drug, she's very knowledgeable, but she'll talk about it for about 20 seconds, and then she's off on something else. And I guarantee you she's the same way with the doctors. But the doctors feel that they're covered. They feel that she's there for them and they, they adore her. They adore her attention and all that stuff. So these are all soft skills. It's got nothing to do with her knowing progression free survival of the cancer drug. See what I'm getting at?
- [42:48]
B
I am. Let's. We have a whole in our metric engine, hundreds of these quality. So kind of subjective measurements. And so I'll give you one, one example, real world example. One of the CROs was adamant. He felt like his sales reps would talk over their clients. He was in the, in the. He'd watch the replay of the video conference and be like, you gotta let them talk and blah blah, blah. And so we had this patient score. So when at the time the prospect stopped talking, when did you interact again? So it was his, it was his thing. Eight months a day. Though completely inconsequential. He, he was so adamant. It was totally inconsequential for all. It did not. That did not matter. But we have a litany of those. And what you're talking about, I just, I want, I want to be, I want to be really clear with your audience because there's two things here that are, I think really, really important. I'm. We're not selling some pithy pixie dust. Measure quality or measure professionalism or measure tonality. What, what we're talking about is AI can start to put scores to those things. Okay? But the magic, it's like nps. If you've done an NPS survey, it's not what the score is of your company because it's the score. How does it move over time? Right? That magic of NPS is not when you do your NPS and national promoters or is it national promoter score, net promoter score. Like whatever it is they tell you, who cares what your first one is? You just want to keep getting better. Right? And because it's people that love you versus detractors and blah blah, blah, same thing. The software starts to measure their tonality, which is different for everybody. And then it starts to measure did you win the deal? Right? And so we have a myriad of those where it starts to give you a score and then I haven't talked anything about it yet, but the second part, the metric engine is what we do. But then we have this thing called time machine that can track it over time because believe it or not, shocking. Salesforce today. Love salesforce God bless you.
- [44:47]
A
We keep saying that so we don't build up bad Salesforce karma, but it's.
- [44:53]
B
It doesn't exist. So Salesforce, today, if you had a proposal and it changed over six months, you can't go back and see how it changed, when it changed, and what variables change. You can't. It does not exist. If you have a proposal they created. And what we rely on today, we tell the sales rep to change it. Change. We like, hey, you tell us when it's going to close. What's the probability it's going to close? Change the value of it. And then we're pissed when the pipeline sucks. And you're like, that's done. What? They're so biased. And so we have this time machine that not only starts to measure these metrics, but then tracks them over time. And you can start to see, is it not. Not is. Is Mookies better than Jack. It's Mookie versus Mookie. Hey, here's how you did it last time.
- [45:36]
A
It gets rid of this standardization, right? It's rid of erroneous variable analysis, such as talking over someone. That woman I just described, the 5x pharma sales dynamo. She's literally yelling at everybody. Sometimes can't even get a word in. And I guarantee you she's the same way with her doctors. But. But it works. Get to what works. Don't obsess over something that's otherwise irrelevant because you think it's going to impact the sales negatively.
- [46:11]
B
Right? And we mess people up all the time. Listen, we. We see it in companies where they put a new system in place, right? We just bought Clarity or. We bought Gong, and we got to follow the or. We have a new process. And you're like. We see it in the data. We're like, hey, what happened February of 2025, that's when we bought blah, blah, blah. And you're like, yeah, since then, everything sucks. Yeah, I mean, like, you got here and you added that system, you forced everyone to use it, and everything went down 32. Like, why are you doing that? What? Like, well, Bob really liked that system, and he thought we really needed to. And you're like, I know, but every time someone uses a system, your close rate goes down. It's so, again, no opinion, no personal opinion. It's all the stats. It's. It's. What are the. You started the show with it. What do the numbers say? And the more data you have, especially legacy data, and going forward, it'll get smarter and smarter and smarter. Your LLM and what we do get smarter each time is we start to measure it. Measure metrics and then track it over time. It's amazing the impact that has on companies.
- [47:15]
A
How does it impact the salesperson? Because I want to dovetail off of what you just said, which is really great for employee empowerment, salesperson empowerment. Because the old school is we got the 22 steps, buddy. And you're talking over people, so shut the hell up and listen more. And when you're from 18 to 19, we notice that you drop the ball and they're like what the actual F. Does that have anything to do with what I'm trying to do here?
- [47:46]
B
Amen.
- [47:47]
A
You're reading between the lines. You're also passive, not active. You're watching with data and you're taking it in. And then you're able to provide recommendations that make sense for the individual seller.
