What AI Knows About Your Buyer with Scott Gillum

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. Now, today I'm bringing back Scott Gillum. He's the founder and CEO of Carbon Design. Scott was on the show back in 2021, where we got into personality-based marketing and ABM, and a lot has changed since then, obviously. Now, he spent the last seven years researching how buyers actually make decisions, used AI to profile thousands of decision makers across hundreds of buyer journeys, and wrote a book about it called The Hidden Buyer Journey.

Now, Pat Spinner, co-author of The Challenger Customer, wrote the foreword and basically said this is where Challenger Customer left off. And here's what got me fired up about this conversation. Scott leaves out four selling relationships, machine to machine, machine to human, human to machine, and human to human. Three of them are growing. The only one that's shrinking is human to human, and nobody is protecting it. That lines up with something I've been saying for a while now, which is that I'm not worried about the fact that these tools are replacing sales reps. I'm worried about when the buyer wakes up and realizes that they don't need us. So we got into that. We got into how 85% of buyers never show up in your CRM.

My corporate culture predicts deal velocity better than your pipeline metrics. We got into return on effort versus return on investment, and what the sales of the future actually looks like. This one's definitely going to make you think. Let's make it happen. Hey, real quick. If you heard me last year, you know I stopped taking manual notes on all my sales calls. Yes, I'm still using otter.ai, but now I'm using their desktop app, which means there's no bot jumping into my sales calls. And honestly, it's become way more than just a note taker. With the desktop app, otter captures all my sales calls and turns them into searchable insights that sink straight into my CRM. And then I can ask otter chat any question about any meeting or conversation I've ever recorded.

The best part? Chat is now connected with all the tools I use. So if something's buried in tools like Notion, Google Drive, Gmail, Salesforce, whatever, I can still find it all without leaving otter. But here's what I actually love about it. The knowledge doesn't disappear when the call ends. It lives in otter. I can spot patterns across my pipeline, remember exactly what was said, and walk into my next call way more prepared. The time it saves me is absolutely ridiculous. And that's before you even get into what it does for teams. I'm partnering with otter to give you an exclusive offer. Go to otter.ai forward slash jbsales to learn more and start selling smarter today. Scott Gillum, welcome back to the Make It Happen Monday podcast.

My friend, how you doing today? Good. It's good to be back, John. Yeah. Good to be coming back on. Of course. I think it was back. I'd looked at the notes. It was like June of 21 is when the last time we talked, which feels like a lifetime ago at this point, quite frankly. You know, it was after COVID. So things were somewhat settling down a little bit. We were, I mean, quote unquote, getting back to normal, which I've always found hysterical people talking about. But a lot's changed since then. You've spent seven years, ever since then plus more writing this book and doing some research on what I think is a massively timely topic right now. And it hits on the biggest pain point and fear that I have.

And so for those of you listening, it's the hidden buyer journey. And it's all about the buyer's use of intelligence here. So first of all, why did you think, I mean, book, book are usually labors of love. So for everybody listening, by the way, go look at Scott, go listen to the other podcast for the background. I know you always like the art story here, but check them out on LinkedIn and check out the podcast back in 2021. I don't want to revisit that, but why the book? Cause it usually books a labor of love. Like you don't really have it. You know, you're not going to make a ton of money. It's a wicked pain in the ass to do. So what really drove you to say, I want to write a book and I need to write this right now.

Yeah. And your setup's right. Like no sane person would write a book because it is incredibly laborious, challenging. Even when you think you're done, you're not done. Um, so this book took three years to write. Um, and it's based on seven years of research. And the reason why I ended up writing it now was AI is coming and it's changing the game. And I, we've learned a lot over seven years on how on the buyer side, right? So we, there are not a lot of books in the marketplace that talk about buying. There's a ton of books around selling, right? So this was written around what we've learned about behavior. So we study personality types and we apply that. And this is built on observational research where we're inside of clients looking at their data and we are looking at the key two things related to personality, your motivations and your behaviors.

And we've learned a lot about that first from a marketing standpoint and then for sales. And the reason I wrote the book is there is a much better way for us to do sales and marketing and really, truly understand buyers on a one-to-one level that can help us provide a performance boost big time. And it's taking advantage of using AI, but not having AI replace the human seller. It's about enhancing the human, the human sale. So I'm going to come out with kind of my biggest fear and walk me back from it. Um, because I, I, I'm really trying to stay optimistic here and I am optimistic for the top of the top, across the board, whatever profession you are, the top 20%, I think are always going to be fine.

Okay. The bottom 80% now though, is the one I'm the bottom, like I do this 10, 60, 30 thing, right? Like 30% are irrelevant, 60% of the mid and 10%. Um, so the 10% great, but marketing is getting so good with personalization with all my entire digital footprint. My theory is people are like, Oh, our inbox is going to be garbage in the future. I actually disagree. I think our inbox is going to be absolutely spot on because if I go on an Instagram, for instance, my Instagram feed is everything I want. Every advertising on there is something I'm interested in. Um, I think in the future, my inbox is going to be super hyper relevant, personalized stuff based on exactly what I need. And I don't necessarily know if I need a human to do that.

