In this episode we journey through the past year's B2B sales landscape, discussing the triumphs and obstacles we faced. With the buyer-centric approach taking center stage, trust-building has become more important than ever.
The conversation flows from the tactical use of LinkedIn right into the relevance of quality over quantity in our social media engagements.
As we gear up for the future, the specter of AI in sales looms large, both intimidating and promising. We demystify the integration of AI, discussing tools that make it approachable, much like AOL once did for the internet and anticipate an era where AI is as routine in business as cloud technology is today. Join us for this episode full of insights and anecdotes, and don't forget to connect for a deep dive into exclusive social selling resources at socialselling20.com.
In this episode we journey through the past year's B2B sales landscape, discussing the triumphs and obstacles we faced. With the buyer-centric approach taking center stage, trust-building has become more important than ever.
The conversation flows from the tactical use of LinkedIn right into the relevance of quality over quantity in our social media engagements.
As we gear up for the future, the specter of AI in sales looms large, both intimidating and promising. We demystify the integration of AI, discussing tools that make it approachable, much like AOL once did for the internet and anticipate an era where AI is as routine in business as cloud technology is today. Join us for this episode full of insights and anecdotes, and don't forget to connect for a deep dive into exclusive social selling resources at socialselling20.com.
Welcome to Social Selling 2.0 Live Show and Podcast, where each week, we explore the future of B2B sales. Social has changed the B2B and professional services landscape forever. Capturing and keeping buyer attention has never been more challenging. Our mission is to help you discover new strategies, new technologies, new go-to-market systems and stay up-to-date with what is working now in B2B sales. Your hosts are Carson Hedy, the number one social seller at Microsoft, tom Burton, a best-selling author and B2B sales specialist, and Brandon Lee, an entrepreneur with multiple seven and eight figure exits and a leading voice in LinkedIn social selling. Brandon and Tom also leads Social Selling 2.0 Solutions, which offers turnkey consulting, coaching and training to B2B sales leaders. Now let's start the show.
Speaker 2:Gentlemen welcome. Episode do you know what episode this is? 64. 64. That's right.
Speaker 4:Sorry, I was looking to see who you were talking to. I heard gentlemen, I find the Carson.
Speaker 3:I hear big numbers, I think like the old home run chases of the early 2000s, like 63, 64.
Speaker 4:Hey, we've got a regroup. I was chatting the other day with Daniel Disney. We've got to get him secure for 75. We talked about him for 50, 75, and 100.
Speaker 3:Okay, I'm in man.
Speaker 2:All right, I don't know when that is. Do you know when that is?
Speaker 4:Brandon, I know we got a spreadsheet. We have a team, so we'll let the teams figure it out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I knew Geometry well enough to play pool. As long as you knew your angles, you could hustle pool games.
Speaker 4:I like it. Good angles, all right. All right, let's jump into it. Yes, so welcome everybody to episode number 64.
Speaker 2:And what we're going to talk about today is a little bit of 2023. And what we've learned and what we've put up with and what we've dealt with and what we think we're going to have to deal with in 2024. And I'm hoping we can get some good interactivity today with people commenting and bringing their thoughts and questions, because Brandon and I were just chatting, carson, before you came on. It's like, man, this has been a weird, weird year, weird, interesting year. I don't know that we could have predicted a lot of things that happened this year.
Speaker 4:Well, and I'm wondering too, guys like we're going to run out of time today, because there's what I see is there's the weird changes inside of LinkedIn, which is all the social selling stuff, but then there's just weird changes in general. Like you know and Tom, you and I were talking Carson, I know you believe this and think this too is what Matt Dick was talking about FOMU is bigger than ever right now. I believe the FOMU is bigger than ever and that could be an entire episode right there, just to talk about what that means and how do we navigate it. Yeah, it could be more.
Speaker 3:It's been a strange year. You know a lot of changes in the tech space where I work, and it's been a roller coaster. I think it's forced an inflection point. I've read a lot of things, too, where in these industries and a lot of industries go through these ebbs and flows right During those kind of fat and giggly times everybody looks like a hero from a numbers perspective, but you really got to dig deep, be scrappy and resourceful when you go through the roller coaster. So, yeah, I think there's been a lot of great learnings. I got a few great examples of where social selling really saved my bacon this year and gave me some inroads to things that I want to put into practice in the coming year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, let's just go around the horn and Carson, why don't? We can start with you.
Speaker 4:Can we address Bob's serenading us and needles?
Speaker 3:Yeah, you know the huge Beatles kick lately. If you've not gone out and listened to their new single now and then and watched the music video just takes me back. I was born and raised on the Beatles, so very nice.
Speaker 2:You're not that old, I wear it well.
Speaker 3:I know, I know I work out a lot. I know that's a man.
Speaker 2:That's impressive. So, carson, tell us how you work out so well and keep your youthful looks in the year of roller coasters that we've had this year. Yeah, and what do you think has been the, I guess, the highs and the lows and the roller coaster that you've observed? I listened to social selling 2.0 while I'm on the treadmill.
Speaker 3:That's how I get in good shape. But you know, I look back at the year and it's really interesting and I started in a different job and I wound up in a new one come October, headed brand new team mid year but also had some big changes to my old business and I think you know some of the commonalities that we saw and we've talked about this a little bit on the show is you know where our customers were from a budgetary perspective. You know there was a lot of uncertainty. There still is to some degree. There's always uncertainty and there are unknowns. But there was a lot of uncertainty around budget and really getting time to value meeting buyers where they are, and you know that need to pivot even more to a buyer centric model. You know really earning that right to be the trusted partner and trusted advisor, but all the more reason why I believe my teams and my social selling practices really thrive.
