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AI Superhumans in Sales with Amanda Kahlow
00:14:29
In today's minisode, AI pioneer and enterprise sales leader Amanda Kahlow shares why intent data as we know it is dying – and what replaces it.
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Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast with John McMahon and John Kaplan. In today's short episode, AI Pioneer and Enterprise sales leader Amanda Kahlo shares why intent data as we know it is dying and what replaces it. Amanda is the founder and CEO of One Mind. In this segment, she discusses how AI superhumans can operate inside live deals with access to every document and data point, and why the future of go to market may move towards agent to agent negotiation with humans stepping in only for that final mile. If you're a CRO rethinking your funnel, a sales leader questioning the future of that SDR role, or an operator trying to understand how AI fits into active pipeline management, this is a good one to listen to. Here we go.
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C
You know, I wrote a post recently that I Intent data is dead in some ways that I believe as we know it, right? So the world as we know it of doing research in a B2B marketplace world where you're going out and getting third party research and you're trying to figure out what products you want, that's just not happening anymore. And I do believe that whether it's through superhumans or others, that our web experience that we own on our domain will be a talking face of your company. So it will be AI that can represent your brand, can represent your products, can solution, can give the demo. It's archaic what we make people do. If you think about a website that has a hundred thousand pages on it, seriously, we make people search and try to find the answer to their questions. Right? That just is so counterintuitive to how humans operate. So we now, and we had to because there was no other way. And now there's another way. And the way is conversational. It's as simple as like, it's in the conversation, it's asking you why you're here, why did you show up today? Okay, you just came to learn. Great, let me help you learn. You want to get something done, let me help you get it done. You just signed up for the free trial and you can't get it working. Let me get that working. And oh, by the way, I'm going to try to upsell you to a paid contract, right? So meet the buyer where they are, make it easy, don't make them have to schedule. So one of the problems with humans is we have to schedule. We have time limitations that is like a massive limitation. We have capacity limitation, we have recall limitations, all that will go away. And when people realize that they can actually trust AI more than they can trust humans, which I think we're still crossing that chasm of trust. People still think, oh, it's going to try to sell me something and it's going to hallucinate. My favorite thing is when people talk about AI Hallucinating, I just look at them. I mean, do your sales reps hallucinate? And how often do they do it? And they do it nefariously to get the deal done. They know they're doing it to move the deal forward. As soon as a AI hallucinates once, you better be damn sure it's never going to make that mistake again.
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D
Exactly. Now, Amanda, it works as you said, when life cycle of inbound, right. Do I ever get it involved? If my sales reps are going to outbound and they're now engaged in a sales process, is there a way in which it works then?
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C
Yeah. So net new outbound, you can put it in the outbound. So think of it as like, I can send you a piece of content, a white paper, a webinar to sign up for at a specific point in time, or I can send you my superhuman and we can have a conversation. Let me bring this to life. Like, for example, we were selling to Cognizant a while back and I remember thinking, you know, they have these just these massive sales cycles, like these massive deals. They're not. It's not transactional at all, but they have all this great research and content. Well, what if you could just have a conversation about that content and apply it to their business in the most nuanced way? That's the art. That's what the superhuman can do. So you can put it in your outbound. But even. But what to your point about in sales cycle. So now a deal that's in flight, imagine putting it in your deal room. She has access to all of the doc, the ROI calculator, the business proposal. She has access to everything that's happening across that deal and your CRM and everywhere where that stage of the deal is in, where it's blocked. So now when she gets on the phone, gets on and somebody engages with her, she can say, oh, I see that Harry is blocking this because of abc. So I'm going to try to apply this tactic in conversation in a nuanced way in a way that humans can't even do. I mean, I know when I'm on sales calls right now, I'm, you know, starting to transition off of them, thankfully, because we're moving to a scale, a mode where I'm like actually told the sales team today, I Can't be on your calls anymore. I can't be on 20 calls.
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You're still going to be on calls. Just gonna be on bigger deals. That's all right.
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C
I just can't have reverse call as I was before. I don't think.
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You're not gonna be on calls.
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C
It was embarrassing. I knew nothing of their business. I could. I looked at the prep talk 30 seconds before because I'm late to the call, because I'm running over from the previous one and I can't keep up. And of course the reps are doing a better job with that. But we just. Even if I read the doc, I forget. Like, my memory is like a fishbowl. Like, I'm just like, I am going around the fishbowl as fast as I can and I'm doing the best I can. It's not that I don't have the best of intentions to have that information in my brain. And a swivel chair doesn't work like all of the AI companies that are building it over here. I can't talk to you and read this. Like, even my prep for this podcast today, I like to always over prepare for whatever I'm going to get into if I have time. I have some notes. Like, I'm like, oh, you're going to ask me about this book. These are the chapters of that book. There's no way I can look down at that piece of paper and talk to you guys. It's not going to work.
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A
One of the statements that you made is the buyer is going to be the same. So the buyer is going to be the same throughout the journey. And now we're starting to talk about complexity of solutions that might necessitate multiple buyers, which is probably 80 to 90% of our audience is they're going to. They're going out into environments with the reality that their. Their solutions are multi. Threaded. So where are we now in its ability to. And that's. And that's typically an outbound. It might start as an inbound. So do you have any to meet a buyer where they are? Customers might start. Somebody might start as in a user of technology and inbound to a company. Then there's going to be a need for an outbound mechanism. Walk us through kind of where you're at now and where you see it going. And I know I'm not going to hold you to the predictive side of it, but we're having some pretty bold conversations here. I just want to see where you think it's going.
