Everett Berry: Will AI-SDR Replace the SDR/BDR?

I don't actually truly believe in the AISDR, I'm being honest, because I don't think the AISDR is prepared to manage that situation. 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 today's conversation is with Everett Berry. He's the head of go-to-market engineering at Clay, one of my favorite new tech platforms. Now for those of you who don't know what Clay is, it can enrich your client and prospecting data with almost any piece of information you could possibly imagine, and then helps to create tailored messaging and workflows based on the specific triggers you want to find.

So the reason I wanted to have this conversation with Everett is because I've seen Clay do some incredible personalization with their messaging, and I wanted to hear his perspective on whether this type of tech will help automate or eliminate the need for sales reps, specifically when it comes to outbound prospecting through email. We tackled this during our conversation, along with what skills are going to be necessary moving forward to be successful in sales, the importance of business acumen, and whether or not you can teach curiosity, and so much more. If you're interested in hearing where the future of sales is headed, you're going to want to listen to this one. Let's make it happen. Everett, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend.

How are you doing today? Hey, John. I'm doing great. Yeah, this is going to be a fun conversation, man. I've been working with you guys for a while. So for everybody who doesn't know, Clay.com is a tool I came across a little while ago and was blown away by the functionality of it. I've been following them along ever since. And now, full disclosure, sponsor, but there's a reason why is because they don't work with companies who I don't believe in as far as their leadership is concerned or their product. And so I use Clay a lot, and I've been really looking forward to this conversation because you guys got some money recently and you're taking it to the next level. But before we get all to that fun start about growing a business, talk to us, Everett, where you're coming from.

And again, this is always not the LinkedIn profile shit, like mom, dad, growing up, those type of things. Where did Everett come from? And then we'll get into some of the debates here about AI and automation and everything else. Yes, yes. Well, my origin story might be a little vanilla. So I'll give it a shot here. So I grew up in the Midwest. I'm actually a fifth generation Purdue engineer. It turns out like my great grandparents went to Purdue and everybody in my family is a bit to the engineering side. And that's what I did as well. I started out in computer engineering. I started a company after university where I was a technical co-founder and really thought that would be the end all be all.

I love technology. I love the aspect of figuring things out, of pushing the edge on things. I got into AI pretty early as well. But as a result of all that, I felt at some point that I was missing out on the business side of things, the growth side of things, the fun stuff, you might say. And so after that first company shut down, I then spent the next four years in growth roles at different developer tools companies. And specifically, these last two years, I was a head of growth with a team of SDRs and sort of a marketing group around me. And I was a clay customer and clay user. And so for a long time, clay was just like one of the best tools in our toolbox. And it was something we were using to grow the business in various ways, run campaigns, so forth.

But as I got into it, it started to actually become my favorite, my favorite single work item. So I was always excited to build things in clay. I helped the clay team build certain things such as our sales loft integration. And there was this guy, Varun, that I was always asking for credits. And I really didn't know a ton about the business until one day Varun reached out and wanted to meet. And so on and so forth. Now I am at clay helping other businesses grow. Love it, man. It's always this kind of a dotted line to where the hell and all of a sudden circumstance hits and you get a phone call and it's like, oh, shit, cool opportunity here. Let's roll, right? Yeah, I really had relished. I had not really done sales before.

And in fact, I'm still not doing sales. I'm doing GTM engineering. But the opportunity to go out and use and evangelize a product I really, really loved. I had not come across it before. I maybe looked at a few other sales type roles, but but they weren't products that I personally used and really felt like I understood the people and the pain behind it. So clay quickly became a once in a once a career opportunity, I think, because even today that the set of products that I use, you know, every day, really intensely is still very small. And so clay was in that group. And so it all just kind of made sense. Yeah, I actually just hit on something there that I talk about a lot to sales reps, right?

I think the number one thing, this is why I actually personally think everybody's in sales, because the number one thing you need to be successful in sales is a belief in what you sell, right? A belief in your product, a belief in your solution, because if you don't believe it, it's really hard to stay past. passionate about going out there and, you know, selling it or whatever, and going to engineers specifically, I'll talk to like the most introverted engineer on the planet. And they'll be like, swear upside down and sideways that they're not in sales. And I'll be like, all right, cool. No problem. Okay, let's walk through this process. Hey, could you explain to me the last time you found a problem and you fixed it?

Like, or you were looking in code and you created something and it fixed a problem. And you literally watch the engineer light up like a Christmas tree. And they're like, Oh, well, the other day I was in this and I did that. And the way they explain it. And I'm like, cool. Look, guess what? If I needed what you just said you had, like, I'm in, right? Right, right, right, right. I think I think sales comes from the heart, you know, and so I substitute probably my lack of formal sales training with just a real belief and understanding of what Clay is great at. And I think the other thing is, you know, go to market systems is sometimes so painful, it's sometimes so painful, and I've lived through that.

And so those calls where we get someone to the other side from some systems or data issue that they're dealing with, and, and that is that like keeps me going. It's it's sort of, I love to play golf. Every once in a while, you hit an amazing shot. And, and it keeps you coming back. And that's what Clay sales feels like to me. I love that. Well, before we get into kind of the topic, automation versus augmentation, a lot of different things that are going on in the world right now as it relates to AI and some of the stuff you're working on. So let's go back to that that company out of college, right? So engineer Purdue, you graduated, how did that situation come up? Like, was it roommates? Was it pro was it?