Speaker 3:And I'll call out a few very specific instances. There was a customer organization earlier in the year where nobody could get through to this CFO and you know we put an all out campaign, we leveraged LinkedIn, we pulled some marketing leads out of our tools of customers at that organization that adopted into marketing and, in essence, crafted a message that went out to over 180 people in that organization, and what was fascinating to me is nobody replied except the CFO, and he said that multiple of those messages had been forwarded to him, but what resonated with him was us showing up, trying to help them optimize costs and also helping them around bottom line and, where we can help them from a data perspective, showing up more uniquely as a partner as opposed to sounding like the vendor. So a lot of the types of things that we talk about on the show. Another big one and I've talked about this one on the show before, sorry.
Speaker 2:Carson, but before you go any further because I think what you just brought up there is important what you did with the CFO is you basically consulted or provided insights that they wouldn't have normally had or she would have normally had.
Speaker 3:That's exactly it. It was basically very unique ways that we could show up to help them optimize costs all up, and it wound up being a scenario where we could help them consolidate certain areas, we could help them take out costs in certain areas, but we could also optimize the cost that we present. They were investing with us in one area today, and now we have lined a site in investing in two more, and so that was really really important. One of the ones I'm super proud of that I do want to mention as well, and we've talked about on this show, is there was a customer who was a COO at the time.
Speaker 3:I spent six months commenting on every post they made the Brandon Lee method and what was magical about this is we got to the point where we were like sharing book recommendations with each other, and he made a comment where he said I know, coming from you, that I should take this under high consideration. We had never spoken. He didn't know who I was outside of LinkedIn. Lo and behold, he gets promoted to CEO of this organization, and I knew that was the time. That's when I need the meeting, and we got the meeting and it took us sort of a whole nother round. We were already working with one business unit in that organization, but he opened up the floodgates to give us access to the other 20. It's just things like that, yeah.
Speaker 4:Can I highlight that too for everybody listening, because this doesn't matter if you're at the enterprise level, you're at an SMB level For whatever you said. Six months you commented and you engage. You got on his radar by commenting. You went where he was and you started commenting and you didn't sell, you didn't bring up Microsoft, you didn't like he knew. I'm sure he clicked, you probably looked and saw that he viewed your profile, right.
Speaker 4:But you didn't go into work business opportunity mode. You just leveraged the no like and trust and I'm sure your content, your comments, started helping him understand, have awareness of who you are, what you do, what you do specifically, because working for Microsoft could mean a ton of different things, right. So you got specific about where you were and you earned that right to take it to the next level and that is social, that is LinkedIn, that is social media. You guys know I hate the word social selling, so I was like that is social. I don't want to say that word. It's not social selling, it's leveraging this LinkedIn thing as a very powerful medium to help you create opportunities and achieve your goals. Carson, I love that. That was such a great, great narrative, great story.
Speaker 3:Don't get me wrong. Here's the key element is the social elements and the leveraging, these tools and these signals. They don't close the deal. So we spend a lot of time talking about the fundamentals and that's why the jolt effect and understanding the biorcentric nature that we need to show up with and showing up with value and seeking to serve and earning the right to be trusted divisor All those things are super, super important. But LinkedIn doesn't teach you how to do that. What it does is it can be that enabler, it can help you open the door that you might not have gotten to otherwise, and I think you know I could give you a litany of these examples.
Speaker 3:Another biggest organization that I supported last year and I met an executive vice president on LinkedIn and I actually interviewed him on a different show Never talked about my company, but what happened is we got to know each other through that process. We asked what each other did, I told him and guess what? We broke off and we did a session at our technology center that ultimately led to another million dollars in pipeline, still yet to be closed. But my point is your goal is relationships and this can help you get there, and that's where you need to be thinking as you look to 2024. Whatever the relationships you need next year in order to be successful, go out and earn them, but there's a lot of ways you can do it, and they are all valid.
Speaker 2:I want to highlight Zach's comment here. First of all, thank you, zach, for your A-plus, but if your goal is to get a no-please go away as fast as possible, immediately send some a message asking for the sale, completely cold. I guess that would be the wrong way to use LinkedIn in the commenting. So yeah, so, carson, I know you have a couple more Carson's on. Shlago.
Speaker 3:I got more, I got more. So one of my other favorite ones they're all my favorites, right. They're like, you know, children, you can't pick just one over, you know, as your favorite there was another one where we were stuck right and the customer was ghosting us and we had had some good conversation, some good momentum, and then nothing. And so what we started doing was a little, you know, sniffing around. You know, I think it's valuable to have a friendly in every situation or every organization. You know you want those proponents within those organizations that can kind of give you the litmus test or the temperature. And so we had somebody willingly told us that, hey, they knew that the executives were talking to this particular vendor slash partner of ours, right? So what did I do? We had no idea who they were talking to.
