Eric Nowoslawski & Varun Anand: How scared should sales reps be of tools like ChatGPT replacing them?

Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And holy shit, do you have to listen to this conversation. I just got off with Varun and Eric, who are over at clay.com. And when I tell you, you need to listen to this conversation and share it with whoever in your network is in sales and gives a shit and wants to survive, you have to pay attention to this one. Chat GPT, in my opinion, changed everything and my perspective on this whole industry and where it's going. We're going to start to see things evolve faster than ever and these guys are at the front of it.

They are helping me personally reinvent my entire approach to prospecting specifically. And we talk about whether I'm just being an alarmist right now or if I'm being a realist with what's going on and how I see clay and chat GPT and a lot of these AI tools replacing a massive amount of sales professionals. But for the ones who care, there is so much opportunity. You know me, I rarely product push. I rarely say, oh, you should go check this out, right? And usually it's just at the ends. But this one is you have to check out what clay is doing and you have to pay attention. Listen to this podcast and share it with whoever in your network is in sales and cares and wants to evolve. Because if you don't, you're going to get replaced.

Let's make it happen. What's happening, make it happen, family? Big shout out to our partners today, Gong, Vidyard, and Chili Piper. Gong's data is more than valuable. It's cornerstone in any organization looking to collect the data that's going to tell them where they can improve and where they need to spend their time making changes. Vidyard makes it easy for people to use videos anywhere. No matter whether you're sending videos in email or on social media, posting them somewhere, or sending them in a DM, Vidyard has got you covered. Our friends at Chili Piper are so much fun to be around. They make it easy for people to get on your calendar. And every sales rep has got to have this function locked in.

It's one of the most important things we can do as a seller. How can I get you on my calendar easily? Chili Piper can make that happen for you. Be sure that you're checking out all these great tools, and now let's pass it over to John to find out who's joining him today. See you soon, everybody. Varun and Eric. All right, guys. We're about to have a real fucking interesting conversation. How are you guys doing? Thanks for joining me here. Doing well. Thanks for having us. Doing great. Excited to be here. Yeah. So for everybody listening to this one, if you've been paying attention to me online right now, talking about ChatGPT and everything else that's happening to the world that we're in right now, these two gentlemen are far further ahead than I am on this topic.

And we're going to be talking today about what's going on out there in the marketplace and also what the opportunities and what the risks are for sales professionals, specifically in the SDR space. So managers, listen up. But before we do that, let's get some background here. So Eric, why don't you kick us off? Give us a little bit kind of background of where you're coming from and what got you to this point and then Navarro, let's go back to you. Yeah, absolutely. So I run growth at Clay. And so what I do is I help a lot of the users enable themselves to be able to understand how to use the product. And also a lot of times they come to me and they say, well, I want to do this. And I usually question their first principles.

And I say, you know, do you really want to do that? Or do you actually want to do something more interesting instead? And so I help enable the users. And then I handle a lot of the content that brings a lot of users into Clay and they get to see it, you know, on LinkedIn or they see it on YouTube and then they get to try the product themselves. Before I joined Clay, I was running an outbound agency that actually was radically changed by the way that we're using Clay. Literally every single part of our process was made far easier by using the product. And then Varun and a couple other people actually came to me and they said, hey, you know, the way you're using the product, no one else is doing that.

Could you teach other people how to do that? That would be that would be great. And so I happily came on and joined the team. And then now we help people understand one prospecting as a whole better and then automating it inside of the spreadsheet. Awesome. All right, Varun, how'd you come up with this, man? Where are you coming from and how'd you start this? Well, I didn't come up with it. So I'm happy to not take the credit on that particular, but I, so I'm our head of operations that I'm responsible for the business side at Clay. And, you know, before this, I was sort of running different business units at different companies and in tech and different startups and things like that. But I was sort of really into the no code, low code world.

And I just randomly heard about Clay a couple of years ago when it was a shell of what it is now. And honestly, the first time I saw it, I was just, my mind was blown and I was like, holy crap. And it was two years ago when it was a lot less than what we have now. And I was like, I didn't, it is honestly the only software I've ever seen in my life that made me feel something that like actually like gave me emotion in any kind of way. And, um, uh, and I just kept thinking about it. So I had to just get involved. And so that's sort of how I, uh, I, uh, how I, uh, how I got involved with the team. And, you know, now I'm basically responsible for things that are not the product engineering side of things and, and work closely with Eric to grow the business, work with customers.

Um, and you know, like what's cool is like, we feel like, and this might sound a little trite, but it's, it's genuine. Like we feel like we are actually just solving people's problems. And it just so happens that the best way to solve their problems is using Clay. And I, we never really feel like we're selling anything. I even tell people, I'm not selling you just like, here's how you can solve your problem. You choose which way you want to do it. And so that's the fun part of about doing that. So yeah, excited to chat and talk about prospecting. I love it. And, and just to, let's start off like this. So back in 2017, um, so everybody knows who's listening to this podcast, you know, I've been doing, I've been in the game for a while.

Um, 15 years ago, uh, Basho was the camp of the company that I took the training from, and it was this why you, why you now email. And it was the, I mean, that shit worked, right? It was about doing research, finding that trigger, writing a super hyper personalized email, firing it off to the executive, getting a referral down. And it worked like a charm 15 years ago. Then, you know, 10 years ago, I started kind of noticing, you know, some of the cadence tools were starting to come out and that type of thing. And then in 2017, uh, a couple of reps from Salesforce left Salesforce and they started a company called Shakespeare and Shakespeare was an artificial intelligence app that created personalized emails at scale.

And, and at first they sent me an email, Hey John, we got, we built it off of your model here. So can we like to show it to you? And at first I was like, yeah, whatever. Right. Who cares? Um, sure. Fine. Send me a sample. And what they sent me, I was like, holy shit. And I, and I, and I immediately hit him back. I was like, wait, there was no human involvement in writing this email. And he sent me back. He said, no human involvement other than picking the article to use from our app. And Oh, by the way, it took 70 seconds. And I was like, what the fuck? Now that just so happened to be the time where I met with Gary Vaynerchuk and I went to his 4d session in, in New York and you had a Q and a at the end with Gary.

And at the time I'm like, Gary, I just saw a computer write an email better than I could have ever written. Um, where does that leave us? And he's in his, and he was right. In my opinion, he, he said, look, don't worry about the technology. Be the last mile. Right. Right before it makes, you know, hits the human, make sure they humanize it a little bit because technology is not there yet. Right. And then I watched it not really take off. I thought it was going to eat world. And I was like, no, okay. It's not there yet. What I saw about four weeks ago with chat GPT and what I've been paying attention to with, with what's happening right now, I fundamentally think we're in a different world. So let's start with the acceleration right now.

Am I, am I being an alarmist right now by saying, I think things are going to accelerate at a, at a pace and let's macro technology wise. Look, we'll get down to the SDR. We'll get down to that technology here. But am I being an alarmist saying that I think that technology is going to move faster than we've ever seen it here moving forward? So I'll jump in on that first that no, I don't, I don't think so. I don't think you're being an alarmist. I think any sales professional right now that isn't thinking about who, how do I increase my technology quotient? How do I increase the, my understanding of all of this technology? Because, you know, a lot of this technology is doing it way better than a human is able to do it.

And it's a lot cheaper than a human. And it's more reliable than a human. So no, I don't think you're being an alarmist at all. I think any sales professional marketer or growth or a person in growth needs to be thinking about, oh, shoot, I need to get my head around this. I, I don't think you're being alarmist, but I don't think I agree. Because I think that in terms of like the technology moving faster than anything we've ever seen, I think it would be hard to beat like what we've done from like 1990 to 2010, when we're like, you know, we had no internet, nothing. And then like we had Google Maps and Uber by 2010. And those are just a couple of things, right? So I think like, it would be hard to beat that.