- [48:03]
B
That's. That's it. Each in our app for every you bring up an opportunity. It ranks the probability it's going to close statistically not somebody's opinion the date we think it's going to close. What is it in critical or non critical staging. Like is it we need to get something right now. And it starts to tell you what should be done and then it does a myriad of other really cool things. It'll tell you exact message to send what you should say, why it's important, how to move the price. A lot of things. But for a rep for each thing you work on it it'll literally be like you might think this but here's statistically where it is what it's worth.
- [48:39]
A
Tell me more about your UI as you've been describing more or less the user interface for the sales manager which adds this other stuff. I'm curious also about the UI for the sales person.
- [48:53]
B
The same. It's the same web interface. Everybody lives. It's you log in the front race. You have a login and it. It literally discriminates between typically a management personnel. If you're a CRO here are exactly what you think management level. Hey, your. Your delay in closing. There's a big gap. Deals have been. It used to be 67 days. It's now 92. Hey. Two deals are scheduled to close today. But both the people closing are not good at closing. Right at executive level it tells you hottest action items constantly. But the same interface when you log in if you're a sales rep it'll give you your deals and your stuff and start to share it with you. Be like hey today here are the signals for what you should do today to have the biggest impact on your day. And if you want to go look at all your deals that are pending here, per deal is what you should do with each deal, if anything, per today. And so it's. It is. Humbly, it is. I, again, I. It's the thing that people want from AI. Can you make me smarter? I'm not purposely screwing up my deals, but that's what people do. They send the wrong thing, they give the wrong pricing point, they send another text and they shouldn't. They should literally do another action item. And so we really help people maximize.
- [50:08]
A
How granular is that experience? So if you've. If you're a sales rep and you've got the rep plugin for Salesforce, you've got your own dash and it gets really nitty gritty. It's like number of calls. It's got a CRM built in too. Right. So it's like I sent the email on April 20th at 8:20 and I did or didn't get a response within two days. And then you got the little yellow and red going. You need to follow up. And it's basically you're a spreadsheet jockey.
- [50:43]
B
Right? But. But you know what's funny? As you asked that question, which is a very fair question, lovingly. It's so funny when we, when I'm dealing with a CRO, said something like that. I got all this in tails for you're like, okay, well then, well then do you hit your goal every quarter or how. How. Yeah, how is. How is this. And inevitably the result's not good. But because here's the issue. One, you're missing some metrics. But two, you and I could look at the exact same data on a dashboard and take totally different actions. Right? You would look at a set of numbers and go, oh, you know, from that I would then call them and reduce the price and I might say, oh no, don't call them at all.
- [51:21]
A
That's what I'm getting at. So does front race replace in a sense, their CRM experience that they've had before you, does it augmented?
- [51:32]
B
Right. We. We don't. We're not a CRM.
- [51:35]
A
What is. What is the actual experience?
- [51:39]
B
Sure.
- [51:39]
A
You coming on board like.
- [51:41]
B
Yep. No, totally fair. We do not. Again, we do not have a kept replacing any of your stuff as we sit here today. What is that? You know, like Salesforce just. I think this. Oh, the sun just came out my house.
- [51:54]
A
I know you're getting a tan there.
- [51:56]
B
My lord.
- [51:57]
A
For listeners on Spotify and Apple Jack Jack in the last few minutes started glowing. And you know what that is? It's like the movies. He's. He's nearing the clothes.
- [52:08]
B
No, no. God, God, I must be saying. I must say something good. Like, God's like, all right, now's the time. Spotlight on. Yeah, so, so funny. But we want to help them get through the deal and provide them that data. But you saw Salesforce this week announced they have no ui. They're just going to have an API, right? They're going to, they're going to lose their front end and start to just let agents plug into it. Right? So that would have been shocking.
- [52:34]
A
That's because they shit the bed on the stock market, right, that.
- [52:38]
B
That would have been shocking though 2 years ago if you said no UI. So could. Are we moving to a time, I believe, where the traditional CRM and these, these sales enablement tools are not the answer? I think we are. I think it's evident.
- [52:54]
A
40 years in a clunky disaster.
- [52:57]
B
I don't want to say failure, but it's. We have more data.
- [53:01]
A
Are. Are. Are bad. It's a pain in the ass to use and it's kind of no better.
- [53:06]
B
But, but if it was, but if it was better, if we hit the number, if we delivered on goal, if 100% of the people on your team or 90% were getting to goal, you'd be like, it's so worth it. Let's record all the calls. Let's. Let's analyze all this stuff. Let's have metric, let's have a dashboard.
- [53:20]
A
Every single person, both worlds.
- [53:22]
B
Now it is amen. We are data crushing our people. And none of it, humbly, none of it is having a difference on the bottom line. Not. There's not a. I've met a CRO yet. Like some companies are hitting goal. God bless. But it's not because of their data elements. It's when they miss goal, they have no idea why. And it's. I believe it's for these things. It's. It's the difference between good and great or 20 or 30 little things we've historically not been able to measure. You mentioned some of them being qualitative. Definitely. Some of them being in the weeds. Type of timing and logistics items. Again, we haven't been able to measure at a macro. And it was so overwhelming. The amount of data which AI makes,
- [54:03]
A
like level of grit, like how determined are they? And that might seem kind of obvious, but how do we measure grit?