I guess proactive? Did you intentionally say out of college, like, this is what I want to do? Or did that a similar to to this opportunity kind of hit you out of nowhere? No, I was, I was, I was working with some buddies on this camera project. We were doing some like early motion tracking stuff. This was this was 2012 time when neural nets had just sort of come out. And, and we had this great professor and the so my buddies and myself and the professor got together, we wrote this grant to, to the government, actually, which which can be used to find and commercialize research. They're called SBIR grants. And actually, in many cases, it can be a great option for small businesses, you don't necessarily have to be a, a research lab or anything to write them.

So, so I just figured, okay, this is another project, and we'll just do this and get it over with. And then I was looking for jobs. And this was sort of senior year graduation time. And then I was actually in a bar, kind of later. And I just, I just looked at my phone, I got an email from the National Science Foundation, we've been awarded this quarter million dollar grant. And, and so we said, Oh, wow, like, we are gonna, we're gonna do this. And then, and then that turned into the next five years of my life. So we hired a bunch more people, we, we raised a little money, we really spend a lot of time on the technology. The thing we didn't spend a lot of time on which, which, which was, maybe the scar tissue that I've carried forward in the rest of my career is customers and go to market.

So we really were obsessed with the stuff we were building, which was so fun. I don't look back on those years with any regret, because like, like, those late nights, writing code and, and doing stuff was, was great. But, but compared to my days today, where there'll be four or five customer calls a day, I mean, that we might, we might have had those over the span of two months. And so we really just had no guideposts for where we were headed in the market, no real idea how to grow the business. Um, and, uh, so I, I, I learned a lot sort of, uh, what, what not to do or what you needed to also do in that time. And, and I think that's, that's kind of driven a lot of, um, a lot of what's, what's happened recently.

I think also, if you have great technology and to, to be honest with you, Clay is Clay can be in this category. It's so fun to use the product. Um, and I personally go down these rabbit holes of data quality things and workflow. Things for customers. You sometimes have to remind yourself like, uh, Hey, you know, there's a, there's a business here. There's a customer need to satisfy. We don't always have to nail the technology. 100%. We can, um, we can kind of find the balance between people, technology, and, and the need that we're actually living on. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. I want to take a quick minute to share with you what I'm working on these days with my new JB sales membership.

It includes live monthly training delivered by me on my two signature courses, which are filling the funnel and driving a close to cover all aspects of the sales process. It also includes monthly workshops that I'll be running on specific sales skills and different tech skills like chat GPT and how to leverage AI throughout the entire sales process. Finally, the membership gives you access to my entire online catalog with every course and every tip I've ever done. And as an exclusive offer to my podcast listeners, if you go to jbarrows.com, click on the individual membership link and use coupon code podcast at checkout, you'll get 25% off. Now let's get back to the conversation. Yeah, I think that's, you know, realization.

I think we all need to come to at a certain point. And this is where like when I was a sales, my first company was IT services and I was one sales guy within 50 engineers, you know, 10 of them Linux engineers, right? Way smarter than me in every way, shape and form. And, you know, every once in a while, my CTO would kind of get on his little high horse about how great the tech was, how great the service was and all this other stuff really like talked down to me in a lot of ways. And everyone, and I never really picked a fight because I always knew my role in this situation, but I would always talk, you know, once in a while, I would get my CTO and I'd sit him down and be like, I just want to make sure that we're clear.

You do realize that I have a job without you. You don't have a job without me, right? Like you do understand that, right? And it was kind of that realization. Like, yeah, I mean, and when I say that, like I could be a jackass sales rep and sell whatever the hell I wanted to. I didn't, but it was their job to service this and keep it in the door. But if nobody was bringing it in the door, there was nothing to keep in the door. And so I'm like, I'm not saying I'm better than you. I'm just saying we need to both have a healthy respect for what each other does and realize that most companies don't fail because their technology or their service isn't good. Most companies fail because they can't fucking sell.

They can't go to market in a way that is, that is, that breaks out of kind of that, that friends, families and fools area. Unless it's like a super viral product, like a thing that, you know, pure PLG scenario. But even then they hit a wall where you got to now go sell. And I think that's a underappreciated, but I think now more understood from an engineer standpoint, like, okay, we got to figure out a way to work together here or else it's not going to work. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think someone needs to have the, have the respect, you know, to translate customer needs into the, into the technical sketch of what's happening. We're actually spending a lot of time on that right now at Clay related to CRM.

You know, what does it really mean to have millions of records that you can sync over and enrich into Clay when Clay kind of started as this like list building campaign building tool? What does it mean to actually have Clay as your primary go to market platform in a scaled out way? But, but there's so much involved with taking the way that a, that a senior rev ops leader is going to think about that and translating that into, you know, properly handling CRM API limits, properly implementing guardrails and, and our back properly handing, handling the initial sync. And making it easy for people to determine what fields they want to think of all those things, which engineers are, are geared in towards none of that makes sense without the, without the roadmap and high level understanding that, all right, we're going to, we're going to hook Clay up to this thing.