I think right now you sort of have two spectrums of people when you're talking about artificial intelligence. You have the people who, you know, use chat GPT and stuff like that and see mistakes and see errors and see how it gets super confident when it tells you that the capital of Pakistan, you know, is, is, is not correct. The capital of India is in Delhi or whatever it is. And they're like, oh, this, this stuff works. Then you have other people who are saying, wow, this is the craziest thing. And it's going to be absolutely insane. And I think the truth is probably somewhere in between. And I think these models are really, really hard. And we're going to see other companies like Google and Facebook and other, and Apple probably come out with other artificial intelligence models in the coming years.

And so it's, I think we've like hit a breakthrough in the, in the public perception and in the technology, but I think it's going to still take quite a while to get these to, to, to, to, you know, be completely, you know, sentient or things like that. But I think where we, and I think it's far beyond like the people who are upset about these little errors and stuff like that, like the, the true potential is there. But I think the truth is really somewhere in the middle. Yeah. And, and, and I, I agree, but I, I just, but it just feels different now. It's for some reason, it just feels different because now you, I mean, I don't know if you guys saw this morning, Buzzfeed, do you see the news about Buzzfeed?

The creators for Facebook? They, well, but they, they let go all their, their writers and they're doing everything ChatGPT and their stock went up by like 95%. Wow. Yeah. Wow. So, so like, and, and, and you, you and I both know that like what three years ago, people were telling people, oh, get into copy, like make sure you're really good at copy because that's going to be, you know, fucking awesome moving forward. Now it's irrelevant. Now you just need to write prompts. You don't need to write copy. Right. So, so that's why I just, for, for me, it feels a little different. And I also think, and, and again, I'm going to stay on the alarmist piece here. If I look at this, I, I, I have been saying that this has been a correction in the software space, right?

In the SaaS space, because they got over bloated over the past few years. And, you know, now it's like, okay, they were kind of stupid. They didn't think that they thought that this was going to last. And now they're just firing the people that they overhired for. Right. I actually don't think that anymore. I actually think it's a preparation because when you have a company like Microsoft drop 10,000 people, but then invest $10 billion into open AI, to me, that's telling them that this is, they're using this as an opportunity to lay off a whole bunch of people because of the quote unquote economy, but they know why they're doing it because they know if they did it in a year, because they automated all this stuff and told the audience, told the world like, oh, we just laid off 10,000 people because we got robots that do that stuff.

The PR nightmare behind that would be worse. So way worse than where it is now in a bad economy. So again, talk to me, Eric. Am I, am I wrong on that? Or am I, is it somewhere in the middle again on there? Well, no. Again, I think that we are in B what we're in the middle of, because in some ways I do agree with Varun because we, we do talk about technology as like when we say, well, it's technology like we've never seen before. You know, there was a much bigger leap from the Pony Express and mail and the telegraph than there was from a landline to a cell phone, right? As far as, you know, because then you went from, you know, three days of getting a message to now instantaneous, right? And so I, on that side, I am, I do agree.

But what I think now we're seeing is two, two factors that really affect exactly what's happening in the tech sector. One, automation and AI is just getting so much better that you can have one person who is enabled by a software co-pilot. You see it with GitHub co-pilot. You see it with a lot of other tools as well, enabled with a co-pilot that can now do the task of 10 people. And that is absolutely happening in the SDR model, 100%, especially if your organization is heavily reliant on email, then 100% is happening right now. And then the other thing too, is just the globalization of talent where, you know, do we need all of these people, you know, in the United States or in Canada or in North America when there's like a lot of people say, you know, uh, intelligence is evenly distributed, but opportunity isn't.

And now the world is getting flatter to, to be able to make that happen. So I know I, I do really genuinely think that just the productivity increases that we're seeing right now, the ease that no code automation is bringing people, the generative ideas that you're getting out of AI right now is something that, you know, will mark a place in sales and marketing forever. Yeah. Yeah. And what do you think? Yeah. I mean, I think, um, I'm not, uh, I think that there, I think what's interesting to me about, uh, about a lot of the developments here is we're like, but we've been talking a lot about the text generation elements of GPT-3 and chat GPT, but what's also, I don't think I would have ever expected that, uh, something like Dali would have happened by 2022, 2023.

And I don't think, like, I think if you had asked any of us maybe 10 years ago, um, if AI has happened, I think a lot of us may have guessed something like chat GPT or, or like that sort of the text element where you can write copy and stuff like that. But I at least would never have guessed like, Hey, you know, uh, generate an image for me of like dinosaurs playing volleyball on Mars, you know, and, and for it to just come up like that. And that that's insane, you know? And, um, and it does it with such high precision and quality and like, that's just extraordinary. And so I think what's interesting to me is like how that technology develops so much faster than our imaginations could have processed.

Um, and maybe even faster than the tech stuff, right? Um, on the, on the software side, on the, um, on the companies and the public markets, like I think the reason Google and Microsoft, Facebook, all these have laid off all the people, I don't think that's totally connected to the AI stuff. Like, I think it's mostly because public markets, you know, are like, we don't think that these companies have cost discipline and the amount of money that Mark Zuckerberg was spending on, uh, uh, on, uh, on the metaverse and, and AR and VR and like that was, uh, you know, orders of magnitude more than the public markets could stomach. So I think like, those are the reasons really driving those layoffs. And I don't think those companies have really automated that much using like this new stuff, but I think they're all really big bets on like the features and, and what they can provide in terms of value to consumers in the future.

And maybe they will start automating their own work, but that's kind of my perspective on that. All right. Cool. I hope you're right. Because I, I just feel like the, you know, the, you know, winter's coming and they know it and some, and a lot of people don't. And I think that's, that, that's a good transition to our conversation about the SDR and the sales world here. Um, because I've been preaching for a long time that I think the, um, predictable revenue model, albeit was great at the time, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, because it helped us as companies scale a sales model, right? It was a lot easier instead of hiring one sales rep to do everything, segment those roles, hire cheap labor, beat them up and move them through the system.

Now, what was, and that was great when software eats world and everything's going well and everything else. And the tolerance from the client perspective was okay. You know, like this is the process, I guess. Um, but now the, the predictable revenue model, I think is, is, has been broken for a long time because it's not customer centric in any way, shape or form. Nobody likes to be handed off 15 times before they actually talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about. And we're going to go back to full cycle inside sales supported by true ABM and AI. So we're in a bit of a transition phase right now because I've been talking to CROs who see that as well. And they've already laid off their, uh, SDR team or they've rolled SDRs under marketing and they're kind of letting them do that, but not necessarily go.

So are we at the breaking point of that model? Um, and what's the transition here? And then we'll talk about what the rep should be paying attention for that. So for a moment, why don't you give me your perspective on this? Are we at the point where it's fundamentally going to shift the sales model? As we know it in SAS, old school sales is old school sales. Okay. But as we know in SAS, are we, are we at the moment where it's a, it's a fundamental shift? Yeah. I mean, I think we are, and I can maybe take the first half of that question and pass it off to Eric for the rest, but like, um, you know, even just building off what we were saying in terms of the public markets and, and cost discipline and stuff like that, you know, the years of, uh, of extremely low 0% interest rates and, uh, free money basically or, or are not here for the time being, and maybe not, not here for a while.