Um, so where is the value of the, of the human sales rep in this equation when marketing can know me so well and the buyer has so much power to do their own research on my stuff? Where is the value of the sales professional specifically? It's, it's a really good concern and question, right? What you're describing is on the consumer side, right? It's looking at you as a consumer, right? And it's gotten really good. What we're trying to do with this book is bring that over to B2B and kind of insights and tools that are being used on the consumer side. We can use it on B2B side, right? And in the book, I open up talking about the four models that we're in right now. We're in human to human, which has been around for a really long time.

We're in machine to human, human to machine and machine to machine. Those three are growing. One is shrinking is human to human. So it's really good. At the end of the book, I talk about everything you're going to learn through this book from the last third of it on is all very practical about how to become a better human seller. And what it is, is connecting back to what you said about the 20%. What I'm showing through the last five, six chapters is really good sales reps always did these things intuitively. Instinctively, they know how to do these things. The other 80%, that's not natural to them, but there are ways now, there are methods and there's tools and everything else that I walked through that says, I can take this 80% and make them into 20% now.

Really? What are some of those characteristics that you found? That you can teach. That you can teach. And I say that because grit, curiosity, these are all things that are kind of really hard to teach later on in life. You can maybe instill them in your kids, but there's certain intangibles, the EQ components of this that are brutal to teach. Yes. It is about the EQ factor. In fact, I show side by side sale. We went down and read sales emails in the course of deals closing, right? And what we're showing is this is a salesperson that has this type of personality engaging with the buyer with this type of personality. And you can see it go wrong. You can see this person is not flexing and understanding the buyer and with signals that the buyer is sending and adjusting their style.

So one of the big insights is how to adjust your style. The chapter is called the sales chameleon. And it's about how to adjust your style to match the style of the buyer or the buyers on the other side. And what's really interesting is this is also regional, right? The example I give, one of the examples, it's a Northeast dominant driver sales rep dealing with a Midwest company, which is a skeptic buyer. Disaster. Well, that's why when I do my trainings, I'm always like, look, I'm going to give you some foundational structure, science art, right? The science I'm going to give you is universal. The art is personal and local. There's some stuff that's going to come out of my mouth when I do a training that you're going to hear and say, are you kidding me?

If I ever said that to any one of my clients, I would get thrown out in a heartbeat. But I tell them, I go, that's okay. Cause I don't, you shouldn't say what I say because I've learned how to adapt. And I think that was also as much as like neuro-linguistic programming has gotten a bum rap as far as like, it's been overused and that type of thing. That was actually an unlock for me when I, when I learned about neuro-linguistic programming and the three types of communicators, visual auditory and kinesthetic and that whole thing. Because I always knew that I was different, but I didn't think it mattered. It was just whatever, this is who I am. And then when I realized I'm a high D I'm a visual and you know, when I'm selling to a kinesthetic, who's a, you know, needs data and analytics, and those are a high C or something like that, I had to change my style, especially as, and I think the bigger thing for me was also as a trainer because in a sales scenario, one, two people, you can kind of hopefully pick up on some cues.

But in a room of 30 people, you got to figure out a way to connect with as many people as possible with all sorts of different learning experiences. So kind of where is the, the psychology component to this when you're, when you're trying to encourage reps to evolve here? Is it go take a psychology class, go get your disc profile, go understand, you know, those types of things? It is. And it talks about the tools that are available now. So there's tools like Crystal Nose and Humantic AI, where not only can you understand the buyer personality type, but then you can also look at yours compared to the buyer and you can look at where I need to make these adjustments. Right. And so I'm dealing with someone who is, has low risk tolerance, but I'm high risk.

Like I've got to really understand that I've got to try to eliminate the risk for this person in making a bad decision or feeling like they bought too much. Right. So it's really starting to get in tune with yourself, but also understand how to adjust those styles to meet the buyers. And you're right. We don't use psychographic data enough in sales. We use it in B2C. This is one of the reasons we were talking about that marketing and B2B is just starting to pick up on it. But for sales, that is like green space. Like that's wide open. It does. And it doesn't, because it's so effective on the B2C side of the house. I don't understand why it hasn't adopted more, especially from a marketing. I get sales reps.

We're there in the moment where, you know, we're not that bright. We're going to see students, that type of thing. Who cares? But marketing, I mean, from a B2B standpoint, it is so obvious to me that, that they, that this, and the information, and now with AI, you don't even need a crystal nose. You can literally, I just did a session last week for, you know, webinar where I called it personas and personalities. And, and I was like, look here, here's an example. I'm meeting with this person. Here's all their LinkedIn profile work, you know, posts. Here's the email correspondence that I have with them. Here's a transcript of a call that I had. Hey, AI, could you tell me what profile this person is?

Hi D, whatever. Oh, by the way, now I'm writing an email to them. Could you adjust my email to their personality style, please? So that it gets, you know, more likely to open. And it was like, and people were like, holy smokes. I'm like, this stuff has been around forever. But, but, but why, why isn't marketing picked up on that from a B2B standpoint? Is it just tradition? Is it just like, that's the way things have been done so, so long and nobody's willing to break that? It's a fascinating question because even when we were working with our clients in marketing, it'll stick for a little bit and then it'll go back. And I think it's because of the pace it is, you know, ready, fire, aim. Just feed the engine, right?

