The Exchanges

Q And I want, I've got a bunch of stuff I want to talk about, but when you said mandate for your team, cause this is a question we got even to Yaman yesterday. What does that mean? How do you show the team the path forward for AI and sales?

A It has to start with you as a leader. I'm in these tools constantly. I'm definitely the most well-versed in this area of the business. And I think I find a genuine curiosity. I'm interested in it. And also like I, I'm, I have such high conviction that this is going to be the most important thing that we can figure out in the next, uh, 12 to 24 months. And so anything that I'm doing, I'm putting into our leadership channels, my personal Clay workflows or the ChatGPT projects like that I use individually for me as a leader. And I take a lot of demos. I talked to a lot of founders. I listened to a lot of content to try to stay on the cutting edge with it, because like you said, it's changed radically in. Yeah. And the risk reward is so big that it takes up a lot of my mind share.

AI assessment note: “It has to start with you as a leader. I'm in these tools constantly.”

Q to do it out of the gate. So if it's, I hear you, you're the best of the best, but the next CRO I interview, I'm going to ask, how are you going to manage a team that's 25% AI and 75%? And if his answer is, I'm going to go, I'm going to find an AI guru, I think I'm going to tell the CEO not to hire him.

A That's a fair point. Yeah. And maybe it's semantics. There's a bunch of my personal workflows that are all, and we're saying anything AI is an agent now. I have a different definition of agent, but we don't need to get into. But yeah, a lot of my job is done through AI. So am I managing agents today? Sure, you could call it that. But I think the point remains, a lot of your job is going to be through AI workflows and agentic services and managing all of these tools. A lot of my job is managing the system and infrastructure of our business anyways. And so the same thing called by another name, I think the point is you need to be a highly systems engineering focused CRO to survive over the next two to five to 10 years. Yeah. If you don't have the acumen to be able to understand how customer journey connects to systems and infrastructure and connects to the rep process, And how this whole orchestration works, you will greatly struggle because you can't win on. Oh, I'm a great sales guy and I'm a good manager and people like me that I'm a good manager.

AI assessment note: “you need to be a highly systems engineering focused CRO to survive”

Q mid-size, I've got five restaurants, I'm bigger. It's just this owner's just as important to me. It's a big fucking deal. So why do I have to be segregated to some weird part? It's the same. Why shouldn't I have, why shouldn't all the experience be fluent? Whether I self-serve a little help, a lot of help. And so they may blur all these lines between the different categories, right?

A I think so. Yeah, I'm, I'm very anti-attribution in general. Like, I think we get into problems where we say, oh, this is a marketing-attributed sourced deal versus a sales-attributed one. You end up making local maxima decisions as opposed to saying, all right, how do we maximize this entire system? Yeah. And the credit, let's not worry as much about the credit. And I think we're going to run into this because you'll have a growth team that reports into product, That's doing all the AI stuff that's taking sales as deals. I've, a CRO said this to me, like, a couple days ago. They were frustrated by it. I was like, well, like, what's your job here? Is it to hit your sales number, or is it to build enterprise value? So you should only be here if you're really doing this for a significant equity outcome, and so trying to get people's headspace around this, like, more holistic understanding of building a business is, I think, going to be really important, because you're going to see this. You're going to see these silly silos, where it's broken, and things don't Aren't communicated across and we're trying to avoid that.

AI assessment note: “I think so. Yeah, I'm, I'm very anti-attribution in general.”

Q So how does that, how do you automate the follow-up so it's great?

A I have a great RevOps leader who is very fluent in sales and the actual go-to-market fundamentals. I think I see this mistake where you have RevOps people investigating tools and then applying them, but then there's no thought of, okay, how does this get to a rep? How do they follow up? How does the manager then look at what's going on? And so I'm in the process of building a What I call the management intelligence layer, which is what is the always on layer for the manager to understand what's happening on a rep by rep basis and get prompted when things are either off base or off track and so that they can nudge the rep back into track back onto what they should be doing. And so you have to think through, okay, there's AI tools, but then there's also how does the, how does the calendar of the manager look and how does that integrate with What they're trying to achieve. And so we, we spent eight weeks at the beginning of the year redeploying what I call my like core operating methodology. And so we wiped every single meeting off of the calendar, started from a zero base and said, okay, what are the most important activities? Coaching is number one.

AI assessment note: “building a What I call the management intelligence layer”