- [54:15]
B
I've never had that question. That's a really interesting.
- [54:17]
A
That to me is the foundation.
- [54:19]
B
I'm going back, look, I'm going back to the tech team and be like, oh, add.
- [54:23]
A
Add grit, relentless determination. Are you 0 to 10 and. And it's a virtual certainty that your 3x people are all 8 and above in terms for the grid.
- [54:35]
B
Right. Tenacity.
- [54:36]
A
That's it.
- [54:37]
B
You know, I was thinking of too this will get me in trouble. But I think too, there's something about, especially in the face to face sales world, appearance look and feel. You're, you know. Right. So be able to take some of those things and start to quantify them. But that, but that those are real things. We can keep trying to sidestep those, but those have those. You can send two people in, forget their. Whether they're pretty or not or whatever, but one looks slightly disheveled, one looks together, you know, based upon whatever you require that they wear. And those are all real things that affect the outcome that we've never measured that. Have you ever seen a Salesforce dashboard on. On their appearance or look and feel
- [55:15]
A
or even like attention getting magnetism going Back to. No. McDonald versus Bill Burr. All right. They're the opposites. You know, McDonald's like, you know, I was taking a walk and the dog took a dump, you know, and then Bill Burr is literally screaming at you at the top of his lungs.
- [55:35]
B
Yeah.
- [55:36]
A
They both have magnetic personalities, but in their own way.
- [55:41]
B
Yep.
- [55:41]
A
So how do you reduce that to a single key variable which is I can't take my eyes off this person and I want to keep talking to them, I want to keep listening to them. Right.
- [55:52]
B
Amen.
- [55:52]
A
That's the kind of essential metric that makes the difference.
- [55:56]
B
Amen. And just in all honesty, when you talk about 20 different things making a difference, will we ever have all 20? Will you be able to. Maybe with robots. If Elon gets us the robots with A.I. maybe we're, you know, match all 20. But in, in the world of humans, the goal is to let. Can we get to 15 out of 20, you know what I mean? And they'll still be five. You'd be like, it is magnetism. It's their appearance. There could be some things.
- [56:19]
A
There's one other element I want to toss at you, which I think is very significant. And salespeople make this mistake, especially sales managers. There's this idea that you need to be awesome for everyone all the time. And if you're not, you suck. So for example, my 5x pharma gal, okay. She's ADHD. And she's running around. They love her. But by they, I'm talking about 80, 85% of those doctors. And I'll put equal money to 10 to 15% cringe when she walks.
- [56:49]
B
Every time I see her face, they're
- [56:50]
A
like, no, not her again.
- [56:52]
B
Not again.
- [56:54]
A
And she's a 5 xer. So that's a critical decision that has to be made. And it goes all the way to the essence of branding, which is pick your lane, find your positioning, pick your identity that works best and is reflective of who you are and understand that it's not going to work for everybody.
- [57:13]
B
Right. You're so right. Listen, and, you know, it's interesting we do that. And any good manager does that. When I have my sales team, I couldn't take Mary Poppins and send her into New York, just like I couldn't take the New Yorker and send him out to Iowa. Right. It doesn't work that way. And so we put measures to people's personalities and how they sell professionalism. The extrovert or the introvert or the
- [57:36]
A
relationship builder, you got to align with the prospect they do is a key variable in this.
- [57:41]
B
Totally. But think about just reality check. How many times have you ever seen a dashboard that says that, hey, client profile and whatever range you want to put in, 1 to 10, just as a range, New Yorker to country. Quiet.
- [57:59]
A
Never.
- [57:59]
B
You know me, right? None. None. None.
- [58:02]
A
And it's so important.
- [58:05]
B
It's. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable.
- [58:08]
A
Donald Bill Burr.
- [58:10]
B
Right? Or. Or one that we measured today is. Is. How did we get the lead? Not all leads are the same. Like, did we get it as a referral? Did we get it off social media? Did we get it as a cold lead from a marketing campaign? Did we get it because somebody drove by a truck and the truck had a big average? You know, that affects the outcome so much. You ever seen a score for that? You ever. You ever seen salesforce be like lead. Not lead, quality of lead, but like, where it came from and how that much that impacts the end result. And I'll give you another one. I'll give you another. We measure. This is a real one. This. This is Cain. This is a real one that no one talks about. Hey, are we discounting this month? Well, what's the biggest variable are we going to discount this month? What is it? How are we doing? How are we doing? How. How are we doing this quarter? If we are crushing it, we're not discounting. But you. You need an arm and leg. Oh, we're 30% under. Oh, listen, we're running a two for one sale,
- [59:10]
A
so blow up your fricking brand. Remember the iPhone? I don't even remember iPhone6 back in the day. It was, it was a huge mistake. Tim Cook's biggest mistake. He did like the $300 plastic iPhone, okay, with like a shitty non glass cover. It almost destroyed the brand because they were competing with the cheaper Androids. So if you're discounting, are you underselling and destroying your brand because you're not selling based on value or are you taking a great opportunity to get in a wedge and build a new client?
