Ryan Staley: Harnessing the Potential of AI to Drive Sales Success and Growth

Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. And today's conversation is with Ryan Staley. Now, Ryan is the founder and CEO of Whale Boss, where he helps technology founders grow from a million to 30 million through a lot of the principles he used to achieve the same results personally. He's taught over 800 CROs, VPs of sales, and leaders on his proprietary enterprise sales framework for startups, companies like Google, Amazon Web Services, and Stripe, and many others. And that's what we focused on.

This was an AI conversation through and through. So if you're sick of the AI conversation, you might want to log off now, but I'd highly recommend you listen to it because there's still so many people out there that are not paying attention to what AI is going to do and is currently doing. And so we got tactical on this one. We talked about how to be resourceful with AI, where to even get started, quite frankly, if you're a sales rep, and how to start leveraging this and very tactical application stuff that he uses to understand ICPs, to come up with messaging, and focusing on the outcomes when you're using it, right? So instead of just going down a rabbit hole, it's focused on what's the outcome you're looking for and then backing into that.

And then how to position your company and your team to crowdsource Intel on AI, which really aligns with some of the things that I've been telling my clients these days. So we even got into stuff like a chief AI officer and how that is the new role coming out and how it's going to be so important for sales organizations and organizations in general. So I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Let's make it happen. Ryan Staley, how you doing, my friend? What's up, John? How's it going, man? How are you doing? Really good. Happy to be on here. Looking forward to cutting up with you, man. It should be a good time. Yeah, it's going to be interesting. I think you and I are on the same page with a lot of stuff as related to what's going on right now in the market.

And we're going to talk a lot about AI and the practicality of it and how to leverage it and all this stuff. But let's give the audience a little background of where you came from and what you're up to today. So kind of that journey, we're going to start with a little bit of your journey, if you will, and then we'll get into some of the tactical stuff. So give the audience a little color here. Yeah. So effectively, I had the, when it comes to sales, I've eaten the turd sandwich, if you will, with the type of jobs I've had. I started all the way from door to door to what was inside sales before, which is effectively called an SDR, but we had, I worked in like a boiler room. So that was a character building job.

And then, you know, progressing that to outside sales, enterprise sales, management, leadership, partner. And then I grew an enterprise group from zero to 30 million in RR in like five and a half years with four salespeople. So that was a blast to do. We didn't have any marketing or SDRs. I had to get highly resourceful in terms of how we did it. And then, you know, for the last two and a half, three years, I've been sharing with companies like how to execute and actuate that. And recently I've been infatuated with AI ever since the founder introduced me to it on my podcast about 11 months ago. I've been all over it. So yeah, that's kind of what I'm up to right now. That's like a super quick one minute summary, which is weird summarizing like 25 years of your life in one minute.

But that's what I tried to do right there. Oh shit. Yeah. It's, it's, it's easy. Let's unpack it a little bit though. I want to go back a little bit further though. Yeah. I mean, with you and what you're doing, look, sales, I think is everybody in sales has that entrepreneurial gene in them because otherwise they'd just get a job and do whatever. Where did that come from for you? Like back up into the childhood type of stuff. Like, did you have parents that were entrepreneurs? Did you have something to follow or did you, is you just figured it out a little along the way? Yeah. Well, that's a great question, Matt. So my parents weren't entrepreneurs. They were actually the opposite. So they work for the machine, right?

So my, my mom was a teacher, uh, like third grade teacher, special ed teacher. And then my dad was a cop, right? And so we were lower middle income. And, you know, one of the things that always stuck out to me is I saw my parents like literally busting their ass, like trying to go above and beyond. And then if they did a really, really good job, they might get a raise of like 3%, right? Or 4%. And so it just kind of killed me inside to see them working so hard, but not having the measurable results. And so there are measurable results from a compensation perspective or just even a career growth perspective. Like sometimes they had to wait for someone to die or get promoted before they can get promoted.

Right. You know, it's, it's the very, uh, blue collar. I'm, I'm from the Chicagoland area, Midwest, you know, you know, kind of manufacturing background, I guess you could say. And so from that, it triggered me to say, Hey, like I want to do something. Where I can get compensated based on the results I create versus just the effort I put in. And that's how I got turned into sales. I think that that's, if I were to pull it, I bet you there's a point where everybody kind of realized that where it was like, Hey, no matter how hard I work, I'm not going to get much further. So therefore, why should I work that much harder? And, you know, once that happens, you have that itch of like, wait, I want to go find something where my effort is directly reflecting on my income, if you will, in some ways, that was what got me even in sales.

Actually, I was in, I was at Xerox for a while and I just remember they had such a corporate culture in the sense that you had to spend two years doing this and two years doing that. And then you got the opportunity to be a promoter. And I remember being like, wait a minute, I'm, I'm kicking ass over here. Like I'm crushing it in my role. And that guy over there is, ain't doing shit. And so you're telling me that we're both going to get the opportunity to get promoted at the same time. Yeah. Like I'm good, man. And that's when I bounced in and got into quote unquote entrepreneurship. But yeah, I think it's a, it's always an interesting journey of where that, that itch hits and whether it's because of you saw your parents and they emulated something you wanted versus something you didn't.

