How Agentic CRM Is Changing the Way Sales Teams Sell with Ryan Braastad

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. All right, this one's a big one for multiple reasons. I have been fighting the Microsoft fight for years. Like all my previous teams, colleagues, partners, and so many more people have all tried to get me to switch to Google and I've held the line. I have been an Office 365, Word doc, all of it for years and I think it's going to start paying off. So when I got the chance to sit down with Ryan Brastat, who leads sales solutions over at Microsoft and is right in the middle of everything they're building with Copilot and Agentec AI, I was fired up for the conversation.

Ryan's been at some of the biggest inflection points in tech. He started as an SDR at Forrester, went through Yammer, Salesforce, ran his own startup, and then came back to Microsoft because of what he saw was happening with AI. We get into why CRM has failed sellers up to this point, what it looks like when your system of record becomes a system of action, and Ryan shares real numbers from Microsoft's own sales team, including a 20% increase in deal closed with Copilot. Now, if you're in sales and you're wondering where all of this is headed, especially in this AI world right now, this is the episode for you. So I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Ryan Brastat, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend.

How are you doing today? Great, great. How are you? Doing fantastic, my friend. This is going to be an interesting conversation. You have had a very interesting career arc, and now you are working at Microsoft on 365, 365, and holy smokes, I preface this, I've fought the Microsoft fight for years, right? Like all the teams I've built, they've all Googled and this, and they've all tried to get me and my COO, Megan, to make the switch to like Google, and we've just held the line the entire time. I'm like, it's my company. You're going to have to adjust. I don't care what you do. And now that Microsoft is coming back around with like all the AI stuff, I'm like, finally, I'm like, I knew it's going to pay off.

So I'm excited to talk about all the fun stuff that you got working on over there. But like I always do on all these podcasts, I love learning about the origin story, my friend. The stuff that we can't learn on LinkedIn, we got a little connection here. You're West Hampton, Massachusetts. So you're a New England kid. I would love to learn about that. You're Boy Scouts and kind of basically, you know, what were the influences that got you on your path, right? And then let's take it to college, and then let's go through some of the learning lessons from your career. But let's start way back in the day with the family in West Hampton and all that fun stuff. Talk to us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I grew up in Western Massachusetts.

There's not a heck of a lot going on out there. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's nice. You know, all leaf peeping. If you've ever leafed a peep, you should peep a Western Mass leaf. Absolutely. In the September, October time frame. I always tell people, like, that's the best time of year to come here, right? You get all the leaves and everything. Don't come after November. It's terrible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But yeah, you know, grew up, you know, hardworking, hardworking parents. Had enough. I have three brothers. Yeah. I'm the second, second oldest. And, you know, kind of thinking about this a little bit, came to a realization just how much my older brother had an impact on me. Yeah. Impacted my interest in technology and the journey that I've been on.

So it was a lot of the decisions that I made. So I can remember. What got him into it? Like, how did he get hooked into it? Yeah. I, he's, he was just always fascinated with technology. He's a little bit of a nerd. Yeah. And so anything related to science and tech, he was, he was definitely very much an early adopter. Yeah. Because you graduated high school. When did you graduate college again? Uh, graduated college, thinking back now, uh, 2005. Okay. So you, so in high school you were, that was like the internet was popping, like, right? Like late nineties, that type of thing. And so he was, was how old, how much older was he than you? Yeah. He's, he's eight years older than I am. Oh, okay.

So he was definitely in it. Okay. Yeah. You didn't even really know what was going on at that point. All right, cool. So I had no idea what was going on. Very cool. And then, so then you, you got the boy scouts and you made Eagle scout too, right? Yeah. Yep. Was there a drive there? Like parents, work ethic, those types of things. Like, cause I mean, in every one of your positions going through, like you were one of the top performers, of course, all these different, you know, roles that you had, what do you attribute that to? Uh, I mean, I, I think about it a lot, especially now that I have, uh, I have young kids and having, having incredible role models, just seeing how they operate, seeing their focus.

I mean, it's, it's, it's everything like kids, even as adults, right. We're like, we're all like a lot of us are still just trying to figure out. So having those role models and continuing that through, through our life, I think was critical. And yeah, so, so my brother paid one of those dad worked for the post office, you know, regular schedule, incredibly disciplined. And yeah, having those, having those folks around was, it's huge. Love it. Yeah. I think, I don't think people realize the question of nature and nurture always pops up for me. It's like, how much of who we are is nature versus nurture. And, you know, cause there's plenty of kids who grew up in terrible situations and end up being, you know, incredible people and super successful.

But, you know, I don't know. I, I look at role models as, you know, my parents specifically and saying, there is no chance I'd be where I am right now if I didn't have them as role models to show me the way, if you will. So that's a, it's good to hear. Then, then you went to college, you went to Kansas, right? Yeah. University of Kansas. I went to University of Massachusetts. Oh, you know, that's right. You went to UMass. That's right. You went to UMass and you studied, what was your, what was your major there? I studied finance and operations. Finance and operations. Yeah. Going from the tech, why finance and ops? Yeah, I, I, um, so I mean, like, I, I, you know, like going, going back to just, just the influence I can remember.

Yeah. I can remember this moment, uh, early on with my brother and he's telling me about, uh, this computer that he wants to get so that he can message our neighbor over the, over the internet or over like the phone of the phone line. And I can remember this like distinctly. I'm, I'm, I'm super young. I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, I never really knew what he was talking about anyway. I was pretty young, but, um, I just stuck with me and I just, that, that put a stick in the ground. It was like, whatever this technology thing is, you know, and I got really, really computers in high school and, and, uh, really went deep there. But, um, you know, knowing that and having that background and kind of learning that on my own, I wanted to have a solid background in business.