Speaker 3:I went out on LinkedIn and, lo and behold, I was connected to 34 people at that partner. I messaged all 34 of them in that day and within 24 hours, I had a meeting set up with that partner and I showed up and I said guys, I know you're working with this customer. I'm willing to go and find some investment dollars to help you win this deal. What do you need from me, six months later signed an eight figure deal. I mean, it's things like that, where it's not always I don't need the best relationship with the customer. If I find somebody else who has a better relationship with the business decision maker and I can invest in them and help them win and that helps my team win, that's the path right. So, using LinkedIn again as a way to create relationships, or, when I was completely blocked and completely being ghosted, finding the obstacle because, as we know from Ryan Holiday, the obstacle is the way and, yes, we're working on getting him on this show that ultimately ended up being the strategy that won it.
Speaker 2:So, Brandon, I'm gonna ask you a question related to what Carson's saying right, and especially, maybe, in the more small to medium sized business world. What do you say to somebody who says it's great that Carson has the time and the ability to build these relationships because he's got an enterprise sale. But I gotta make some deals this month. Right, I gotta make my numbers this month as quota this week. How do you do that when you don't have a year to get a deal done?
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, and I think a lot of the some of the companies that we work with it's they're like full cycle AEs, they're more traditional and they're working on quarterly goals, not as much the two week and 30 day goals like tech and software tend to do. But I think, looking at it at the SMB level and I'm sorry my brain went like five different stories I wanna tell. So I'm trying to do it in a rational, logical way and not just vomit all over the place.
Speaker 3:We don't do rational or logical on this show.
Speaker 2:That's right you might need another show for that, if you want logical, you need to call Dr Spock, right, that's it.
Speaker 1:That's it here's a little bit of a story.
Speaker 4:So look, here's a couple of stories that I've been hearing as well and experiencing, as Zach said, or as Zach was mentioning, using this as a platform to create conversation, to create relationship, to show up and to be known and I love that Mark Lawson says that know, be known and serve. You know James Gimlin, one of our concierge clients that we work with on LinkedIn. You know he went to his 20 year high school reunion and walked around and felt like he was, you know, king of the prom because everyone's walking up to him, going dude, you're crushing it on LinkedIn and like, oh my gosh, all this stuff you're doing on LinkedIn and none of them had ever commented or liked any of his content. Like that is something that we need to remember when it comes to social. Is we want this immediate gratification, like we want this how is this gonna help me close a deal this month? And there's other tactics for that, but with a lot of this, it's not about, as Zach mentioned here. It's not that cold message of hurry up and get on a call and a demo with me. This is about building your brand and elevating your company brand.
Speaker 4:I heard something this week. I had never heard it rephrased this way before and I don't know why I didn't, or maybe I didn't. It didn't sink in. But you know social media a lot of times with some of the companies that we talk to, I think C-suite is very resistant and as we start unpacking why they're resistant, there's some of these myths or these misperceptions they have about social and one of the biggest ones is that it is self-promotion. Right, social media is not about self-promotion. I think it's about idea promotion and it's about building rapport and relationship and creating the opportunity so you can speak to the people that you wanna speak to when you want to speak to them, and they have a high likelihood to agree to that conversation. And that's, I think, carson, the way you use it a lot of times is around that it's that channel to create conversations with the right people at the right time. And you earn that over time because you show up every day, multiple times a day.
Speaker 4:You comment, you post, you go on shows like this is about building. You can use these words like personal brand. What the heck does that mean? Like people know us because of our show. People know us because we publish. People know us because we go to other people's posts and we comment.
Speaker 4:We add value when we talk with people and what happens is tactically, yeah, our connections increase, our impressions increase, but also our emails coming in increase, our calls increase the direct messages inside of LinkedIn of going, hey, I've been watching your show and I think you guys can help us. When can we talk? Those increase. That's what I'm seeing around this year and it's escalating because and I'll shut up, I'm sorry, guys it's escalating because a lot of the traditional companies that we talk to traditional professional service providers, manufacturers, distributors they're finally really hitting that point where you know the way I've sold for the last 25 years is just not producing and they're finally getting to the point where they're realizing that just making more calls or getting tickets to a different match, or okay, we're gonna go golf at this really cool golf course now instead of just the normal one those still aren't working. They're not getting people to step up and build that relationship with them.
Speaker 3:But if you set up a LinkedIn event and put it at top golf, you can still get a lot of people there. Absolutely Add the social to the old way. That's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I wanna summarize what I think I'm hearing both of you say and it certainly resonates with what I've seen this year is I'm going to look at saying quality versus quantity.
Speaker 2:I think we have shifted from a mentality and maybe we fully haven't as an industry, but I believe that there's more and more of a respect and an appreciation for quality in the sales process than quantity, and I think that even a year or two ago it was all around quantity, quantity, quantity, quantity, numbers, numbers, numbers.
Speaker 2:And when you combine that with what you were talking about, brandon, and what Matt Dixon was talking about is the fear of messing up versus the fear of missing out, is the quality. The people that show up with the right quality, like we've talked about, have a lot more opportunity to build trust and alleviate that fear of missing out or sorry, that fear of messing up. And I think, if I were to look ahead in the next year, which I know we're going to talk about, I think that quality characteristic and quality focus is going to become more pronounced. I think that a lot. It's hard, I think it's been hard for people to digest this movement from quantity to quality, but I do think it's happening and I'll be answering your take on that, but I think it reflects what both of you were saying.