I think both of those are equally strong motivators for people to get into this fucked up world. No, I mean, good for you. Then you, it sounds like you realized it really early. It took me a while. And I think one of the things too, that, or I should say kind of pushed me over the edge in terms of going into entrepreneurship is I saw a pattern too. And the two patterns I saw is one, your, your stock options, your equity is, is never close to the value that that's projected. So that's one. And then two is, you know, if you get good enough of that effectively, you're always going to need to sell more and you're going to start making less. Like those are like the two truths of sales and sales leadership, which suck because you would like think it's not that way, but that's kind of what I learned the hard way where I'm like, all right, screw this shit.

I want to do it on my own. You know? Yeah. That's a, then, then you get a whole host of other problems, right? When you go off on your own, but at least they're yours. And I'm, I'm reading the ebook. Have you read the ebook revisited by any chance? No, no, I haven't. I'm sorry. E-myth, E-myth revisited. Have you read that? No, I have to, I've, I've heard about that. Do you like it? Is it good? The e-myth revisited, the e-myth, the e-myth I understood fundamentally, and I knew I wasn't going to fall into that trap. The e-myth revisited, I fell into the trap that they outlined. And what was so scary, it was so scary about it is, you know, they said, you know, a tactician, you know, somebody who's really good at a certain thing goes off on their own because they think, and they call it an entrepreneurial seizure.

You're not an entrepreneur. You had an entrepreneurial seizure. You kind of woke up one day and said, that guy sucks. Well, I'm working for this. This doesn't, I can do this myself. But then you get into it and you realize, oh my God, I'm the, I'm, I can't just do what I love. I have to do finance. I have to do sales. I have to do all these different things. So then you hire somebody to do that. And they, you, you offload a ton of shit to them and eventually things start falling apart because it's not, you're not paying as much attention. And then you downsize back to where you can control your shit and then you die. So basically like that mapped out what has happened to me over the past, you know, six months here.

I was like, holy shit, I grew and then downsized back to this. And I'm desperately now trying not to die. I don't think of all I got those plans and this is the transition to AI of where I think AI is going to bring us. And hopefully, you know, me personally. So with your, you talk a lot about leveraging, you know, in the prep for this, I looked at a lot of different ways that you're currently using AI right now from identifying ICPs and all these different things. How should people, how should the average rep look at it right now and get their self into it? Because it is scary and it is a, not just scary, but it can be. And I'm a testament to this, a massive waste of time, right? Like where you go down a rabbit hole, there's been times where I'm like, oh, that's kind of neat.

And like three hours later, I pick my head up and I haven't done shit and I'm just going down to some weird rabbit hole creating songs for Taylor Swift, right? So what, what would you suggest sales-wise people start doing with ChatGPT or tools like it, or are there tools that you would suggest they start using that are a little bit easier? Yeah, definitely, man. That's a great question. Cause like, like I've been on a lot of podcasts lately and it's, I love doing it. Cause that's the most common question I ask is like, okay, from a sales perspective, where do I get started? Right. And so like, and that's part of the reason, like I published it a weird time of day. I just wanted to get it out there.

Uh, so I created a sales, a B2B sales cheat sheet with AI on LinkedIn that anybody could grab and check it out. Uh, but it basically, it shortcuts a lot of this to make it super simple. So, but like, here's what I would say. If you look at it, there's like three core outcomes. Cause I'm gonna get outcome based person. I'm like a high D and the disc profile, right? ID, high I, middle I, I should say, but very, very results orientated. Right. So I always look at outcomes. Like I saw all these people doing like carnival tricks, uh, with AI and like, oh, watch how I could do this or watch. I'm like, that has nothing to do with like actual outcomes. I'm like, yeah, that's cool. But, but let's, let's talk about outcomes.

And so one of the things that I look at are like, I look at it in three buckets and one is like, how can I compress hours into minutes, right? Like of, of work, how can I compress decades into days? And that's more like, think of like bigger picture acumen and understanding. Of who you're selling to the market business, everything like that. Uh, and then number three is, is automated execution. Like, how can I get this to do work for me? That is either soul sucking or that I suck at, right? Like either I don't like it or I'm terrible at it. Right. So like, if you look at it through those three lenses, then what I would suggest is you pick one, not 10, one large language model. And, and then what I mean by a large language model is that's like Google Bard, that's chat GPT or Claude, which has came out, which I've been really, really impressed with in terms of what it's doing.

Like, it's kind of weird. Like I was blown away by chat GPT for a while and I think it's, it's still really amazing, but it seemed like it kind of, once they started having a lot of issues with the browser and everything, they Claude back. Right. So, uh, in terms of some of the best output I've seen, it's been either chat GPT or Claude right now. So pick one of those two, my recommendation for real world research. If you're trying to do real world, real research, Bard is pretty good at that because that's based off Google search engine. So I think pick one of those. And the reason why I'm saying that versus like the carnival games of like graphics and in visuals and movies is because like, if you really think about what you do, it's based in language and 80% of other AI apps are built on those models.

