AI Innovation

AI has the potential to revolutionize sales management by providing insights from aggregated conversations, freeing up time for managers to focus on coaching and engaging with their teams more effectively.
Chris Beall and Helen Fanucci dive deeper into the evolving world of sales management in the era of AI. They explore how artificial intelligence can revolutionize coaching strategies and provide valuable insights from countless sales conversations. Helen emphasizes that "it's not enough to just give the sellers goals. The managers have to continue to be engaged to get the outcomes expected." Chris and Helen discuss the potential for AI to give managers back time to do their "real job" - identifying and executing on coaching opportunities. They touch on the emotional challenges of leadership, with Chris noting that "the higher up you go in an organization, the more you're emotionally challenged every day." This episode offers a forward-thinking look at how AI can empower sales leaders to focus on what truly matters: developing their teams and driving results in an increasingly complex business landscape. Listen to this episode: AI-Powered Coaching: The Future of Sales Management.
Listen to the first part of this conversation.
Listen to all episodes with Helen Fanucci as their guest.
Links from this episode:
Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell

In this episode, Chris Beall welcomes back Helen Fanucci, founder and CEO of Pipeline Power, to explore the evolving world of sales management and AI-driven insights. Helen shares a startling statistic: "17% of the reps deliver 81% of the revenue," setting the stage for a deep dive into boosting team performance. The conversation reveals how AI, particularly ChatGPT, can revolutionize sales conversation analysis, offering quick and insightful skills assessments. Chris and Helen emphasize the importance of "getting messy with data" and how AI empowers sales managers to focus on critical aspects of their role. They discuss the shift from traditional quota-chasing to strategic market share capture, highlighting the value of early relationship-building in the sales process. This episode offers CEOs and sales leaders practical strategies to leverage AI and data for more effective sales management and market dominance.
Links from this episode:
Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell

In this next episode of our Mental Models series, Chris tackles two critical aspects of modern sales strategy. He begins by examining the 'do nothing' competitor - often your most formidable adversary. Chris uses vivid analogies to illustrate why prospects cling to the status quo, invoking the familiar and ominous warning that 'Winter is Coming.' He then explains how to position your solution as a complementary, hybrid approach rather than a disruptive replacement.
Chris then explores how AI tools, particularly ChatGPT, revolutionize sales operations. He shares practical, step-by-step techniques for using AI to expand your target lists, refine your sales scripts, and challenge your existing mental models. Drawing from his daily use of ChatGPT, Chris offers insights on staying ahead of the curve and avoiding mental ruts.
Throughout the episode, Chris examines the balance between embracing new technologies and respecting established business practices, all while focusing on improving your sales effectiveness in an ever-evolving market landscape. Join him for this episode, "Breaking the Spell of 'Do Nothing': AI Tools for the Modern Sales Warrior."
Links from this episode:
RightBound
5 Sentences That Will Change Your Life
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell
 

In this solo episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall explores the potential of AI-powered data analysis using ChatGPT. Chris demonstrates how this cutting-edge technology can uncover valuable insights from complex sales data in a matter of minutes, a process that would typically take a human analyst days or even weeks. By utilizing ChatGPT's Data Analyst feature and uploading data from ConnectAndSell, he's able to quickly examine the correlations between sales reps' skills and key business outcomes, Chris showcases how AI can help identify the most critical factors influencing pipeline generation and financial success. This eye-opening episode is a must-listen for CEOs, CROs, and CSOs looking to leverage the power of AI to make data-driven decisions and optimize their sales strategies. Join Chris as he delves into the future of sales analytics, revealing surprising findings that could revolutionize your approach to sales training and coaching. Join us for this episode, "Your New Data Analyst BFF Uncovers Surprising Sales Insights.
Key points and timestamps from the episode:
(00:01:37) Chris Beall introduces the topic of using ChatGPT to analyze sales data and uncover insights.(00:02:39) Chris shares his experience working with ChatGPT to write a book summarizing Market Dominance Guys podcasts in just two days.(00:04:20) Chris discusses using ChatGPT for a pricing exercise at ConnectAndSell, balancing customer ROI and company profit.(00:04:55) Chris explains his plan to use ChatGPT to analyze the correlation between reps' skills and business outcomes.(00:07:37) Chris walks through the process of uploading data to ChatGPT and having the AI analyze the columns and data structure.(00:08:34) ChatGPT identifies key columns relevant to the analysis, including activity metrics, conversion rates, and skill scores.(00:19:49) The correlation matrix reveals that asking for the meeting has the strongest correlation with positive outcomes, while professionalism has a surprisingly low correlation.
Keep listening for the analysis results:
The regression analysis shows that 24.1% of the variability in direct amounts is explained by the combined skill metrics.
The breakthrough score has a significant negative coefficient, suggesting that higher breakthrough scores might be associated with lower direct amounts.
Conclusion:
Chris emphasizes the value of using AI for rapid, unbiased data analysis to gain insights and make data-driven decisions in sales.
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
 
