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Startup Stories - Mixergy
#2305 I earned $600k when AI replaced my managers
Chandler Bolt of Selfpublishing.com
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Transcript26 lines
- [00:00]
A
I run an eight figure a year company and we just added half a million dollars in sales to self publishing.com last month. And it's all because of this tool that I'm about to show you. Look at this. You can actually see individual salespeople getting better. This is live, literally as we speak. There's calls coming in here. We can see the team as a whole. It's pretty crazy. We're replacing managers at the company with AI, starting with sales management. People watch this video. They're going to add a bunch of revenue to their business.
- [00:29]
B
Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. Chandler, this hub is what you all built using lovable. What am I looking at over here?
- [00:37]
A
So this is pretty crazy. So this is if you think about what does a sales manager do. They give good feedback to sales reps based on individual calls. What's the problem with that though? They can only review a couple calls per week, maybe per rep. Well, now we have every sales call that happens in the business being automatically graded that based on this rubric we got quoted. I want to say it was 12 grand to build it and six grand a month to maintain it. We built this in less than a month ourselves using the prompts I'm about to show.
- [01:11]
B
Unlovable and lovable is such an easy tool. I mean, we're going to show the screen. It's so babyish that I hadn't even showed it. Let's click in one of them. Tab number two. You've got us clicking into like one person.
- [01:21]
A
So this is actually Matt on our team. The prospect's name is here. We've got, you know, this was an 83 out of a hundred. This is a great call. And so if you think about what makes a good sales call, this might be different for your business. We've got the whole skill and rubric and everything on how you can actually create this for yourself. But for us, this is kind of what it looks like. So do you have a good first two minutes? Well, Matt had a nine out of ten. Framing an expectation setting for the call. This was a 6 out of 10. Incitement and enthusiasm, 9 out of 10. And it keeps going. You can see throughout the whole call because it's easy to just say did you make the sale or not? And so if you made the sale, it was a good call, if you didn't, it was a bad call. No, everybody who's in sales know that that's not how it works. You need the full kind of sandwich here. So this grades everything what's this down here? Here's the. So this is the summary. He opened with a beautiful morning here in Nashville, riffed on Colorado, blah, blah, blah. It was fun and personal, not transactional.
- [02:23]
B
Do you know what they could have done better based on this? And we're going to talk about how people can build.
- [02:26]
A
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And so it says right here at the end. So it says, hey, to reach an 8, Matthew would add a phrase like, and if all that makes sense, we can go ahead and get you started and schedule with a coach at the end of our call today, directly into the opening frame.
- [02:39]
B
Dude, this is way better than a sales manager. I mean, the details, less personal.
- [02:45]
A
All of this is actually in HubSpot in our CRM, but it's just pulling it in in a way that's far more helpful for our team.
- [02:53]
B
Okay.
- [02:55]
A
So it's kind of becoming more and more of a hub for sales success. It started as, oh, how do we just give them feedback on calls? Now we're saying, oh, if we can get them living in this, well, then what's all the things that they need to do to do their job well? Well, obviously they need to process orders, so we've got everything linked up in here for them. They probably want to know what the script is so that they can then go look at the actual script itself. Okay, perfect. They can click into this, use it, follow along with it. So this becomes really, really helpful for them.
- [03:28]
B
Okay. And speaking of, this is something that wasn't there last time you and I talked, which was we're recording on Monday. It was Friday that we talked, so this wasn't there on Friday. It's in lovable. Can we see that last tab that you have open in Lovable to just show how you asked it? This is lovable for people who aren't familiar with it. On the left is what you ask for. On the right is the finished. And there's a prompt. I'll read it, add a new page to the hub, add slash, and then has a URL that lets the team view scripts and rubrics for every call type and lets owners and scope managers edit them with the draft, et cetera. Okay, so that's all you did, and then you ended up with this page. Beautiful. This is the beauty, by the way, of lovable.