Right. So this will give you a massive starting point. Then what I would recommend is like literally next time you have to do something that requires Google or something else where you don't know the answer, just leverage a large language model for it. And, you know, block a half hour out for it. You don't need to block off days. Just block a half hour out for it and experiment and just keep asking it questions and you'll be blown away with, with kind of what happens when you do that. Right. And so I think that's step one. So then you kind of see what's possible. Step two, I would say then is like, uh, you could look at like either what you spend the most time on or where like you could connect with customers at a greatest level or biggest gap in understanding, and then try and apply it through that.

And then just continuously incorporate it into your job and identify like, what are the big workflows that give you the base result in the less amount of least amount of time? I should say that's kind of how I would look at it. Like that's a really quick summarized version of it, but yeah, no, I like it. I think it's a, it's about getting started. Right. But you mentioned something in there that was, I think is important is to do like half hour a day, hour a day, whatever it might be, but don't, don't like treat it as, okay, I'm now going to go deep on this for the next five hours. Cause you know, that micro learning kind of gets you to, to start to figure it out. And that's where, um, you know, you had said something on either, I forget, it was a post or another podcast you were on about crowdsourcing the best of the best, right?

Where, and I have a similar philosophy where I'm telling the orgs that I work with, you, you need to turn your sales org into a sales lab basically. And it's an almost like, you know, hackathons, right? You hear hackathons for engineers, well, we should have them for sales and we should, you know, collectively work together to address and try to figure out which tool can help us best solve that problem. So how do you suggest crowdsourcing intelligence right now? Cause we are going through a transition phase. I think a lot of companies have two options. One is legit rip and replace and start AI native, right? So, I mean, because what got us here is not going to get us there or restructure their team to start to help crowdsource Intel so that we can learn from it.

So what are some suggestions you have for companies on how to crowdsource that so that the reps can play with the tools, but within a structure? Okay. And I have a definite recommendation. I love the term labs, lab or labs that you have like sales lab. Did you see the episode or the series quarterback on Netflix? Uh-uh, no. Okay. So then this is highly, this is related. I know it seems unrelated, but it's totally related. So basically they followed around Patrick Mahomes. They followed around, uh, Kirk Cousins. They followed around Marcus Mariota for a year, like all last year, which was pretty cool that Mahomes won the championship because it, it shows the ups and downs. Right. So one of the things that Andy Reed gives them every Wednesday is lab time.

So basically they let Patrick Mahomes and the other offensive players come up with creative plays that they think will work. And then if they impress Andy Reed, he'll incorporate them into the game plan. So like, that's, that's where you see some of the weird stuff that they pull off. And so that's why it's funny you say that. Cause like, I literally just saw that episode yesterday. I'm like, this is so cool. Okay. So let's relate it to AI. I will go in full circle now. But anyway, it's like plug for quarterback, no spot for the ship or affiliate money got past hands for that one. So, okay. So here's what I would recommend, like in terms of how to crowdsource it with your team, like what you're talking about.

Cause let's face it, I would say very few companies are starting from zero, right? It's so they either have sales infrastructure in place or sales teams in place. And so basically taking a different version of kind of what I just mentioned previously, but for your team. And so here's how I would start. The first thing you got to understand from a leadership perspective is really what's possible. And so as a leader, it's really easy to figure this out. And like, you could literally Google like top business use cases for AI in sales or top business use cases for AI and marketing, right? You could literally start there and spend, you know, you're going to do 45 minutes prep for a team meeting anyways, do that and understand what's possible.

If you're in a community or forum, ask, you know, just other CROs, VPs of sales, what's possible there, right? So then what happens is, so your next team meeting, this is what I'd recommend. You bring those ideas of what's possible and you show your team, right? In terms of like, what's possible in terms of hours and minutes, you know, decades and a days. And I post lots of comments on like, we're cool, like actionable workflows that you could do on LinkedIn. So you could check that out, but there's, there's tons of things out there, right? So show your team what's possible. And then from there, give them an assignment. The assignment is over the next week, you're to spend an hour using one large language model.

You get to pick, right? You get to author, it can be chat, it can be Claude, whatever, right? And I want you to experiment and find out, you know, one to three things that make your job exponentially easier. And then you're going to present them to the team, right? So then when you present the next meeting, you present them to the team, all of your reps present. And if they have one to three things, say you got five reps, you get assigned three things. I don't think three things is too much, but basically you have 15 different use cases and then the team upvotes, which ones are the best. Then you implement those in the team and then you rinse and repeat and report back results and do it every week.

That's so simple. And it's like labor is literally the largest expense right now. It's a great way to engage your Salesforce, but at the same time, also like upskill exponentially on the AI side, because most companies are only focusing on the product and that's where I see a big, big flaw. I love it. You know, that I, you know, again, I used to do that manually, but with, with certain things throughout the week, uh, from a sales skills standpoint, right? It was at the beginning of the week, I would tell my team, all right, what's the problem we're trying to address here? Oh, getting through gatekeepers, dealing with this objection, whatever it is. And I'd say, okay, let's find an approach that we think works.