And, and that really forces you to readjust like your priorities as a business and really force you to look at your balance sheet and your costs. And, um, there's a lot of costs there when you're, when you have a team of 25 SDRs, maybe. And, uh, and I, I think now that you have so many, uh, data sources out there, so many tools like, like clay and others that you can use, you can automate almost all of this work and maybe you could automate it all with having no SDRs and just having it run through entirely from a singular person. And this isn't just clay. Like there's tools like Zapier and Airtable and so many other great products out there in the no code, low code world that have sort of brought this about, uh, over the last five to 10 years.

And now that the, the pressure is there from investors and, uh, and the markets to also do something about it. And, uh, so there's sort of outward pressure and the tools are, are, are there to, to make it happen, um, we're sort of at the point where, where the circumstances allow for, for some, a shift like this to happen and for a pretty dramatic change in how we do the sales model so that you can get to a point where maybe you're sending tens of thousands of emails a month, uh, six months, a year, and have that completely automated end to end, um, with no human of the loop even, and have it be really high quality, high, really targeted, really personalized and, um, and only have humans to respond to these emails or, or do direct dials and stuff like that.

So I think that's kind of the, uh, the, the moment we're in where a lot of circumstances have collided, but I don't know, Eric, if you have other thoughts you want to share there? Yeah, absolutely. Um, and it's kind of taking a step back, right? I think the one thing that I appreciate about the predictable revenue model is that every person in your Henry Ford style assembly line, all should be specialized and know their task better than anybody else. Should be. Should be. That's an operable term right there. Yeah, exactly. And so in, with teams who are trying to replicate the predictable revenue model, they read the book and they say, we're changing the whole sales motion. We're going to do it this way.

Then it seems they take the most junior person straight out of college who has no clue what they're doing and then put them on the front line to represent their brand in front of every CEO in their, their target addressable market. And it worked back in the day one, because, you know, the, the, you could just fire off emails. And I remember in 2016, I was doing personalized emails with just a first name and nobody could sniff it out. I sent 200 emails and got 70 responses. Like nobody, nobody could sniff this stuff out. Now I send a personalized line based off of how long they've been at the company as the first line, a personalized line, pulling in an employee that works underneath them, that this tool would be able to help them with.

And then I even compliment them on a restaurant in their area. And they say, take me off your list. I'm like, wait, wait, wait, hold on. And so what I can appreciate, appreciate about the predictable revenue model is we will still have people who are very, very good at their jobs and they need to be siloed in order to do those things. What it will change towards, I think is outbound is going to become more like the ad networks of Facebook and Google and you know, Amazon. And what I mean by that is, is people hate outbound because there's no relevance to them. They get the email and they're like, I'm out. People, you know, I would go to my friend's house and they talk about Bed Bath & Beyond and then we'd see an ad for Bed Bath & Beyond and they're like, oh my God, they were like listening to us.

No, they're not listening to you. You looked up Bed Bath & Beyond on your phone. I connected to your wifi. They see us in the same spot. It's really, they're not listening to us. But what I can appreciate about that is finally on Instagram, I'm getting ads of things that I might genuinely buy. Dude, Instagram has me figured out. I'm like, oh cool. And then you're hitting on the point that I, sorry to jump on this, but that's exactly it. Like if my inbox was filled with super relevant fucking good ideas and shit like that, like I'd actually, I'd actually be kind of interested, but it's filled with a bunch of bullshit. So it's like when I'm on Instagram, I'm like, actually, I do want that. I didn't even know that thing happened.

That's fucking cool. And I like it. And so now I think the revolution that we're really going in right now is if you think that you could just email every chief marketing officer at your market with 50 and 100 employees and say the same thing to all of them, my bet is not on your horse. But if you break down your market and you say, okay, if this trigger is true, we're going to say this. If this is true, we're going to say this. If this about their company is true and they don't have these people on the payroll, we're going to say this. And you have all of these relevant steps that you could know and experiment with on your users. And then the best part about all that is there doesn't have to be any humans in the loop with all of these data sources that are together.

Whether or not you want to check out Clay, like just keep investing in data rather than people and automation. One CEO came up, came to me and they said, you know, I took them from one in 500 emails as a positive response. And I got them down to one out of like 150. We like really, really improved the response rate that they were getting. And he said, all right, I think I want to double the SDR team so that we can send more emails. And I was like, or I just set up more inboxes. And they were like, yeah, but what about their LinkedIn profiles? I'm like, what about their LinkedIn profiles? LinkedIn, you know, you can connect with a hundred people a week, maybe. And then you get 30% of them to connect with you.

And then you're, what are you going to do? Pitch slap them? Like, no, if people think about LinkedIn all wrong, which could be a whole nother conversation. It's a media platform, not a DMing cesspool, but we can talk about that later. But anyway, that's, that's what I, where I think all of this is headed. So, all right. I want to take two angles here on this. One from a rep standpoint, one from a business standpoint. We are companies who are in the predictable revenue model that have SDRs that are getting less and less results, um, and, but still rolling off of old playbooks. And I'm going to be, I'm going to throw myself into the, into the fire here of an old playbook. I think my playbook is one of the best out there without question for what was.

I fundamentally know that if I don't completely overhaul what's going on right now, that I'm going to be a, I'm, I'm a dinosaur already, but I'm going to try to be the alligator that comes out of the dinosaur realm and stays still an alligator. It might not look like a huge beast, whatever, but I'm still going to be here. Right. So let's talk about the, let's talk about the companies first. If you were a VP of sales right now in an organization that had a 50 SDRs and, you know, 150 AEs, and you were seeing that the outbound like stuff just was not working right now. Would you, and be as draconian as you want on this, would you literally cut the 150 as, or call it, cut the, cut 45 SDRs out of the equation, keep five of them, and then empower them with the tools that you guys have?

Or would you find some way of leveraging those 50 SDRs, um, to, to do something through this transition? I might, I suggest option C, which is, uh, like spend like a week, not even spend a few hours, use something like clay or something like that, and just test this out. Like, you know, we're not like spitting out voodoo magic or something, you know, like, uh, like just test it out, see how it goes. And it'll almost certainly, and then compare that to the output of your SDRs. And then this thing costs like a few hundred dollars a month, maybe. And that thing costs you tens of thousands of dollars a month, maybe. And look at the output you're getting on the SDRs. Look at the output that you're getting on this automated solution and just compare.

And then, then you don't even have to make this dramatic, uh, dramatic choice. And then you can, and then you have the numbers to, to, to back it up. And so I probably recommend just like testing something that's out, some, something like this out for like a week, two weeks, a month, something like that, get the data that you need and, uh, and invest in that. And then, um, and then either like, no one wants to lay people off. Right. And either see, can you make these people a lot more efficient and get like, you know, exponentially a higher degrees of output from the existing workforce. And if not, uh, uh, then maybe talk about a riff or something like that. But if you can, that's maybe a win-win solution for everyone.

And then I, I just want to also just open up with, I've never been a chief revenue officer. I've never been a VP of sales. So it's tough to, to give that perspective as well. But what I have done as I helped multiple SAS companies in the outbound agency, I've helped multiple SAS companies at clay. And, uh, what I would be doing too is, is having a conversation around, okay, you know, what, what do we have here? If say this all does work. And we completely automate email and we could get them all personalized and they're all relevant. What do we have here? We have people who can make really good direct dials. We do have that. We have some people who can, who can really handhold and really manage a large account and watch that with like the, the level of human expertise that we, and relationship that, that we don't have.

