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AI Adoption Requires Leadership Discipline, Not Just Technology with Marcy Stoudt
01:03:09
In this episode, Marcy Stoudt returns to unpack why AI adoption starts with mindset, how productivity gains break without cross-functional integration, and why the next competitive edge will come from leaders who drive curiosity, coaching, and clarity in how their teams actually sell and hire.
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- [00:05]
A
Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives. Hosted by five time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that, and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for skin scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid Enjoy today's episode in this episode we're joined by Marcie Stout, founder of Revel Companies, where she advises revenue leaders on hiring, leadership and organizational performance. This conversation tackles one of the biggest shifts happening right now in go to market teams. AI is everywhere as we know, but most organizations are still treating it like a technology decision instead of a leadership one. Marci breaks down why that thinking falls short, where AI is actually driving real productivity and how leaders need to rethink coaching, hiring and alignment to keep pace. What makes this discussion important is the gap that's already forming. You may be seeing it in your own industry. Teams that are integrating AI into how work gets done are moving faster, coaching better, and making sharper decisions. Those waiting for clarity or governance are falling behind. Let's dive in.
- [01:29]
B
So Marcie, great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. I reached out to you on the recent blog that you did that you titled Don't Complicate the Moment. This is not about technology. Johnny and I have been having a lot of conversations. You can't swing a dead cat right now. I'll get crushed on the comments on this one. Anyways, you can't swing a dead cat right now without hitting the conversation of AI. So you've always been a favorite of our listeners and I like the disposition you take in this blog of really encouraging people to jump in the water is great. So first of all, why'd you write it and talk to us a little bit about it?
- [02:12]
C
Well, thank you for having me. Always love talking to you guys. I think the story for me, my personal experience, it really comes from I'm talking with so many of my clients and and then friends and it's like a dichotomy of people leaning in and kind of. I don't know if people are BSing what they're doing with AI. It's hard to kind of know the real AI story to then the other half is total fear. Like I've got kids going from college into the workforce and are their jobs going to be eliminated should they go into trades or I've got a lot of senior leaders that are in my network that are fearful they're going to be replaced. So my first step before I wrote the blog a while ago, a couple years ago when AI was coming out and I just was confused by it. So we have a podcast as well and my sister and my business, we run it together. What our first step with our podcast is like when we don't know something, let's record it and get an expert in. So we had this guy, Edwin Jansen, he's got a great platform of AI before AI was even understood. And he said something so strong two years ago and, and he was kind of demystifying it for us. And he's like, you're going to see this 10x factor that for instance, in the medical field, people, because we were concerned about governance and things like this. And he's like, you're going to have doctors getting sued in, in within five years because they are not consulting AI. One human brain can only handle so much capacity and to not know all the different medications and all the things. And you know, again, two years ago, I'm like, what? And I was just trying to learn the basics of how to do it. So Edwin's kind of been a friend of mine, mentor of mine on the side. But right before, like six months ago, I'd say I just had this uptick of really good friends, great careers. And I'm going to say they're 25, 30 years into their career, wonderful wisdom, all these things. And slowly but surely they are being asked whether it's a downsizing, whether it's a restructuring, whether it's, whether they let go. And those phone calls started like once a month, but I started getting a few of them a week and I'm still getting them now. And that all of a sudden I had this moment of fear, like, what am I going to do if this wave happens? And over the course of the next six months, I'm stuck in a situation because my business doesn't work the reverse. Like if a company needs us to find somebody, we find the person. But we're not paid to help somebody find a job. So I just had a lot of fear of that. So I did. My first thing I always do is always call. You're an expert, call Edwin. And we start talking through it. And within minutes he had shift my entire mindset around it. He's like, this is not about technology. You've got it all wrong. Like my 30 years in corporate, like you know, doing RFPs to figure out salesforce.com and then implementing it in a billion dollar company, like technology adoption is totally different than AI adoption. So within like a, I'd say a 20 minute confrontation where he's, you know, confronting me, you know, because I'm asking what you my AI tech stack. And he's like, your AI tech stack? Are you kidding me? Why are you thinking like that? And I was like, what do you mean why am I thinking like that? I'm like a small business. I don't want to over invest in these license. He's like, there's no license agreement. Figure it out. I'm like, well, is there a course I should take? He's like, yeah, call ask your GPT. So anyway, so in this like confrontation moment that he had with me, I recognized that I was just, I have, I have a discipline about thinking about technology that has served me well. And all of those rules don't really apply anymore. So I just got went on a deep dive myself, experimenting a lot, doing a bunch of different things. But eventually I realized, you know, I needed to hire somebody like Edwin on my team to confront me and make sure I do it differently. So anyway, long story to answer, like, I think fear was my reason why I jumped in. But then what I recognize is under fear I had a real negative story about the future. And that's just not, that's not my North Star. And I feel like in this day and age it's always about what's the competitive landscape, what does it look like for me today, how do I position myself, how do I win and then how do you invest to make that happen? So for me, it looked like hiring somebody to help me. But for a lot of the companies and listeners here, there's so many different technology innovations that you can use the
- [06:24]
B
way that you've outlined it. I think, you know, John and I have been having this discussion for a few years and I think what we both did was kind of jump in early. We're kind of lucky to get involved early with companies that we were advising. So we learned about the technology through the conversations that we were having, but really didn't learn. At least in my case. John's a lot smarter than me, but at least in my case, I really didn't learn until I applied it. And I think I got lucky because I applied it to try to figure out the promise was productivity, the promise was capacity, the promise was speed. And so what I did was I looked at all of those things that were causing me challenges in those areas. And you know, as a, you know, basically, basically, and as a seller even, you know, I'm CO FOUNDER OF Force MANAGEMENT But I sell every day. I found the capacity to prepare, the capacity to follow up, the capacity to differentiate, the capacity to analyze and to, you know, to, to get people on the same page faster is just, is just amazing. And that's where my fear kind of went out the door. The problem is, and you talk about in your blog if you don't have people looking at it with this at the same workflow level, at the same now because we tend to hand things off in companies, if you have one person with 10x capacity and that gets handed off, that work stream gets handed off to somebody that's doing 1x capacity, it is just an absolute train wreck in my opinion and especially for the user experience with a customer. So. But I'm with you and I want to talk a little bit more when we get going here about like some of the things that you actually automated in the company. But Johnny, how about you? I think John actually encouraged me. He was encouraged me and then he became kind of an AI snob because I'd tell him, you know what tool I was using. He goes, oh, that tool's horrible. You know, you shouldn't be using that, you should be using this. And so I, I had my own built in, I had my own built in coach. Johnny, how did you get started?