Let's write it down. And now this week, whenever that thing happens, you have to tell me whether it worked or not. Like just keep a little back and back and math. And then I would add up all the numbers at the end and say, Hey, we hit that, you know, whatever it was, that objection a hundred times, we got 30 positives, 70 negatives. That's actually good, right? Let's go. So I think that continuous improvement, um, is critical, but you have to involve the team. So how do you give them structure? I like the structure that you broke down there. Um, do you give them like the, would you give the team a structure on how to approach it? Because I find that if we just tell people, Hey, go find something, right.

That's going to optimize that, you know, we'll get anything and everything and we'll get some pretty lame stuff to a certain degree. So how can you give them a little bit more structure to, to identify the components, uh, that they could be hyper-focused on? Yeah. So I think, um, the low hanging fruit are research. You could do summarization of like, you could do summarization of transcripts, excuse me. Um, particularly Claude, the Claude has like longer, like it can ingest longer material. So you can import basically an entire, uh, transcript and say, Hey, identify the top five buyer points from here or the top five objections that you see this person might have. You could do things like that.

You could even put, um, here's another example that works really well. Trying to think you could do this with Google, um, BARD because ChatGP doesn't have web browsing enabled anymore, but effectively you could copy a link for someone's website. Like say someone you're trying to sell to and say, identify the top three to five things that are most important to this organization and what objections they might have if I'm trying to sell them. Why? Right. So that's another example use case. You could use it for emails. You could use it for, um, positioning saying like, you know, you have a meeting with, let's say the C-level team and you're selling cybersecurity. Let's say you're selling cybersecurity, right?

Like a cybersecurity SaaS solution to CISO and other members. You could say, Hey, I'm trying to sell the CISO and the BP of product, um, at this type of company for, you know, this solution. What would be their most likely objections, right? Like, so those are like, probably like, I just dropped like five use cases that you can do very simply. And, and then what you'll find is there's certain ones that'll work better than others. And yeah, you gotta have a little patience, right? And just, just talk to it. Um, like it's a person and you'll keep getting better responses. So that's kind of my feedback on how to tactically execute it. How do you prevent the team from not just taking what, like looking at it as a silver bullet is I guess what I'm trying to get to, right?

Cause I think there's, I always think of it as the, as humans gotta be the last mile, right? Like, like, like let the data do all the, you know, let the AI do all the hard heavy lift in research, write the emails, but before it goes out, make sure you check the sources, make sure you make, you know, this makes sense. Cause we were joking around. I was meeting with, uh, Henry shock over at zoom info, uh, last year and, uh, or actually not earlier, I'm sorry, earlier this year. And my CTO actually prepped me for the meeting by using chat GBT to summarize their 10 K hander report. And he was chat GBT, which again, 2021, right now, thankfully I didn't, I was like, okay, cool. Thanks. You know, and I looked at it.

Thankfully I didn't use too much of the data, but he can't be reached. Like I got frantic text messages during the meeting be like, dude, do not reference that. That's actually a two year old thing, you know? So how, what's your philosophy right now on that, where the human has to, there's curiosity on the front end prompts on the front end to get the right outcome. Right. And I like the way that you look at it. Do you start with the outcome first and try to back into that, but how do you prevent the sales reps from being like, Oh, great. There's a cadence hit send, um, mentality wise, structural wise, what's, what's your thought on that? Well, I mean, there's like a million templates out there right now as it is.

What 99.9% of them suck. Yep. So it's like, people could just scrape the stuff off the internet and pull it, or they could spam people, you know, from like, we've got so many automated sequencers and things like that. They could just pop in the template and do it. So it's like almost the same thing. And I think, I mean, if you call out a really great point though, you definitely need to free frame it as like, Hey, this will get you 80 to 90% of the way there. You still need to check it and, you know, verify it. And, you know, good way to do that. I think this is how I kind of found like the stretches of limitations with the models, at least in my opinion, is I started off with things that I knew and I asked it on questions that I knew and wanted to see like, how, how, like, how close was it to like, what I knew was true, you know, based on my experience and wisdom.

And then I started to expand and then I would, I would just kind of double check the more I go outside of my edge of understanding. So, um, that that's a good way. What's the, what's the mentality? Cause I think a lot of, with the clients that you work with, uh, how many of them are, are like really optimistic and are like, okay, cool. How can I use this? And how many of them are still the naysayers and still, I mean, I'm guessing you don't work with the naysayers, but how many opportunities you come across with a CEO is like, no, you know, there's too much, there's too much going on, too many variables versus no, we got, we know it. Cause I think there's, there's almost no middle ground right now.

I think there's so many people that are just like, fuck, I don't know what's happening. So I'm just going to stay focused on this and what I can control. And then there's a whole host of us that are like, fuck it, try it, screw it, see what happens. How do you cross, how do you, first of all, how many people do you come across that are in those buckets? But then second, how do you open somebody's mind up to the possibilities from a business standpoint of what they can do this from a leadership standpoint? Great question. So I haven't run into a lot of people that are naysayers. Okay. And the reason being is because like, I work mostly with tech companies like you, right? So I think, however, I have seen naysayers, I'm not going to mention names outside of tech of people that I know, uh, not just, uh, from a community perspective or colleague or personal perspective.