Speaker 3:There's. I would agree with you wholeheartedly that, especially person to person, I mean, there's a quality, there's a finesse. We're earning that relationship and that is ultimately what's going to be respected and that's ultimately where customers are going to make that decision to buy. Because you've de-risked that decision for them, they're going to be more likely to trust you. Hence you need the quality. You've got to spend the time earning your seat at the table and then ultimately earning the business. Now there are absolutely times as well.
Speaker 3:I made a transition mid-year to a much larger ocean. You know hundreds of customers in the Americas, and so it was really paramount for us to build a scale engine. And it's okay and I tell my team this all the time it's okay to passively educate. Not every single time we do some big informative session are. You know you're going to get a lot of attendees, but it may not turn into as many calls.
Speaker 3:I like to look at the business, the quality element, the quantity element, as a stock portfolio and all of the different ways that we can invest in those. They reap dividends over time. I mean I've told a story on the show before where I had a customer that wouldn't give me the time of day year one, where I covered them, or year two. But year three I got a very valuable piece of intel that there was a reason why they weren't talking to me or to us as an organization because of a prior scenario. I found a partner that had a great relationship and I rallied behind that partner, earned my seat at the table and ultimately won.
Speaker 3:That was a social selling situation gone right, but it took a lot of time to invest, but that was needing to get to the quality, but there was a lot of quantity that went into it. You've got to find the right balance. Brandon, I'd love to hear your vantage point too, from your unique perspective and lens. And then I also want to spend a moment on Rob's, or maybe a few moments on Rob's.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm looking at Rob's and then both you know both of Bob's I think are worth it too. Yeah, so.
Speaker 2:All right, well, let's start with Rob's. So self-promotion is a complex topic that has both pros and cons. On one hand, self-promotion can help you increase your visibility, build your reputation, achieve your career goals. On the other hand, self-promotion can be seen as arrogant, annoying or dishonest and damaged relationship with others.
Speaker 3:I've been called word.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And you know what? Here's the thing I like about it, and I think Rob has brought on, is that there's a nuance and there's a strategy that I think you can do in social where you're not seen as arrogant, and that is when you promote ideas versus you promote yourself. And Tom and I were having this conversation and I'd love to hear your take on this, carson, because you weren't in that conversation. We just had it today. I think it is. You guys are talking without me. I know, keep the leave that I left you out.
Speaker 3:here I'm testing out.
Speaker 4:I'm sorry. You know we're products of the 80s and for me those were formal learning years, right, I finished high school in 88, went to college in the 90s, and even the 90s it was a time where more of fake it till you make it was our motto. So we didn't show up and say things unless we were confident that we were right, because if we were wrong, somebody was going to tell us we were wrong and shove it in our face. That fair, I mean, that's a pretty harsh way of saying it, but that was the tone of it.
Speaker 2:We had to be. That was how you were judged. There was a judgment.
Speaker 4:Yeah right, the social media era changed that and I think for me, I feel like I failed in social media for a while because I had this 80s and 90s mindset of going, hey, this is what I've done, this is what I've learned, this works. And I do believe I was more seen as being arrogant and self-promoting and I was sitting there going, what the heck, why is my content not working? I've done some cool shit in my life. I've built and sold three companies. These are the things that I've learned. I have the experience In the 80s and 90s. You show up and say, hey, I built an $18 million company in five years and sold it to people like, what'd you do?
Speaker 3:But now, People would rather hear when you fell flat on your face.
Speaker 4:Exactly.
Speaker 3:It was interesting to me and I talk to people about this stuff all the time because I talk to a lot of people that are like I don't know what to post, I don't feel comfortable posting, they spend like they almost have analysis paralysis. God love them because they think so much about like that first post and getting out there. And you'd be surprised to know I am an introvert. I struggled a lot with getting out onto social and I've kind of like dabbed my toes into the water with this thing and I've tried this and like this is working. So I'm willing to go out and try this, like the TikTok or the then the podcast. And I was very reluctant to do that a few years back and then I got comfortable doing that.
Speaker 3:And I think the key element is you've got to become it's kind of like looking for a job. You ultimately have to become the obvious choice for whatever it is that you want to do, and that doesn't guarantee you the job, doesn't guarantee you the business, even if you're the obvious vendor, as we've discussed on prior shows, you can show your value till you're blue in the face, but they're going to make the decision based on the risk and if they're willing to make that call. But what you can do is become an obvious choice to have a relationship with. You can become an obvious choice to be a trusted partner.
Speaker 3:And where I really tried to think about my social presence, because I did the exact same stuff, brandon. I've tried a lot of stuff. I've made a lot of mistakes. Over the last decade of plus of social selling, I've spent, sent messages that I'm sure were considered spammy and I've posted things that people probably thought were braggadocious because I thought that's what would resonate that I was wrong. But resonates is stories and when you're able to come out and be vulnerable about a scenario that you went through, and hey, I felt flat on my face.
Speaker 3:I got so many hits on a post that I made not long ago about the time I missed quota and how excruciating that was for me and what it forced me to do as a person to come back and like rise from the ashes. Right there you go. I got insufficient results, zero rewards for an entire year. It was humiliating. I was one foot out the door and I get more credibility and appreciation from people in my organization and my team when I share that story than pretty much any other, Because it humanizes you. If your social presence humanizes you and you start a conversation and you're provocative, then it will stand out without being so promotional.