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It Knows exactly where you are in the stage of that account. It knows all the different buyers in the. Now I don't think, I actually don't think we're in a world where buyers are the same. I actually think we're going to move to an agent to agent world as well. So the key in everything right now, it is human to agent, human to superhuman. I do believe we're going to move to a world where it's agent to agent. You have agent buyers and agent sellers that have to talk to each other and so.
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And that agent buyer is going to make a budget commitment on a sale.
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Absolutely. Maybe not money, but like that's.
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That was my ask.
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Oh, oh, oh, yeah. No, I mean, no. I don't know. I mean, maybe I haven't.
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Let's play that out though, man. It goes that far and there's no ROI or there is an ROI and somebody has to back up. We do all this work, okay, it's faster. But we get to the point where somebody needs to make a commitment of money to it. What, what's your thought on that? Is it going to back up from there?
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C
I think it's going to get to the point where it's going to say, I've done all this research. Here are all the players in the space, here's the cost, here's your needs, here's your business. This is all the, the nuances of your business. Because every buyer thinks that they're unique and in some worlds they are right? So it looks at the nuances of their business and the agent comes back and says, this is what I recommend after having all this information and this is why. And these are the trade offs. And I think there will be the final mile. I do think there's going to be a final mile with most jobs and roles and functions.
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A
Define that. You talk about that a lot. Define that.
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Yeah. So I think there is like even in the sale, that's where I think the final mile today the AE is the last one. It's that there is a new. Somebody does have to sign off on it today. I don't think I can get my head around that not being there. But I actually think somebody else smarter than me is thinking about how to make that go away. Where humans don't have to be in the loop. But I think there is a, like, okay, I'm going to check off like, yes, this is the right decision. And all these logic trees made sense. You just presented the case, you made it super easy for me. You presented in a way that I want to consume it, whether it be like in a podcast format or you presented in a business case or whatever it is. So I do think there will still be like the nuance of the human needing to. But the human is going to be checking off across multiple things. Like are even in go to market, you're not going to have sales, marketing, customer success. You're going to go to market and the CRO will truly be the CRO. I think one of the things like a lot of CROs right now are really just ahead of sales. Like let's be honest, they don't run customer success and they don't run marketing. But we get like leveled in titles and they need the title and so there they have the CRO title. And so I think, I think it will actually be a revenue generating role that owns the full life cycle of the customer journey.
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We could actually start that now without AI. No, I'm serious. The burden of all of those roles that you just said and the inability to make decisions inside of a company in a go to market sense, I mean I don't want to be damning but it's, I mean that's half the problem.
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C
Well, and then the other half. The problem is everybody. I think a lot of things people aren't getting right with AI today and I'm doing this as well. Like I do want all of my employees to be building agents and know how to use AI and I lean into the fact that I want them to replace themselves but it has to be top down that bottoms up and asking people to go and like figure out how to do the task that you're doing today and figuring it out for themselves versus at the C level saying this is what we're going to do. And I have to change systems and processes and throw away my old playbooks. It is fucking scary to throw away your old playbooks and to think that the metrics that I'm going to walk into by more meeting are not what we're looking at before. Like we need to be thinking about ARR per employee. We need to be thinking about our, the costs in this and that, what that spread looks like and the lifetime value of the customer and who's responsible for that lifetime value. Not just responsible for revenue and not just responsible for customer success. And how do we measure that across the organization. I think all those things are going to shift, but that it takes bravery and it takes. And I think the people who lean into it first right now are the ones that are going to have first mover advantage. And that's going to, they're going to win. Yeah.
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I want to just, I highlight something that I really, really respect that you do. You're talking about the top down, but you're also encouraging people from the bottom up. I'd like you to make a statement to the audience that you and, and you really do it in your company. Figure out ways to automate what you do and create opportunities, additional opportunities for you in the company. You put your money where your mouth is. Can you speak about that? Because I think it's outstanding.
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C
I mean I encourage people to replace themselves and their job every day. Every day. And if you do, I will find you another seat at this company. And I haven't gotten approval yet from our board, but I would like to get to the place where there's something created where we can forward vest your equity if you fully replace your job. Meaning that job had that equity assigned to it. Now let's put you on a new salary and a new equity package. That to me makes a brilliant sense. Right, because now I've brought my cogs down like I and I'm putting you into another role. For example, I had, I have somebody who was our solutions engineer. His job used to be to join the calls with our customers. He doesn't do that anymore. We don't need that. Our AI, our superhuman joins the calls. So what, his job now is to train the superhuman, collect the information, make sure we're getting it from all the different places. And he's maintaining the brain of the superhuman that is doing his job. So it is a very different job. He's not forward facing, he's not customer facing anymore. He is actually building the brain that is replacing himself and he loves it.
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And then he's like an example of a next door neighbor that was a data scientist that I read somewhere. Now he works in the company.
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Yeah, he's not at the company anymore. But yes, he was a data scientist and he came to us and then we turned him into a prompt engineer and he's still doing that onto his next company. And they said, look, I can't find a job as a data scientist. What should I do? And I was like, find a new career. Like this is not that job doesn't exist anymore. And so we were early when he came on. So no negativity. He was amazing. But he came on and we taught him how to do prompt engineering.
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And now that's what he does for a living.
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That's what he does. Like now he's moved into a new role. So I think that's why I say, like, yes, it sounds harsh that we're going to be replacing all these jobs and that the job as you know it today is gone. Like, it is gone sooner than you know it. But the worst thing that we can do for people is not to be honest with them. Like, this is happening. Like it or not, no matter what any of us say, if I build it, somebody, if I don't build it, somebody else is going to. It's happening.
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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 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.