But then we also have all of these LinkedIn profiles that if we give a content strategy to could also become a huge beacon for our company as well. And I would just have a conversation and sit down with everybody about, okay, you know, we, we want to leverage more automation and we want to leverage more data. Um, Vroon and I, if you look at our statistics for clay, about 40% of all of the waitlist signups come in through our LinkedIn posts. I think a lot of companies aren't taking as big of a stand as they possibly can on social media. None of the SDRs are posting. They're not being, you know, the, the lighthouses for the company. And there's tons of free impressions out there. So I think there's still, there's still opportunity to keep that headcount.

It's just, well, what are we going to have these people do now instead of the things that we could take over with automation and everything. But if that being said, I still would sit there and I'm a CRO or a VP of sales. I think you should set up a hundred inboxes, get them all warming up, give yourself a month to prepare and then light this stuff up and, you know, escape the spam filter. Um, but you know, that, that's also my take too. Yeah. Well, and I think, well, what you would, but both of you really outlined there was the value is, is not necessarily the sales value. It's more the marketing value of these, of these players, right? For, so, you know, SDR is getting on LinkedIn and posting and sharing stuff and leveraging the tools and the insights and those types of things to connect, you know, connect with people.

Now the phone is where I think it's going to have a resurgence, um, because I do believe that that is part of, you know, okay, that, that's a human piece. And I, and I will tell you right now, I'm actually curious of what just happened to me literally today. I get this call from the local police, um, you know, trying to, for donations. Right. And it is blatantly obvious to me that they are reading a script. Right. So they'll read a script to me and I'll be like, guys, and obviously because it's the police and I, you know, I don't want to piss them off cause I don't want to be on their bad list. Right. So, so I'm like, Hey, I'm like, could you just, you know, could you just talk to me like a human being?

And the guy keeps going back into his script. Right. And then like he did it twice. Um, in the second time when I, when I, when he called, I said, look, I paused, I said, are you a robot? And he said, no, sir, I'm not a robot. I'm just going through a process here too, but he read it like a robot. So part of me was like, this motherfucker is a robot. Like this, you know what I mean? Like this is chat GPT with an AI thing, giving me the answer to the question that I had, but continuing on their script. So, but it, but, but I was still questioning him cause I know what a, like historically I know what a robot sounds like. You know what I mean? Like when I get the robo dial and it's high, you know, dah, dah, dah.

I'm like, all right, fuck off. Right. And then it kind of kicks to a human. And now finally the human says something. Right. But this one was so weird because the guy was, he, he was, he sounded robotic, but there was enough little points in there that I was like, wait, is he, is he, is he human? So I guess with what you're seeing with, I mean, I know you're working with my boy KD, um, with like get potion, you know what I mean? With the, with the, with get potion is the, um, the, the deep fake stuff. So with the deep fake stuff and then somebody like Jeffrey Gittermer, who is in our space to little red book of sales, you know, self-proclaimed King of sales, he's telling me that he's uploading all his shit to the group that actually works with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson's family.

And there's going to create an avatar of Jeffrey Gittermer that is going to be Jeffrey Gittermer. It's not going to be like a cartoon version of Jeffrey Gittermer. It's going to look exactly like him. And because he's got so much content out there, they're feeding it into this machine and they're going to create a coaching tool that any rep can sign up for and get coaching from Jeffrey Gittermer. Right? So like, you'll be able to ask like, Hey, Jeffrey, I'm about to go into a meeting with a CFO and I, you know, this is the situation. Any suggestions? And he will answer it exactly as if he would answer it because he doesn't, you know, he's not saying new things. He's like, he's got, you know, catalogs of content.

So with the deep fake shit happening and the stuff like, um, you know, not open AI, but the, the, the, the chat bot or the, the, the voice AI stuff, how are we going to be able to tell that it's a human? And, and, well, let me, and let me put one more piece to that. And does it matter outside of layoffs and getting rid of people and all that other stuff? Does it, does it actually matter? Will it matter that I fucking care that I'm talking to a human in the future? So, uh, so one, I think that it will one people like people despise if you, if they feel like the email was just an automated email, they, they despise being on the other side of it. Um, so I think, but, but Eric, I'm going to jump in on that, that you made the point earlier that if it was really fucking relevant and super personalized to me, I wouldn't give a shit if it was, I wouldn't give a shit if it was, it was automated.

I'd also say that maybe on like chat bots and stuff like that, people aren't like that upset. And like people get the help, get the help they need when they like, you know, reach out to an airline or a Dyson or whatever and ask for help and they get automated responses. And there's all these little companies that are being sprouted up right now that ingest all of a company's documentation and like, it's an AI chat bot to just like explain and answer questions directly. And that's pretty helpful. And like, I'm not, as long as my question gets answered, I'm not upset. You know, like, uh, if my question doesn't get answered, if the problem doesn't get solved, then that's a separate issue. But, um, but, uh, but if it does, then like the flaw faster, you know, that's better for me too.

Yeah, that's true. Um, and I, I think inside the sales world, it will, you know, people will appreciate it as long as it's relevant. And you, you know, you're pointing out on somebody's website, they found this error and those kinds of things. Um, there, there could, I think there might be, you know, I think people could be a little mad if a personality were to, so if you were to make deep fakes and say, Hey, like I've seen the work that you're doing as an SDR, you do it so well, blah, blah. And then they find out that that wasn't you. I could see them being like, Oh, you know what? I, I had my whole career cause Don Barrows told me that I was doing a great job. So I don't know, maybe something because I sent you a video and now you're like, fuck you, you know?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I don't know, maybe something, but Varun's point is very good as well. Like there's so many customer support. Actually, I think all of customer support is going to get radically changed because you can just take all the documentation and then just now it's the same thing. Turn 10 SDRs into just one sales office person. You can probably take 10 success managers and just put it into somebody who's jockeying the tough questions. What's up everybody? I know you're enjoying this conversation. John does a great job with genuine curiosity on these episodes and our guests consistently bring the heat. We want to take a moment here and let you know that you've got an opportunity, an opportunity to become better than you were yesterday.

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That URL one more time is joinjbsales.com. Let's get back to the show with JB and our guest for this week. All right, so let's talk then what does a sales rep do right now? So I'm a 23-year-old SDR. We're in a shit economy. I'm listening to this fucking podcast right now and going, holy shitballs, what does that mean for me and what do I need to be focusing on? I'm saying to reps, business acumen, emotional intelligence, and curiosity. Those are the things that you got to really double down on because that is, you know, that emotional intelligence, that connection with people, the genuine curiosity. Even though computers can do that too, there is just something about, I'd rather not go through a tree of questions.

I'd rather just have a dialogue with somebody. But if you're that rep right now, and I'm only talking to the reps that give a shit, by the way. The ones who have been fat, dumb, and happy over the past 10 years by pushing fucking buttons because this industry has been on fire for 10 years and never sold through a down economy, and you go home at 5 o'clock and you wonder where your leads are coming from every time you step into a company, those people can fuck off. I got no sympathy for them. But for the reps that care, that are like, I love this profession of sales, I want to get better, but I don't want to get replaced. Where and what should they be looking and focusing on right now? Yeah. So, like I said, I think technology quotient is going to be the difference between all of this, right?

Like, just if you're a sales rep and you know how email deliverability works, instantly you are ridiculously more important to the organization because this is something that every single organization is having a problem with right now. If you understand how automation works, awesome. If you understand how to collect data and to synthesize that data in order to run a better outreach campaign, that's what you do. And whether you're using Clay to do these things or you're using other no-code tools, just brushing up the amount of SDRs that I talk to, and I ask, what's your day-to-day like? And they go, okay, I log on, I go out to Sales Navigator and my saved list. I get a spreadsheet out and I copy and paste 15 people for the day.