Right. So they have very strong feelings and usually that's rooted in insecurity and grab. There's some, there's a lot of sensationalism out there of like, uh, but that's to sell headlines. Right. I think with someone who's a naysayer, the simplest thing that you could do is literally, um, and I did this with, it was funny because my sister wasn't a naysayer, but she's, she's a doctor, right? She's higher up in like the medical arena. And I'm just like, Hey, do you guys have a chief AI officer? She's like, no. And I'm like, why not? And she's like, it's probably something that I could go after, but like, I don't want that right now. Like, I don't want like another job right now. Like I'm like up to my eyes, but the simplest thing is I'm like here.

So what's something that you would have a question on or something in your space specifically that, um, you know, you'd have to get, you'd have to get information on, or you want to understand better or something like that. And I'm like, give me a question. And so I had her give me a question. I popped it in the chat CPT mobile app and then like showed her the response. I was, as it was populated out, she's like, wow, that's really good. That's what I would say is the best way. Or if you're virtual, just pop on your computer and do the same thing with the question. I had, um, it's funny you asked me this, John, I had a former client that was the CEO of a fortune 500 company. Right. And he's retired and he never used it.

Right. So he's just, but he's a writer. He writes books and playwrights. And I'm like, Hey, have you heard of this? He's like, no. I'm like, dude, this could help you out big time. And so that I showed him, he's like, this is amazing. Right. So like, it's one of those things is almost like you got to show people. So they totally ingest what's possible. And then their mind starts working from there. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's once you kind of get hooked and see that, holy shit, I can do some. And that's why I think it's important to just start playing around with it in general, like for your home use, you know what I mean? Like what's a good diet I should have, you know, here's, I have high blood pressure.

How should, you know, what kind of diet should I do for myself? Or I'm going to a vacation. How should I plan this out just to get used to it? Cause I think you're right. You know, we've moved from Googling it. I actually thought Google search was going to get killed because of like the TikToks and the Instagrams of the world, because the people are now Googling on TikTok and Instagram. But I think now, you know, people, far more people are going to go towards a tool like ChatGPT to gain insight and not just Google it because they'll get some context. Sure, man. So with that, where does that, where do you see the future? I mean, there's a lot of like, uh, sky is falling. Holy shit. Skynet's here.

We're all going to get fucking replaced. Uh, what are your thoughts on five years out? What does this look like? And let's just make it focused on the sales or because I want to make sure that we prepare reps to evolve into this world. Some people are saying, I mean, and for a little bit more context, my friend Scott, these, for instance, he thinks that in seven years, their sales reps won't even be a thing. They'll, they'll be completely replaced. Um, I'm more of the 80, 20 rule. I think it's probably going to wipe out 70 to 80% of the population who are acting like robots and give the 20 to 30% the power and the tools that'll be almost indispensable. So where you're, where's your head off at right now?

Yeah, I'm probably more in alignment with what you're talking about. I think like, I definitely think the bottom third is going to get knocked out, uh, because the fact that, I mean, it's kind of been heading that way with, with product led growth. And as you see the product led growth dollar amounts that people are spending is continuing to increase anyways. And so I think with that, combine that with ultra personalization, that's going to shave out the bottom portion of the market in terms of the need for sales folks in terms of like, as you start to continue to move up market, I think there's, in terms of deal sizes, what I'm, what I'm talking about, right, where you have to orchestrate, you know, 12 to 15 people and they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of decision that could lead to their career, whether them getting fired or promoted, right.

Or staying status quo. I think like, that's where I think folks will still want people to talk to. And I think like, I'm, I'm, maybe I'm optimistic on this. However, I think what's going to happen is it, it's going to make a different level of experience happen for the folks that are really good. And so their productivity is going to be way higher from an output perspective. However, at the same time, I think they are going to focus on the relationship components of like human to human. And then at the same time, like another thing, I think as a result of that, folks are, because of so much AI in terms of like, you're going to have your own personal AI with email, you're going to have your own personal AI with content and all these other areas, it's going to really drive people to want to meet in person at events and other live areas.

So you still need like, I don't think people are going to want to walk up to like a ATM on wheels, um, you know, and, and buy something from them, right. Like for big deals, I just don't see that happening in the short term. Um, what I'm trying to think of what ships, was that a modern family where, you know, they had Phil Dunphy's head on the, uh, Apple iPad. Like, could you imagine someone buying something from that? Like, no, like a $500,000 deal, you know, like maybe that's where I think, you know, there's, there's still room for sales folks, but there's also going to be new opportunities that pop up as a result from it. You know what I mean? So, so what's the future sales rep look like to you?

I mean, uh, you know, is it full cycle? Is it more marketing? Is it customer success with PLG? If you were to say what your vision of a, of a great sales rep looks like, uh, in those, in that five year attempt, what does it look like? It's a really great question, man. And I haven't actually like drawn this. I should create like a mid journey picture of this, like what the sales rep in five years looks like. Yeah. Um, I think, uh, I'll try to think of the movie. What was the Tom Cruise movie? Uh, yeah. Minority Report. Yeah. Minority Report. Actually, I used the image of him to say the same, I did a presentation the other day. Oh, nice. And I actually used the exact image that he's standing there with the gloves on and moving everything around.

