The Role of AI in Pre-Sales

So we know for sure the landscape of pre-sales is evolving rapidly. Pre-sales in general is just an amazing profession because it changes all the time. We're in the middle of change. We're now in a new level of change with AI. The title of this is the new pre-sales motion. Must include it. We know it's at the forefront of the transformation in this stage. Okay. We're going to explore why integrating AI into the motion is key, why it's no longer optional. We're going to give you some real life examples. We brought on an amazing set of people here on the panel who are using it, who have something to say about it. I'm going to launch a little bit of a form here. And this form, I'm going to throw it in the chat to everyone. So feel free to click on that link. That's the form. I'll maybe share it a couple of times so we can catch everyone. And this came out of a prep session because. Jack, Ryan, Maria, and Daniel and I were talking and we were like, I wonder what everybody's using because we know what we use. And so we just threw this together. We're going to share the results of this at the end of it. The conveyor team is going to share with an email kind of the results of this poll. So please insert all the information you can because I think the more we know, the better. Again, I'll share that link a couple times. And I want to welcome our guests and I'll get myself out of the way. So first of all, I'm going to. Welcome Ryan Grosjean. Grosjean? Did I pronounce your last name right, Ryan? You nailed it. Just like the pants. Not the Grosjean French. Just, yep. Okay, cool, cool. So Ryan comes to us from Gong. He's an AISE. So AI is in the title. And we all know Gong plays heavily into the AI world. It's going far beyond just transcripts. So we very welcome Ryan. Jack Cotrain, I always get your last name wrong. Jack, sorry about that. I say Co-Train. Yeah, it's Cochran. That's okay. I know. That's good for everybody to know. It's Cochran, not Co-Train. Not like, yeah. Okay. Anyway. So Jack, you know, podcast host, producer, pre-sales enablement master, director of solution consulting and action IQ. We all know Jack. Welcome. Maria Latt, same goes to you. You're a pre-sales force to be reckoned with. You present all around the globe, industry events and platforms. You're also leading solution teams over at HubSpot. And then Daniel Kish, whose title is the VP of Marketing at Conveyor, but he was an SE. He's been on the podcast. I recommend you all try to find that episode. He's great. Well, way more than just marketing. I don't think the title suits you that well, Daniel, but you're good at marketing too. And then myself, I'm the Pre-Sales Collective General Manager. So thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to start the conversation by asking the hot topic, is AI going to replace us? Is AI going to replace Pre-Sales? and what's your take on how it changes our role? Jack, over to you. Yeah, I mean, people are already saying no in the chat. I'd love to see it. I think we're a long way away from that. In fact, you could make the argument that we're never going to have a full replacement, but it is certainly something, and that's part of the reason why I think we want to start off with this, because the more and more we see things about, you know, this capability now can be replaced with AI, and this, now you can... have a different assistance. You can actually set up demos where it can be run by a bot that you can train if you wanted to, to, to, to answer questions for you. But you know, I think the better way to talk about it, I think most of even as we were kind of prepping for this, the most of our conversation is going to be not so much on what part of my job is being replaced, but what are the tools that are out there that make me better at my job? that make me a better SC. And I think one thing to say, if you are an SC who's not willing to look at and utilize all the tools available to you, you as an SC might become irrelevant. You as a pre-sales professional might become irrelevant, but those of us who are looking to embrace, grow, improve, I think it's just going to become more of a fun profession with the tools that are available to us. Yeah, that's wonderful. And I love that comment, Aaron. How can I use AI to work better? 100%. That's a good response. Daniel, over to you, bud. Yeah, I mean, I love exactly what Jack said. And I'm sure folks have heard the old horse and buggy moving over to the Model T story where there were a lot of people who used to go fix horses and buggies. And then, you know, engines and cars came around. And all of a sudden, those people were out of business and they kind of transitioned to going to do a new thing. In every big shift, which we are absolutely in the middle of, there's a lot of change. And that change can be really exciting. It can also be super scary. And I think that we're going to see a lot of job risk in some ways for exactly how Jack said, right? Like if we don't adapt, if we don't adapt, we will find a lot of challenges with how our roles will change. And so I absolutely think that SEs and the solutions consultant space at large is about to experience a really big shift, but it's also an exciting one for this persona who has always loved, and I count myself as part of it, has always loved finding new ways to get really excited about a new change, a new dynamic. And so, yes, we will absolutely still need everybody who's doing solutions consulting, and the job will shift. It will not be replaced by an AI agent, likely. It'll be replaced by somebody who's really good at using AI. And so I kind of like the idea that we're starting off with a really hard hitter, because I don't think anybody's job will necessarily go away, but how we do those jobs will absolutely shift. Over to you, Maria. Yeah, and to echo what Daniel and Jack were saying, my short answer is no. You know, what sets you apart as an SC, SC in free sales is the ability to connect with people and explain those technical concepts in an easy to understand way. And so that's really where your value is gonna become. Like you at the end of the day are the value through this sales process. You know, prospects can easily do their own research and come to the conclusion of what solution may work best. they do at the end of it still need that human element of someone really understanding their needs. And so what AI is going to really help to do is reduce a lot of that time that you all are probably spending on that upfront work, the mundane work of doing account research, trying to understand what the customer does, how they make money, things like that. And so us having now that way to cut down that time enables you all to be more efficient. And- AI is not going to be able to replace the creativity that you all bring, the problem solving, the way you build relationships, right? AI is going to help you build those genuine connections much quicker and build that credibility up front. Because as we know, buyers buy from folks that they trust. And I believe that AI will help to elevate the role of resales by making us that true trusted advisor that will help them solve their business challenges. Yeah, well said. And for those, I see a lot of comments coming to the hosts and panelists. So switch it to everyone. If you want to add the conversation, please add your opinions to the conversation in the chat. It'll give us more talking points, which is helpful too. Over to you, Ryan. What's your take, man? Yeah, I think my thoughts on this, I try to take the posture of, you know, what if it could replace me, right? Because I think it's interesting to sort of protect yourself and make sure you're leveling yourself, upskilling, utilizing the technology and almost taking a posture of let's not bet against it just in case, right? Things are changing so quickly right now that I kind of like having that in the back of my mind of, hey, this could be coming for you, right? Keep it up, keep moving. I've seen in the comments here, you know, some of the things we've heard around AI isn't going to replace you, but people who are using it effectively might. I definitely think that's a key component of it is learning to use it effectively. But I do see on the other side, AI potentially replacing elements of the SE role, right? So I could see it taking certain things off of our plates, maybe, right? Some of those Harbor Tour type demos that I think oftentimes maybe we don't love giving anyways, right? See a world where some of those tasks might get replaced. And the last thing I'll add, I saw a comment, I think it's the CEO of one of the AI SDR companies that are out there these days saying. The intent isn't to replace your top-notch SDRs who are doing all their research, creating super compelling message. Our intent is to replace the SDRs who are kind of doing a half-assed job at it. And I think we could see probably a similar thing in the SE world, which is if you're not at the top of your game and to Maria's point, really adding value in the sales cycle beyond things like just giving a demo and not asking questions and digging into the client's pain and trying to go above and beyond. I see that as potential risk for getting replaced through AI or through an SE who now has more capacity to take on what you might have done before. Yeah, that's good insight, especially because you pretty much talk about AI all day. I'll give my hot take in here because I can't help but jump in. And I think of it from an operator perspective. I think about from... If you're growing a business, like why do we start businesses? Why do we grow businesses? We're growing them to make profit. We're, I think, just fundamentally interested in growth in general as people. And I think if we're seeing efficiency gains. using AI tools, we're essentially going to reinvest it into more growth in some capacity as a business, right? So like, my thought is if you're seeing, if you're, if you, let's say you're replacing the low hanging fruit of, of, of low performer SDRs with an AI tool that costs half as much, the other half of that expense is probably not just going to go into a fund where everybody could take Fridays off. We're all going to continue to work Fridays. And we're probably going to take that other 50% of investment and put it somewhere else in the organization to create more growth, right? So we're going to get smarter outbounds. We're going to get smarter go-to-market effects. So I see it as a evolution versus replacement. I know that we're getting it better at using the tools. The tools are getting better themselves. And there's an evolution there. Like AI says, build your own. And then there's Salesforce. They're automating things like service agreements, right? That's what Dreamforce was all about. The repetitive data-driven tasks will increasingly get automated, like RFPs and things like this. And then more investment will be made in the customer acquisition and retention. That's my bet. So I'm going to go down the line. I'll put that down. Is that like, that's where the investment is going to be remade into our go-to-market industries? Because let's face it, we can't help but continue to grow. We're not going to like, we're not going to say we don't want to hit those numbers. But speaking of efficiency, I'm super interested in how you are finding efficiency gains. I think a lot of people have joined us to understand, hey, we've got some experts here. How are they using it? So let's talk about the efficiency gains. I want you guys to all give your take on how AI can help automating the time-consuming tasks. We talked about RFPs, but there's a whole host. There's security questionnaires. There's all that stuff. So Maria, I would like you to take that question and just share with us what you think there. Yeah. And I'm going to give a shout out to the SEs and FAs on my team who I've talked to and, you know, how are they using AI today to make it easier for them to get through these deals and through the sales process? And the resounding theme is researching prospects, competitors, and going deeper. I think long gone are the days of saying, well, it's not my job, right? Like it's just the rep's job to understand the account and the, you know, the inner workings of our prospects. But really now you have. it at your disposal to understand, you know, what industry is your prospect in? What are the nuances of those industries? What's happening there? What are they hiring for? And I think today, for those of you who are taking the time, this can take you a few hours, right? And if you find the industry, right, is it a niche industry, having to understand like the logo and nomenclature, AI can now reduce the time you're probably taking to do this from an hour to two hours to now 10 to 15 minutes. And from that too, now you can take what you know and internalize it. So it's not just like, okay, I did it. It's a checkbox exercise. You can now craft those stories to make those really great custom demos. I was talking to one of my SCs, Nathan DeLong, about how he does all of that upfront research to now create a really great tailored custom demo that's really going to be a compelling story for prospects. And with that too, who are the personas that are going to be on these calls? And now... with AI, you can do a quick gut check of who these individuals are, what they might care about. And even if it's a use case you've seen before, making those assumptions is not going to get you to set yourself apart from the competition. This is now a way for you to have a leg up and really make those stories compelling. And also too, lastly, I know I talked to one of our essays, Peter Sirocco. It's a great way to also debug your code. If it's