- [59:50]
B
Right, well, listen, yes, but I would just say very few brands, very few have the luxury of we never move all price. You know what I mean?
- [59:58]
A
Like, I'm not saying it's monolithic, but to your exact point, when to do it and how much.
- [60:04]
B
Right, right. Because people, what I deal with companies, they're like, well, Google does that or Apple does that and be like, you're not Google or Apple. What are you talking about? You're barely in business, don't compare yourself to Google. But so in that pricing world, it's like, how much are you going to move on price? It's so affected by how you're doing as a company. That's the point. It's like, I don't care who you are because we've all seen Louis Vuitton, went down as far as we go and came back, God bless, but when they were down, they would very different than what they would do today. So right when you're riding high and everything's great, you're like, listen, the price is the price.
- [60:38]
A
You don't want it, don't thin it out. And then if you really want to stay competitive in a commoditized atmosphere, whether to your point, whether it's 5, 10, 15%, that could make you or break you for some of these similar reasons because you don't want to undercut value.
- [60:56]
B
But when have you ever seen a CRM dashboard and said, oh, here's our pricing based on where we are in the month or the quarter toward our goal. The correlation between those two is so high. It is. Especially if you're a company that does a lot of stuff at the end of the quarter or the end of the month, the correlation between where you are to go and where you are time of the year is enormous. Your ability to discount or change price or move on price, highly competitor data, highly correlated. Highly correlated. Unbelievable.
- [61:30]
A
Exciting stuff. So, all right, I am Bald Ambition llc. And I've got. I'll send you the contract source of 100 guests. And they're. They're ready to rock.
- [61:44]
B
Amen.
- [61:45]
A
How does this process work? Because you describe a very, very aggressive onboarding process and there's, there's minimal due diligence when it comes to process and conversation. You guys aren't a McKinsey. It's the opposite. And it sounds like there's a technical aspect. So there's a couple things there beyond just the immediacy of the timing. And the thing that pops up immediately into my bald head is privacy and security. You're API ing my ass all over the place. Where's my data going? Give me some assurances.
- [62:23]
B
Sure. API, we're AWS or Google Web. Right. So all super secure stock to all those necessary things. But you bring up a really, really good business point, which is, I don't know, I'll get myself in trouble here. But I would just say that executives that like where you and I are in life, when we start talking about what we do, they start fibrillating because we have the old construct of what data project and connecting data and normalizing it. Like we're in our, you know, we just tried to connect our CRM to something five years ago, you'd be like, oh my gosh, I'll see it next year. And so it's amazing what's happened and, and how more fluid that process is. And so our biggest thing is we make sure that we're more diligent. Sounds weird, but the more mature an executive is, we want to make sure that we go through it because sometimes it gets killed when they take it somewhere else. Because, like, how are they going to do that?
- [63:22]
A
I got to relate some of my own experiences to my own clients on not the podcasting side of the house, but on the consultancy side of the house. And, and it's amazing the extent to which sometimes very senior people in organizations across multiple verticals don't get it. And that's no insult to their intelligence or their experience. But to your exact point, there's an old school mentality about what technology is and does and the flexibility, fluidity, the plug in nature of AI, which is really one of its key strengths.
- [63:59]
B
Yep.
- [64:00]
A
Is it really made aware to a lot of people who are used to this. Jurassic Park. I need. I need a team. I need real six months. I need half a million dollars before anything happens, anything. I need to shut everything down. While I might remember data migration, I need to migrate. I need to migrate the server. Right. Have that mentality in senior leadership.