- [08:54]
D
I just started using the big LLMs like Grok and Gemini and ChatGPT and Claude for very practical things like, you know, I was looking at a real estate deal and I got sent a real estate contract. I didn't know exactly what it said. I didn't really want to call a lawyer. So I pumped it into ll, said tell me what this means in layman terms and tell me how it applies to Florida law. And it comes back with all the information. And I say, well, tell me how I should reply to the person on the other end. It basically tells me exactly that. So I saved myself hundreds of dollars and just going to a lawyer, I wanted some tax info. So I just, I can ask one of the big LLMs about tax information or stock analysis. I want to analyze a couple stocks. Tell me about the stocks that are in this market. Who's the most competitive. You can get a lot of information so quick. So from a self productivity standpoint, those are just three examples, but there's many more that I use the big LLMs to, to just make myself a lot more productive a lot quicker. It's like the AI companion that's listening to the zoom call and it's going to the script of exactly what we said. I no longer am reading big long emails either. You know, Gemini is breaking down the email for me. Here's the three main points and I can move on.
- [10:11]
B
Yeah, amazing.
- [10:12]
C
I think that's like the most important thing to realize is that you have access to all these tools to be more and more efficient. You don't have to find the next one and download something. You can use the own tools that your company provides or that you have. But if you're not using the tools, you are going to be a person that's left behind. Like, for sure, your customers expect you to be faster, your team expects you to be clearer. Your follow up needs to be crisp. So at the simplest level, like I think of, you know, growing up in the sales world and John, both of you prescribing to both of your, you know, methodologies, like, you gotta understand the customer's problem, right? And you gotta know the problem better than the customer may know it itself. And then you have to use, whether it's medic or whatever, you may use like use techniques to navigate and progress the sale. Well, those things haven't changed. But what has changed is the best sellers were the one that were a little bit more prepared. They were the ones that had enough political agility that they could go to the financial, you know, they could go throughout the whole organization and earn credibility at the line level, at the C suite, all that stuff. And then they listened so well. Like we spent, I'd say half my time as a sales leader. I got results because I just taught my sales team how to listen better. Like, like the old school, two ears, one mouth. You gotta listen more. So how they documented, how they followed up is all important. All that is still true. It's just right now your competition has the same access to you. So as people as your sellers are coming in, if they're not using a transcript when they're talking with their clients, uploading that transcript into, hopefully you're at the level where you have a custom GPT that's kind of documenting the right way. It should be transcript upload into that GPT, which is super easy to create. Part of me last that I'm on this podcast because I have this level of like, if I could do it, you could do it. Like, don't let anything be in your way. And if you can't do it and you have a little insecurity around it, hire somebody. Like just be the best you possibly can. But you should have a custom GPT. It does not have need to have governance around it. But then when you put the notes into that, what spits out is the exact same format in order of your CRM. And so you as a seller upload and then it's copy paste, copy paste, copy paste. Like that is like a one on one, maybe a 201 way of getting the information in there. But what hasn't changed is you're still hiring personalities and people that can actually get the client to think differently, to pause, to have those moments. So some things we're hiring for in terms of like, ability, yes, you need AI fluency and they need to figure out how to do it faster. So it doesn't take them two days to repair, it takes them an hour. Like those types of things for sure. But you still need the right leader that can get people on board, that can motivate the product team to rise the occasion. And then, you know, certain things like listening skills, you have more information, but what do you want it to do? Or like, what is that? What is that information saying? So there's some parts like I think if you're a seller listening to this or a CRO, you want to listen to the whisper of your customers. Like your customers are telling you their expectations around AI that you don't have the capability to do, but you might. So don't wait if you're a big company. My biggest fear for CROs at the large companies is you're waiting for your governance and your IT team to come up with solution while your smaller competition is just taking share. So what you really want to do is you want to figure out how can we be more efficient, how can we kind of align better, how can we influence the sale? And so I always think, like, when I do with my clients, like a fun exercise for you guys to do is just have a piece of paper and on left side you're taking inventory of like, what are our strengths? And on the right side you're taking inventory and you can just put in like, you know, where are, you know, where do we suck? Or like, where are we, like slow, like, where do we lose? So one's kind of like the complaint department and then the other one is, where do we win? And if you keep doing that with your team, you end it with, well, what do we need to automate? Or what can we do? So instead of generic AI governance, like circle a problem and if that problem has two or three departments that intersect with that department, you know, John used the example of like legal, for instance. As a small business, your legal Team is who you pay. You know, it's like for contract. But as a big company you have like, I don't know, six or seven lawyers that have a big opinion and a lot of influence. So is there like an AI problem solving? Like how could we get our sellers to be faster with contracts? Understand this. And you just whiteboard like you promote your AI to be the thought leader in the room and then you do a cross functional thing on the inefficiency where we slow down, where we lose sales because there's that type of friction internally that is slowing down the technology promise. Because the promise is real. It's just your company might not be living up to the promise because of internal friction.
- [15:06]
B
One of the things that you just brought to light that I really love and CROs, I think you really need to listen to this. I am having amazingly frightening conversations with CROs right now where they are deferring to technology teams to answer how they can be more efficient in sales. And it is blowing my mind. I understand it.
- [15:37]
C
I clearly understand it's like respectful training that you've had over years because you've probably been told don't go out, don't go rogue. But AI is different.
