John Barrows: Future-Proofing Your Sales Career in the Age of AI

All the grunt work, the cold calling, updating CRM, now that's all being taken care of by AI. If all that stuff is going to be taken care of, where do the fundamentals come from? 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 I figured I'd just talk to you directly on this one. You know, I've actually gotten a lot of feedback from people saying, John, I love your podcast, but you know, it doesn't really showcase your expertise and wanted to hear a little bit more from me. Now, I do a lot of my training, obviously, you know, I have my whole membership and that's where I give a lot of my super tactical stuff.

And I use these podcasts to explore, you know, more things I'm interested in and, you know, talking to industry experts and thought leaders. So piquing my curiosity and again, I've told you before this is how I learned, right? I started my podcast, not because I wanted to get my voice out there. It's actually, this is the way I learn. You know, I don't learn by reading books. I don't learn by doing, you know, taking courses or anything like that. I learned by talking to people who are smarter than me, but I figured this would be a good opportunity, especially based on some of the things I've recently seen out there. For those of you who've been following me, you know, a few weeks back, I went to Dreamforce and I went to Inbound and then I was part of LinkedIn's insider group or influencer group and went to one of their events in New York.

And I saw all the upgrades that they're making to their platforms with AI. And as impressive as they all were, you know, these AI agents, it got me thinking and a little worried about where the future of sales is headed, quite frankly. And the positioning here, and I'm doing this directly to everybody just to, you know, make sure that we're paying attention here. Cause there's, I don't think there's an option anymore to level up. Like this stuff's coming for us faster than I've ever seen. And I know everybody's all technology evolves and so do humans and we'll figure it out along the way. I, quite frankly, I think this one's a little bit different because specifically what I saw at Salesforce with Dreamforce and all their agents, you know, these things can do all the research for you, write the majority of the emails, respond to emails, record the calls, update CRM.

So for a select few sales reps who have business acumen and sales fundamentals and are agile enough to be able to adjust and leverage these things, it's going to be absolutely off the charts from a value standpoint and give us the time back to really focus on engaging with a client. But therein lies the problem, right? Those three things, sales fundamentals, business acumen, and agility. I think those are the three things we really need to focus on right now, as opposed to sales skills and, you know, any new technology or anything like that. We need to get back to these fundamentals. And the challenge I see though, is this, it's a generational thing. You know, I'm a Gen Xer, right? So I grew up in sales without all the tech, right?

I mean, shit, without even email for crying out loud. For the most part, I was doing cold calls, face-to-face, going out there, meeting with people, going to networking events. And so I have a lot of the sales fundamentals and I have a lot of business acumen just by being in the industry for a long time paying attention. But usually my generation and above, we're not really all that agile. And we, it's really hard to get people to change their process and their routines once you get to a certain age, right? I mean, I'm what, 48 years old, about to be 49. I mean, shit, and you got a better shot at seeing God than me changing my process here, right? So with that, using these technologies, it's hard to adapt or adopt them.

On the other hand, newer generation, right? Grew up in a world of tech. So they're super adaptable and they can use all these tools and tech, but they lack the fundamentals and the business acumen. And if you've heard my keynotes before, you hear me talking about how the golden age of sales, right? 2010 to 2022. If you got into sales after 2010, specifically in tech sales, I'm sorry, it just hasn't been that hard. I mean, I know sales is hard. Don't get me wrong. I think sales is one of the more difficult professions out there. Not physically difficult, but just, you know, challenging as a profession itself to stay with it. But it hasn't really been that hard because we've been able to get away with blasting out template emails, you know, setting up disco calls with anybody with a pulse, droning through bant questions and discovery calls, you know, droning through demos, right?

Using our SE to do the majority of the work and then offering a massive disco. Like that's pretty much been sales for the past, you know, 15 years when money was free and it was a grow at all costs mentality. And we've skipped the fundamentals. We've skipped the business acumen. We've taught far more on tech and process than we have on the tools necessary to actually be a sales professional. And so with that, all the grunt work that used to have to be done to, you know, in the early years of sales, right? The cold calling, the research, the updating CRM, like all that shit that quite frankly did suck. Now that's all being taken care of by AI, or at least I can see it being taken care of by AI.