- [64:28]
B
You see what Claude actually put our cowork. I think today OpenAI released their connector. There is so much happening, and I don't have this, like, are we all gonna be out of a job? But it's gonna be different. We have to start thinking about our issues differently. Like, if somebody would have said to you the day the Internet started, oh, we're gonna watch movies on our phone. Or they're gonna be. They're gonna be. We're gonna stream tv, you're gonna get rid of cable and you're gonna stream. You'd be like, there is not a chance. I can't even download a picture. And, you know, and so again, we're in our infancy of this AI thing. And I just, I just want to encourage your listeners or folks that are watching what. What we try to do for companies is give them a foundation of analytics so that again, this last mile, it's going to keep changing the solutions that work. AI is cannibalizing itself every single month. And so we want to give you a set of analytics so that as you plug different AI tools in, you can measure. Is this helping us? Is this hurting us? Is this good? Is it bad? You got to have a way to measure what's happening. That's what we're trying to do for companies. I don't want to be out here on this last mile. This. This is so. God bless Elon and. And whoever Sam, that whatever they want to do. But your company needs to normalize the data, know what the process flow is, test different things, test AI and what works today. Promise you will not be the thing you're going to want 18 months from now. There's no way the way technology is advancing. So you want to have something to be able to measure and constantly track. Hey, is this good? Is this bad? When do we start declining? It's time to replace that. Do you know that we're paying for this now? This part's free. And so that's what we're trying to do for companies is give them a baseline that they can make good decisions over the next couple years because it's changing constantly.
- [66:13]
A
The point that I think I'm hearing, and I just want to bring it back to you, is, is. Is. Is limited barrier of entry. So it's not as easy as snapping your fingers. But as you mentioned, within a few days, you can plug in. And by plugging in, it's unobtrusive. Your systems remain your systems. You're doing your thing, nothing changes. And you're an add on application.
- [66:39]
B
It's a layer, right? A little layer on top, a little
- [66:42]
A
layer on top and then you're given a scalable option. Dig in a little, dig in a lot. Have your sales people focus a lot on this information. Have them do whatever they need to do. But it's crawl, walk, run.
- [66:56]
B
Oh, it's great. We always say that, we always say that internally. So as we say that all the time. Yep. Crawl, walk, run. Do not go out and spend $250,000 on some AI solution. You don't, you're not going to want it a year from now. And I say this all the time. There's no AI expert. If somebody shows up, your door, gets on a one of these boxes, you're on a web conference. Where are the AI experts? No one, there's no one has any idea what 2030 looks like. And you're trying to do 2030.
- [67:25]
A
They have no idea about 2027. Yeah, my, my favorite, my favorite talking about, you know, my most and shittified platform, which is LinkedIn, I hate it is like you got, you got people who are giving these deep seminars on AI and certain stuff, they're laying it out. This is AI when like by the time you get to module number six changed out from under you. I mean if you're not talking about immediate pragmatic application through the lens of business rules and business application, what are you talking about?
- [68:07]
B
Listen for people listening. Everybody wants to jump into AI. Listen. My best advice, best humble advice, work on your data, Standardize your data, get it cleaned up and get your process flow. Understand what they are before you invest in any AI.
- [68:22]
A
95% right there. And that's never going to change because you got data from multiple sources. You need it to all be interoperable and normalized. And then most significantly, understand your own workflow, your own work stream.
- [68:37]
B
Yeah, garbage in, garbage out is so applicable, AI is going to expedite that. Like you said in the years past, you'd migrate your server. Well, six months you didn't know you got burned. Immediately you go buy some in AR ii, apply it to your incorrect data elements, you will make seven more hard decisions, wrong decisions, and you'll be out of a job or your sales will be down 30.
- [68:56]
A
Your vendor, who you brought in to fix stuff, all of a sudden breaks even more. They own your ass. And then you're actually one step forward, 10 steps back. And in a salesforce kind of view or a salesperson kind of View sales management, your people are still not benefiting at all because they're running around not listening to anything you're saying. Anyway, listen.
- [69:20]
B
And every, everybody today you talk AI is making more work for the people that. I mean, it's just. You feel like, oh, I gotta check. I can look at AI, I gotta create. It's like so many more cycles of everything because you're like, did you, did you check that? Did you put that in chat GPT? Did you check that in Claude? Do we do it? You know, it's, it's, it's creating a thousand cycles now and everything. I'm really going to miss you on LinkedIn. When they, when they, what do you, what was the old liberal thing when they cancel you. When LinkedIn cancels, you'll be like, I
- [69:47]
A
think they're going to bot me. They're going to stand, I'm going to get kicked off LinkedIn and then Salesforce is going to, you know, that's it.
- [69:56]
B
They're going to be like, they're going to be like, you remember him? He. Where is he now?
- [70:00]
A
Go dark now. We love you, LinkedIn. It's not. I've been on other podcasts saying Satya Nadella has been one of the best CEOs in all of history. So he'll forgive me for on LinkedIn. I do want to ask you one important thing, though, before, before we go. And that is, and I've seen this personally from my consulting work in AI employees, whether they're salespeople, whether they're part of teams in whatever vertical, are freaked out. If you bring in, if like an AI company comes in with a new application layer and you're asking anything of these people, and it's especially true, I'm curious your opinion of salespeople because they're really competitive to the point of paranoia. Don't take my stuff. You know what I mean? A lot of people think that you're coming after their job.