And that's been around for more than 10 years, has millions of records, has data that is probably never even been looked at by a single person, but it's in, it's in the CRM anyway. Clay is going to suddenly surface all that and work on that. What does that really, what does that really look like? So, so I, I, I just could not agree with you more. And I think it's always unfortunate when I see a company, which is like extremely highly indexed on engineering. Um, the, maybe the one exception I would say, which, which actually we, uh, we talk about is, is these AI companies. I think there's something about the AI companies where the, the technology is so fundamental that it truly can be a situation where you're working on it in, in a room and you really don't poke your head above water until the model is fully training, ready to go.

And, and you kind of drop it on, drop it on the public and, and that seems to be working, but, but for everybody else, I think the rule of thumb is like more customer contact, more calls, more outbound, more of everything in order to get that full picture of what's happening. Yeah. I think that leads to our, to our conversation today, as far as, you know, I think, I do think fundamentally we are at a, at a, an inflection point as a society, as business, as that, as sales. And everybody else that, you know, when, when I remember, you know, when I saw chat GBT come out, you know, at least when I saw it was back in February last year. And I, I immediately was like, Ooh, this is different. Like, you know, cause I'm, you know, I'm gray hair here.

You know, I've seen the internet, I've seen iPhones, I've seen high speed internet, I've seen all that stuff. But all of that was just kind of a gradual evolution and it created jobs, it displaced jobs, but this AI stuff is exponential. And where I want to take this conversation is kind of go, go back to the engineer, right? To your point, I think a lot of this AI stuff is so fucking easy that any idiot can literally turn it on and, and just start talking to it basically. And it'll give some pretty solid answers. Now I'll argue that the inputs and prompt engineering and all those other things matter, of course, but you had posted something about, uh, just recently about whether we know it's AI or not.

It's in the sense that when something's posted, whether it's an email or not, and did we use AI to do it like full blown automation or is a human doing it? And is it important for the receiver of that information to know whether it's AI or a human? Now I have my opinions on this, but I would love to kind of hear where you're coming from because so many people like, let's go to the cadence tools, the sales lofts, the outreaches, the Apollos and all that stuff. When those tools are used, right? I think they're fantastic tools, but when they're not, they're used as spam engines and they're just as bad as anything else. And it's the same thing with AI on my side. So where's your thought process on a, the line between AI and humans and be the identification of whether it's coming from an AI or human.

My take is that already I'm seeing messages that are indistinguishable from something that a human would write and, and I see it every day. I think it's, I think it's actually only the beginning. Some people use the phrase today's AI models are the, are, you know, the worst they will ever be. I agree with that. I think that the, the reason the responses in many cases are, um, of lower quality or that the big tell is usually they contain what I call chat GPT phrasing, which is usually more convoluted wordy than, than you would typically send in a sales email. Um, and then that's actually something I spent a lot of time with customers prompting is, is getting the terseness, getting the punchiness, right?

But, but it is possible today. And, and for some definition of common, it's common today to create messages and send them, which are fully written by an AI. And in fact, uh, to be honest, the post that I posted about that was also largely generated by an AI with, um, with myself layering and some, some editing. So, so I think it's basically inevitable and there's no need to necessarily quote unquote, come right out and say it. What I think the training is, there's one other thing I'd say here, which is for a decade, we've been sending sequences, which are, are, you know, high first name where first of all, you probably know it's a sequence when you get it. I almost always know. Second of all, when the variables aren't inserted correctly, whatever, uh, fallbacks aren't done correctly, then you obviously, you obviously see that.

So people have an understanding. I believe that, um, a lot of the messages that they get are automatically written. The, the trickiness with AI is that you need to have a strategy to handle it. When customers might start to accuse you of, of writing a message with AI, I think the best strategy here is to always be upfront. And, and I think that's where you can do various things. One of my favorite things is just to say, yes, this initial message was, um, you know, written with the help of my AI assistant, but here are the reasons I'm actually interested in talking to it. That message is customized. And, um, and I do think we're in this kind of transition period where some people may not respond well to that.

Others will be fine with it, but I think give it another year, honestly, and that this will just be the complete norm. I actually also think people will use AIs to monitor, monitor their inboxes and clean them out and flag things that are important. And so I think you will, you will have an AI writing the message and AI reading the message. And those two will more or less try to determine what the Venn diagram of interest is in, in the message itself. So basically my, my, my stance is, you know, there's, there's no pretending this is happening. It's, it's extremely real. And, you know, working at clay and working with customers, I, I see these every day. Um, and so, and so given that that's the state of the world, the post was meant to sort of take a shot across the bow at, at how should revenue leaders actually think about that and enable their teams to, to handle this world.

Yeah. It's interesting. I, and from my perspective, you know, obviously I got a lens, a different lens than most on this stuff, right? Cause I'm trying to balance that human versus tech and I love the tech, but I also need it to be humanized and I can't stand it when reps are lazy. So, you know, for me, it's almost like if, if I know, if I know it's AI, I'm totally cool with it. I'm actually interested in reading the post. I'm interested in reading the email, quite frankly, if I know it was generated by AI, but it's when the rep pretends that it's personalized. Rep pretends that they sent it or wrote the post, but then I can sniff out like somewhere in there, like, wait a minute. And then it loses all credibility.