So my question now is, is where does the future sales reps come from? Right? If all that stuff is going to be taken care of, then where do the fundamentals come from? And by the way, this isn't just sales that I'm thinking about here. I'm thinking about any profession. Think about the legal profession, think about healthcare, think about any of it. Like I'll pick on legal here for a minute. You know, when you, when you go to law school, um, you, you know, you get your, you pass the bar or whatever. And then your first few years as a lawyer, I mean, you are doing straight up shit work, right? You're a case precedent, you're looking at research and all this stuff so that you can provide that information to the lawyer, right?

The big lawyer who goes and argues the case or whatever. Now, Hey, uh, Chachi BT, could you scan the library of Congress and tell me the top three cases in the history of legal cases that are relevant to my case and help my client get off? Like that's going to be taken care of. So where again, do those fundamentals come from? And that's why I'm, I'm, I don't want to say it's a, it's an alarm right now for us in sales, but I do think that we are moving into a world where the majority of the admin stuff and everything that created the ability to have the context, to have these conversations, right? Is going away. Just think about it. If you're, look, you know, AI can do the research for us, right?

I mean, I've seen it. I have tools and prompts and other things that do all this. They do all the homework on the client. So they give us all this intel, right? Um, talking points, questions to ask. You can even role play objection handling, but if you have no business argument and if you have no sales fundamentals here, yeah. Okay. You can regurgitate that question. But once you get on the phone with a sophisticated buyer or somebody who knows what they're talking about, you're going to get your ass handed to you. Like think about it, right? So say some kid gets on the call with me and you know, says something that's like, wow, that's actually a really insightful comment, right? They're a really good question.

And we get into it, but then I realized that they can't have an in-depth conversation about this and they're effectively just regurgitating what the AI said. Well, if that's the case, then why would I want to talk to the human? If the human is just regurgitating what the AI is telling them, but can't go any deeper than that, then why wouldn't I just go to the AI bot and start asking a question? And this was my, for those of you, again, who's been paying attention, if you remember my Guy Kawasaki interview, I had Guy Kawasaki on the podcast a little while back and, you know, I had done some research and prep for the interview and in the interview or while I was prepping, I read his book and, you know, I always like to do prep on people.

So I'm not asking the same questions as everybody else always asked them. But one of the interviews I saw him post a few days before I interviewed him directly was an interview he did at Google. And he had said in that interview that he had created the Kawasaki GPT that had every book, every podcast, everything he's ever done. And he said in that, if you ask Kawasaki GPT a question, um, you'll get a better answer than if you ask him directly. So I was like, all right, game on. And, uh, and so I asked all the questions I was going to ask him live. I asked it was GPT. And then during the interview the next day, I asked him the same exact questions and I didn't tell him that I had already done it.

And at the end I said, Hey Guy, um, I know you're a huge AI fan here, but, um, I just got to let you know, I've already had this conversation with you. And he was like, what? I was like, yeah, you know, you're GPT. And I'm going to be honest with you, man, you were right. The, your answers last night were better. And he joked, you know, he had just come off of surfing for the podcast. So he was like, well, then why am I not out still surfing and whatever? And I said to him, I said, Guy, that's actually my question to you is if I can get better answers from your GPT, what's the fucking point of this conversation, man. And that really got my head twisted here about the direction that we're headed in here.

I think it's fascinating what's happening with AI. I think it's, you know, the insights, the information, you know, I still have yet to find anybody who's really making a ton of money doing it outside of open AI, obviously. Um, but you know, efficiency is cool, but it's really starting to take away what I thought was the necessary tools and things that reps needed to do in order to build their business acumen and have the context. So when they get into conversations with people, they can have a business going into conversation. You know, executives these days, they just have no tolerance for a no value interaction with sales. I mean, you've heard me talk about the stat with Gartner that put out there, uh, back in 2022 about the, how they averaged out Gen Xers, millennials, and boomers, uh, B2B buyers of complex sales.

And they found that, uh, I think it was 43 on average, 43% of, of clients want to rep free experience, right? They do not want to talk to a sales rep. I've actually had Todd Capone on my podcast recently and he kind of shit all over that, uh, stat. He was like, I hate that stat. He's like, I mean, 43%. He's like, it's, I mean, it's probably like 80, 90, a hundred percent. And I think we're moving in that direction. And the main reason is, is there's no value in the conversation of a sales rep, right? People talk a lot about, you know, qualification and those types of things. Well, as an executive, you know, I don't need a sales rep to be asking me a bunch of questions to figure out what my problems are.