[00:00:00] Susan Finch: Welcome to another session with the Market Dominance Guys, a program exploring all the high stakes speed bumps and off ramps of driving to the top of your market with our host Chris Beall from ConnectAndSell and Corey Frank from Branch49.[00:00:20] 
[00:00:23] Susan Finch: In this solo episode of Market Dominance Guys, Chris Beall explores the potential of AI powered data analysis using ChatGPT. Chris demonstrates how this cutting edge technology can uncover valuable insights from complex sales data in a matter of minutes, a process that [00:00:40] would normally take a human analyst days or even weeks.
[00:00:43] Susan Finch: By utilizing ChatGPT's Data Analyst feature and uploading data from ConnectAndSell, he's able to quickly examine the correlations between sales rep skills and key business outcomes. Chris showcases how AI can help identify the most critical factors influencing [00:01:00] pipeline generation. and Financial Success.
[00:01:02] Susan Finch: This eye opening episode is a must listen for CEOs, CROs, and CSOs looking to leverage the power of AI to make data driven decisions and optimize their sales strategies. Join Chris as he delves into the future of sales analytics by uploading his own data and [00:01:20] feeding in complex prompts. This reveals the surprising findings that could revolutionize your approach to sales training and coaching.
[00:01:27] Susan Finch: Join us for this episode, your new data analyst BFF uncovers surprising sales insights.
[00:01:38] Chris Beall: Hey everybody, Chris Beall [00:01:40] here with another episode of Market Dominant Skies. My co host Corey Frank is actually in Armenia right now. And while technically I'm sure it's possible for us to co-host Market Dominant Skies Armenia and Southern Arizona at the same time. Well, let's let [00:02:00] him be. It's getting pretty late there.
[00:02:01] Chris Beall: It's about 2. 35 in the afternoon here in Arizona. Intuitively, I know that's got to be very, very late in Armenia. So I want to try something today and let's see if it works. It could be a little bit tricky, because it could require following a fair amount of verbal input from [00:02:20] me, I guess output, input to you, for something that's a little bit complicated.
[00:02:24] Chris Beall: But here's what I want to look at. I want to look at an example, maybe inspirational, maybe more step by step, you can use it in some way or another. to an example of how to use ChatGPT in [00:02:40] particularly to analyze some information that you might have and point the way forward, maybe give you some surprises.
[00:02:48] Chris Beall: So I've been doing a fair amount of work with ChatGPT since it came out, at least since I was introduced to it. By a couple of smart young people in the backseat of a car coming back from Whistler, [00:03:00] and they were using it to do something that was kind of surprising to me, but made a lot of sense. Once I understood it better, that was to write a yearly family letter and the results were great, but it was the process that really intrigued me.
[00:03:14] Chris Beall: So I decided to learn a little more about it, ended up working with ChatGPT, so to [00:03:20] speak, to write a book that summarized a bunch of market dominance guys podcasts, and I wanted to see, could you do that in a couple of days? The book wasn't great. It never got any human editing, but it was usable. You could read it and you could get something out of it.
[00:03:38] Chris Beall: And two days is pretty [00:03:40] short for a book. Half a year, a year, a year and a half, two years is pretty common. So I thought that's really interesting. And it was very straightforward. As I proceeded through 2023, more and more taking time with ChatGPT to see what I could understand, [00:04:00] uh, building some scoring capabilities for reps skills on cold calling as part of that process.
[00:04:07] Chris Beall: I thought, well, let's, let's just see how far we can go with this. And at one point I did a pretty. Substantial pricing exercise for the products here at ConnectAndSell, trying to balance the customer's [00:04:20] return on investment with ConnectAndSell's own profit on any given deal, at any given price point, given structure.
[00:04:28] Chris Beall: And what surprised me was that it was a better analyst than any human analyst I'd ever worked with, part of which was, it was just comfortable. There's something about asking a bot to do [00:04:40] something for you that has both an impersonal quality, but kind of gives you a feeling of, I'm in control of this.
[00:04:46] Chris Beall: There aren't going to be a lot of, yeah, but I'm not going to deal with a whole bunch of bias. It's going to make mistakes. I'm going to have to pay attention, but not a bad experience at all. In fact, a very, very good experience. So I thought, [00:05:00] Hey, there's a lot of things we all believe that might be subject to analysis.
[00:05:05] Chris Beall: And one of them is that RepSkill in conversations is correlated with outcomes, business outcomes. So I thought I'd take a skills analysis done by a GPT 4 model using a skills [00:05:20] rubric itself written by a. GPT 4 model that was provided originally with an input of about one hour of a detailed description by an expert of exactly what needs to happen in a cold call, second by second by second, and what skills need to be demonstrated.
[00:05:39] Chris Beall: So the [00:05:40] rubric was good. It's kind of long. It describes for each one of the skills that it invented, by the way. It describes what happened at sort of a zero to one point level, you know, two to three and so forth. And it was a 10 point scale. And so just ran that against a whole bunch of data that we [00:06:00] happen to have about our own reps.
[00:06:02] Chris Beall: And pretty much just took the transcripts of all their conversations they had for a few weeks, put them together in, uh, in a form that the GPT. system or the GPT model could digest, apply these skills rubrics to it [00:06:20] and basically score all the reps one week at a time on these different skills. So that was something that was fairly straightforward to do, but it required a lot of, I'll call it kind of mechanics, you know, grabbing a hold of the recordings and turning them into transcripts and making pipelines of [00:06:40] data that went to processes that did X, Y, and Z.
[00:06:43] Chris Beall: But once I had it, I thought, you know, I wonder, we kind of assume that these skills mean something with regard to outcomes. Why don't I take a look? So here's an analysis that was done by the ChatGPT [00:07:00] data analyst, which is one of the kinds of flavors of ChatGPT that you can get nowadays. And I'll actually read through it and tell you how long it took.
[00:07:11] Chris Beall: So this entire process. It took about 12 minutes end to end once I had all the skills in an [00:07:20] Excel file. And here is my initial prompt. I said, let's analyze a collection of weekly results of the ConnectAndSell sales team's cold calls. I will upload an Excel file and walk you through what the columns mean.
[00:07:33] Chris Beall: And we can then conduct a regression analysis to understand the impact of each rep's skills on [00:07:40] three business outcomes. Meeting set per prospecting hour, meeting set per week, and amount of new sales pipeline influenced directly or indirectly by those reps. Now one thing I like about ChatGPT, I don't know, I feel a little foolish liking this, but, ChatGPT.
[00:07:55] Chris Beall: com Our emotions count is it comes back [00:08:00] usually with some encouragement. So it says, that's, that sounds like a great plan. Please go ahead and upload the Excel file. And we can start by reviewing the columns and the data. Once I understand the data set, we can proceed with the regression analysis to examine the effects of the rep skills on the specified business outcomes.
[00:08:18] Chris Beall: So I upload away. [00:08:20] And the data analyst comes back and says, thank you for uploading the file. By the way, no analyst has ever thanked me for anything before. So this is great. Let's start by loading the data so I can understand its structure and contents. I'll check the first few rows and provide a summary of the columns.
[00:08:35] Chris Beall: The dataset contains a detailed breakdown of weekly results from sales [00:08:40] representatives activities. Here are some of the key columns that might be relevant for our analysis. And then it lists the columns. The rep name. The week start date and week end date, the dials, connects and conversations, the number of meetings, the total session time, total talk time, total wait time, total wrap time.[00:09:00] 
[00:09:00] Chris Beall: Those are relevant in ConnectAndSell LAN. Session time is how long we're using the system to call people. Talk time is obviously talk time. Wait time is the time between when you push a button and get a conversation. And wrap time is the time you spend wrapping up, taking notes, And setting next steps and [00:09:20] formulating your teleprompter for your next conversation.
[00:09:23] Chris Beall: So then it says conversion percentage, conversion rates from dials to meetings and from conversations to meetings. Scores. There was a greeting score, an opener, breakthrough, a meeting score, an objections score, [00:09:40] and a score for assertiveness, professionalism. And there was also an overall score, which was.
[00:09:45] Chris Beall: Actually weighted based on the number of conversations that got the subscores. So then it says there are also more complex fields like direct amount by stage and positive amount by stage, which seem to indicate financial [00:10:00] metrics related to sales pipeline stages. I'll stop reading here and just say that was pretty good.
[00:10:07] Chris Beall: It got everything right, including the financial metrics. And I'll explain these financial metrics here in just a moment. Since we're interested in regression analysis, it goes on to understand the impact of rep [00:10:20] skills on business outcomes. We should identify which specific metrics and scores will be most relevant to use as independent variables, predictors, and dependent variables, outcomes.
[00:10:31] Chris Beall: Please guide me on how you would like to proceed. Specifically, which outcomes and variables we should focus on for the analysis. Now, that was a [00:10:40] fair amount of output for a fairly small amount of input, and it sort of nailed everything. These financial metrics, by the way, are from an attribution report that we have in ConnectAndSell that looks at opportunities by stage, and opportunities [00:11:00] by how they were influenced.
[00:11:01] Chris Beall: So some opportunities came about after a meeting was scheduled. Some after a positive conversation, that was the positive amount by stage, and some after any old conversation, and that's called possible amount by stage. So all of this data is in the spreadsheet. It's a very, very wide [00:11:20] spreadsheet, and it has a lot more columns in it that talk about things like.
[00:11:24] Chris Beall: Which objections were the most common? How were those objections handled? And also, what was the rationale for each score? But I wanted to stick to the numbers here. So now I'm about, what, maybe 2 3 minutes into this entire process. I get this [00:11:40] set of analyses and guesses as to what the columns are. And they look pretty good.
[00:11:45] Chris Beall: So I said, well, let's take a look at the columns with Amount in their name. And it said the columns in the dataset related to Amount are DirectAmount, Direct financial outcome associated with activities. This means meetings, by the way. Positive [00:12:00] amount. These are associated with positive activities. Now, GPT, the ChatGPT got that wrong.
[00:12:08] Chris Beall: It said positive financial outcome. It actually was intended to mean is financial outcome from positive conversations or preceded by positive conversations. But [00:12:20] is good enough for this purpose. I didn't need to correct it. And then there's a possible amount, which is the same thing, but it's possible attribution, possible influence.
[00:12:29] Chris Beall: And then it went on to say these amounts are also broken down by sales pipeline stage. So we could look at every stage and look at, say, the closed one only, or look at [00:12:40] contract through the closed one, or whatever it happens to be. Then it goes on to say these stage specific columns likely provide a more detailed breakdown of financial outcomes according to different stages in the sales process.
[00:12:51] Chris Beall: Given this information. It says, by the way, this is the ChatGPT analyst. Given this information, we could analyze how [00:13:00] these financial metrics are influenced by various factors, such as the number of dials, connects, conversations, and different score metrics of the sales reps. Would you like to explore any specific relationships between these financial outcomes and other metrics in the data set?
[00:13:16] Chris Beall: And I said, we will focus on [00:13:20] direct amount. As the financial outcome of interest. So that means a meeting has to be set. Well, it's really not shocking that we're gonna find a high correlation of direct amount to guess what meetings that are set. It won't be a hundred percent. 'cause not every meeting set is actually a meeting attended, and nor is [00:13:40] an opportunity created for every meeting set, although in our way of doing business at ConnectAndSell.
[00:13:45] Chris Beall: We tend to create an opportunity as soon as a meeting is set, because that way we can track it more clearly. So the data analyst says, great. I love that, by the way. We'll focus on analyzing the [00:14:00] direct amount as the primary financial outcome to see how it's influenced by various factors. We can investigate its relationships with 1.
[00:14:07] Chris Beall: Reps performance scores, 2. Activity metrics, such as dials, connects, conversations, and meetings. Thanks. Given the potential complexity and size of your data set, let's start by [00:14:20] exploring the correlations between direct amount and these various metrics. This will help us determine which factors might have a more significant impact on financial outcomes and are worth including in a more detailed regression analysis.
[00:14:34] Chris Beall: Shall we proceed with this correlation analysis? I love that it asks. If there is [00:14:40] any specific subset of variables or additional factors you're particularly interested in, let me know. And I said, this is the easiest of the prompts. Yes. That means I'd like to proceed. It immediately outputs a correlation matrix between direct amounts and all the predictors.
[00:14:59] Chris Beall: Of [00:15:00] course, every predictor maps to itself perfectly, so that correlation is one. And then there are correlations of Meetings, as an example, with outcomes and that correlation is very strong with the outcome of direct amount. Meetings correlated at a [00:15:20] 77 level. That's a high correlation and with conversations at a 59 level.
[00:15:28] Chris Beall: That's not too surprising. It's really hard to set a meeting in ConnectAndSell. Unless you have a conversation first. So it doesn't say that all you really have to do is just [00:15:40] have tons of conversations, but it does say that conversations are highly correlated with meetings and meetings are highly correlated with direct amounts.
[00:15:48] Chris Beall: Therefore, conversations are correlated with. DirectAmount. That's just kind of the way it goes. That correlation of conversations to direct amounts is 56. It's almost the same as [00:16:00] the correlation to meetings. So, it gave me this beautiful matrix. So, down one side it says DirectAmount. That's the answer, so to speak, what we're correlating to, that's the financial outcome.
[00:16:11] Chris Beall: And then Dials, Connects, Conversations, Meetings, and then the Scores. The Greeting Score, Opener, Breakthrough. That means how well did they [00:16:20] execute the breakthrough portion of the conversation. The part that goes something like, I believe we've discovered a breakthrough. That completely eliminates the need to To do a bunch of manual analysis in order to have a detailed and comprehensive set of insights based on complex data.
[00:16:38] Chris Beall: I just made that up right now, [00:16:40] but that's an example. And then meeting, which is asking for the meeting and re asking for the meeting and re asking for the meeting. Objections, objection handling, assertiveness, and professionalism, and then the overall score. So this map is red. I'm not showing it to you because we don't do that here on Market Dominance, guys, [00:17:00] but could.
[00:17:01] Chris Beall: Red is the 1. 0s. That's a 100 percent correlation. Most everything's correlated to itself. And then there's sort of an orange, that's some lower level of correlation, kind of a white, which is medium level, and then it goes into the cold blues. All the way to, to a dark blue. So [00:17:20] it shows me the correlation matrix.
[00:17:22] Chris Beall: I can look at it right, there is huge value in making a correlation matrix like this in Excel or some other way. I don't know if I would've done it. It's just too painful. It's too much work. This is a huge time saver, and I can look with my eyes at it and let my visual system [00:17:40] call things out that are surprising and I say, huh, 
[00:17:44] Susan Finch: we'll be back in a moment after a quick break.
[00:17:52] Susan Finch: ConnectAndSell. Welcome to the end of dialing as you know it. ConnectAndSell's patented technology loads your best sales folks up with 8 to [00:18:00] 10 times more live, qualified conversations every day. And when we say qualified, we're talking about really qualified. Like knowing what kind of cheese they like on their Impossible Whopper kind of qualified.
[00:18:12] Susan Finch: Learn more at ConnectAndSell. com[00:18:20] 
[00:18:20] Chris Beall: Here's something that's surprising. There is a very low correlation 0.05, which is almost the same as zero between how professional the reps are, professionalism and meetings, and there's also a very low correlation. Which is 03, [00:18:40] even lower, between professionalism and the direct amount of pipeline that's built through meetings.
[00:18:48] Chris Beall: So I wouldn't have expected that. I don't think you would either. One would think that. A rep that is more professional, that comports themselves in a way that we would say is professional, they don't get rattled, they don't [00:19:00] have emotional responses that don't make sense, that that would be correlated with positive outcomes, and it's not.
[00:19:07] Chris Beall: It's funny, though, because it's a negatively correlated with the number of connects and negatively correlated with dials, which kind of makes you think that if you have too many conversations, you might lose a little bit of your [00:19:20] professionalism, something to keep track of out there. Assertiveness was a little bit better.
[00:19:26] Chris Beall: It was a 0. 28 correlation out of 1, so 28 out of 100 with the direct amount. So it's not nothing, but it's not strong. Objection handling is [00:19:40] 0. 32, a little bit better than assertiveness. But nothing to write home about. And then BreakthroughScript itself. We prize our BreakthroughScript. We think it's really fabulous.
[00:19:52] Chris Beall: That adhering to it makes a difference. Well, the correlation with direct amount is 0. 17, 17 out of 100. The [00:20:00] opener also we think is super important, and yet it's correlated only 0. 12, 12 out of 100. Hmm, that's pretty low, right? Same thing with the greeting, 0. 15. So the greeting The opener and the breakthrough, which is the first kind of chunk, most of the [00:20:20] bulk of the breakthrough script and all of these reps are using our breakthrough script.