And I think that's the, the, the, again, the inflection point that we're at right now. I'm now unfortunately still questioning almost every comment that hits my LinkedIn posts. You know what I mean? Like I'll do a LinkedIn post and I'll read through them and I'll be like, oh, that was a real, well, hold on a second. God damn it. That was written by AI. And the weird thing is, is no matter how good that comment was or insightful that comment was, if I sniff that it's AI, I'm like, you know what? Fuck that comment. And I don't know if it's just my, my like anti, like, look, I'm a, I'm a progressive. I want to learn. I want evolution. Right. But I also, I'm really worried about the over-automation of shit and the lack of, of fundamentals that that causes.

Right. Cause we're skipping the line right now. Yeah. You know, I would say one other thing on this, which is I still advise customers. I would never send an AI generated email to a very large company. Like, I think there's this enterprise strategic prospecting side of things that you would not, it's a waste of time to send AI generated automated messages to these companies. Because in those scenarios, I, I never believe that the AI is captured enough depth of context of what the kind of set of problems is current initiatives are in order to, in order to really facilitate that. So I guess that would be one caveat on my position is, is I believe you should use AI to gather the data, gather the contacts, do all the research on the account, but for, for prospecting into, you know, the fortune 1000 prospecting into a company where there could be a hundred different people that you could reach out to that still, that still requires, you know, human touch.

And to your point, I think it's, it's really a rep enablement situation of like, are you sending emails or are you building relationships? And so the idea is to use the technology, to use the technology carefully. But as you can imagine here at Clay, we send AI generated messages all day, every day. We get responses to them. We feel them. We book meetings. A lot of our customers do the same. It works well. And, and, um, it's, it's not just the future, it's the present, but I think that, that in the new world of potentially, you know, fewer higher skilled reps, one of the skills is to understand the technology that's being used and to handle objections, responses, and so forth about that, about that very thing.

Um, and I, and, you know, I just compare it to the world of sequencers too. Um, so many times I would get responses from my, my sequence campaign that said, um, you know, you know, remove me from your list, whatever, like, and, and I, and many cases, once they've responded, there is an opportunity there to do something. Um, and, um, sometimes they'll respond and say, you know, Hey, this is first of all, like your message was, you know, generated by some automation. And second of all, it's not the right time. And then you kind of say, Oh, well, when would be the right time? Right. So there's, there's all these things here, but, but this is why I don't actually truly believe in the AISDR. I'm being honest, because I don't think the AISDR is prepared to manage that, manage that situation.

Now I could have a totally different tune on that in two years as the models progress, but current stance is the responses and facilitating the, the, the meeting and the relationship. That's, that's, that's all humans and no one, I think should have any concerns on, on their role in that. Um, but why not if you're, if you're prospecting into hundreds of cap of accounts and, and you're already using sequencers, why not just take it up another level and leverage some of the stuff today? So that kind of leads to like the, what is an SDR, you know what I mean? And, and this evolution, I mean, you've seen it for a while, the evolution of the tools and everything else. And so I'm curious what you think the skills and SDR needs in the future, because what you just outlined there would, which I tend to agree with.

And which I've been talking about all the while is that outbound at this point, like, you know, pure outbound approach is actually needs to be looked at as far more of a marketing function than a sales function. Because it's an impression point, right? It's, it's a positive impression point that show. And then when people react, it shows intent. And then, you know, we start to hear the term inbound, let outbound type of thing where somebody clicks on something or shows some type of interest in whatever you just sent them. So, you know, with, with the spray and pray or the, the mass email sequence type of thing being taken over by AI and being, and, and hopefully doing better than what we've seen where somebody just replaces the name, the title in the industry and calls it personalization at scale, which is bullshit.

You know, these AI tools are really getting personalized in a, in a, in a lot of ways. And I do think in the next year or two, that my inbox is going to be filled with super relevant, super personalized stuff. And I don't necessarily care if it's coming from a human, but we have a mass audience of, uh, and, and thousands and thousands, if not millions of SDRs out there doing kind of the, going through the motion, sending these sequences get, and we've turned them into robots. So they're getting replaced by robots here. So what are the skills that you think? And how do we get the fundamentals in place so that they can have the conversations when the client shows interest? The good news for SDRs and I think everyone out there is that there's the skills to be great have really not changed.

I don't think they've changed hardly at all. The, the, the things that are going to make someone a great AE and a great enterprise AE and strategic seller are the, are the same skills that can, that can start being developed and built as, as an SDR. Um, the, and those skills are basically three things in my opinion. One is understanding the company, the second is understanding the market, and the third is understanding the person. And, and actually there's a ton of great value in going through people, companies, and markets every day in order to develop that because you, you basically just become this kind of business analyst. And in some cases, um, this is why I've seen a couple SDRs promoted is, is they end up with a better understanding of, of what the state of affairs is than the AE, right?