Like I know what my problems are. I don't need to spend 15, 20, 30 minutes on a call with you to explain to you what my problems are. And so if I'm not getting value out of this conversation, I'm out of here. And that's where I tell a lot of reps, if you don't think we're in trouble right now, do yourself a favor, go into one of these tools like ChatGPT or perplexity or pick one, I don't care. And pretend like you're a customer, right? Pretend like you're a client or a potential client of your solution. So for somebody, for me, I would do something like, you know, go into ChatGPT and say, okay, I'm a VP of sales at a company. I got 20 SDRs. I got 38 E's. You know, here's my ACV. Here's my sales cycle.

And here's some of my challenges. And I'm looking at prospecting training. And I was thinking about the JB sales training. Tell me what I need to know about it. And how does it compare? How does his training compare to some of the top competitors, pros, cons, everything like that. And when you realize in a five minute conversation with ChatGPT, that you'll get more value out of it than you will to a 20, 30 minute conversation with some kid who's just going to drone through band questions and then try to flip you over to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. You realize how much trouble I think we're in. And so for me, this is more of a call to arms for the sales reps who give a shit.

I start off all my trainings with this concept of 10, 60, 30, which was something I came up with a while back. This was well before AI really hit the scene, actually even before COVID. And I was doing a training with, you know, it's probably a group of about 500 reps. And at the end there was a Q&A. And one of the reps said, hey, John, all those logos that you have up there, right? They're all basically our competitors. So if you're going to train us all on the same stuff, how are we going to differentiate? And my answer to him was 10, 60, 30. He goes, what? I go 10, 60, 30. I go 10% of you in this room, I'm going to take what I tell you and execute at the highest level because that's the type of people you are.

60% of you in this room, I got to do something different because it's easy and it makes sense. But 30% of you in this room ain't going to do shit different. So the question isn't how many people can I train? The question is, is what percentage do you want to be it? And that's your choice, right? So I used to say that and think, okay, 30%, whatever, you know, I think that's the distribution of talent there. And it's always been there. And the bottom part is always going to survive at some level, right? I mean, if you're average, the world is filled with average. So we're going to survive at some level and kind of chug along there. Now I just, I don't think that's true anymore. I think those 30%, that bottom 30%, they're actually, they're irrelevant.

And I think they know it, right? Cause they're just going through the motions, whatever. But, and the 10% is always going to be the 10%, like those ones who are always going to be pushing. But that bottom part of that 60%, the ones who are literally just doing their job, right? Just going through the motions, like your average B player kind of doing their thing. I actually think they're irrelevant and they don't know it yet. And that's scary to me. Cause that's, I think that's a large part of the population. Now, the ones I focus on are the, the upper end of that, that 60%, like the top end of that, top 50% of that 60%, if you will. The 10%, like I said, they're always going to be the 10%. I don't even know if I'm in the 10%, quite frankly.

You know, I, my mentor, Jeff Hoffman, he is, you know, when people talk about natural born sales professionals in the right way, like not the douchey sleazy ones, you know, there's only about two or three people I've ever met in my life. My, my uncle is one of them. And Jeff is the other where they are just, I mean, literally top five natural born sales professionals that just know how to engage with people, the questions to ask, how to evolve all of that. Right. I, you know, I try to be in that 10%. I work my ass off to be up there, but I'm probably a little bit more in that top end of that 60%. And the key to that part is the ones who want to get better, right? The ones who are willing to put in the work and want to improve and are willing to evolve as well.

Those are the ones that I try to focus on. I say all the time, I live between the world of the give a shit factor and unconscious competence. I can't get you to give a shit, right? But once you do, I'll give you everything I got to get to the level of unconscious competence where you don't really need any of the tips, techniques, because you just, you just are them. Right. And so I think we all need to make a choice right now of what bucket we want to be in. And if you're, if you're saying yourself in sales, like, you know, I'm just trying to get by here, you might want to rethink this profession because you're going to get relegated to an admin role pretty damn quick, or you're going to roll them up, you know, under marketing or operations and not really be in sales, quite frankly.