- [70:52]
B
Totally agree. Yeah.
- [70:53]
A
So how do you deal with that onboarding for front race? Coming across as a friend instead of an enemy. That's ready.
- [71:03]
B
Great question. You know, it's an old, old school, like change management, right? It's, it's not the facts, it's how you speak about it. And I, I would, I would share the following. Just being super direct, it's what's happening today. This is a long answer to your question, which is what's happening today? In the old school, if you were a public company and you fired people or you did a mass layoff the market would crush you. They'd say you're a bunch of idiots. You over hired, you just did a riff. In fact we want to fire all of you. And we'd start now. We've seen the last six months. Companies are rewarded for doing a massive rift. Their valuations go up. All these public CEOs I guarantee you are all having meetings.
- [71:42]
A
AI capex just meta. Meta just fired a bunch of people.
- [71:47]
B
Right? That's what they say. It's never been done. Right? It's never been done. It's, it's when you, a public company did a mass rift, the market penalized them because they said you managed the business poorly.
- [71:58]
A
Right?
- [71:58]
B
Only in the last six months. Now we have this dynamic where oh my gosh, you guys did a mass riff and say it's going to AI, we love you guys.
- [72:06]
A
You're staffing goes down and then market cap goes up. They're inversely proportional, correct.
- [72:14]
B
So that is a wild card in what's happening. And I just want to say to people, one, you AI is coming, right? And so what we try to do for companies, they're like, oh, you're going to share my stuff. Think about what I said earlier. You go work for a new company or you work for a company and you want to know what, what's the best people doing? How would you find that out today? Like forget like how you're going to learn. You're going to get trained by the CEO or they're going to hire a sales training company. How would you smart, Goodwill, 32 year old, starting with pick a company you love, Apple, Google, whoever, whatever. And you want to be great. You want to be in the top 20. You want to be what? How would you possibly get trained up to be great at that company on this in the sales world, what does that look like today?
- [73:10]
A
It's a mess.
- [73:11]
B
You go to corporate training, those people don't sell. We know that.
- [73:15]
A
You don't pay attention. You get drunk at the hotel bar.
- [73:17]
B
The people training you don't sell. The people that do the training don't sell.
- [73:21]
A
Either they don't sell or they're a sales star. To our point earlier, they don't know
- [73:26]
B
what to sell, right?
- [73:26]
A
They don't know what they're talking about.
- [73:28]
B
No, but you maybe get the sales star for two hours. You don't get them for two weeks of training.
- [73:32]
A
Not for the whole seminar. No. You get a teacher, you get a shower. Not a doer.
- [73:37]
B
Right. And they'll teach you some model and you have no way of doing it. And so that's a long winded answer to your question. What we're trying to do for people is share. Since COVID particularly, no one really knows what success looks like. I believe that's one of the reasons we're still fibrillating from COVID We no one knows what, what is Tom and Susan and Mike doing at their home office, in their living room, blah, blah, blah. We're going to track what's great about you because as we said, everybody's created a part of it. And so for the AI to be able to like say, you know what Mookie's really great at? I don't know about the. You're not great at cold calling or building a pipeline, but once they're in from demo to close superstar, and you've been able to talk about that, see it quantitatively, look at it. Because when people know your skillset and you're getting coached and management sees it, you then have more value. If not, you better be great at the whole thing. Right?
- [74:36]
A
That is such a terrific point because nobody does everything well and the probability that you really suck at certain things is exponentially increased with how good you are at doing other things.
- [74:48]
B
And think about the clients. A lot of people separate enterprise from maybe SMB, but some companies don't say them. Maybe you're great at big company deals, maybe you're great at small company deals that we are going to help share what's great about you. You may suck, by the way. Like, like, let's just discount people that suck. Discount people that aren't really working. They are not really.
- [75:09]
A
Back to grit and determination. Right?
- [75:12]
B
They shouldn't be in sales. Forget those people that are, but people that are in the bell curve, good, solid people. We start to be able to measure what they're good at, how to make them better in other areas. Share that with the company. Know that, hey, you're entering an area of weakness. So let's get another resource to help you because that's not what you're good at. Right? So those are all things that we deliver for. I believe we're an enabler to those people so they're better measure, share what they're great at. Because no one's great at everything, but we have to pretend like we are. And so I believe we really help that person stand in.
- [75:44]
A
I love that on a deeply personal level because I know I suck at things and I'm. I'm awesome.
- [75:51]
B
Me too. Me too.
- [75:54]
A
If I could do more, almost entirely of the shit that I'm great at. I will be happier and the world will be happier if we, if we could shake it up. How many times have you seen an employee doing whatever role and with one group doing certain things for certain clients, they're a rock star. And then there's a company reorg or something goes on and this same person doing more or less the same stuff goes to a different group is assigned a different kind of client and they tank.