Because now that for the AE, once the meeting is booked and the person's in, in plight, you know, there's a product to sell. There's a, there's a playbook, all that SDR in many cases, actually there's a playbook. Sure, but, but the playbook can be thrown out the window if you spot someone that has, um, you know, some recent, actually my most recent outbound opportunity that I booked, there was an acquisition that, um, that happened by a rival company. And they were like, Hey, we, I was like, Hey, would you like to use clay to kind of understand this rival company's customers and, and social base and all of that, and start to go after their customers? Because everyone knows when there's an acquisition, you know, who knows what the future of that product is.

So, um, so that's the kind of skill that, uh, that a great SDR, I think will, will key in on. And I think that same skill level will help folks get to the AE side of things. I think the skills that, that may not translate, to be honest, would be, would be like high execution on a lot of tasks. Um, there's this concept in gaming of like, of like clicks per minute, you know, and I think SDRs that are just, that are, you know, incredibly efficient at moving from Salesforce to outreach to zoom info to, you know, among like seven different browser tabs. That to me feels like something that there is a level of danger there of like, of like task execution. And you use the word like robotic is that's the kind of stuff that I don't feel there is much of a future for.

Um, but, but the good news is that, uh, that kind of work also is I, you know, it's, yeah, it's boring. It doesn't like develop you as a person. It doesn't stretch your creativity, which is, which is one of the core themes of play. And so, you know, why not, why not throw it out? Right. Like why not, um, come to work excited to learn about these markets and people and companies and build these relationships and use a lot of automation and, and data to, to, you know, make yourself productive and, and, and take care of the routine stuff while still like retaining that core, you know, human, human element. And I think that's, that's always the way I've prospected. Um, but, but the difference today is I can prospect a lot more because I have something like clay or something like, um, you know, some of these tools today.

So with information being so easy to access now, right. And, and all this stuff being personalized, I guess that makes sense to me is right. Let, let it be a marketing function, but let's educate the sales rep so they can have this business acumen. But so many reps skip that line right now, you know, and we use the merger and acquisition example, most reps, what they'll see is they'll see a merger and acquisition. They have a value proposition for that. They'll tie them together and they'll send out the email without really understanding what truly happens during a merger and acquisition. Right. So, you know, cause there's everything that there's the, there's the announcement, which is a pure marketing thing.

Nothing's happening there. Then we have, you know, six months out where they start to look at disparate data systems and overlap. And then usually a year out, that's when they start making changes. And so instead of just looking for the trigger and being robotic, which any robot can do right and say, Oh, yep. Merger and acquisition. Let's grab our value proposition, educating the rep on what that means. So they can have a logical conversation about it. And if, and when they get into a conversation about it, they have some meat on that bone. But I fear that, that most organizations are now like skipping even further ahead and, and like skipping all those fundamentals, all that business acumen, because it's so easy right now to get the answer.

I mean, I, I worry about this a little bit with my daughter. Like she's 13 years old and I'm wondering like, what, what is the school going to teach her? You know, critical thinking, those types of things I think are critical, but you know, she is going to have a chip in her head here in the next five years where all she has to do is think of something. It's almost like the matrix. I want to learn Kung Fu. I know Kung Fu, right? So how do we, how do we instill fundamentals with where we are right now? How do we use the tech to, to, to go back to fundamentals, business acumen while skipping the line on all the admin stuff that you were talking about? Yeah, I think ironically, the critical thinking side might be more important, um, because all the other stuff, ability to quickly do lots of tasks and so forth, I think is, is, is not as, not as relevant.

A great example of this is job changers. That job changers is a super hot workflow right now. Clay supports it. Others have it. Um, when someone switches jobs from one company to another, it's a big event, especially at a leadership level. You always want to go in there with your, with your best foot forward. But so often the copy is like, Hey, if you pass on the new role and it's like, you've already lost me, you know? Um, uh, whereas I think in reality, like for, for people that understand what it's like to switch companies, sometimes it's great to get a little education on what that company does. You know, Hey, I've been working this account for a year. Here's where we're at. Like, these are the types of things that are so valuable and even more valuable if everybody else is sending the same copy.

And I think for mergers and acquisitions for, for job changers, for all these event-based signal-based situations, it's where the critical thinking side actually becomes so key. How do we develop that? I mean, the way I develop it is I actually just spend all day in clay tables going through stuff row by row and trying to understand like, why is this happening? And usually that's very educational, uh, for figuring out not only what the current state of, of AI is and, and, um, and, but also just learning about these different companies. So often I see data in clay where I'm like, wow, I didn't know this company was that big or why I didn't know this company was, was, um, you know, so global. And, and it, and sometimes it'll lead you down a path of investigating things, learning about these different industries.

And, and so you got to look for, you got to look for places where you can kind of let your creativity run wild in places that stress your critical thinking a little bit. Um, it's another reason like the, the no code spreadsheet style stuff is, is a lot of fun, I think, because there's a logic to it. There is a, there is a, you know, step-by-step situation to it. And, and it is this critical thinking problem. The last thing I'd say on this though, for SDRs in particular is, is mapping out an account and understanding how it works, who to go after and all of this. That is, that is super key, super key too. I never want to be in a situation where the rep has so little, so little flexibility around them that they can't, they can't leverage their creativity and their critical thinking to make some adjustments.