Always on. We've always got to be pumping things out. And I think one of the key things we have to realize right now is that we're, we've tapped the volume game, right? We're on the top yield curve when it comes to volume. It's about conversion and really thinking about how do we get better at conversion and do that. We have to really better understand our industries, better understand the corporate cultures we're dealing with and understanding people. And that's kind of what I lay out is like, there's a better way to understand how to position value in an industry. There's a much better way to understand how corporate culture drives decision-making inside of organizations. And then all the way down to how people behave in a buying group.

You can get into the psychographics of the buying group, which really starts to get interesting. Well, this is, that's why I found your, your, uh, forward fascinating, right? Cause who, uh, it was the guy who wrote Pat Spenner, right? Who wrote the challenger customer. Yeah. Which is a really good followup to challenger sale, right? So challenger sale, like, I think they even admitted in challenger customer, like, Hey, okay, you could be as big of a challenger as you want, but if the customer isn't like, you know, you're not, good luck. So it, and I think he said your book is where customer, uh, that one left off. Yeah. Why was that? What, what did, what he's, what did he kind of admit to you when you, in your conversations with him that, that, um, challenger customer missed and why this is so important to add as an addendum almost?

I don't, I don't think it missed anything. Um, Pat and I were working together to create, he was at CEB, now Gartner. I was at an agency and we had contributed to the book. Then we were starting to build challenger marketing off of the research and the principles in the book. And one of the areas, if you remember in the book is the discussion around mobilizers. And this is research on what makes a good buyer, right? Just like challenger sales, like what makes a good salesperson. This was what makes a good buyer. And so Pat and I are trying to figure out how to target these mobilizers. So in the book, they identify seven different types of mobilizers. They're basically stakeholders in the buying group and how they behave.

Right. And there are three that you really want to go after and try to target because they move the buying group forward or they can get to a decision. And so Pat and I try to find a way to target these with media. And it was at the time, things weren't developed, we couldn't do it. What we really have to do is like hang content out and see who hits it and then figure out what they were. It wasn't until 2019 when I saw an AI profiling tool that was built off a disc that I realized the attributes of these mobilizers match attributes of disc. And that's when I could start to identify those things. So for example, a go-getter mobilizer is a dominant in disc, right? Now I could find them by name and we could then start to figure out how to send the right type of content.

And then we could pick up taking online behaviors and say, okay, what are they interested in seeing? What are they opening, right? What are they attending? So that's like the beginning of the seven years. We started there really looking at what are those online behaviors and how do they match with offline behaviors? How much does, I was thinking of this because that's why I did personas and personalities, right? Because you kind of bulk groups in and you kind of make assumptions about groups. Okay. Like you said, Northeast, right? High Ds, right? Maybe CFOs are a little bit more conservative and kinesthetic types. Did you find that certain groups of personas all shared similar characteristics or were their personalities as different as they are in the general public?

You know, the, the, uh, quote of Meyer, uh, Meyer Angelo, um, we are more alike than we are disaligned. Okay. Yeah. Or something along the lines. Yeah. The birds of the feather also analogy works here as well. People gravitate in particular, if you have advanced degrees to certain roles into certain industries. And we, we talk about that in the book. For example, we looked at the airline industry. If you're in operations, in the airline industry, there's a 60% chance you are dominant or you're a conscientious. Okay. Right. Skeptical data driven. And you think about the industry it's run on efficiency, right? You can perfection and precision coming out of the sky, right? Yep. The more we saw airline industries that were their business models were built on efficiency, the more conscientious people we saw working in those companies.

And so SIS, uh, CISOs, chief information security officers, 60, 65% of those are conscientious. Detail oriented, right? Analytically driven. It makes sense. When you start to look at these things that you can target large groups with highly personalized messages, because there is this grouping, you become oftentimes who you are as a person in your role. Yeah. I can, I mean, most sales reps, right? Like high D's disorganized, you know, that type of thing. And, and it's funny because those characteristics, when you really start to reflect on yourself, I think it's super important to do your own, right? Yeah. Pick a, pick a, you know, disc, whatever, pick one of them just so you can kind of see your own.

Cause man, like that's why crystal nose blew me away when I first saw it because it knew me so well. I actually had to call up drew the CEO. And I was like, dude, how do you know this about me? Cause it was like, John doesn't like waiting in line. And you know, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like what in the world? How do you know this? Because it's so, but it's so easy based on what we put out there, like how we talk, the words that we use, how we write, how we interact. If your email is two or three lines versus a paragraph, like those things matter. And I'm, I'm curious, like from a marketing standpoint, are we moving into a world where everything is going to be personalized?

Cause I'm hearing now, like websites are going to be automatically adjustable based on who, like, as soon as I log into your website, it's going to know who I am, what I do, all that stuff. And I'm going to have a completely different experience than you are when you log into that exact same website. Are we moving in that direction? Dynamic websites have been a dream for a long time. Right. Right. But now it's potential reality, right? Yeah. We're getting closer. I haven't seen evidence of any of that happening yet. It'll happen in the consumer side first. And I haven't looked on that side. It may be already happening on the consumer side from business to business. I haven't seen, but that is the promise.