And then I find their email addresses manually by looking them up one by one in Seamless. And then I write personalized emails to all of them, which ends up being some crap about the college that the person went to. And then they ship off those 15 emails and then they'll do their 70 wishy-washy direct dials that they hope to connect to somebody on that they were told to do. And then they repeat it the next day. And I'm just like, oh my gosh. And that company, I literally, I went to the CEO and I was like, I will give you your whole TAM, the entire thing. You just pay for the emails to validate and I'll get you the entire thing at cost. And he was like, all right, like, and it turned out to be less than what he pays one of those SDRs on like a monthly basis.

And I was like, how have you guys just not even thought about this? But this isn't just at startups though. I was speaking to somebody at Amazon two weeks ago, AWS. He was like, yeah, they still have me manually pull people out and do these things. And I was like, oh, here's your list. Here's all 2000 people in your market. You're done, go do something else. And it's just because they just don't have the technical quotient, the access to the tools. They don't even know what questions to be asking as well. So I tell everybody, you need to learn how to use generative AI. Prompting is going to be huge to be able to do that. You need to learn how to web scrape and you should know how to use no code tools slash figure out how an API works.

And then you become incredibly invaluable to the rest of the organization. I say all the time, there's a huge difference between a rep who knows how to scrape data and a rep who doesn't. And the one who knows how to scrape can just move so much faster. Yeah. See, I need to learn how to scrape data. Well, we're teaching you. Yeah, I know. Varun, what are your thoughts on what rest of your book? I don't have too much to add relative to what Eric said. I think the more technical you are, the more indispensable and differentiated you become as a person and as a resource on a team. I think that if you can learn how to do these things, there are very few people who know how to do these things. And the key is you don't want to have to depend on other people, right?

You don't want to have to depend on this person to show you how an API works, on this person to help you set up these apps, on this person to help you build lists. And if you can just be more self-sufficient, you can develop all these skills. And they're really, really rare. And soon you won't be an SDR, soon you'll be an AE, and then you'll be managing people. And maybe you decide to start your own business because of how successful you are and how much value you're creating. Like, honestly, if I was one of these people, like, and Eric goes, like, Legion agencies, very lucrative businesses. And, like, very good and not that hard to understand the core skill sets. And, like, it's there for the taking for people who are hungry and who want to learn and get better.

And that's, I think that's the point. I think that's the piece of this that I hope my audience is listening to. You know, and you guys have heard me say this before. I say, you know, I did a training one time and, you know, 300 kids at the end. When I say kids, obviously, that's a Boston thing. They weren't all kids. But, you know, one of them said, hey, John, you train all of our, you know, we saw your logos, man. We train, you train all of our competitors. Like, if you train us all on the same content, then where does that leave us, right? And I said, 10, 60, 30. And he goes, what? I go, 10, 60, 30. I go, 10% of you in this room, I'm going to take what I tell you and run with it and execute at the highest level because that's the type of people you are.

60% of you in this room are going to do something different because it's easy and it makes sense. 30% of you ain't going to do shit different. So the question isn't, how many people can I train? The question is, is what percentage do you want to be in? And I genuinely believe that, and let, like, look, I've always been a little bit frustrated with B players because I'm like, oh, why don't you want to be a fucking A player? But I've realized a long time ago that the world needs B players. If we had all A players, we'd tear each other apart, right? So there are the people who are just happy doing what they're doing. But unfortunately, I look at those people, which is probably the bottom part of that 50% in the middle, that 60% in the middle, right?

That those people are in danger of getting replaced through automation because if their jobs are just kind of doing the job, but it's that the top end of that 50% that want to get better and those 10% that know what's going on right now, it's that spot. The top 50% of that 60% is the people that I'm speaking to right now. And then I'm trying to get on this train of figuring this shit out and learning and trying to forget what you know and get on the train right now for what is to come. Because like I said, I personally think that we're going to start seeing stuff move faster than I personally have ever seen in my career. And look, I get the telegram to this and I get the leaps that we've made, okay?

But not in the past 15 years have we seen leaps and we're seeing leaps right now. Now, how do we monetize all this stuff? Who fucking knows? There's a bunch of nodes out there right now, but the fact that Microsoft put 10 billion into OpenAI and they have LinkedIn and they have, you know what I mean? Like I'm now looking at Microsoft going, ooh, you know, everybody's like, look, oh, Microsoft, you old fuck. No, no, no. Like once they put all these pieces together, they're going to potentially be the fucking killer app again for everybody. What else should be people paying attention to right now? Anything that, anything that, that, I mean, look, like I said, I think emotional intelligence, I don't know how to train on emotional intelligence.

Um, but it's, but I think it's important. I think curiosity is really important. And, um, like I said, business acumen, learning the structure of business. So you can actually have conversations with people about this and the impact that it's having. Cause I'll tell you right now, I'm not talking about sales training anymore with a lot of the, the, the teams that I'm having conversations with. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I can train your team. Like based on this contract, have you seen what's going on out there? What are your thoughts on this? And because I'm staying like, like literally even a half a step ahead, they're like, what the fuck? Holy shit. I need you to talk to my CRO. I need you to talk to, and I'm elevating the conversation because I have business acumen and because I have context.

And I'll put, I'll bring one point up. And this is my fear is you said customer service, Eric is going to fundamentally change, right? I totally agree with you. I saw a 15 year old kid create a customer service response on Tik TOK, right? Where he just automated all this customer support stuff. And I was like, holy shit, that's brilliant. And I guarantee that's better than almost anybody would ever do. But the problem is that kid's 15 years old. He has no idea what customer success or service even is. So are, is, I guess, let me ask you this. Is it, does it matter the context that somebody brings? To this technology or is the technology good enough that somebody without experience can be vastly better than somebody with experience, but without the knowledge, without the tech, right?

So when I say this, like, if I'm going to say like somebody like me, old school, fucking get it right, but I'm kind of allotted when it comes to the technology versus some 20 year old kid who has a little bit of knowledge about sales with tools like what you guys have. Who wins? Wow. What a great question. Who wins? I know my answer. 20 year old kid, because there's enough knowledge out there right now from guys like me. I mean, think about the, Varun, you, you had this with the artists, right? Like blows your mind with the artists. What the fuck is going to happen with artists right now? There's no original art anymore and all that. And there's actually lawsuits now of artists suing because the bot is learning off of me.

You know what I mean? Like the Beatles, if I'm the fucking Beatles right now and AI is being pointed at my library and creating music that sounds like my shit, like I, I gave the machine that, but now any fucking dipshit kid can say, write me a song like the Beatles and I want to, I want to be it about, you know, balloons and frogs and whatever it is. And it'll sound like a cool ass song for the Beatles. So is it better to be that kid with technology knowledge? Like you said, like learn the, learn the scraping and learn that or an experienced person that has the knowledge, but can't scale it, can't get it out to as many people. Oh, what a good question. Cause I could see both sides of it. And I think I'm going to just answer it with an example of the amount of people that Varun and I demo.

And we say essentially every database that you could possibly want is at your fingertips right now. And if we don't have it yet, we'll build it. And you also can use Google inside of clay. So any research that you want to do tons of time, people are like, well, I like, I always check to see if they mentioned this thing on their website. All right, done. We can do it. It's over, you know, move on to the next thing. But the amount of people that we demo who, who come to us and they say, I just want to get emails at a sales navigator is just ridiculous. And I'm like, like I've even been on demos with people and they're like, we think clay can change our entire sales function. And then I talked them through the process and I'm like, I'm going to be completely honest.