- [15:48]
B
I think it is. I mean, well, I know it is. And if, because for me it's always been at the workflow level, solving a problem at the workflow level, the governance, the security, clearly these are things that we have to have conversations about. But having it driven by some organization completely outside of, of the go to market team and because it includes tools and it includes the stack, which I get why this happens. But any CRO listening out there, if you, you want to be, things are being done for you, not to you, that's as old as dirt. And I feel like there's a lot of people right now that there's things being done or nothing being done and waiting and kicking the can down the road. Johnny, what are you seeing in that regard?
- [16:41]
D
Same type of thing, but it's almost like having your sales guys on the team, you know, tell the development team what type of tools they should use. It just doesn't make sense to me because they don't have the domain expertise. The issue is that all these tools right now are very general tools. You know, all we're talking about is LM ll bit large LLM companies and for the most part the tools that are out there right now, especially for sales or even recruiting, any of those types of tools, all they are is people jumped in early and they took an LLM wrapper and put it around a bunch of data. And then they said, hey, this is the AI tool you need to use. And what's going to happen in the future, just like it's happened with software development is. And the reason I think, I think that software development occurred first is because software development people know software development. So they took their domain expertise and they took the time to embed it in an AI tool. So you have products like Claude Augment Cursor with these gigantic valuations of private companies. And it's all because the soft people don't need to write code anymore. You know, they need to, they need to write code. But if you were somebody coming out of college right now and you're looking for entry level job, these, you know, large LLM tools like Claude, what, Augment Cursor can all do that. I think the same thing's going to happen in the rest of the world. Like right now you're seeing companies like Harvey that are coming out and doing law and you're going to start to see like Johnny and I at one time sold a CAD package, mechanical computer aided design package. That package could be used to design an iPhone, a Ferrari engine or Boeing airplane wing. I think eventually you're going to get somebody that's going to come out with a, you know, diesel engine design. The guy takes all his knowledge, he's the best diesel engine designer in the world. He teams up with a couple other people that know diesel engine design and they come up with a CAD package specifically for diesel engine design. And I think all we're seeing right now is just these tools are too general, they're not very specific. And I think eventually you're going to see very specific tools in sales. All you see so far is people trying to automate this SDR position where they basically are gathering a bunch of information as quickly as they can, try to prepare for a call, bomb out a bunch of emails and a bunch of calls and try to get leads a lot quicker. But that's all you're really seeing right now. You're not seeing anything very specific to sales. And I haven't seen anything very specific to recruiting where someone took the time, years to embed their domain knowledge in it and come out with a very specific tool for that domain. And I think that's the day when people are going to get a lot more productive.
- [19:36]
B
I really like John's point because like one thing that I realized at Force Management, I'm like, why are we, in the early days, like, you know, five Years ago, four years ago. Why are we getting all these calls from these early AI companies? And they all wanted to be partners with us. And then I figured it out because it was exactly what John was talking about. They were the experts in the technology and what they didn't have was domain expertise or what I call human factor knowledge. The human factor knowledge of that domain is, you know, for, for this example we were talking about, it's Egypt old, the seller deficit disorder. For thousands of years, customers have judged buyers of goods and services, have judged sellers of goods and services the same way. And they still do the same surveys, they come out the same way. What are the two biggest things that, that, that cause you the biggest problem with sellers? And buyers respond? Number one, they don't understand my business, number one. Number two, they don't listen. So the technology geniuses say, I can solve that problem and I can help them understand that customer's business faster, better than anybody else. And I can also create transcripts and feed them into LLMs and play that stuff back so they can prove that they can listen to better than anybody else. And that was kind of like the first train that for me, I think that left the station. But here's what they didn't do, they didn't do. And John and I have talked about this, like, how do you teach a seller with that information? How do you teach them to be interested versus interesting with that information? That's a human factor. So the more you tell me I have a problem or the more you tell me that, you know, I should be doing something, which is the habit, I think that gets emphasized here with having access to a lot of information. You're trying to prove how smart you are to people. And I think it's backfiring in some cases because what it should allow you to do is really be more interested in the conversation than try to differentiate yourself with the information, if that makes sense.
- [22:08]
D
Some people believe that we're eventually going to get to the spot where it's going to be bought, talking about, you know, seller bot, talking to a buyer bot. And that may happen someday. But I think to your point, even if you had tools that still, they're not out there yet, do you have tools that specifically told the sales rep this is what you have to execute next, you still need a sales rep that has the characteristics and the skills to go out and ask those questions and gather that information from the customer they're trying to call on. Now, bot may talk to bot. When you, when you're selling, route Cisco routers and, you know, Dell storage or some sort of laptop. But it's not going to happen when you sell an enterprise software to multiple stakeholders in multiple divisions, spread out in multiple states. That's just not going to happen overnight. You're going to need someone that's in there with the expertise to figure out for all these people what is the decision criteria, what is the decision process, and how am I going to corral all these people into a common decision? That's pretty tough stuff to ask for just an AI bot to do.
- [23:16]
C
Right? And that's the example of, like, the senior leaders. They have wisdom and they have experience, domain knowledge that they can kind of, you know, if AI helps you think faster. So instead of getting one option out of a, you know, say you do a whiteboard session with your team and they, at the end of, you have one really good option. Well, if you have AI in the room, you could have five really good options, outline detailed risks and everything in that same meeting. But the person with the wisdom can say, you know what? This is the one we have to like. Somebody's got to pull the trigger and make the decision. So the challenges for the senior leaders that aren't tapping into both their wisdom and AI are the ones I do fear will be left behind because they sound dated. They're not. You know, if I were a leader right now of a big team, the number one thing I do is I would be pushing my team on AI curiosity. Like, hey, how have you used AI for this? Like, tell me where you're inefficient. And I don't even care if they're using it for, like, kids scrapbook stuff. Like, it does not matter how they're touching it. They have to have this discipline of better prompting, better questions. How else could we do it? Like, one simple thing that I've committed to, like, I try to do my 20 minutes a day of learning AI. And so I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters. There's a lot of people selling to you.