But if you really want to be in this profession and make a difference, I think there's a huge opportunity to make a difference. I mean, not just for you and personally, right? As far as your income and those types of things, but for the client, because with that stat that I talked about earlier with Gartner, right? 43% wanted a rep-free experience. That was the negative part of that. The positive part of it is that of those 43% that wanted a rep-free experience, they had a 23% higher regret rate. So they regretted the decision more when we weren't involved. And that tells me that there's a lot of value to be added to the equation here from a sales standpoint. It's just different than it ever has been before, right?

The old days of qualifying bad questions, droning through demos and, you know, offering discounts, right? And forcing them through our selling process and not adapting to their buying process. Those days are over, right? Every time we engage with a client, we got to be adding value in some way, shape, or form. And this is why prospecting, for instance, I look at outbound prospecting almost more as a marketing function. And it's, it's a, it's an impression point, right? This is why your personal brand matters more now than ever, because nobody knows who to trust. This is why I can still justify cold calling, not because I expect somebody to pick up the phone and start into a sales cycle. I mean, that's what cracks me up is I work with a lot of companies who are, you know, their, their VPs are like, you know, make more cold calls.

And I'm sitting there going, okay, if, if you're sitting, if you think that one, you're going to have the right contact information, good luck with that. Two, you're going to get to talk to somebody other than an automated system. Good luck with that. And three, you're going to get through that gatekeeper and talk to somebody in somewhat of a decision role. So you got to go through that gauntlet first. And then you think that you're going to get on the phone with them and say something magical where they're going to say, oh man, you know what? I would, all these other priorities that I was dealing with right now, you know, what you just said there is absolutely mind blowing. So I'm going to dump all that.

I'm going to jump right into a sales process with you and see if we can make this happen, right? If you think that's going to happen, you are going to be sorely disappointed and demoralized, quite frankly. But if you look at cold calling as, as, like I said, more of a marketing function where it's an impression point where, you know, that call, that voicemail might lead that person to, you know, maybe read it on their iPhone and then look at the email that you sent recently. And then maybe look at your LinkedIn profile and go to your website. If you look at it that way, you can start to justify it. So, I mean, we do this and we test this in our training and the clients that I work with, where we'll do cadences to a specific persona, right?

We'll create a, call it a 10 touch cadence. And in one version of the cadence, we will just do email, just pure email, 10 emails, straight up, go across, you know, it's all relevant, all very directly towards that persona. And then we'll do the same exact cadence to the same exact persona, but we'll put phone as touch number three, five, and eight or something like that. Inevitably, when we do that, we, we turn into, you know, the, I think the response rates are usually about five to 10% higher overall. So to the cadence, then the one that just does the email. So that's why, like I said, we have to be doing everything right now as sales reps, you know, cold calling. Yeah, I know it sucks, but if you think about it the right way and you put it as part of your process, it does produce results.

It just might not be short term. Same thing with your personal brand. Like I said, you have to be out there building your personal brand because trust is a real thing these days. I mean, with all the AI, I have no idea what's real and what isn't anymore. So if you're out there building your personal brands, there's somebody I can trust. And I've talked about this in my trainings and I've shared this on social quite a bit. I'll give you, you know, for those of you listening here, a very tactical, easy way to do this in a very authentic way. You don't need to be the content creator when it comes to your personal brand. You just have to be the content curator. So for instance, you know, say you sell to CIOs in healthcare, right?

Sales reps have no idea that, you know, they didn't go to school to be a CIO. They know limited information about healthcare systems or whatever it is. So you sit in there trying to be that thought leader or that challenger, quite frankly, on CIOs in healthcare, you're going to embarrass yourself. But you don't have to be that. All you have to do is follow the actual thought leaders in that space. So here's a tip for you, super tactical. Go into ChatGPT or perplexity or any of those. And say, hey, could you give me the top five, top 10 thought leaders who are CIOs in healthcare or who are writing about the challenges and priorities that CIOs in healthcare are facing in today's world, in today's economy?