- [76:28]
B
Yeah.
- [76:28]
A
Nothing has changed. They're the same person. Rock star to bum.
- [76:35]
B
Yep.
- [76:36]
A
And. And the fault is not their own default is alignment issues and and that can be circumvented with data with knowledge real world only.
- [76:47]
B
Only people that run teams and live this real world are going to agree with the following but it's like you can't have all A players. It's not everyone's wired that way. You, you need B players to be with B players. Like, like you need a lot of B players. Like you need stereotype. If you have a single parent that needs to pick up their kid at 3 o' clock and they're. They're a 70, you need those people like to expect them to do what what the super energetic young go getter, not whoever the go getter is like who's working 12, you know, 15 hours a day. They're different but not all the same. And a company you do do you need those crazy 15 hour people. You do right? But you also need a lot of super solid, very good quality people. And matching what they want their earning potential with the opportunities is so important. Like expecting everyone to be the. It's not. Doesn't work. It doesn't work. And so matching what they want to do with their skill set and the company being happy with that performance is all part. When B people do B work and are paid B money, everybody's fine. They really are. When A people do a business paid A money, everyone's fine. It's when a. It's when a B player wants a money for B effort. That's when you get sideways in the HR world. And so again we help kind of put people in buckets and let them self choose like hey, here's why your earning is here or here's what it is. It's cool if that's. Are you good with it? We're good with it. We love that you're what you're doing. We need it. We need, we can't, we can't exist with the bell curve moving all the way to the right.
- [78:27]
A
It's like the Nightmare before Christmas. Jack Skellington wants to be Santa Claus. Part of this problem is the B player is a B player. They need to acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses, know which swim lane they're great at. Put them with the other B players. And there's no shame in the hierarchy.
- [78:45]
B
And most of them are. But most of them are happy that way.
- [78:47]
A
And stop being aspirational to A when really it's B is fine. Be the best B player you can be.
- [78:54]
B
Right? Most people I know in that world are fine. They're like, good. I. I don't wanna. I don't. The extra hours to me in my personal life or to be able to go work out or to take care of my kids or whatever it is, to be a little league coach is way more important than. Than the other things. And it's fine. It's totally fine. But if you don't have the data and you try to treat everyone the same and every opportunity the same and the same sales process. That's why we are 40 years in with no true answer to why is a public company with an incredibly complex tech stack with every metric under the sun, how can they possibly miss quota or. Or sales team only 30% get the goal. How can that possibly be with no answer?
- [79:37]
A
Sales team turnover. You've got frustrated people, Right? And then you got the A list. People who are just freaking out in their own way without proper guidance and reinforcement. I do want to end on a Pollyanna note. The thing that I love most about this conversation and what you're bringing to the world is the opposite of the doomsday AI scenario. And by that I mean everything that you've been talking about shows the benefit of using this technology to better understand ourselves, our jobs, and to bring benefit that way and to do it in a way that's expeditious, unobtrusive, and cost effective. Everyone's like, oh, my God, AI is stealing our jobs. Oh, my God, AI is going to end the world. It's the Terminator. It's of kind. Skynet. We're doomed. The flip side of this is all of our lives could be so much better if we're better aligned to our own skills and the stuff that we do in the world.
- [80:42]
B
Yeah.
- [80:43]
A
And I think we're at this golden age. If we can go through this disruption exemplified by a lot of what you're proposing for sales teams, which is, I want to do the job best suited to who I am as a person, and the best way to do that is for you to know as much as you can about me and aligning me in situations where I can be a star.
- [81:06]
B
Amen. Listen, here's the sales. Here's the sales. Dirty secret. This is so true. I think I've never had a person disagree with this. Here it is, here's sales. The entire history of sales. Hey, I reach out to 100 people. I connect with 30 of them, 15 of them will talk to me. I demo seven, I sell three. Right. I mean everybody's numbers are a little different, but isn't that true? Like I reach out to 100, I only connect with conversion funnel.
- [81:36]
A
It's never changed.