- [24:28]
B
Yeah.
- [24:29]
C
And I go to the website, I copy everything. Well, I used to call Edwin. I'd be like, edwin. They're selling me this on my calendar. I don't think I'm using AI. Still feel really busy. He's like, you don't need that. And then you tell me why. And I'm like, oh, better prompt there. But that's. That's a different story I'll tell. But I would. I basically take it. Like, the one I did over the weekend was how to Build a website in an hour. So we did our website and now I have my marketing team and they do it. And I love the branding. I'm not ready to let go of that, all that stuff. I'm like, let me just give it a shot. And sure enough, it was not hard. So you take the email that they kind of instill that curiosity. You're like, huh, that's interesting. Copy paste, upload it into your main, go to one and say, teach me how to do this. And then that's it. So what it does, it helps you kind of say what typically was a price point of say, $15,000 to do an extra page. Now if you're like, oh, let's figure out how we can do it with $5,000, like at me as a small business owner. And it's that type of stuff where I'm challenging anybody on my team. I'm like, how can you do it faster? And it's just having that domain expertise of what you need and what you want. But the second most important thing other than AI curiosity is alignment. Like, only a human can create alignment. And that alignment, or lack of alignment is what winning companies are losing companies. Like, it's going to be a slow drift with those that are allowing their people. Like, you're waiting for governance. Of course, everyone's using their own. They're all preparing just slightly different. And then they're all waiting for case studies for marketing or they're waiting this from their product team. They want this and it just creates this delay that's, that's not necessary right now. But a strong leader can pull the right people in the room. Be like, guys, let's figure it out. They got a man on the moon X amount of decades ago. I'm pretty sure AI can figure out this small problem for us to make to work better together, like with less friction. And you just need to lead with like this wonder of curiosity and excitement towards the future. And the negative what if or anybody that's kind of complaining about like, oh, AI is wrong, I would just say you stay down that path and you probably will be dated and people won't really want to be enjoying conversations with you. But if you go down the path of like, hey, how can AI teach you? Like, you know, there's all those, the training ones now, so you could actually have a sales prep call. They have the CRMs that they do the funnel management. And so then they're watching your emails and they have a heat map of who to call once you figure out who you want to talk. You can actually be like, I would like John McMahon and John Kaplan to have a conversation to prep me for this call. And they literally use, you know, the books, the blogs, everything that you have, that you have a lot of content out there. And you can have the two of you in their corner and you can say, well, what would John Kaplan say? Or what would John McMahon say? And it's almost like a custom blog. So there's so many different things that you can do with it. The one thing you can't do right now is be skeptical of. Let's wait and see. Nobody wants to be the blockbuster moment. You're going to your IT department to ask questions, but meanwhile they have so much investment in their corner premier geographies that they're like, well, I don't know, you know the cost of this. And that's, that's to me it's like, don't be a blockbuster moment. Like, you know, digital video is here. It's time to figure out how to win. You know, if we're going to be streaming into people's homes.
- [27:53]
D
Yeah. I think the big thing I take out of what you say is prep. Like any salesperson today that isn't totally prepared going into a call with how easily you can access information today is just they're in the wrong job. And then to your point, because you can do that, you can act a lot quicker and manage a lot more
- [28:11]
C
deals and you can performance manager people too. Like it was so hard to like, did they really listen? You know, like, you know, when you're teaching sellers to be great listeners. Oh and the other and like to be great listeners to ask better questions. I think since your competition is positioning themselves pretty much like the today's unique differentiators are going to be tomorrow's different, comparative. Everybody's comparative right now. So the buyer that has that skepticism what they're saying, like, can you really do it? You have to be better at those trap setting questions. You have to be better like being prepared because you still only have 20 minutes or 30 minutes with your buyer. Like you don't have a long time. So what is the one question you're going to do? And if you don't use technology to figure out how to assess your sales team, you're just kind of like, they talk a good, you know, you really have to be coaching more. Clear your calendar with like things that are in that are time consuming to make more space to do the human stuff, which is leadership. It's coaching. It's Making sure your teams are aligned with the messaging and getting that type of alignment, like that's what matters the most. And we're going to see like great leaders that know their people are going to be the ones that win.
- [29:23]
B
I love this point because, you know, for me, the lifeblood of organizations has always been frontline management and the ability to qualify and the ability to coach and develop individuals. So I always say, like, you got to own your number, you got to attract top talent to the company, you have to retain top talent and you got to be a voracious qualifier. That's. Those are four sentences. Those are really, really big deals and coaching, I think. And Marc, I'd like your opinion on this. I know as you've started Revel, it was basically executive coaching and you're so good at it. And so I'd like your thoughts on this. But for me, automating and giving capacity to. You first have to tell somebody what's expected of them. You next have to show them how to do something. You next have to watch them do something. This is the one that typically where everything falls down in the planet. We can't watch, we can't replicate ourselves. We can't go on enough calls. With technology today you can. So you now have access to be able to validate what is happening with a customer in a conversation or what have you. And then the last thing is to give people feedback. So the ability to coach people, the ability to correct challenges and behavioral things, sales skills and sales knowledge is never, ever been this amazing. I mean, you used to have to be in the room, in the car with the rep and even then we didn't take advantage of that. There is no excuse on the planet now to not be a great coach. Those are just the tools. Now, can you imagine when you put the technology, those tools together with incredible domain expertise like a Marcy, a John McMahon, a John Kaplan or what have you. This is the utopia where you have that technology capability and you can build in the, the human factor of the domain expertise. This, I think we're going to see some explosions in the marketplace. I think this is going to be a really fun time.