And I need to see their blogs, right? And could you include their blogs, right? So 5, 10, whatever it is. And then what you do is when ChatGPT or perplexity or whatever gives you those, you can go read those blogs and see if there's valuable insights in there about what CIOs in healthcare are dealing with today or what some of the challenges and trends are. When you find five or six of them that you like that are producing pretty good content, go into, I use a product called Feedly. So it's F-E-E-D-L-Y. And in that, so what it all Feedly is, is an RSS aggregator, right? So say there's like five blogs, 10 blogs, sales blogs you like reading, usually you have to go to five or 10 different sales websites or get five or 10 different emails to hit your inbox.

Where in Feedly, what I can do is I can create a folder in Feedly called sales blogs and I can dump all my blogs in there. So the RSS feeds. And so now when I open up that folder, I just see all the headlines of the blogs. And so if I'm going after CIOs in healthcare, I go into ChatGPT and I tell me, I ask it, tell me the top 10, whatever thought leaders in this space. I find five to 10 that I like. I open up a folder in Feedly called CIOs in healthcare. I put those blogs in there. And then every morning is my morning routine, right? Instead of checking my fantasy leagues or, you know, reading the news, both of them are horrible, right? Because I suck at fantasy and the news is just abysmal these days.

So I used to do that, but I would start my day off in just a miserable mood. Now I've replaced that by checking these data feeds of the personas and the people in the industries that I go after. And all I'm doing for 30 minutes is I'm just kind of scanning through, looking through the headlines and reading a few articles. And when I come across an article that I read and I learn something from it, and this is the key, the focal point needs to be learning, right? Because if you can learn something and only when you learn something, then what you do is you share it, share that article with what you learned, with your context, right? So, hey, really interesting, you know, article here by XYZ, blah, blah, blah.

You know, my key takeaways were, one, two, three, would love to hear what other people thought about this. Now, when you share that, okay, your primary goal has been met. So who gives a shit how many comments, like, shares, that type of thing? So, but when you do that, say somebody who's following you. Okay, let's use this as an example. Say I write a blog, right? I mean, I write my newsletter. For those of you who haven't signed up for it, it'd be great if you did. It's just jbarrels.com slash newsletter. You know, I'm going to say it's a pain in the ass. I actually like writing it, but it takes three, four hours for me to think through something that is valuable enough, I think, to put out there.

And so I put that out there, right? So say you read it and you like it. So you take it and you share it out there on LinkedIn or whatever with a little bit of your context. Hey, great post by John here, great newsletter, whatever. Here's my thought process, takeaways, whatever. Now, somebody who's, who you're connected to reads my blog because you shared it and they get value out of it. Who did they thank? You. Now, I might get another follower or whatever, but they don't say thanks, John, for writing the article. They say, thanks, Sarah, for sharing that article. You get all the credit. I did all the work. So outbound cold calling, prospecting, right? Again, think of it more as a marketing function, which is why I think it's still important.

Personal brand building, super important. Networking and business development. I just did a podcast recently where we talked about, you know, becoming a problem solver as a, as a, as a sales rep and stop just trying to sell your solution, try to solve problems. And the way that you can do this and putting yourself in a position to solve problems and to get referrals and be that trusted advisor for your customer is to identify, you know, get real tight on your ideal, ideal customer profile, right? So, so revisit that because I don't think enough people do, right? What, what technology, what are they using? Who's the competition in there? What stage of the business are they at? All that stuff.

Who do they sell to? Like your, I, your ideal customer's profile, who is their ideal customer's profile, right? And has that changed? And then understand the persona, right? So who do you sell to most, right? For me, it's CROs, VPs of sales, that type of thing. And then what you do is you kind of look at their ecosystem, who are all the other vendors that, that touch that persona in that ICP of yours. And ideally find ones that are complimentary to what you sell. Okay. So for me, it'd be like email delivery platforms, you know, cadence tools, uh, you know, call recording software, uh, you know, CRMs, those types of things. And then what you do is you go find the, the top businesses in each one of those categories.

So you go on G2 and you find the two or three top vendors in each one of those areas, and then call into those vendors or use LinkedIn and find some of the top reps who work at those companies and reach out to them and make a connection. Say, Hey, um, you know what? I wanted to talk to you because you, it looks like you and I sell to the same type of, of client here. And I just need you in my back pocket here because a lot of times when I talk to clients, you know, I come up with needs that I can't really solve and I want to make sure that I can refer somebody in who, who can help solve that problem. And I was wondering if maybe you and I could, you know, get together on a monthly basis or weekly basis and just talk about what you're seeing out there, maybe share some leads or whatever it is.