And so figuring out how to, uh, run an organization, you know, thinking about logistics, operations, the core components of, of the finance and how to run, uh, run a company that I was, I was looking to really build that foundation and see where I could take it from there. And then, but then you got into sales. So, so you still, so I know you had more foresight than most, right? You're like, wait, I need to understand the fundamentals here of business and how it works. And then I'll figure out how to sell versus most people figure out, like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing in college and I'll get into sales just because it's like kind of the default profession here. Was it a conscious choice to get into sales with Forrester or was this kind of like, uh, I was looking for a job and there wasn't much else out there.

I, I was, I was, I was kind of at a crossroads. And so, uh, I, you know, you go through a whole series of interviews after undergrad and one direction, one option was with a very large financial services company. And then, and Forrester and Forrester kind of came through, through the job search. You know, I didn't know a ton about them at the time, but I am incredibly grateful for that opportunity, uh, to, to join, join the new business team, uh, as a, as a sales development rep, I didn't realize it until much later, but seeing that as the foundation, um, and having that opportunity to understand technology, the breadth, all the different technology segments, who the roles are, and then, and then using those sales skills and that discipline to, to, to really just develop as a, as a young kid.

And believe it or not, uh, one of the first sales trainings that I have ever taken Yeah, I was actually just going to ask you that. Did you go through the original Basho show early on? I did. I think it was, was it Jeff? Jeff Hoffman. He's my mentor. He's still to this day. He's my mentor. Yes. I remember it. I remember the training. He came in, I think, I think it was maybe just a one day, maybe a two day thing. We had, we had an offsite, but, uh, that was the first year of sales training that I had ever participated in. Um, believe it or not. I had a colleague reach out. I haven't talked to him a long time, but he bashoed me over LinkedIn. And I'm like, I know this style. All right. I'll tell you, man, that talk about, you know, things that woke me up when I saw Jeff, because my first startup was IT services, SMB, right?

So I did, I did, uh, DeWalt power tools, then Xerox, and then a small startup for IT services in the SMB market and we were kicking everybody's ass. Like, I thought my shit didn't stink at 25 years old, 24 years old. I'm like, oh man, I got this sales thing knocked out. Right. And all of a sudden I go to a two day workshop and I saw, I see Jeff Hoffman stand up there. And I remember vividly going, oh, okay. Um, that's what sales is. I'm like, what I do is like hustle, hard work, grind. That's the artist. I still, to this day, you know, when people talk about sales, art and a science and how there's natural born sales, I think there's probably only about 5% of our population that are like the true natural born sales professionals.

And I don't mean like the douchey blah, blah. I mean like, just know how to read people, know how to, and Jeff is in that 5%. Like I still, to this day, I marvel at watching him. Like I, sometimes I'll jump in on a sales call with him just so I can, you know, learn myself again and be like, holy shit, man, that's awesome. So that's, that's great because you got that. Um, so then customer success at Yammer. Then you went into Microsoft because that was the acquisition, right? Yeah. And you were a senior manager product strategy. So you went, you got the finance, the ops background. You went into sales, then you went to customer success. So you're getting the full GTM experience here. And so what draw, what drew you to our kind of towards product strategy for that role?

Yeah. Well, I, um, you know, after, after being at Forrester for a long time and, you know, I did, I was, uh, did sales and I was doing a lot of consulting work on that side. I just, I wanted to, I guess, go back to my technology roots and really understand fundamentals, build something part of that journey. So I joined, so I joined Yammer, uh, kind of, kind of midway through, through their adoption. And then soon after, yeah, we were, we were acquired, we were acquired by Microsoft. I ran, um, I ran, uh, you know, it was, it was called the product strategy, it was a product strategy role, but little did I know it was, uh, it was kind of rooted in product marketing and product management. And that's where I really, uh, really fell in love and found that sweet spot of, uh, really understanding and working with customers, trying to build something that's compelling and useful and really mixing that strategy with the go-to-market capabilities.

I've been, they've been doing that ever since so. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's cool when you find that, when you finally, after you're testing all these different things, it's like, there it is, you know, that's, this is what I love. This is, you know, what is it, Ikigai, right? Where, what people love and what people pay you for and that whole thing, man, when that sings, it sings. It was like me with training. It's like, I didn't even know I wanted to be a trainer. I never actually, I rolled my eyes at it. I'm like, please. Then when I had the opportunity, but it wasn't just to be a trainer, it was sales, which is my passion. And it just so happened. I'm okay at translating that information. But man, when that hit my, I remember asking my mom, when I got my first company got bought by Staples, I got, you know, offered another position fired.

Um, I'm looking around and, and I, and I got the opportunity to work for Basho. And I remember calling my mom, who's a career counselor. And, uh, you know, I've had a Myers break since I was like five. Right. And, uh, I go, Ma, I got this weird opportunity to be a trainer, you know, like a sales trainer. I'm like, I'm just kind of getting your, you know, what do you think? And she literally just starts laughing. And she's, she's the only one who calls me John Michael, but she's like, John Michael. She's like, I never wanted to tell you what to do in your career. She's like, but if there was one person that I thought would be good at teaching slash training, it was you. And I was like, really?

Huh? And then when I got into, it was like a fish to water. So did it click for you that, that this is, this is where I want to be? Yeah. I mean, it's it, I, I loved it. I love, uh, I, I love kind of just how, how it's ever changing. There's always new problems. Uh, I wouldn't say that it ever necessarily clicked because there's always just, there's always new, new challenges and there's new market shifts and the business and customers are always demanding more. So, um, yeah, I've, I've, I've learned to, uh, I've had, I've had a little bit of success and, uh, but I'd say love, love, love the, love the challenge. But you did look, it looks like you did catch the edge for a startup though. Cause you're, you're a couple of years at Microsoft and then you did project drop, which is, that was your startup, right.