Um, I always allow, I always love letting people edit the emails that, that AI has drafted for them. I always love allowing for edits to title searches and edits to, to company list building. I think the best organizations that I've seen actually, actually feed off of that stuff, because if you're sitting there, you know, three layers up and you've got, uh, you know, a manager and then a manager under them and an SDR under them, it's really hard sometimes to know, like, like what are the, what are the fundamentals that are driving you to our success or our, our, you know, weaker numbers. And so you've got to allow for people to have that, have that room to run. And as an, as an SDR, as a rep, I think you've got to, you've got to kind of, you know, work your creativity muscle and, and your curiosity muscle.

And I think like for me, it's rare that I don't learn something in a day about a company, about a, about an initiative, about someone or something. Um, and I think if, if you start to look back on your days and weeks and say, well, I really haven't, I really haven't understood any more about, um, either my own company or the market or the people I'm going after than I did a few weeks ago, you've got to think about what can I do differently to, to get out of that situation. So a lot of that, you know, comes down to curiosity, right? And I think I was blessed in the sense that I think I was born curious. And I think maybe that comes to, from the fact that I know I'm not the smartest kid out there.

Right. So I'm always, I mean, part of the reason I have my podcast is because this is the way I learn, right? I learned from talking to people who are smarter than me, you know, banging through issues. I don't learn by reading books. Um, but from your perspective, can you teach curiosity? Yeah, the, my favorite game to start to instill this is, um, basically learnings from, from calls. So the, I think the thing that's easy is to post great calls and great wins and happy messages from customers. The thing that's harder that someone has to usually push the button on a little bit is to post the, the shitty calls and the, and the close loss reasons and the, the bad sales interaction. I like to be on all the threads with, um, all the GTM engineers I work with because, uh, because sometimes, uh, you know, it won't work out, but I can then pull the leadership person on the other side out of the thread and just say, Hey, what's the feedback on, on what happened here?

I know it's not because of, you know, whatever you said it was like, we're trying to learn here, just give it to me, give it to me direct. And then I always share that. I always post that. And so I think someone at the org has to, has to stress that the learnings are almost everything. And it's, it's, I think sometimes people think, you know, I've worked in startups a lot. You're always, there's always a focus on learning and trying to get better. Sometimes people think that's not true for large orgs, but it's actually, it's actually the opposite because, um, uh, for sales development in particular, there's always something happening in the market and to your customer base that is, that is worth, that is worth learning about.

So, um, you know, and then, and then I think the thing to, for reps to ask themselves or for, for managers to kind of think about is, you know, who are the people that are chiming in on those threads? Who are the people that are reacting to them? You know, it sounds, it sounds, or who are the people in the office that are, that are speaking up in meetings? I mean, it sounds kind of, um, kind of routine maybe, but it's, it's, uh, I look back at the last, you know, we fired a lot of people recently on the, on the GQ engineering side. I look back at specific folks who started out and they, they were a little quieter and, and it was worth a conversation with them around like, Hey, like I would love, you know, love your input here, you know, right or wrong.

I mean, you've got to get in the conversation and get in, get in the arena, as they say, as a rep and, and make sure that's happening as a, as a manager or else, or else it's, it's probably true and fair what you're saying that it won't actually happen. It won't actually happen naturally. It's really uncomfortable. A lot of folks, I think, especially these days equate, uh, failure on a deal or on a prospect with failure at their job, but it's, it's not true. They're, they're completely decoupled. Um, and so I, those are some of the ways that I try to spur this. Um, and, um, and if those things are not happening and, and you just feel stuck, you know, like maybe it's, maybe it's just time for a change, you know, maybe, maybe it's not the right to your, to your part of the very beginning.

If you're not getting up and you're not like somewhat jazzed about something that you're going to work on that day, maybe it's just not the right, right. Not the right situation. Yeah. And I, and that's my fear is that it's not necessarily the organization. It's the mentality of the rep, right. Of, of, Hey, I'm want to learn. Cause I personally think you can learn something from every situation, right? As shitty as it might be to your point. That's why in my training, I talk way more about my failures than I do my successes. Cause I don't really learn anything from my success. I'm like, okay, that was cool. But as I ripped through a deal that I absolutely lost and it crushed me, it's like, yeah, see, that's why.

And the problem is I think a lot of people are afraid to fail right now, or at least fail out loud with, with the, and have other people listen and are trying to, are just impatient to get to that next level. Right. That's why I cringe when I hear SDRs who just, you know, I just got to get through this so I can get, be an AE. And I'm like, do you realize the skill that you were developing here as an SDR, if you can mask, you know, master it, this will make it so you never, you literally, you'll never go hungry if you figure out how to hunt, how to find the right type of opportunities. But you know, the good news, bad news, I think with AI is I think it's making it easier for us not to learn in some ways, cause it gives us the answer.

But in a lot of ways, at least for me, it's, it's making it easier for me to learn and be curious. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You can, you can go on to chat GPT right now and just give it a list of your 50 accounts for today. Ask them about, ask it about recent news for those accounts, right? Or, or ask it about maybe, okay, maybe recent news is not the best example because internet access is helpful there, which is where Clayagent comes in. But, you know, ask it about something interesting about those companies. Ask them what, what's the industry that all these companies fit in? Are they in different industries? Ask them to bucket it or categorize it or, or I completely agree with you. The tools out there for learning and curiosity are, are so much better than they've, they've ever been.