[00:20:23] Chris Beall: And these are all cold calls. They don't amount to much with regard to booking meetings and therefore getting opportunities on the books that required booking meetings. The strongest correlation of all was the [00:20:40] correlation with, guess what, asking for the meeting. And then kind of insisting that the meeting is a good idea.
[00:20:47] Chris Beall: That correlation is 40 out of 100. So it is approximately 2 point something times how well you do in the opener, or the greeting, or the breakthrough, and [00:21:00] it's about maybe, you know, something like 33 percent more important than objection handling. And assertiveness is vastly more important, uh, you know, more than 10 times, probably 12, 13 times more important than professionalism.
[00:21:18] Chris Beall: Not that we want people to [00:21:20] be unprofessional. I'm just saying it doesn't lead to measurable results. You probably shouldn't be coaching it too hard unless you're just doing it for your own feelings. So, then, I just explained all that to you, your listener, but ChatGPT Data Analyst explained it all to me. And it [00:21:40] basically said, key observations from the heat map.
[00:21:43] Chris Beall: Meetings have the strongest positive correlation with direct amount, suggesting that as the number of meetings increases, the direct financial outcomes tend to be higher. One could say, well, duh, but it feels kind of bad to say, well, duh, to a well meaning bot, right? So I'm going to say, oh, that's, that's good that you [00:22:00] saw that.
[00:22:01] Chris Beall: It actually. it is kind of comforting that this obvious connection was made. Conversations and Connects also show positive correlations, though not as strong as Meetings, indicating their importance in influencing financial outcomes. Now this is important in a very simple way. You actually have [00:22:20] control if you're running an organization to some degree over how many conversations the team has.
[00:22:25] Chris Beall: Your data could be better than it is right now, and it would take fewer dials to get conversations. You could use technology like ConnectAndSell that gets you more conversations. And you could also look at the reps' activities and ask, [00:22:40] is too much time being spent wrapping up or pausing or hanging out, petting the cat and drinking coffee?
[00:22:47] Chris Beall: Could that time have been spent? Without abusing the rep in actual conversations. Sometimes reps have fewer conversations than they otherwise could. Jeff Blunt says one more dial. [00:23:00] We always say one more conversation here at ConnectAndSell. Then it says most of the score metrics show positive correlations.
[00:23:08] Chris Beall: Those are the skills with direct amounts, but these are relatively modest. This suggests that while higher skills ratings do relate to better financial outcomes, the strength of these relationships [00:23:20] varies. So then it says, given these insights, a regression analysis focused on meetings, conversations, and perhaps some of the higher correlated scores could provide further understanding of their impact on direct amounts.
[00:23:32] Chris Beall: Would you like me to proceed with a regression analysis based on these findings? Or is there any specific aspect you'd like to explore [00:23:40] further? Now, this is super important. At this point, I could go with the flow and say, yeah, that's about it. But on reflection, what I'm really interested in is. What about the skills?
[00:23:52] Chris Beall: We work a lot in sales on skills. We coach skills. We don't work as much on data, [00:24:00] even though it could increase the number of conversations easily by getting better data. I mean, say all of your data was for calling was data that told you that these are people who answer the phone. Or their actual propensity to answer the phone.
[00:24:15] Chris Beall: Now we actually have that data in ConnectAndSell and it's automatically integrated into every [00:24:20] calling session, but it's still one of those things that management pays less attention to than they do to skills, at least with regard to lip service. I'm not sure how much attention is actually paid to skills.
[00:24:34] Chris Beall: Because I'm not sure that the breakdown of skills is actually done that cleanly. But here's what I [00:24:40] said to my friend, a ChatGPT data analyst. The correlation with meetings is actually mechanical, in that direct amount is defined as, quote, pipeline that resulted from meetings set in cold calls using ConnectAndSell.
[00:24:55] Chris Beall: This is also true to a lesser degree with regard to conversations and connects. [00:25:00] Even though the score metrics, that's the skills, have a weaker correlation with direct amount, they're actually more interesting to me because the impact of skill scores on business outcomes is an unexplored research topic.
[00:25:13] Chris Beall: So let's try the regression analysis with the score metrics and see what we get. Now, one of the [00:25:20] things when you're working with generative AI, and I work a lot with ChatGPT and then some other GPT 4 turbo models that we've created. is, hmm, it'll do anything you ask it to do. It'll give it a shot. This is highly different from most human employees, especially [00:25:40] analysts that you work with.
[00:25:41] Chris Beall: If you say something to an analyst and they don't really agree that that's worth studying, you're not going to get their best. I love the fact that there's no complaint about rework. or delving in again, or correcting it and giving it another shot by this particular [00:26:00] bot data analyst. I think it's huge because it lets me be more creative.
[00:26:04] Chris Beall: I can simply ask it to do what I want it to do, look at the results. I didn't put a lot of mental energy into the mechanics of producing the results because That's what it did. And I can be more reflective. I can think [00:26:20] more about what I'm seeing and what I'm learning. So, the data analyst here, when I said, hey, let's do the scores, it says, that makes sense.
[00:26:28] Chris Beall: Ah, comfort to me. Focusing on the score metrics, the skills, to explore their impact on direct amounts will help us understand how rep skill levels influence business outcomes. Since [00:26:40] this aspect hasn't been deeply explored, it could provide valuable insights. We'll perform a multiple regression analysis using these score metrics as independent variables and direct amount as the dependent variable.
[00:26:53] Chris Beall: I'll prepare the regression model and show you the results. Let's proceed. And then it goes ahead and does the analysis. [00:27:00] Now, if you're like me, you probably could do a multivariable, multivariate regression analysis. With some effort. Using Excel. I don't know how you might do it, but you could probably get it done.
[00:27:17] Chris Beall: This wasn't much effort. I just said, please do it. [00:27:20] And here's what I get. The results from the regression analysis using the RepSkill scores as predictors for direct amount are as follows. Regression summary. R squared. 0. 241. That means that about 24. 1 percent of the variability in direct amount is explained by the combined score metrics.
[00:27:39] Chris Beall: [00:27:40] Which indicates a moderate level of explanatory power. So this is really important, because even though skills, it turns out, are not highly correlated with outcomes, there are some things we can go after and try to make better. And 24 percent of your pipeline is a lot. So if 24 percent of the [00:28:00] variability in your pipeline, at least in this case produced from meetings, is explained by these score metrics.
[00:28:05] Chris Beall: Well, okay, it might not have been super strong, but it could be worth pursuing. And then there's an adjusted R squared, adjusted for the number of predictors. And it indicates after accounting for the [00:28:20] number of variables, the model explains about 18 percent of the variance. So less than 24%, still not zero.
[00:28:28] Chris Beall: And think of it this way. If there is potential variance in the pipeline from 1, 000, 000 to 1. 18 million, or [00:28:40] some number like that, the skills could actually influence your ability to get that extra 180, 000 of pipeline. So these are not locks, by the way, because we really don't have cause and effect here yet.
[00:28:51] Chris Beall: We have correlation, but worth knowing. And then it gives me the individual coefficients, [00:29:00] and the individual coefficients They tell you how statistically predictable these predictors are, that is, how wrong they are. So it says the greeting, opener, objections, assertiveness, and overall score are not statistically significant predictors of direct amount, as their p values are [00:29:20] greater than 0.
[00:29:21] Chris Beall: 05. That is, the p value means probability of the variance just due to Randomness. So, would you get the same thing over and over and over, or would it spread all over the place, so the p value is basically, say, percentage due to chance, eh, kind of high. The score [00:29:40] breakthrough, the breakthrough score has, get this, a significant negative coefficient.
[00:29:45] Chris Beall: with a p value of 043, suggesting that higher breakthrough scores might actually be associated with lower direct amounts, which is an interesting and possibly counterintuitive finding. Now this is the analyst, [00:30:00] the GPT analyst, telling me that this is interesting and possibly counterintuitive. So if you kind of think about that.
[00:30:07] Chris Beall: That's pretty amazing that a bot that just knows how to spit out next tokens and next, effectively, words, would conclude that this is an [00:30:20] interesting and possibly counterintuitive finding. So I find it counterintuitive also, especially since I'm Kind of one of the people who came up with the breakthrough script.
[00:30:30] Chris Beall: And I would think following the breakthrough well would be a good thing, but maybe not, or maybe it's only in the case where you're trying [00:30:40] to follow the breakthrough and you fail that that's a good thing. So again, we don't know, but it pointed that out. The analysts pointed that out. The meeting score.
[00:30:49] Chris Beall: This score has a significant positive coefficient with a p value less than 001, it's a really small chance that it's due to chance, indicating a strong [00:31:00] positive impact on direct amount. This suggests that skills in securing meetings are crucial for achieving higher financial outcomes. Well, in one way, that's well dubbed because if you don't ask for the meeting, you don't get the meeting.
[00:31:12] Chris Beall: But in another way, it tells you, hey, if you're going to coach something, go coach that, asking for the meeting. That would, in sales [00:31:20] in general, be considered to be coaching for closing. There's whole books on this subject, but I think it's particularly interesting that the mathematical analysis says it's kind of where it's at.
[00:31:30] Chris Beall: And then the last one is professionalism, which also shows a negative coefficient. and p value close to the threshold for statistical significance, [00:31:40] suggesting a possible negative impact on direct amount. So, then it gives me an interpretation. We're almost done. I hope that this was tolerable for you to listen to all this, but I thought it might be interesting because I'm going to go back and just go through the prompts and tell you how long this took.
[00:31:57] Chris Beall: I don't think I could have done this kind of work if I'd been [00:32:00] left alone for a day, and I wouldn't have trusted the results. I would have had to go back and check them. More than once. And then also, if I presented them to somebody else, they surely wouldn't have trusted the results because they go, hey, Chris, these are your results.
[00:32:15] Chris Beall: So, here's the interpretation. The most influential skills based on this model are [00:32:20] related to handling meetings, that is, asking for the meeting, and breakthrough moments in calls. With meeting skills being particularly critical for financial success. So, interestingly, one was positive and the other was negative.
[00:32:34] Chris Beall: This analysis suggests a selective impact of different skill areas on [00:32:40] financial outcomes, highlighting the importance of specific training and development focuses for sales reps. So now it asks me, would you like to delve deeper into any specific aspect of these results, explore other models, or adjust the analysis in any other way?
[00:32:55] Chris Beall: And I'm going to do a live demo right here, and I'm just going to add a prompt. [00:33:00] Let's consider The impact on another financial metric, which is possible. Now, I'm testing it here to see if it can figure out that possible means possible amount. It does a great job. It says we will now analyze the impact of the REPS skill scores on another [00:33:20] financial metric, possible amount.
[00:33:21] Chris Beall: Possible amount means some conversation took place, and later,
[00:33:30] Chris Beall: So, what happens here? Interestingly enough, even if the conversation did not [00:33:40] lead to a meeting, you have the same correlations of the skills, the greeting, the opener, the objections, the assertiveness and professionalism to the outcomes, which is pretty much nothing compared to what Except for one thing, [00:34:00] professionalism has a strong negative impact on possible amount.
[00:34:03] Chris Beall: Now think about that. Isn't that just fascinating? That you can be more professional and maybe you sound a little stiffer. Maybe you're harder to trust. Anyway, it's a strong negative impact on the possible amount and on the [00:34:20] amount directly from meetings. So I think that's quite fascinating, and the breakthrough score is still negative, but it's not as strong as professionalism, and the meeting score, asking for the meeting, has a positive coefficient on the overall amount, that is, whether it's from a meeting or not.
[00:34:39] Chris Beall: Now, [00:34:40] we have to have a little bit of warning here. When you're looking at results from any analysis, whether this kind done by a GPT model or done by hand, By an analyst, you have to be careful of certain things. So this particular analysis has a flaw in it. And the flaw is a kind of selection bias, and that is [00:35:00] the overall metric, which is, Hey, did you get anything in the pipeline at all?
[00:35:06] Chris Beall: Includes the metric from the meetings. That is, from the direct attribution from a meeting leading to the pipeline. So what I should really do is subtract out the, [00:35:20] uh, the pipeline that was generated from meetings and make sure that it's not being included. And I could go ahead and do that even without reloading the spreadsheet.
[00:35:29] Chris Beall: I could ask the analyst to make up a new metric that subtracts the possible.[00:35:40] 
[00:35:46] Chris Beall: So again, I'm going to recap the purpose in this whole exercise. The reason I'm doing this is just to show you that there are deep insights, or at least interesting insights that can be gotten much more rapidly than you might think. And I [00:36:00] think in a more compelling way, it's easier to think about because you didn't wear yourself out on the mechanics of the analysis, and you didn't end up with the biases of your data analyst and just using a GPT model, like ChatGPT, and I recommend that the GPT 4 Turbo Model Data Analyst, just because I'm using it here.
[00:36:19] Chris Beall: I'm sure [00:36:20] there are others that are Equally good, and perhaps better, but using that in a simple way by loading up some data and then telling it what you're trying to do. As I said, let's analyze a collection of these results and look for a regression analysis to understand the impact of skills. On business outcomes [00:36:40] and just be guided by the response of the GPT model.
[00:36:44] Chris Beall: It comes back and says something, you ask another prompt and away you go. This entire process for me, the first time, I think, took 12 minutes. It would have taken me about a week. I get one pretty picture out of it, which is a correlation matrix, which I [00:37:00] can share with people. I get an analysis that I can share with a little copy and paste.
[00:37:06] Chris Beall: I got some, I can't do this because the file has gotten stale. So I reloaded the file and did it again. The whole analysis again, I didn't even have to tell it what to do other than let's switch over to the possible amount from [00:37:20] direct amount. So, I hope this is somewhat enlightening. The main thing I want to do is, I want to encourage folks to use these large language models as their partner in reasoning through business situations and understanding them without relying [00:37:40] On a human analyst, you might take you a day, two days, five days, or forever to come back with results and may be injecting their own bias, either through selection bias or survivorship bias or something else.
[00:37:54] Chris Beall: And you can avoid a lot of arguments this way, get yourself some insights, and [00:38:00] then they're packaged up nicely so you can discuss them with others. So a very different episode of Market Dominance, guys, but hey. We believe in data here and unanalyzed data. Well, it's kind of like an unexamined life. Is it worth living?
[00:38:15] Chris Beall: We don't know, but unexamined data or unanalyzed [00:38:20] data generally is not worth very much. So for Corey Frank, Enjoying Armenia and Chris Beall, this is Market Dominance, guys.
[00:38:37] Susan Finch: Selling a big idea to a skeptical customer, [00:38:40] investor, or partner is one of the hardest jobs in business. So when it's time to really go big, you need to use an uncommon methodology to gain attention, frame your thoughts, and employ successful sequencing that is fresh enough to convince others that your ideas will truly change their world.
[00:38:56] Susan Finch: From crafting just the right cold call screenplays, to curating and mapping [00:39:00] the ideal call list for your entire TAM, Branch49's modern and innovative sales toolbox offers a guiding hand to ambitious organizations in their quest to reach market dominance. Learn more at branch49. com. Never miss an episode.
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Welcome to this special Market Dominance Guys compilation episode featuring highlights from some of our most downloaded episodes in the first quarter of 2024.
In these segments, Chris Beall and Corey Frank are joined by expert guests Shane Mahi and Helen Fanucci to explore critical topics for sales and marketing leaders navigating the evolving landscape of go-to-market strategies, data-driven targeting, and the impact of AI on authentic human connection.
You'll hear eye-opening insights on the future of software development in the age of generative AI, why conversations are the often-overlooked key to unlocking your total addressable market, and how to coach reps effectively by providing immediate feedback.
Helen shares her framework for leveraging proprietary data to identify your best opportunities and align resources accordingly. The discussions also examine the challenges of territory assignment and the power dynamics of sales leadership.
Shane and our hosts dive into balancing the power of AI tools like ChatGPT with the irreplaceable value of genuine, trust-building conversations. And you won't want to miss Shane's story of how combining the entrepreneurial operating system with AI helped him rebuild his business in record time after previous setbacks.
These clips from Chris, Corey, Shane, and Helen will help you learn how to position your organization for market dominance through the right mix of data-driven strategy, technological leverage, and authentic human engagement. 
 