For, uh, for a fitness app. Yeah. Yeah. We, so I was, uh, uh, took off from Microsoft, uh, ran, ran a little, little startup company, uh, fitness company, built an app and, you know, all over, you know, kind of running. Was that just scratching an itch for entrepreneurship or? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really forced me to, to, to understand what it means to build something, to own something, uh, try to find product market fit and, uh, ran it for about two or three years. And then, uh, and then, um, yeah, then decided to sell it and ended up rolling it back. So, um, ultimately learned a ton. Was it a failure? Yes. But you know, it's all, it's all, it's all part of the journey. Exactly. I, I always say it's, you know, it's not a failure unless you don't learn anything from it.

Right. And if you learn that it's, then it's part of the puzzle. Um, but what I guess, I mean, cause you go from very large organizations to a startup and I think some people going back to like figuring out where they fit, right. For me, something about corporate never felt right to me. Right. I, I just, but I didn't know it because I didn't know anything about entrepreneurship or any of that stuff. So I kind of stumbled into it thankfully. And then, then I would just like, oh, this is where I'm supposed to be for you. And, and also for other people out there listening, you know what I mean? Like when you try to figure out where you fit best, what were some of the things that, that, that kind of helped you figure out whether the startup that experience was cool and you learned a lot, but you wanted to go back.

Was it, was it, you wanted to go back to a little bit more structure and a little bit more predictability or was it kind of, what was that decision like for you? Yeah. So why I chose to go back to Microsoft, ultimately, I always think about it as product and opportunity first. Okay. And then I think about the culture and people. I mean, that's, that's, that's my strategy. So, you know, we think about the product, um, is the TAM there as the opportunity? Do you agree with the strategy looking at the competitive? Is there an angle? Is there something compelling? Uh, is, is there, uh, an interesting, uh, way to, to make a dent in, in the product strategy and ultimately grow it and try to win the segment or gain market share, whatever, whatever that goal is.

And so that's, you know, looking, looking at Microsoft to see in the opportunity and some of the partnerships that, uh, that had been in place. So for instance, with, uh, open AI early on, it was, um, I was, uh, immediately obsessed with the idea of looking at traditional productivity tools, all the things that we're using every single day, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, teams. So, um, and then looking to see how, uh, how that transformation in this kind of moment that we're in with AI and agents, what's that going to look like, how is it going to change? And I thought that, I thought that if I could be kind of the center of that, go through that personal change in kind of from a productivity standpoint that we're all going through right now with these new tools and applying that to some of, some of the kind of traditional productivity space, it was a, it was a it was a, it was a no brainer.

I also, uh, I also love the team. Uh, a few folks that I worked with before rejoined. And so for some, in some ways it was kind of like coming home again. So. Yeah. And I definitely want to get to what your view of the future of work looks like, especially in this new agentic world. Um, but I do want to pick on the, the experience at Salesforce, specifically with Einstein. Right. Cause I was there during that time and it was, and I'm curious what your learning lesson was from that because Mark Benioff love him to death. Okay. Um, but he's definitely a hype guy in a lot of times. Like I remember going to almost every, uh, Dreamforce and he would like announce some big, awesome thing. And I was everybody like, holy shit, that's incredible.

And then two or three years later, it's still kind of like, uh, you know, what is this? Like a lot of the reps didn't even know what Einstein was. You know what I mean? When I was trying to, I was like, okay, you know, when you talk about messaging, it's like, all right, let's use Einstein. And reps are like, I don't even know what it is. So what were your learning lessons from that phase that, that you brought with you now to Microsoft in this phase? Cause they were very early on talking about AI and Einstein and all the things that it could do and how it could integrate and all this wonderful stuff, but it really never took hold. And I'm curious why, and what you learned from that, that you're now applying it in, in, in this transition phase that we're in where it's real.

Yeah. It's what I, what I think about in that time to where we are now, it's, it comes down to the usability of AI machine learning and think about it, you know, 10, 15 years ago, like, like we were telling these stories and I remember when I, when I started at Salesforce, uh, we acquired a small, uh, uh, analytics, uh, ML company, you know, they built an interesting model. We were working on integrating it and, and the story was great. Use cases are great, but in practice and using it, the output, you know, the data complexity, uh, the user experience for these tools at that point, um, were the use cases real? Yes. But were they accessible and did they have the output and quality? It was really, really, really hard to, to get that.

And so, so I look at, and I think about that moment now and where we are just with the user experience, the output and the quality of the prompts and the information that we can get now. And it's just, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. And so, so much of what I think about it and what we think about as a product team is, is that quality and how do we ensure that we're doing the proper testing, that we're thinking about the roadmap or really being truly empathetic to what the core users and customer needs are in order to build and get the results that weren't around. And despite what, what, uh, you know, marketing or what folks were saying, wasn't, wasn't, wasn't where we are today. And I think that, well, you said something there to like the core user, because even with AI right now, I mean, you've heard the stats, you know, 95% of corporate AI initiatives fail and, you know, and there's adoption issues across the board.

And I think for power users, a lot of this stuff is like, holy, so like, look what I can do. Right. Um, but it's still, I mean, I don't know what the stats are anymore about how many people actually use, you know, just ChatGPT, you know, the basic function of ChatGPT. I think it's still like 5%, you know, the population, if you will. Like I always try to pull myself out of tech and SaaS, right. Cause I, I get so like, like, oh my God, I'm laying, I'm staying behind. This is crazy. And then I pull myself out of it and I'm like, wait, this is like sales, 1985 all over again. Right. And the vast majority of my friends and family and everybody who's outside of tech, like, it's still kind of like you weirdos, like cut the shit with this AI stuff.