Would you be open to that? I don't know too many top reps who would say no to you giving them business when it, when it was appropriate. So you do that to five or six different, you know, other vendors and you create your own little networking group here. So now when you go in to talk to a client, you, you know, you, you try to problem solve. And unfortunately, like I said, sometimes the problem that they have really isn't the one that you can solve and, or it is, but there's more of a root cause to the problem. And an example that I have here is, you know, a lot of times people come to me and ask, you know, John, we need sales training. I'll be like, okay. You know, why? Well, prospecting, man, we need, we need, we need sales, we need better prospecting.

Okay, cool. Why? Uh, well, our AEs are just abysmal. You know, our VP took a look at some of the emails that our AEs are sending out there and they were just absolutely appalled. And so we got to get them to write better emails. Okay. Well, why, why is writing better emails going to solve that problem? You know, there's tools like Grammarly and, you know, Reggie.i, like all these different platforms actually write better emails than I could ever teach you. Right. So why do you need training for that? Well, we just need to get, okay, well, let's take a step back from there. Let's, let's see if training is really the issue. Um, what about your deliverability rates? Uh, for instance, do you know what that is?

Like, forget about your response rates here for a second. Cause obviously they're pretty low, but do you know what your deliverability rates are? What do you mean? Like, do you know how many of your emails are even getting through to the intended? Well, we'll know. Okay. Well, look, I'm happy to take your money and I'm happy to teach you, you know, your reps how to write better emails, but, um, we might want to take a look at that first because it doesn't matter how good I teach your reps, how to write emails. If your emails aren't even getting through because your domain is blocked or whatever it is, um, it's not going to matter. So here, here's a company that I work with that can actually do a quick little assessment for you on your deliverability rates and see if that's the issue first.

And then from there, let's talk about the efficiency of your reps writing their own emails versus having an AI tool do it. And then we can talk about training. I, again, I know that sounds counterintuitive in a lot of ways because so many of us are being pushed for short-term results. We got to close the end of the month on us, but I can't impress upon you enough that we have to play that short and long-term game here. You know, I'm a firm believer that what goes around comes around. And if you do things the right way, it constantly comes back to you. And it's not maybe short-term, but long-term it is. And there are countless times that I can point to where I probably could have sold the client on what I was, you know, what they were looking for or what they thought they were looking for, but I knew it wouldn't really solve the problem.

So I referred somebody else in or brought somebody else in. And yes, I didn't get the sale in the short-term, but inevitably they come back to me when they're ready and they're like, all right, John, now we're ready to go. And then it's not even a competitive situation. So you become a problem solver and you build your own little network here. You can start to build your sales career in a way that is, you know, kind of creates a moat almost around this AI stuff because it's based on relationships. So again, looking at yes, cold outbound, still doing it and why I think AEs still need to make sure that they're doing outbound in a very thoughtful and strategic way. And still, yes, making calls, right?

Because it's more of a marketing function, you know, building your personal brands is, is critical right now, more than anything, in my opinion. And then, uh, becoming a problem solver, right? So, so that you're building your own network of people who are going to help support you moving forward. And then yes, all the skills, you know, when it comes to sales, as far as negotiations and closing and all that stuff, but those, I don't think are as important anymore, quite frankly. I mean, yes, it's important to know negotiations, but I mean, I've never been a hardcore negotiator. I've always been somebody who just needs to make sure that we're both on the same page here. Right. And, and yeah, I'm probably going to give a little bit up to get with, you know, get what I want.

And so are you, but I'm not talking about some hardcore, like manipulative negotiations. I don't think there's any room for that in sales or even the closing, right? I mean, I still train closing techniques, but not because, you know, we're back in 1985 and I'm trying to convince you to do something. I've told you, I've said this before. I think sales, if you're trying to convince somebody in sales, I think you're doing it wrong. You know, sales about helping people solve problems or achieve goals. So for me, closing, it's important to understand the techniques of closing because now I kind of know how to use them more proactively and when and where, because I always used to close, right? But when I was, was, but I just did it.