Okay. So you and I are on the same page. I don't know if he's got gloves on, right? I don't know if the future rep has gloves on, he or she, I should say. Right. Uh, but what I see happening is a couple of things. One is like, you could say like, all right, I think there's, I think there's going to be like less components tactically that each person needs to do because it'll be automated at a higher level. And so what I mean by that is let's say marketing is like, okay, I want you to create a 15 point campaign, multi-channel approach, uh, hitting this target ICP for companies in this range, uh, with this demographic and this psychographic and executed over a 30 day period with whatever 20 touch point.

I'm just making up stuff right now with all, all the parameters. Right. And so I think that'll be orchestrated from someone more at a strategic level. Whereas right now you have reps that are tactically like building piece by piece out and using the template. So I see that part like orchestrated, right. For, for leading companies. Then the other thing that I see happening is, you know, all of the non-sales activities, like basically note taking CRM notes, all those different areas are going to be automated as much as possible with oversight, with rep oversight, basically just on like tweaks here and there. Right. And then also you, they could adjust temperature settings and probably creativity settings of like different components.

So they still have their own unique person as them. Um, I also think they're going to have their own personal sales AI where they could push it out and that AI will do the automated digital versions of them for them. And then, you know, when it comes to like the connecting aspect, I think it's more going to, they're going to be really good presenters and storytellers. And I think the really good ones will be meeting with people live, which sounds weird. Right. Went through the period where it was live, now it's virtual, um, at events and different shows. And then like really connecting with them, like humans. And I think like, that's where I see kind of the future of a sales role is from right now.

Cause it's like, it's a great question though, man. I hadn't really thought about the exact architecture, but that's how I would kind of draw it up right now. Yeah. I think that, that image is there on me. And the other one I keep using, I've used this for a while though, is, is the Iron Man, right? Iron Man, Iron Woman, right? Yeah, that's perfect. Because it's the suit. It's not just, cause we used to have the person in the suit, right? Um, but we need the AI for Iron Man to work, right? If that, without Jarvis, Iron Man's just a chunk of metal, right? And so Jarvis makes it go. And that's where I think that, that, you know, that visual is, is stuck in my head. Um, and, but you had mentioned something else as far as evolution here is concerned that I don't see enough of right now.

And I'm wondering why, which is the chief AI art officer, right? Which is, I used to think that the advent of the chief evangelist officer, which should, should come out soon, which is the kind of the internal person that represents your brands, you know, the person, not the company, uh, that hasn't taken off nearly as much as I think it should have. Um, but with this chief AI officer, um, are you seeing any of them right now? Like being, cause I haven't looked into this as far as if there are jobs, even are like that. But do you think every company should start moving in that direction where they have somebody internally who is like solely focused on AI and what it can do for the business? Oh, without a doubt.

Right. Without a doubt. I think there, there are some of those out there. There's a guy who's like a futurist named Peter Diamandis. Have you ever heard of him? So he, he runs like XPRIZE is one of his things. And he's been talking about AI for years. Very, very sharp. Yeah. I mean, he's got like 10 PhDs or something like that, but, um, he's kind of part, I saw an event that he had in stability AI's CEO was there and he's like, this is going to literally be the single biggest change to mankind because of the rate and the effect rate and this, not just the rate, the rate and the impact that it'll have on people. Right. And so I think here's, here's why I think it's important. A, why it's not happening are two reasons.

One, it's a really hard role to find like the right character traits and the right skillset to actuate it. Cause you need someone that understands technology, but is a business liaison. And then also has, has, and can connect future looking trends while also be able to politically align people. Like it's, there's a lot of, of details to it. So I would say that's one of the barriers of why there's not more out there too. Who is, I think the biggest flaw companies are making right now is they're enabling AI into their product, but not so much their people, like I talked about before. And so I think they're, they're focusing on AI, but solely through the lens of the product. Right. And so what the chief AI officer would do is not only look cross-functionally with departments and projects and opportunities, but I think they would also look at the labor component, which like, I mean, John, you see this.

I mean, Mark Benioff's pissed that, you know, people don't want to go back to the office. Other CEOs are frustrated with it. Productivity is down. You know, what's the next step that they want to take? They're like, okay, I automate those people in a second. Like, good, bad, or indifferent, like, I mean, I think that's where some people's heads are at. So like, you got to get your, your shit together if you don't have it. You know what I mean? That's, and that's what I'm worried about is, is that there's this weird dynamic happening right now where the, the corporate world, the corporate culture is getting shook, right? Because now there's so many opportunities to do everything. Um, but yet they're, you know, and, and, and reps are looking for purpose.

They're looking for, they don't want to work as hard, you know, it's just inevitable, right? Like I go into sales organizations, I'll come out of a training at four 30 and we'll, you know, I'll check my emails. And by the time I'm at five o'clock hits, nobody's there. That's just foreign to me, right? Like I, when I was trying to build up my career, I was working, I still work 16, 17 hours a day type of thing. So that's this, it's this weird dynamic of like, we want our people, but to your point earlier, people are the most expensive component of any business. And if those people aren't being productive and I got an AI tool to do it. So are we inevitably headed towards kind of a pretty high on employment and universal income?