And we probably will be there quickly. Yeah. So let's talk about some of the things. What was something in the seven years of research, what was a surprise to you? What was like some of the data point you were like, Oh my God, like that is either super counterintuitive or I am shocked. What was one of those things? So this is one of my favorites and it answered something I had been chasing for 20 years, trying to figure out the answer to this. It has to do with marketing attribution. Like why is it so hard to connect content that is being used in the buying group, right? To the deal. Right. Initially, and I honestly started this 20 years ago and what we thought was sales reps are so busy, they're not putting in the information of what kind of content they're using.

Right. So if I'm sending a white paper, I'm not like, okay, I did it in white paper. And then we thought maybe sales enablement tools will pick up on that. Like maybe we'll see it in Gong and other things, but it's not. So we got a chance to look at 20 and now it's 50 deals from the start to either in progress still or completed, maybe decision, no decision, right. We're getting all the way through. So we're looking at 12 months, 15 months of data. And what we found, which is most interesting is it's not the content that's not entered. It's the buyers 85% of deals that we've looked at the buyers in the buying group were not in any database sales or marketing. Jesus. And the reason for this, and this is fascinating is typically what you'll see is there'll be two people that do the initial outreach.

Those two people are usually in a database because they start the opportunity. Right. So there's probably in Salesforce or HubSpot, whatever it is, but as it progresses in particular, when you get to demo and trial stage, those buyers expand. You have all these people now attending a demo or attending and doing a trial. They don't enter into CRM anywhere. Right. And then we get down to final presentation. People drop out, new people come in, new enter, right. They don't go in to the database because at the time the reps are so busy trying to get the MSA in place and they're trying to get the trial set up and they're trying to do the demo and they're putting a presentation together. They don't put it in.

And what's really, I think missing the opportunity for sales is if you do have these people in the Salesforce, you can then track intent signals. Right. Because what happens is you have all these new buyers entering in a process that's been going on for six to seven months and they burst their activities on websites. They're downloading things. They're looking at things. They're trying to get up to speed. We miss it all. So I show example of like how people come in and then if you have them, I give an example. We were able to have a client with a deal that they had 10 straight losses to this competitor, but they were able to win this because the CEO was in the database and started bursting on intent.

And we saw he searched on cashflow 35 times. And then we went to the sales team and said, why is the CEO looking at cashflow? And they said, it's real time project profitability. That's his big concern. Like, okay, build this entire line of presentation around that. They ended up winning. So this kind of leads to my sell to the 20% mentality here, which is, you know, my fundamental belief that pick a product or service that you own. It doesn't matter. Guarantee you only use 10 to 20% of the functionality or whatever that is. Um, and so, you know, sell to that because that's the way that's how people use. So therefore that's how I believe people buy. I don't believe they buy the whole package.

They buy the part that's most relevant to them. And I think the challenge with challenger customer, for instance, is, you know, your priorities versus that person's priorities versus this person's priorities, figuring out your 20% and then that Venn diagram in the middle there. So how do you, I, are, are we moving or with what you've seen, are we headed towards the, we're going to be able to know what that 20% is without even like that much just quote unquote, traditional discovery because of your intent, because of your personality, because of those things. So I can tailor my presentations to just talk about those things for you. You can get a lot closer than we've ever been. You know, there's these internal conversations going on that we're not privy to, but you can pick up a lot more currently on what is it that they're really trying to do.

And I think that's one of the biggest misses that we have right now is that no, none of our tools or a lot of our reps put this in is the motivation. Like companies have a lot of problems to solve, right? There's no, there's no shortage of that. The question is, what are they motivated to solve and why? And then within that buying group, who's motivated and why to move this forward? Are they going to benefit? So there's dominance, there's high piece. If it's going to benefit them and advance their career, you know what they're in, right? And if you know that they're in, then you start to communicate in a way that we're using personalized language around what's in it for them, right? So that we're, there's a lot of data that's available currently that we're not using.

And particularly when you start to put it together with who these people are, not titles and roles. They don't make decisions. People make decisions. When you start to talk to people and use this insight, you're, you're going to be much more effective. How much of the benefit to them to like, what's in it for me, right? As it relates to the org chart, for instance, my theory and experience without data and analysis behind it is the lower you get on that chart, the more personal it becomes. Like, how can I, how can I use this thing to benefit me, my career, that type of thing. Whereas the higher you go on the food chart, it's more about the business, the company and everything, but there's obviously ego involved in all of it.

But is that a, is that a general, generally accurate or is everybody personalized? Is everybody really ultimately concerned with themselves and how this makes them or how this makes their life easier? Hey, taking a quick break here to remind you to check out some of my sales training programs at jbarrows.com and use discount code podcast for 20% off the individual packages. If you're not interested in training or you don't think you need it, then you can still support me by leaving a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform or G2. If you've already gone through my training before, you can also sign up for my newsletter on jbarrows.com where every single week I put out a newsletter that breaks down what I'm learning out there, some of the new tips and tools and tech and resources that I'm coming across and some stories from the streets of train wrecks that I go through and stuff not to do.

So if you could do one of those things, either sign up for the membership, give me a five-star review or follow me on the newsletter, it would mean the world to me. Thanks for your support. Now let's get back to the show. It's a really good question. It depends on the corporate culture on how that connects. If you have a corporate culture that is very dominant-driven, like Netflix, for example, very dominant-driven. They pumped out, I think, 135 projects last year. This is the company that goes at light speed, right? In that environment, they really put a lot of decision-making power lower in that organization to move quick. So yeah, if you're like at a director, senior manager level inside that organization, you see personalized wins all the time because they've given you that responsibility to move quick, right?