taking you a while to write some code and you're getting errors. It's a great way to get unstuck without having to spend time trying to debug it and try to figure out what's going on. It's a great learning tool as well as you think about how to do the role better. Oh, you nailed it with competitive intelligence, Maria. I didn't even, like the preparation is a huge thing. We'll get into like prep because I think that's a whole nugget right there. Thank you so much for sharing that. Who wants to hop in next? Yeah, I can hop in with that because a lot of my thinking around it is very similar to what Maria had just said. I mean, the best thing that a lot of AIs can do is help you find publicly available information and summarize it, right? And so competitive information is definitely one. I can give a little bit of a shout out here for everyone who's involved in sort of the rise. It's not a new thing, but it's become more important lately around pre-sales, people getting into value engineering, doing business value assessments. And not just talking about what your software can do, but right up front showcasing, here's the benefits you should expect to see. Because it's not okay anymore to come in and say, well, we don't really know your numbers. We don't really know your industry. We really don't know. what you might be able to save because there's so much information out there that can be so easily summarized that for every engagement you have, you can walk in and say, based upon what we know about you, based on what we can find out about your industry, here's our best guess, what we think you can save. And we'd love to talk through more of these with you. And a lot of that work, we didn't use to do it because it would take literal days worth of work to go out and figure out what are the best industry trends? What are the typical in this industry? What are the metrics that they track? What are averages of those? a company at this size, what are they probably experiencing? You can use AI to help you make a best guess. And so there's no reason to not be doing that. And so that's one thing that I've seen a lot of efficiency gains with that, which is it's kind of like efficiency gains, unlocking a capability that we used to reserve for just the top, the biggest clients we had, where we could spend a full week getting ready. We can now do it with every single deal we have, which is kind of, it's the efficiency that unlocks more pieces, which is awesome. I might add on here, I totally echo everything Jack and Maria just shared that from the preparation and the tailored aspect, it's unmatched and how quickly you can prepare. And I'd say right now it's critical to everything has always been competitive. Everything always feels competitive. It feels even more competitive right now. It's probably just because it's right now. But I think it's you can't not do it either right now. Right. And so I think that's a key element to it. And the other thing I'll add is I know there's a lot of tools out there that do these types of things, but internally we've built a resource that's primarily utilized by pre-sales teams, but also some post-sales as well, that looks across our Airtable, our Jira, our Help Center, our product release, all those types of capabilities. And so as an SE, when there's things I don't know, things that, hey, is this on the roadmap? Where in the roadmap is it? Instead of relying and waiting on getting juggled across a few different... product teams, PMs, right, et cetera, I can go to this tool that we have created and embedded into Slack to get answers to those types of things. So that's just another part that's become an integral part of my workflow. Sometimes I'm using that on calls so I can get a bit more granular, not just, oh, it's on the roadmap, but hey, it's on the roadmap, you know, our PM's working on it, it's in LA this week, you know, just being able to have more specific answers at my fingertips. So that kind of tool has been super beneficial for just really from RP responses to roadmap to really anything in between super powerful. What I like about all these answers is they're kind of like a mixture of two classification categories that I think about. One is like the know your customer side of the world. How do I use AI to know my customer better? The other one is like, how do I know myself? And there's all these really interesting backend technologies that are like, I have an incredible amount of organizational knowledge. How do I get the right knowledge at the right time to solve the task? And what I think is so cool about AI efficiency right now is we're seeing a bunch of 50th percentile problems and what I'll call 90th percentile problems. And the chat's blowing up like a lot of really interesting stuff around RFPs, build versus buy. And what I kind of like about the era of AI that we're in right now is like, we could do a lot and get to the 50th percentile for either like a customer problem or a know myself kind of problem. But then there's all these other really tricky things that we're noticing, right? Like, hey, is the accuracy there? Do I have to mung together backend systems and actually do a bunch of things that are chained? Do I have like a low maintenance way of figuring out how to like, not just do the thing today, but like have it persist over time? And some of those kind of classify then into the 90th percentile category. And so I think like right now, our eyes are very much open to all these possibilities and we are starting to experiment with a lot. But that to really get all those efficiency and productivity gains that we're like, we're realizing and waking up to like, these are opportunities for us, we're probably going to have to invest a lot. And so there's like the build versus buy trade off that we're all making, where I can like do a lot of things with the 50th percentile. And like, I can do it cheap too. And then there's a whole bunch of other things that I might need to pay money for. And so not everything is always clear at this moment in time either. But that's, that's, I think like, we're going to keep searching for like, what are the 50th percentile and 90th percentile problems. Yeah, that breakdown is awesome, Daniel. I wrote it down. Like the AI to know your customer, the AI to know yourself. I almost feel like I need that for my own family home, like the AI for what's on the calendar, when soccer practice, when swim practice, that stuff too. But I'm going to share a poll again. I shared this poll earlier on and it's actually, it's not a poll, it's a survey, sorry. A survey on tooling. Because in one of our prep sessions, we were wondering like, what the heck? What is everybody else using? I'm going to put a little nugget in here to say, please, basically anything besides ChatGPT, because we all know and we all use that. And I would love to get some other answers besides ChatGPT in here. A side note, I'm looking for a tool that I could put like a script into to create great Google Slides. So presentations, I do a lot of presentations here. So if you know of one of those great tools, please throw it in the chat. That'd be great. I'm going to get into prep. So we've talked a lot about knowing your customer, as you said, Daniel. And a lot of the time we're trying to get in front of our customer and act like we know a lot about them. But we might have to do that five times a day, maybe eight. So how do you shortcut this? And Ryan, I'll let you take this one. Awesome. So I work at Gong. Before I worked at Gong, I was a Gong customer. So I have to toot the horn of Gong a little bit because it definitely helps from a preparation standpoint. So traditionally, to prepare for meetings, you might have some notes from the AE. Those notes may or may not be accurate, relevant, or representative of what the client truly needed to understand. You might be stuck in a 30 minute to hour long meeting with that AE to prep to tell them that the questions they think the customer asked can't possibly be the questions that the customer asked. Right. But bottom line is there's a lot of inefficiencies that go into the preparation process currently. So now my preparation is typically going into Gong, pulling up the call history, potentially pulling up the account history. I use Gong's ask me anything capabilities to say What have we covered with the client so far? List out the key priorities for each persona I'm going to talk to on the call today. I say, what's any feedback or challenges they've surfaced so far? I do my own prep work in literally five to 10 minutes. I ping the AE with kind of my plan, see if they've got any pushback or anything that I'm missing. And very rarely are we having to waste any time on internal calls. I mean, I would say, well, I don't know. I hadn't thought about putting an official number on it, but it would be a very significant portion of time that has been eliminated from prep on that side of it. And then it goes into what Maria has already talked about. I think we've kind of flushed out pretty well in terms of using chat TPD to prepare on anything you need to learn about the client, especially when it's a new industry, new segment. Just learning about that industry or segment as a whole is a game changer as well. But. On the existing interactions you've had with the client perspective, the fact that AI can have all that categorized, summarized by the persona, by the title, and that you can just simply ask for the exact nuggets that you need to go with the tailored demo has been a game changer. Yeah. And actually, Ryan, to add to that, that was a great summary. I think if you leave with anything, know that now your prep can be shortened. And something I want to double down on is you're going to get time back. with a lot of that work that probably took hours on end or just the time wasted of having to get yourself up to speed on it. So I've been telling my SEs, like with that time back, like time savings is only as good as what you do with the time you've saved, right? And so how can you now have a point of view or a perspective with that time back and be strategic with your reps? So now that you don't have to spend 30 minutes getting up to speed, how can we come to those prep meetings? with okay based on everything we know here's my perspective and i was actually on um the buying end i was looking at working with the sales team on looking at digital sales room software and as the buyer the company the the prospect didn't know anything about what our pains were they didn't know what we cared about and that was not a great way to start the conversation and so i kind of thought about okay how are my sc's and essays um coming in prepared and you know, come in with a point of view, even if it's wrong, you know, I think your customers, your prospects will appreciate the prep or the, at least the, the thought that you had to formulate an opinion. So I think, you know, with the preparation with AI shortening, a lot of what can take a lot of time, you know, use that to formulate your opinions, internalize the information, you know, and, you know, they say like knowing is not half the battle, right. It's how you apply it. And so take that extra mile to now come to those calls with. a stance and it generates a conversation, if anything. To do that effectively, Maria, though, you will have to block your calendar because otherwise that extra time will quickly get plugged by additional demos and customer meetings. It's the only caveat I'd say there. Very true. Yeah, it's one of those crazy things. As we all know, as soon as you do things to be more efficient, people will efficiently put more things on your calendar. I don't have much to add other than what Ryan or Maria have said, other than to say specifically for pre-sales leaders out there. you know how hard it is to keep track of everything your teams are doing. And you don't even need to do necessarily AI, but certainly there are, if you're not using some type of a tooling or even potentially some combination of, say, call summaries from something like Gong that can combine with a, you know, more of a library-based AI model that you feed that information into in order to be able to understand, okay, with Acme Inc., where are we at? Because I have no idea and someone just asked me. So... That's, I think, where, especially as pre-sales leaders, make sure you have something so that you're not spending the majority of your brain time wasted on just the administrative keeping track of things. I think that's a lot of what we're talking about here as well is a lot of the things that we're looking at doing, you know, call summaries, meeting notes, doing the research, etc. It all falls into the line of things that are tasks that take up a lot of time, tasks that take up a lot of brain power, but aren't actually that hard to do for something like AI. And I would much rather spend my time on the things that are harder for me to do, such as strategizing on if we need to make a pivot in an account based on something that we just learned or new sales motions altogether or new ways to go to market where maybe we want to position ourselves differently. I want to spend my time more there because that's going to more impact my company and leave AI to do all of these summarization things and research, et cetera. So definitely. The recommendation I would have is go through your day and think about the things that you have that you know, like, you know what, I really this is a not value added high time high brain power exercise that I could probably offload and find ways to do it. I love seeing all things in the chat as well. If you're not following the chat, which again, plug make sure everyone's posting the panel to everyone as opposed