- [81:37]
B
Right. But, but imagine if we're able to use AI and do some of the amazing things so that we, we no longer have to talk to 100 people. Imagine if we only talk to 20 and of the 2017 are dialed in. It changes the entire world. You know how much time we spend in sales, for lack of a better word, wasted. Just calls that are unreturned, emails that aren't done. Like it's imagine if we're able to self actualize AI and be like imagine I'll use this. I'm a huge sports fan. I use this analogy all the time. Jordan Belfor, the Wolf of Wall street guy said this. It's so true. If you came to me and said I have a Tom Brady trophy or Tom Brady helmet signed Patriots, hey, it's 500. I, I, you couldn't sell it to me unless I resell it, right? If I was gonna. But it's not going to my house. I don't care. Tom Brady, not if there's not a chance. I don't. It doesn't matter if you could have Tom Brady made it out to Jack Stein. Love you, you're the best guy. I'd still be like, I don't want it and I'm not paying for it. I, I don't want it. And so, but if you had a, I don't know, Baltimore Ravens helmet who I grew up Maryland. Signed by Ray Lewis. What is it? It's 900. I'll pay you a TH000. I'll take you like we're, we're all that way. So imagine everyone typically hates sales people or hates to sell. Imagine though, as you go through your day, you go through your life, if the calls you got, we all get too many. Spam call While we're on this podcast, I've gotten three calls. Spam, spam. You know, it's like imagine the people that reached out to you were things you really cared about. Like hey, you just whatever got a flat tire this morning and it knows you have a flat tire. Like hey, here's three tire vendors in the area that'll come to your house and replace the tire on driveway. I definitely, I definitely want that. Right? So imagine our business world. If they knew from the signals that we're giving, we either hired people or we fired people or we moved over to a new market or we just got a new office. If you had people that were in line with how you're living, interact with you, think about amazing that would be. And that's to me where we're going to. We don't have to do 100 anymore. We reached out to 100 again. 80 of them, 70 of them want to tell you to hang up on you. Please stop calling me. You're annoying. I hate your guts. But that's how we waste our time. Let's just get down to 20. And of the 20 you call, they're all like, oh yeah, I'm definitely looking. Yes, thank you for calling.
- [84:09]
A
Same transparency and alignment that I was talking about. Your sales team is toward the prospects. They're exuding all this data too. So connect the dots.
- [84:21]
B
That's the map.
- [84:22]
A
That is the marketing challenge. Right. And even the best platforms do a half assed job. You know, like if you watch this on Netflix, you might like that it's variations of these recommendations because they get to know what you're watching.
- [84:37]
B
Yep.
- [84:38]
A
If we can get that right, then to your point. Salesperson prospect. And the salesperson is getting better at doing what they naturally do. And the prospect is becoming more and more transparent in terms of their pain points and needs, opportunities and AI with machine learning, deep learning is perfectly positioned to munch all this data, connect the dots and share best practices to do it.
- [85:07]
B
People are listening. People are not. Especially in the sales process. The higher dollar value you're buying are not going away in the sales process because there's not a person in the world that wants to spend six figures plus and be like, who'd you buy that from? Oh, I bought it from an automated agent and they're gone. You know what I mean? Like, have you ever, have you ever had a problem with your company and you try to call Google, like they either took down your page or the search results don't work or somebody said
- [85:29]
A
there's no one to call the other line. Right.
- [85:32]
B
You can't. So imagine you do that with something that's critical to your operations are really important. So the more for the audience, the higher dollar value what you're selling. The chance you go away is very small because people want to be able to call back and be like, hey Bill, Mike, Susan, you know, hey, this is going good. This is not going good.
- [85:52]
A
Remember the qualitative attributes about what makes the salesperson good is human qualities. We're making human connections. And it's particularly important for a consultative approach for higher value services.
- [86:07]
B
You need help, you want help, you want support, you want. Nothing's perfect and so you're not. Again, try to call Google or Facebook when you have a problem. Zip. You get nothing. And you're like this is unbelievable.
- [86:22]
A
Well, you're gonna get a bot, right? Your value prop sounds intriguing. I'm gonna put links in the description for the podcast and the YouTube video. How does it work? Reaching out to you. Is it a, is it a consulting call? Sure.
- [86:41]
B
My little 15 second commercial. You can find Jack sine S I n e y on LinkedIn. You can ping me or. But if you go to frontrace.com frontrace.com one word frontrace.com in the upper right hand corner it says join the race. Just fill out the form. We'll let you have the software. We put our money where our mouth is. We'll set it up, customize it for you. You can have it for a month for free. So you don't have to take my word that it works like literally not some what is it? Proof of concept where it's vanilla, it'll be customized to your stuff. You will literally I we tried to create a company that is so sought after, it's like even if you never buy it, you're going to be so much smarter a month from now. Totally for free. That's how much we believe in what we're doing. You can just go hit join the race. Got your name. I think it's email phone number. Put it in there. We'll set up the software. You can use it for a month plus make sure it works great for you ever have to pay for it.
- [87:34]
A
Awesome. And then my IT guys, they're not going to flip out. You can just plug in API key.
- [87:42]
B
Just quick sidebar. You mentioned the call make sure your IC security, they all want to make sure do you have the right security. But that's always the question who has it. But it's all super secure. You're good but there is that question. But Once it is API key data set up at about 10 minutes, you're good to go.
- [87:59]
A
Thank you Jack, like comment subscribe Share thank you.
- [88:02]
B
Thank you.
- [88:03]
A
Yes, thank you very much.