Clay is actually a little over bloated for you. You, you should do X, Y, and Z. And here's a couple of parts that you could do in clay would love if you buy the software, but honestly, you just need these three softwares and you can just go nuts. And they, they, I was on the phone with the head of growth and then the other person on the phone was like the VP of operations. And she looks at the head of growth and she's like, I can't believe you never thought of that before. And so the reason I say this is because I think the one thing that the 20 year olds doesn't bring is they don't bring the context to have good ideas. Like all of this is great, but to not have a good idea just, just kills the amount of times I meet marketers and I tell them, I'm like, the best thing you can do in a cold email is give your most valuable thing away for free.

And then they come up and they're like, well, we have this white paper. I'm like, no, no, no. So what I mean by that is, so I clay, we're about to launch outbound campaign. Of course it's a test. I have no, I have no, we've never done outbound. We get so much inbound that, that we have to, we're, we want to get our feet wet though, because we need to know one, how does an outbound program work? And then if we run ads, what are we going to say that we have to figure these things out? And the outbound campaign I'm running is going to be to about 700 GDPR compliance softwares. And I'm going to tell them, look, I know a big part of your workflow is knowing if the, if the company you're reaching out to is even compliant to begin with, I'm sending in the email, I'll teach you how to scan their website for the keywords, GDPR compliant, GDPR and data processing addendum.

So, you know, before you talk to them that their GDPR compliant or not. And that's the campaign we're going to run. And if anybody's listening to this podcast and wants to tell me that that's not a valuable, you know, a value first campaign, love to get an opinion on what would be better than that. Come on. But there's so many marketers who are like, well, we have this white paper. We can show people how to do these things. And it's like, no. And so that's, that's the only thing that I have against that is there are people, you know, business brokers speak to them all the time. Uh, I, I, I, one of my most successful campaigns I've ever run is targeting businesses that potentially want to sell.

And anybody want to take that campaign? It's a 12% response rate campaign. Super, super easy. Talk to business brokers. They have no clue how to make that work. Nothing at all. So you have these people who have all this context and they've been in the industry for 20 years, but they, they can't even open that up. So I don't know quite how to answer that question, but I, I do want to just say that like people are missing a ton of context and just good ideas, but then there's also people who know what to say, but then they don't have the technology. So again, I hate to say that it's somewhere in the middle, but with those two examples, I hope it makes sense of why I'm saying that. I get it. What do you think?

I think the 20 year old is probably gonna be better positioned at better, better positioned at creating a small software business that makes them like a million dollars a year or something and that, uh, you would be better positioned at asking people to pay, pay you like, you know, $20,000 a month for, uh, advice that they can't find anywhere else. And so I think both people will be successful just in a different ways. Yeah, I think that's, and I think that's where, you know, my hope is, is, is that kind of the experienced people get on this train to realize that they can actually now leverage their experience at such a bigger volume and make separate. Yeah, they can productize it and they can actually make a bigger difference.

You know what I mean? Like, yeah, yeah, that's true. Like I, I can make a bit, I feel like, you know, I've, I've always been frustrated and I'm going to, and I'm, you guys are going to help me do this, you know, from, for instance, for me, Grant Cardone, I fucking hate Grant Cardone, but Grant Cardone is a hundred X me. Why? Cause he's got this megaphone and he has no problem stuffing crap down people's fucking throats and forcing them to buy and doing the old school bullshit. Right. And he's like the bane of my existence. I'm like, God, you know, if there's a direction that a rep comes into sales and they get, you know, I'm just hoping they get access to my stuff versus his stuff before they dive in.

Right. So, cause they're going to take one of those two tracks. And so, but I don't have a megaphone and I want to help more people do sales in my opinion, the right way. Right. Well, it's so sorry to interrupt, but what I, we were talking about like, all right, so what should people focus on? I, you want me to scrape a website? I can scrape any website. I could get through Cloudflare, you know, whatever you want me to get through. And if you even know what I meant by Cloudflare, then you know what I'm talking about. Um, but one thing that I wanted to add onto that is, all right, if you're not going to be this technical, then you should learn how to build an audience because the ability to build an audience is going to just get more and more expensive as time goes on.

And you should just start doing it right now. So if you're a sales rep and you're like, I don't even know where to get started technical, just start posting content because I, I, I'm not sure if you do this, but I had the opportunity to work with Grant Cardone. It was a partnership. I didn't work in the company, but we, we partnered with them and I saw it from the, from the outside looking in and their ability to just cram content down people's throat is, is a hundred percent their success. There's literally no other success. Like if they can just cram content down people's throat. And so that's what I say. And that's why I said about, you know, if you're a sales rep and you, you're a beacon for your company on LinkedIn, you can get 4,000 views a post on LinkedIn.

And if you try to do the same thing on Instagram, you're going to get 40. Like literally you could just start posting today and get more eyeballs than what you would pay for ads on Instagram. So, but people just don't do that enough. And so I a hundred percent agree with you. And then it's, it's the next side of just how do you take on like an Alex Hermosey content style where you have this quantity of, of content and the quality is super high and you could just keep ripping through that. And sales reps should, you know, there are sales reps who are, who are changing their entire career just because they started, started posting on TikTok. Like you have no clue who these people are, but they're like now the cold calling master because you saw them on TikTok, you know, it's so, uh, you know, that's what I think.

Another thing, sales reps, if, if you don't want to get technical, start, start putting out that content. Well, and real quick before you jump in, Baroon, I, you know, that's what I'm learning too is, is we at sell, at sell better here. You know, I started this as Jay Barrows. I didn't want to, I, I, cause I was like, ah, I like, I'm, people don't think I'm going to like, people think I'm an extrovert. I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm an introvert and I force myself to be an extrovert when I have to. Um, so me being Jay Barrows, I was like, ah, fuck, I don't like this. Right. But I said, all right, well, training is about the person and the training is like a 50, 50 thing. And then, but then as we grew up and we moved to JV sales and then we moved to sell better by JV sales and that was a very purposeful thing to get away from me personally and put it on the company.

But now, and this is, this is literally this inflection point for us. Any 20 year old kid can do chat GPT and, you know, you read a few blog posts and be the expert, like you said, on Tik TOK, the cold calling expert. Right. So me trying to like us as a business being like what we are and why I think we have a great brand, but we're going to have, we're like, I'm going to have to lean back in on the personal brands of this based on the industry, based on how long I've been in here in this industry, because there's credibility there. And that's what I'm going to now start to leverage more than anything else I've ever done, which is my credibility in this space, because that's what I, if you're going to listen to somebody, like everybody can kind of do the same thing.

So who should you listen to? And it's brands, it's personal brands, it's people with followings, it's people who are adding value to their communities. And, and companies, I've always said this, I think companies are going to have to get very comfortable with individuals within their companies representing their brands, like chief, you know, chief, um, evangelist officers and those types of things. So insights there, Varun, your thoughts? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that people should definitely, I mean, there, there are, there, there used to be this culture, like, um, I don't know if you guys are familiar with demand curve, which is like a very popular, like content, uh, platform for, you know, they do a great stuff on growth basically.

And they have an agency that's attached to it and they have these amazing guides on growth and someone on our team used to actually work at demand curve and wrote a bunch of like guides and stuff like that, uh, um, on their website. And then like he left and then they erased his name from everything. And, uh, and this is like a really like prominent website. And so I feel bad for kind of calling them out, but I think they now actually, uh, put their, uh, keep everyone's names on it now. So I think they've changed policies there, but like those types of policies, that type of approach, isn't going to, uh, you know, get the types of people that you need who are going to champion your brand. And I think the more that these companies have more of a, uh, you know, a human voice and like more of like, um, and more resonant and, and, and try it like, you know, we at clay, we have a slack and actually all of our support happens on the slack.