Right. Um, you're scaring us all. So like, how do you, how do you make it so that the core user is, and what's your thought process on when you're rolling things out to speak to like the, the crawl, walk, run, use case scenario where it's like getting people familiar with this as a new way of doing things. Cause it is a new way of doing things. You know what I mean? It's not like a Google search. It's not just a thing. It's like, you have to learn how to use it, but man, once you learn how to use this stuff and how easy it is, it, the sky's the limit. Do you, do you think about that when it comes to the different types of users and their quality, their skill level, as far as their ability to even adopt this or accept it?

Yeah. Well, you know, so the, a lot of my job day to day is, uh, looking at the market, listening to customers, looking at our roadmap and seeing how we need to shift things in terms of launch, what we need to develop, what we need to bring to market. What's the story that we're telling is that's kind of what, what I'm thinking about at kind of the heart of my role every day and working with engineering, with a little bit of market, with working with sales folks. And, you know, there are certain trends just related to business applications and CRM that, that we are, that I'm deeply embedded in thinking about every single day. Maybe we can get into that in a little bit, but, um, when you think, when you think about sales folks and you think about the habits that they have, even in that we have, uh, you know, when working at the tools, working within the organization, if you're, if you're, uh, if you're a sales sales pro, you've been in it for a long time, you've had some success.

Maybe you're great. You lean into what has been a success. You build those habits, your follow up, the, the, the tools that you use. And so much from what I've observed, um, you know, being in, being in a role like that and seeing those sales professionals that have been incredibly successful, so much of it is about leaning into that process, knowing the process, truly developing it and tinkering it. And so many of the details are in the nuance of how that person operates and acts every single day, you know, uh, training and coaching. It's, it's incredible. I have leaped like the benefits of, of, of the work that we're talking about. Um, but it's all about how the person adapts that and makes it their own and develops the habits that they create for the output that they're usually trying to drive more revenue, you know, landing that big deal, connecting with that customer, unlocking that company.

So, um, so, so much, I think, I think especially now where with the technology, it can be so personalized, it could be incredibly flexible. The stack doesn't have to be what it is in that kind of traditional segmented stack, this tool for that, that tool for that. It can really lean into and support the nuances of someone, their goals and how they're trying to operate day to day. And so I think we have, you know, at Microsoft, there's a long way to go. I think the industry has a long way to go, but it's a, it's super exciting to see, uh, some of the developments that are supported in that. But I kind of go back to the, you talk about like, you know, let's go back to the Jeff Hoffman, the top 5%, the super successful sales reps, they lean into this stuff.

They're curious about these things. They figure out a way to do it. Right. Those aren't the ones I'm worried about. You know what I mean? Like, I'm never worried about the top 10%. I'm never worried about the top 20% because they're going to figure it out. And that's why they're in that percentage. And you know, the, you know, the whole distribution of talent, the whole idea is to get the middle to move up and all that fun stuff. And how do you get adoption across the board when you're making this shift? Cause you, I mean, and let's talk about, I think one of the biggest unlocks was the MCP connectors and almost the idea of a headless CRM. And, and, and so I can just, I personally believe we're all going to just live in a dashboard, uh, like of, you know, I'm currently cloud coworker or whatever, but, um, you know, whatever your portal is, chat GPT, cloud, cloud, Gemini, all of those, it's like, okay, go do it.

Right. So connect it to the backend and just go update CRM for me. Go, go do that. Where are you on, on that? And where's actually, where's Microsoft on that? And how is that translating to user adoption? Is it, is it helping or, or do you have to kind of give people the old school way of doing things and baby step them into the new way of doing things? Yeah. Yeah. So that's, so, so, so there's a lot there. I think is, I think one of them is how do you support the, the long tail of reps and sales orgs that are, you know, need to develop, you need to learn those best practices. Another component is, uh, how is this technology all coming together? And, uh, and then the third part is, is adoption.

And so I think starting with the, with the, the second one and then going to the first and then the third, uh, you know, looking at, looking at the, looking at the CRM space that, that we're in today, you know, it's, um, you know, it's very largely been disconnected silos. Data quality has always been an issue. Uh, we were very much seeing this system of record turning into what we see as a system of action where data and data quality is the foundation that can be built on. It can be improved. And there's a lot of different benefits that can come from that. What's, what's unique and really compelling, uh, with what we're, what we're doing at Microsoft is that, you know, we have, we have, uh, this core business application, this platform, we also have the productivity suite.

And so our thesis is that, is that yes, headless, but it's headless plus, plus, plus, plus, because, you know, we, we have, we have built and we're developing agents that are, uh, that we have studied and that are supporting every job to be done related to a typical sales organization, typical role. We have the M, uh, we have the API, we have the MCP, we have a really sizable partnership network that can support that. But really when we think about usability and the user experience, when we talk about customer insights or CRM in the flow of work, or for example, if, um, if you're a sales rep and you happen to run your business by checking email every morning, or maybe you do a little bit of competitive analysis or you checkup and want to get an update on, uh, where you are with the top, uh, three or four opportunities you're looking to push forward, you don't want to have to go to a separate system to do that, right?

You, you want, you want to jump into email and you want to be able to query, you want to get answers. You want to have that data and information at your fingertips as you respond in emails to customers that maybe have sent you a note in the middle of the night. And so we're thinking about it as, uh, taking that information that the kind of the rich data and customer information opportunities, accounts, and ensuring that that is embedded through the entire experience. And so when you think about someone and their personal preferences and their habits, it doesn't matter where they work or how they operate. They can be in teams, they can start their, their day in a meeting, they can be an outlook, you know, they can, maybe they want to do, they want, they want to, they want to tighten up their pipeline and, and, and work on, um, can review some context.

They can also choose to jump into the CRM if they want to. I don't know. I don't know a lot of, I would prefer that over the, over the former, but, um, the, the, the thesis and what we've been, what we've been building is really leaning into that productivity suite, rebuilding that product product suite to modernize that and ensuring that all those customer insights and data can support the individuals to drive their business. And, you know, to, to the first point, going back to that, you know, with, with the data capture and, you know, looking at maybe your top 10% sales folks, those, those insights, those, the strategy, the way that they operate can be captured and then leveraged by sales leaders to help to coach and reinforce those positive habits for, you know, the, the, the bottom, the bottom 90% of the, of the sales organization.