Speaker 4:And that makes me think of two things, carson. One is we can learn in public and that creates community. And I think that's what people are talking about. And I think again in the 80s and 90s, mindset for me was you had to figure it out and know what you were talking about before you opened your mouth. In social media era, you can come in and say I'm trying to learn something and people go, oh, I want to be involved. And then you can say this is what I'm doing. Ah, man, that's stunk, it didn't work. But hey, I'm doing this and I'm getting a better uptake. What have you guys? And that's what, in fact. I think method. That's how Darren built his community and his audience. He just started sharing publicly like, hey, I want to try and figure this thing out, I'm going to post every day. I don't know what I'm going to say, but I'm going to post every day. And now he's what? 100 and some thousand followers or whatever it is. He built it by just being transparent into the community. The other pieces and we talk about this and maybe we don't talk about it deep enough or tactical enough.
Speaker 4:On the show we do with customers and really get into the nitty-gritty. It's. You know, what are you observing? That's content. What are you thinking? What are you feeling? Oh my gosh, we're not supposed to do feelings, but you know, tom and I were talking earlier and Tom's like you know, I feel like next year this is going to happen and I'm like Tom. That's excellent content. You should be posting that. It's like I feel with AI, that what's happening with people is this. You should be posting that. That should be content. What you observe is going on. What do you feel about what's going on? What do you think, or why do you think things are happening? You start sharing that type of content in your industry and now you're building your personal brand and you're elevating your company brand and as no, it's not is your product perfect? You're building that know, like and trust, and people want to do business with people they know, like and trust. Still, and this thing called LinkedIn is the fastest way to do it. Still, in my opinion.
Speaker 3:Yeah, your experiences are valid. Lead conversations with your thoughts. That's all it takes to be a thought leader.
Speaker 2:So let's hit a couple more of these. I like Bob's stuff. I like this one the traditional US capitalist approach to businesses morphing into the European model of relationship. First and I think that's exactly and maybe I didn't phrase it as well as I should have here about quality, right, what Bob's saying is not sure I agree with the move towards quality. If that were the case, we wouldn't see the massive migration towards self-service buying, For quality isn't unknown Well, as we know. Right, people, if they can buy without a salesperson, they will, right, but there's a lot of things in this world today you can't buy without the guidance of a salesperson and I think with AI and some of the new technologies and new tools and capabilities, Brandon, you're seeing this right. People need more help than ever, not only just to buy, but to use, to adopt, to understand all of that.
Speaker 2:What I completely agree with Bob is commodity products are going to go more towards self-service, but there's a lot of products and services that are going to be in our coming out day after day and are going to be in next year.
Speaker 2:A lot of products that even may look they've been commodity products before, but as they become more advanced, they start utilizing AI. All of those things are going to require more assistance and more guidance. You know I'm amazed, Brandon, I know you see this as well, and, Carson, I want to get your thoughts on this as well. You guys are really, really co-pilot and a lot of AI tools the number of people right now that we talk to every day that AI I don't know if I use the word as scary, but it's intimidating and they don't really have any idea of what to start or what to do with it it's higher than I've seen with probably any other technology that I've seen in my career. So we're going to need to provide more guidance and, yes, there will certainly be products that go towards self-service, but I think a lot of other products are going in a different direction.
Speaker 4:I think we were talking about this internally and I'm going to date myself again by saying 80s and 90s, but also I used the analogy of AOL. Aol convinced a whole bunch of people that they were on the internet and they were kind of. But AOL brought an easy version of the internet to people. They weren't going through a browser and going into different forums and chat rooms and all of that type of stuff. They were using this AOL thing that brought email to them. Now, of course, there weren't other tools out there yet to help most people or the mass public do it. So AOL filled a very important niche at the time and people felt really good that they were on the internet.
Speaker 4:It wasn't until years later that a lot of people started realizing oh, I could get a browser, I could get Netscape and go straight to wherever I want. They didn't have to go to AOL and do a search. They could open up a browser and go wwwwhatever they wanted to go to. And I think that that's what's going to be happening over the next 12 months with AI is that there's going to be a lot of easier versions of tools, because I know for me as a CEO, for take away the tech side. As a CEO, I want the output of AI, but I don't want to go figure out all the prompts and everything. That's not who I am Now. We've got people on our team that love that stuff and they should go do that and figure it out and become experts at it, but for me, I don't want that. That's not the best use of my time.
Speaker 3:I think that and I'll use a tech word, but then I'll quickly move away from it, I think the quicker that organizations can at least get a handle on how it can be leveraged from a use case perspective, it will not go down the path of becoming like a shadow IT, because I think the challenge that you're going to run into is a lot of people are leveraging it right now, playing around with it, and I've got a handful of litany of stories of ways that I've used AI this year to accelerate grease.
Speaker 3:The skids serve as the WD-40 of email writing or writing up my marketing content, or humantic AI and leveraging that to really turn around a relationship that I had with an executive a non-existent relationship into a significant deal. So there's some amazing use cases for it. But I think we need to collectively look at what are the problems we're trying to solve and just being very intentional and if there are ways, like a lot of the organizations that we work with right now on AI projects, it's all about streamlining processes, automating things, making a better proofread, more adequate or articulate message that is going to go to an executive and it's not going to be perfect, but it's like. That's why we've called it co-pilot here at Microsoft, because it doesn't replace any of the work. It is your co-pilot, it is your guide, it is your wingman. So I think that's the key element is, we've got to start looking at the ways that it can help us as sellers and as sales leaders, and those use cases are rife.