to just us panelists. There are so many tools that I'm going to be taking away and checking out that I don't even heard of. So like this is like educational for me on some things I've not even thought about so please keep all those things coming. I'll add one more thing too, because I love how Jack pulled together a few different threads. One is like, we can demand more from like all the chaining together of these things. Like when I think about what's happening upstream in a Gong conversation, there's so many automations that we know are just like getting bottlenecked, right? Like it happens in a call and then it's anybody's guess like when that thing actually gets solved. But so many of our vendors must be building systems that like take that stuff from like upstream and then flow it all the way downstream. And if we're users, like we have to demand that of like our leaders too. It's like, Hey, we need this to be more productive. We know that we're spending too much time on admin and backend work. Like if we want to go hit these aggressive new goals, if we want to go enter new markets, like we also need the capability to like go after and tackle these problems where they're occurring because the AI is getting so good that if we're not demanding the same like level of results from our vendors and our leaders, like we're going to be in the same position two years from now. And so I think like now is the time to say like, we know it has a capability. Let's go get it done. On that front. Yeah. So I love that. And I kind of want to switch gears into how to help. Well, there's a few different shots. There's so many threads here. Oh my gosh. And with the chat, like you said, I'm coming up with all kinds of other ideas. So I've already like saved some of these recommendations. So thank you everybody for sharing them. Let's talk about buyers, right? So we've kind of, I've actually, as I've listened to this conversation, I'm kind of thinking about myself and I'm thinking about pre-sales engineers and leaders and us and organizations. But as we know, being a buyer is super hard. It's harder than ever to understand what you want to buy, what it does, if it's actually telling the truth, you know, what the competitive landscape looks like. Um, so yeah. And just to your point, like so many people are actually injecting the gen AI into their products when they're really not doing it, which Daniel, I know you have a lot to talk about there. Um, but how do we help? Like let's enable our buyers with AI. How do we do that? Ryan, let's start with you since you have so much experience on that front. Yeah, I think, you know, I. sort of approached it from a bit of a tactical perspective and just how does this show up in my you know sales process every day and something that sort of dawned on me is oftentimes as pre-sales we're thinking about how do we be more efficient with our jobs right how do we save ourselves times and it just sort of clicked and hey the prospects encounter some of the same challenges in the buying process that we struggle with hey it's been a couple weeks since we talked to them what did we talk about right who are the people that said this versus the other and so From my perspective, you know, what I like to do is use the AI to quickly summarize. I pretty much do three very tactical things. I say, who are the people we were talking to? What have we presented to them so far? What's their feedback been? So that as we enter each call, I can remind them of, hey, here's just a reminder, right? Here are the kind of the North Stars that we're aligned on, right? These are the challenges you're trying to solve. These are the solutions that we've presented to you so far. And not only that, but here's been your feedback, right? So, so-and-so, like you name someone, you describe that this, you explain this is exactly what you were looking for, right? And so you can kind of check that box. are we agreed on this, right? Can we kind of move forward from here? Is there anything outstanding we still need to tackle? And so there, I think it eliminates some of that duplicative nature that happens often in sales process. Hey, you know, is this still a priority? Remind us where this is going, right? Oh yeah, it hasn't, like obviously buyers sole focus isn't buying our software. So how can you give them all, arm them with the information that they need as well, right? And so I know that's a bit of a tactical application in that buyer enablement. I still think there's... tons that could be done there, but that's kind of the POV I'd share on it. Yeah, that's a great summary, Ryan. And I think if anything, it's helping them connect those dots, right? Like you're basically regurgitating the things that they've come to us with and reminding them like, hey, you can do your own research, but what you came to us for is to solve these problems. And to tackle what Ryan said, it's helping to understand where there might be gaps and helping the buyers quickly fill it with. everything that we know and how we can be, you know, the solution to the problem they came to us with. So I think it's great. I think it helps to speed up a lot of the process today and helping buyers be more confident in going with your solution or company. I recently tried to do some grownup stuff by getting a financial advisor. And I had a, we had a demo and my wife and I are sitting on this call and 30 minutes in, I'm like, still confused as to what these people do. I'm like, I don't even know what it is you're, I don't know how you're going to help me, you know? And then we had a call like three weeks later and I had forgotten about it because I'm busy at Pre-Sales Collective and I jump on and they're kind of like, hey, you have any questions? And I'm like, I need you to remind me of why I'm here. And what did we even like about the last conversation, right? I haven't thought about this in weeks. So to your point, it's like, remind me of who in the room, what viewpoints did we have at the time and why did they matter? Because I'm jumping from one. to the next to the next. So Jack, oh, go ahead, Ryan. Go ahead, bud. Yeah. Just as you were talking, one other thing that popped into mind there is being able to utilize AI to surface what other buyers that you're talking to have cared about within your other close one business. I think it's always tricky to be able to find customer success stories, getting nice case studies from the Daniels of the world, the support for marketing. How can you find some of that information ad hoc, right? So when all of these conversations and knowledge is there, being able to also just quickly surface based on, hey, have we talked to these titles in this industry? And hey, what were some of the things they were trying to solve? And did we close that deal? How's the deployment been going? What are some of the wins they've shared? So I think even from a buyer enablement perspective, being able to say, hey, we worked with a client in a very similar space as you. They were actually evaluating the same competitors. Here are the couple of reasons they decided to go with us, right? It sounds like those are some of the things that are important to you as well. So being able to quickly find that information, I think, is also really invaluable in terms of, you know, helping it feel more personal to them, feel like you've done this before, right? Know what you're talking about. So that's just kind of another thing that popped into mind there. Cool. Daniel, do you have anything to say about enabling buyers with AI? Boy. Buyers, the word of the moment is multi-threading. I'm sure everybody's heard that word, right? And it's all about how do I get more leverage? How do I get to more people? How do I cultivate my champions? And that's really hard, but the mechanics of those steps are kind of the same mechanics from customer to customer. And the nice thing with AI is it's giving us a lot more leverage. And so I think if like what we're hearing from all of our leadership is usually some flavor of like, Go like, you know, cultivate more champions, get more multi-threaded within the organization. Everybody's looking at like everybody else, like, I don't know, how are we going to do all that? And the only answer that I've figured out so far is using AI to like kind of do those mechanical steps over and over again. And the key there is like personalization, what Ryan said. So if you can personalize it to me, you can then use all of that same information to the people who are in my org, are related to me, know the persona, know the company. The data is all there, right? Like it's sitting usually in a gong, it's in Salesforce, and we now have leverage. So the question is, what do we do with that leverage? Because I think like we're all feeling like, hey, maybe our teams are under-resourced, we've got a lot bigger expectations. And the only way that I can figure out about how to enable a buyer at scale with personalization is to like bring all these tools together that looks at a single thread of what the customer wants, and then the multi-thread of all the people who are involved in that buying process. And that's really hard and it takes up a lot of time. Historically, it's been many. This is the first time in history it's not going to be many. But it's going to take a lot of effort to get all those layers moving in the right direction. And so I think that we are seeing, again, the possibility of what it's going to take to do buyer enablement well, but that it's not going to be a foregone conclusion that we're going to necessarily like throw it at chat GPT and like expect an answer. And so I think that we are at the very beginning of like what's going to be a bunch of really hard but solvable problems. And so I think that's kind of like, you know, we see the end of the road in the promised land, but like we're still somewhere not quite there yet. And Daniel, I love that because I spend a lot of my time figuring out how to make sure I'm not selling to a persona, but to a person, because I think that's the important thing. There's actually a tool that, it's not a tool we use at our company, but a couple of the AEs have been using it. And those that do, it makes a significant difference. It's a product called Crystal Nose. It's been around for a very long time. It hooks into your LinkedIn. You can look up someone's profile and it provides a personality profile. Is it right? Not always, but it's scaringly right most of the time. And how they use that really effectively is when we're then crafting our responses and trying to help someone to know where they're at, it's this person prefers things that are direct, factual, no fluff. Perfect. We provide them with the factual, no fluff approach when we're presenting them with the plan to purchase. If it's wrong and they want more fluff, they'll tell us, but it gives us, again, it's all these things that we can do to try to make our first attempt a little bit better. And if there's someone that likes to get... buy-in from their whole company one of the first questions that we ask is who else needs to be at the table for this because i know it's probably important to have that like yeah it is that's great i'm glad you asked let's bring in these seven people like it just helps you a little bit based upon the information that's out there based upon stuff you would enable remember being able to spend the time doing to get more to the person um again it's it's you taking it and doing it though as opposed to just blindly listening to someone else that's something that we actually use someone just posted in the chat i think that's the right one i haven't i haven't looked it up personally. I just use the AEs and tell them to look it up for me because I'm too lazy to go do it myself. But yeah, I definitely recommend checking out that and things like that that can do that type of like person lookup information for you. Yeah, that's super cool. Maria, you said it got yours right. I had never heard this tool, so I'll just pull it up. Scary. Yeah, if it's right, I'm sorry for scaring you for the day. Yeah, it's funny how we don't like to know some things about ourselves, right? We're like, oh, am I so predictable? Oh, man, yeah, I thought I was mysterious, you know? Authenticity I hear in this thread a lot. So like the past like five minutes, I'm just thinking data, authenticity. Is it right? Is it real? It's not right all the time. How do you tell if it's right? And Jack, you shared in a prep a very interesting story of authentically communicating with your team using AI one time. So I want you to share that really quickly. And then talk about authenticity. Yeah, I'm being sarcastic. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think I was being very authentic. This was like right as Gen A was starting to become the thing. And I forget what I was using it for. But I was like, I like to, on the end of the week, just summarize, thank the team, highlight some contributions. If we've been doing things, like if we've been heads down on lots of RFPs. because we don't have a nice AI-based RFP or security document response tool yet. Thank the team for their time. And I was like, I was in chat GPT. I'm like, you know what? I wonder what would happen if I use chat GPT to write my thank you for the week. I was never intending to keep this. I was going to like put it in there and then be like, hey guys, what'd you think about that? Was that weird? Like, what's your response? I wanted, I was kind of science experimenting it. Which I learned to never science experiment on your team. Just a lesson for every leader out there. I did it, I took it, I posted it in the chat, and I learned later that within seconds of me posting it, private DM threads were spinning up amongst the team, like, what the heck's going on? I had two people thinking I was leaving the company. Like, it just sent the entirely wrong message. Not that what was said was wrong, but the fact that it was clearly like an alien trying to make a hamburger just by viewing what a hamburger is like. I forget who had first made that analogy, but it's spot on. And it just, it wasn't authentic. And it wasn't me the way all my messages normally are authentic. They're definitely from me. And, you know, the key takeaway for me around being authentic is you have to do a double check anytime you're just going in blindly with something from an RFP tool, something from Crystal Nose, even something from even Gong. Sorry, Ryan, even something from Gong. I've seen, I've seen AEs take this call summary and just send it as here's the summarization of our call. And it's like. we probably didn't need to include that we spent five minutes talking about our weekends out on the boat. Like, it's clear that you're not being authentic with your response there. So kind of what I learned was, yeah, you can use it for some things. But anytime it requires you coming across as authentic and actually having time invested. the message that actually gets delivered coming from you is very important. And so that was my lesson learned to this day. That was like two years ago. And to this day, my team still gives me crap about using Gen AI on them all the time. And I'm like, it was that one science experiment. So don't make this mistake because likely your customer won't forgive you if you make that mistake with them. I feel like everyone's got an eye out for it too. I mean... any presentation you're listening to, even if it's an internal presentation, it's kind of like, hmm, if I put that into chat GPT, would they be saying the exact same thing I'm hearing here? Right. So I definitely think it's something you got to keep an eye out for. I think everyone's kind of curious. Was that just an LLM that spit out that response? So yeah, definitely echo there, Jack. And sometimes it's so it's so tempting, though. Right, Ryan? It's like, you know, you can just throw an idea into chat GPT and build a LinkedIn post and you can share that and it's going to be okay. It's not going to be terrible. So in the back of your mind, you're thinking maybe it's better, you know, but if you're somebody who creates a lot of content like me, it's like, oh gosh, but, but, but if you did that all the time, you would not have a voice that you have to, you have to mess up sometimes. Like you have to stumble over your own two feet. I, so I love this conversation because authenticity is not equal to accuracy. And For somebody who similarly is like, I post a lot, I write a lot, I am like my authenticity cannot be like taken into a chat GPT because I evolve too much. My voice changes, my thinking changes. What I've been reading lately influences how I start writing in many cases. But for some reason, because we've seen the power of chat GPT, we've kind of like conflated authenticity and accuracy. And so I think that we need to like keep like separating those two. And what I mean by that is like accuracy to Jack's point might be, did I get all of the call summary actions correct? And then what I, what I earned the right to do when I correctly get all of those accurately is I can do fancy things. I can automate stuff, but I I'm like, as a marketer, whenever I see like some of these tools that are trying to like replicate my authentic voice, I'm left a little bit feeling like, Hey, that was like way off the mark, but with a lot of the accurate stuff. I'm noticing that we're getting really close on so many of these things. And so one area that I would encourage everybody to do is to like split our brains in terms of like, is this an authenticity problem or an accuracy problem? And if it's an accuracy problem, can I evaluate the level of accuracy so that then I can demand more of my automations? Because I think that a lot of these tools that kind of need to prove themselves, like when we, when we don't like them often, it's like an authentic authenticity issue. We're like, ah, didn't really capture me, didn't capture my voice, but like maybe it got the facts right. And so a lot of these tools right now, like we have to judge the facts and make sure that they're nailing those, that they are sourcing everything. There are no black boxes, there's no hallucinations. And only then I think, are we going to be able to get to a point where like, all right, now we can fine tune and change the volume knob on authenticity, which again, even as a marketer, I'm very suspicious of, but accuracy, like we can do that one really quickly. Yeah. I love that, Daniel. what Jack, Ryan, and you all have been saying, I think what I've deduced from this is AI can either make you smart, better, or it can make you lazy. And don't let it make you lazy, right? Don't build bad habits with AI. Because at the end of the day, you are the value. And if you don't want AI to replace your role, add that value, inject your point of view, or, you know, what you are taking from AI, personalize it, you know, because to Jack's point, like you're gonna, folks are gonna know when it's not authentically you and that you know, you can't leave to AI to come up with who you are. And I think that's a piece that needs to stay genuine is how are you going to take the information that you're learning and gathering and bring it with your perspective and your experience and, you know, be a student, right? Formulate opinions based on what you're getting from AI, but it should not be a copy and paste exercise. It should be a, okay, how am I going to be better or be smarter, be a thought leader with the information that I have. And, um, That's where I think, yeah, authenticity is definitely going to play a big role as we introduce more AI in our process. Awesome. All right. This isn't my quote and I'm blanking on it, but where does the LLM's innovation end and your product's innovation start? And it's almost like the same for SE role, Maria. It's kind of like, what could an LLM do without you? What's the value you can add beyond that and making sure that there's a significant gap? there that your skills creativity and what you're bringing to the role is significantly above and beyond uh what does uh what ai can so i think that was a good summary there Yeah, we've got five more minutes. We'll let everybody go five minutes early. There's so much good points in here. Let's just do like one round of words of wisdom, right? I like to leave everybody with maybe some examples, real life examples, maybe what your favorite tool is or integration. Let's say you're trying to get budget for a tool. Let's say you're trying to, maybe this is the game. You're trying to get budget from your CRO for an AI tool, okay? And it's something you currently use. Maybe it's Gong, Ryan. That's okay. We can say Gong 2 or Conveyor. And what tool would it be that you recommend would move the needle more than any other? And how would you go about getting the business case for that? Whoever wants to go first. Well, I'm not going to plug my own product because that's a little too much. I'll talk about the business case, which is, I feel like everybody starts off with like, what's the thing that's causing me the most pain, right? But the way CROs think and the way that like they really evaluate a business case is they want to see that capital B billion. They're looking for billion dollar problems and billion dollar solutions. And most problems that you're probably experiencing pain with on a day-to-day basis can lever up into a million dollar, billion dollar problem, depending on the size of your business. But I think like, The one thing that I always encourage people to do is to like aim higher, be more ambitious with the amount of value that you think that you can go get. Tie yourself yes to the revenue problem, tie yourself yes to the win rate, tie yourself yes to differentiation and velocity and all those things that move the needle on top line. Don't forget about the bottom line either, right? Like how are we saving costs? How are we driving more productivity and efficiency? And once you like tree out all of those things and you kind of like grab everybody's attention with a big dollar value, You start to realize like there's so much more that with the right tool we can solve. Like Gong has always been one of my absolute favorites. It's connected to revenue. It's connected to cost. It's got a whole bunch of AI productivity in there as well. But I think like the number one mistake that everybody makes is like to start too low on the number. And so like aim high. That's my best recommendation. I can go since I got an easy one that's top of mind here. No, but in all seriousness, right, there's a reason I came to work at Gong after utilizing it and finding it to be a game changer. I feel like as an individual contributor in pre-sales, it just immediately stripped off all the things off my plate that I didn't like as part of the role. Like in general, I love the solutions engineering role, the creativity it brings, all of that. But there's some tedious elements of it like... you know, there's been roles where you have to log your time, you have to log your meeting, you have to update your notes. And if two managers were talking to a room, like, what's Ryan really not good at? They'd probably say he never updates Salesforce. And I don't, right? So I hate doing that. I love focusing on the clients instead. So like, first of all, going for me is taking all that off my plate, right? The meeting notes, the document, everything you talked about with the customer, it's all just there. So I purely get to focus on the creative side of it. Um, so I love that element of it. I think Jackie touched on that then right from my leader's perspective, they have a report in Salesforce that says how busy I am, how many meetings I'm on, what, how much revenue I'm attached to. And I didn't have to put any of that in. So that piece I sometimes even take for granted has been removed off my plate as a pre-sales person. And then the other side of it is, uh, there's undoubtedly increased deal capacity. I kind of made that joke earlier, Maria, but. Maybe I should have been a bit more protective of the calendar, but it has enabled me to just be on so many more demos and meetings than I ever could have before. But in an effective way still, like I can still walk confidently into those demos and not feel like I'm missing a beat because I still have everything I need to, at least what I believe, deliver an effective demo. And ultimately, that means I can stay across. more deals, more opportunities. So I do think the scale that it brings to an SC, that there's really true and tangible value there. And I think it's like every SC, at least, you know, that I work with, talk to, you know, enjoys it. And so I think there's that element of actually wanting to use it. That's a factor as well, but I'll cut myself off there. Yeah, I can speak for me. I, my two favorites are actually gone. But then the problem I ran into is that I spend a lot more time on internal meetings than I do on external meetings. And a lot of the needs that I have is to be able to quickly go, well, what the heck did we talk about last week? Or I know there was a thing from then. So I actually use something that doesn't tie into the meeting, but ties into just to my speaker and microphones called crisp.ai does a very similar thing, except it's not looking into the meeting directly. It's just transcribing in the background, which is what I need. So I don't have to focus on meeting notes. I can just focus on the meeting and later go back and be like, I need the summary of that. And then I can share it with my team as well. I don't know that I could do my job without both gong for external and crisp for internal at this point. That's exactly what I was going to say. Gong I use for external, internal, I need that link, Jack, the internal, because that's the hard, that's the hard part is the notes for internal meetings. And I think about it in this way, like what can I outsource in my day-to-day that doesn't add value to my job, my prospects, my team. And so I think about that research, the note-taking. And so that's really where I double down is any internal note-taking solution. I have to still do my research on that, but That I think would give me so much more time back. And it's not even just the notes. It's like, okay, from those notes, what are those next steps that allow me to be successful in what I do? And Gong, of course, though, is great for coaching my team. I love that it gives me summaries of the call because even though they'll tell me, hey, look out for these things, I get a nice summary of everything in the call and talk time, talk ratio, things like that are always my favorite. But yeah, definitely the internal note-taking solutions. Oh, wonderful examples. Thank you all so much. And thank you to Conveyor for making this event happen. Daniel, you guys are great, great investors and partners to PreSales Collective, and we couldn't do it without you. So really, really appreciate you. Appreciate you, Ryan, Maria, Jack. I recommend everybody who's joined, everybody who's watched the recording, please reach out to these four individuals and connect with them on LinkedIn. Follow them. They create great content. Listen to the podcast Jack has. Listen to and... And follow Daniel because if it's not a insightful thing on LinkedIn, it's at least a really funny meme. Mooding has been a takeover right now, which I really appreciate, Daniel. So thank you all so much. I greatly appreciate you. And until next time, take care.