- [31:41]
C
Well, hopefully, you know, like it should be the fun time. Like I know a lot of people have fear on AI, but if you can clear clutter, you are, I think the epidemic that you have going on in probably all countries but America especially is this state of overwhelm. It's like one meeting to another. You're no longer walking down the hall or to another building for Your next meeting getting any sort of break, it's like back to back to back. And I'm like, those days have got to be over. Like busy is. It's basically going to sink your ship. So now that we have this AI thing, you should figure out where you can kind of find space in your calendar. And, and I know, John, you mentioned the blog. Like I wrote in the blog that I love finding time, that typically I would sit and strategize with my computer. Like, I'd kind of think about this and I think about that. I'd write it out, I'd prepare with my computer to try and have a good work document to make sure I'm doing it. But now with AI, I just use the voice feature and instead of being in my office I've been in all day, I can go sit outside and get like a fresh view. Like, your creativity, your brain is, is amazing when you actually fuel it with like the right energy and focus. But you're just like, hey, this is what I'm thinking. My customer's struggling with this. I was thinking that. And you just talk to it and it'll kind of give you feedback. And if you do it right, like, for what I did is what I didn't realize is initially when I was using ChatGPT, it was always give me, you know, atta girls. Like, my chatgpt thought it was really good and so it gave me all this positive feedback and I was like, I'd eat it up. I was like, yeah, that's right, that's a good idea.
- [33:11]
B
And.
- [33:12]
C
And then I programmed my strategist and I. You do custom instructions. You know, hopefully by this point, everybody that is on this do custom instructions for any of your projects. Whether you use Gem or ChatGPT, but do your own projects, you can have closed loop instructions. So I have some that are closed loop. Like it's not allowed to go outside of the content I give, but I had to program one for me that basically. And I uploaded the strategy books that I follow. I uploaded like some main core thinkings and then I say, have it challenge me. Never accept an answer based on what I say. Always think of it, but you can do that. So then I never am feeling stale. I feel like I can prep with my AI strategist to think bigger and it pushes me harder. And you know, nowadays it's like, it's kind of nice to get confronted because when your GPT is confronting you, you're like, oh yeah, I really do need to think a little bigger on that one, you know, you're not alone. And that. I think that's the main point of this. Like, I'm not a AI technologist or investor, like a big scale, but nobody should be left behind. You're only left behind because you. You lack. You have a limited mindset versus a growth mindset around this. And if there's one skill you're really going to be great at is figuring out how to make it work for you in a way that feels fun. Like, it's. This is like the time. This is a time in America, in business that's like no other. And it's just cooler when you're at the top of the tidal wave figuring it out versus at the bottom, waiting for, like, wow, where are the jobs going to be in 20? You know, name the year that people have fear over.
- [34:45]
B
I think that's big. I think that. I remember I was telling my kids, my son. I was at a wedding with my son this weekend, and I said, I remember when my grandfather. I was sitting with my grandfather at the end of his life, and I was saying, gramps, you rode in a horse and buggy. You rode in an automobile, you rode in an airplane. You saw computers. You saw them put a man on the moon. And I'm going through all this, and he's. My grandfather's a real smart dude, and he listened to me in the end, and he goes, yeah, you're right. And he said, that's going to seem like a blink of an eye to you when you. And it's funny because when I was talking to my son, you know, last year, we created more data than in the entire history of the world of data. So the fantastic thing about that, if you have that mindset, Marcy, like, it's just a wonderful time. I love what you're saying because I'm way more productive. I'll be working out. I'll be walking or riding a bike or working in the gym or what have you. And I'm using voice notes. And people say to me, you know, how much time does it take you to do the, like, the Monday motivations or whatever? Those are all a conglomerate of the things that I thought about during the week, and then it comes together for me on a Sunday. And I really enjoy that time because it's. It's like, okay, and you want it to be useful or purposeful. You just don't want it to be, you know, vomiting up, you know, ideas. You're. These are conversations you're having with people. Embrace it. And look for productivity, I mean, that would have taken. Those things would have taken me hours to write in the past. They take probably less than 20 minutes now for me, which is fantastic.
- [36:39]
C
With no headspace. Like, I should be doing this, I need to do it like that. The drag, a lot of stress is because of a negative thought of what you should be doing. And now if you use AI effectively, you can have more moments when you're in flow and just get it done. Like, there's nothing better for me than being on like a run or a walk. And I'm just. I'm kind of in the flow. I got the good ideas and I just go to one of my. Hopefully you're organized already. But like I go to one of my projects of what it's about. So it knows what I'm trying to do already because that's already programmed. I just kind of talk to it. So by the time I get back to my office, it's copy paste into my draft and then from there I can use my lens on it. But it really, I mean, it's. Yeah, we're in a really cool age.
- [37:21]
B
What else are we seeing at the sales manager level? We talk about at the individual level, I'm wondering if we could just encourage more, you know, the coaching piece. I think we touched on. Anything else at the sales manager level that would be helpful that you guys are seeing?
- [37:39]
C
Yeah, I mean, one thing that I really think is for sales managers is they have an obligation to actually hear what the customer's expectations are. That has changed because of AI. We can't. The old script is done. Like there's no way that their expectations are the same as it was six months ago. So you really have to hear what the competitors are positioning, what they're worried about. So the top problems that you solve. I think all that needs to be updated. Like there's no sales manager that needs to assume. Even in staffing, you know, like, staffing's like it's. It's the business of knowing the culture, knowing the skillset, finding the person. And that hasn't changed in, you know, forever. But in today's landscape, the expectations are different. Like, they want better summaries, they want better scorecards. Like there's so much difference in how's it being done. But if you're not understanding what the needs are and not actually going back to your higher ups, like I'm thinking sales manager, if you're not going to hire ups and making sure that the voice of the customer is in the center of the Room, you might have a one year gap before you catch up to what their needs are and then you've lost your competitive edge. So that's the biggest thing. It's just that voice of the customer has to be literally in the center of the room right now and just be validating it because so much has changed and with that so has skills of the people you're hiring. So some people that are struggling right now might be struggling because you're not using technology, you're not using AI enough.
- [39:08]
B
This is going to become an issue.