And so when I learned the techniques, I was like, oh, that's what that is. And then I was a lot more strategic with how to use it. Again, not to manipulate people, but to potentially influence or, you know, just push people over the edge here when they're ready to go. So I think all of those skills are necessary, but there's so much more to being an effective sales professional today than there ever has been. That's why, you know, I'm doing a webinar coming up here of the transition from SDR to AE and how to make that transition. And quite frankly, I think that is for any SDR who really think sales is the career that they want to build their, you know, their career around. You got to move quickly into full cycle sales.

You got to move quickly into building your business acumen, learning what it takes to have a business conversation, you know, while leveraging all these tools as well. Because quite frankly, I just think that the front end of the sales process is going to be taken over here and kind of already has. These AI tools are way better than we are at scraping information, looking for triggers, making connections to value propositions and sending out true personalization at scale. At this point, I used to roll my eyes at personalization and scale. I remember, you know, me and Kyle Porter, who was the CEO of Sales Loft, he was a good friend of mine. We, you know, he used to say that, you know, it was personalization at scale.

I'm like, Kyle, would you please stop using that phrase? Because just because you change somebody's name, title, and industry doesn't mean the emails can personalize, man. But that's what that was in the golden age of sales. Now, you're seeing real personalization at scale. I mean, you're seeing, I mean, I'm seeing emails that are straight up personalized, you know, it's coming into my inbox, but I still know that they're not really, they're, there's the give a shit factor isn't there. I think that's the one thing that sales, we can focus on here is I call it the give a shit factor. And, um, because AI can pretend to give a shit, but it fundamentally can't. And it's, it's evident now when I can tell somebody actually cares, they've actually spent the time doing this to, to be very targeted with a value proposition to me.

And that stands out more than anything anymore. So I think quality over quantity, but the quantity game, man, that is being taken over by AI in spades. And so USDR is out there who are, you know, still cranking out, you know, templated cadences and your, your company is not even allowing you any autonomy to change the messaging, you know, do a side hustle here to figure it out on your own, like pick some accounts, go, you know, do your job, obviously, because you don't want to get fired for, for not, you know, hitting your metrics, but, um, you know, take a side hustle and do some homework, you know, level up here, go targeted, you know, learn what it takes to, to give a shit and get out of that mode of just going through, going through the motions here.

Cause if you're going through the motions and if you're doing this stuff, like really just that a computer can do, it's, it's only a matter of time. You know, I think that question is an important one we need to ask ourselves right now, which is what can we do that a computer can't? And I'll be honest, that, that question is getting harder and harder and harder to answer here. So with that, you know, again, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to hopefully wake a few people up here and realize that I think there's massive opportunity here in the next two to three to four years. Now, what happens after four years, who the fuck knows what's going to happen? I mean, this shit is moving faster than I've ever seen before, but in the short term here, those reps who are really sound in those sales fundamentals understand business acumen and, and can again, have a business conversation come problem solvers, right?

Not just sales reps and are agile enough to start trying and testing and playing around with some of these new tools and tech without replacing the human component of this. I think there is just massive opportunity to make, you know, a huge difference for the client to help them make decisions. Again, remember that, you know, 23% higher regret rate. Like there's a lot of clients out there right now who just, it's analysis paralysis. They don't, there's almost too much information. There's too many options. I mean, I actually, another point on this, I've been reading this book. Um, you guys know me, I'm not a huge reader here. I'm a state school kid, dragged my way through four years of college, probably read about 10 books in my life, but Jolt Effect, right?

Which is the third in succession of the Challenger sale. Like there was Challenger sale, Challenger customer and Jolt Effect. And Jolt Effect, I think they really nailed the problem right now that we're facing in sales. I don't know if I love their solution to the problem, but they absolutely nailed the problem, which is not no decision, right? Everybody thinks our, you know, our biggest competitor is no decision. Well, yeah. And it's actually indecision. And the reason is, is because things are moving so fast right now. And there's just so many options that it's, it's, you know, people are scared to make a decision because again, people, nobody got fired for not making decisions. People get fired for making bad decisions.