The title of this is the new pre-sales motion. Must include it. We know it's at the forefront of the transformation in this stage. Okay. We're going to explore why integrating AI into the motion is key, why it's no longer optional.

We're going to give you some real life examples. We brought on an amazing set of people here on the panel who are using it, who have something to say about it. I'm going to launch a little bit of a form here. And this form, I'm going to throw it in the chat to everyone. So feel free to click on that link.

That's the form. I'll maybe share it a couple of times so we can catch everyone. And this came out of a prep session because. Jack, Ryan, Maria, and Daniel and I were talking and we were like, I wonder what everybody's using because we know what we use. And so we just threw this together.

We're going to share the results of this at the end of it. The conveyor team is going to share with an email kind of the results of this poll. So please insert all the information you can because I think the more we know, the better. Again, I'll share that link a couple times.

And I want to welcome our guests and I'll get myself out of the way. So first of all, I'm going to. Welcome Ryan Grosjean. Grosjean?

Did I pronounce your last name right, Ryan? You nailed it. Just like the pants. Not the Grosjean French.

Just, yep. Okay, cool, cool. So Ryan comes to us from Gong.

He's an AISE. So AI is in the title. And we all know Gong plays heavily into the AI world.

It's going far beyond just transcripts. So we very welcome Ryan. Jack Cotrain, I always get your last name wrong.

Jack, sorry about that. I say Co-Train. Yeah, it's Cochran.

That's okay. I know. That's good for everybody to know.

It's Cochran, not Co-Train. Not like, yeah. Okay.

Anyway. So Jack, you know, podcast host, producer, pre-sales enablement master, director of solution consulting and action IQ. We all know Jack. Welcome.

Maria Latt, same goes to you. You're a pre-sales force to be reckoned with. You present all around the globe, industry events and platforms.

You're also leading solution teams over at HubSpot. And then Daniel Kish, whose title is the VP of Marketing at Conveyor, but he was an SE. He's been on the podcast.

I recommend you all try to find that episode. He's great. Well, way more than just marketing. I don't think the title suits you that well, Daniel, but you're good at marketing too.

And then myself, I'm the Pre-Sales Collective General Manager. So thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to start the conversation by asking the hot topic, is AI going to replace us?

Is AI going to replace Pre-Sales? and what's your take on how it changes our role? Jack, over to you. Yeah, I mean, people are already saying no in the chat.

I'd love to see it. I think we're a long way away from that. In fact, you could make the argument that we're never going to have a full replacement, but it is certainly something, and that's part of the reason why I think we want to start off with this, because the more and more we see things about, you know, this capability now can be replaced with AI, and this, now you can...

have a different assistance. You can actually set up demos where it can be run by a bot that you can train if you wanted to, to, to, to answer questions for you. But you know, I think the better way to talk about it, I think most of even as we were kind of prepping for this, the most of our conversation is going to be not so much on what part of my job is being replaced, but what are the tools that are out there that make me better at my job? that make me a better SC. And I think one thing to say, if you are an SC who's not willing to look at and utilize all the tools available to you, you as an SC might become irrelevant.

You as a pre-sales professional might become irrelevant, but those of us who are looking to embrace, grow, improve, I think it's just going to become more of a fun profession with the tools that are available to us. Yeah, that's wonderful. And I love that comment, Aaron.

How can I use AI to work better? 100%. That's a good response.

Daniel, over to you, bud. Yeah, I mean, I love exactly what Jack said. And I'm sure folks have heard the old horse and buggy moving over to the Model T story where there were a lot of people who used to go fix horses and buggies. And then, you know, engines and cars came around.

And all of a sudden, those people were out of business and they kind of transitioned to going to do a new thing. In every big shift, which we are absolutely in the middle of, there's a lot of change. And that change can be really exciting. It can also be super scary.

And I think that we're going to see a lot of job risk in some ways for exactly how Jack said, right? Like if we don't adapt, if we don't adapt, we will find a lot of challenges with how our roles will change. And so I absolutely think that SEs and the solutions consultant space at large is about to experience a really big shift, but it's also an exciting one for this persona who has always loved, and I count myself as part of it, has always loved finding new ways to get really excited about a new change, a new dynamic.

And so, yes, we will absolutely still need everybody who's doing solutions consulting, and the job will shift. It will not be replaced by an AI agent, likely. It'll be replaced by somebody who's really good at using AI.

And so I kind of like the idea that we're starting off with a really hard hitter, because I don't think anybody's job will necessarily go away, but how we do those jobs will absolutely shift. Over to you, Maria. Yeah, and to echo what Daniel and Jack were saying, my short answer is no. You know, what sets you apart as an SC, SC in free sales is the ability to connect with people and explain those technical concepts in an easy to understand way. And so that's really where your value is gonna become.

Like you at the end of the day are the value through this sales process. You know, prospects can easily do their own research and come to the conclusion of what solution may work best. they do at the end of it still need that human element of someone really understanding their needs.

And so what AI is going to really help to do is reduce a lot of that time that you all are probably spending on that upfront work, the mundane work of doing account research, trying to understand what the customer does, how they make money, things like that. And so us having now that way to cut down that time enables you all to be more efficient. And- AI is not going to be able to replace the creativity that you all bring, the problem solving, the way you build relationships, right? AI is going to help you build those genuine connections much quicker and build that credibility up front. Because as we know, buyers buy from folks that they trust.

And I believe that AI will help to elevate the role of resales by making us that true trusted advisor that will help them solve their business challenges. Yeah, well said. And for those, I see a lot of comments coming to the hosts and panelists.

So switch it to everyone. If you want to add the conversation, please add your opinions to the conversation in the chat. It'll give us more talking points, which is helpful too.

Over to you, Ryan. What's your take, man? Yeah, I think my thoughts on this, I try to take the posture of, you know, what if it could replace me, right?

Because I think it's interesting to sort of protect yourself and make sure you're leveling yourself, upskilling, utilizing the technology and almost taking a posture of let's not bet against it just in case, right? Things are changing so quickly right now that I kind of like having that in the back of my mind of, hey, this could be coming for you, right? Keep it up, keep moving.

I've seen in the comments here, you know, some of the things we've heard around AI isn't going to replace you, but people who are using it effectively might. I definitely think that's a key component of it is learning to use it effectively. But I do see on the other side, AI potentially replacing elements of the SE role, right? So I could see it taking certain things off of our plates, maybe, right?

Some of those Harbor Tour type demos that I think oftentimes maybe we don't love giving anyways, right? See a world where some of those tasks might get replaced. And the last thing I'll add, I saw a comment, I think it's the CEO of one of the AI SDR companies that are out there these days saying.

The intent isn't to replace your top-notch SDRs who are doing all their research, creating super compelling message. Our intent is to replace the SDRs who are kind of doing a half-assed job at it. And I think we could see probably a similar thing in the SE world, which is if you're not at the top of your game and to Maria's point, really adding value in the sales cycle beyond things like just giving a demo and not asking questions and digging into the client's pain and trying to go above and beyond. I see that as potential risk for getting replaced through AI or through an SE who now has more capacity to take on what you might have done before. Yeah, that's good insight, especially because you pretty much talk about AI all day.

I'll give my hot take in here because I can't help but jump in. And I think of it from an operator perspective. I think about from...

If you're growing a business, like why do we start businesses? Why do we grow businesses? We're growing them to make profit.

We're, I think, just fundamentally interested in growth in general as people. And I think if we're seeing efficiency gains. using AI tools, we're essentially going to reinvest it into more growth in some capacity as a business, right?

So like, my thought is if you're seeing, if you're, if you, let's say you're replacing the low hanging fruit of, of, of low performer SDRs with an AI tool that costs half as much, the other half of that expense is probably not just going to go into a fund where everybody could take Fridays off. We're all going to continue to work Fridays. And we're probably going to take that other 50% of investment and put it somewhere else in the organization to create more growth, right? So we're going to get smarter outbounds. We're going to get smarter go-to-market effects.

So I see it as a evolution versus replacement. I know that we're getting it better at using the tools. The tools are getting better themselves. And there's an evolution there.

Like AI says, build your own. And then there's Salesforce. They're automating things like service agreements, right? That's what Dreamforce was all about. The repetitive data-driven tasks will increasingly get automated, like RFPs and things like this.

And then more investment will be made in the customer acquisition and retention. That's my bet. So I'm going to go down the line. I'll put that down.

Is that like, that's where the investment is going to be remade into our go-to-market industries? Because let's face it, we can't help but continue to grow. We're not going to like, we're not going to say we don't want to hit those numbers.

But speaking of efficiency, I'm super interested in how you are finding efficiency gains. I think a lot of people have joined us to understand, hey, we've got some experts here. How are they using it? So let's talk about the efficiency gains. I want you guys to all give your take on how AI can help automating the time-consuming tasks.

We talked about RFPs, but there's a whole host. There's security questionnaires. There's all that stuff. So Maria, I would like you to take that question and just share with us what you think there. Yeah.

And I'm going to give a shout out to the SEs and FAs on my team who I've talked to and, you know, how are they using AI today to make it easier for them to get through these deals and through the sales process? And the resounding theme is researching prospects, competitors, and going deeper. I think long gone are the days of saying, well, it's not my job, right? Like it's just the rep's job to understand the account and the, you know, the inner workings of our prospects.

But really now you have. it at your disposal to understand, you know, what industry is your prospect in? What are the nuances of those industries? What's happening there?

What are they hiring for? And I think today, for those of you who are taking the time, this can take you a few hours, right? And if you find the industry, right, is it a niche industry, having to understand like the logo and nomenclature, AI can now reduce the time you're probably taking to do this from an hour to two hours to now 10 to 15 minutes.

And from that too, now you can take what you know and internalize it. So it's not just like, okay, I did it. It's a checkbox exercise.

You can now craft those stories to make those really great custom demos. I was talking to one of my SCs, Nathan DeLong, about how he does all of that upfront research to now create a really great tailored custom demo that's really going to be a compelling story for prospects. And with that too, who are the personas that are going to be on these calls? And now...

with AI, you can do a quick gut check of who these individuals are, what they might care about. And even if it's a use case you've seen before, making those assumptions is not going to get you to set yourself apart from the competition. This is now a way for you to have a leg up and really make those stories compelling.

And also too, lastly, I know I talked to one of our essays, Peter Sirocco. It's a great way to also debug your code. If it's taking you a while to write some code and you're getting errors. It's a great way to get unstuck without having to spend time trying to debug it and try to figure out what's going on. It's a great learning tool as well as you think about how to do the role better.