There's not, there's nothing else. There's no like, I mean, I guess you can email us, but there's no like Zendesk or intercom or anything like that, but you get on the slack and like, you just talk to us like immediately. And it's like, you have a problem. We fix it. You want something, we do it, you know? And like, you know, maybe that can't work if we have 10,000 customers, but, uh, but for now it's working. And I think like, there are people who actually buy clay just because of the slack, because they get there. They're like, wow, this is crazy. The, the, the value that we get, uh, is like insane just from seeing what other people are able to build, you know? Um, and so I think the more that brands can, um, you know, lift up the people who work there and, and sort of make that a lot more human, the more they can get differentiated in unique ways.

And I, and that's the, that's the balance, right? I see it from a business standpoint. It's, it's kind of like training right now these days because there's very little limited loyalty anymore in general. And I'm saying from both sides of this equation, you know, like for instance, the average SDR. So what is it? 14 months or something like that, maybe at best. And I don't mean like average SDR before they get promoted to another role. I mean, average at the company, right? So if you're a company looking to invest in your team, you need to give training because if you don't give training and you know, you, if you don't invest in your people, then they're going to leave. But if you do invest in them, there's a strong likelihood they're going to leave.

So from a brand standpoint, I'm going to invest Rune. I want you to come over here. I want you to be Rune. I want you to go out there. I want you to build your brand and we're going to help you do that. And holy shit, you just built your brand and now you're fantastic. And now you're going to go bounce and do something else because you're more valuable to somebody else. So it's this weird, I don't envy organizations right now trying to figure this out because I think individuals with brands and who know like what you guys are saying, like get out there, start posting, get a following and those types of things. They're going to be able to kind of basically call their shots, right? Because if you can bring an audience to a company, you're far more valuable than if you're a great sales rep.

Because we're just, I personally think that we're doing this from a marketing and sales standpoint. I think marketing is eating sales. I think most sales reps have to become mini marketers. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Like if there's not, like it's not about the, just the cold, it's about the tweet, the share, the retweet, the email, the video, all these little small positive impression points that we're coming after you with. And then once that intersection happens where I finally got you to say, huh, maybe I should talk. Now I got to be a real person. Right. But it's, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I, I see where, I see where it's going. I see, I see Ironman. Like, I also don't understand. Oh yeah. There, my computer's name is sales journalist.

That's like, it's like, I've literally named it that if you look it up on Bluetooth. Um, and so, uh, I, I told, I just don't understand why reps don't invest in these like social kind of, you know, audience building, because even if you don't have an audience, at least maybe they're intimidated, but it's like, at least even if you don't have an audience, somebody could still look you up and say, oh wow, they post valuable content or the amount of times I get on a call and somebody's like, I saw you on the podcast, uh, you know, on another podcast, or I saw your LinkedIn posts. It's been super helpful. I just have these couple of questions and then I'm going to buy clay. It's like, perfect. That's what we're here for.

Like that's, that's what this whole motion is all about. Um, and so, yeah, I, but also this is also becoming super important because as we, I love outbound and the reason I love outbound is because the ROI is just nuts. If you can get it right, right. We're talking about a couple of email domains, data that's, you know, get it from the right place. It's half a penny per contact, you know, super, super cheap and great ROI. And you could go directly to people, you know, are qualified. There's, there's a lot of things for outbound. But you have solutions like gated that are blocking people's inbox. The spam filter is tougher to get through. I keep my phone on do not to serve. I don't pick up a phone call of anybody from an unknown number that I don't see.

Uh, LinkedIn is cracking down on how many DMS you could do. I actually think that outbound as a whole might even be in trouble one day and audience building ads and you know, all that stuff is like all that's going to be left over anyway. So if, if I tell sales reps anything, I always tell them, you know, get, get your social game on point, get your technical question on point. Because you're going to have to lean on those pretty hard going forward. And I, I think one of the things, and Vern, you might've said it like they're scared, but I think it's also this, this immediate satisfaction or immediate, immediate gratification that everybody's looking for. And they're not playing the long game, right?

They're looking, so if they post, for instance, like, look right now, I mean, I just read the other day that, uh, podcasts, it's harder than ever now to start a podcast. Like if you started a podcast, like two to three years ago, you got a lot of traction, right? Same thing with TikTok. Like if you got on TikTok early, man, that fucking algorithm puts you everywhere, but now it's really hard to go viral on TikTok, right? So I think there's that immediate gratification, like short-term thing that isn't there for them and therefore they give up, right? Because it's not, it's not going to directly lead to revenue. Doing a social post, doing, sharing something like that and the, and the pressure that these reps have to deliver results, balanced by, right?

Yeah. So they're not long-term, they're looking short-term and therefore they're going to be helpful to say, you know, and, uh, and it has to be helpful, valuable, like, um, that's not easy, you know? There's a hack to that. There's my hack to that. And this is what I tell reps. Don't tell people how fucking smart you are. It's just like challenge yourself. Well, fuck you, challenger sale. Like, I mean, literally, and I don't mean like, great. I love challenger sale and I think it's a great thing, but I mean, I got myself in trouble a while back. Like I stood up in front of a whole group, uh, this was like 10 years ago. I was like, could you all do me a favor and stop teaching 22 year old kids how to be a fucking challenger, please?

Like they don't even know what they're talking about yet to be a challenge. Like Gary Vee said, you can't be a 22 year old life coach, right? You haven't even lived yet. So, but, but the ability to share content of what you're learning, Darum, that's the key. It's if you consume content with, with the, with the primary goal of learning and then what you do is you share that with your context of what you learned and build in public, then then it doesn't matter how many people click on your shit because you, you've actually crossed off the primary goal, which is you learning. I think every, yeah, go ahead. Oh, sorry. Every creator needs to start from a place of I did this versus you should do this.

Yes. That's where like you can post, you should do this stuff all the time. Varun and I are ringing the bell every day of like, I just made this like, but we're not saying this is the sales motion that you need to take on. And so that's, and it's just people knowing kind of their spot on that, that line of, you know, when, and I don't even really know when you cross that line of you should do this. You shouldn't. Oh, sure. Great. In my opinion, I never, you hear me, you, you will rarely hear me say, this is exactly what you should do to when you make a cold call. Mine is, I don't know, try this and try this. I've tried this and it works a little bit better for me, but you could try that because your personality is different than mine.

Right. So there it is for Jay Barrows. Even keep it always to, I did this, you know, like, cause you're absolutely right on that. Too many people are like, I'm the next, you know, cold email king. And it's like, ah, I ran this campaign. I got a 3% response rate. Anyone got thoughts? So, you know, it's far better content than the other one. When it comes to content, I feel like there's like two ends of the spectrum. There's either like people who are absolute experts in their space or like have this like amazing history that other people don't know about. Like, you know, sometimes I see on Twitter, like these former NHL players are like, here's what it's like to really be a NHL player. Here's, I was a pilot on private planes.

Here's what it's like to actually be, um, to, to, you know, do chartered planes all the time or stuff like that. And that's interesting to people. Cause it's this like, you know, 1% thing where someone has a set of experiences and no one else does. And they're sharing that. And that, that's super valuable. And then you have the other end where it's like, you know, you don't know anything about something, but you're teaching people as you go along, you know, and that's like super valuable too. And so those like two ends of the spectrum, I find like really, really helpful as like grounding mechanism, like what can be successful. You notice that. And I'll make last point here on that is you notice the, the people that, that you would look to, to say, wow, that is the fucking expert.