Links from this episode:
Shane Mahi on LinkedIn
MEGA.ai
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell
Helen Fanucci on LinkedIn
Full episodes for this segment:
#10: EP215: Sales Artisans: Thriving Alongside Smart Bots
#9: EP216: Conversations, The Kryptonite of MarTech?
#8: EP213: Ethical AI Selling - Reality vs Hype
#7: EP208: Balancing Relationships and Efficiency in AI Sales
#6: EP209: Your Only Product Is the Meeting
#5: EP214: The Future of Sales: Balancing AI and Authenticity
#4: EP212: Reps Dread It, Managers Avoid It: Coaching
#3: EP211: Conversations Convert to Pipeline Power
#2: EP210: Sales Targeting Beyond LinkedIn and Navigator
#1: EP145: Building Trust Must Always Be Step One
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
 
#10: EP215: Sales Artisans: Thriving Alongside Smart Bots
The economy always gets reshaped around new capabilities in ways that surprise everybody who is thinking about it. So it's never like that. This is going up and this is going down and it crosses or whatever. It goes along as it goes along with increasing efficiencies in certain areas until somebody innovates a flip and the flip turns it on its head and now it's new, whatever the new thing is, and now you have the old way competing with the new way and the new way since it's enabled by new material science. By that I mean a new capability that does tricks you couldn't do before. It always wins, but it always starts where it has the obvious advantage. The skyscrapers are not out in the desert, they're in Manhattan. It depends where you look, but once you get 'em going in Manhattan, I pretty much guarantee you the little three story building that you used to have that you had some offices in or whatever. First the offices go, then the condos and it's all skyscrapers. Take a look at New York. It's all up, right? Take a look at Des Moines. It's a little up. Take a look at Scottsdale or Tenny. It's just how it goes.
Shane Mahi (01:09:35):
You can even see in Dubai, Dubai was what? Flatland desert. DJ Khalifa Burj Khallifa  is the biggest one up. And now, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the line in Saudi Arabia, same kind of concept, complete desert. Now there's what, a quarter mile long, two pieces of glass inside a metropolis that is going to be heavily tech-orientated, flying cars, all kinds of weirdness. So if Saudi's doing stuff like that, at what point do the outbound agencies or even tech companies realize we've got to kind of adopt the same kind of thing?
Chris Beall (01:10:08):
For sure.
Shane Mahi (01:10:08):
Who is that going to be? Chris, Chris and Corey. Who do you guys have your eyes out on in those markets who are going to be those game changers, those market shapers for AI and tech in our space?
Chris Beall (01:10:22):
Who I don't know. I don't know and I don't care. I don't know and I don't care. I know who the big early winner is going to be with ai. This is actually fairly simple. Microsoft pulled off a trick that nobody even thought of and that trick was to invest 10 billion to get an unlimited royalty free forever license to not only the tech, but all the learning that goes into it, all the training. That was a very good trick because they've always been in the business of helping folks build new things. And the most obvious thing about all this gen AI stuff isn't what it does to sales, which is trivial. It's what it does to what used to be called software development. Software development essentially is in the same state right now as a sugar cube is in a hot cup of tea. You can be pretty sure that game is over right now.
#9: EP216: Conversations, The Kryptonite of MarTech?
Yeah. Is there a natural aversion to that or is it just Occam's razor where it's too simple? Or they're going about a complex formula, methodology, and technology pathway. When you forget to dance with who you are, what are my prospects? What are my people in my TAM saying, what are the people in my ICP? What do they want? What pain do I solve? And gosh, if I could just have a conversation, not send them a survey, not send them an email, but actually have a conversation that can open up these veins of trust that that's the key versus carpet bombing them with content, with white papers, with Gartner magic quadrants, and there's no dialogue there. That's monologue,
Chris Beall (15:20):
Right? This is kind of the awkwardness that I noticed in the entire thing. I'd asked this question, what if you could just talk to people? It's like, oh, well, you can't just tell Chris spiel that you can't talk to people. That one doesn't work. You can't go down that road. I'm sorry. No, you can't talk to people. Then it's like, well, but you'd still need, and then they'd tell me that you'd still need, and I tend to agree. I mean, my thing I was telling folks is, look, I think all the digital stuff is fantastic, but why not cheat by starting with the conversation? You can't get enough conversations for it to be worth cheating. And I said, well, isn't go to a SDR or BDR world if you had 40 conversations a day with targets, that's the equivalent of 40 targeted Google ads that caused somebody to go to your website. So that's pretty good right there. What would 40 targeted Google ads to a vice president or whatever you're trying to reach that actually caused them to go to your website, what would that cost? And they generally go like 30, 40 bucks each. Well, that's $1,600 a day without any meetings of value that you're getting from the advertising of just having conversations. Surely you're not paying your BDRs $1,600 a day. There's margin in there.
(16:39):
And the idea that, oh, talking to people could be a form of marketing that is, I think where the edge is. It's almost like, but talking to that's
Corey Frank (16:48):
Interesting
Chris Beall (16:49):
Light or something. If marketing can't include talking to people nowadays,
Corey Frank (16:55):
It's like bottled water. Hey, we're out of water, we're out of bottled water. We're going to die of thirst. Well, what about this little thing called the tap? I tell my kids all the time. It's like, Hey, dad, the ro, and we're awa. It's Arizona. You got springs all over the place. So sometimes I suppose we're trying to overly complicate something where there's conversations all around, but what do you say to that rebuttal if you can't have enough conversations to make the math work? I think you and I would disagree on that, right? But is that where fundamentally the mindset is? Is that Chris? That's cute. You can talk with a couple people, but I'm talking about sending out mass emails and segmentation, and I do more before 7:00 AM than you do all day with a conversation.
Chris Beall (17:37):
Well, I would say that that level of confidence is not what I was seeing at the conference. It was more like this, which is really, that seems unlikely. And I sometimes have my phone with our current statistics just for the day. I could go look at it right now and probably find how many conversations did we connect yesterday? So we have this thing that's called daily dials, and  if I were to look at daily dials, here we go, daily dials, I can probably find some numbers. And this is one of the things that I tend to do is just look at the numbers every morning when I get up. Actually, I'm kind of lazy, so I lie in bed and I reach over for my phone, and here I am looking at the Daily Dials report, and it said that ConnectAndSell customers had 19,352 conversations yesterday.
(18:35):
Not over some vague period of time, but literally yesterday. And out of those, say that they only set 1,679 meetings, and one of our customers sets lots of meetings. They set 983 with just one of their groups. Really, really kind of a good brand. So if I bring this up and I go, well see here, there's this group of folks and it's 242 companies, and they had 19,352 targeted conversations. It's like, yeah, that's them, but not everybody can afford that. And I'm thinking, well, wait. So I talked to somebody who does advertising, saying we wanted to send an ad or have an ad associated with all the online activity, the phone, particularly activity of everybody we talked to. So that'd be 19,432 people a day of everybody our customers talk to. Is that doable? Oh, yeah. And how would that work? Well, it costs you $20,000 a year minimum.
(19:32):
You have to sign up, you have to commit. It's like, well, why? Well, I mean, for $20,000, you'd have a lot of conversations. Yeah. Well, it's just like, it's almost like I'm trying to come up with a good analogy. I love your bottled water analogy.
#8: EP213: Ethical AI Selling - Reality vs Hype
Certainly with your round table that you've talked with a lot of CEOs like Chris, but that authenticity, whereas as humans, we perceive those little subtleties and mood and those complex needs through a simple conversation. And when a tell happens from an ai, either Chris, to your point from a text or a bot, how do you combat that? Is that the racist to get as authentic as possible or because that's where I think the Delta ethics happened. Chris is, wait a minute, I thought you were a real person, but now you're a machine. So Shane, what do you think about that and bridging that gap?
Shane Mahi (00:23:29):
So Chris mentioned it yesterday and it drove a lot of the discussion, which was it's the ability to tell the truth and just being truthful about anything upfront. And I used it when I started, and it comes from the 27 seconds, is the point of inoculation. And it's stating a fact before somebody has that objection. And if you are using any type of artificial intelligence, computer robot, I think the most authentic, genuine thing to do is to tell the truth. And that comes from, Hey, this is a robot, Corey, I'd like to have a conversation with you. If not, would you like to be speaking to a human? You'll then say, sure. The robot then has the advantage of saying, Hey, Corey, it's going to take about five to six minutes to patch you through. I can probably get your questions covered in the next 45 seconds.
(00:24:18):
Do you want to have a chat with me or do you want to have a chat with the next person? And for me, that makes all the difference because time for a ceo, for a business professional is absolutely everything. And the ability to cut out that wasted time is everything. I'll give you a quick example. I called, I mentioned it yesterday, right, Chris? I called Pizza Hut the other day and it took me six minutes to remove onions from my pizza because the guy kept battling from me that I said, you can't just pick the goddamn onions off the pizza. I don't like onions. And it was a nightmare. Now, had a bot just been able to say, Hey, which toppings would you like to add or remove if any? Just remove onions. My pizza's at the door in 10, 15 minutes. And for me, again, the truth allows that time to be shortened, which gives you more opportunity to take care of other things that are most important in your life.
(00:25:13):
And another thing that I think is really important, I just watched it the other day, and that point you made on authenticity and being genuine and the truth. Mackinac, I'm sure you both have seen that. I had no idea. I think Sam Altman is an ex Mackinac that's swear God, because when that person, the robot locked the door, obviously it's playing with the guy. I'm a sucker for women, absolute sucker for women. So if I was in one of those situations and they were manipulating me without knowing it and putting the love spot, well, were you really interested in me? He's lying to you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to get out. That is where everything changes for me. And now after seeing that movie, I'm wondering, Chris is very smart, Cora, you are very smart. Are you going to start peeling off your skin one day and saying the same thing to me?
Corey Frank (00:26:11):
Well, but I think that's part of it. It's a brilliant point. I love the trust thing
#7: EP208: Balancing Relationships and Efficiency in AI Sales
(8) If there's skepticism or resistance from sales teams or clients towards AI tools like ChatGPT, how do you recommend addressing these concerns?
Well, a couple of different ways. There will always be skepticism about new technology. There should be. New technology means new, it's unproven. We're not sure what it does. Really, really cool technology that makes you think something that's not actually true. Like, hey, ChatGPT is a person who's talking to me. That's not actually true. Hey, ChatGPT is thinking about this. That's not actually true. It's the next engine. It knows a lot of stuff that it's read so to speak, and it knows how to spit out the next token, think token word, very similar concepts. And so when ChatGPT is talking to us so to speak, it's really just going next, next, next. Now maybe our minds work like this too, and our voices work like this. 
Chris Beall (18:52):
I have a feeling we do a lot of next, next, next, ourselves. It's just the way the world is. We love to think that we're really brilliant, having deep, deep thoughts and all that. Probably not. We're probably just spitting out the next word that comes to mind. That's why we call it. And so its natural skepticism is natural. The way skepticism is overcome is through two things. One is transparency, it let's be open about things. And the other is track record. So if the track record is good, and we note that over time some particular function, and I'll go back to those conversations where you take a discovery meeting, and the AI compresses it down to 10 points. Well, the first time I read one I might think maybe it's missing some things. By the time I've read a hundred of them, which only takes me a hundred minutes that I might've spread over a couple of weeks, I'm starting to go, Hey, I think this is pretty good. 
Chris Beall (19:47):
I don't have any big misses yet. But it just takes time. It takes time, and it takes experience. This is why the most skeptical people who are really, really smart plunge in and start experiencing what I call in anger or with an intent for a meaningful outcome, a new technology that is clearly as powerful as ChatGPT and all the things that are like it. So if you haven't gotten in there and put your hands on it, so to speak, and made some mistakes, try writing some prompts and seeing what happens. Don't just do the same thing over and over. Your skepticism only will go away appropriately and correctly with experience that leads to a track record because now you kind of know where the landmines are. 
How about question number nine, future trends. 
#6: EP209: Your Only Product Is the Meeting
(Not this one - it's another short compilation episode)
#5: EP214: The Future of Sales: Balancing AI and Authenticity
We picked the most lovely industry to go into, and that's telemarketing and cold prospecting. And what was it? And the only reason that I was able to get to the truth faster was because read about Daniel Disney when the pandemic hit found, cog found ConnectAndSell, bought Cog, bought ConnectAndSell, spoke with Gerry, did Flight Scool, had seven meetings in six hours, and that's where it started. It was the ability to have your script, be honest, open, and just get into those conversations. And by doing that fast, quickly, efficiently, and at scale, we were able to progress our business much faster, I think, than a lot of people. We actually had 444% growth from year one to year two from using ConnectAndSell and implementing a system called the Entrepreneurial Operating System™ by Gino Wickman.
(00:35:15):
Now the authenticity of our brand, and even what is happening right now, came from all of the mistakes we made. And those are typically our storytelling, selling mechanisms, the mistakes we made and the path we took got us to a place where we made all those mistakes, learned everything, and served customers. I obviously lost my business because of some bad decisions I had to let go of my business, A lot of bad decisions. But I've recreated my business. That took me three years in three months with the use of ChatGPT. And why is it because I prompted all of my problems, all of my stakes helped me build a business plan that bypasses these mistakes and gives me the outcomes I'm looking for in half the time. And in that now, my marketing, my messaging, emails, prospecting, research, everything that, again, like you said, rightfully so, anything in the future is anxiety.
(00:36:12):
Anything in the past is regret. The only thing that matters is right, right now. And what's happening right, right now is yes, you better get on board because AI is happening. As much as you are worried about what can happen 5, 10, 15 years in the future, that shit is going to happen whether you like it or not. So it's either get ahead of the curve or get with the curve, or you are going to be that. They're just bums, bums who want to stay behind and complain and say, this is going to ruin me. This is going to take my job. Get with the program, dude, get with the program. Start using it. I was a novice, an absolute novice using ChatGPT when it first came out. The only thing that drew my attention was a hundred million users in one week for that alone. I was like, all right, let me see what this is about. I'm a novice still to this day, but the amount of times I've set up till three in the morning, six, seven hours, prompting, prompting, prompting to the point, the only reason I went to bed is because it said, you've maxed out your attempts. You can't use us anymore.
Corey Frank (00:37:13):
You finished the internet, you exhausted ChatGPT. 
Shane Mahi (00:37:18):
That’s right, and that happened multiple times. And my knowledge comes, which is why I believe podcasts, even to the education of AI and ethics and sales and marketing, everything behind it has come from listening and watching podcasts. That's the only reason I was able to learn.
#4: EP212: Reps Dread It, Managers Avoid It: Coaching
CLIP 1:
So that's really key to getting coaching to work. The coaching has got to be immediate. Most coaching is way, way, way, way too late. Coaching somebody on Friday I about a performance they had on Monday, don't bother. It's just not going to get anything done. This is where I think managers often confuse what I'll call deal work with coaching. They think that they're coaching, they're actually talking through how a deal might go, what some tactics and techniques might be, and they get an agreement from the rep to do something better, different whatever in the next interaction that they have with the prospect. And that feels like coaching, that's more like advising and it's nice and it's important unless it's just war stories. But coaching is really to improve performance and you need to have the performance and the coaching and the performance and the coaching be very close to each other in time. 
Chris Beall (16:28):
Minutes are okay, not very many minutes, hours are too long and a week may as well be forever.
CLIP 2:
got to have a chance of listening for the same thing over and over. So it's really, really important to do it. But most of what's called coaching isn't really coaching, it's kind of advising it's too far after the fact. 
So if you can figure out ways, be listening behind the scenes, coming in and whispering to somebody immediately after a conversation and helping them perform that little bit better on first failure, you'll find over time that and fairly short amount of time that what you're hoping for in the bottom line, which is conversion rates, small number of conversations, leads to a bigger number of meetings, and a larger number of meetings are being set per rep hour, which is the key number. You'll find that stuff improves on its own. So start from the beginning, you'll get to the end. Eventually, you'll get some great results
#3: EP211: Conversations Convert to Pipeline Power
Because let me tell you, if you think you know, you're fooling yourself, you're fooling yourself. If you aren't getting feedback from the market through conversations at a short enough cycle time and a high enough frequency, you're just guessing and your problem is competitively, somebody else might choose not to guess. And I think Helen's going to help her clients choose not to guess. 
Corey Frank (08:33):
And so with that, the helping knuckleheads like me choose not to guess. Where do you start, Helen, right? I'm a small mid-size VP of sales. I have a decent patient board. I have a SaaS software product. I got some funding. I think I'm doing everything right. I have enough people, I get more people as soon as I start proving myself and go to the board. So I think I'm doing okay, but where would I start with something like this? With people's power? 
Helen Fanucci (09:05):
I would start by looking at the data that you currently have in your CRM system or whatever your system of record is to find out one, where you're winning, who you're winning with, what types of people are making the buying decisions as a business. You may or may not already know. That depends on how you have been crawling through your own data. So I'd start there to look at the current state and try to draw some conclusions or at least illuminate where resources are aligned and are they aligned to where you're currently winning or are they misaligned? So I would start looking at the current state to build a hypothesis of what you could do more of to accelerate your revenue, and it might be repositioning some resources to an industry that you're doing well at or trying to then going to find people. Let's say you have some folks that make the decision, so you have some champions or economic buyers, what do they have in common across each other? 
Helen Fanucci (10:24):
And I don't just mean job titles, but the characteristics. You can look on LinkedIn and see what the characteristics of those and then go find some more like that within a defined addressable market or where you think you want to go. I think some of those things are places to start. This begins to get the closed loop feedback here. You have data, you have some results and dispositions from your go-to market, even if it's closed loss or not now, not interested, what have you. So trying to apply current data to then make some recommendations of how to move forward. The other thing too is what information do you have or that you capture that's proprietary to you? Because they can't build a defendable market dominance position on publicly available information. So what is it that you're collecting or that's proprietary and how do you get more of that that's relevant to your business? And I don't know if that's something in my experience anyway, that's not really a deliberate thing that people put. Time sort of happens and some people have more insights into their customer set, but doing that in an organized fashion to build up insights that your competitors don't have, or at least that's proprietary to you, makes a lot of sense and differentiating yourself and defending your position in the market. 
#2: EP210: Sales Targeting Beyond LinkedIn and Navigator
Helen Fanucci (22:01):
One of the things that was interesting is this idea of territory assignments, and we have a rep that has a locked in territory and people, I guess feel a comfort zone with that versus well, okay, here you have maybe 10 accounts, but all the other unnamed accounts are fair game and they go to whoever gets a meeting in those accounts. It's so interesting to see how anxious or irritated people are by having an open territory concept. It's like everyone wants to have their patch defined, locked down so they can pursue it as they wish. So is that going smaller and smaller? It probably is, and it was just fascinating to me to observe the dynamics around that and the discomfort with having all these accounts that were fair game for anyone to go after. I wonder if you have seen that much in what your thoughts are about that, but when you talked about the shrinking world or shrinking view, that's kind of what I was thinking about is, yeah, you can zero in, but then you lose sight of what's possible where you're not looking. 
Corey Frank (23:21):
Yeah, it's funny. I think it's probably the same reason why a lot of sales reps have the security of a bloated pipeline. They can't disqualify folks in this particular quarter. Hope Springs eternal that this person will always close for this angst, this fear that if I keep sending them touch base emails, not picking up a call and having a conversation, not promoting something new, that I'm seeing what's happening in the world from 40,000 feet that's relevant or German to them. But if I simply do touch base emails, which is the equivalent of did you decide on choosing me and giving me your money yet? Or is there a better option that's out there? But that's why pipelines remain large. I can see that there is certainly from the team that all three of us collectively and Broaden knows we're a sales organization. The bigger, the more states I have, and Chris, you and I have talked about this when it comes to people too, if you're a sales manager, the more people I have under my purview, under my fiefdom, certainly the more prominent I am, I guess the more secure I feel. You probably saw this a lot at some of the larger companies you were with Helen, right? Is how many headcounts are under your particular p and l, and that somehow is a status thing. 
Helen Fanucci (24:33):
Well, it's power. You have more resources as a sales leader. You don't have a budgeta compared to headcount. So headcount is more resources. It is a version of power to be able to get bigger revenue, bigger quotas, because headcount always comes with bigger quotas. The more headcount, the more quota. So if you're willing to take that on, great. Why not?
#1: EP145: Building Trust Must Always Be Step One
(not this one - this was a small topic compilation episode that continues to be their top episode for over a year!)

