Jonathan Kvarfordt on this episode
Jonathan Kvarfordt is CEO of GTM AI Academy, former VP of GTM Strategy and Marketing at Momentum (acquired by Salesforce), and host of the GTM AI Podcast. He teaches AI strategy to revenue leaders at companies ranging from $20M to $200M+, giving him a front-row seat to how CROs are—and aren't—deploying AI in their go-to-market motions.
The core mistake CROs keep making is optimizing for the seller instead of the buyer. Most leaders ask "what AI tools should we get?" before they've even mapped their buyer's journey or identified internal friction. Giving a rep a copilot license without training, context, or redesigned process just means the same broken motion runs faster—and faster doesn't fix a buyer experience that was already terrible.
The reframe is this: start by deciding what experience you want your buyers to go through, then figure out where humans and AI should live in that journey. One company mapped this in a month, replaced 15 SDRs with 2, and generated the same pipeline by month two. By month four, they had four SDRs doing 30% of pipeline generation—while marketing accelerated, not decelerated. The friction-mapping exercise, combined with data-driven targeting (firmographic, technographic, intent signals), and strategic human touchpoints (video messages, personalized intent signals rather than blasts) is what unlocked the leverage.
This episode covers why 70% of sales cycle length is internal friction, not the customer; how to stack-rank your best accounts using AI and signal data; where humans still outperform AI in outbound; the "slingshot effect" of slowing down to speed up; and the first move any CRO should make right now before buying another tool.
What we cover in this episode
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2:45
The ROI Problem with AI Tools Most companies see no transformation from AI because they're just running old motions faster without process redesign.
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4:04
Wrong First Question CROs ask 'what tools should I get' before mapping buyer friction or defining desired experience. Start with process, not tools.
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8:15
Seller vs. Buyer Optimization Optimizing for reps (faster emails) instead of buyers (better experience) perpetuates broken motion. Align to buyer's journey first.
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10:39
Psychological Safety as Exit Criteria Trust and comfort in the sales relationship are unmeasured but critical; most teams lack explicit metrics for this foundation.
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14:50
Friction Mapping Framework Identify internal (handoffs, data, team comms) and buyer friction (form fields, call delays). Friction signals where to apply AI or humans.
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18:22
15 SDRs to 2: Case Study Company redesigned entire SDR motion from scratch, replacing 15 reps with 2 doing same pipeline gen in month two.
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21:28
What They Uncovered Data-enriched targeting, internal process streamlining, and strategic human moments (video, voice) replaced automation-heavy motion.
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24:44
Stack-Ranking Accounts with AI Combine firmographic, technographic, and intent data to dynamically rank accounts; pair with rep capacity planning for precision targeting.
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29:21
Where Humans Outperform AI Character-based trust (integrity, intent), EQ, relationships, and accountability remain human strengths; AI excels at capability and results.
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41:00
The Slingshot Effect Slowing down to redesign processes feels painful short-term but launches you ahead once aligned; most CROs lack patience to reset.
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48:54
Start Here: Friction First Map internal and buyer friction before tool shopping. Define buyer experience first, then decide where AI and humans add value.
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49:04
70% Sales Cycle is Internal Friction Most delay in deals comes from handoffs and miscommunication inside the org, not buyer hesitation or market conditions.
The lines worth sharing
If all you're doing is giving a tool to help someone write an email faster or send them off faster, you're not going to have organizational or revenue transformation.
Jonathan Kvarfordt · 0:16
Each brand has to decide what experience they want their buyers to go through. Then where is the best place to put the humans.
Jonathan Kvarfordt · 0:26
Friction is your friend. When you can identify friction, it's a symptom of what needs to be solved for.
Jonathan Kvarfordt · 14:50
The more that you make your sales process aligned to the buyers process, so you line it to that first, the better the results are in revenue.
Jonathan Kvarfordt · 9:32
Common questions from this episode
Why aren't CROs seeing ROI from AI tools?
Most CROs give reps AI tools without training, context, or process redesign. This just accelerates broken motions. Real ROI requires mapping buyer friction first, redesigning the motion, then layering in AI and humans strategically.
What should CROs do before buying an AI tool?
Map internal and buyer friction. Define what experience you want buyers to have. Then decide where humans and AI fit best. This foundation work is more critical than tool selection.
How can one company reduce SDRs from 15 to 2 without losing pipeline?
By redesigning the entire motion from first principles: data-enriched targeting, streamlined internal operations, and strategic human touchpoints (video, voice) instead of pure automation. The leverage came from eliminating busywork and aligning to buyer needs.
Where do humans still outperform AI in outbound?
Character-based trust elements: integrity, intent, relationship-building, and accountability. AI excels at knowledge transfer, capabilities, and results delivery. The best motion layers AI support with human EQ and trust.
What percentage of sales cycle length is internal friction, not the buyer?
About 70% of sales cycle length stems from internal friction—handoffs, miscommunication, data misalignment—not buyer hesitation. Mapping and eliminating this friction is higher-leverage than optimizing rep activity.
How should CROs think about AI if they don't know the technology well?
Don't become a prompt engineer. But understand the capabilities and limits of the tech you're deploying. Know what AI can and cannot do. More importantly, ask: is this better for my buyer? If not, don't do it, regardless of what's possible.
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Read the full transcript · 67 KB · Jonathan Kvarfordt
JOHNATHAN0:00I teach
JOHNATHAN0:00an AI strategy course to, and it's usually crows
JOHNATHAN0:03one of the first questions they ask me before we start is what tools should I get?
JOHNATHAN0:08I think people expect that they can just turn on a tool
JOHNATHAN0:11all of a sudden transformation happens.
JOHNATHAN0:12They magically have 50% more pipeline as a result. It doesn't work that way.
JOHNATHAN0:16if all you're doing is giving a tool to help someone write an email faster or send them off faster, you're not going to have organizational or revenue
JOHNATHAN0:22transformation. As a result,
JOHNATHAN0:23each brand, in my opinion, has to decide
JOHNATHAN0:26what experience they want their buyers to go through.
JOHNATHAN0:28And then where is the best place to put the humans so they can be optimized the best possible
JOHNATHAN0:33so once they identified that, they mapped out their plan, which took a month to do,
JOHNATHAN0:37they had two stars doing the same amount of pipeline gen as 15 before by month
JOHNATHAN0:42then by month for they had four stars doing 30% of pipeline gen, which by the way, marketing didn't slow down, so they had amplified and built more pipeline as a result by blowing up what they're doing before and starting from scratch, doing exactly what I'm talking about.
EDDIE1:17All right. Welcome to a new episode of Go to Market Science. Today we're going to talk about the mistakes that crews are making with Go to Market AI. Our special guest today is Jonathan Carr, Ford VP of marketing at One Mind recently soon to be I don't know, we'll find out in a
EDDIE1:32Here's a little elevator pitch on this episode and what we're going to cover.
EDDIE1:35So first, Jonathan has a wealth of experience in go to market AI, coming off a stint as VP of go to market strategy and marketing at Momentum and incredibly exciting AI company just acquired by Salesforce. He hosts the go to market AI podcast. He's the CEO and I love this title. Chief AI nerd at the go to market AI Academy and educational platform dedicated to empowering go to market professionals with cutting edge AI insights and strategies.
EDDIE2:01Today, we're going to dive into mistakes that crows are making with AI, things he's seen firsthand in his work across all of the things I just mentioned, as well as success stories Jonathan has seen firsthand as well. So thank you for joining me,
EDDIE2:15Eddie.
JOHNATHAN2:15I'm a huge fan. I just want to say thank you so much for having me. And to the audience listening, thank you so much for taking a second on your busy day to listen. So just much appreciated. I humbled to be here.
EDDIE2:25I love that you say you're a huge fan. It's, you know, massive like imposter syndrome. When I get that kind of feedback from folks like yourself and it's it's awesome to hear. So you have a lot of.
JOHNATHAN2:38For real when you reach out to me, hey, you want to come with the pockets like the Eddie wants me on his podcast? I'm honored. Like, yeah, I was excited.
EDDIE2:45Oh come on. Well, anyway, I'm excited to dive into it, so let's just, like, get right into it. One of the things you mentioned on our prep call was, no transformational change is going to come from sending emails faster. I got a bunch of questions for you, but let's just dive into that. What did you mean when you said you're not going to have transformational change from sending emails faster?
JOHNATHAN3:06Yeah, it's both sending or writing emails. Fashion. I say that because I see a lot of companies right now who throw a chatbot, team license or a copilot license to their team and don't provide any training and not a lot of context, say, here's this cool AI tool, go transform yourself and no one knows how to use it.
JOHNATHAN3:27And really, what people do is they just write or send more emails without having good prompts. Driving it without having context with no training. And the tools are just not well used. Like people expect this amazing transformation to the organizations without thinking about what they're willing to transform besides just giving a tool, you know what I mean? And it's interesting how I had a lot of people come to me, like at the serial level, I there's a there's a community I teach an AI strategy course to, and it's usually crows who come and attend, and we're talking like 20 million to 200 million plus type works.
JOHNATHAN4:04And one of the first questions they ask me before we start is what tools should I get? And I always tell people like, that's not not. I wouldn't say it's a bad question. It's just the wrong place to begin, you know? And I think people expect that they can just turn on a tool and all of a sudden transformation happens.
JOHNATHAN4:21They magically have 50% more pipeline as a result. It doesn't work that way. And I think that going back to the point of the question you ask, which is if all you're doing is giving a tool to help someone write an email faster or send them off faster, you're not going to have organizational or revenue transformation. As a result, you have to think differently.
EDDIE4:38I couldn't agree with that more. And it just reminds me, and we also work with companies of that size like typically 550 to 500 million in AR. So these are mature businesses with sizable sales teams. They've got a lot going on. And I see the same thing. And we saw this, I think with its last iteration was with sales often outreach.
EDDIE4:56And we had folks that are like, okay, we can now automate these email sends. We can automate voice mail drops, we can automate the outreach process. And all that did was create a race to the bottom. I mean, there are not a lot of organizations, except in the very beginning when they kind of got this arbitrage from doing this before everybody else that have been able to show results from that, because what you end up doing is you send that message out to, let's just say, the first thousand prospects, and the message isn't as good as it could be if you'd done it a little bit slower.
EDDIE5:25And so you miss a bunch of those folks. So then you go to the next 1006 thousand. Before you know it, you're on. You know, the batch of, you know, 200,000 plus. And those folks are just like, no matter how good your messaging is, the conversion rate is so much lower and you've created this race to the bottom.
EDDIE5:42Meanwhile, all their competitors are doing the same thing and like inboxes are just flooded and there's not really any value that's being created from this. And it's ironic because I think those tools have their value. I personally built something like Salesforce or Outreach in my instance of Salesforce, back when I was the first day in a SaaS startup, because I needed something like this.
EDDIE6:02It was rudimentary. I'm not trying to brag and say I built some amazing things, but I saw the need for this first hand. But I think that we like leapfrogged and said, well, okay, like let's press to send all button and then that should that should magnify our results. And it did the opposite. You can even go back further and look at like the implementation of Salesforce.
EDDIE6:19And a lot of companies are like, okay, we'll get 100,000 leads, dump it into Salesforce, we'll tell our reps to start making calls. And that didn't magically generate revenue. What generates revenue is having a sound process that folks can execute consistently, that produces the desired result. And I know we're going to get into this on today's show, but tell me if you disagree.
EDDIE6:40I think that that's the lens we need to look through, is how do we use AI to better produce this, this repeatable, proven process?
JOHNATHAN6:49Yeah, we we wrote momentum last year. We interviewed 30 people and we wrote and released a book called Ignites Your GTM with AI. And really, it was just a collection of thoughts from crows, VP of Leaders of marketing, CS around AI, that kind of thing. And the gist in what we released was a framework that we kind of put together, which is basically what you're talking about.
JOHNATHAN7:09It's like you need to think about how do you build or redefine your revenue. Org not thinking AI or human, AI and human. And where's the best place to put each one? So that's a good experience for the buyer. So make sense.
EDDIE7:25So it does. Don't go on anyways.
JOHNATHAN7:28It's just it was just amazing how.
JOHNATHAN7:31How many of them like I was the one who talked to them or my CEO talked to them in the interviews so they didn't know what the other people were saying. But we did, and the pattern kept coming up that it's like, okay, you have to balance what we did before, which is funny because this is what one of mine talks about, but it's really about being willing to say, do we really have to do things the way we used to do it?
JOHNATHAN7:49Or can we think of a new way to do it that might be better? Hopefully it would be better for the buyer and for the seller because it's a better overall experience. But it requires you being willing to look at what currently exists and say that doesn't work anymore, or there's a better way to do it. And a lot of people are uncomfortable with that, because a lot of those I know run the same playbook for four years and think it's just going to work again.
JOHNATHAN8:10You can't do that anymore. You have to be willing to think outside the box of what you've done for however many years, you know.
EDDIE8:15Fantastic segue to my next question, which is what did you mean when you said that there's too much focus on human optimization and not enough on buyer optimization?
JOHNATHAN8:27Oh yeah, I could go on this one for a long time. The gist is this when you think about the different roles across the customer journey. So from top of funnel through the sale implementation, CS account management, there's at least seven roles that someone could experience depending on the on the complexity of the technology or product or service.
JOHNATHAN8:46So if you have an STR, you have an AI, you have a sales engineer, you have implementation, you have CS, you have a. And all of this means handoffs and then transitions and same questions over and over again. It's not always the best experience like I've been in a lot of companies, large and small, and there's very few who have this like down perfect.
JOHNATHAN9:04It's mostly rough, which is amazing. The business keeps operating as a result, and I, I tied a long child with the guy. His name is doctor Tom Tonkin, and all he does is do thought leadership and research on the buyers, the buyers experience versus the seller's experience. And he's just showing how the more weirdly enough, the more that you make your sales process aligned to the buyers process.
JOHNATHAN9:32So you line it to that first and it's the foundation, the better the results are in revenue, weirdly enough, you know. So.
JOHNATHAN9:41So again, this is dichotomy of thinking, okay. Instead of thinking how do I help my salesperson have more calls and do more things and auto entry CRM data, which again, that's all momentum did. And I love that use case. You're still not looking at the the core foundation of the entire sales experience, which is what is the buyer going through.
JOHNATHAN10:00You know, just because like an auto entry data into the CRM does not mean the buyer experience is magically any better or different. It's just doing the old way faster. Which again, I'm not dissing on momentum because we had amazing business, but you have to be linked to look at both sides of it and then be willing to say, okay, is what we're doing actually beneficial for them and best for them in their buying process?
JOHNATHAN10:21And if it's not, then you need to be willing to shift that thinking that help. Like for example, let me give you an example you gave me. Psychological safety is a huge concept in the buyer's journey that most salespeople don't spend any time on. They have to do their exact writing of, they have mid-pack, they have bats, or they have whatever stuff.
JOHNATHAN10:39It's very like, I've never been in a pipeline meeting where someone says how psychologically safety you feel like this person is with you like that. You do have that question because the good salespeople, in my opinion, or the ones who get people on a text basis and are sharing family pictures, and they have that because they build a relationship, but it's not an actual measurable exit criteria item.
JOHNATHAN10:58It's a side benefit. Does that make sense? It's like that's the thing you need to focus on is how safe is that person with you? How comfortable are they with you so you can move along the sales process? I don't make sense or not, but.
EDDIE11:09It makes perfect sense to me. I mean, like so for background, for you and for the audience. I spent the first ten or so years of my career in finance. I dipped out into SaaS and then back into finance, and then finally kind of came back into SaaS, joining Salesforce. And I think that I was drinking the B2B SaaS Kool-Aid while I was working in private equity.
EDDIE11:30And I was thinking, why don't we have anything systematized? Why is nothing automated? Why is everything manual? Because it was so much about the relationship, about that text message, about taking folks out for steak dinners. And I got so frustrated with the mentality of that industry because everything was so slow and not automated and like, literally like we'd be passing Excel sheets around, even though we had Salesforce passing Excel sheets around, showing like who we'd met with and what stage they were in, basically pipeline reports in Excel.
EDDIE12:00And then I came to Salesforce, and I saw the exact opposite end of the spectrum where the relationship didn't matter, where everything was automated. And I started to realize, oh, this is why these folks in finance were pushing back on me, because we would get on calls and it's like, okay, you've gone to the marketing website, you've filled out a form, then you talk to an STR, then you talk to an AI that you for a second time.
EDDIE12:25Then like the essay comes in and they qualify you again. And it's all of this is happening before you can even see a demo. And so when we take this back to the buyer experience, I remember I left Salesforce and at the time we were doing some work in private equity, since I knew that industry and these firms would call a salesperson like, can I just see Salesforce?
EDDIE12:43Like, can you just show me how Salesforce can help me raise capital or like identify investment opportunities? Right. And they'd get so frustrated they had to go through this whole process. And the rep would be like, well, I can't just customize Salesforce. So I spun up a video and I created a five minute video on YouTube, and I sent it to all the A's at Salesforce that I was working with, and they sent it to all their clients, and I got like hundreds and hundreds of hits solely from being sent directly from because their customers are like, can I just see the thing, please?
EDDIE13:09And this isn't like some magical AI solution, but it goes back to your point about like optimizing the buyer journey. They don't want to go through 15 calls before they see the demo. And you could even like extend this to things like filling out forms on websites. Why do we ask folks questions that we could already find the answer to by just doing back in like data augmentation?
JOHNATHAN13:27Yeah, it's you know, what's funny is that I feel like with AI it's giving more of a BDC. Like we're not there yet, because obviously B2B conversations of any tech or service is not the same, but it's almost like AI is making the experience of having answers quickly, and things happen so fast that B2C experience is coming more and more to the B2B world.
JOHNATHAN13:54You know what I mean? It's like people want on demand answers. They want to have something friendly and personalized to them. They want to have answers faster. Instead of going through 12 calls to get a demo and then get pricing, it's like it's just not a it's not a pleasant experience. It's like, imagine if that happened with getting a coffee at Starbucks.
JOHNATHAN14:08It would be the worst experience in the world. You know, I have to talk to this chatbot. They have to talk to a person who doesn't know anything about coffee. And then then I go to the next person who asks me the same questions. It's just a horrible experience, you know?
EDDIE14:20I mean, I'm starting to see some of that stuff in B2C too, but I don't want to spend too much time on my soapbox. I want to talk about tangible, actionable takeaways. So what have you seen like in terms of what use cases are you most excited about that you've seen where AI can help improve this buyer experience?
JOHNATHAN14:36Well, without I'm not going to I mean, I will mention one of mine, but I'm not going to make this about a pitch. Like I think it's more about asking the question. This is what I would give advice to is I was at human X last week talking about this, and I feel like more people should hear this.
JOHNATHAN14:50I'm gonna give you the advice. I give it human X, which is friction, is your friend. I know it sounds weird to say that, but friction is your friend. Meaning that when you can identify friction, it's a symptom of what needs to be solved for. So the question is, have you mapped out internal friction? Like what is your team have to go through with handoffs and data and team communication and using AI to obviously make that so much easier?
JOHNATHAN15:15Then the other side is buyer friction. Like have you has anyone on this listening to this? Have you paid someone or had someone who like a like your wife or a kid or somebody someone that you trust to go through your own buyers experience, go on the website, book a call, go through that process and map everything. How much time did it take?
JOHNATHAN15:34How was your experience? On a scale of 1 to 10, would you recommend this for a friend? Was it something you enjoyed? The buying experience, which is very few things you could say you enjoyed, but did you enjoy it? And then how long did it take you to get answers around like pricing and demo, and have someone go through your experience and mark off the friction that you have and start to ask, okay, first question, whether it's AI human, is this friction good?
JOHNATHAN15:59Like, I don't know if any friction is really good, but like, how can I make this less by either automating and making sure my team is there to to be there and help. Or can I use a technology like a one mind or whatever technology you want to use so that the body experience becomes a pleasurable experience? And I don't mean that in a in a derogatory or inappropriate way, but genuinely a good experience, you know?
JOHNATHAN16:20But most people don't map the friction. Friction is your friend. When you find the friction, it tells you where you should start fixing things. You know.
EDDIE16:27It's so interesting. Like, I've been drinking the Alex from Kool-Aid the last number of days. Just like all day, every day, consuming his book $100 million leads or $100 million offers. And I have, like, mixed views on him. I always wonder how much of what he says is real, but he actually has in his book, this exercise that you mentioned, where you basically lay out, like all the challenges that your buyer has in realizing their dream outcome, and then you translate that into solutions, and that's how you actually think about packaging your product or solution.
EDDIE16:58Right? For us, we're talking about go to market, which like then kind of like goes into like a whole other conversation of like, should we treat go to market like product like product development, which I'm a big fan of. But I just did this exercise this week, and I have a 55 page document that Claude helped me put together on every single challenge that a crow faces in realizing the dream outcome that we are trying to deliver.
EDDIE17:21And it makes me question like, what can I do to reduce these challenges that stand in the way of the dream outcome that they want?
JOHNATHAN17:28exactly. I bet you that one thing is probably gold, because I bet you that that a lot of the things you talk to the crows about are probably pretty common, you know? So when you can find a playbook or roadmap and say, okay, regardless of your tech stack, here are some principles. Thought process you want to take yourself through so that you can map those out.
JOHNATHAN17:47It's really, really powerful, you know, but it requires a crow who's willing to like, I put things on a spectrum of how much you want to transform. On the far my right side is the side of major transformation, of blowing things up, and the other side is just optimizing time. There's no good or wrong bad way to do it.
JOHNATHAN18:05Like I think all of its good, but at some point you can only optimize a human's time so much and you'll be capped and you have to get to a point where transformation requires not just using AI, but looking at first principle, thinking of what's the buyer's journey, what's the friction? Is this even what we want them to go through in the first place?
JOHNATHAN18:22Why are we doing it this way? You know? So then when you build out the process in the future, it becomes better. So I'll give you an example from someone who's on the podcast with Dosa. They had 15 stars providing 15% of the pipeline. The CEO, who was on the podcast with me said, we got to redo this and so they blew it up.
JOHNATHAN18:39Now I'm going to say a little prayer, thought here if the stars were doing 80% of the pipeline, it would have been a different conversation. But since 15% they could they could take more risk. That makes sense anyways. So they they, they let go of a lot of the team members. They didn't feel like we're ready for the next level.
JOHNATHAN18:57They kept one person who was very AI forward thinking, and they rebuilt the entire journey of stars, doing two things one asking what the buyer should go through, and two asking, where do we want a human to have? Part of the experience of the buyer makes sense for them. And when they map that out and they got new technology, they had the roadmap or their their flow.
JOHNATHAN19:19Sorry.
EDDIE19:19What was the second part like where a human is part of the buying experience? Meaning like what part of the buying experience is AI and what is human?
JOHNATHAN19:26Yes, it's trying to figure out, like each brand, in my opinion, has to decide where do they what experience they want to make for the buyer. Like, do you want to have all I do? I have all human or AI plus human. And if that's the case, where do you put each thing. Right. So for them they're looking at okay, if this is what we want someone to go through there like email sequencing or going to an event or whatever the pipeline is, what experience they want their buyers to go through.
JOHNATHAN19:50And then where is the best place to put the humans so they can be optimized the best possible way. So so once they identified that, they mapped out their plan, which took a month to do, and by month two, they had two stars doing the same amount of pipeline gen as 15 before by month two, which is crazy.
JOHNATHAN20:09And then by month for they had four stars doing 30% of pipeline gen, which by the way, marketing didn't slow down, so they had amplified and built more pipeline as a result by blowing up what they're doing before and starting from scratch, doing exactly what I'm talking about. It's not easy. You do slow down. When you're in the slow down mode, you feel like you're going behind, but as soon as you get it in line, you're slingshot and you go past where you were before.
JOHNATHAN20:31It happens every single time. It's just hard because in the moment for that quarter where you're catching up, it's tough because you don't have the results to show, you know what I mean? But once you actually upswing the other side, like you catch up really quick where you were before.
EDDIE20:44I want to press you on this for some tangible examples before but before. I do
EDDIE20:49the thing that always runs through my mind as a founder, CEO, entrepreneur is it is just drilled into my head that I have to work on my business and not just in the business, but it does seem that crows fall into this trap where, you know, they were a successful sales person by hustling and making calls and setting up meetings and closing deals, and then that mentality and that, like ethos carries forward into the Crow role.
EDDIE21:11And they're under so much pressure to close deals and higher reps and train reps. Yeah, it's hard to take a step back, but it's hard as an entrepreneur to do that as well. But you cannot build a better business if you are just constantly working in it.
JOHNATHAN21:26I agree, totally agree.
EDDIE21:28So let me press you on some specifics, like what were some of the specific things that they uncovered in this process?
JOHNATHAN21:33One was they realized that they didn't want to have the experience of
JOHNATHAN21:37they were using a lot of kind of classic tech sequencing tools, and they realized they didn't want to do that. They also started to use, I think they're using one user gems for, remember correctly. And again, I'm not saying that. So I love the User Gems team, but they wanted to do something that was more data focused so that when they had information come in that the STR wasn't just blasting out to everyone who had the title of their ICP, but it was definitely more data enriched.
JOHNATHAN22:04Reach out on a very narrow message because they knew if the certain signals were there from both first party and third party data, the message would cut through better versus just blasting everybody no matter what the data was. This makes sense. So one of it was, how do we know what our buyer is going through when they're not talking to us?
JOHNATHAN22:22And how do we get those intent signals or third party signals or whatever the case is. And we're talking beyond just job changes, like what is it for their company? What what are the things that they have seen in their own data that's proprietary to them? And then let that be reflected in the AI process for outbound. So it can be informed when they do outbound.
JOHNATHAN22:40So make sense. Hopefully. So a lot of it was trying to make sure like let's take the data from our customers, the information we have from the conversations there and then move it towards the top of funnel and mix that with the third party data, so that the AI was doing things and signaling things that was actually relevant, and not just saying, hey, have you have a new CMO title?
JOHNATHAN22:59Let's go after this person. So make sense? Therefore, the messaging was more relevant and the experience was better because it was actually relevant to the buyer. So make sense? Lovely.
EDDIE23:07It makes perfect sense. This is actually something I've been talking a lot about. And I want to bounce this off of you. So first, when I think about the absolute most impactful thing that you can do in go to market, especially as it pertains to a new business, although this also applies to as well, is just identifying the right targets and then by extension, meaning that there is a target out there, be it an individual or a company or a set of individuals in a company, that whatever your messaging is, is going to convert at ten x higher than another company, that is not as much of a fit for you.
EDDIE23:37This is the basic premise of ICP. We all know this, but how do we maximize this? Right? And it's exactly what you described, which is we have our firm graphic and graphic data. We have the data that we can pull from zoom info and clay. And then there's other proprietary databases that are specific to one industry. And we take all of this data together.
EDDIE23:57And that's sort of our, you know, our firm graphic and techno graphic data. We've got our intent data. We've got our, our our our third party intent data. I mean to say we have our first party intent data being our marketing data. And we have all of this data together. And then we also have like some of this data is somewhat static, like this person is in this job and they work at this company.
EDDIE24:17And some of this thing is a trigger, like they just raised a round of funding or they just like announced a new hire on their website. And how do you take all that data, aggregate it, and then you ultimately end up with a score to count list that is dynamically being updated. That is saying, hey Mister, miss Sales rep,
EDDIE24:34here are 100 accounts.
EDDIE24:36And by the way, we couple this with capacity. How many accounts can that rep actually work? By following the right process over the right period of time, let's say it's 100.
EDDIE24:44Well, what are the absolute 100 best accounts that we can identify that they can go after? And how do we stack rank them. And that's a hard thing to build.
EDDIE24:52But that for me is sort of like the penultimate gold standard of like if I can put that in front of a team of salespeople, which includes our inbound leads and our outbound prospects, possibly even our existing customers, and just stack rank it and say, these are the best folks for you to go after. Then I can't imagine something that would improve our conversion rates and our revenue more.
JOHNATHAN25:13Yeah, there's a concept in the book that is from Jordan Crawford, actually, so I can't take credit for this because this is all him. But he talks about how when you have conversations with your customers and you start to ask them, like, what if you're paying 50 K for a technology and you ask them saying, what is what is the thing about our product or service that is ten times the worth of what you're paying and what's not like?
JOHNATHAN25:37Where is the true value? And you start to find patterns between what people actually get or not out of things. And then you also start to find like,
JOHNATHAN25:47because not every customer will get a ten times value back from what they're paying, some people will be like, it's like double, it's okay. And some people say it's about the same value of what I'm paying.
JOHNATHAN25:55So you want to find the differences between when someone says, I'm getting the same amount of value that I'm paying versus that same title, but someone different might say I'm getting ten times value because of this. Like there's a pattern in between those two things. Even if the title and the size is the same, something situationally is going on inside of that company so that this person is getting ten x and this person is getting one x.
JOHNATHAN26:18So that makes sense. So when you find those patterns, you find your inner champions, obviously, because they're the ones who geek out on your tech or service. But it also tells you like, okay, if they're going through this situation that gave that much value, then my marketing and my outbound needs to match that messaging so I can match it to other people who are just like this person who don't know who the heck I am.
JOHNATHAN26:36That make sense? Hopefully.
EDDIE26:37Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking of a concept. I'm thinking of a concrete example right now. Like years ago, I signed up for this virtual mailbox and it's got this cool benefit of like, I get a Park Avenue address. But for me, the reason it was so important is, is that they will take my checks. I think customers used to send us checks.
EDDIE26:53I don't know that they do anymore and it would just automatically send it to my bank. It had an integration with Chase and then on top of that, like I moved around a lot like and so for me, it was really valuable because we had a virtual office. I did not have a physical office where I could pay somebody to like, take all of our physical mail and then go deposit checks in the bank.
EDDIE27:11And so, like you think about it, it's not the fact that I'm a small business owner, it's not the fact that I'm a CEO. It's not the fact that I work in professional services. It's this fact that, like, I run a remote company and move around a lot, and I don't even if I'm there in New York, I don't want to, like, take the check to the bank.
EDDIE27:26And I think, like, I pay $100 a month for this thing, like I would pay $1,000 a month if I had to.
JOHNATHAN27:31Right, right.
EDDIE27:32Exactly like the amount of time it would take me to, like, go to the bank, like every week like that alone, I would pay thousands of dollars for if I had to.
EDDIE27:40But it comes down to like niching down to like, who is the ideal customer that can actually fit that description, right?
JOHNATHAN27:46Yes, yes. And it's and the challenge is that those signals are it's not you're not going to find it in clay. So make sense. It's not going to be in a third party data thing. You might be able to find it in some social media outputs, but like most of the time people aren't posting on LinkedIn. Maybe Reddit maybe.
JOHNATHAN28:06But like a lot of times, like, I haven't seen a lot of posts by people saying I'm getting ten x value out of this thing and less they're being promoted to do so, which is not bad. But like, that's why you need to have actual conversations with customers and say like, tell me the goods, tell me the baths, and tell me the really, really good and what is that?
JOHNATHAN28:20And then you look at the aspects of that person and say, okay, is the size, what's going on internally? Why is it having ten value? Is there any other aspect of this like tech graphics or thermal graphics or whatever that could fit along with the information around what's happening internally? You know what I mean? So it's like it's not bad.
JOHNATHAN28:37It's just you need that little angle that you don't get from the data. So hopefully. So yeah.
RACHAEL28:43Quick pause. Everything we talk about on this show. Diagnosing go to market ops. Prioritizing projects for revenue. Impact processes. Metrics. Insights. Building a predictable go to market engine. We've built frameworks for all of it. They're free and undated on our website. Union square consulting frameworks. The link will also be in the show notes, so make sure you check that out.
RACHAEL29:06All right. Back to the episode.
JOHNATHAN29:08Well.
EDDIE29:08Let's go back to the story about the team that reduced their SDR team. And then basically ten x their STR output. What else did they uncover in this discovery about their buyer experience that they were able to leverage to increase their output so much?
JOHNATHAN29:23Well, besides, just having the data two is just realizing that they were they were leaning like a concept was kind of gentle, but they were leaning on the human doing too many things. Like, for example, human had to check the email before it went out to a sequencer on sales loft or whatever the case was. The human had to make sure it did these list checking and make sure that one one list matched another list.
JOHNATHAN29:46Like they just found a lot of internal friction points where the human was responsible for a lot, so that the STR that more than half the time was doing all the piddly do things, like you said, like they're going through an Excel file and matching that to a sales loss list, and all this crap was just wasted time.
JOHNATHAN30:02So a lot of what they were doing was making sure their internal operations was streamlined. That's the that's the internal side. And then on the buyer side, just making sure that they they had the same it's just thinking through like if someone wants to use sendo. So one of the things that they're going through and how how do we communicate that in a way.
JOHNATHAN30:22So it's actually valuable to the buyer beyond just giving a case study like what would be valuable for them. And so they really fine tune the messaging. So it's really about how do we provide value that we know is relevant, that's automated. And I don't want to say personalized, but more of like what would be important to the person reaching out to in a way that uses AI and then brings human in the loop.
JOHNATHAN30:43So it's kind of not necessarily checking your single email, but at least agree with the, the the motion. The second part I would say, is that they also, even though a lot of things on email and LinkedIn was being done, they had the human do things like leave video messages or voice messages on LinkedIn that you can't automate.
JOHNATHAN31:02Yeah, maybe in the future you can like they would hold up signs saying, hey, I'm a human, I want to talk to you. Like just dumb little stuff like that. That, that is like only a human can do that. But beyond this, all the automation. So like, again, I was looking at saying, how do we want to have this experience with our brand and our and our stuff?
JOHNATHAN31:21And how do we use the product itself to be part of the experience and send people stuff that's actually nice. And also the things it's just it was really cool how they thought through to be innovative, but then again, just going down to the foundational basics of like, how do we just make this better for them without making the buyer go through all these hoops to get answers once they actually say, yes, you know.
JOHNATHAN31:41So all.
EDDIE31:42Right, so these are some great, great tangible examples. So to recap, they used a lot of data to better like to figure out how to identify better targets. Yes. Also to improve the messaging. And then thirdly to save their reps time so that their stores could get more done in a day. And this is a common theme that I'm seeing because I'm doing a lot of other interviews like this with other folks and doing CRO stories where cross are sharing what's working in their own business.
EDDIE32:07So I'm seeing these themes, but what I'm also seeing that I kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier, is I think people want to cut out this human element that's actually adding a lot of value. I think it's one thing to say, go to take the AI and go to the website and read the K1 and summarize it for me so that I can have a more informed discussion and to just write the email for me, because when there's that personal touch, for me, it's not even about the quality of the message.
EDDIE32:36As a buyer that receives this messaging, for me, it's like, do you believe that you can help me enough that it justifies your own personal investment of time? Because if you don't, why would I believe that it's worth a half an hour of my time? Like when I get an email from somebody and I'm like, okay, it's clear that AI wrote this.
EDDIE32:54So what you're telling me is it's not worth two minutes of your time to craft a personalized email. Why would I think it's worth a half an hour of my time to spend with you on a zoom call?
EDDIE33:04And it's not me being egotistical. It's just like, why would I think this is a good investment of my time?
EDDIE33:09And so where my head goes is, how do we leverage AI to improve that interaction, where the SDR or the AI comes armed with all of this information to target the right buyer with the right messaging, and there's still that personal touch that tells them, hey, you know, I'm worth your time.
JOHNATHAN33:26Yeah, it's a very interesting discussion. Like, it's funny because with one mind, like where the product we have is I know how I can describe this. Like we're able to do a lot of things at a human can. But yet the funny thing is, we're not replacing any roles. We're doing things that humans never did in the first place, like a big of example.
JOHNATHAN33:45There's no company that I know of that has 5 or 6 experts sitting on the website waiting for people to come them 24 over seven and ask me questions. But one mind can I, can you deep demos, deep pricing, all this stuff, all like the sales engineer, I don't know of any company that has 1 to 1 coverage of sales engineers to ease, you know what I mean?
JOHNATHAN34:04But you can do that with an AI tech that can join your call and actually do everything that sells. You could do. It's not replacing it sales engineers, it's just giving more resources to more people who need it, you know? So it's like and what we're finding is because my team has access to the second uses, it is that the human is all the EQ relationship, trust based stuff.
JOHNATHAN34:25And the AI takes care of love, the knowledge transfer and technical stuff. And it doesn't mean like we sell AI tech that is literally doing some crazy cool advanced things, but we still have a sales team like we haven't gotten rid of our sales team. You know, we're building on it because people still want to have that connection, understanding and and that EQ trust is very important now.
JOHNATHAN34:45The world will soon come where no matter what your AI is, AI will start buying from AI at some level. Like there's arguments of like how much that's going to be and what industries that's going to be. But like even right now, people are using open claw to go do research and then help even have a threshold of budget that can go buy stuff like that will eventually happen.
JOHNATHAN35:05But in my mind, this is where I think things are going. Businesses are going to have to decide on different paths. Do they want to be a business that says we are only humans? And so when you come work with us, we only give you human attention because they could do that. And I'm guessing people will do that because the buyers want to have that.
JOHNATHAN35:21Then it's going to be the human plus AI experience, where AI is in the first three steps and the humans last four steps, or maybe all the way through. And then there's going to be pure AI experience where the human doesn't want to talk to another human. I just want to talk to an AI. And then the next level is AI buying from AI.
JOHNATHAN35:37And businesses are going to have to be ready for each one of those scenarios, meaning that they don't know which buyers going to come in and say, I don't want to talk to AI, I only want to talk to a human. And that means that the quality of experience that they're going to get from a human, number one, is scarcer, because it's going to be scarcer to have that.
JOHNATHAN35:54Number two, the criteria that's going to be higher, because they're going to expect that person to be really freaking good at what they do. Does that make sense? Like mediocrity will not be tolerated in the future. We've got to be able to be someone who are experts in the field. Yeah, yeah.
EDDIE36:08I was just going to say I was talking to Hayes Davis about this on our podcast a while back, and he had this viral post that he talked about, like, could a mid-market AI close $10 million in revenue, you know, presupposing that their quote is a million, it goes ten x to 10 million. And he talked about a lot of these things, which now that podcast feels dated.
EDDIE36:25Things have just moved so fast. It's like this hypothetical exercise. And now I think we're seeing like tangible, you know, success with some of this stuff, maybe not quite ten x, but some of these improvements. And the point he made is like, just because an AI can close ten times more revenue doesn't mean that buyers will buy ten times more.
EDDIE36:43So what you may end up with is one tenth of the salespeople, which is fine. I mean, that's what we saw with agriculture. You know, I love using this comparison like my grandfather was a farmer. Not that I know anything about that or ever even went to this farm. But, you know, he had like, you know, the 40 acres and a mule or I think it was 100 acres and maybe like a rudimentary tractor.
EDDIE37:02And now, like the last time I went to a farm, which was the only time I went to a farm, one guy was farming 17,000 acres. And, oh, by the way, the acres produced five x the output per acre. Because of all the seeding and all the technology that goes into GMO and everything like that. Right. So I think if I, if I remember the math, that's like an 850 x increase and we've gone from a society where 90% of the population works in agriculture to like 1%, and we have more food than we had when 90% of the people were working in farming.
EDDIE37:30And so as much as I love sales, it's sad to see like that. We might have less salespeople. But I agree with your point. I think ultimately it comes down to trust, because here's one of my issues with the whole buying from AI to AI, etc. is at the end of the day, like I believe it. But for some things, at the end of the day, who do I hold accountable?
EDDIE37:52So even if the AI doesn't hallucinate, even if I trust everything that it says, when things go wrong, who's accountable? Who's the person? Because like I can say, like even when I worked at Salesforce and I was just a cog in the wheel, some, you know, AI, that doesn't matter to anybody. When a customer called me and they were like, you screwed me over, fix it.
EDDIE38:13I felt a personal responsibility to do that.
JOHNATHAN38:18Yeah, there's I came from the world of Franklin. I used to work for Franklin every once upon a time, and I was. And I was certified in all of their stuff. And if you don't know Franklin Covey, they wrote Stephen Covey wrote the book Seven Habits for Highly Effective People. And then his son wrote a book called Speed of Trust, which is a fascinating book.
JOHNATHAN38:37And in the speed of trust, he talks about in order to have trust in someone, because his argument in that book is saying, when you have trust in business, everything accelerates, which is what his whole point is. And he has four things that people need to have to have trust. Two are character based and two are competency based.
JOHNATHAN38:54So one is integrity, which is beyond honesty. It's about making sure like, are you aligned to your values of whatever you're proposing to be. And then second is your intent like, are you motives clear? Are you trying to be shady and do something weird? Right. So you need those two character things. The competency ones are capabilities like do you have the talents, the skills, the abilities to actually get this stuff happening?
JOHNATHAN39:15And the last one is results. So for me, it's like you take those four things. I feel like the character based stuff is the human side of selling intent and integrity, and then you have the capabilities and results is all AI because AI can bring the capabilities to the results. But you still need the character, the moral, the ethical EQ, the relationship as part of the process, at least currently.
JOHNATHAN39:37That could maybe change the future. But let's say even if you had like an AI agent robot that was your real estate agent and sold you something, you still want to know? Like what was the intention of the person who built this freaking product to sell me a house? You know what I mean? It's like you still have these same questions because we're humans.
JOHNATHAN39:52Let's be interesting to see how that changes as we progress, you know?
EDDIE39:56Yeah. So let's see what other questions do I have here man. So much good stuff.
EDDIE40:01Okay. So one of the things that you mentioned on our prep call was that
EDDIE40:05one of the mistakes that crows are making is not being familiar enough with AI to have realistic expectations. Can you explain that?
JOHNATHAN40:14Yeah, I talk to cereals all the time. Both those like Kyle Orton who's obviously well versed geek into AI stuff to those who don't know a whole lot. And I think a lot of
JOHNATHAN40:25our
JOHNATHAN40:26ashamed, afraid to admit they may not know a lot. So like for example, they may see some posts on LinkedIn where someone vibe coded a CRM like, hey, we should vibe code on CRM, and they think that it's a possible thing.
JOHNATHAN40:36And so then they they have their geek person inside who maybe the classic vibe coder said, make me this thing and expect that this particular problem they want to solve can be done with AI without knowing if they actually can be done or not. Does that make sense? So it's it's a it's a problem of making sure that Ciro's are willing to do the dirty work, at least understand the basics.
JOHNATHAN41:02Like if if you don't understand what a skill file is, if you don't know what context windows and why that's important for a harnessing process with AI agents. If you don't know that and you're trying to do AI, you're severely handicapping your team if you don't know that stuff. Because to me, that's not even advanced stuff. So most people don't know what the heck I just said, you know what I mean?
JOHNATHAN41:22But because that comes down to saying it, be kinda like saying to a human saying, hey, go lift up that truck. That's three tons. Wait, because they saw someone else on LinkedIn talked about Samson being a really strong person. Like it's like saying, oh, he did it. You should go do it. It's like the unrealistic expectations of what people think is possible based off of clickbait posts.
JOHNATHAN41:41You know what I mean? And the problem is, there's so much volume of that LinkedIn that it feels like it should be the norm. And it's not it's not the norm. You know, it's kind of like how last year I told people that there's this unspoken pressure to be in a certain place with AI because you have, like the Shopify memo, come out last April, and then you have Marc Benioff talking about how half the stuff's being done by AI, and then you have a Duolingo, talk about all this stuff like this.
JOHNATHAN42:07All these people talk about transformation, and then everyone's going, I don't know how they're doing this. Like all we're doing is ChatGPT no one's sharing the juice on how to actually get it to happen, you know? So there's this pressure to push their teams to do things that they don't even know what's possible, because they're doing it based off of a very surface level understanding of what's realistic.
JOHNATHAN42:27So exactly.
EDDIE42:27And then on top of that, like every LinkedIn post and I've talked to my team about this a lot, is every LinkedIn post is somebody talking about how they like, use cloud code or Cloud Coworker or whatever, or vibe code or something, and they produce this result, a book like 75 meetings in a week. And half the time I've jumped in the comments and I'm like, so how much revenue did you produce?
EDDIE42:46And then, like, you get crickets in response. And these are like solopreneurs and small businesses. And even if all of the results are true, I'm like, well, what's the expectation for, you know, a $200 million software company? Are they supposed to have like every AI have like clawed code or open claw running on their desktop, like we need, you know, enterprise solutions that we can deploy across the entire team.
EDDIE43:10But I would also push back on you. I think it's interesting what you say about the crow needing to be familiar with all this technology and the problem that I've seen working with technology for the last 15 or so years is not necessarily a lack of understanding of the technology, but a lack of commitment to getting the fundamental process down and producing the end result.
EDDIE43:34So what I mean by that is, is that the crow or whatever executive comes in and like we need to build this AI tool, we need to implement Salesforce, what have you. And then they duck out, they delegate it to somebody that doesn't know what they're doing, doesn't have the power in the organization to like, get things done.
EDDIE43:47And they come back in like three months later and they're like, what's going on with this? Oh, this is a failure. And it's like, okay, this is every single failure that I've seen with like every Salesforce implementation for the last 15 years. And the flip side, when somebody like, look, I don't know, I don't know how to turn my computer on, but we're going to make this thing work.
EDDIE44:03What do you need for me? I'll be in every meeting. I will talk to whoever. I'll talk I need to talk to. I'll learn what I need to learn. I'll bring in every resource. I would argue that they will learn the stuff that you just mentioned. Because if that's their number one priority, it's going to get done. And it might take longer and cost more than they expect.
EDDIE44:20But the problem I see is thinking that it's like going to be like an easy button. And then they walk away and they come back a week later and magically we've produced $10 million of additional revenue.
JOHNATHAN44:29Yeah. I don't know if we're saying different things. I think we're going to say the same thing is doing different angles because like,
JOHNATHAN44:34I'm not expecting any cereal to all of a sudden become an expert prompt engineer or agile agent builder or whatever. Like, I don't expect that. But like you do need to understand that both capabilities of your technology and people in order to push your team to the highest level of performance, like the only way that Kyle Norton is able to do the things he's able to do and get four X out of his team is because he understands both what AI can do and also AI cannot do you know what
JOHNATHAN45:01I mean? Because that's the problem is that people have this false confidence that I can do all this stuff and they're like, no, there's a, there's a, a line that currently AI can't do that. Now, would that change a month? Probably because AI is crazy and advances every freaking month, which is crazy. But the point is, you need to know where the capabilities are, then adds to the question of even if AI could do that.
JOHNATHAN45:22Is that what I want my buyer to go through? Is that the best experience for them? So because that should be the governing question of everything, like is it better for my buyer? If it's not, don't do it because otherwise it's going to affect your bottom
EDDIE45:36Yeah. And I think maybe I was misinterpreting what you're saying. I do think that other people are saying that like the Crow needs to learn everything they can about AI, and they need to be like vibe coding on the weekends. And for me, I think what I'm saying is, is that if you say, okay, let's take a particular use case, we want to improve how we are targeting our customers or improve our messaging.
EDDIE45:57And I'm going to work with people that understand the technology. Then by definition, you're as a crow. You're going to learn what you need to know about that technology by dedicating yourself to it and trying to produce the output you want, right? Like, how does anybody learn anything by doing it? And my view on this is always the more that we can focus and say we want to achieve this outcome, we want our buyer to experience X, y, z steps.
EDDIE46:21And we want to figure out how we can use AI to do that better and faster. And we're committed to it. And it's our top priorities. And they're most likely going to succeed at that.
JOHNATHAN46:29Yeah, I think so too. I think it's beneficial for someone to try to vibe code because really vibe coding, even on livable cloud code, it's not that difficult like people make it scare than it is, but at the same time there's other stuff to do. I do think they should get their hands dirty. Do they need to be an expert?
JOHNATHAN46:43No, not at all. They seem to play like just try it. It's not like it's it's not that hard. It takes an hour to go. Oh, this is what I can do. I did this survey with the academy, where I looked at 300 people, and half of them were in C-suite CMOs, heroes and other people. And I realized this pattern of the more that fear comes up for people, the more that was correlated or associated with people who do not have a lot of experience with AI.
JOHNATHAN47:10And the more someone has experience with AI, the fear concern goes down and the strategy goes up. Like the concern is strategy, not fear. Does that make sense? So fear to me usually points which is consistent my experience to not understanding the technology enough. And when you do it starts to become a different conversation. The fear because you know the limits of AI, you start to think, okay, now that I know an AI, at least the what I need to know as a crow now it's a strategy conversation.
JOHNATHAN47:37So that makes sense. But above and beyond anything else. So because like for example, when people are saying like, hey, it's going to take jobs notes, other stuff, again, to me it's like it has the capability of doing that now. But what we don't know is how the buyer is going to want to have that experience or not.
JOHNATHAN47:53Like does the buyer want to go through that? Like for example, I could take away mower, an Uber, but I still take Uber because I like the experience better and faster, even though I have the option of a totally automated car ride.
EDDIE48:04Oh, interesting. I'm talking with a bit for for Waymo I like. I can't wait to not have to deal with the Uber driver.
JOHNATHAN48:11I well, I can tell you my reasons why, but like I been to San Francisco, I don't know how many times in time. So me it's a time thing like Uber is faster. Funny enough.
EDDIE48:19So that doesn't make sense. I wonder if we were going to get to a point where autonomous vehicles drive like 500 miles an hour because the entire, like, all.
JOHNATHAN48:28Robot, right?
EDDIE48:29Yeah. Like just well, I actually haven't seen iRobot, but if you just think of like the entire system is interconnected, then why couldn't a car drive 500mph? Because it knows exactly when the other car is going to cross the lane, you know? But anyway, let's take this back. So
EDDIE48:44when you think about like particular use cases to drive sales specifically, you've shared a couple of them better targeting, better messaging, saving sales reps time.
EDDIE48:54There are other things that come to mind to you that if I was asking like, what can I do to move the needle most with RR right now, where would you point them?
JOHNATHAN49:04Oh gosh, the hard part about this is it really depends on the company. But I'll tell you some basic ones. Again, going back to friction, a lot of the times, like we did some surveys and we used data from momentum because we're just an internal operation workflow tool. But we found that more than 70% of the time, the things that slow down the sales cycle the most was internal issues, not external.
JOHNATHAN49:30Like if someone had a 90 day sales cycle, 70% of the reason why it was 90 days was because of internal problems, not because of the customer. Like it would have bought faster, but the internal team was slowing them down. So just that alone, when you think about the consequence of even reducing sales cycle by 20%, like that's massive.
JOHNATHAN49:47And so I would say again, where can you use internal friction and reduce that so that you get out of the way of someone trying to buy your fricking product? You no. Second is like I do think not to pitch one. I want to pitch one mind. Like giving people the option of having more answers readily available to them, whether it's the website or on your live calls, like, well, mine does helps the cycle because there's research from I was just reading this from Gartner, of course, I can't remember what was, but the buyer who gets answers the fastest is more likely to buy from the person who gives answers the fastest.
JOHNATHAN50:22So make sense doesn't mean necessarily that I'm obviously has to be the right answer. But it's this interesting study they talked about how fast does answers go to the buyer, and does that affect the buyers process. And it does, which is crazy. You know, because like think about how many times someone says, hey, I got to get back to you.
JOHNATHAN50:40I don't know that technical information. I got to check with my finance person about this pricing thing, blah, blah, blah, blah. And when you start to slow that down, that impacts the person buying, you know, so it's whether whether you use the tool like momentum to automate things internally. So it helps the person do their job faster or use a tech like one mind where AI is now actually doing some of the work for you.
JOHNATHAN51:00That's just thinking through like, what can you do to make that one process better? So people get answers better because buyers are fatigued and tired of the same old seller's journey? You know what I mean? So I would say if all someone takes Mis podcast is
JOHNATHAN51:17if they make the buyer's journey and process the foundation and then map the sales process to that, you will absolutely make a huge difference in in revenue as a result.
JOHNATHAN51:26Like you'll two to 3XA lot of results very quickly from just that because the buyer's experience sucks for most people.
EDDIE51:34Yeah. And I mean, this resonates with the other CRO stories that we've done. I mean, Kyle Norton is one of them. We had him on the podcast and he shared about how they used AI to identify the the behaviors that led to closing more deals and how they increase their win rate from 38% to 53%, which is.
JOHNATHAN51:51Insane, by the way. 53%. That's crazy.
EDDIE51:53It's absolutely insane. And what he uncovered, a lot of the things were, how do we just make the buying journey faster? Like how do we move quickly? You know, people want to make decisions and you get that buyer fatigue. And but what I also loved about this is this wasn't hypothesis. This was real data from real call recordings and real closed one and close loss deals.
EDDIE52:15And I had Ryan Milligan from Quota Path on the podcast as well. And they used momentum and they talked a lot about the same concept of how do we streamline the process so that the buyer has a faster, easier journey. And so we are almost at time, and this is a time where if you do want to plug something, you can and I'll just say thank you for coming on the podcast.
EDDIE52:36And where can people find you or find out about you or your company or anything that you want to plug right now?
JOHNATHAN52:44If people want to follow me, just LinkedIn. I consider LinkedIn my my journal. So I just most things there of my random thoughts, you know, so all the things I do from the podcast, the one mind to whatever is all there. So I, I like to, I genuinely like my intention is to generally give value I don't like.
JOHNATHAN53:00I told you like on our prequel, I don't want to come on and just pitch because that's not my style. I want to actually help people. So I genuinely hope this was a
JOHNATHAN53:07some insights or hopefully help with this. And all I do in my LinkedIn is to try to do the same thing. So if someone wants to follow me, that's the place to go.
EDDIE53:13That's awesome. Thanks for joining us
EDDIE53:15Thanks for listening to the episode. If this resonated. Please give us a five star rating and a follow. It helps us reach more people, and you get our latest and greatest content without having to search for it. And if you're looking for hands on help and go to market strategy and or rev ops, please reach out to us.
EDDIE53:29We help our clients with everything from annual planning to improving processes and go to market, implementing systems to support those processes and go to market AI. We're always happy to offer a free consultation to help you identify the best opportunities to improve your go to market engine, with or without our help. You can find us at Union Square consulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