And so, yeah. Is that where CRM failed? Not just dynamics, but Salesforce and all that stuff, because to your point, nobody loves going into CRM. And, and what do you think if we take a AI out of AI out of the equation and all the different CRMs you've played with over the course of your career, what do you think the big fail is when rolling out a CRM or getting people to use CRM and why don't sales reps, they, they do it because they have to, they do it, but it's, it's always, it's almost always carrot, no stick. I'm sorry. Always, always stick, no carrot, right? Like I track my activity. So I don't get yelled at. I got to update my forecast. So I don't get yelled at. Right. It's not because I want to do this.

It's not because I think it's helping me do this. So where do you think most orgs fail when it comes to rolling out a CRM? Yeah. Well, it's, I mean, it's, it's the question. And I think that, uh, the product organizations, it's all about asking that question and doing the right level of customer research and truly understanding what has happened and why it happened. But like, what's your perspective on it? Why do you think it failed? Well, because I think it's always because again, the, there's no benefit to the rep. If you were to tell me, John, I need you to track these, you know, your activities this way, specifically, I need you to update your forecast like this. So we're going to be able to, because we're going to be able to run analytics on those things.

And in a month, if you do these things, I'm going to come back to you and tell you where your gaps are, what you need help with where I can help. So I can be much more direct on, on how I can support you. Right. Cause it like, that's the loop that never comes back. It's, you know, certain, that's why certain tools are take off like wildfire because they are immediately impactful and they immediately get like, you know, slack, right? Right. It's like, okay, cool. It's Salesforce. Like this is easy for me to see ROI immediately as a rep. I can do this. Right. And, and some of those tools are, are no brainer productivities for sales reps. Whereas CRM has been, first of all, way overblown. You know what I mean?

It's like, it's like one of my wife and I moved from our first condo. We had a 800 square foot condo, right. And you know, one little room and two bedrooms and whatever. And then we moved to this 3000 square foot house, our first house. And I remember vividly, we were sitting in the house, like in the, in the one little room that was about the same size of our, of our condo and looking around being like, what the did we do here? Why did we, why did we buy this house? There's no way we're ever going to fill this house. And then in the six months later, we're like, we need a bigger house. We don't, we don't, we don't have enough. You know what I mean? And it's like CRM always comes with the, here you go.

And it's, I can do everything. And so all, and you talked about data quality being the foundation. Well, the reason that most data quality is horrendous in CRM is because it's let go ahead, do whatever you want to do. Like put information everywhere. Here's a field for this. Here's a field for that. Don't do this. Don't do that. And then it's this rat's nest of completely irrelevant information that it does nothing to benefit me. And now it's just a task manager. Now for me, I like it because I'm a very task oriented person. You know, I, I, I schedule a task and I mow through those tasks. I'm a zero inbox guy. So it helps from an organizational standpoint, but the, the actual benefit of execution, living where I am and giving me the information when I need it has been up until now has been just a complete farce.

Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I think, yeah, it's, it has been an add on body of work that sales organizations need to do. That doesn't necessarily translate into closing that deal. And, and, and it, and it's, and so there's just this, this long tail of data entry and the user experience is typically separated and, uh, and you know, the other data resources that you have are usually also siloed. And so managing all of those things, it's just, just a massive, massive amount of friction. Yeah. And so, uh, looking at ways to bring that together to remove the, the long tail of work that the business needs, but people don't want to have to do, you know, like the, the, the, the, the way that we're thinking about it is that, uh, sales organizations, reps, they need to think about driving revenue.

They need to think about the customer and that's, and that's, that's really it. If everything else can be taken care of in terms of, uh, you know, say lead qualification or data enrichment behind the scenes and allowing, uh, to, that allows sales and reps to be much more strategic, be much more educated and help customers in a way that maybe they hadn't had time for. Like that, that, that's, that's kind of the, that's the Holy grail. Yeah. I agree. My only, my worry is you hear all this, like, oh, you know, the sales reps only spend 27% of their time, you know, with the customer selling and the other 73 or whatever is, is admin. So we're going to give all that time back. My fear is that I don't think most sales reps are, I think a lot of sales reps, just like any profession, um, use all that 73% to kind of justify busy work to justify their job.

You know what I mean? Because as, as objective as sales should be as a profession, like you either hit your number or you don't, there's so many other subjective components to it as it relates to relationships and management and all that other stuff that I'm, um, um, curious how you're seeing, uh, the, the productivity side, because I, I still think in general, we're in the productivity phase of AI right now, not necessarily the results phase of AI right now. And I'm curious what you're seeing at Microsoft right now with this shift. Cause obviously the team has to be using these tools and everything else. Where are you seeing the big benefit right now? Is it giving them time back so they can do this?

Are you seeing, you know, with customers and yourself, higher close rates and more with less, like where are you seeing real sweet spot as we stand today with the value of AI? Yeah, absolutely. So it's, uh, so, so much about everything that we have been developing and launching, uh, you know, from private preview, public preview to GA, uh, we are, uh, we are testing and using it internally with our own, with our own sales teams. Happens that Microsoft has a whole number of huge sales teams across a number of different products, B2C, B2B across the board. Uh, we we're, we're seeing, we're seeing some, some pretty remarkable, remarkable numbers. And so for example, um, uh, 20% increase in, uh, deals close from sellers that are, that are using copilot and sales agent, um, 13% increase in lead to opportunity conversion using, uh, our sales qualification agent.