Corey Frank and Chris Beall are once again joined by Fred Mondragon for this final segment from their visit. In the first two episodes with Fred, the guys covered the topic of The Seductive Shadowboxing of CRM data - Fit vs. Intent, Then the other side was discussed - Intent, Fit and the Future of Sales intelligence.
In this final segment, the trio explores how Rev's AI-powered platform is helping sales teams "find the zipper in the weasel suit," transforming weasels into top-performing pigs. Fred explains how Rev's "special purpose AI" leverages vast amounts of data to help reps identify and target their ideal customers, while Chris emphasizes the importance of engaging in trust-building conversations. Corey sees the immense potential in combining Rev's AI targeting with ConnectAndSell's powerful sales acceleration tools to solve the challenge of "Who do I go after next?" Join us for this episode, "Finding the zipper - helping weasels become top-performing pigs."
About Fred Mondragon:
Fred, a senior sales and business development executive with extensive experience at SaaS software companies, joined Rev in 2021. He has managed revenue generation channels at numerous successful startups and large companies, including TimesTen, Oracle, and most recently, Medallia, where he set up the channel sales and alliances function from scratch. Fred received his B.A. and MBA from Stanford.
Links from this episode:
Fred Mondragon | LinkedIn
The Sales Development Platform: Find your next best customer | GetRev.AI
Corey Frank on LinkedInBranch49Chris Beall on LinkedInConnectAndSell

Artificial intelligence is transforming sales, whether we're ready or not. In this episode, we dive deep on questions sales leaders have about leveraging AI amidst the hype and uncertainty. What’s driving adoption? Where can bots add value now vs. someday? We debate ethical considerations and the threat of/or replacing human jobs.
Our guides, Chris and Corey, are joined by Shane Mahi, now Chief Partnership Officer at AI startup mega.ai. Shane shares insights from the AI frontlines on what’s realistic today and the autonomous sales agent vision of tomorrow. Shane shares the hard-won insights he's gained through making over 650,000 sales calls and landing more than 30 major clients. In this 3-part series, we'll cover Shane's journey along with the role of AI in sales. 
Join us for episode 213: Ethical AI Selling - Reality vs Hype
Links from this episode:
Shane Mahi on LinkedIn
MEGA.ai
Corey Frank on LinkedIn
Branch49
Chris Beall on LinkedIn
ConnectAndSell
 