You know, he should be telling me what to do. For instance, you notice most of them have podcasts where they have conversations about it as opposed to posting things about what you should do. Like I look at Simon Sinek, Simon Sinek, based on where he is in the industry, he should be telling us, go do your why, like set up your why you need to do this. This is that, uh, these are what your values should be. But he doesn't do that. He says, here, here's what the why did for me. Here's, here's an example of when somebody got true to their why, what it did for their life. It's like, oh shit. Right. As much as he could be telling me, like, you got to do this. He's having a conversation about it and giving stories and examples and, and learning lessons.

Uh, uh, Tim Ferriss, another brilliant person who most people would agree, Tim Ferriss, tell me what the fuck to do, man. How do I, how do I make a four hour work week? Tell me what to do. Right. But, but everything in the four hour work week is an example of how he did it. Like he's not saying do it. He's like, this is what I did. And this is what it made. This was how it allowed me to live this life that I lived. Right. So that's where I think that I'm noticing the, to me, the real soothsayers, the real ones who are out there, they're having conversations like this and they're humble enough to realize what they know and what they don't know. And they, they interject when they do, you know what I mean?

And, and they take a step back when they don't. And that's to me, I think social building brands all day, every day. So shit guys, we covered a lot of, covered a lot of, yeah, absolutely. I think we could, I mean, I'm excited to be working with you guys on this because my hope is, is that with your help, I, we can turn me into that, the sales rep of the future who can do, you know, who has exactly what I said earlier, who has the experience, but can leverage the technology to get that experience out to, to a broader audience and has the context to do it and, but just do it in a, in a way that is thoughtful and is, and is real as opposed to just mass spam engine bullshit that, that I think is going to hit us real fast here real soon.

So I appreciate you guys partnering with me. And before, and before we close up, can we just tell everyone a little bit tidbit of what we're working on? Yeah. Yeah. And so if, if anyone's like, well, what, what are they doing? And then they just cut the podcast. Uh, and so essentially what we're working on is this dynamic customer list. And what we're helping John with is, okay, you want to walk up to every VP of sales and every chief revenue officer of a B2B company that has 50 sales reps. What are you going to say? And what we're doing is we're setting up a conditional format system system where I say, all right, John, if this is true about the person, no matter if there's six people in the world that this is true about, if this is true, what's the most.

Awesome thing that you could say if, if this thing is true. And he's like, okay, well this, if these stars align, these four stars, that is my ideal customer. They're going to buy from me. Awesome. Perfect. Okay. Now what if these three stars line? Okay. We're going to say this. Okay. Now what if these two stars line? Okay. We're going to say this. All right. New stars. What if, you know, the company is hiring for SDRs? Okay. Well, we're going to say this. Well, what if the company just laid off SDRs? Ah, okay. We're going to say this. And so essentially what we're going to be able to do is take all of these contacts on a contact level and an account level and score all of them for these, these magic moments I'll call and have this dynamic list of, okay, now we've done all of the research completely programmatically.

We have all of the verified emails. We're ready to reach out to them. But every email is relevant based off of the stars that are included on that person's line inside of the spreadsheet or the way that they align with, with other things that are going on. And, uh, you know, this is the, uh, in my opinion, the highest and best use case that we have for clay right now, we were talking to another company that does this. They put 14 engineers on the project to be able to make it happen. And even then they're even still taking looks at other things. And so, uh, you know, this, this is, I think is like when we talk about like the new way the sales is going, this, this idea of like a dynamic prospect list where every single prospect has these different things, which then we'll fall back on, you know, a message that's still valuable.

If no stars line, it's not like we're not going to reach out to them, but then we'll, we'll, you know, have all of the people that we have far better things to say to. Yeah. I can't wait to turn this shit on. Uh, let's do it. Which are you around tomorrow? Cause I got, I got an open day tomorrow. If you got some time. Uh, so I, yeah, I was actually going to let you know about that. I was like, I was like, I am working on your thing tomorrow morning. So I will have to go, I'll be home between nine and, uh, 11 and then after 12. So I'm yours. You just told me. Okay, cool. Yeah. I'll ping you on Slack. Varun, um, tell people where to like clay. It's clay.run, right? That's the website. Clay.com.

Okay, cool. We got that domain, baby. Oh, you got it. Oh, good for you. I was like, cause I keep, I kept screwing it up. I was like clay.io, clay.run. And so it's clay.com. You got it. Awesome. Yeah. And, and where do you want to, do you just want to point people there? Like what's the best paper? Because I, I'm going to, I rarely do this by the way. Um, I never tell, I never lean in on say, oh, you definitely have to do this. I'm like, all right, give you a little promo here. This is one where I'm going to tell reps, go fucking check this out. So, so outside of going to your website, um, is that the place to go or is there other places to hit you guys up to see what you're doing? Yeah, I, I didn't go to the website, um, sign up for the wait list.

If you just mentioned John Barrows in the, in the wait list form, well, we'll get you off the wait list. So don't worry about that. Uh, and I would say like, go check it. There's a tab on the website. It says like learn clay. Um, there's like 40 videos there of crazy things that you can do. Uh, and just check them out. I mean, I think your creativity can kind of go wild and the more creativity you have, the, the more powerful clay can be. And the videos cover everything from how to, you know, get tech stack and news data and job listings and, uh, scrape websites for keywords all the way to use a, you know, AI to automate emails and 10. So the world's kind of your oyster. I forget. I forgot about that.

Um, for those people who are listening right now, who are out of work, they can point it at job postings, right? Yeah. So, I mean, we have a Chrome extension that's free. Like you don't, you know, it's free to use whatever. And, um, you could like go to LinkedIn jobs, whatever, and scrape all those job listings or indeed or whatever it might be, put it into clay and then enrich it. And you know, all, everyone on the free trial gets like 1500 credits. So, um, uh, put it into clay and then enrich those companies. And figure out, uh, you know, which of the companies that are the right fit for you, you know, depending on employee size or fundraising data, and then get the email of your hiring manager or find out who that is.

Reach out to them. Like, yeah, it's a great, um, hack for recruiting as well. Fucking fantastic. All right. All right, guys, my head's spinning as usual. I appreciate it. Uh, hopefully we didn't freak too many people to fuck out right now, but I, I do say that that those of you who are listening, and if you know me and you're listening, you've been a long time listener here, you, yeah, I'm, I have a feeling you give a shit. And I have a feeling that you care about improving and staying relevant in this world. So stay relevant. Listen, go fucking try some of this shit out. Play around with stuff, break shit, ask questions, get better because otherwise you will get replaced. And so with that, ending on a happy note, even if you are freaked the fuck out right now, and you think this blew up your world and our, and you're like, holy shit, I had a terrible day because of it.

Go out there and make somebody smile today. Uh, cause no matter how bad you think your day goes or how bad you think it is out there, if you make somebody smile today, you know, you had a good day. The world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I'll see you on the other side. Thank you so much for your time today and listening to the podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts in the industry with over a million downloads. And I can't thank you enough to keep the momentum going. If you could go to your favorite podcast platform and leave us a five-star review, I would greatly appreciate it in return.

I will answer any question that you have on Instagram. Hit me up there at John M as in Michael Barrows with a video question or a DM, and I will get right back to you. I promise. And last but not least, if you're looking for training, I'm adjusting my training approach this year, and I'm actually going to be delivering training to the masses. I'll be delivering live training the first and second week of every single month. With our two marquee courses, filling the funnel and driving a close to anybody who wants to join. And it includes membership in our on-demand platform with weekly AMAs. So you can go to jbarrows.com slash open to check out the details. Thanks again, and have a great day.