Another structured organization, highly structural, like we looked at a South Korean company. It's not down there. It's up at the top because of the culture. So it depends on what you're dealing with, but you can figure out where those wins are within the organization based on the culture. Because you said corporate culture predicts deal velocity better than any other factor, not pipeline, not medic, not activities. So how do you measure culture? That's, this is another really important point that gets missed that we don't use and it's so easy to do. Corporate culture. So people make up companies. That's a great thing. And corporate culture is driven from the top down. If you profile the personalities of the senior executive team, and then where other functional area you're selling into, whether it's like cyber security, so you're in IT or if you're ever in sales or marketing, right?

You take the senior executive team, try to get like 20, 20 white people. And then you take that area you're selling into and combine that. That will give you a pie chart of the personalities. And we call it the two thirds rule. It happens every time. Two thirds, at least two thirds of that makeup of that organization is going to just be two personality types. And one of the personality types is probably going to be 50%. Once you understand that, I'll give you an example, construction company, Fortune 500 construction company. We profiled 22 senior executives, 21 out of 22 had the same personality. We're all just diversity, right? That we talk about, backgrounds and experience, right? Birds of a flock together.

The personalities are the same. Is that a good thing or a bad thing for corporate culture, right? Because in the general sense, diversity has been proven to elevate companies as far as different backgrounds, ethnicities, you know, whatever. But does, does personality alignment work in their favor or against? I don't know. Maybe that'll be the second book. I don't know. But what I will say is that if you are a personality that is different from that core personality, you probably feel it when you walk in the door. So for a dominant personality type culture, which is extremely driven, fast moving, if you're a steady, you're going to feel very uncomfortable in that environment, unless you're in a pocket somewhere.

Like we find people migrating to like procurement. We'll find a lot of studies in procurement, right? It's kind of predictable. It's nine to five job, right? So you'll find that migration, but a lot of times they will leave. You know, the age old saying body reject the organ, you'll see that all the time because of the personalities. When do you think the buyers are going to wake up? And I, and I go back to that, my, my original concern, right? It's not the sales reps. Yeah, we can get better, but it's as a solopreneur right now, as somebody who just had the unlock of Claude co-work about three weeks ago, you know, I know Kung Fu, right? Matrix stuff. I don't think I'm ever going to talk to another sales rep again from a buying standpoint.

Just again, I'm a solopreneur. I can break things. There's not a lot of security enterprise, stuff like that. So I get it with the, but, but when is the enterprise buyer? Cause right now I used to work at IT services, right? And there's a product called Kaseya that manages all your debt, you know, knows all the software on your entire system, right? So why aren't we in a position already where, and I know you can, where you just say, hey, uh, here, help me put together my 12 to 24 month business plan about our, our goals. Now, could you do an analysis of all our tech stack, figure out which ones we're not using from an adoption standpoint, cut those ones out and then identify the top three vendors that we need, uh, go to them, put an RFP together, send it to their procurement department, get that RFP back, evaluate that.

And now again, like, when is that coming? Cause it's coming the machine to machine. Well, that's kind of like the mini human and mostly machine to machine. Um, when is that coming? Do you think from what you see? Yeah. When we, when the trust of the machine goes above the trust of a human, yeah, that's it. That's the threshold. And the machines are pushing on both ends, right? Of the, the selling and then the buying process. So you've got machines on both ends. What we're trying to do is say there's another level of human selling in the middle, right? There's a, there's a way to become more valuable. And if you look at what's happening is the value on the front end and some of the value on the back end machines can do it better.

Um, you know, getting spam, but you know, somebody doesn't know your company with an email that's generic that there's no value there, right? But someone's taking their time, done their research, know how their product or solution fits your needs and understand your needs pretty well. And you as a, as a buyer, as a person, right? There's high value in there, but that takes effort. And as the machine can do better than the person or the person doesn't want to put the effort in, the machine will do it. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we did research with a thousand irons, number one driver for why they chose the vendor was trust. Yeah. And it's interesting there. I think the Gartner report updated now, it used to be 43% of B2B buyers want to rep free experience.

Now I think it's 85%. But, and I always say the flip side of, well, that's the bad news, right? The good news is on the, the previous stat was 43% of one of the rep free experience, but 20, but, uh, they had a 23% higher regret rate. So they regretted decisions more when we weren't involved. Okay. So there's value for us. Now it is deals close one time, 1.8 times more when a human's involved. And, and I don't know if that's a good, I mean, that's a good thing from a sales standpoint, obviously, cause we get to sell more, but I don't know if it's necessarily a good thing from a buyer standpoint, but I'm, that's the part that I'm trying to figure out how do we equip sales reps to sell in this world where that is the objection, period.

First of all, why do I need to talk to you? Second of all, what value do you bring to this equation? Because I can get my own demo now. I can look at reviews. I can ask, you know, somebody tells me, well, there's always going to be a need for a sales rep because sales reps ask questions that they don't, you know, that people don't even know they should be asking. Oh really? Hey Claude, could you act as the best sales rep from XYZ company and ask me the questions that I'm not even sure I'm, I should be asking right now. Like it's a, it's a people who keep fighting that fight to me are, are going to be run over really, really quick. So I'm just trying to figure out how can we equip this generation of sales professionals to survive and thrive and, and, and add a lot of value in this world where AI is going to just talk to AI, talk to AI, talk to AI.