- [04:08]
A
It really is. And literally just this morning, you know, my ops manager who's building all this, he shipped this and he said to the team, hey, everybody was DMing him, like, hey, how am I being graded? How can I Change this. I think the grading needs to be improved. Whatever else now they can just go in directly and see it and update it. So now, which I think this is the problem that a lot of people probably watching this video or listening to this have is you've got one builder in your organization and maybe zero builders and but one if you're lucky in a lot of companies and maybe that one person's you. So then there's just continuously a bottleneck. So we're saying, hey, how do we get people in the game making this better? And that's why it's starting to iterate and get better so quickly.
- [04:58]
B
Okay, we're not going to have you scroll through it because it's some personal data in but you will show this doc and the prompt that we'll give people if they want to study their best sales calls and, and compare them to your self publishing.com sales calls to figure out how they can improve. But this is the prompt and you guys made it look nicer here. So where do managers fit in the future of companies now that we all have AI?
- [05:23]
A
Yeah. So we've all seen the headlines, you know, whether it's Jack Dorsey or whoever else, that management is going to be eliminated using AI. And I think you hear that and you think, wow, yeah, in some distant massive company land where they have thousands of employees, that probably makes sense for me. But that doesn't really doesn't make sense to me as a small business guy. But I started thinking about this and I truly believe this is going to happen at any size company and it's going to be great for the business, it's going to be great for your customers and it's going to be great for people at the end of the day. And so we're replacing all of our managers. And so if you think about what is management? Well, management is sameness. Can you just hold people accountable to a standard of, or in this case the rubric, the script. Give them feedback. It's quality control. Leadership is uniqueness. So if we think about, about automating management, then what? Basically what you do, and I did this with AI as well, is you list out all your leaders and managers in your organization. You get clear on what they do that drives value. Maybe you have job scorecards, maybe you prompt this with AI. You order those things based on revenue and then you start using AI to get quick wins. And so what you just saw is an example of that where we said, okay, a sales manager, what do they do? They review calls, they recruit great Reps, you know, it's, it's. They coach people. So then, well, sales, call review and let's just stop right there for a second and say call review. If you were in a call heavy business, which a lot of people, if you're in the service business, you are. You've got sales calls, you've got, you've got customer calls, you've got business development. I mean, you've got calls, calls, calls happening all over the place. And for us, coaching calls as we coach authors through the process. So if you build it once, you can now all of a sudden knock out all of this management layer. And I'm talking about, for us, it's five plus people doing five to 20 hours a week of call reviews and quality control, which might sound insane to people, but. But now our people are getting better. We're building this out and we're replacing this component by component. And I mean, I can go into more of what this looks like, but that's kind of the end thesis of we're going to be able to do that and it's going to provide better results for our customers, better coaching for our employees, and better outcomes for the business.
- [07:47]
B
Okay, I can see how it works in sales a little bit, but I have a question about it. I can see how it works with working with your authors. Right? You don't need a manager who's going to listen to the sale, to the conversations with, with your authors. You can just have software watch what's going on and improve them just like you did for the sales calls. What I don't understand though, is the component that you mentioned earlier. A salesperson struggles with telling a story. Shouldn't a manager then be the person who goes and talks to them and says, look, I know you're looking at the same stats I am. You're clearly not doing as well with storytelling. I. Let's work on it together. Isn't that still what a manager does? Or how do you replace that?
- [08:26]
A
I think yes and no. I think the management is the sameness. So, I mean, that's the cool thing about this hub, right? Is you saw that where it said, hey, you're doing not a great job selling with stories. Well, here's what you can do. And it'll literally coach this, which by the way, we built this out as well, which was. We call it the librarian. So, you know, We've published over 7,000 books over the last decade. So an issue that we started, kept running into is a salesperson would be on a call and they would say, oh, I need a good story that resonates specifically to this person. And then we had, you know, a handful of them cataloged and if they could look them up real quick, you know, maybe they could find it or if they had a memory of it, but it was really just this handful of stories. And what they would do is they'd say, hey coaches, can you tell me about this? Nobody would get back, right? Like it just, you're live on the call, you need it right away. And so now what we just built into it is in Slack they just say ibrarian and they name the category and it will literally in the thread link the top five to 10 books that we've published in that category. How many reviews do they have? What's the average number of reviews? So all of this is repetitive. Now to get back to your question though, Andrew, what I think what you're saying is leadership, which is the soft skills. I don't think AI is going to, I put this down at the bottom. The punchline is that AI will eliminate all layers or sorry, all managers, but not leaders or individual contributors for now because the leader is going to give the encouragement. The leader is going to show up to the one on one and yeah, has. Is armed with the facts and the data and whatever else, but can personalize it to the human.