Speaker 4:I like using humantic AI as an example, because what's happening there is you're getting the output value of AI without having to know AI.
Speaker 3:Right, it's like you're not digging into the secret sauce, so it's not as daunting, right.
Speaker 4:And that's why I think I don't agree with Bob. I love you, bob, but I don't agree with that. I don't think that AI is going to become as sexy as ERP. I think AI is going to become whatever what's a right analogy as sexy as the cloud it's going to. Some people are going to be fast adopters and some people are going to be laggards, but I think eventually we're all going to be using it, whether we like it or not. Tom, what do you think? You're more the AI guy out of us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, boy, I think there's two parts to his question. I don't think the AI honeymoon is anywhere close to being over because I don't think we've scratched the surface of what we're going to see, as to what's possible and what it can do for us. I think I was telling my wife yesterday remember when we were I'm going to date myself, brandon remember when we were kids and we had those cups and you'd connect them with, like fishing line and you'd talk to each other and you could hear each other on the cup.
Speaker 3:I'm not familiar with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was way before your time, Carson.
Speaker 4:I've seen that in movies they were all black and white, but I remember seeing that.
Speaker 2:But if you look at that, I think that's where we are. If you take that and then you look to where we are with mobile phones and smartphones and all of that, I think that's where we are in AI, right, well, and it's already happening.
Speaker 3:I mean, you order things on Amazon, right? They are sending signals to say, hey, it's probably about time you order that toilet paper. So it's built in behind the scenes or you know it's just. I think it's all a matter of where it's showing up. I mean, eventually, in my belief, it's going to be built into every single home appliance that you have. Like, hey, the fridge tells me it's going to be time to get milk in X number of days, or whatever the case may be, It'll make my grocery list for me. Like there's a lot of things that I think it will continue to be baked into. So I think you're seeing the precipice right here. But, at the same token, there's a lot of elements that, as sellers and as sales leaders and as career professionals, that we can leverage it to help us write a better resume or all of these things right. And I think that's where we need to think about, like, how could AI help me be better at this particular task? And as we train our brains to do that?
Speaker 3:it will just make us better, all the while making sure that we don't completely ever let it dehumanize our sales approach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I did a little project just this week where we have a tool on our website that basically, if a company comes to the website, it records who the company is and all that kind of stuff. But what I did is I set up a little tool that when something happens like that, I then send it to chat or AI. Ai does a full business canvas model for that company. People do a competitive analysis to its top competitors and then email it to our sales team. Right, that are there, right? So now, rather than the sales team getting, hey, microsoft came to our website, no, and then, okay, now what, they've now got a complete.
Speaker 2:You talk about research a lot. Right, they have a starting point of which they can use to jumpstart what they're doing. Again, that's not in the scope of what's possible, it's not very. It's like scratching the surface, but the value is very large given the, the investment that goes into it and we're going to see more and more of that. That's going to make our jobs, whether it's sellers or business executives or whatever, easier and more efficient. And I want and going back to the second part of Bob's question, or point about, will it become as sexy as ERP?
Speaker 2:right, what's going to be sexy about this is the business results that we create for us and the money and the profits and the efficiency that and, hopefully, the free time that it gives back to us, or at least not free time, but time to use our attention in places that are that we enjoy versus things that we, that we hate so much.
Speaker 3:Think about it like putting an F1 car out there without making it stop for the pits. Right, you're, in essence, enabling that car to do what it's made to do drive fast, and that's what our great sellers want to do. Not do all the administrative tasks. Not take the time to write this big, robust presentation. Not take the time to have to mine through all of this data and minutia to put together something. It could do a lot of that for you, make it better than it might have been anyway and allow you to focus on the relationship, and I think that's the thing that's empowering about AI.
Speaker 4:If only there was a two-tier platform that could help me, am I? I we're having so much fun building what we're building and just what we're gonna launch in January. I really hope it serves people well, because I think I mean it just relates to this conversation Help sales, help people be more efficient and better. Stop looking at AI is always gonna remove the humanity. No, it is only gonna remove humanity if you allow it.
Speaker 3:But if you focus on how do we help people be more efficient and better, there's so much, so much potential that we're just just scratching the surface with and be willing to tinker and try right, like not just AI, but even other things like I would encourage you, do an internet search for you know just some of these different platforms.
Speaker 3:Like it's time it's coming up on time to make our new year's resolutions right. So think about like what would it look like to do a blog, or a blog or you know, just make a post once a week or a couple of times a week at a. Linked in it starts a conversation. The key element is one of the biggest things that I've really learned over the years around social selling. We talked about this way back when we did a show around like selling this to your boss. Be willing to try these things, but track results and modify your approach based on what's working and what's not.
Speaker 3:Listen to these signals, but be willing to try Some of these different approaches to see what might create a relationship that you didn't have before. Or when you're in a situation where you're stuck, how might I mean you can go out and ask AI to literally give you a response To a customer, or an email that you can send to a customer in a situation where they've ghosted you. Or the last touch point was this you can be very specific and it might give you some ideas that jog your. You know that you'll get your, get your juices flowing. So my point is be willing to kind of tinker and try. Think about the things that you want to achieve in twenty twenty four, and how can all of these tools Perhaps make it better, make it easier for you to earn those relationships?