Oh, you nailed it with competitive intelligence, Maria. I didn't even, like the preparation is a huge thing. We'll get into like prep because I think that's a whole nugget right there. Thank you so much for sharing that. Who wants to hop in next?

Yeah, I can hop in with that because a lot of my thinking around it is very similar to what Maria had just said. I mean, the best thing that a lot of AIs can do is help you find publicly available information and summarize it, right? And so competitive information is definitely one.

I can give a little bit of a shout out here for everyone who's involved in sort of the rise. It's not a new thing, but it's become more important lately around pre-sales, people getting into value engineering, doing business value assessments. And not just talking about what your software can do, but right up front showcasing, here's the benefits you should expect to see.

Because it's not okay anymore to come in and say, well, we don't really know your numbers. We don't really know your industry. We really don't know.

what you might be able to save because there's so much information out there that can be so easily summarized that for every engagement you have, you can walk in and say, based upon what we know about you, based on what we can find out about your industry, here's our best guess, what we think you can save. And we'd love to talk through more of these with you. And a lot of that work, we didn't use to do it because it would take literal days worth of work to go out and figure out what are the best industry trends? What are the typical in this industry?

What are the metrics that they track? What are averages of those? a company at this size, what are they probably experiencing?

You can use AI to help you make a best guess. And so there's no reason to not be doing that. And so that's one thing that I've seen a lot of efficiency gains with that, which is it's kind of like efficiency gains, unlocking a capability that we used to reserve for just the top, the biggest clients we had, where we could spend a full week getting ready.

We can now do it with every single deal we have, which is kind of, it's the efficiency that unlocks more pieces, which is awesome. I might add on here, I totally echo everything Jack and Maria just shared that from the preparation and the tailored aspect, it's unmatched and how quickly you can prepare. And I'd say right now it's critical to everything has always been competitive.

Everything always feels competitive. It feels even more competitive right now. It's probably just because it's right now. But I think it's you can't not do it either right now.

Right. And so I think that's a key element to it. And the other thing I'll add is I know there's a lot of tools out there that do these types of things, but internally we've built a resource that's primarily utilized by pre-sales teams, but also some post-sales as well, that looks across our Airtable, our Jira, our Help Center, our product release, all those types of capabilities. And so as an SE, when there's things I don't know, things that, hey, is this on the roadmap? Where in the roadmap is it?

Instead of relying and waiting on getting juggled across a few different... product teams, PMs, right, et cetera, I can go to this tool that we have created and embedded into Slack to get answers to those types of things. So that's just another part that's become an integral part of my workflow.

Sometimes I'm using that on calls so I can get a bit more granular, not just, oh, it's on the roadmap, but hey, it's on the roadmap, you know, our PM's working on it, it's in LA this week, you know, just being able to have more specific answers at my fingertips. So that kind of tool has been super beneficial for just really from RP responses to roadmap to really anything in between super powerful. What I like about all these answers is they're kind of like a mixture of two classification categories that I think about. One is like the know your customer side of the world. How do I use AI to know my customer better?

The other one is like, how do I know myself? And there's all these really interesting backend technologies that are like, I have an incredible amount of organizational knowledge. How do I get the right knowledge at the right time to solve the task? And what I think is so cool about AI efficiency right now is we're seeing a bunch of 50th percentile problems and what I'll call 90th percentile problems.

And the chat's blowing up like a lot of really interesting stuff around RFPs, build versus buy. And what I kind of like about the era of AI that we're in right now is like, we could do a lot and get to the 50th percentile for either like a customer problem or a know myself kind of problem. But then there's all these other really tricky things that we're noticing, right?

Like, hey, is the accuracy there? Do I have to mung together backend systems and actually do a bunch of things that are chained? Do I have like a low maintenance way of figuring out how to like, not just do the thing today, but like have it persist over time?

And some of those kind of classify then into the 90th percentile category. And so I think like right now, our eyes are very much open to all these possibilities and we are starting to experiment with a lot. But that to really get all those efficiency and productivity gains that we're like, we're realizing and waking up to like, these are opportunities for us, we're probably going to have to invest a lot.

And so there's like the build versus buy trade off that we're all making, where I can like do a lot of things with the 50th percentile. And like, I can do it cheap too. And then there's a whole bunch of other things that I might need to pay money for.

And so not everything is always clear at this moment in time either. But that's, that's, I think like, we're going to keep searching for like, what are the 50th percentile and 90th percentile problems. Yeah, that breakdown is awesome, Daniel. I wrote it down.

Like the AI to know your customer, the AI to know yourself. I almost feel like I need that for my own family home, like the AI for what's on the calendar, when soccer practice, when swim practice, that stuff too. But I'm going to share a poll again.

I shared this poll earlier on and it's actually, it's not a poll, it's a survey, sorry. A survey on tooling. Because in one of our prep sessions, we were wondering like, what the heck? What is everybody else using? I'm going to put a little nugget in here to say, please, basically anything besides ChatGPT, because we all know and we all use that.

And I would love to get some other answers besides ChatGPT in here. A side note, I'm looking for a tool that I could put like a script into to create great Google Slides. So presentations, I do a lot of presentations here. So if you know of one of those great tools, please throw it in the chat.

That'd be great. I'm going to get into prep. So we've talked a lot about knowing your customer, as you said, Daniel.

And a lot of the time we're trying to get in front of our customer and act like we know a lot about them. But we might have to do that five times a day, maybe eight. So how do you shortcut this?

And Ryan, I'll let you take this one. Awesome. So I work at Gong. Before I worked at Gong, I was a Gong customer. So I have to toot the horn of Gong a little bit because it definitely helps from a preparation standpoint.

So traditionally, to prepare for meetings, you might have some notes from the AE. Those notes may or may not be accurate, relevant, or representative of what the client truly needed to understand. You might be stuck in a 30 minute to hour long meeting with that AE to prep to tell them that the questions they think the customer asked can't possibly be the questions that the customer asked. Right.

But bottom line is there's a lot of inefficiencies that go into the preparation process currently. So now my preparation is typically going into Gong, pulling up the call history, potentially pulling up the account history. I use Gong's ask me anything capabilities to say What have we covered with the client so far? List out the key priorities for each persona I'm going to talk to on the call today.

I say, what's any feedback or challenges they've surfaced so far? I do my own prep work in literally five to 10 minutes. I ping the AE with kind of my plan, see if they've got any pushback or anything that I'm missing. And very rarely are we having to waste any time on internal calls.

I mean, I would say, well, I don't know. I hadn't thought about putting an official number on it, but it would be a very significant portion of time that has been eliminated from prep on that side of it. And then it goes into what Maria has already talked about. I think we've kind of flushed out pretty well in terms of using chat TPD to prepare on anything you need to learn about the client, especially when it's a new industry, new segment.

Just learning about that industry or segment as a whole is a game changer as well. But. On the existing interactions you've had with the client perspective, the fact that AI can have all that categorized, summarized by the persona, by the title, and that you can just simply ask for the exact nuggets that you need to go with the tailored demo has been a game changer.

Yeah. And actually, Ryan, to add to that, that was a great summary. I think if you leave with anything, know that now your prep can be shortened. And something I want to double down on is you're going to get time back.

with a lot of that work that probably took hours on end or just the time wasted of having to get yourself up to speed on it. So I've been telling my SEs, like with that time back, like time savings is only as good as what you do with the time you've saved, right? And so how can you now have a point of view or a perspective with that time back and be strategic with your reps?

So now that you don't have to spend 30 minutes getting up to speed, how can we come to those prep meetings? with okay based on everything we know here's my perspective and i was actually on um the buying end i was looking at working with the sales team on looking at digital sales room software and as the buyer the company the the prospect didn't know anything about what our pains were they didn't know what we cared about and that was not a great way to start the conversation and so i kind of thought about okay how are my sc's and essays um coming in prepared and you know, come in with a point of view, even if it's wrong, you know, I think your customers, your prospects will appreciate the prep or the, at least the, the thought that you had to formulate an opinion. So I think, you know, with the preparation with AI shortening, a lot of what can take a lot of time, you know, use that to formulate your opinions, internalize the information, you know, and, you know, they say like knowing is not half the battle, right.

It's how you apply it. And so take that extra mile to now come to those calls with. a stance and it generates a conversation, if anything. To do that effectively, Maria, though, you will have to block your calendar because otherwise that extra time will quickly get plugged by additional demos and customer meetings. It's the only caveat I'd say there.

Very true. Yeah, it's one of those crazy things. As we all know, as soon as you do things to be more efficient, people will efficiently put more things on your calendar. I don't have much to add other than what Ryan or Maria have said, other than to say specifically for pre-sales leaders out there. you know how hard it is to keep track of everything your teams are doing.

And you don't even need to do necessarily AI, but certainly there are, if you're not using some type of a tooling or even potentially some combination of, say, call summaries from something like Gong that can combine with a, you know, more of a library-based AI model that you feed that information into in order to be able to understand, okay, with Acme Inc., where are we at? Because I have no idea and someone just asked me. So...

That's, I think, where, especially as pre-sales leaders, make sure you have something so that you're not spending the majority of your brain time wasted on just the administrative keeping track of things. I think that's a lot of what we're talking about here as well is a lot of the things that we're looking at doing, you know, call summaries, meeting notes, doing the research, etc. It all falls into the line of things that are tasks that take up a lot of time, tasks that take up a lot of brain power, but aren't actually that hard to do for something like AI. And I would much rather spend my time on the things that are harder for me to do, such as strategizing on if we need to make a pivot in an account based on something that we just learned or new sales motions altogether or new ways to go to market where maybe we want to position ourselves differently.

I want to spend my time more there because that's going to more impact my company and leave AI to do all of these summarization things and research, et cetera. So definitely. The recommendation I would have is go through your day and think about the things that you have that you know, like, you know what, I really this is a not value added high time high brain power exercise that I could probably offload and find ways to do it.

I love seeing all things in the chat as well. If you're not following the chat, which again, plug make sure everyone's posting the panel to everyone as opposed to just us panelists. There are so many tools that I'm going to be taking away and checking out that I don't even heard of. So like this is like educational for me on some things I've not even thought about so please keep all those things coming. I'll add one more thing too, because I love how Jack pulled together a few different threads.