It's using AI to make you make yourself a better buyer or seller, but you are a better seller by becoming a better under a better person and understanding buying. And once you understand that process of how people buy and it doesn't fit a process or methodology, it doesn't fit what we have today. Our tools are not built to really truly reflect how people, not titles and roles, how people make a purchase decision in a group. Yeah. Right. This, this is like, if you really simplify everything, I'll simplify sales and marketing first. At the end of the day, sales and marketing objectives are very, very similar. We're trying to get someone to take action. That's simple. Right. And that action in marketing is open an email, attend a webinar, blah, blah, blah.

Right. On the sales side, I want you to take a demo, do a trial, make a decision, right? If we come back to that, that's a very simple thing. What gets complicated is when you take that person and you put them inside of a group and you put them inside of a company and you put them inside of an industry becomes very complicated. You understand, how do I get that person to advocate for us, advocate for our solution, taking action. You can do that now. You can bundle that. We have the right tools to be able to help you understand that complexity and then how to navigate it and become a better seller. There's an example we ran into like the seller of the future. He's the Swiss army knife of sales.

He was selling across three different company product lines. And every time we didn't bring it up, the customers we interviewed brought his name up across the product lines in different companies. In each one, he was doing something different. They valued him for something else in each of the situations. One area, he was able to create a consolidated invoice for a company was flying across three product lines. The company couldn't even do that today. We still don't figure it. We can't figure out how he did that, but he did. Then we had another scenario where he's talking with product engineers and designing the next product. So he's able to have an engineering to engineer conversation. And then the last one, he's able to actually figure out how to quickship.

So the business model that the company was selling to is they guaranteed 24 hour shipping. He was able to figure out how to get the products and supply and set them up on auto buy so that they could do quickships. Three different scenarios. Guy was loved, right? Because he was able to understand where he was valued inside of those organizations. And he like knocked it out of the park. And that's where I think, you know, I did a, I did a keynote at Pavilion a few months back and it was called anything but predictable. And it was basically my thesis that predictable revenue ruins sales. The segmentation of roles and turning sales into an assembly line ruins the art of sales. And I'm a huge science fan of sales.

Like I always talk science and art, all that stuff. I think sales should be more of a science because the structure and the foundation, blah, blah, blah. But the art's personal, right? I think we have swung so far to the science side that it's obvious why sales reps are becoming irrelevant because we've turned them into robots and now they're robot. They're getting replaced by robots. Yeah. You just described 50% of my book. You just described 50% of the book. Right. And that's, that's where it's just like, holy shit. You know, we have a whole generation and I positioned 2010 to 2022 as the golden age of sales. Like if you got in there at that point, it's especially, well, tech sales, you know, blasting out template emails, you know, asking dumb ass band questions, droning through demos.

Like it was a frustrating buying experience. It was never a customer centric way of selling. Nobody wants to be handed off 15 times before they talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about. But it was great for us with scale. Now it's broken in so many ways and the tolerance for it, even though it was accepted back then. Cause that's just the way it was, you know what I mean? Like, okay, I got to wait a week to talk to a kid who actually knows what you're talking about. I got to deal with this SDR, fine, whatever. Now I don't have to deal with any of that shit. My tolerance for value is very high. Like I need or low, whatever you want to say. Like if you, if I am not getting value out of this conversation, I'm gone.

Yeah. And that's why the buy, like, so how do we shift? Here's a question for you. How do we shift the, the sales stage mentality? Cause I've always hated the sales stage. It's like, oh, we're in discovery. It's like, what? So you stopped asking questions like, oh, you're in the negotiation stage. You haven't been negotiating from the minute you've been start talking. Like, so I think it putting them in these silos actually consciously or subconsciously kind of puts us into that frame of mind when we're talking to the client, because it's in that stage. So how do you, you know, sales VPs, how do we as a sales culture adapt to a buying framework that is, that is all over the place? Is there any way we can put structure to the buying process?

Yeah. It's, it's a really good point because we, we silo our technologies as well, right? So our, our, our stacks are for very specific points of our sales process, not the buyer's journey. And as a result, there's no tool exists, even though demand base is working on some things that I've seen, it's not great that you can identify a buying group and then take that buying group through the sales journey or the buyer's journey, right? It doesn't exist. And that's what we have to design is how do we figure out who's involved in that buyer's journey? And then how are they taking that journey? And through engaging and understanding humans, people, we get a lot closer than here's my, you know, ICP, which is generic is all, you know, right.

It's title industry driven. It's not what happens. It's not how people buy. And if you start to understand how people buy, by looking at the information that's coming at you right now, currently, you can take online behaviors, match it up with human behaviors, and you can figure out what's really happening. You can take sales conversations, pull those out, look at those conversations, analyze it from a human perspective. You can see what's going on. You can see where you're alienating a buyer because you're not being responsive, or you can see where you're not providing the information they're asking for because you're not listening. And you can see where you're not being empathetic to that person's situation inside that organization.