Speaker 2:Well, and I'm gonna go one step further, carson, like even the example I just gave about where we are creating the business model canvas or a competitive analysis or whatever, maybe you're building those for yourself, but share those as well. Build one for your prospect, build one for your partner, build one for and say here, here you go, I made this for you or I created this Little GPT that you can use, or whatever the case may be, and you can use it to actually again provide more value indirectly versus just even direct, and so again you just become that. That's so many ways now that you can use it to help yourself, but to help others.
Speaker 3:I love that you said that that was. Another discovery that I had this year was A lot of our customers were in situations where we had mutual customers, where they were selling to a subset of people that were also buying from us and I do a lot of training globally at my organization around Prospecting digital selling, personal branding right, and so I saw a huge value in giving that same offering to some of these customers and partners, as in how could we mutually construct some of these what is letters, things that would go to our mutual customers that are gonna serve everyone. We're still passively educating these folks. We're ultimately generating leads for our customers. That's a huge value add in a huge differentiator, and it became less about what my company did, but more what I could Unique and in these situations and then help me when I was an executive sponsor to multiple customers over the past year.
Speaker 2:Right, and I think, brandon, even with what you're doing with this bump and the IQ stuff and you're going, that platform is going to enable Individual contributors to do exactly what, brandon I'm sorry what Carson said there yeah, make it easy to help and provide stuff, you know, assistance, above and beyond what they're posting and commenting on.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's why I was saying, if only there was a platform. I just didn't want to make it so promotional about what we're doing. That that's not the point.
Speaker 2:Show about pitch slapping. So whatever you need to do, do it is great right.
Speaker 4:Get back in here and see if I pitch slap right. But yeah, I mean it is. It's in everything you guys were saying. Like you know I would. I would love to have a sales team that every time they went to talk to a customer, they did the research and they had all this information about a. Here's our company and our value proposition and our offering. Here's who they are and what we know about it. Here's the three best topics you should be talking about in order to capture their attention and show value to them. Fantastic, but the reality is, how many sales people do that? Because of the time that it takes? But what if there was An engine that could do that for you in a matter of minutes and feed it into a sales rep's hands so that they could read and be that much more prepared Before they get on a conversation? With the prospect? That alone, how much? How much would that be worth to companies moving into next year?
Speaker 2:You know, there's a side effect that I'm seeing as I work with companies. I talk about AI and I'm Brandon. You may have seen this as well. Companies don't really know their business all that well and they don't know their customer all that well. When you start to try and automate things and put things into AI, unfortunately, or fortunately that Lack of understanding comes to the comes, the service, and so companies, right now, or sale more than ever, are going to need to know. I think this is going to be a big two thousand twenty four. I think businesses are going to get to know themselves way better.
Speaker 4:We just work and we just I mean, let's, let's illustrate that a little put it, put a little narrative around it. We did a beta test inside of our fist bump, a IQ, and part of that is we're looking at, you got to feed the machine, right, you got to feed the beast to train it, and we were asking them to load things like documents Of their ICP. They're offering it's all private, so even contracts and all this to train it, and I'd say ninety percent plus of the people in the beta didn't get past that step. A huge learning moment for us, because we thought, oh, everybody has these right, 90%. They didn't get past the step. And we went back and started asking questions and it was we don't have that.
Speaker 4:I got it here, I think, sort of kind of. I think I know, but I don't have it written, I don't have a document. And it's like well, if you don't have a document, how do you share that with people on your team? How does everybody else know? I think you're right, tom. Ai and what we need to be prepared to truly feed AI is going to spotlight all kinds of company weaknesses.
Speaker 2:But it's also going to help remedy those weaknesses. So rather than just rub them in their face, we now have a way of remedying those things.
Speaker 4:Awareness and admitting it is a first step, right? Okay, and a lot of times we don't know that we don't know because, oh, I think I got a good understanding of it.
Speaker 2:So Bob, I think, is definitely our Commenter of the day. Commenter of the day. He's on a roll and I think what he says here companies don't know their customer. Everyone talks about being customer-centric, but give me 10 minutes when I'll prove that 90% of my that's powerful.
Speaker 3:Can they pass the Bob test?
Speaker 2:Yes, right, but I do think that that 99% is going to improve a lot next year, and I know that, and this week we've talked a lot this show today we've talked a lot about what we've learned in 2024. I think next week, before we go to the break, we'll really start to look more at what do we see in the future, rick, what do we see more in 2024? And how can we take these lessons learned and apply them into a bit of a playbook for next year? And I think taking some time on that would make sense on our show next week.
Speaker 4:What I take Bob's comment to say is there's a lot of rhetoric in companies about being customer-centric at it. For the most part it's just been that like ooh, the new buzzword is buyer enablement instead of sales enablement and we start using these words, but it hasn't changed the sales motions in a lot of companies. It's still a very linear cold outreach sales approach. We just threw a different wrapper on it and hope and pray that the inside was going to taste different.
Speaker 2:And Right, they don't know the customer, they don't know the prospect, they don't know much about them other than maybe they came to the website or filled out a form, or whatever that's one of the big problems and that's actually one of my big tie-ins for now and thinking about this coming year, because it isn't just about AI.