Are you looking at it that way? Because I don't think that AI is going, this, this version of technology is going to do what the previous ones did, which is yes, they replaced some jobs, but they also kind of equally created jobs and created new opportunities. I think there's going to be a whole lot of creation of opportunities, but I think there's going to be a massive cut in jobs. So we're from a, if we macro this out, how do you see it impacting five years out? Yeah, I think you're right. I think there is risk for that. And, and maybe people do, maybe certain people need to wake up call, right? On like what, what's kind of required to, to be employed. Cause like, like you, man, I, I hard work was always like work ethic was something that I've always, always, always kind of cultivated and built and have right now.

But it seems like some of that's starting to lack in terms of like different generations that I'm not going to like identify who's who, but I think, yeah, I think there could be a massive chunk of people laid off. I mean, like here's an example I saw, and this is just one micro example. There's a tool to edit video clips, right? That, um, I was going to use an agency. The agency would have charged $600 a month. Right. And this tool costs $40 a month. I get the videos back in 15 minutes. It would have taken 48 hours for each video before. Right. Like, so that's going to continue to happen. And so like you have two options. One, either you get on, on the, um, the right track and you start to take advantage of it or you're going to get left behind in terms of massive unemployment.

Like, I think there will be some unemployment. There's going to be some new opportunities, but what I could see happening, John, and this is something not talked about very often is, you know how it is. It's like we had, um, you know, we had Obama and then we had Trump, right? We had, we, you go back, it goes back and forth in terms of extremes. Right. So I think what will happen is people are trying to automate the shit out of everything and then it'll, it'll work to an extent, but then there's going to be a disaster. Like something goes like ethically wrong that crushes the company's brand. Yeah. And then they're like, oh shit, we do need people. Right. And then it'll scale back. And so I think there could be an element of that too, where there's some learning.

Cause like, I mean, even look at chat GPT right now, like they're getting sued by authors because like, they potentially, I don't know for sure, just like pirated copyright information or whatever. And like, like Sarah Silverman is suing them and a bunch of others. And so like, you don't know where legally some of this is going to lead. Cause there are, there are some potential holes in some of this as well. Oh, there's some huge holes. And that's why that's the danger though. Right. Like when crypto fell apart, I, I was, I mean, I was on that trend all day. I was like, holy shit. Cause I've always said the U S is going to get knocked off the top. As soon as the dollar gets knocked off as being the world currency.

Right. And I looked at crypto and I was like, that's it, you know, like, that's the thing that's going to kill us. Uh, but then the, you know, there's no regulation to it. So I, and that's people's money. So the mass adoption of it is it's until it's secure and there's somebody you can phone up and says, where's my crypto. I, you know, I kind of, if I really looked at it, I could have predicted that crash. Right. But AI is, is, is different. You know, it is, it is fundamentally different because, and there's no way we can put regulations on it. Right. Because if we do China, Japan, all those other countries aren't, so it's almost like you have to take the good with the bad and almost hope that the, the, you know, the positives outweigh the negatives or the good bots beat the bad bots type of thing.

Cause there's, this is Pandora's box that's been opened up and, and it's not going back in the box. Right. So totally agree, man. I think you nailed it. What do you see? Like, let me ask you this, John. So what do you see like the best use cases in sales right now? Like from your perspective, I think it's a lot of what you talk about, which is kind of the micro compare. What I, what I do is I look at manually, what am I doing to prepare for this meeting? Like you brought up earlier, and then I'll double up the time that it takes for me to prepare for a meeting. So I can do the exact same preparation. I can take the same amount of time and using a tool like AI and see if I can get to a similar conclusion to how I would prepare for it in the first place.

So, and, and if it takes, even if it takes a little bit longer, but it's close and I can teach it then, therefore it's going to be that much better than that thing. But I actually think where AI is going to have the biggest impact on sales specifically is coaching, is, is frontline coaching because, you know, reps don't get enough. And, and there's a couple of tools that I'm playing around with, Wonderway and a few others that, you know, pretty legit. Now for somebody like you and me coaching, right, coaching us, okay, like I get it. I didn't ask another question. What the fuck? But for like that 22 year old kid who's not getting any coaching, I think that's where that personal AI assistance is going to come in pretty handy.

But just tactically it's, it's, I mean, you had mentioned something as far as looking at, um, you know, ICP stuff, like taking your existing accounts and reverse engineering them with AI and, and really getting into the nuance there or messaging or those types of things. So it's, it's more point than it, than it is anything else. I I'm shying away from personally the, the platforms that are using these tools. Cause they're using it within the platform, which I think is fantastic, but I don't want to rely on a platform compared because of how fast things are going right now. Yeah. I feel like a lot of these platforms there, for instance, putting chat GPT, you know, 3.5 as the engine behind it.

But then all of a sudden, you know, Claude comes out or something else way better comes along and kind of makes that whole platform now not as relevant. So that's why I'm looking at the free tools and playing around with them and just getting used to them. Makes sense. Yeah. It totally makes sense. Cause it, I mean, there's definitely different use cases for different tools that they do better than the others. Right. So like, I think, what are your favorites? Well, favorite use cases, if you will. And it is changing a lot, man. Like, do you know how many plugins there are now, by the way? Oh God. No, I don't know how many, but I'm assuming there's going to be a million of them. So I got a sheet on this with like all these plugins.