Right. Where he's trying to make everybody happy. He's up against the wall as well. Like help him make everybody inside the organization happy. So it's coming back to like human selling. This is something we do in our lives every day. So your kids trying to keep practice before they go to school. Right. You sell your spouse on going out, you know, for a date or to see a movie. We do this naturally. We put all this technology and these processes in the way of it. And that's where like, you know, I, again, I just wrote the post this morning. There's this empathy. Yeah. I call it the give a shit factor. It's the one thing I keep holding on to that AI can't do. Like it can pretend to care. My shit.

Claude tells me how great I am all the time. You know, I got to literally keep putting personalization and behind it be like, dude, stop kissing my ass. I need you to be a contrarian here. I need you to force back, but it can make us feel good, but fundamentally it can't care. Um, and that's what I said. The unlock is for most reps is when they catch, I call catching your sales group. It's, it's when you stop, you know, going through the motions, basically asking the questions, just to ask the questions, you know, giving the pitch because you're supposed to, and you actually start giving a shit about the person that you're having a conversation with them. Think about, think of them as a human, right.

As, as somebody who gets up in the morning, gets their kids to school, sits in traffic, has a boss yelling at them, all these different things. Like once you can make that human connection of how you, because you know, it's still true that, that nobody remembers facts and figures. They remember how you make them feel. Yeah. Empathy makes somebody feel heard. Yeah. So I'm, I'm less concerned with that than I am with the robots buying, because then there's no empathy. Then there's no human connection. And that's the part that quite frankly, terrifies me for this entire industry. Yeah. Two points related to that. One is the empathy, right? How people remember that experience with you, they'll tell others.

And when you're selling to a CISO, for example, their top four information sources are people to people. Yeah. It is word of mouth. It's a trust factor, right? So that benefits you to do those things because it'll get you future business betting on who you're selling to. The second point is, this is why I'm so confident in the book. The AI is not going to replace human to humans because we are training AI on bad process and bad performance right now. Yeah. It is learning from our data. It's learning from, right? A close rate that who knows what it is, right? At this point, it's not good. And for marketing in response rates and open rates and performance and marketing is terrible. It's like three to 5%, right?

Or something like that. Yeah. And we're training these tools on really bad practices. Yeah. And that there's a whole theory of you've been following the theory of the dead internet, because from what I understand, 30% of the content that's already on the internet is AI generated. So it's almost like an incest scenario where they keep having, you know, babies of their own. I don't know. It's just going to be like, you know, straight up. I can't say the word, but you know what I'm talking about. So the, you know, are we, are we headed in that direction where the internet is basically just going to be filled with crap for this AI to continue to adjust? Yeah. It's a, it's a really good point. So AI searches already in Google is leading the way on this where, um, the highest ranking content is based on authority.

So you have to be the source. If you're not the source right now, you're noise. If you're just taking other people's information and you're repackaging it, you will not get ranked. You're not going to show up in, in the AI search. So, um, it's going to become, the authorities are going to really stand out like this, the sources of information that is original. And I guess what is, so I'm loving to hear that because I think authenticity is what I've built my whole brand off of and content, but what about original, you know, how, what is original, right? So is original, like me literally typing, or does a, like, if I use my AI to write a newsletter, that is my original thought, but AI writes the majority of it and I tweak it.

Is that something that Google's picking up on that this was written with AI? Um, even though John is the original source. So I'm, I, I, this is just a nerd out question from a marketing standpoint. I'm curious if, like, if, if me using AI to write my original thought is going to hurt the algorithm paying attention to that. No, because it's the source data. So ask like Claude, right. Where, what are your top sources of information? Yeah. Right. So the academic space is actually going to become much more important and powerful nerd is, uh, it is the original thinking of it, how you package it. It's the original originality of the thought. Okay, cool. That makes me feel better. Cause, cause that's what, I mean, I've been saying for, for, for me personally, you know, I never was intentional about building my brand.

I just did, right. I just shared good content. I'd try to be authentic with what I did. And, you know, and it's been a struggle because I've never had the, I've never taken the hack, right. So like, Oh, I get 50,000 followers now. So my growth has been really slow, but my hope is, is that now there's a golden age of, of all the work that I put in with that content, with that, you know, stuff that, that will now, you know, I'll have that blue check mark, if you will, on the, on the content scale. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we do a lot of paid social and paid search and, um, you know, what LinkedIn is telling you is performance is not real performance in a B2B environment. No way. Yeah. Cause that's your ecosystem.

That's your, that's your followers. It's not the reality of it. And nobody can figure out LinkedIn's algorithm because they change it every day for crying out loud. Yeah. If you have to focus on one thing that's going to drive business, yeah, it's the word of mouth. It is do a good job, create an experience, deliver on the value that you promise you will get talked about and you will get into the role. The marketing side has always worked that way. It's always been word of mouth, right? Sales is going to become very similar. It's going to be word of mouth almost exclusively. And then it's going to be authorities. It's going to come down to these things. Word of mouth, authorities, and they may be the same thing.

Yeah. That's why building your brand is an important thing, man. I think, you know, no, no rep, like not no, a lot of reps that I work with, they're just, you know, yeah, yeah, I get it. Build my brand, but I got to hit my number. And, and quite frankly, I, you know, it's hard to justify because there's no short-term benefit in building your brand as an authority or whatever. It's more of a long-term play. And we're in, unfortunately, such a short-term focused world that it's hard to get people to think about that and do that. But I can't tell you, I mean, I can't put into just like quantifying, you know, the value of, of, of a culture. I can't quantify the value of brands, but I'll tell you, it matters.