Chris Beall (00:08:41):
Great. So I just finished a book I can recommend to everybody called Molecular Storms. If you want to understand how quantum physics actually derives from or is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics and why we are we are, what we are, where we are, and how it all works. Read that and Stephen Hawking has mentioned it in that book, so go for it.
Corey Frank (00:09:07):
The original Hawking and you are the Hawking of Hawking. Alright, I will add that to my children's book list. Yes, it's recorded, but we have a guest, we have a repeat guest from what, almost three years ago. We have Shane Mahi from Points undetermined Morocco, the UK, Maryland. So Shane, great to have you back on the Market Dominance Guys, after an extended disappearance and as you've built up your companies and built up your rotation and how many hundreds of thousands of phone calls you've had since the two and a half years that you've arrived, ready to share the information, not only on all what you've learned in those two and a half years since you've made the last appearance, but also we're going to talk today, Chris and Shane Wright is about something I know nothing about, which is the I in ai, and we're going to talk specifically about AI in sales and in outbound sales. So Shane, great to have you back on the Market Dominance. Guys.
Shane Mahi (00:10:05):
Thank you very much Corey, and thank you, Chris. It has been, I think, almost four years now. We're in 2024. And from what I know, Chris, our episode was one of the most popular, most listened to episodes of that year. And in that time, I am thankful to Chris and the ConnectAndSell team, I was able to grow my company to a million dollars in sales revenue. I won't say pounds because it doesn't sound as cool, but we hit a million dollars in sales revenue. We made over 650,000 calls. We landed about 32, 32 major clients that had an A CV of about 76,000 pounds each. They ran for about seven, eight months and we were on our way to becoming a very dominant player in the market as a boutique firm. But the normal peaks and troughs of startup life happened. Me, I neglected my marriage and my family and I focused a lot on my business.
(00:11:07):
And that ended up breaking down what that relationship was. I also made a few mistakes in that process, which I'm glad I made because it helped me figure out how to increase the value of my business, what I'm doing, profit margins and all of these peaks and troughs. Letting go of my entire team at one point has led me down a path to where I am today where I have an abundance, an abundance of knowledge, I have an abundance of experience, the types of conversations I sit in, the people in people's room and just really repeat what Chris has said, what Jerry has said, what all the CEOs that I've ever spoke to have said, and they're just thinking, who is this young kid? And I'm 37 years old. I'm proud of everything I've done to this date right now. I don't even know what my company name is.
(00:11:55):
I've changed it so many times, but where I am today, I'm the chief partnership officer of a company called mega.ai. I was brought into that company to build the strongest relationships in the industry. Chris, I believe is going to be one of, if not the strongest relationship I've ever had in my entire life because of this, Corey, hopefully you too. And the next journey in the next 11, 12 months is to build the next generation of autonomous agents that are going to be booking meetings 24 7, instant ramp up time, a thousand dollars an agent, 2070 5% cheaper than a human rep. And more importantly, your business can scale exponentially without the need for human labor. The only reason I've been able to build this type of narrative is because I ran 27 seconds, 650,000 times. So that to me, in a nutshell,
Corey Frank (00:12:47):
27 seconds, that actually works. Wow.
Shane Mahi (00:12:51):
Seven seconds and 20
Corey Frank (00:12:52):
Baby. So wild. Wow. So no, that is an incredible story. Of course, Shane, as impressive as that is, right, you're also a very prolific contributor, never with your handout, but just contributor and thought leader into the space of B2B sales. And I know your reputation speaks for yourself. You take calls at all hours of the night. People use you as the sounding board for so many of us in the industry. So that's also a testament, I think, to your great reputation. So great to have you. So let's jump into it, Chris, on this AI and sales, what chain is talking about, certainly with mega, we want to hear a little bit more about, but let me pose it to both of you guys. How are folks using AI today that really has changed from maybe even since the last time you were on the show, Shane, a couple of years ago. You have sales copilot, I think from Microsoft, you have Einstein from Salesforce, I believe, and certainly the ubiquitous ChatGTP that folks have been trying to write screenplays. But maybe you can talk a little bit about Chris, what you've seen certainly in the private equity side of other burgeoning businesses inside of ConnectAndSell, and then Shane, kind of what you're seeing as well. So Chris, what do you see as just the seismic tectonic plates that have shifted just in the last handful of years here now? Well,
Chris Beall (00:14:20):
The big shift was just in the end of 2022 actually when ChatGTP came on the market, it did something that was totally unexpected with regard to ai. Suddenly you had a popular, like everybody wanted it, everybody could figure out how to use it, AI friend, so to speak, that you could ask questions of. And it showed a couple of things. One is that vast general knowledge gained from just everything that's ever been out on the internet put into a relatively simple, but really, really big neural network that's organized in a very clever way can provide value to regular people that exceeds what they can get from going out and Googling. Because as the internet got more and more populated with websites that tell you everything, if you're being told everything, then you're kind of being told nothing. And so who do you trust?
(00:15:26):
To tell you the truth, well, Google came up with an idea a long time ago who has the most backlinks, and then they expanded on that with various levels of authority oriented algorithms and then somehow tried to make that work in a world that was fundamentally corrupt because they were taking ad revenue and they figured out how to square that circle. And then chat, GPT came along and said, eh, who really needs that? Just ask me a question and I'll tell you something. And then if that doesn't quite work out, ask me another question. And so instead of getting a bunch of stuff on the screen, including a bunch of ads, what you actually got was this sort of friendly, authoritative voice. And it took about, I would say, 362 milliseconds before somebody figured out how to use chat GBT in sales just by asking it to write an email for them.
(00:16:18):
And then they'd copy and paste it. It's a better writer than any of us as long as you accept whatever the style is and write in different styles. So you can ask it as you and I know Corey, we wrote a book in two days, and actually I just did it by copying and pasting stuff out of chat g pt, there's the book, right? Market Dominance book, a conversation with ChatGTP, and did that with no instruction, no nothing. And it actually walked me through the process of publishing it on Amazon. So end to end between six o'clock on a Saturday morning and 11 o'clock on Sunday night. That book was created from podcast episodes and it wrote everything except for the how we did it part. So that was already being used in marketing anyway. But the use in sales is pretty clear.
(00:17:08):
Most salespeople are not exactly readers and writers, shall we say, male colorblind, left-handed a DD. Dyslexics generally didn't grow up getting like you did a degree in Elizabethan poetry, which often does require a certain amount of reading. I'm sure you regret taking that path with the amount of reading it took, but actually Corey is a prolific reader, but sales is populated with folks who didn't raise their hand in class saying, oh yeah, teacher, I got the answer to that, right? It was folks who knew how to talk their way from a D to a C in order to graduate. So that was the immediate first use. And all the copilots are just that. That's where we've come, yeah, that's where we've come. I'll write something for you, right? What's happening now is much more interesting, which is, and this is what we'll have Shane talk about it.
(00:18:08):
This is what Mega is all about, as we whipped right by the Turing test. The Turing test was a big deal. If you're interacting with a bot and you can't tell it's a bot after a bunch of interactions by text, by the way, which is kind of a dumb way to do it. But if you're doing that and you can't tell if it's a bot or a human, well, it's passed the Turing test. And we've gone beyond some point in the evolution of computers and their relationship to society. We blew by the Turing test in one day and didn't even notice it. Nobody cared, nobody noticed, except people said, oh my God, it's going to take over the world. That, by the way, is ridiculous. Something typing to you is not going to take over the world and pictures don't help. It is, oh, it made a picture of somebody, great, fantastic.
(00:18:58):
But in sales. Now the big question is can you make a selling bot? And that is a graded question. It starts with, in my mind, can you get a bot to get a gatekeeper to do a transfer that's a sale. Can you do it? And that's a really interesting question. That's one that we're going to be exploring with mega because we have a lot of gatekeeper interactions and it costs money. It's human beings who are doing it. Maybe we can do it with a butt, I don't know. But I like baby steps. I'm an old rock climber. You can stare at the summit all you want, but you actually have to make the first move and it comes off the ground. So sitting back across the valley going, oh, look at that. Doesn't get the job done. So what's the first step in making a selling bot?
(00:19:49):
Probably talking to a gatekeeper. Not really a regular gatekeeper, but maybe just an operator. So we suspect there's things that can be done there. Now, can you go all the way to closing a deal? A real deal where somebody's putting their butt in the line where their careers are on the line, where they're risking everything, their family, their future on the advice of a vendor's, but maybe not just because of the vendor's. Butt is intrinsically at the moment on the wrong side of the uncanny valley or somewhere in it, and it's like, well, we know the vendor's but is clever. It was made by clever people. Hopefully their salespeople aren't quite as clever, so maybe I can trust them. But that's the continuum of questions. And yesterday, Shane asked me to be in a round table with a bunch of folks, and we were talking about the ethics, potential ethics, which I'd love to talk about here. But I think it's really about the practicality, the ethical difference between AI and not AI and sales is like the ethical distinction between a knife and a gun. It's like, okay, so with a knife, I got to get close to you in order to draw blood with a gun. I can do it from a little farther away. And if you're a certain friend of mine, that might be about two miles.
(00:21:13):
So is there an ethical difference between those? Not really. There's a practical difference between those. It's still unethical to walk up to Shane in a bar and say, Shane, you son of a dog. I used to think you were a wonderful person. And now I don't. And slip a shive into him that's just as unethical as shooting him as he comes out of the bar. What's the difference, right? So I believe this big ethics discussion tends to be a political discussion about computers, actually not about ai. And it has to do with who's going to get more power at different points in different processes.
Corey Frank (00:21:54):
Well, Chris, Let's talk about that just for a second with Shane and bring Shane in here. I see that ethical dilemma to me, it starts with authenticity. And if there is the sense chain that, hey, wait a minute, it's as if you're watching a Spider-Man Marvel movie, and you're just engrossed in the experience of swinging from building to building, and then all of a sudden I see a string holding Spider-Man, or I see a boom mic in the corner that maybe the editor forgot to take out. The illusion just goes down immediately. And I said, wait a minute. I'm in a movie theater here and I'm eating bad popcorn. This is not me. The stakes all of a sudden go from being here where I care about the characters to now the stakes are just cruelly, artificial. And Shane, do you find that, or how do you bridge that?
(00:22:48):
Certainly with your round table that you've talked with a lot of CEOs like Chris, but that authenticity, whereas as humans, we perceive those little subtleties and mood and those complex needs through a simple conversation. And when a tell happens from an ai, either Chris, to your point from a text or a bot, how do you combat that? Is that the racist to get to as authentic as possible or because that's where I think the Delta ethics happened. Chris is, wait a minute, I thought you were a real person, but now you're a machine. So Shane, what do you think about that and bridging that gap?
Shane Mahi (00:23:29):
So Chris mentioned it yesterday and it drove a lot of the discussion, which was it's the ability to tell the truth and just being truthful about anything upfront. And I used it when I started, and it comes from the 27 seconds, is the point of inoculation. And it's stating a fact before somebody has that objection. And if you are using any type of artificial intelligence, computer robot, I think the most authentic, genuine thing to do is to tell the truth. And that comes from, Hey, this is a robot, Corey, I'd like to have a conversation with you. If not, would you like to be speaking to a human? You'll then say, sure. The robot then has the advantage of saying, Hey, Corey, it's going to take about five to six minutes to patch you through. I can probably get your questions covered in the next 45 seconds.
(00:24:18):
Do you want to have a chat with me or do you want to have a chat with the next person? And for me, that makes all the difference because time for a ceo, for a business professional is absolutely everything. And the ability to cut out that wasted time is everything. I'll give you a quick example. I called, I mentioned it yesterday, right, Chris? I called Pizza Hut the other day and it took me six minutes to remove onions from my pizza because the guy kept battling from me that I said, you can't just pick the goddamn onions off the pizza. I don't like onions. And it was a nightmare. Now, had a bot just been able to say, Hey, which toppings would you like to add or remove if any? Just remove onions. My pizza's at the door in 10, 15 minutes. And for me, again, the truth allows that time to be shortened, which gives you more opportunity to take care of other things that are most important in your life.
(00:25:13):
And another thing that I think is really important, I just watched it the other day, and that point you made on authenticity and being genuine and the truth. Mackinac, I'm sure you both have seen that. I had no idea. I think Sam Altman is an ex Mackinac that's swear God, because when that person, the robot locked the door, obviously it's playing with the guy. I'm a sucker for women, absolute sucker for women. So if I was in one of those situations and they were manipulating me without knowing it and putting the love spot, well, were you really interested in me? He's lying to you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to get out. That is where everything changes for me. And now after seeing that movie, I'm wondering, Chris is very smart, Cora, you are very smart. Are you going to start peeling off your skin one day and saying the same thing to me?
Corey Frank (00:26:11):
Well, but I think that's part of it. It's a brilliant point. I love the trust thing. Chris and Shane, by the way, the coming up front, front loading the fact that my AI interaction may be lumpy. You may call me out on it. You may see the wires, you may see the boom bike, but come on, it's a movie. And so that authenticity can be front loaded by telling the truth. But Chris, do you see, and Shane, that a lot of these AI tools, the, is it Air ai, the one that has the demo for Apple? To me, that seems manipulative, and I think I'm not alone as a consumer, as a B2B consumer of say, they don't front load that authenticity or that honesty at all. But Chris, do you see there's a race towards making that seamless to the point where you don't have to even admit that? Or how was it received in the round table yesterday when you said that, Hey, I think we got to lead with this honesty and trust upfront? Well,
Chris Beall (00:27:17):
I actually think that this is one of those rare cases where the ethics and the practicalities converge so tightly that you will not win in the marketplace with a bot that doesn't say it's a bot. I think there's a lot of freaking out about this kind of stuff that just comes from how people kind of act like a bot. They sort of act like ChatGTP, and just start emitting the next words that come to mind, which is it's a bot, therefore it's not a person, therefore, it's inauthentic because they've heard that string of words before. But if you really think about it, we do love to interact with bots as long as they're responsive and we feel that they're sufficiently neutral. That's why chat GPT went nuts and became the fastest growing application in the history of applications because you perceive that it's neutral, it's on, if anything, it's on your side.
(00:28:16):
And in fact, it uses language damn well it's a bot, right? But it uses language that implies that it cares about you. When you correct it, I ask, Hey, tell me about Chris Beal. And it says, oh, Chris, he has a degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford, blah, blah, blah. And I say, no, no, no. I mean, Chris be the ceo, EO of ConnectAndSell co-host to market dominance guys. What about that guy that says, oh, yeah. And then it says some other bullshit about me. And I go, no, no. And it says, oh, I apologize. It apologizes to me. So it sees the world through my eyes, which is a bot that needs a little bit of help, kind of staying on the rails. But it does useful things for me, and it's not against me. I think the big issue is going to be being the vendor's bot.
(00:29:02):
We're making an assumption that a selling bot has to be the vendor's bot, but selling is a highly complex activity full of all sorts of interactions. One of the interactions is learning, do I need to learn one vendor at a time? James Thornberg would say, no, James Thornberg would say, and God knows, he knows more about it than any of us on this call. Being a neutral actually allows you to get better information and save time for the other party. You tell us your requirements once we'll tell you which of three or four vendors that we work with is most appropriate, and those vendors are going to pay if one of them actually ends up doing business with you. Because for them, channel doesn't mean manipulation. It just means being in the game, right? So we're making a lot of assumptions about the bot filled future of sales that are simply knee jerk.
(00:29:57):
They're simply, they're not really even proper assumptions. They're actually emotional reactions to the idea of being manipulated by something that might be smarter than us, and it's very, very interesting. So the ethics and the practicality are going to merge just the same way they do in the 27th seconds. So Shane mentioned, how often has he opened with those two sentences? I know an interruption is the key. I didn't say it right that time. Let me say it correctly. I know I'm an interruption now, why do I say that? Well, I say it because it's the truth, and I'm telling you that I see the world through your eyes. So I say, Hey, Corey, I'm called Sam, but I'm actually a bot and I'm working for Joey over at company X, Y, Z. What I do is I reach out to folks like you to see whether you are interested in learning more about X.
(00:30:55):
You could go, well, I am, I'm not. And I could say, as the bot, Corey, I know, I mean talking to a bot who's a vendor's bot especially could be uncomfortable and affected, but you could think I'm manipulating you. If at any time you feel that, just call me out on it. If you want to talk to a human, let me know, right? I could say that as a bot. I could say it just like that. Modern bots can say stuff like that. I can work my way from acknowledging the truth, still following Chris VA's advice, right? You've got to show the other person, you see the world through their eyes, then you need to demonstrate to them that you are competent to solve a problem they have right now. Those are two things. You have seven seconds to do it. Can a human do it? Most humans can't. We train 'em, they fail. Why? They won't throw themselves under the bus and they won't make it sound fun when they offer to move forward. And people call it permission-based, which is utter baloney. There's no permission involved here. It's doing these two important things. I could do those things. It's just cheaper. And by the way, it'll actually do
Shane Mahi (00:32:03):
I agree. I agree fully. I think that's a very, very, very important point. And anything that is scripted where it doesn't require too much thinking involved, such as let's just call it either an agent or the progression of an agent that becomes a bot or a bot in the future that has that four, five seconds of scripted behavior to get through the gatekeeper. Again, a human is going to cost five, six times more than that. Whatever kind of country you're in, if you can use a robot to do that kind of stuff and just be authentic, be genuine, inoculate before you get to it, the market, what is it? The barrier to entry or that crossing the chasm becomes much easier. What was I going to say in the ethics piece? You jump in again and then I'm going to jump on that piece. I just wanted to catch that last piece.
 

In our brave new AI-augmented world, navigating tech integration while retaining that human trust factor remains a tricky balancing act.
So who better to provide expert guidance than our sage of sales, Chris Beall? Today our very own ChatGPT steps in as co-host for Corey to pepper Chris across the AI-sales trust landscape. Should we unleash these bots to comb leads? How do we mitigate client skepticism? Does transparency enhance trust? Chris distills hard-earned wisdom on these questions and more.
From specific use cases in training and process efficiency to ethical dilemmas around transparency, you’ll gain critical insights for smoothly integrating AI without severing those all-important human connections. Chris even gazes into the future, weighing engaging versus alienating roles for our robot friends.
Chris offers actionable advice so we can deploy AI judiciously while cementing bonds of respect and rapport. Time to bridge that tech-touch gap in this episode, Balancing Relationships and Efficiency in AI Sales
 
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Below:
Chris Beall  (00:14):
Hey everybody, this is Chris Beall, CEO of ConnectAndSell. And today I am not joined by Corey Frank, my co-host. Corey runs the awesome company, branch 49, in addition to many other things, finishing school for future CEOs by providing folks who want to be great professionals in the world of business with the opportunity to learn how to talk to strangers by cold calling them. So I asked chat GPT today to come up with 10 questions to play the role of Corey and kind of interview me Now, poor chat, GPT doesn't get to listen to the answers. I could probably have it do that, but I'm not going to do that. But I asked it to give us an opportunity to talk about a topic that is near and dear to me, which is the relationship between trust and efficiency in B2B sales in the era of chat GBT. 
Chris Beall  (01:12):
And there's a lot of speculation out there as to where all this is going. I've been fairly immersed in AI for a long time, since 1992 in fact, and certainly am delighted that we have the ability to get to the next level with ChatGPT and all the GPT-4 stuff. And it does lots and lots of neat things. Many people speculate on what it might be able to do in sales, replace salespeople and so forth. I thought I'd explore just this one question, which is how about trust and efficiency? Are they actually at opposite ends of the spectrum? That is if we ramp up efficiency too far in B2B sales, do we ramp down trust or is there a case to be made for trust and efficiency actually working together in B2B sales. Now, just to remind my view of B2B sales, pretty simple. We need to establish ourselves with somebody else, another human being as an expert in a matter that's important to them and as on their side. 
Chris Beall  (02:18):
If we can do that, we become what's called a trusted advisor. And a trusted advisor has a lot of freedom to get good information, quality information from another party so that they can bring their own expertise to bear and guide the process of coming up with a potential solution to a business problem that can result in a commercial transaction between the seller's business they work for and the buyer business, the one they work for. So trust is super important, but efficiency is important too because there's a question of, well, who are we going to sell to? There's a lot of folks out there we could talk to. Most of them will not be ready to 
Chris Beall (02:58):
Buy in the near term, even if they fundamentally need our offering, and most of them probably don't need our offering if we're at all specialized. I happen to work for a company called ConnectAndSell that provides something that lots of B2B companies need, but not all of them need it to the same degree. And so we have an efficiency problem just like everybody else. How do you efficiently go through the market and find the folks that are worth exploring with further, this is why the end of every sales interaction or the outcome of every sales interaction is the same. It answers the question, should we mutually decide to go down the road further together? So I asked chat GPT to play host Corey. It is standing in for you right now. And here's its first question.
 