One is like, we can demand more from like all the chaining together of these things. Like when I think about what's happening upstream in a Gong conversation, there's so many automations that we know are just like getting bottlenecked, right? Like it happens in a call and then it's anybody's guess like when that thing actually gets solved. But so many of our vendors must be building systems that like take that stuff from like upstream and then flow it all the way downstream. And if we're users, like we have to demand that of like our leaders too.

It's like, Hey, we need this to be more productive. We know that we're spending too much time on admin and backend work. Like if we want to go hit these aggressive new goals, if we want to go enter new markets, like we also need the capability to like go after and tackle these problems where they're occurring because the AI is getting so good that if we're not demanding the same like level of results from our vendors and our leaders, like we're going to be in the same position two years from now. And so I think like now is the time to say like, we know it has a capability. Let's go get it done.

On that front. Yeah. So I love that. And I kind of want to switch gears into how to help.

Well, there's a few different shots. There's so many threads here. Oh my gosh. And with the chat, like you said, I'm coming up with all kinds of other ideas.

So I've already like saved some of these recommendations. So thank you everybody for sharing them. Let's talk about buyers, right? So we've kind of, I've actually, as I've listened to this conversation, I'm kind of thinking about myself and I'm thinking about pre-sales engineers and leaders and us and organizations.

But as we know, being a buyer is super hard. It's harder than ever to understand what you want to buy, what it does, if it's actually telling the truth, you know, what the competitive landscape looks like. Um, so yeah. And just to your point, like so many people are actually injecting the gen AI into their products when they're really not doing it, which Daniel, I know you have a lot to talk about there.

Um, but how do we help? Like let's enable our buyers with AI. How do we do that?

Ryan, let's start with you since you have so much experience on that front. Yeah, I think, you know, I. sort of approached it from a bit of a tactical perspective and just how does this show up in my you know sales process every day and something that sort of dawned on me is oftentimes as pre-sales we're thinking about how do we be more efficient with our jobs right how do we save ourselves times and it just sort of clicked and hey the prospects encounter some of the same challenges in the buying process that we struggle with hey it's been a couple weeks since we talked to them what did we talk about right who are the people that said this versus the other and so From my perspective, you know, what I like to do is use the AI to quickly summarize.

I pretty much do three very tactical things. I say, who are the people we were talking to? What have we presented to them so far? What's their feedback been?

So that as we enter each call, I can remind them of, hey, here's just a reminder, right? Here are the kind of the North Stars that we're aligned on, right? These are the challenges you're trying to solve. These are the solutions that we've presented to you so far.

And not only that, but here's been your feedback, right? So, so-and-so, like you name someone, you describe that this, you explain this is exactly what you were looking for, right? And so you can kind of check that box. are we agreed on this, right?

Can we kind of move forward from here? Is there anything outstanding we still need to tackle? And so there, I think it eliminates some of that duplicative nature that happens often in sales process.

Hey, you know, is this still a priority? Remind us where this is going, right? Oh yeah, it hasn't, like obviously buyers sole focus isn't buying our software.

So how can you give them all, arm them with the information that they need as well, right? And so I know that's a bit of a tactical application in that buyer enablement. I still think there's...

tons that could be done there, but that's kind of the POV I'd share on it. Yeah, that's a great summary, Ryan. And I think if anything, it's helping them connect those dots, right? Like you're basically regurgitating the things that they've come to us with and reminding them like, hey, you can do your own research, but what you came to us for is to solve these problems. And to tackle what Ryan said, it's helping to understand where there might be gaps and helping the buyers quickly fill it with.

everything that we know and how we can be, you know, the solution to the problem they came to us with. So I think it's great. I think it helps to speed up a lot of the process today and helping buyers be more confident in going with your solution or company. I recently tried to do some grownup stuff by getting a financial advisor.

And I had a, we had a demo and my wife and I are sitting on this call and 30 minutes in, I'm like, still confused as to what these people do. I'm like, I don't even know what it is you're, I don't know how you're going to help me, you know? And then we had a call like three weeks later and I had forgotten about it because I'm busy at Pre-Sales Collective and I jump on and they're kind of like, hey, you have any questions?

And I'm like, I need you to remind me of why I'm here. And what did we even like about the last conversation, right? I haven't thought about this in weeks.

So to your point, it's like, remind me of who in the room, what viewpoints did we have at the time and why did they matter? Because I'm jumping from one. to the next to the next.

So Jack, oh, go ahead, Ryan. Go ahead, bud. Yeah. Just as you were talking, one other thing that popped into mind there is being able to utilize AI to surface what other buyers that you're talking to have cared about within your other close one business. I think it's always tricky to be able to find customer success stories, getting nice case studies from the Daniels of the world, the support for marketing.

How can you find some of that information ad hoc, right? So when all of these conversations and knowledge is there, being able to also just quickly surface based on, hey, have we talked to these titles in this industry? And hey, what were some of the things they were trying to solve? And did we close that deal? How's the deployment been going?

What are some of the wins they've shared? So I think even from a buyer enablement perspective, being able to say, hey, we worked with a client in a very similar space as you. They were actually evaluating the same competitors. Here are the couple of reasons they decided to go with us, right? It sounds like those are some of the things that are important to you as well.

So being able to quickly find that information, I think, is also really invaluable in terms of, you know, helping it feel more personal to them, feel like you've done this before, right? Know what you're talking about. So that's just kind of another thing that popped into mind there.

Cool. Daniel, do you have anything to say about enabling buyers with AI? Boy. Buyers, the word of the moment is multi-threading.

I'm sure everybody's heard that word, right? And it's all about how do I get more leverage? How do I get to more people? How do I cultivate my champions? And that's really hard, but the mechanics of those steps are kind of the same mechanics from customer to customer.

And the nice thing with AI is it's giving us a lot more leverage. And so I think if like what we're hearing from all of our leadership is usually some flavor of like, Go like, you know, cultivate more champions, get more multi-threaded within the organization. Everybody's looking at like everybody else, like, I don't know, how are we going to do all that?

And the only answer that I've figured out so far is using AI to like kind of do those mechanical steps over and over again. And the key there is like personalization, what Ryan said. So if you can personalize it to me, you can then use all of that same information to the people who are in my org, are related to me, know the persona, know the company.

The data is all there, right? Like it's sitting usually in a gong, it's in Salesforce, and we now have leverage. So the question is, what do we do with that leverage? Because I think like we're all feeling like, hey, maybe our teams are under-resourced, we've got a lot bigger expectations. And the only way that I can figure out about how to enable a buyer at scale with personalization is to like bring all these tools together that looks at a single thread of what the customer wants, and then the multi-thread of all the people who are involved in that buying process.

And that's really hard and it takes up a lot of time. Historically, it's been many. This is the first time in history it's not going to be many. But it's going to take a lot of effort to get all those layers moving in the right direction. And so I think that we are seeing, again, the possibility of what it's going to take to do buyer enablement well, but that it's not going to be a foregone conclusion that we're going to necessarily like throw it at chat GPT and like expect an answer.

And so I think that we are at the very beginning of like what's going to be a bunch of really hard but solvable problems. And so I think that's kind of like, you know, we see the end of the road in the promised land, but like we're still somewhere not quite there yet. And Daniel, I love that because I spend a lot of my time figuring out how to make sure I'm not selling to a persona, but to a person, because I think that's the important thing. There's actually a tool that, it's not a tool we use at our company, but a couple of the AEs have been using it.

And those that do, it makes a significant difference. It's a product called Crystal Nose. It's been around for a very long time.

It hooks into your LinkedIn. You can look up someone's profile and it provides a personality profile. Is it right? Not always, but it's scaringly right most of the time. And how they use that really effectively is when we're then crafting our responses and trying to help someone to know where they're at, it's this person prefers things that are direct, factual, no fluff.

Perfect. We provide them with the factual, no fluff approach when we're presenting them with the plan to purchase. If it's wrong and they want more fluff, they'll tell us, but it gives us, again, it's all these things that we can do to try to make our first attempt a little bit better.

And if there's someone that likes to get... buy-in from their whole company one of the first questions that we ask is who else needs to be at the table for this because i know it's probably important to have that like yeah it is that's great i'm glad you asked let's bring in these seven people like it just helps you a little bit based upon the information that's out there based upon stuff you would enable remember being able to spend the time doing to get more to the person um again it's it's you taking it and doing it though as opposed to just blindly listening to someone else that's something that we actually use someone just posted in the chat i think that's the right one i haven't i haven't looked it up personally. I just use the AEs and tell them to look it up for me because I'm too lazy to go do it myself. But yeah, I definitely recommend checking out that and things like that that can do that type of like person lookup information for you.

Yeah, that's super cool. Maria, you said it got yours right. I had never heard this tool, so I'll just pull it up. Scary.

Yeah, if it's right, I'm sorry for scaring you for the day. Yeah, it's funny how we don't like to know some things about ourselves, right? We're like, oh, am I so predictable? Oh, man, yeah, I thought I was mysterious, you know? Authenticity I hear in this thread a lot.

So like the past like five minutes, I'm just thinking data, authenticity. Is it right? Is it real?

It's not right all the time. How do you tell if it's right? And Jack, you shared in a prep a very interesting story of authentically communicating with your team using AI one time. So I want you to share that really quickly. And then talk about authenticity.

Yeah, I'm being sarcastic. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think I was being very authentic. This was like right as Gen A was starting to become the thing.

And I forget what I was using it for. But I was like, I like to, on the end of the week, just summarize, thank the team, highlight some contributions. If we've been doing things, like if we've been heads down on lots of RFPs. because we don't have a nice AI-based RFP or security document response tool yet.

Thank the team for their time. And I was like, I was in chat GPT. I'm like, you know what? I wonder what would happen if I use chat GPT to write my thank you for the week.

I was never intending to keep this. I was going to like put it in there and then be like, hey guys, what'd you think about that? Was that weird?

Like, what's your response? I wanted, I was kind of science experimenting it. Which I learned to never science experiment on your team.

Just a lesson for every leader out there. I did it, I took it, I posted it in the chat, and I learned later that within seconds of me posting it, private DM threads were spinning up amongst the team, like, what the heck's going on? I had two people thinking I was leaving the company.

Like, it just sent the entirely wrong message. Not that what was said was wrong, but the fact that it was clearly like an alien trying to make a hamburger just by viewing what a hamburger is like. I forget who had first made that analogy, but it's spot on.

And it just, it wasn't authentic. And it wasn't me the way all my messages normally are authentic. They're definitely from me.