It's just like 6,400 plugins. Jesus. 6,400. Right. Right. I mean, plus more than that. Not just like, you know, 60, 63, nine, nine. It's 6,400 plus. Right. And so, um, I think like when you look at like creative writing, chat, CPT and Claude are very good real-time insights is, as long as you give it like links, the Bard is really good. I think from that aspect, uh, when you look at graphics, I think like mid journey is really strong stability AI and then runway is really good for video. Um, but then, yeah, like I look at like, so I look at three opportunities that are really big when it comes to it, either stacking prompts. Right. So like you could stack prompts in terms of like, once you start with it and give it context and then keep having conversations, you could stack and create a whole workflow.

So that's like one example, you could stack plugins. So that means you could set up three plugins at one time and give it instructions and it'll do all of it at one time, which is wild. So like I said, take this video, I want you to transcribe it. I want you to create content that I want you to create a new separate video on this with a voiceover. And it did all that with one command. Right. Like that's another example. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I would say stacking that and then there's stacking tools, right? Like how do you integrate tools and stack them? And there's, there's things like Zapier where, you know, you can contact it. However, like when I saw Zapier and I don't know if your experience is this, um, but like a lot of it works a lot better in theory than it does in practice, you know, when you use it cause it's like, ah, it's so easy to just do this.

I'm like, this is amazing. And then it's like, you have an error. I'm like, what the hell, you know? Like, so I don't know, man. I, I, I think there's still a lot to be done. It's not all figured out, but I've had a couple of airplane experiences with, uh, like integration tools like that, um, that have caused me heartburn. Yeah. I think that's what, that's how you learn, right? I mean, you make mistakes, you fuck things up. And I think that's the, the key here is like, you're going to fuck things up, but you better start playing with it. So yeah, totally, man. Awesome. And so what are you working on these days? Let's, let's transition to kind of tightening things up here, but what are you, I, I, I saw you have this really cool proprietary enterprise sales framework that you bring to a lot of clients.

Could you give a little bit of con like insights on that? And then let's talk about where people can get in touch with you, but I'm curious Yeah, man, so a couple of things I'm working on today and this was, these were things that like, I'm a big proponent of like practice what you preach, right? And so there's two areas that I see, like, and I look, I focus more say on like mid market plus when I'm helping organizations. So, and there's two core elements, there's pipeline creation, and then there's basically conversion, right? If you look at those, I mean, that's massively oversimplified, right? But like either you get it in the pipe or you sell it, right? Um, and so like on the pipeline side, like there's two, uh, I think, um, a lot of companies have opportunities to create a podcast as a pipeline and interview their clients.

There's massive opportunity there, especially if you got higher ACB, it's almost like pandemic golfing, um, along with referral led growth. So creating systemized customer prospect referrals, uh, just like you would a process, but you like a sales process, you create that on the referral side. So that's on the pipeline side and then on the enterprise sales, you know, I saw a lot of the, when I got tasked to like grow that business group, I basically there, the methodologies out there were kind of piecemeal and they were more internal facing. And so what I really started to look at is like, okay, on top of like qualifying people and having questions that you ask and making sure that you're with the economic buyer and you know, um, all of those details, right, that you on top of it also in the, like integrate orchestrating the people strategy, um, emotionally, psychologically, and logically throughout a deal when you're trying to work with 10, 12, 14 different people to get it across the line.

So I think that's the, the big piece that I add on to that, um, all the way from, you know, how to crack with them within minutes down to how to orchestrate people at scale, not manipulate, but orchestrate, like, and get a movement within an organization. So then they come to, you know, a shared outcome and, you know, that helps us close deals as large as 20 million, um, as well as like, I don't know, it was over, I think 35, 40 deals over $500,000 plus. So very cool. Love it, man. Well, look, uh, talk, talk to me, talk to people where they can find out more information, what you're doing and where, you know, if there's anything cool you want to point them towards. Yeah, man. So, uh, you want to learn more about some of the stuff I'm talking about on AI or just about me, ryanstaley.io for my websites.

Like you get, you can grab that sign up for my newsletter, superhuman revenue. Uh, if you want content, like ongoing content, LinkedIn, I publish every day. And then I have the scale up show where I interview SAS CEOs, how they grow their companies. And so those are the key areas to find me, man. Love it. And, uh, and it's just for everybody listening. It's, uh, Staley, S T A L E Y on LinkedIn. And Brian, thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate the conversation. This is, uh, I think there's not enough of this. I think there can be added. I think might, some people might just still kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. But the ones who are paying attention, uh, hopefully picked up some stuff on here to start moving in the right direction.

So I appreciate you coming on. Yeah, man. It was a lot of fun. Love nerding out, uh, with you on AI. So that was really cool, man. So thanks for having me on, John. Absolutely. And everybody, thank you for listening as always. And as always, they say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today because no matter how bad you think your day is going or how bad you think it went, you make somebody smile today and you know, you had a good day. The world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. 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 check out my new website at www.johnmichaelbarrows.com where you'll find even more ways to engage. There's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team. Look, I'm out there selling every day just like you are, and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends and technology. So if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales, let's connect and let's make this happen together.