The one area where I think that there's, there's kind of no stopping it. And it's, it's a really, it's, it's just a, it's just a new way of operating is I think that AI will eventually make it so that most of the account research and the gathering of just information about accounts and prospects is, is completely automated. And I don't know what the right way to parse all that out into a kind of tangible, juicy thing is, I mean, obviously you can, you can ask AI to turn, you know, some Google doc or something into an email. Obviously you can ask it to collate the information, but, um, but I'm not sure how the best way to kind of help reps digest an overwhelming amount of information that is possible to gather and consolidate in seconds is.

And that's one area where, you know, uh, I think probably speaking of learning, we're all just going to learn together and we're all gonna, we're all gonna sort of end up in this, a new way of doing things. That's, um, and when the dust settles, there will be an answer to that question. But I think that's one of the interesting open questions right now is like, is like, um, you know, if I was to point an AI to a large document or, you know, a 10 K or something, is it going to pull out like all the relevant information or is it going to pull, it's going to pull out so much information that I can't actually parcel through what the right thing is. I mean, there's, there's, yeah, I've seen that happen.

Yeah. And that's like, that's why, again, you know, for somebody like me, this AI stuff is awesome, right? Because I, I ha I've been selling for 28 years. I've been in a million different scenarios from a business standpoint. And, and I know to, to a certain degree, what's important, right? So I can sift through some of the crap that AI sends over to me. I'll be like, all right, you know, this is good. This is bad. But again, I like, it's that fundamentals that I keep coming back to, you know, on the example that I use is LinkedIn. I was member 36,541 on LinkedIn. Super, super early adopter. And when I, but before the first 20 K were fake. Yes, exactly. Um, so, but, but before that I went to every networking group I could go to in the morning, I went to every networking event I could go to at night.

And so, for instance, you know, when I met somebody in person and shook their hand and immediately started pitching them on my shit, like I could, I could literally see and feel their negative reaction and realized inherently it was wrong. And so I learned that through the face-to-face through the networking. So then when LinkedIn came out, I was like, oh, this, yeah, this is just a more efficient way to do that, which is why I treat it as a relationship and networking and a brand building platform. Whereas the rep that gets into sales right now, without that background of networking, they use it as a sales tool, which is why you get those fucking emails to sell you some shit, whatever it is out of nowhere.

It's the same thing with AI. I have the foundation of going through a merger and acquisition. I have the foundation of building multiple businesses. So I can actually use AI because I understand what's real and what's not and what's important. Whereas a kid coming in today, they're just going to take whatever ChatGPT tells them is important and not really put the lens on. And that's my biggest fear of the transition that we're in right now and what that means for the future of sales and business in a lot of ways without that foundation and acumen that comes with it. Yeah. Ironically, I think the thing that is more valuable now is probably in-person events or direct mail or the visit, the return to the physical world, right?

Because the digital world is so far along the spectrum of automation. The, I think it's just the reality though, that, um, you know, the, the top people will rise to the top. I do think there will just be fewer of these, uh, like reps that you might consider them today. However, you know what there's a lot more of today that there wasn't before are clay agencies and clay experts. And, uh, okay. I'm kind of pumping clay right now, but I think this is true for many other tools as well. There's people that are, um, experts in creating notion and creating Zapier things and, and people that are basically have a new set of skills, which is to own and operate these tools and, and use them as a replacement and an improvement on the kind of like, uh, human, uh, clicking farms that, that we've had for the last 10 years.

And so I, I generally just think that that is a positive change. And I think those people plus the best reps who can build relationships digitally and, and to your point at events and, and really gets to know customers that, that is, at least in my opinion, an improvement on, um, on the previous world. And I think as well, you know, for many companies, it happened during COVID and happened. In the last 10 years of SAS, where you did just sort of look ahead to next year's pipeline number and say, well, we're just going to divide this by the number of, of, you know, but our, by our current rep pipeline generation number. And, and you just end up with, you know, 20, 40, 80, 200 sales reps. And that's how you get into the situation where you have to, in order to manage and, and have that many people running in the same direction, you do have to have these processes, which are so dumbed down that people can just, can just follow them on day one.

Cause you have to hire that many people that maybe shouldn't even be in that role in the first place. So I am biased clearly, but it just feels like a good improvement on the state of things to have a smaller number of highly skilled people that are great with relationships, great emotional intelligence, great understanding of the business and the market, coupled with a small number of people that are operating these tools that are, that are kind of like skilled up in a way that, um, that they weren't able to before. And, and for companies, it's going to mean a slightly smaller, probably a number of people on the sales side, but maybe there will be more companies. And, and I think the general hope is that, um, the ability of companies to automate and do more things and more markets is going to create a lot more opportunity.

And that's, that's my, that's my sunshine and rainbows, uh, take. And, uh, you know what, I, I haven't been wrong yet, but of course, chat GPT is only, only two years old. So, uh, so that's, that's what I hope for the future though. All right. Last question here. Just a sheer, uh, opinion on this one based on what you're seeing. When do you think, so all this stuff as a GTM leader, right. And, and engineering this go-to-market campaign and giving sales reps, the tools to be more relevant and thoughtful and personalized to, to get these meetings, to have these conversations. When do you think it flips, when do you think it flips so that the buyer is using these tools to buy shit? Because arguably what you guys do, like, so for, you know, me, what you're working on is we're combing through, uh, you know, HubSpot.