- [39:10]
C
Yeah, they could be struggling because they don't want to adopt AI and they're not being as efficient as their competitor. So like one person enters the room and they don't have an okay sales meeting their competitors. The next one has this, you know, custom presentation.
- [39:23]
B
I'm hearing it all the time from sellers that are calling me or people that are, hey, what do you think about this company? And you know, it used to be, you know, culture, product, market, fit. Those are still really important. I want to learn something from the leader that I have. But I'm telling you what's showing up more and more now is the productivity tools that they have available to them. Like you telling me that you still want me to plug all that stuff into Salesforce manually or whatever. Like, and, and people listen up out there because I'm telling you that you are going to be judged whether you know it or not about your level of adoption and the things that we're talking about. And because people are just going to peace out, they're going to go other places. Who would else to have their job be to be more productive and easier.
- [40:09]
C
Yeah, this is one small window of time. And I think this window is like now maybe 18 months, maybe less. But like if you have a best, a person has the most agility to do well in the future, you should be wanting them to be loud that the company needs a change. And like don't look at complaints as like, oh, he, you know, put people in a box accidentally because they're the high performer. Like no, no, no, tap in. Like what where inefficient. Where can we, you know, what do we need to change? And you might have to change product stuff. Like there might be some complicated things that need to change. But again, that customer's opinion, that front line, they have a pulse. They know the whisper of what customers are really thinking and feeling. They might not be able to articulate it, but if you're not consistent with taking those transcripts and putting it into the right thought leader to kind of get, you know, the data to tell a story of where you need to change. You're just, you're missing a win. And that's the, the promotion of AI as your thought leader versus a person that's like happy helper, you know, like better emails, maybe do a PowerPoint or something like that. But you really want it to be more of a thought leader that's giving you options just as if you hired a big consultant. You don't have to go with the consultant recommendation, but it sure makes you think differently. So, John, I wanted to ask you. There's one analogy that I always share with like the CEOs I work with. And it's around. There's a training I went through with you and you always use the Mel Gibson Braveheart story and you talk about it and I talk about the difference of that story then versus now. Can you just share it to kind of warm up the audience?
- [41:37]
B
Well, I think the one you're, the one you're referring to is the famous one where he's, where he's yelling, hold, hold. And I think the way that I utilize that is the, you know, that the British were coming in and he didn't want to play the hand. They had spears underneath, like their kilts or something like that behind the head. They had all this surprise for them. So he's telling them, hold, hold. And where I used that over time was, you know, thinking about sellers in discovery. You know, hang in there, hold. I would say just hold. But somebody would say, aha. They said that they have a little bit of an inkling of a problem. They really didn't say anything. They mentioned a feature and the rep goes on the desk with the brochure in their mouth and their hair on fire and they start talking about, you know, the technology. And that's what the whole did for me. I think what you turned it in was in like in strategy and letting it develop. So I think you have a variation of that.
- [42:46]
C
Yeah, well, it's kind of, it still goes to the sales rep too, but in like the really good leader that is, you know, they've got the mute button for their seller to make sure that they don't jump in, like letting them speak and things like that. It's such a great skill for salespeople to know. Like, okay, if I can only ask if I got time to ask three questions. I've got about 10 to select and I'm going to use the right one at the right time. I'M not going to kind of recommend too fast, but now, and I actually feel like it's probably a bigger risk for the larger sales organizations when typically communication is kind of better with them because they kind of stay real tight to it. But what happens is now everybody's using their own AI to prepare. So now those like the questions, like those trap setting questions that you really want to kind of hold to the right moment, everybody has their own variation of it. And all of a sudden like you're like, you know, Mel Gibson says okay, you know, he unleashes everybody. You're going to have people, some of them running to a medic. They know that there's going to be casualties, so they're running to the medic. Another person's like, well, we needed this. They're like going to get, get knives. So everybody instead of one unified sprint towards the British because of AI, if you aren't a leader, figuring out AI fluency, addressing inefficiency, getting your people on board with like, how do we sharpen our competitive edge? You will re see that scene and literally everybody's 10 different directions and it's only like one degree. So in social chatter it feels very subtle. It just feels like slight drift. But on that scene that I love so much, that's where they go everywhere and they don't die. So I kind of like, I try to use that as an example with a lot of my clients to be like, how clear are you with your competitive landscape right now? How clear are you with what the customers are expecting of you or the problems that you're solving? And then how are you using AI? And I don't even care if some of the companies that are like really technical, that they're AI governance, like the healthcare companies, or like preserve those, like, let those like just be really clear about where is out of bounds and then let's clear up clutter in these other spaces. Like while we're waiting for the big guy to figure out this medical device governance, we actually should start making this clear. And those are the types of things that you don't need to wait. Everybody should, you know, if you're a leader or a seller and you want to be great today, the things that you know about AI have already probably changed by the, by the end of this conversation. So you'll just want to stay agile with it and always curious of what's, you know, how I can be better with it.
- [45:23]
B
Donnie, what do you, what advice do you have at the sales manager level?
- [45:30]
D
Maybe I could just Talk about something that Marcy was commenting on. Like, I think it's dangerous when there's people are too programmed that just say, you know, ask certain questions. And the reason I say that is I used to go on sales calls and you're driving in the car and the rep tells you, okay, now here's what he's going to say. And then I need you to say this and I need you to say that, and I need you to ask this question or that question. I'd say, dude, like, I can't do that. I just can't do it. Like, that means that I'm not really listening to the customer when I'm in the meeting. If it comes up naturally, yeah, I'll ask it or I'll say, I'll make that type of comment. But what I found is originally, when I would succumb to that, when I was a young manager, I found that I wasn't listening to the customers, only thinking about what I was going to say or what I was going to ask. So I think there's real danger there. I always felt like when I got more comfortable with myself, like, I'm going to be here in the meeting, in the moment, and I'll know what to ask, I'll know what to say, and then if, you know, I think it comes off more authentic, it's more genuine. So there is a danger in just telling these people. Like, just listen to what AI says and just start asking these questions and making these statements. It doesn't hurt to be prepared to know what you could ask at the right moment, because now you're more educated and more prepared. But I still think that should be part of the prep. But when you step up into the batter's box now, you just wait for that pitch to come, which is where
- [47:03]
C
role playing is definitely not going to go out of favor ever. Like, I think it's really good.