- [10:15]
B
So are you just renaming the manager job as leader and you're giving them more responsibility?
- [10:22]
A
I don't think so because I think I've always like this shows up in my company. I don't know about yours or other people's, but in some places I have really good managers that don't know how to lead and so their teams flounder and, and in other cases I have really good leaders that don't, aren't good at the management piece and so the potential of their teams is capped. So this allows me to say, hey, good leader, here's an AI manager alongside you now. Go be personable, go encourage people, go recruit, go do all the things that are really important that's way harder if not impossible at this point for AI to do. And then we're going to automate all the rote annoying stuff that just ends up slipping or you know, some people is just going to eliminate that manager altogether. And we'll just say, all right, what do you want to go back to being an individual contributor and doing the thing for the client and then that's better for the client and that's better for the business and it's better for them because it cuts out all of this. It's, at the end of the day, it's waste.
- [11:32]
B
So how much time would you say that a sales manager spent listening to calls, checking in on why a call didn't work, that kind of a thing in the past? What percentage?
- [11:43]
A
Yeah, I'd say it's roughly five to 15 hours a week. And I've got two of those sales managers in the organization. So this is automatically saving 10 to 30 hours a week. But even more importantly than that, if you, it's doing it, it's doing 40 plus. You can even do this in 40 hours a week. It's doing the job of like if you just had a dedicated call reviewer, it's doing that job and giving better feedback to the rep. So that's what gets me so excited because it's better for our people and it's better for our customers.
- [12:16]
B
Okay, so now it's on the manager to say I'm going to look at the same data as a salesperson and see if I could level them up. If I could level them up by helping them tell better stories, by hanging out with them so that I could find the stories that they might want, share by giving them a little bit more motivation, push, whatever, that person then will continue to lead a group of people. If they can't do that, if what they were really good at is looking at a chart of requirements and seeing who's fulfilling each one of these requirements, those people are either going to lead the company or go to being individual contributors, meaning they're going to start to make sales calls. In this case, that's where you see the company going.
- [12:53]
A
That is. And so that's kind of where I put down here like basically once this is complete, because we're still very much early days of building out the whole AI management layer, but we're going one step at a time. Once that's complete, well then obviously you need someone to maintain and improve the systems and then you can eliminate or repurpose your managers. Now in a lot of cases you'll most likely be eliminating that layer altogether and only repurpose if they can do one of these three things which adds value to the company. So if they can build more AI stuff to grow the company faster, if they can drive high level strategy that improves results, or if they can pivot back into being an individual contributor. So if they can't do one of those three things, their role is going to be completely eliminated. But if they can, then great, that adds more value to the company and to our customers.
- [13:44]
B
It sounded scary when you first brought it up. And I kept telling you, Chandlers, there's got to be a way for you to not come across as a jerk as we as we talk about getting rid of managers.
- [13:53]
A
And you said, no, that's not the issue.
- [13:57]
B
You kept saying, no, Andrew, that's not the issue. This is actually good. I get it now. It's really giving more power to people to do their work better and to not spend time in that annoying stuff like going through skills called transcripts and so on. All right. You saw how a founder is replacing managers with AI. Let me show you another founder who's merging both AI, AI agents and employees so tightly that it's almost difficult to tell. It is difficult to tell who's an agent, who's an employee, but it makes the company so effective. Watch that story next.