And it's going to matter more now than ever. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's not, we are now, I mean, we've talked about this forever, you know, don't work harder, work smarter. Yeah. Now we, now we can't, we have amazing tools that can allow us to be much smarter and use our time much more efficiently and use the buyer's time much more efficiently and increase the value there. Are we still in, from your last question on my end, are they, are we still in the like efficiency versus results? Because I'm waiting for, you know, you see all these, including myself, like I am super efficient with stuff that I used to take me hours. Now it takes me minutes. I'm still not seeing like a drastic improvement in results though.

So going back to like the marketing efforts, right? Like three to 5%, we're training it on this shit. Um, when do you think there's gonna, and obviously this is a general question, but when do you think we're going to shift to the, Ooh, we're getting better results because we're using this, not just we're becoming more efficient. Yeah. It's a great point. If you're trying to sell ROI with any AI tool, you're done, right? This is return on effort. Everything we're seeing now is measured on return on effort. Even agents, right? Agents take a lot of management time and that's not being discussed. Like you're, if you're going to replace your people with agents, you better have like done your homework on how, and the reality of managing agents because they can actually require more time than managing people.

Yeah. So this is all now about return on effort. Yeah. I love that. I think you got to coin that, man. Uh, cause I like, I think that's a, that's a, that's probably what I'm going to put as the title of this podcast, which is return on effort versus return. Because I've said that now for a while, like ROI is a bull, it's always been kind of bullshit, but now ROI, ROI is a promise today for a future, like money today for a future promise. And I don't know about you. I can't even look six days in front of me, forget about six months, a year, two years. So you promising me something in the future, fix my problem today. And then we'll talk about the future and overproduce. Like you said, so you can get the word of mouth and, and, you know, give a, help me solve this problem.

That's why I think PLG is, is taking off more than anything because it's like, get it in my hands, help me solve this problem now. And then we can talk about the other stuff that you got. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Awesome. Scott. Well, look, I think we could unpack a lot of this, but I want to leave more for the listeners to go get it. So when is the, is the book out already? Or is it, um, sorry. Uh, it'll be mid June. Um, if you want to visit our website, the carbon design.com website, there's a preregister for the book page on the book. And so if you want to learn more about it, um, as mentioned, Pat Spinner, co-author, challenger customer, right. Wrote the forward. Um, got some people really jazzed up on the insights in it.

And it's, you know, it's a lot of times you pick up a business book and you read the first chapter and then you're like, I got the whole book. Yeah. Yeah. This book doesn't work that way. Wait till the end. Yeah. You're just, I had somebody review, you know, you send the book out and you have a lot of people look at it and give you feedback. And a lot of times it's brutal. My client is very mean versus yours is brutal with me. Um, so are my friends and one person's like, I think you have too much in this book. Like you gotta pull stuff out. I'm like, no, I want people to use, even if they take one thing from the book and they apply it and it helps them. That's what I want. I want people to be able to make more money, reach their goals.

That's really what it's all about. And there are ways to be able to take these insights and apply them. And in fact, the end of the last seven chapters, I give exercises like here's how to take this insight and apply it to your business today. Nice. Love that. And I think that's the, that's the unlock, right? That's the, when I talk about at the end of every training, I do 10, 60, 30, right? 10% you're going to be taking a run with it. 30% of you get, you know, 60% of you go to something different because it's easy and it makes sense. And 30% ain't going to do shit different. Um, the 10% is always going to be the 10%. They're always going to take whatever it is out of whatever it is. The 30%, unfortunately right now is irrelevant.

And I think they know it. The bottom part of that sick middle part, the B players, unfortunately, they're the ones who are irrelevant and they don't know it. Um, but it's the ones in the top end of that 60%. Those are the ones that I try to focus on the ones who care and who care and work hard and smart are, are willing to put in the work because even though we can work smart now, you still have to work your fucking ass off to be successful. So anybody who's trying to hack their way into efficiencies without actually putting in the work, it's actually, it's going to be a compounding problem because you're not going to learn anything along the way. And so it sounds like hopefully this book will get a few of that middle 60% at least to, to see the few, see what they're, they're faced with right now and realize they have to get moving and they have to get moving now.

Yes. If you want to get better, there's a way. Yes, there is. You just got to be willing to put in the work, man. So awesome, Scott. Well, I love the conversation as usual. Uh, can people find out? So you told the the website, um, your LinkedIn, what's the best way to communicate with you? Yeah. Uh, just hit me up on LinkedIn. It's, uh, Scott Gillen and, uh, and there's a LinkedIn carbon design page for the company. We put a lot of announcements out there, but, um, yeah, just, just hit me up. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you, Scott again. And, uh, let's, let's see what happens in another couple of years here. I don't even know if we're all going to be around, but Hey, if we are, we should, we should catch up again.

Some more studies, right? We'll send her machine and talk to your machine. Exactly. We'll have a nice little AI conversation between each other. So, uh, awesome. Well, everybody, I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. And like I said, at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, you make somebody smile today. You know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all very much. And I will see you on the other side. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll see you next time.