Speaker 3:Ai is one of the many, many, many, many variables. But knowing your customer especially like in the large enterprise space, we don't do our. We do our customers a disservice sometimes, because there's also a lot of folks that have, like this, tribal knowledge in pockets and it's not stored anywhere but in somebody's brain. And one of the big things that I do this time of year now my fiscal runs July to June, but I'm thinking about this like it's a lot of people's June in my brain is I spend a lot of this time of year, as things kind of slow down, studying. I look back on kind of what we did today. I reflect what worked, that I really need to double down on, what didn't work, that I don't necessarily want to jettison or get rid of, but I might want to tweak and do a little bit different. And then also, what are the nuances of the current playing field? Very similar to what we did today.
Speaker 3:So I spent a lot of time studying and then I think about very intentionally what are the relationships that I'm going to need next year in order to do what I need to set out to do. Who are the players? How can I help all those players win, whether those are customer players, my colleagues, my partners, all of that, but those are the types of things. Those things are going to shift, and AI is going to sharpen the people that are going to use it the best. The cream is still going to rise to the top, though. The people that work to build the relationship, earn the relationship, show up to value, seek to serve. Those are going to be the winners, but AI is going to need to be a tool in their toolkit.
Speaker 4:And here's a shift, even as we talked earlier on or I talked earlier on about the mindset in the 80s and 90s compared to now, when it comes to social media and all that Hustle isn't going to do it moving forward. Not hustle alone. There's got to be more intention and intelligence built into processes and being customer centric, and all that. For years, we could get away with not knowing as much, but just pound the phone harders and talk to more people and send out more emails and all that, and that was grit and muscle motion. I just don't. That's not going to be enough. The companies that go a little bit slower, a lot smarter, leverage things like AI to be smarter about what they do and smarter about their customers and smarter what their customers need, they're going to win a lot more. Go slow to move fast, right, tom?
Speaker 2:Quality over quantity, what you're saying. I think these were some really excellent. I've made some notes here. I think, like you said, carson, this is really helpful. Sometimes it's just helpful to talk about some of the things that have happened over the last year and get some visibility on them. I do want to focus a lot as we go into next week on what we see going into next year and then, as we come out of the break, I think we've got another big, huge lineup of guests for the next six or eight weeks.
Speaker 3:Who's upcoming Anything we?
Speaker 2:have the CEO of Seamless AI coming. We have Julia Hansen coming. We've got. Let me look here.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I don't have it open on my screen right now.
Speaker 2:Mario Martinez, patrick Pina Drew Alice.
Speaker 3:Brandon Born-Hanson is coming on. Yeah, brandon Born-Hanson.
Speaker 2:What was that Carson?
Speaker 3:Brandon Born-Hanson, who wrote secrets and others, but I'm in sales secrets.
Speaker 2:So anyway, yeah, once we get past the break, we've got some pretty good lineup here. Love it All right.
Speaker 3:I want to come back for more. Then I was in negotiation to re-up my contract. I will be back in 2024 with that roster, oh boy.
Speaker 2:That was close. Well, Brandon's up, I think, in January. So I don't know. I think he's going to be getting like a tonne contract, like the tonne contract.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was just going to say. The only people that couldn't afford me at this point would be probably the Dodgers.
Speaker 4:They don't have anything left, that's right.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 4:I was expecting a pink slip in January.
Speaker 2:All right. Any final thoughts before we sign off today?
Speaker 3:No, Just appreciate everybody being on. Send us any recommendations for future shows, future topics, future guests. I think what's amazing to me too and Brandon, this really emanated from when you're talking about just some of the things that you're working on with this bump is that is all being created by listening to the audience, listening to what's working, what's not, and very much aligned with some of the things that we talked about today as we reflect. So we'd love to have the audience as well share any reflections in the chat that you had over this past year things you've learned, what worked and what didn't work. Maybe we should do a full show on the biggest social faux pas that we've made. I'd be more than happy to share some of those, but I think it's really fun to continue learning with this crew Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Talk about when my LinkedIn account got suspended in 2015.
Speaker 4:Pardon, talk about when my LinkedIn account got suspended in 2015.
Speaker 3:I want to hear more about that.
Speaker 4:I was an early adopter of automation and I was like oh, that's interesting, cool, let it run. The next thing I know I had, like I don't know, 4,000 unanswered connection requests and they shut me down. And at the time I didn't even know that what I was doing was against the T's and C's because I never read them.
Speaker 2:That's why.
Speaker 1:I use Octopus.
Speaker 3:CRM, because it cuts you off.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Lots of them do that now. They all got smart. But early adopters, we had to learn the wrong way, right? I had to run into the door a few times to realize I had to turn the knob.
Speaker 3:That's why I always like to show up later to the party, let everybody kind of get their bearings, and then I can show up after somebody's already spilled something on themselves and fallen on the dance floor.
Speaker 4:See, that's an interesting way to end our conversation around AI.
Speaker 2:That's right, that's true. All right, all right, guys, thanks. Thanks for everybody who commented. Have a good week and we'll see you next Wednesday.
Speaker 3:Yes, happy social settling.
Speaker 2:Hey, tom Burton here and I wanted to personally thank you for listening or watching today's episode of Social Selling 2.0. If you enjoyed or found value in today's show, please share with your friends and colleagues. Also, we'd really appreciate it if you could leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast outlet. And please also subscribe to our YouTube channel and join our free online community at socialselling20.com. There you'll get free access to the latest social selling resources, training sessions, webinars and can collaborate with other social selling professionals. Thank you again for listening and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.