- [47:08]
D
I know of some companies that are using the big LLMs, the role play sales calls. Yes, it's what. And it works pretty effectively.
- [47:16]
C
And then they get feedback afterwards, too. Like they can get scorecards or where they need to adjust their pitch or, you know, add, you know, more facts or something like that.
- [47:26]
D
So.
- [47:27]
B
So I think there's a couple of pieces of advice that I have. First one is based upon our conversation here. If you're leading a sales organization and you are making decisions based upon management inspection versus seller, workflow, productivity, that's a big red flag for me because it's not going to get consumed. One thing we do know about the sales function is if it makes their job easier and it makes them more productive. John always used, used to say something to me. If you give the sellers what they want, if you give the sellers what they want, inherently you're going to give
- [48:11]
D
the company, the sellers, the type of tools that they need. Then by definition the managers will get what they need. All the tools that are all around the sales rep, at least in enterprise software sales, it's all big brother tools.
- [48:25]
B
There's no, that's not just a phrase. That's a heads up warning. That's a heads up warning. The other one is, I think now more than ever, Marcy, you've heard me say this for 20 years, probably Johnny, you too. How you sell is going to become just as important as what you sell in the world that we're in now. How you position it, how you're talking about. What did we talk about? We talked about trap setting. Question. We talked about preparation, we talked about discovery. How you utilize those skills are going to be huge differentiators for you. The knowledge, the questions, those might be easily picked up by an LLM, but the timing, the tone, the positioning. So if I'm a leader and I am focusing more on the automation of the questions versus the, the use and the feedback and the analyzation or analyzing how a customer receives it, I think that those are two things I would do like immediately to get a head start. I don't want to let you go, Marcy. Before we talk about. You spent your major part of your career in recruitment and you are one of my favorite leaders in recruitment. You have give us a little highlight again on Revel and Rebel Search and, and then give us some heads up on what you, you know, how are you seeing? Do you have some advice on what people can be doing right now in recruitment as it relates to AI strategies? So first remind us about Revel. Revel Search, Rebel Coach.
- [50:14]
C
Yeah. So we started Revel. We're always in the business of leadership. I originally started it on the coach side and then we were helping anywhere tied to revenue culture and burnout. But it was hard to be in the CEO room with their team talking about how they scale without performance, management of people and hiring the right people. Half my clients knew I was in the recruiting industry so they just kind of quickly went to me and said, don't you do this, can't you find somebody? And so we naturally extended our business to Rebel Search. So now when we work with companies, you can either use this on the hiring, recruiting or you can use this on the leadership advisory work. But what I find fascinating about recruiting right now is there is so much movement in the speed of getting candidates out there and the speed of people updating their resume. It's noisier than ever. And what I find fascinating is it is not hard to take share like in the, in the people that are listening to this, if they're in recruiting or they're in any sort of like staffing business, what's going to matter most is how much you really understand your clients, who they're looking for, who would be successful. Because resumes are being written so well by AI. Like, you know, obviously people are updating the, uploading the job description and the AI and they have the perfect resume. So that discernment that you go through of really being able to interview and get a good read for who the person is going to fit is one of the most important things. So there's lots of tools that are coming. I'm going to go back with like John McMahon's comment. I'm not seeing a favorite yet. I'm seeing like shortcuts like that we're using for scorecards and for making some things happen. And I'm liking some of the video technology, but I'm really hoping that somebody that's brilliant kind of comes in and untoples LinkedIn recruiter, the most expensive license that they lock you in forever. And it's really not easy to search and weed through things. So hopefully we're going to have some technology come out. But yeah, the discipline of knowing people is a skill that really can't get automated. You can basically sift through people faster to kind of have a higher probability, but it's still going to be that conversation with the person to know if they're a fit.
- [52:30]
D
That's why I've always said that I never really trusted the resume anyway. One, it was never certified by a third party. People could always write what they wanted to write. You know, it's like those fancy brochures on the resort on some fancy island. You know, the pictures look great, the description's unbelievable. You get there and you're like, this place is a dump.
- [52:51]
C
Right?
- [52:52]
D
And resumes are no different. It's the same exact thing. And all you're saying is that resumes are going to look even better than they even do now.
- [52:59]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [53:00]
D
That's why you should take a resume when you see it. And if you think that the person has some. All you can really tell from a resume, you can't tell anything about the person. If you really think about it, you can't tell any of their characters. They can't tell how smart they are, can't have how driven they are, how curious they are. All those things that you talked about before, Marcy, all you can tell is the number of jobs they had and maybe a little bit of some sort of domain knowledge that they have. That's about it. The best thing you can do when you're interviewing is take that resume, turn it upside down and interview the person.
- [53:33]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [53:34]
D
Do they have the characteristics that you want? Okay, now turn the resume back over. But up until then I never really trusted resumes. I just don't like them.
- [53:43]
C
Yeah, I agree. I mean I feel like. And even references, they want their friend to get the job. Yeah, of course, you know, nobody really
- [53:52]
D
need me to be. You need me to be a director, VP or C level person. I could be that. Just call me.
- [53:58]
C
Yeah. So I feel like that's super important. And then the other thing I'm finding within recruiting is because it's so noisy, you know, in terms of emails that they're getting and you know you're getting hit from all over the place. You got to work that referral chain. So you're looking when you're having, whether it's a TA team internally or recruiters, you've got to have people that build rapport and trust that they get referrals.
- [54:20]
D
I think you're going to have stuff on both ends, you know, as the position as an example gets so good and they're just sending out so many emails and making so many pre programmed calls programmed by AI on the customer side. They're going to start having AI filters and filtering out all that stuff and all that spam, spam. All that's going to happen is spam is going to increase and its filters are going to get better. And it's no different in with these resumes. Here come all these resumes. And on the employer side you have to be able to have a really good filter to filter out the bad res the resumes.