Chris, could you start by giving us a brief overview of how chat GT and similar AI technologies are currently being integrated into B2B sales processes? 
Chris Beall (03:56):
Well, one place we know they're being integrated into B2B sales processes is in conversational intelligence. Almost every conversational intelligence technology now, and in technologies like the one I'm using here Zoom video, I've got the ability to summarize conversations using a GPT model. What does that really give us in B2B sales? Well, one thing it gives us is time compression. If I'm a manager and I'm trying to understand how are all the deals going, I can talk to my reps and have one-on-ones, I can have one-on manys where we do some pipeline review or deal review, all of those things are available, but if I could take every 30-minute conversation and have it compressed down to me into 10 relevant points that I can rely on, I can actually learn what's going well, and also where it might be worth bringing some other resources to bear, whether they're technical resources, whether it's a senior executive, whether it's some brainstorming, other resources might be worth bringing in at a certain point. 
Chris Beall (05:07):
And these technologies are awfully good at this. So they're helping us be managers to participate more in the sales process without interfering in it. And it's really an efficiency play. Now the efficiency comes from taking a 15, 20, 30 minute conversation, maybe longer compressing it down to 10 relevant points that can be read in about one to two minutes. So that's call it 30 to one compression of time. And that means as a manager, if I had time for say 10% of all the conversations that are happening to come into my brain, so to speak, I now have time for a hundred percent and it only takes 30% of my day. So it's quite an amazing breakthrough. And how does it speak to trust? Well, it's kind of interesting. We need to trust that GPT compressor that took the information from a 30-minute conversation and the transcription engine that gave that information to the GPT engine for analysis. 
Chris Beall (06:14):
We need to trust that it's kind of getting the whole thing that is, we wouldn't want to find out, oh, it gave me kind of a vanilla compression or a vanilla list and there's a disaster going on in there and I didn't notice it because once we rely on something like a piece of technology to help us out, it can often introduce blind spots. This happens quite literally when you're driving old-fashioned car mirrors, you have a blind spot right next to you, but you're relying on the mirror to tell you who's right next to you and you can make certain kinds of errors more frequently. So that's a place anyway where these technologies are being used in a very efficient way. They're also being used to write, I'll call it better emails. And I don't mean these automated emails that are being sent out effectively as spam, let's just face it too many, many folks. 
Chris Beall (07:10):
But really just writing better than most reps. Let's face it, most sales reps did not grow up as readers and writers. Some did, but most are better talkers and listeners. And so having an assistant, a co-pilot as they're called to actually draft an email for you to do it in a professional way and to do it in what it thinks is your voice, it's dynamite, saves a lot of time for the rep, but that's not mostly the time. The rep can maybe get to the point of trusting that technology to frankly write better than the rep does. It's certainly more efficient. So let's go into the second question. So ChatGPT or Corey in stand-in mode here is asking me.
 
(2) In your experience, how has the incorporation of AI like ChatGPT affected the level of trust between sales professionals and their B2B clients? 
 
I would say not at all in the case where trust is actually being established, but I think it has kind of fooled a lot of sales professionals into thinking that they can generate trust in a mechanical way by having some AI write lots and lots of very clever emails, very wonderful emails and just send 'em out to folks. 
Chris Beall (08:29):
And somehow, that will generate trust-level relationships. I don't believe it. I still believe that there are those seven seconds that we have in an ambush call or a cold call to get trust, and that has to do with how people work on the inside. So if I read something that may have been generated by a bot, and I know that's true of everything that comes my way at this point, it affects the level of trust immediately because I think, well, why would I trust a vendor's bot? I know what its job is. Oddly enough, I will actually be more inclined to trust a salesperson that I know is a person, but how do I know that that's a person? Well, I can't know it through a bunch of texts that's on the screen an email. I need to actually be speaking with that person and they need to be acting like themselves, so to speak. 
Chris Beall (09:20):
So even if they were replaced with a bot, it'd have to be a really, really good bot. It's not enough to fool me into think it's a person. It has to enable me to comfortably say, yes, this is this person and by the way, get me to the point where I believe they're an expert and they're on my side. 
So how about efficiency improvements? 
 
This is question number three that chat GPT came up with playing the role of Corey Frank, 
 
3) Can you provide specific examples of how AI tools made B2B sales processes more efficient coaching?
No difficulty coming up with an example or two. I've already given one of them. I think there are more to come. I believe we'll actually get to the point where AI tools will help us look for how a whole team is doing or how a campaign is doing right now. 
Chris Beall (10:10):
It seems to be very much one at a time. Here's a conversation, analyze the conversation, take a look. What about analyzing all the conversations or a bunch of conversations that fits some criteria or finding the challenges that are thematic within a team's efforts to reach out to the market? Do we really know who our message is resonating with in ways that one of these AI models can pay attention to? These things are tremendous at finding patterns within vast amounts of detail. So that would make it more efficient to find out who to talk to or more efficient to find out where our own team is challenged or those kinds of things. Bigger chunks I would call it. So those are some examples. By today. Most of it is conversation at a time or doing some writing and also doing some research for us. So if we are out trying to do some research before a conversation, a meeting that we're having with somebody, certainly AI can help us a lot because it reads faster than we do. 
Chris Beall (11:17):
It's probably already read about this person. But one thing for sure, and this is about trust, remember GPT technologies hallucinate facts. So if you rely on facts that have come back from an interaction, a chat with a GPT technology, you probably are going to be brought up short someday. This is why lawyers have been caught recently trying to use ChatGPT and similar technologies to generate citations, legal citations, and they'll use them confidently and it turns out well, it wasn't a citation, it was a hallucination.
 
Alright, so next question from our virtual bot named Corey Frank,  
(4 )How do you see companies balancing the use of AI with the need for human interaction in sales? Is there a sweet spot? 
 
Well, let's work the other way around on this one. The need for human interaction in sales is absolute because of what I already said, which is we need to establish ourselves as the seller, as an expert who is on the other person's side. 
Chris Beall (12:24):
We can afford to be on their side. We're the expert after all, they're the buyer. They're a generalist about what we are an expert on. So is there a sweet spot with regard to using AI? All of research is a sweet spot because the AI can lead us to understanding things about the world that would be too expensive for us to go find out, like who should we be talking to or what's going on in this particular field? Or there's some new developments that we should be paying attention to and so forth. So AI is great for research, great for drafting, but we have to be a little careful in final form. So proposals, sure, draft a proposal, you GPT model, but am I going to s end it off without taking a look at it? No. It actually implies that there's going to be other human interactions kind of to check that what the AI is producing is accurate and compliant, which is also a big issue. 
Chris Beall (13:22):
Well, how about in sales training? How can, this is question number five. 
(5) How can Che GPT and similar technologies be used in training sales teams to enhance their efficiency while maintaining trust with clients? 
 
Well, one thing you can do with the GPT model is make a simulator that plays the role of a client. And certainly, if you're working off an awful lot of client responses, which are all out there for almost every kind of product in the world, getting a simulator out of a GPT model is pretty straightforward and chat is a very natural way to do it. Now I'll give you the caveat on this, which is when it comes to establishing trust with the human voice, the human voice is a human voice, not a human keyboard. So you can simulate by going back and forth using your fingers. You can also do it using speech-to-text, but it's the sound of your voice that is crucial, especially in those first few seconds. It's actually always crucial, and it may well be that, fairly soon, these AI models can listen to the sound of our voice and give us feedback as to how trustworthy we sound. That would be a wonderful thing. Right now, they're not quite there. They're fairly easy to kind of fool into thinking that we sound wonderful. It's very subtle what human beings pick up on with regard to trust. I've often said people are to trust or 
Chris Beall (14:51):
As wolves are to fear, they can smell it. And if you're not trustworthy folks, they can so to speak, smell it in your voice. I know that sounds weird, I'm not talking about some synthesia either. So how about ethical considerations? What are this? 
(6) Question number six, What are some ethical considerations the companies should keep in mind when deploying AI in their sales process? 
There is one, keep this in mind. If your bot is talking to a client, it needs to say it's a bot. That's pretty simple. Transparency is always the way to get to a high level of ethics, and I have a bad feeling there's going to be a lot of folks saying, well, that wasn't me. That was my bot after the fact. Instead of saying it upfront, you got to be upfront. So that's a big, big ethical consideration. Another one is, if your bot or your AI is giving advice, expert advice, you better make sure it's actually expert advice because you take on a little bit of what I would call kind of a Hippocratic stance. 
Chris Beall (16:01):
That is, first you do no harm. When you advise somebody, you have to be conscious of the harm you might be potentially doing to them when they follow your advice. And so, just blindly saying, Hey, the advice from my GPT model is just go ahead and follow it without having it checked. It's not just a problem that you might not be trusted. You might be committing a pretty serious ethical breach. 
 
Alright, so how about question number seven. 
(7) From your perspective, how do B2B clients generally perceive the use of AI and sales interactions? Does it enhance or diminish trust? 
Chris Beall (16:44):
It depends. If you give me something that you say was generated by your AI, by your chatbot or by your GPT model and you say, Hey, I had the GPT model whip this up for you and I took a look at it, it looks pretty good to me. Let's discuss. No worries at all. In fact, it might enhance trust because you're being open and transparent about using your technology, this technology to be more efficient and to bring in maybe other points of view or to digest more data that might be useful to the client. So in that case, I think you can enhance trust. I think destroying trust is really, really easy. I think I just hit on it in the previous answer, which is, hey, ask somebody to trust a piece of automation that you're providing and don't tell them that it's automation. That one is going to cause not an erosion of trust, but a step function down from some number, probably not quite one if one is the highest number but to zero, and once trust is lost, it is not something you can go and get back. 
Chris Beall (17:52):
So how about skepticism this question number eight,
(8) If there's skepticism or resistance from sales teams or clients towards AI tools like ChatGPT, how do you recommend addressing these concerns?
Well, a couple of different ways. There will always be skepticism about new technology. There should be. New technology means new, it's unproven. We're not sure what it does. Really, really cool technology that makes you think something that's not actually true. Like, hey, ChatGPT is a person who's talking to me. That's not actually true. Hey, ChatGPT is thinking about this. That's not actually true. It's a next engine. It knows a lot of stuff that it's read so to speak, and it knows how to spit out the next token think token word, very similar concepts. And so when ChatGPT is talking to us so to speak, it's really just going next, next, next. Now maybe our minds work like this too, and our voices work like this. 
Chris Beall (18:52):
I have a feeling we do a lot of next, next, next, ourselves. It's just the way the world is. We love to think that we're really brilliant, having deep, deep thoughts and all that. Probably not. We're probably just spitting out the next word that comes to mind. That's why we call it comes to mind. And so it's natural skepticism is natural. The way skepticism is overcome is through two things. One is transparency, it let's be open about things. And the other is track record. So if the track record is good, and we note that over time some particular function, and I'll go back to those conversations where you take a discovery meeting, and the AI compresses it down to 10 points. Well, the first time I read one I might think maybe it's missing some things. By the time I've read a hundred of them, which only takes me a hundred minutes that I might've spread over a couple of weeks, I'm starting to go, Hey, I think this is pretty good. 
Chris Beall (19:47):
I don't have any big misses yet. But it just takes time. It takes time, and it takes experience. This is why the most skeptical people who are really, really smart plunge in and start experiencing what I call in anger or with an intent for a meaningful outcome, a new technology that is clearly as powerful as ChatGPT and all the things that are like it. So if you haven't gotten in there and put your hands on it, so to speak, and made some mistakes, try writing some prompts and seeing what happens. Don't just do the same thing over and over. Your skepticism only will go away appropriately and correctly with experience that leads to track record because now you kind of know where the landmines are. 
How about question number nine, future trends. 
(9) Looking ahead, how do you think the role of AI and B2B sales will evolve? What new developments should we expect?
I think the main developments we should expect are around efficiency. We will get much, much more efficient in B2B sales when two things happen. One is we have a better idea of who to talk to, who to go out and have conversations with that is very efficient. Secondly, we will be able to efficiently assess new people coming onto our team, assess performance of people on our team and help them get better. There's a lot of detailed information and patterns that can be detected, and those can be detected in meetings so they can be detected in targeting or in messages and we will be able to bring that stuff together much, much more efficiently so that we can generate trust more frequently. And if you think about B2B from a sales perspective, it's essentially the manufacturing and management of a portfolio of trust. So first, you have to be worthy of trust; okay, that might be the hard part. 
Chris Beall (21:48):
But once you're worthy of trust, are you being trusted by enough folks who might be able to take advantage in a good way of what it is that you provide? Probably not. I see AI, this GPT type, as being able to help us sift through, make sense out of detect patterns in larger amounts of data with different data sources so that we'll just do a better job of having the right people talk to the right people often enough and generate more trust because that's how it works over time and do so efficiently. So, allowing the generation of trust efficiently I think is going to be the main role of AI for quite a while in the world of B2B. And then finally, advice for sales leaders number 10. So Corey, here you are being played by ChatGPT who asked the final question.
 