That's why you're seeing more people involved in the sales process than ever before. Cause if I'm the decision maker, right? If I'm the one who is quote unquote, the decision maker for this solution. And I make a mistake in like three, six months after implementation, it's not what, I mean, my ass is on the line, right? So that's why before I make this decision, I'm like, Hey, Sarah, could you come? I need your eyes on this. Hey, Bill, come over here and whatever, because I, you know, I need some plausible deniability here. So later on, if it doesn't work, I'd be like, well, Sarah said she liked it. And so did Bill. It's not just me. And that's also why people, I mean, I've never been in a sales environment now before where, I mean, somebody will look you dead in the eye and say, yeah, we know we got a problem.

We know, you know, current state, future state gap, all that stuff. Um, and it looks like your solutions better, way better than what we're doing right now. And as a matter of fact, it's cheaper. So you, you get the better, faster, cheaper. I mean, old school sales, right? You can come up, Hey, you better, faster, cheaper. You can get two, but not all three, right? Now you're actually hitting all three. Uh, and they'll still say, yeah, but we're still not going to do it. Or they ghost you. And it's like, what the fuck is what? And it's again, because it's indecision because people are moving. So things are moving so fast. So if you can be that sales rep that, that helps distill all the information down and helps the client make a decision and become that problem solver.

And again, it doesn't always have to be your solution that solves that problem. If you can be that person that you're invaluable to the client and the amount of upside for you as a, as a sales professional, as far as income and all that stuff is going to be through the charts, off the charts. So, you know, I don't know, hopefully by listening to this, you know, it kind of strikes a chord with some of y'all to, to really stop going through the motions and kind of doing what we're supposed to be doing. Right. I think that's an important thing to pay attention to is like, yes. Okay. You know, we're supposed to do this. We're supposed to do that, but think to yourself, should I be doing this? Is there a better way of doing this?

How can I upskill myself right now? Now, look, you know, here's my little pitch on my, you guys know me. I don't really pitch my training all that much. And I've been getting shit from all my people and consultants who tell me I need to sell more about my own training and everything else. Uh, this is what I'm trying to address here with the, with the JV sales membership. And I didn't really mean for this to be a sales pitch, but this is what I'm trying to do personally myself is, is train the fundamentals, but also look for AI to augment, um, to augment what we're doing. So we're not taking the human element out of it, but we're starting to look at practical application of how to prepare for meetings, how to, you know, ask better questions, those types of things.

So if you want to join, I'm revamping the entire membership come Q1. So right now, if you get in, you'll get everything, all the upgrades come out Q1 too. Um, but you know, I don't want to push anything on anybody. So just email me directly. If anybody wants, I'll, I'll give you a 25% discount just by being on this. I think it's like 400, yeah, it's 420 bucks a year, uh, for the whole membership gives you all my live content and everything. I'll give you, uh, it was 420 for a reason and you know why, but, uh, I'll give you 25%, but you got to email me, right? John at J Barrows. Cause, um, I want to just kind of see who actually is listening out there and just help each other out. Right. When you, when you, when you're out on social, you know, try to repost the stuff from real people, you know, the people who aren't using AI to, to post their shit or create their content, you know, support authenticity in every single way, uh, including yourself.

This is why I told you about that little tip to, to create your personal brand by consuming content, repurposing what you learned, right? Support authenticity and support the people who are really trying to level up. And if we can do that, like I said, the ones who are going to survive here, the ones who are going to still be valuable are just, uh, I think the, the world is, is their oyster as they say, but for the ones who are just going to keep going through the motions, yeah, you're, you're, you're on the clock. I don't think it's going to be in, and what I used to think was a lot longer of a clock. Uh, I don't think it was very long anymore. So you got to decide if this is the profession that you want to be in.

And cause if it is, it's time to level up. So there's anything I can do to help with that. Do not hesitate to reach out to me, um, directly, you know, I'll give you everything I got told you. I can't get you to give a shit about what you do. I'll give you everything I got to, to get you to that next level. So thank you all for listening to this one. Hopefully it got you to think a little bit. And, um, like I say, at the end of all my podcasts here, you know, I think one of the more important things is no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, you got to go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause if you go make somebody smile, no matter how bad your day went, um, you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now.

So thank you all very much. I'll see you on the other side. Peace. 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. It would mean the world to me. If you could go and leave a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your favorite episodes with your network. Also, I am super excited to be launching my new newsletter where I'll be sharing everything I know and everything I'm learning along the way while I'm out there selling every day, just like you go to jbarrows.com slash newsletter to sign up today.

Let's all level up and make this happen together.