Um, a lot of what we think about is, is, is ultimately, and to your point, yeah, kind of sellers are somewhere going to kind of do what they're going to do. Are they actually going to maximize their time? A lot of what we think about, especially from, you know, like a DPF sales, CRO perspective is how do you increase the revenue per seller in aggregate? Like as that being a kind of a newer and compelling metric that sales organizations can, can think about and monitor that one's coming up more and more. And it's one that we use internally. So, uh, one, one of the metrics, you know, we have one, our, uh, one of our, um, SMB teams, uh, you know, looking at, and they developed and have ran a few pilots and have fully adopted a couple of our agents increase revenue per, per seller by 9.4%.

Right. And so, you know, internally we're seeing, we're seeing a whole number of these results. Okay. And we're working really, really hard with all of the, the new tools, agents, co-pilot to, uh, to make sure that we can adopt them, that we can improve the product, that we can improve quality. And then we also see that with our customers as well. We have a whole, you know, a number of customers success areas as well. Yeah. How do you control it? So, and when I say that, I mean, it looks like AI is, you know, just again, from a, from a general standpoint, it's fantastic for individuals, right? I can do this. I can vibe code something I can like, but, but when it comes to the, the org, like rolling it across the org to like to have some type of standard on how they use it, that's where I see a lot of organizations fail.

Right. So how are you balancing that? Standardizing across the board of like, kind of, this is the way it needs to be done now in this new world of agentic. Um, but also letting reps play if you want. Um, cause vibe coding is awesome, but I got to imagine from an engineering standpoint, it's a nightmare, right? Cause now you got morons like me who are like, check out this app that I just built. And it's, you know, it's good, but it's not, you know, then all of a sudden there's all these other, so how do you kind of allow reps to play while working on standardization for the teams? Yeah. Well, with the, you know, and kind of just going back to why we rejoined Microsoft thinking about how to manage AI and agents in this world where we don't really know some of the impact that some of these models will have at the foundation, Microsoft has just placed so much effort since the very beginning in governance and trust and security and permissions, which has been consistent through the entire productivity stack.

And so there, there is, um, you know, I, I can't go super deep there. It's not, uh, it's not a, it's not a, it's not a kind of a core part to my role, but, um, when we, when I look at working with our customers and doing some of these early pilots, the, the way in which customers are starting to dip a toe. And it's usually that it's, it's looking at one specific use case, usually in an area of the go to market or the customer journey, where they haven't had the resources to invest or support. An example is, um, so let me tell you a customer story. So, um, uh, a, uh, multinational, uh, multinational conglomerate, Sandvik Kormit, they're based in Sweden. They ran a pilot just a little while ago.

They had the problem where they had all these leads, uh, you know, their multinational company, whole different, whole number of different countries that they plan. No, they didn't have the resources in order to, uh, support and call on these leads and fall, follow through. And so they, uh, they ran, they ran a smaller pilot, ran it for two weeks. And, uh, and it, and, you know, the, the, the numbers are small because it was a pilot, but they saved a little over a hundred, 124 or 120 hours in terms of lead qualification time. That would have been reps that they didn't have, you know, a little over 20 K in savings. But, you know, just, this is just one example where, you know, they had a problem.

They didn't have the resources to serve it. They were never going to hire a team and focus dedicated on that specific part of the customer journey. So look, so, so with them, an example, as an example, many customers are looking to say, Hey, where, where can I start to maybe drive revenue and find opportunities where I don't have folks that are focused on this today. And the adoption is usually happening like that. And this is what we recommend usually is, you know, start with a very specific use case, try it out, have those metrics and KPIs measure. If you get the results and you think that that is, there is, you have trust in the system, you can harness and configure the agent in a way that can support the organization, scale it and scale it appropriately and scale it appropriately within, you know, the confines and the requirements of the business.

And so it's across the board, you know, it's, it's early innings for, for everyone. But more and more, you know, we're seeing, you know, you bolt on one use case and then you extend another one, maybe have two or three agents that are starting to support and drive more revenue in a way that you haven't been able to before. And how do you communicate that internally? So, you know, when you talk to these customers who are successfully rolling out things like this, and whether it's piecemeal or across the board, you know, there's the adoption part of this, but then there's also the, the fear, quite frankly, you know what I mean? Like every sales rep is looking over their shoulder right now. I mean, I think everybody is looking over their shoulder right now, but I'm going to pick on sales reps right now.

It's like, you know, you hear like, oh, SDRs are never, you know, we're not, we're not going to need SDRs because it's going to be super hyper-personalized every single message. We're not going to use like, you know, we don't need this, we don't need that. So there's the perception. And then the reality is there, do you coat, do you help organizations when they're, when you're running these pilots or you're talking to these, do you hear the ones that are being successful? Is there a certain way that they communicate or approach this that is fundamentally different than the ones who are not doing it well or, or failing when they're rolling these things out? Yeah. Well, I think, I think the first point is that the transformational organizations realize that they, they have to be in the game and they have to start testing this because the worst case scenario is that they fall behind and maybe their competitors get ahead.

So unfortunately I think, um, I think, you know, those enterprises know that they have to play ball. And so they are, and so they're testing and they're starting to kind of figure out what they, what they need to do. I wouldn't say that there's necessarily like, like a kind of a language or, or, or culture around how they're adopting and thinking about necessarily. But I don't know, like what, I mean, I'm fascinated with your podcast because I've been listening more and more and more. And what are some of the themes that, that you're picking up related to this? Because I mean, you're kind of in the perfect spot to be, to be. It helps. Yeah. I'm kind of in this intersection. Right. I think it's the ones who, um, the, I think the top down decision-making these days is, um, not nearly as effective.

Right. Whereas the, and I just go back to generally generationally, like, you know, when you and I were growing up, it was like, all right, yep, this is the way it's done. Go do it. Right. We didn't really have much say in what was going on. And this generation itself feels like they need to be invested in this or involved in this. I think the best leaders understand that. And so for instance, when, you know, one of the things that I recommend to, to the clients that I work with is you almost want to turn your sales org into a sales lab. Right. So, and, and to your point of like picking just components of the GTM motion that, that aren't as, as effective as they could be. Right. And once a week, you know how like, uh, engineers get, uh, have, they have hackathons, right.