- [54:52]
B
And I have a suggestion, filter. Now I'm a little biased because I've been talking about this for 20 years in what we do at Force Management. But for me the success profile is the center of the universe. It's that, you know, the competencies and success behaviors of what success looks like, evidence of what success looks like in the role. We just went through it with a major hire at Force Management. We went, we interviewed like 80 people, but it didn't take us months. They focused on the success profile and then that success profile created those conversations were bounced against that success profile. Candidates were bounced against that success profile, all the while looking for evidence. And that's been a game changer. So anybody that's out there recruiting, if you are not establishing a success, whether you're internal recruiting or external recruiting, if you're not establishing a success profile with the end user or the economic buyer of your solution or what have you, and then you are not evidence based saying you can't afford not to interview this person because of this and they're walking through the success profile. That I have to believe that's my expectation. Marci, little heads up. Marcy's doing some work with us and I know she's going to kill that for us. And that for me is just table stakes. And then one last thing on the references, because this just happened to be me. You're right. Nobody's going to give a bad reference. So you expect them to be very good references. And I like this, that's. But most people don't give references now. And I say, why don't you, why didn't you take references from my internal recruiting team or what have you, they'll say, oh, you know, they're only going to be great anyways, you're missing an opportunity. Because I just did this the other day and it works so good for me because we hired this person and it's, it's, it was really a point of opportunity for both of us. I always ask the same question. Hey, we like XYZ person also. We like them a lot. What is the one thing that you think I'll be able to help them with the most? We talked about what they do great and what, like, give me an answer, give me an idea of where you think I can help them the most as they've explained the job to you. And there's an old saying that says, words that are spoken from the heart enter the heart of all who hear them. And I get great answers from that. If you ask it authentically, they're like, okay, this is my buddy. I want that person to do well. You know, in this environment. They struggle in these areas. So if you could help them get off the dime in these areas and it's just been fantastic. So I don't think that changes with AI. I don't think that's as old as dirt. It's going to be around long after we're gone. Anything else, Marcy, on any of the recruiting stuff that you're seeing the other
- [57:55]
C
thing with recruiting is there's so many like minor things on the culture fit that get overlooked. Like some of it is there's cultural norms like you might be a little bit more independent, entrepreneurial, so you want somebody to sink or swim, swim. But the person's actual style is they love check ins. Like they're the type of person that they're independent, entrepreneurial and they're willing to do it. But their leadership, what they crave is they want constant check ins. So they are, they're the type of person when they join a company and you're like, just throw them out there, they're going to feel like they're struggling and they're like, I don't have access, you know, accessibility to this person or that person. So you want to kind of really get that nuance. Because how they start, we always like to say within their first 90 days they are either basically signing their name in blood because they know they're going to get that sale, they know they're going to be successful, or they're keeping their resume updated and they're still taking calls from recruiters. And it's simply because of that small difference. You know, some people, you know, it's funny, we have one of our tests on our AI tool that we use for our coaching tool. One test is just preferences. And so for instance for me, which I was surprised by the differences, I actually don't like a lot of check ins with people but I'm very personable so you would think I would. But when you see people that are kind of on my team or the opposite, they would think I'm being dismissive to them instead of like they would get lost. But if the opposite, if I had worked for them, I would think they're micromanaging me. You don't need to check in. So that, that subtle difference again, it's kind of like listening to the whisper of the company's culture. You got to know that because people still can do well in different environments, but they don't know how to adapt. They get confused by what's actually happening.
- [59:36]
B
And I think that point is so strong. It was around way before AI, it's going to be around way after AI as it relates to really taking a look at what somebody's doing in the job and how they do it and understanding how that person fits. That is, that's never going to change. So I love what you just said. We've struggled with that before in companies that I've been involved with and where we have an expectation that somebody will respond in the role a certain way. But we didn't test for it. We didn't look for evidence for it. We didn't actually do personality or competency testing for it. If you're not doing those things today, I just. You're really. I think you're just really. You're really missing the boat. This is a pre AI conversation, right?
- [60:32]
C
Well, I think that's kind of like concluding this kind of whole conversation is some of the best things that we've learned from, you know, decades ago are the things that are going to matter even more as long as you have the discipline to clear your calendar and bring that, bring the human work to life and bring that more often. So, like if AI creates like that 10x producer, so there's a 10x capability, but only the leader will determine if it's a company that delivers 10x results. So that's, that's, to me, is, you know, the most important way of looking at it. Just like get the culture going, like, own that mindset around AI for your team and then from there you can kind of keep figuring out how to keep 10xing and getting that inefficiency addressed.
- [61:16]
B
I love that. Johnny, wrap us up, man. What do you got over there?
- [61:21]
D
Right now I'm like, Marcy, I'm just more on the practical aspects of it and not getting caught up in anything. I don't think we've only seen really the tip of this iceberg, to use a cliche. There's going to be tools with really deep, deep domain expertise that are absolutely going to change the way things are done. And it's going to be tools that are built on the right side of history and tools that are built on the wrong side. There's only going to be two places that you're going to be. And the same thing for human beings, as Marcy said, the ones that are going to accept it and, and go with it and use everything part of it that they can use. And there's going to be the other people. Only going to be two groups.
- [62:05]
B
Well said, buddy. That is well, well said. Marcy, you're amazing. We're thankful that you continuously come on. Our audience loves you and remind us how we get a hold of you.
- [62:22]
C
I'm on LinkedIn. Pretty easy place there. Marcy Stout or our company website is the Revel companies dot com.
- [62:29]
B
Well done. Thank you for joining us again.
- [62:32]
C
Yeah, great to see you guys. Thank you.
- [62:34]
B
You're amazing.
- [62:35]
D
And thanks everyone for listening to another episode of the Revenue Builders Podcast.
- [62:44]
A
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.