And, you know, the key takeaway for me around being authentic is you have to do a double check anytime you're just going in blindly with something from an RFP tool, something from Crystal Nose, even something from even Gong. Sorry, Ryan, even something from Gong. I've seen, I've seen AEs take this call summary and just send it as here's the summarization of our call.

And it's like. we probably didn't need to include that we spent five minutes talking about our weekends out on the boat. Like, it's clear that you're not being authentic with your response there.

So kind of what I learned was, yeah, you can use it for some things. But anytime it requires you coming across as authentic and actually having time invested. the message that actually gets delivered coming from you is very important. And so that was my lesson learned to this day.

That was like two years ago. And to this day, my team still gives me crap about using Gen AI on them all the time. And I'm like, it was that one science experiment. So don't make this mistake because likely your customer won't forgive you if you make that mistake with them.

I feel like everyone's got an eye out for it too. I mean... any presentation you're listening to, even if it's an internal presentation, it's kind of like, hmm, if I put that into chat GPT, would they be saying the exact same thing I'm hearing here?

Right. So I definitely think it's something you got to keep an eye out for. I think everyone's kind of curious.

Was that just an LLM that spit out that response? So yeah, definitely echo there, Jack. And sometimes it's so it's so tempting, though. Right, Ryan? It's like, you know, you can just throw an idea into chat GPT and build a LinkedIn post and you can share that and it's going to be okay.

It's not going to be terrible. So in the back of your mind, you're thinking maybe it's better, you know, but if you're somebody who creates a lot of content like me, it's like, oh gosh, but, but, but if you did that all the time, you would not have a voice that you have to, you have to mess up sometimes. Like you have to stumble over your own two feet.

I, so I love this conversation because authenticity is not equal to accuracy. And For somebody who similarly is like, I post a lot, I write a lot, I am like my authenticity cannot be like taken into a chat GPT because I evolve too much. My voice changes, my thinking changes.

What I've been reading lately influences how I start writing in many cases. But for some reason, because we've seen the power of chat GPT, we've kind of like conflated authenticity and accuracy. And so I think that we need to like keep like separating those two. And what I mean by that is like accuracy to Jack's point might be, did I get all of the call summary actions correct?

And then what I, what I earned the right to do when I correctly get all of those accurately is I can do fancy things. I can automate stuff, but I I'm like, as a marketer, whenever I see like some of these tools that are trying to like replicate my authentic voice, I'm left a little bit feeling like, Hey, that was like way off the mark, but with a lot of the accurate stuff. I'm noticing that we're getting really close on so many of these things. And so one area that I would encourage everybody to do is to like split our brains in terms of like, is this an authenticity problem or an accuracy problem?

And if it's an accuracy problem, can I evaluate the level of accuracy so that then I can demand more of my automations? Because I think that a lot of these tools that kind of need to prove themselves, like when we, when we don't like them often, it's like an authentic authenticity issue. We're like, ah, didn't really capture me, didn't capture my voice, but like maybe it got the facts right.

And so a lot of these tools right now, like we have to judge the facts and make sure that they're nailing those, that they are sourcing everything. There are no black boxes, there's no hallucinations. And only then I think, are we going to be able to get to a point where like, all right, now we can fine tune and change the volume knob on authenticity, which again, even as a marketer, I'm very suspicious of, but accuracy, like we can do that one really quickly. Yeah.

I love that, Daniel. what Jack, Ryan, and you all have been saying, I think what I've deduced from this is AI can either make you smart, better, or it can make you lazy. And don't let it make you lazy, right?

Don't build bad habits with AI. Because at the end of the day, you are the value. And if you don't want AI to replace your role, add that value, inject your point of view, or, you know, what you are taking from AI, personalize it, you know, because to Jack's point, like you're gonna, folks are gonna know when it's not authentically you and that you know, you can't leave to AI to come up with who you are. And I think that's a piece that needs to stay genuine is how are you going to take the information that you're learning and gathering and bring it with your perspective and your experience and, you know, be a student, right? Formulate opinions based on what you're getting from AI, but it should not be a copy and paste exercise.

It should be a, okay, how am I going to be better or be smarter, be a thought leader with the information that I have. And, um, That's where I think, yeah, authenticity is definitely going to play a big role as we introduce more AI in our process. Awesome.

All right. This isn't my quote and I'm blanking on it, but where does the LLM's innovation end and your product's innovation start? And it's almost like the same for SE role, Maria. It's kind of like, what could an LLM do without you?

What's the value you can add beyond that and making sure that there's a significant gap? there that your skills creativity and what you're bringing to the role is significantly above and beyond uh what does uh what ai can so i think that was a good summary there Yeah, we've got five more minutes. We'll let everybody go five minutes early. There's so much good points in here.

Let's just do like one round of words of wisdom, right? I like to leave everybody with maybe some examples, real life examples, maybe what your favorite tool is or integration. Let's say you're trying to get budget for a tool.

Let's say you're trying to, maybe this is the game. You're trying to get budget from your CRO for an AI tool, okay? And it's something you currently use. Maybe it's Gong, Ryan. That's okay.

We can say Gong 2 or Conveyor. And what tool would it be that you recommend would move the needle more than any other? And how would you go about getting the business case for that? Whoever wants to go first.

Well, I'm not going to plug my own product because that's a little too much. I'll talk about the business case, which is, I feel like everybody starts off with like, what's the thing that's causing me the most pain, right? But the way CROs think and the way that like they really evaluate a business case is they want to see that capital B billion. They're looking for billion dollar problems and billion dollar solutions.

And most problems that you're probably experiencing pain with on a day-to-day basis can lever up into a million dollar, billion dollar problem, depending on the size of your business. But I think like, The one thing that I always encourage people to do is to like aim higher, be more ambitious with the amount of value that you think that you can go get. Tie yourself yes to the revenue problem, tie yourself yes to the win rate, tie yourself yes to differentiation and velocity and all those things that move the needle on top line. Don't forget about the bottom line either, right?

Like how are we saving costs? How are we driving more productivity and efficiency? And once you like tree out all of those things and you kind of like grab everybody's attention with a big dollar value, You start to realize like there's so much more that with the right tool we can solve. Like Gong has always been one of my absolute favorites. It's connected to revenue.

It's connected to cost. It's got a whole bunch of AI productivity in there as well. But I think like the number one mistake that everybody makes is like to start too low on the number.

And so like aim high. That's my best recommendation. I can go since I got an easy one that's top of mind here.

No, but in all seriousness, right, there's a reason I came to work at Gong after utilizing it and finding it to be a game changer. I feel like as an individual contributor in pre-sales, it just immediately stripped off all the things off my plate that I didn't like as part of the role. Like in general, I love the solutions engineering role, the creativity it brings, all of that. But there's some tedious elements of it like... you know, there's been roles where you have to log your time, you have to log your meeting, you have to update your notes.

And if two managers were talking to a room, like, what's Ryan really not good at? They'd probably say he never updates Salesforce. And I don't, right?

So I hate doing that. I love focusing on the clients instead. So like, first of all, going for me is taking all that off my plate, right? The meeting notes, the document, everything you talked about with the customer, it's all just there.

So I purely get to focus on the creative side of it. Um, so I love that element of it. I think Jackie touched on that then right from my leader's perspective, they have a report in Salesforce that says how busy I am, how many meetings I'm on, what, how much revenue I'm attached to. And I didn't have to put any of that in.

So that piece I sometimes even take for granted has been removed off my plate as a pre-sales person. And then the other side of it is, uh, there's undoubtedly increased deal capacity. I kind of made that joke earlier, Maria, but.

Maybe I should have been a bit more protective of the calendar, but it has enabled me to just be on so many more demos and meetings than I ever could have before. But in an effective way still, like I can still walk confidently into those demos and not feel like I'm missing a beat because I still have everything I need to, at least what I believe, deliver an effective demo. And ultimately, that means I can stay across. more deals, more opportunities.

So I do think the scale that it brings to an SC, that there's really true and tangible value there. And I think it's like every SC, at least, you know, that I work with, talk to, you know, enjoys it. And so I think there's that element of actually wanting to use it. That's a factor as well, but I'll cut myself off there.

Yeah, I can speak for me. I, my two favorites are actually gone. But then the problem I ran into is that I spend a lot more time on internal meetings than I do on external meetings.

And a lot of the needs that I have is to be able to quickly go, well, what the heck did we talk about last week? Or I know there was a thing from then. So I actually use something that doesn't tie into the meeting, but ties into just to my speaker and microphones called crisp.ai does a very similar thing, except it's not looking into the meeting directly.

It's just transcribing in the background, which is what I need. So I don't have to focus on meeting notes. I can just focus on the meeting and later go back and be like, I need the summary of that.

And then I can share it with my team as well. I don't know that I could do my job without both gong for external and crisp for internal at this point. That's exactly what I was going to say.

Gong I use for external, internal, I need that link, Jack, the internal, because that's the hard, that's the hard part is the notes for internal meetings. And I think about it in this way, like what can I outsource in my day-to-day that doesn't add value to my job, my prospects, my team. And so I think about that research, the note-taking. And so that's really where I double down is any internal note-taking solution. I have to still do my research on that, but That I think would give me so much more time back.

And it's not even just the notes. It's like, okay, from those notes, what are those next steps that allow me to be successful in what I do? And Gong, of course, though, is great for coaching my team.

I love that it gives me summaries of the call because even though they'll tell me, hey, look out for these things, I get a nice summary of everything in the call and talk time, talk ratio, things like that are always my favorite. But yeah, definitely the internal note-taking solutions. Oh, wonderful examples. Thank you all so much. And thank you to Conveyor for making this event happen.

Daniel, you guys are great, great investors and partners to PreSales Collective, and we couldn't do it without you. So really, really appreciate you. Appreciate you, Ryan, Maria, Jack. I recommend everybody who's joined, everybody who's watched the recording, please reach out to these four individuals and connect with them on LinkedIn. Follow them.

They create great content. Listen to the podcast Jack has. Listen to and...

And follow Daniel because if it's not a insightful thing on LinkedIn, it's at least a really funny meme. Mooding has been a takeover right now, which I really appreciate, Daniel. So thank you all so much.

I greatly appreciate you. And until next time, take care.

Transcript for:The Role of AI in Pre-Sales

Transcript for:
The Role of AI in Pre-Sales