(10) Finally, what advice would you give to sales leaders looking to integrate AI into their strategies without compromising on the trust and personal connection that's vital in B2B sales? 
Chris Beall (22:53):
Well, my advice is kind of always the same, and I know people might get a little bored with it, but it is what it is; that is you're trying to essentially pave a market with trust. A market is a list of people that if any one of them decides to do business with you, it reduces your cost and risk of doing business with every single other person. And therefore, their are companies in that market. Now that is not an oversimplification, but it hides some things like the flow of people through that list. Some come on, some go off, they retire, they go to new companies, they do all sorts of things. So there's a lot that goes on. And usually your market is not defined very, I'll say, coherently. That is markets normally are simply made up. Oh, we're going to sell to all industrial companies who have more than a thousand employees who are located in these states or something like that. 
Chris Beall (23:51):
That's a kind of target market that you can think of, but it's not a true target market because it doesn't follow the rule that we were just talking about. So okay, so I got this market out there. Now what's my advice? Well, you had to pave the market with trust, but you have to do that both in a targeted way and a little bit of a promiscuous way. That is you have to take the current opportunity and you have to identify it targeted, not just among those who might need what you offer, but among those who are more likely to need it. So we're going to have more application of AI to determine different levels of intent. Now we tend to determine intent from something super simple, which is, oh, they visited a website or they went to G2Crowd or whatever it happens to be, right? 
Chris Beall (24:41):
Action indicates intent. Well, there's a lot of other ways that folks express intent, mostly through investment and mostly maybe about investment in people. So there's going to be a lot to be done with regard to paying attention to how you can identify the folks that you need to pay attention to in the market while also helping the 11 twelfths of your market that's not in market right now be more accessible and that you understand more about them and more favorably inclined to think that you are somebody they can trust to be an expert in an area they care about and that you're on their side. 
So just by sticking to those principles, then we are very free to use these technologies in creative ways. When we abandon those principles, we enter the danger zone and we're probably not going to do too well. So I just want to thank my virtual Corey Frank here, ChatGPT for asking. 
Chris Beall (25:42):
I answered these questions. I think they're pretty sharp questions. Did ChatGPT think them up per se? No, it responded to a prompt. 
Here's the prompt, 
 
please play the role of Corey Frank, co-host of the podcast Market Dominance Guys, you will be interviewing Chris Beall on the topic “the relationship between trust and efficiency and B2B sales and the era of ChatGPT”. Please generate 10 questions for Chris to answer. So Corey may well be a next engine himself and spit out questions like this one word at a time. I think he probably goes into a little bit deeper conceptual well than ChatGPT. But ChatGPT, you did a pretty darn good job there. I really appreciate it. And until next time, for Corey Frank, this is Chris Beall, Market Dominance Guys.
 

Alex McNaughten continues his visit with Chris to share psychological insights that challenge traditional sales training. As an AI entrepreneur, Alex emphasizes confidence should be the priority when onboarding salespeople, not technique. He advocates first building enough confidence just to "pick up the phone” and draws parallels between sales and coaching - both guide people through "the emotional journey to consider something new." Alex tells his story about overcoming fear in sales and boxing, noting most training overlooks the emotional side. He concludes that "so much sales training, particularly cold calling, is wrong or missing" these emotional components.
Alex’s perspective as an AI builder brings a unique view on honing the emotional skills crucial for sales success. He advocates pushing sales leaders to transform training to address confidence and psychology first. Join them for this episode, “Confidence Beats Technique in Sales Training.”
Links from this episode:
Grw.aiBranch49ConnectAndSell
Alex McNaughten on LinkedInCorey Frank on LinkedInChris Beall on LinkedIn
 
Full episode transcript below:

The guys are tackling the big question on every sales manager's mind: Could AI replace me? With wisdom and reassurance, Corey and Chris explore the power of Taylor, an AI sales coach created by grw.ai CEO Alex McNaughten. Taylor provides a judgment-free space for reps to vent frustrations and surface red flags managers miss. As Chris explains, Taylor's conversational skills elicit "confessions" from reps. And for managers worried an AI could do their job better, Alex gently says: "The goal here is to make leaders better...not replace them." So breathe easy sales managers, and get ready to be 10-50X more effective. With the power of AI augmentation Sales Managers will be unstoppable. Join us for this episode, AI Coaching Conversations Elicit Unfiltered Rep Feedback.
About Our Guest:
Alex McNaughten - CEO/Founder - Grw.ai
With a background in B2B sales for both Kiwi startups and US tech giants, Alex is passionate about increasing the level of professionalism & performance in B2B selling globally. Prior to Apprento, through his advisory firm, he trained hundreds of founders, executives and sales professionals and worked across over 130+ ANZ businesses from pre-revenue startups like SafeStack Academy, to growth companies like Rocos to large multinationals like Vodafone, helping them to reduce their sales costs, speed sales cycles, maximize win rates, build out teams, expand into new markets and ultimately generate $10s of millions in new revenues.
Links from this episode:
Grw.aiBranch49ConnectAndSell
Alex McNaughten on LinkedInCorey Frank on LinkedInChris Beall on LinkedIn
 
Full episode transcript below:

Prepare for another thought-provoking journey as Corey and Chris are joined by special guest Jim Graf, the CEO and Founder of Kazzcade, a former private equity finance titan turned outreach sales guru. Together, they delve into the concept of "Gresham's Law" – where "bad money drives out good" – and apply it to the world of sales.
In an era overrun by cheap tricks and impersonal outreach, the MDG team explores how these practices can diminish the value of genuine, high-touch sales. With AI and automation flooding inboxes with repetitive and uninspiring messages, Chris, Corey, and Jim examine the phenomenon of how "cheap outreach actually drives out the value of good outreach."
Join the conversation as they discuss the impact of this shift on the art of selling. Can we reverse this trend? Can we, in fact, perform real “conversational alchemy” by transforming mundane interactions into genuine, meaningful connections? This episode offers valuable insights into navigating the challenging landscape of modern sales and cold outreach, where authenticity and real dialogue are held at a premium.
Don't miss "Conversational Alchemy: Transforming Sales in the Age of Cheap Outreach" as it explores the timeless wisdom of Gresham's Law and its relevance in today's business world.
 
Full episode transcript below:

In this episode, we step in with the AI sales tango. Corey, our tree-hugging sales champ, questions if AI can replace good old empathy. Our resident sales physicist, Chris chimes in, revealing AI as your trusty confidant, not a sales rival.
Chris dishes out AI secrets: it's an emotional prosthetic, erasing self-doubt and boosting confidence. It's like AI saying, "You've got this!" Corey and Chris tag-team AI's power in sales—providing insights, suggesting next moves, and extinguishing self-doubt. AI's not stealing the spotlight; it's your backup dancer, complementing your sales swagger.
They salsa through the AI-human tango, admitting AI won't replace human connection magic. But it's the GPS guiding you through the sales maze. The bottom line? Episode 191 busts the myth: AI isn't your enemy; it's your trusty sidekick on the sales stage. Join us for this episode, “Boosting Your Sales Swagger with AI As Your Backup Dancer."
Linked from this episode:
Corey Frank on LinkedInChris Beall on LinkedIn
Branch 49ConnectAndSell
 
Full episode transcript below:

Are you looking to gain a competitive edge in your sales process? Are you interested in understanding what lies deep inside your sales funnel and pipeline to drive more revenue? Then you don't want to miss this episode!
Join our Market Dominanc Guys, Chris Beall, and Corey Frank, as they dive deep into the world of sales technology and AI-powered tools. Discover the true advantage of understanding and optimizing the flow rate within your sales projects. Learn why it's essential to focus on time as the denominator when measuring success rather than vanity metrics like conversion rates.
They provide valuable insights on discerning whether a tool truly de-risks your sales path and reduces friction or merely adds to your tech stack inventory without tangible results. Explore the fascinating concept of "speed beats free" and why pushing time on the denominator matters more than dream outcomes in sales.
Join us for this episode, “AI for Sales? Don’t be ‘Candy Crush’ Complacent
 
 

Chris Beall and Corey Frank take us on a nostalgic journey through the evolution of sales tech and the intriguing world of AI. They start with a blast from the past, reminiscing about a 1960s AI program called Eliza, which acted as a non-directive therapist, fooling people into thinking it was a friend. Fast forward to the present day, they question the true value of CRM systems, pondering whether they actually help make money or just keep salespeople organized.
Corey shares a road trip story of stumbling upon racks of rock salt in Alabama, sparking the idea of the right people selling the right tools. Chris passionately emphasizes that onboarding salespeople should involve engaging them in discovery meetings from day one to boost their success.
This episode encourages sales managers and CEOs to rethink their sales tech strategies, focus on revenue-generating activities, and find the perfect balance between the human touch and AI. Join us for “Rock Salt & Roll: Unraveling Sales Tech's Mystery.”
Linked from this episode:
EP9: How to Harvest Authentic Trust in your Discovery Calls
Corey Frank on LinkedInChris Beall on LinkedIn
Branch 49ConnectAndSell
 
 
 
 

Chris and Corey continue their conversation with Ben Sternsmith of Sybill AI . This episode covers how AI is revolutionizing the sales process, making it more precise and empowering for sales professionals.
Discover how AI analyzes tonality and body language, equipping salespeople with unparalleled accuracy in assessing deal progress. They discuss the importance of building trust with clients and how AI can support but never replace the human touch in establishing meaningful connections.
They also explore the resurgence of cold calling as a powerful strategy in the digital age and introduce Dealy. This innovative AI-driven solution enhances CRM systems by analyzing customer interactions and providing valuable insights.
Join us for this insightful episode that explores the synergy between sales and AI, offering practical tips and inspiring ideas for sales professionals.
 
Links from this episode:
Ben Sternsmith on LinkedInCorey Frank on LinkedInChris Beall on LinkedInSybill AIBranch 49ConnectAndSell
About Sybill AI
Sybill AI is an AI company that originated as a Stanford project three years ago. The founders, frustrated with the limitations of remote teaching, developed a behavioral AI engine over Zoom. This innovative tool records calls and analyzes body language to determine engagement levels. Leveraging the power of large language models like GPT-4, Sybill AI offers generative AI for salespeople. It automatically generates call summaries, writes AI-powered follow-up emails, and even appends CRM data.
 
Full episode transcript below:

The guys welcome Ben Sternsmith of Sybill AI delves into the benefits of AI in sales, such as freeing salespeople to be more engaged and focused during customer interactions. Ben shares his experience of being able to concentrate on customer needs without the burden of note-taking or manual follow-up tasks. As Corey, Chris, and Ben explore the possibilities opened up by AI in sales, they discuss the challenges faced by sales professionals and the potential for AI tools to streamline and enhance their work.
With tools like Sybill AI and ConnectAndSell, sales reps can offload repetitive tasks and focus on building genuine connections with customers. Join Corey, Chris, and Ben on this captivating episode as they unravel the fascinating world of AI in sales and its potential to reshape the industry in this episode, “Harnessing Generative AI: Revolutionizing Sales Strategies and Results”.
Links from this episode:
Ben Sternsmith on LinkedInCorey Frank on LinkedInChris Beall on LinkedInSybill AIBranch 49ConnectAndSell
About Sybill AI
Sybill AI is an AI company that originated as a Stanford project three years ago. The founders, frustrated with the limitations of remote teaching, developed a behavioral AI engine over Zoom. This innovative tool records calls and analyzes body language to determine engagement levels. Leveraging the power of large language models like GPT-4, Sybill AI offers generative AI for salespeople. It automatically generates call summaries, writes AI-powered follow-up emails, and even appends CRM data.
 
Full episode transcript below:

Chris Beall is on the road in Seattle, attending the annual Microsoft Build conference. Amidst thousands of software developers learning about the latest advancements, Chris and Susan discuss the impact of AI on sales and address common concerns about its effects on job security. Drawing an analogy of material science advancements to the evolution of building materials, Chris explains how new technology creates opportunities for salespeople rather than making them obsolete. He predicts an explosion of new products and businesses as companies leverage the power of AI to enhance their offerings. With an optimistic outlook, Chris emphasizes that salespeople should embrace the possibilities brought by material science advancements and look forward to a world of new products and increased sales opportunities. Join them as they explore the exciting potential of AI in sales on this episode, "Unleash the Sales Kraken: Fearless, Innovative, and AI-slaying!"
 
Full episode transcript below: