After the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence has been a global subject of conversation and particularly in the realm of business.
The changes AI has the potential to bring to companies all over the world has business and sales leaders alike steadily & cautiously observing.
Will it take away jobs?
Is AI reliable?
Can decisions made by AI be trusted?
Thanks to John Barrows, we’re answering all these questions and more.
On this episode of Evolved Sales LIVE, host Jonathan Fischer sits down with John Barrows, business founder and consultant and AI pioneer, to discuss ways to embrace this technology in order to stay ahead and not get left behind.
Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn for more engaging sales insights and discussions! Happy watching!
Meet John:
John Barrows has been recognized by Salesforce, Forbes, LinkedIn, and many others as an award-winning sales trainer, author, and influencer. Passionate about what he does, John firmly believes, “When Sales is done right, it’s one of the greatest professions in the world but when done wrong, it’s one of the worst.”
With a multi-decade career of training thousands of sales professionals at some of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in the world, John has his finger on the pulse of what works in sales – and what doesn’t.
Check out the transcription of this webinar episode below!
Jonathan Fischer 0:04
Welcome back. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jonathan Fisher, in November of 2022, on November 30, in fact, chat GPT was first opened to the public by the Silicon Valley tech firm, open AI. And ever since Artificial intelligence has been a top of mind topic all across the world, especially in business, many business leaders are still on the sidelines wondering what the implications of AI will be. But today's guest says now's the time to jump in and start using this technology. John Barrows is a business founder and consultant has been recognized by Salesforce, Forbes, LinkedIn, and many others as an award winning sales trainer, author and influencer, after a multi decade career of keeping his finger on the pulse of what's working in sales and what's not. John's at the forefront of the conversation around artificial intelligence. And as a firm believer that we must embrace this technology or else be left behind. He's got some actionable advice for us today. That's gonna allow us to do just that. John Barrows. Welcome to the show. Great to have you today.
John Barrows 1:05
Hey, Jonathan, what's going on? And thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Jonathan Fischer 1:08
Yeah, we're excited to have you. So you've done a lot in terms of sales training for years. Now. Could you share with the listeners a little bit more about your background? And what kind of has led you to focusing on artificial intelligence as you are today?
John Barrows 1:21
Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be interesting conversation, because it changes almost, you know, minute by minute at this point. But yeah, my background real quick. So I got my degree in marketing, because I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and then fell into sales like most people did, and started with DeWalt power tools. And then Xerox is where I got my formal sales education. And then from there, I joined a company that a friend of mine started doing outsourced IT services. And this was a small business. And I ran sales marketing, and I had no idea what I was doing. So I took every training, I could I took Sandler, Miller, Heiman, Tasmin, you name it, I was taking it. And I came across this one group called Basho. And Basho was very cool training that was super tactical. And so I loved it because it was, it wasn't as big theory I had to follow this huge process I had to do it was here's how to send an email here, send an email. And so I used that show to help grow thrive, we were ended up being the fastest growing company in Massachusetts for a few years in a row. And then we got to about 85 employees and about 12 million in revenue. And then we sold off to Staples, Staples came in bought us, I spent about a year going through that integration come to find out apparently I'm not a corporate guy. I don't have much of a filter. And I really don't like playing politics. So after a little while staples offered me another position. They fired me and I was looking for a job. And that company Basho said, John, you want to be a trainer. And at first I was like absolutely not. You know, I don't like trainers. And the reason was, is because most of the trainers I had come across and up until that point in my career were either failed sales professionals or professional presenters. And if you've ever been through a training, obviously, that you can tell the trainers never actually done, what they're telling you what to do. I didn't want to have anything to do with that. But they had a different model, you had to you had to use the techniques to sell so you could train so you get paid. So I joined Basho took on some bigger cons brought on some bigger ones. And then boats, I don't wanna say 10 years ago went off on my own with JV sales, because they screwed it up. And I took it over. So took all my clients with me. So now I'm working with companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box, Dropbox, Google, Amazon, and Okta. And a lot of those, you know, a lot of tech SAS companies. And you know, as it translates to the artificial intelligence. You know, I think everybody in sales, if you're not evolving, you're getting left behind, like golf sales is one of those professions, it's kind of like golf, you can never be sure to zero in golf, right? So sales, you can always get better. And there's a lot of stuff, there was a report that came out from Salesforce about how much time and we've seen the stats, but like how much time a sales rep actually spend selling, I think the numbers was like 27%, or something ridiculous like that is that that's the active time they have selling where the other 70 plus percent is admin tasks and everything else. And so the way I look at AI is it's now finally at a point where we can start offloading a lot of that administrative tasks to put us in a position to really leverage what is special about us as humans, which is that interaction, you know, and I'll talk about how I got a wake up call back in 2017, when somebody had taken an email that, you know, this email format was called why you why, you know, email that my mentor Jeff Hoffman came up with, and that Salesforce, the reps from Salesforce left Salesforce, and they actually created an artificial intelligence bot based on that email. And they said, John, we want to show it to you. And I was like, Yeah, whatever. And at that time, I was like, Sure, fine. Let me see what you got. And they sent it over. And when I tell you this thing was I mean, it was better than I could have written. And this was back in 2017. And I sat there and I kind of freaked out because it because I asked him I was like, how long did it there was no human involvement in writing this? And he goes, no human involvement other than picking the article to use from our app. And oh, by the way, it took 70 seconds. And at the time, I mean, I was my head just went boom, and then right very soon thereafter. Gary Vaynerchuk has This thing where you can go to his office was called his for D session. And you go to his office and you sit down with, you know, 1015 other entrepreneurs, and you have all this department heads come in and talk about what they're doing with the biggest brands in the world. And then Gary comes in at the end and does a q&a. And at the time, I that was right when I saw that email, and I said, Gary, I gotta be honest, like, I'm a little freaked out right now. I just saw a robot write an email better than I ever could, you know, where does that leave us as sales professionals? And what he said resonates with me to this day, he said, he goes, Don't worry about the technology, you're not going to beat it. Okay, but be the last mile. He goes be that last mile. So let the technology let the AI do all the heavy lifting, right let it do the research. Let didn't even write the email. But right before you hit send, make sure you humanize it. Because as long as people still buy from people, right, we have a chance now don't get me started like if you know it, once we start once the computer start buying I think then we're in a lot of trouble. But as long as there's a human other on the other end of that phone or the under that email, like we have a chance and so that's what my whole mentality is is be the last mile at this point. How can I can all this ai do all the heavy lifting for me? And then so I can maximize my my human ability to connect with people? Well, I
Jonathan Fischer 6:15
love that. And, you know, props to Gary Vee, every entrepreneur in the English speaking world and beyond, I think, has some props for that guy. So you talk about that last mile personalizing it. I'm wondering about a lot of our listeners, though, maybe they haven't even begun to embrace AI at all. Maybe we can bridge that gap a little bit in the conversation like what are some of the key reasons that the organization's maybe they're still managing to get it done through largely human driven effort, I speak with business owners every day in my own work. The vast majority are not utilizing AI in a comprehensive way. They dabble with it, perhaps to help create some of their, their their ad as their assets for marketing and sales. However, they're not really pushing it. It's still fairly conventional, let's say. So what what would you say are some compelling reasons why sales teams and sales professionals ought to be embracing this in their work and then with that, as a leader, and maybe start to list some of those for us, if you would,
John Barrows 7:12
I mean, the reason that we got to is because we don't have a choice, this stuff is getting so much better, so much faster. Like this isn't this is you know, this is it's this thing is learning on top of itself. I mean, this is why I kind of joked about like, Okay, today, it's I mean, minute by minute, this stuff is changing. What I saw last week that I thought was fascinating is now irrelevant. Now. It's like Holy smokes, that thing came out. And and unfortunately, and this is why I think we're in a weird spot right now from a transition standpoint, because if I was starting a company today, I would, I would actually not hire too. I mean, I talked to a lot of venture capitalists, right. And, and they a lot of them don't know what to do right now, because you used to have to put 50 million to a company to build their engineering team in their go to market strategy and hire a whole bunch of sales reps to go. And now you don't really have to do that at all. So instead of being in 50 million to one company, they're given a million to a bunch of companies and just playing roulette at this point. Because nobody knows what's going to pop because things are evolving so fast. And the problem though, is is that we've we've over engineered the sales process for the past 10 years that and I'm gonna be people probably not like what I say here. But if you started in sales, after 2010, that's tech sales, tech and SAS sales. If you started in tech and SAS sales after 2010 I'm gonna be very direct with you, it hasn't been that hard. We've been able to get away with blasting out template emails making generic cold calls, asking dumb ass band questions, you know, doing droning through PowerPoint presentations and demos, letting our se do the majority of the work and then throwing over a massive discount to get the deal done. Like that's basically Ben Sasse sales for the past 10 years. And it's not necessarily the reps fault. It's it's us as management and leadership because we've tried to over engineer the sales process. I mean, these poor STRS, they come into an organization and they're here's, here's your cadence tool, here's your this, here's, here's all these tools, push buttons, right. And some of them a lot of them that I that organizations I talked to, don't even give their STRS the the autonomy to create messaging. We don't teach them how to create messaging that they have marketing, create the messaging, and then stuff it into cadences and have the reps press play. So we've we've over engineered this process, and we've skipped the fundamentals, right? I mean, think about a button see a 60% button seat in the past 10 years is better than zero button. See, because hey, we're printing money over here, right? Money's free interest rates are nothing. VCs are stuffing money into this industry and it's growing like a weed. And so ROI be damned, all that stuff. And now the times are hard. You have a lot of reps who are sitting there saying I don't what wait a minute what you don't want to see my crappy as demo. You don't like my should I push more buttons and do more volume here. And so the reason that we have to pay attention and we start to have to do more than dabble in this is because we've gotten ourselves into a situation right now. That If we don't, then you might as well just pull the cord dump it all and start from scratch in my opinion. But I think there's a great opportunity here to make a transition with dueling expertise, if you will, leadership and Frontline reps. So one of the things that we can dive into some other examples, but one of the things I'm recommending every company do right now is turn their organization, their sales org into a sales lab. And you know, how engineers have hackathons, right? Where engineers get together, and they kind of pick a thing, and they nerd out on it, right? Well, I think we should do that in sales. So I think, you know, Fridays, from two to four, grab some beer, grab some pizza, and pick a topic, right? Whatever it is, whether it's writing emails, whether it's researching whether it's, you know, summarizing meetings, all these little kind of components of the sales process, pick one, have a little hackathon to see who can find a free tool these days with AI that does that better than we do it. And this way, what you're going to do is you're going to first of all, you're going to increase player satisfaction, because now you're going to have these reps working on cool stuff and learning stuff. And the more senior and the more junior reps can work together to figure things out, the senior reps can bring their business acumen to the table, the junior reps can actually bring their AI, you know, their tech insights and their native AI to the table. And we might start identifying as an organization areas that we can't, we can actually leverage AI without having to go all in on it or without having to rip and replace everything that we do. Because there's no way that leadership right now, any leader has the ability to stay up to date on what's happening at this point. And we have a bunch of reps. And look, let's be honest, if they're not thinking about getting replaced, if they're not worried about the STRS and BDRs. And A's, there ain't stupid. They're seeing what's happening right now. And they're sitting there basically saying, like, when when's the next shoe going to drop for me? What am I going to get replaced? So let's help them. And let's, let's get them to help us figure out how we can evolve through this, and how can really leverage these tools. And so that's where, you know, you can actually have some fun with this stuff and learn and connect the dots in the organization. So it's not leadership over here, STRS, here, AES here, and we all kind of have to figure it out on our own. Let's all get together and figure out how we can solve these problems. Because if you can solve those problems, I'll give you one perfect example. data, right, like so contact information. A lot of us pay a lot of data, you know, people a lot of money to get emails and phone numbers. Well, there's some free tools out there right now that can get emails and phone numbers using some of this AI stuff. So why don't we have a hackathon in the afternoon. And every whoever can find out who can get contact information of our target audience and compare it to what we're currently doing with our current tech stack. Whoever does the person wins, or that team wins? Well, now, you've increased player satisfaction. You've identified an area where you can reduce your tech stack and your spend, and everybody wins. Right? So
Jonathan Fischer 12:57
yeah, I love that. Real quick reminder to our live audience. We're going to have a q&a at the end of our conversation here for another 10 or 15 minutes at the bottom of the half hour. You don't have to wait go ahead and put those questions right into chat. We'll bank those and circle back and have some asked me anything time with John Barrows. The end of our time, John, the folks that know you call me JB though, right?
John Barrows 13:17
Yeah, call me anything. My mom calls me John, Michael, my friends call me JB, or John JM or whatever. So I'll usually respond to almost anything.
Jonathan Fischer 13:26
It's just that that guy who's really smart about sales, that guy
John Barrows 13:30
from smart, I just taken enough beating to have some experience.
Jonathan Fischer 13:33
I resemble that remark. Well, JB, I love what you said a minute ago, but the hackathon idea. I wonder if you agree, I feel like there's a lot of fear and reticence of like, is this a threat to my job? You know, and I wonder if you know, if leaders giving permission to their folks to do what you said, jump in, get involved, start to get involved the conversation, if that could allay some of those fears? I guess that's a two part question that on the other hand, should it? Because you know, are we going to find some some ways to do things that could lead to some right sizing of our organizations?
John Barrows 14:06
Yeah, we will. And if you don't, as a leader, you should you know what I mean, like, leaders, think about McDonald's. Okay. McDonald's is replacing their stores with automated stores. It's evolution, we're going to like if anybody is like, Oh, I wish it were to go back like you've already lost. It's just like, when COVID hit then when people are like, Oh, I can't wait till things go back to normal. What do you mean normal? Like, things are moving so fast right now that if you are not at least trying to stay up to date, and guess what, you'll educate those reps on how to use these tools. And yeah, there might be some points where we start to have to shave off because we are becoming more efficient. But it's gonna be the reps that figure it out, that helped us get to that point and are going to be indispensable. Right. So the I mean, quite frankly, there is a large portion of our population that is going to get replaced and they shouldn't be scared. But those are the ones that And I'm gonna say those are the ones that are going through the motions themselves. They don't give a shit about this industry. They don't care about the profession of sales. They show up at nine o'clock they leave at five o'clock and they bitch and moan because they don't get the Commission's or they don't get the leads and Oh woe is me and quite frankly, they should get replaced. I have zero sympathy for people like that zero, okay? The people that give a shit though, the people who are like, ooh, like, I want to learn about this profession I want I want to treat this as a profession. Think about it. Almost every other profession is educated. There's a degree in it, they have certifications for it, they you know, and people are actively trying to get better at their profession. For some reason, we've kind of lost that in sales. We just show up and we're like, oh, okay, I got a bunch of inbounds. Great. How many do you want? How many do you want? I mean, again, we've been order takers for the past 10 years. And if you can't get out of that mindset, of I'm, like, I want to get better. You'll get replays? I got no sympathy for you know,
Jonathan Fischer 15:59
yeah. Yeah. Let the folks that are fighting over the Glengarry leads, take that fight somewhere else, right? If we're involved, we're going to find out how we need to evolve. Yeah, that's pretty good. If we're involved, we'll see how we need to evolve. So I bumped into that one. So what are some some? So for those who are involved? Let's talk about implementing AI. So I mean, are there probably an array of areas where from your own your own involvement in this space, they could immediately start to look for how to solve some problems and make the sales process a little more cutting edge?
John Barrows 16:33
Yeah, I mean, I think it's all about practical application, right, then what you do is you just kind of look through the sales process, and you find areas that are admin, heavy, whatever it might be, and you start to look for those solutions. So let's, I'll give you a really easy one that every year we do this, there was a report, I paid like usually three or $4,000, to have some kids who are way smarter than me go out there and research the top priorities of the top executives in the top industries, right. And it's this killer document we always pull out at the beginning of the year, and it's broken down by every industry. So like, you know, you name it, right. And then it's CIO priority 123, CFO, party, 123 CEO, and we do it every single year. So you can see the progression of those priorities. And the in the idea of that is the reason we want to know that so we can craft messaging that is relevant to those personas, right? Because what you don't want to do is say, Hey, tell me about your priorities. Like that's a dumbass question. You should ask an executive. Ideally, you go in with, hey, you know, we're talking to CIOs in healthcare. And they're telling us that the top priorities walking into 2023 are X, Y, and Z Are those yours? Like that's, you know, even that slight alteration makes a big difference. And so that that thing cost me $3,000, right, that I put out every year, I don't need to spend $3,000 on it anymore. I can go into chat GPT, or one of those tools and type in, hey, could you tell me the top priorities? We'll chat GBT is I think is still 2021 and back. So you want to find the ones that are updated on the internet right now? And are pulling from real, like real world info. You say, Hey, could you tell me the top priorities of CIOs in the tech industry or in the SAS industry right now in 2023, and how they are being impacted by AI. And that thing is going to come back to you with some pretty interesting stuff that you might not have thought of right. And then we can use that research to then build our business acumen to have that conversation. If you're researching accounts, right? Usually, you have to go to a website, you have to go to their news and events section, you have to go on somebody's LinkedIn profile, you have to kind of look at, you know, all the articles and all that other stuff. Well, there's tools that you can research these accounts, put the URL and the LinkedIn account into there and say, Hey, summarize for me, what are the top things as it relates to initiatives that they're working on the top top 12. So my research is going to be super efficient. My summarizing conversations, there's tools out there right now, where if you're using a gong, or any one of the call recording softwares that has that can transcribe all your conversations. And I think even zoom is putting a new one together where it's embedded into their system. I think Gong does that now too. But there's tools out there that as long as you have that transcript, you can take that transcript, put it into one of these AI tools and say, Please summarize this for me with the top three takeaways. There we go. Podcasts. There's tools out there that you can take a podcast, plug it into that podcast, I plug it into this AI tool and tell it Hey, could you summarize that podcast for me with the key takeaways? And are any of them relevant to whatever your solution is? Right? So there's all these little, just super, you know, it's almost like what you want to do is you want to do your version of whoever it is, whether it's research or writing or something like that. And then just find that extra 10 minutes on the back end of that thing to find a tool to see if we can do it faster than you. Right, we're better than you. Now. Don't get me wrong, a lot of these tools you need to train to get to a point where it is acceptable. So that's why the rabbit hole for me has been pretty deep these days. Because I'm like, Okay, here's the message that I want to be able to put out. Here's what I write. Now. Let me see if I can get a tool like chat GPT to do it and it's like Yeah, make it friendly or Do this, do that. And like 15 minutes later, I finally have something that's reasonable. And I'm like, Ah, I could have just done that on my own with like, you know what I mean, I'm faster over here. But the benefit is if I put that work in early, and I train it with my language and my stuff, like and keep, you know, iterating iterating iterating. Eventually, it's going to know my voice. Eventually, it's going to start to get there, but you have to put in the work. And this is why I recommend everybody, like half hour a day. Pick a tool to play with, don't go down the rabbit hole because you'll go down a rabbit hole. But also, you know, people ask it, I love that, you know, people ask me, John, how should I get started with chat? GBT? Like tools like this? I know you don't use you. Aren't you as chatty btw that I'm dead serious? Go into chat GBT and say I'm a 47 year old man. I'm a CEO of a sales training organization in Boston, Massachusetts. And I don't know what to do with a tool like GPT. Could you give me some advice and things that I could use you for? And that sucker will tell you?
Jonathan Fischer 21:04
Well, that's a great advice. Use it to ask you. Well, and you mentioned about podcasting. maybe now's the time for me to do the big reveal that I'm actually AI. By.
John Barrows 21:15
By the way, that would not surprise me. It'll come it'll come. Press. I'd be massively impressed because of the body like, you know, all that other stuff. But I'd be like, damn, because I've been duped now on phone calls. And I listened for this stuff. And I've been duped on AI phone calls. Where
Jonathan Fischer 21:33
are getting to be where? Yeah, they're there. They're on the other side of the uncanny valley. You couldn't you can be fooled. Now. It's pretty funny. You just have to ask the right question and get the weird answer, because the intonation is pretty much spot on now. So the intonation isn't going to tell you.
John Barrows 21:48
Somebody do want to address that. I'm excited about AI tools. But how do you alleviate security concerns? I'm here to tell you, you can't. You cannot alleviate security concerns with stat, GBT. It already knows the information. And as long I mean, what are you going to do? I mean, you're not gonna put trade secrets in there. But depending on if you're a public or a private company, you're telling me that your information isn't out there in some way, shape or form already? And yeah, come on. It's like when loved it when Snowden. Remember back in the day when Snowden like you revealed that the government is spying on us here, right? And everybody was all up in arms. I'm like, come on. I'm like, You didn't think that already. I go look for the especially for the people that were all like, Oh, my God, like, this is like I knew what I knew. And I'm like, Okay, I got one question for you. Have you changed your password yet? No, then shut up about your security. I don't want to be callous about it. But it is true. Like, that's why, by the way, the cat's already out of the bag with AI, we cannot regulate it. So people thinking about the US and how we need to regulate it. No, we can't. We absolutely cannot. You know why? Because China's not going to Russia is not going to they're not going to regulate it. So if we put regulations on this thing we're going to lose. So we just have to hope and pray that the good AI outweighs the bad AI. And eventually, those who have a fight, this one's going to be stronger.
Jonathan Fischer 23:06
Yeah, yeah. Are there any ethical considerations you think that sales professionals should be aware of speaking of AI, you kind of alluded to that there a moment ago, there could be some people of ill will push into technology? What are some ethical thoughts on the sales side of this?
John Barrows 23:20
I don't know about the sales side. I mean, there's tons of I mean, this is actually a real thing, I would highly recommend everybody come up with a safe word for their family. The reason for that is these AI conversate. Like, and by the way, when you get a call from somebody that is not in your phone, don't when you pick up the phone, do not even say hello, because what they're hoping for you to do is you pick up the phone, you're like, hello, hey, who is this? Hey, what the hell is this all about? Right? And every word you're saying they are recording it. And they only need about I think 10 or 15 words with your tonality to fully replicate your voice. And I'm seeing more and more examples of families getting a call from somebody saying that their daughter was in a massive accident or they've kidnapped their kid and in the background, you literally hear the kids voice saying Mommy, mommy helped me please, please. And people are like draining their bank accounts to pay these ransoms. So I just encourage everybody at a macro level to make sure you have a safe word so that if that happens to you, you can say okay, well, what's the safe word and then go from there. But as it relates to sales? I don't know ethical, I mean, that. Here's here's where I think the challenge is, is that too many people are taking what these tools are outputting to them as truth. Right? They're not using it as a curiosity vehicle to learn more about that thing, and then go source check. Right, what they're saying is they're just putting into GPT and taking it as truth. And we all know that the obviously the internet. I mean, I don't know what the percentage of crap is out there on the internet, but I think it's pretty large. I would venture to say more than 50% of the stuff on the internet is total fake news total crap. So so when you get an answer, I think the unethical thing to do to answer your question is So is to just take it and just do the lazy thing like basically letting ai do your work for you without having to put in kind of the background of like, where's this information coming from? Is this even true or not? So I think that's probably the the place, I would say the unethical pieces. This is just you're believing the technology and not using it to to, you know, to learn to be curious. And so that's why I think that sales reps might get some trouble because let's use that example. I'm doing research on CIOs, right? CIOs and healthcare well, very easily. Oh, great. That's what CIOs care about. Okay, you know, source Check, Please source Check, please. Maybe look at it. Maybe ask your CIO, hey, are these your priorities? Like, I just want to triple check, right, that type of thing. Those are some things that I think hopefully reps will do, because it can cut down a lot, but not 100%. You know what I mean, get to be the last mile, not last mile has go educate yourself on this, go learn about that go be more curious. Go source check that.
Jonathan Fischer 26:01
Yeah, well, and you're really alluding to some limitations of the technology, it still is computerized. And this has been since the first computers its data in data out. And if it's garbage, it's gonna be garbage. So we do have to do cross check it. Are there other limitations in the technology, at least as it stands today that I ought to be aware of as a sales leader?
John Barrows 26:23
Yeah, I mean, there's tons I have. That's why I haven't adopted everything. You know what I mean? Like, that's why I haven't automated my entire process, because the emails are okay. That they come up with, like, the challenges, they're better than most, you know what I mean? That's, again, going back to the over engineering the sales process with a kid, you know, with a rep who has been treated like a robot. Yeah, whatever they're doing, AI is probably going to be better at this point. But when you get to a point where you have some business acumen in this space, and you have, and you understand the game, and you know how to have conversations, you know, how to manage yourself and that type of stuff. Like for somebody like me, some of this stuff is interesting, but I'm still going to do it my way, right? Because it's just not there yet. And so I mean, the limitations are the data that it pulls, but it really comes down to the prompts that you give it right. So that's why I think we all got to get better at writing better prompts, not necessarily looking for the not writing the email, but writing the prompt that is going to write the email. So I think the limitations are the prompting, right? And the ability to understand what prompts to give this thing so it can learn the right way, and it can learn on our messaging versus everybody else's. And so that's where I think the there's still a ton of limitations. I will tell you the one I'm pretty excited for, that I saw. And this is because I've stuck with Microsoft. I'm I'm old school, Microsoft, you know, Word doc, you know, through Office 365. I can't stand Gmail, you know, the Google Suite is fine, but whatever. But Microsoft, their copilot that I saw a demo of was who? Pretty impressive. Because like you because it integrates into office 365, and LinkedIn, and you know, their Dynamics CRM. And I saw an example where, you know, the guy just literally talked into it and said, Hey, I have a board meeting coming up next week, could you do me a favor, put together a board presentation and use the most recent forecast review, put that as Pivot Table number five on and all of a sudden, this thing opened up PowerPoint went bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, put bullet points on each one. And it was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? So that's the one I'm like, I'm playing around with all these point solutions, just to kind of get a sense of what they all do. But I am really looking forward to the day where it's just right in my inbox, because I'm you know, Outlook, if I can be an outlook and create cadences and Outlook to purple that's tied to LinkedIn, because I'm already connected to it. And that is the one that's the one I'm waiting for. Personally, that's pretty
Jonathan Fischer 28:51
amazing. Well, we've had such a wide ranging conversation, it's blown by already, John, you're the kind of guy that as you talk, you get the impression, there's a whole lot more beyond what you actually have already said. I know the listener would like to chase more of your insights down how they best go about doing that.
John Barrows 29:07
A couple of ways. Appreciate that. I mean, you could go to Jay barrows.com. So letter J, ba, rr ows.com. That's where I got all my content, right? So you can connect with me on Instagram. And also, I got my own podcast. It's called to make it happen Monday podcast, where we pick topics like this and dive into them with people who are way smarter than me. And so yeah, I mean, look, I put a ton of content out there on LinkedIn. Unfortunately. And I hate to say this, because it sounds like a humble brag it kind of is, but it's annoying. Like I've reached the 30,000 limit on connections on LinkedIn. I'm creeping up on 400,000 followers, but that 30,000 connections is super arbitrary. And it's I can't accept any more connections on LinkedIn, which sucks. But Instagram, John M Barrows. That's where I do all my free consulting. So if anybody has any questions about this stuff, you can hit me up on Instagram and I'll get back to you right away. And then I got a YouTube channel that you'll find on the site and everything else.
Jonathan Fischer 29:55
Right on. Well, and at this point, we always like to switch over to To q&a, we've got some good questions coming into the chat, feel free to add more. But now's the time, we'll get and pull in and got a few here. And let's, let's go and begin with Anton's question. If we could, he's asking, how do you think the role of a sales leader is going to evolve? We talk a lot about sort of the I think we've talked sort of a strategic side and the tactical side, how about the middle of that? How are these leaders need to evolve out there?
John Barrows 30:25
So this is gonna be an interesting and leaders are, you know, it's I think it's a defined leadership, right. So if we're talking to frontline managers versus you know, VPS versus senior leadership, but I think the area that leadership lacks the most and could use the most help with is coaching. And I think these tools are going to be fantastic for coaching. I think that because I'm I'm already playing with, you can actually, if you go to my LinkedIn profile, right now, if you look at the pinned content, there's one that is me, as I just put some free tools, we took a couple of blog posts of mine, a couple of weeks of podcasts, and we ingested it into this little AI that looks like me. And it sounds like me, it looks like me, it talks like me, and like so if you think of, and I'm going to do this, I just need to find the time to if you the amount of content that I have on the internet right now is bananas, right? As far as videos and podcasts and blogs, and all that stuff. So think about taking all of my content, ingesting it into this AI bot, and having John Barrows AI as a coach that is available 24/7 And can, you know, in and also in any language, quite frankly. And then you add on the fact that that's my data set, but then there's every other sales guru on the planet that you can pump through this machine. And so now you're gonna have, I firmly believe that each one of us are going to have our own personal sales assistant, that for whatever reason, whenever we're needing help, we're going to be like, hey, or just talk to it, hey, I'm about to go into this meeting with whatever. And then that bot is going to pop up and give me some advice. And then we're going to record the conversation. And afterwards, we're going to have some very direct feedback from AI. And I think that's where AI is gonna shine. Now, what does that mean for middle management? I don't know, I think it leaves middle management doing what middle management does. We've always we've always tried to pretend like middle management can coach, but we never give them the tools. We never give them the training and we never give them the time. So what are most middle managers, they're usually the best sales rep who got promoted to be a manager, they don't know how to manage that. Well. And so what do they do? They deal Chase, they do what they're good at doing. They help the reps, close deals. Okay, so why don't we just admit this, why don't we just have aI coach and and then pinpoint the areas where a human should come in and actually coach the rep because it maybe hit a block or whatever it is, but then let the managers be the deal chasers that they are. Right. And so I think that's kind of where I think it's going to cut down if there's like five layers of management. I'm pretty sure AI is gonna cut that down to maybe two, right type of thing, because there's just so much redundancy in those managers, of managers, of managers of managers. But I think where we should be paying and looking to use AI is coaching now, again, coaching on frontline not necessarily coaching on somebody like me yet, we go back to the limitations of it. You know, I bet your for you, Jonathan, like I don't know if you've played around with some of the coaching tools, but you know, I've had to record my stuff and give me advice on what I should have done better. And I 90% of that stuff, I just roll my eyes out. I'm like, okay, dude, I didn't ask an open ended question when I should have like, shut up. You know what I mean, but did you get the report there? Did you understand how that client was really excited based on the things that I was talking about? Otherwise, he didn't. So I don't want that coaching. But for that frontline rep, who doesn't get the coaching in the first place? I think it's gonna be golden.
Jonathan Fischer 33:53
Nice, nice. Well, and you've kind of put me in mind, you got me thinking, you think of like Superman where his dad is able to communicate with him after deceased? I wonder if we're gonna be able to do that for our kids. I'm thinking yeah, well, me. They can refer back and whenever they need a good dad joke in my case. But yeah, good stuff. Here's a great question. You've definitely been hitting this kind of through album, maybe you can kind of hit it in all in the section. What are some of the great AI tools out there that can assist with that 70% admin work for salespeople?
John Barrows 34:29
There's a billion of them. I just put together a list the other day for a client that it was asking because I just all I'm doing is every time I see someone LinkedIn, I go up and I save it as a favorite and put it in a file and then just kind of start poking around on him. You know, one of the ones I use I'm using perplexity. perplexity is a is a good one. It's like chat GBT. But it's it's super easy to use, and it's actually current. So that one I'm actually I like, the reason I like perplexity is because you put a prompt in there. It'll give you an answer, but then it'll give you three or four other questions that you could ask as it relates to it. So it kind of peaks that carry out So you keep going down that rabbit hole. You know, there's ones late. Let me see if I'll just open this one up. There's ones that are like, let's see, you know, I talked about note taking, right? So there's one called fadem FA T HLM. Never take note, it's you know, the tagline is never take notes on Zoom again. It's the automated prospecting prompts. wind.ai ai assistant. So wi n n.ai. That's a, an assistant that you can use. I've seen some pretty cool things about it. Rewrote AI, rethink everyday writing. So our EWRO te is another one. personalized videos at scale stuff, you know, I mean, there's clickup Ai, there's clickup.ai, that's an AI writing assistant. I mean, there's there's a, there's a million of them. And I'm not saying one's better than the other, by the way. I'm not and I don't get paid for any of that stuff. But those are ones that you can kind of take a look at and say, Okay, let me at least start playing around with these things.