I think we should have sales hackathons and where the whole GTM or gets together, you know, Friday afternoon pizza and beer, right. And we identify a problem in the GTM motion, whether it's preparing for meetings or sending follow-ups or updating CRM or whatever it is. Right. Give a little bit of a framework, but then we break everybody up into, you know, SDR, AE, CS, marketing, and an engineer, like put all five of those together so we can collaborate and figure it, you know, help each other out. Cause the SDR is going to be usually younger and bring some AI fluency. Senior AE is going to bring some experience and business acumen. Engineers are going to bring coding and whatever else and say, okay, everybody, here's the problem.

Y'all got an hour. Whoever can come up with a better solution on how to do this, whether it's with our existing systems or with some new AI tool that you come across, whatever it is wins. Yeah. Let everybody go right. Giggity, giggity come up with, and then everybody presents their solution at the end. And we all vote like, okay, we like that one. And then next week we implement it and we see what the difference it makes because this whole agile organization right now is the way that I think that your alignment, right. The companies that I see are failing are the ones that were still siloed, right. Where marketing is over here. Sales is over here. RevOps is here. I went to a RevOps conference recently and you know, there was this arrogance about RevOps and how great it was compared to like, you know, enablement.

And it's like, uh, you're not that special. I'm sorry. Like you don't work without the enablement of how to use that stuff that you're giving us. And so the ones that are doing this and are kind of agile and keep just picking a problem, figuring out a solution, implementing it, seeing the result, or quite frankly, like you said earlier, kind of more like the SWAT team where it's like, everybody just keep doing what you're doing. Okay. Just, I'm not going to change it, move your cheese here at all. We're going to try to figure this out over here with some people who want to write the, the hand raisers who like, I'm interested in this. So it's not like we're forcing them to do it, but also the ones who are pseudo on the top of the list, as far as performers are concerned.

So when they create something, it's a model for everybody else to follow. Those are the ones that I'm seeing be successful in rolling stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's, I mean, you're, you're reminding me of, you know, the, the point in time and the practice within sales where it's like, Hey, this email really worked and you kind of share that around or, or, Hey, you know, we closed this deal. Like, let me share you strategy and how it worked. Yeah. You know, it can be, because the barrier, the barrier to entry for, for programming and coding and playing with these tools, it's come down. Right. And so like, you can take it, you could do something like that at the prompt level, like, Hey, some of these prompts are working really, really well for this specific thing that I'm trying to do with this company.

Um, with co-pilot studio, you know, within the stack, you know, alongside dynamics, alongside the productivity tools, M365, host a hackathon to build a series of sales agents, you know, look at them, test them, AB, pick the favorites, implement them a couple of weeks later. Like, I think that's, that's super cool. Every, every sales, every sales, they can find the time and the discipline to run something like that. I think it'd be remarkable. And, and to me, that also empowers the, the, the employees. Exactly. That kids change management, one-on-one give ownership. Exactly. And now all of a sudden they're the champion internally and they run with it as opposed to VP telling everybody to do this.

Right. And I think that's where, you know, a lot of traditional organizations fail because they still think that this top town, I'm the big brain on Chad here, and I'm going to have to figure this out. Now you're going to do this. It just doesn't work in this environment. It's too fluid. It moves too fast. And you're not that smart. I'm sorry. You know what I mean? As a leader, you're just not that smart. Um, especially because it's, especially if you're three, four, five layers removed from the front line of these kids. It's on the details to think about the impact and, um, working with the customer. So yeah, it's that nuance. Love it. Let's, uh, let's finish on this one. Um, so enhanced AI CRM versus truly agentic CRM.

Talk me through the difference here. Where's Microsoft? Uh, because you've had, you went to see it, you know, you were CRM and then you've, you've evolved to this. So what's the difference between what you're seeing? It doesn't even have to be CRM. Cause you're seeing a lot of these SaaS tools trying to put lipstick on a pig. You know what I mean? They're like, oh, we're AI, but it's like, no, you're not. You just kind of bolted on chat EVT here. And it, and it made it a little bit sexy versus truly embedding it into the system. What's the difference and, and what should CROs and, and those who are making decisions on technology look for right now so that they don't invest in something now that will be irrelevant in six months?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, I feel like it's changing every few months, but the, the patterns that we see in how, how AI and these agents are supporting individuals or teams or organizations, like those patterns are, are changing and shifting. Yeah. And so, you know, like where, where it was, you know, simple chat based prompts, maybe you can have something that is managing a component of work and then kind of the third pattern where it's orchestration of agents or even agents that are running on their own, you know, Microsoft, we think that it's really right now, it's kind of those four very high level patterns where agents can support individuals, teams, and organizations. And depending on the trust, depending on what you want them to do in the use case, you can set them up accordingly.

So like, you know, there's the, the, such a, there's such a huge focus and investment on, on co-pilot and, and the various components of co-pilot. So last week we, we made co-work generally available. Co-work in terms of productivity and time savings and output has been absolutely unbelievable for myself and for, for everyone else who is using it. I mean, think about just, just the simple thing of, Hey, you're prepping for a meeting or a podcast or something like that. We want to create a slide. Like you can, you can do that in just a few minutes and the quality, you know, it might be, it might be not, it might not be perfect, but it's 90%. And then you can tweak it. And I think about what that would have taken me before.