We're finding the exact ICP for me and that type of thing. When are we at a point? And there's, and look, I come from the IT world where I used to sell IT services and network monitoring solutions that could within one click of a button, know every single piece of software on your network, know who's using it, adoption and all that stuff. So how far away are we from customer companies using AI to say, Hey, go analyze all my tech stack details, utilization, marry it up to my 12 to 24 month business plan, identify the softwares that we can get rid of and which ones we need. And then putting RFPs out there to the top three vendors in those to analyze and then suck that information in and then come down to the two or three small points that a human asked to that.

Like, when do you think we're there? Cause I see that coming and I see that's the biggest, Oh shit factor for sales in general. Yeah, it's, I haven't seen it yet. Um, but because, and here's why, because the thing I think current AI is not good at is this agentic stuff where there's multiple decision points that need to happen. So for example, we have clay agents and clay, it's fantastic. It's the climax of our demos. Basically it's this kind of mind blowing thing that can search the internet and read PDFs and click on links. But, but even still it, you know, we'll do five or six different things and summarize the information. And, and it, one of the number one tips I give customers about using our agents is to actually separate the agents themselves out into, into multiple columns and steps.

So for example, have an agent go find the 10 K URL and then have a second column and clay or second agent analyze the 10 K. And that's going to yield you more found 10 Ks and, and better, better results. And so, but those two agents are distinct. It's not the same. It's not the same process doing, doing both of those. So I think, I think the expectation for open AI and for Anthropic and, and, and Mistral and others for the next generation of models is that they will be able to do these multi-step lawn involved workflows, which do exactly what you just described. I have heard on the periphery of agents that could run for 16, 24 hours. I haven't really heard of the results of that yet. I haven't seen a lot of public stuff on that yet.

I haven't seen a lot of private stuff on that, but I think it is, it is being worked on and it's possible. And this is where you get into the AI futures debate, but it's possible that the next generation of models will be truly fantastically agiatic where they will be able to perform multi-step processes, use browsers in a very effective way. And at that point, that's where I think what you're talking about will, will happen. And I think it will happen just as fast as the current generation of, of AI tooling and things and things came about. And, and I'm actually excited for that day because even with all of the stuff that we have going on, I still end my day and I have 50 different tabs open for different things.

And, and I definitely believe that there is an agent out there that can do it, but I think this is a real unknown. I think it's also possible that the, the memory situation, the ability for AIs to understand and make decisions in a way that leads them to the proper outcome. That could also be five, 10 years away. I think it's the biggest X factor in the space right now. It's one of the most interesting questions, but, but when it comes, my suspicion is that it will come. And when it comes, the thing that you're just talking about where companies are actually using these agents to go out and procure software will absolutely be a thing. And, and, um, and then, you know, uh, I don't know what the products that sell will look like there, but I, but basically they will be, it will be AI selling to AIs and, um, and it'll be a, a wild and crazy future.

Yeah. And hopefully by then the economy is so fucking good because we'll be so efficient that everybody has the time and the, you know, can go and play on vacation and do the four hour work week and just have that creativity factor and dump it in. But yeah, we're, we're headed towards, uh, we're headed towards an interesting future, my friend. So, uh, um, I appreciate you having this conversation with us and it's obvious Clay's right in the middle of it, if not leading it, um, especially with the new round and you guys going to the next level. So, uh, I'm excited to be on this ride with you. Uh, tell people where they can find out more information about Clay, about what you're doing and how to get involved.

Yeah. Clay.com is probably, that's the starting point for everything. Um, I, we've been doing a ton of work on it. Our marketing team is crushing it. Uh, the new site looks amazing. Um, and there's a lot more resources on there now where you can learn about Clay. I would like to stress one thing in particular. We have, um, we have these new cohort programs where you can sign up and actually do this like intensive sort of couple week cohorted, uh, uh, program with people from Clay internally and all your peers. And that is, uh, really successful as far as I can tell people really get into the product in a way that, that they hadn't before. Um, and so, uh, all that starts on, on clay.com and then, and then in concert with that, there's a Slack community, which I think is quite large at this point where everybody is, um, Clay users in general, talking about Clay, uh, talking about growth, uh, strategies and automations.

And so, um, I always tell people this, I tell us to recruits too. I say, just go hang out in there for a while, see if you can answer some questions, see if you can even understand what the heck people are talking about. And, um, that is the, that is the great, a great starting point for Clay. And, and of course for me, I'm on LinkedIn, Everett Berry, I'm surprisingly responsive to LinkedIn DMs. Um, and so please also hit me up there and, and let's talk. And, um, I'm absolutely jazzed about, about, um, being in this role and helping the Clay community. So I always love to talk to anyone, no matter what they, what they want to talk about. Love it. Awesome. Everett. Well, thanks again for coming on the show, man.

I really appreciate it. All right. Thanks, John. All right, everybody. And hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Like I say, at the, at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day went or how bad you think it's going, you make somebody smile and you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. Hey everyone. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests. We're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now. And I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going.

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