Jonathan Fischer 36:01
Yeah, good. Okay. That's a really helpful list. Is there some I had not heard of actually. Here's a question too. And my MiTek my feet isn't letting me down here. But I can still see it in the chat. So late, he was asking. Let's see here. Are there any common misconceptions or myths about AI and sales that you'd like to address or debunk?
John Barrows 36:25
Myths? I don't know. Anything is a myth right now. I think I think, you know, we got to take it as it comes and, and make sure we're paying attention. But I mean, the myth of it's going to replace all the sales. I think if we go that level, no, I don't think so. I think it's going to replace a large portion of sales professionals. There was a study that came out recently, and this is why it gives me a little hope. There's a study that came out recently that from Gartner that talked about how they average out boomers, millennials, Boomer Boomers, Gen xers and millennials. And this is b2b sellers, or b2b buyers, and they said, you know, in the data was 43% of companies or individuals in b2b scenario, want a rep free experience, they do not want to talk to a sales rep. 43%. And you know, that's just gonna get worse when Gen Z is coming in, right. But the good news is, that's the bad news. The good news is is that over that 43%, they had a 23% Higher regret rate when it comes to the purchase. So they didn't want a sales rep. But when they didn't want a sales rep, the regret rate went up by 23%, which tells me there is a there still is a high value in what sales can bring to the table. But it's not. And that's what value has changed value. The definition of value has changed right now. It is not blasting out template emails asking generic cold, you know, making generic cold calls asking dumb ass band questions, droning through demos, like that's not what value is. I mean, the question we got to ask ourselves is right now is what can we do to the what can we do that a computer can't? And I mean, that like really asked that question, because it is getting harder and harder and harder to answer that question. And so that's why we have to find out those ways like it, can a computer do this better than me? Well, if a computer can do it better than me, then I either need to start looking for another job. Or I need to step up and I need to evolve. And I know we're coming up on time, but I want to leave people with this, you know, only answer more questions, but only people with this mental if you ever seen the movie, Hidden Figures, but anything that Jonathan Do you ever see Hidden Figures?
Jonathan Fischer 38:25
Yeah, yeah, I that's a pretty cool story. Yeah. Love that movie.
John Barrows 38:29
Love that story. The subplot, there was one of my favorites. Remember all the women they were called? They were called computers, right? So these black women, they were always in the back when and they were computers. And they literally hand wrote like massive calculations to get us to the moon, which is just like what, like you were doing manual calculations to get us to the moon. If I'm John Glenn I getting in that thing. But But But what happened was the head of the computers that woman, she was walking in the main office, and she saw this huge IBM mainframe that just got delivered, right? And, and she had to she was she looked at it, and she goes, Oh, and she knew that that was going to replace them. And so she had two choices, she could one either go back to her team and say, Hey, we gotta get smarter, we got to get better. We got a big we got to beat that machine, we can do it, or what she did. She grabbed the manual. And she started learning how to turn it on how to maintenance it, how to use it. And then she brought it back to her entire team and said, Hey, we have to learn how to maintenance this thing. And so when they turn that sucker on, the IBM nerds couldn't even figure it out. And guess who could? So those women went from replaceable. 100% replaceable to indispensable and that's what I think we need to have that mentality on.
Jonathan Fischer 39:46
I love that it's a great note to end on. It's a wave, the wave can drown you or you can ride it cruise to new places. That's pretty cool. Well, it's been a great conversation. JB You are welcome, anytime back on the show. Thanks for bearing with us today. I appreciate it. Well, and thanks to our audience, you make the show what it is, and it's been a great ride here at the Evolve sales leader keep on coming back. We're here every week at the same time, same station. We're proudly powered by overpass.com overpass is one of the best places you can possibly go to get talent to help you grow your company, evolving talent to be virtual assistants, SDRs anyone that you need to help you grow your company at a great level of skill and amazing cost. Check them out@overpass.com It's free to open your account and see just how easy it is to hire some talent to grow your company. If you've been enjoying the content here on the show, you can always go to our main podcast, the evolved sales leader can be found anywhere you'd like to go and get your podcasts. That's gonna do it for today's session. Thanks for being here once again, and we'll see you next time everybody make it a great weekend.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