Right. And now it's, so it's, it is, it's, it's absolutely, it's absolutely unbelievable. But, um, you know, the, the way that we're thinking about those patterns, as it applies to sales and CRM, you know, we, we call it, and we're kind of like anchoring on, on, uh, agentic CRM where there are these different ingredients or types of agents that are supporting the organization. We think about, uh, co-pilot being kind of that new kind of cornerstone main user experience that can be part of wherever an individual wants to work. You know, if they want to just work in M365, they want to work in Outlook, they want to work in teams, it can be there. It can automatically, automatically update data and records based on your meetings, record that you can have the transcripts.

You don't have to ever go into CRM if you don't want to, which, which is, uh, which is, uh, the best words, I think from a lot of sales reps. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, core is a component of that. And so depending on what that tactic or output is, you know, it's, it's truly, uh, uh, delivering, um, having, uh, having an action core, take part of that and deliver content and work for you that can be done in parallel. So, um, you know, speaking, uh, speaking from, uh, from customers and even my personal, uh, personal experience, a lot of times with co-work, you know, we're seeing that folks are running queues in parallel, you know, they build me this deck, give me some competitive research and, uh, uh, let me know the latest what's going on with this opportunity.

You can run those in parallel, you can run multiple tasks and where, um, where then it's more about that task management and that output management, saving a lot of time. I can be more prepared and, and, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and really focus on, on the customer or whatever output that I'm looking at. The, the, we also have a whole, a series of, you know, calling them, uh, autopilots. And so a lot of these autopilots, they have, uh, they have an ID, uh, they can be managed, they can run, uh, and be configured to point to a specific task or actions that can, uh, that can run in unison, side-by-side supporting the sales team. You know, some of those, you know, like lower level long tail tasks that no, no rep organization has the resources or, or, um, or, or want to do.

And so those are some of the patterns. Those are some of the examples we have also have built a whole series of agents related to, uh, related to the customer journey that can look, you know, can handle sales qualification that can handle, can automatically port data into the system, um, data enrichment agent. What's interesting about these agents and the different types of agents in these patterns is that because many of them can also support data quality and improve that, that data layer. Think about it almost as a virtuous cycle of data where if it's pulling in third-party resources related to company information, maybe it's competitive, maybe it's customer information and you know that the baseline quality of data is already improved.

That means that the prompt quality for anybody who's using copilot or any other tool, the bar can be raised there. You can have better outputs. You can help the customer a little bit more. What's also interesting about that is that this agentic network can also lean on that data quality. And so agents can also be more performant because they're leveraging that high quality database. So. Gotcha. Awesome, man. What, what's, uh, what are you excited for next? Let's finish up on that. What, what's getting you fired up here about, uh, the projects you're working on or anything else that's coming out? Yeah. I mean, it's, uh, the, I've, I've never seen the industry move at the rate and the pace that we have been in.

And, and so, uh, I'm taking it day by day, honestly. I kind of have to, right. I was like, you talk about ROI. People are like, Oh, ROI. I'm like, I don't even know if ROI is a thing anymore because ROI is a investment today for a future return. And like, can you tell me what this world is going to look like in six months and three months? I can't even look six days out and be like confident in where this thing's happening. So to your point, every day I just wake up, I'm like, all right, let's see what happens today is just keep keep moving forward. I think that your, your point is valid as far as there's a lot of things you can do, but the one thing you really can't do right now is sit still.

Yeah. Because if you do, you're going to get smoked and, and this isn't like, Oh, like this will settle down. And then, right. I mean, I think learn a little bit of that lesson with COVID. You know what I mean? Like I, I knew people when you heard when, you know, we were six months into COVID and you heard people, Oh, I can't wait till things go back to normal. You know what I mean? I don't know if you heard that, but I would look at them. I'd be like, first of all, what's normal. Uh, and second of all, you really, you're waiting for things to go back to normal. You've already lost. Like you need to move. I don't care what it is. You need to move and start trying and testing and moving and, and breaking things and seeing what happens.

I mean, within reason, obviously, but the ones who are going to survive, I think are the ones that are going to keep moving here and keep testing and keep being agile versus sitting waiting for this thing out. Cause I just, I don't think there's any weight in this thing out. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We're, we're, we're, we're moving, we're moving at a lightning pace internally and yeah, it's, it's super exciting, but yeah. What's around the corner next? We, we have, we have, we have some ideas, but yeah. Oh, I mean, you, you get a little bit of a, you know, window into it with open AI and what they're doing and everything else, but man, I mean, like you said, every day it changes. Something new comes out.

So it is a whole new world, my friend. And it has been fantastic talking to you. I know we got a lot more to talk about, but I think we will leave that to the audience to go do some more homework. So tell them where they can find out more information about you, about Microsoft 365, about all the cool things you got working on these days. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can find me on LinkedIn. If you want to follow up any questions, ideas, feel free to, feel free to send a note. All the information kind of related to what we're doing is, uh, is on our dynamics 365 website and M365. Uh, the worlds of productivity and business apps are, are colliding. It's already happened. And so we're, so there's a lot of information on there, but, um, yeah, feel free to reach out and thanks.

Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. Thanks for coming on and everybody listening. It's Ryan and it's B R A A S T A S D. If you're looking them up on LinkedIn, we'll put it in the show notes, but just for those of you listening in the car, uh, go check them out. Office 365 or Microsoft 365 dynamics, 365, all the fun stuff's included. And I, like I said, when we started this, man, I'm glad I stuck it. I got, I'm glad I stuck with Microsoft over the years because now seeing what you guys are building is, uh, it's nice to, it's nice to be able to stick in other people's faces who, uh, tried to force me off the platform. So it's awesome. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. Not it's a B R A A S T A D is the last name, but S T A.

Oh, okay. Sorry. It was up. It was on the screen. Sorry. I'll make sure it's right in the show notes. Awesome. Well, again, Ryan, thank you for joining us, uh, and, uh, really enjoyed the conversation. I'm looking forward to what we, uh, what we can do together next. Yeah. Likewise. Appreciate that. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, if you make somebody smile today, 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.

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