AI-Powered Seller
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AI-Powered Seller
The Non-Linear Buyer Journey: How Top Performers Adapt and Win
Your champion just went silent. That 90% deal just died — and it wasn't killed by the person you were talking to. It was derailed by stakeholders you never knew existed.
Host Jake Dunlap sits down with Gal Agha, CEO of Aligned, to break down why traditional sales methodologies like MEDPIC are failing in today's complex buying environment. With clients cutting sales cycles by 30% and increasing win rates by 15%, Gal reveals what he calls "buying process as a service."
What You'll Learn:
- Why MEDPIC is built for 1950s buyers, not today's complex stakeholder groups
- How to use AI for scenario planning and competitive intelligence
- The difference between hierarchy and "powerarchy" in modern deals
- Why 95% of buying happens without you — and how to influence it
- Tactical frameworks for accommodating vetted, educated, and self-service buyers
Key Takeaway: The future belongs to sellers who deliver "buying process as a service" — becoming an extension of the buyer's team rather than an obstacle to navigate.
Check out:
- The Innovative Seller: https://a.co/d/cbh8hM3
- JourneyAI: https://meetjourney.ai
Subscribe: New episodes every week on your favorite podcast platform. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts to help us reach more sales professionals.
Remember: AI won't replace sellers — sellers who know how to use AI will replace those who don't.
Nobody is going to want to talk to a salesperson if they can't add incremental value to the conversation. If you cannot add incremental value above and beyond what I can read on a piece of paper or a video I can watch, that's a one-size-fits-all demo why would I want to talk to you? I?
Speaker 2:don't.
Speaker 1:Most people only want to talk to the customer success people, because that's the people they're going to interact with anyway. That is the person who's got to make sure I actually use the product and it's successful, not the salesperson who's going to hey. I feel like every buyer should ask this one question in the very first call Are you going to hand me off at the end of this if you close the deal? And if the answer is yes, you should say hey, not a problem, jake, I love that. On the next call call, I need the CS rep I'm going to be assigned to because I need to make sure they actually know what the heck they're talking about and that they're involved from day one.
Speaker 1:That is what every buyer should do that AI powered seller. All right, welcome to today's episode. You are going to have a ridiculous amount of takeaways. If you've ever wondered how to win those deals when it seems like 95% of the buying happens without you in the room, well, today's guest has cracked that code.
Speaker 1:We are going to talk to the CEO and co-founder of Aligned, mr Gal Agha. He's built a reputation for transforming B2B sellers and buyers through digital sales rooms. This guy's got almost 20 years of sales experience, has worked with a ton of organizations. They've got 50,000 plus reps Intel, hubspot, you name it and his clients are cutting their sales cycle by 30% and increasing win rates by 15%. I think we all want that, and what I'm really excited about is, in this episode we're going to go deep on really two areas. We're going to talk just a little more sales. We're going to branch out of Just AI. We're going to talk about the evolving customer journey, ai. We're going to talk about kind of the evolving customer journey and we're also going to talk about how some very tactical ways that we can use AI to really master this evolving customer journey. So super, super excited for the episode and let's get into it. All right, gal, welcome to the show. Excited to have you, looking forward to the conversation.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me. Really excited to be here. Very excited it's going to be a fun one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's going to be a fun one. You've got, you know, you've put a lot of conversation, a lot of content out around the buyer experience. That's something I'm obviously passionate about. So I think, when it comes to people that are trying to figure out ways to use AI and think about AI and the customer experience in particular, this is going to be a great episode for everybody. So you've coined I want to kind of kick it off with this concept you coined this concept of buying process as a service, which I think is interesting. I truly believe we are entering a complete paradigm shift in B2B sales, where we no longer can try to take this approach of like we're qualifying them and we have all the answers and we have all the information, and really the power is truly flipped, I feel like in 2025, 2026, to the buyer. And so let's talk about this a little bit and kind of break down you know how buying process as a service works versus maybe like a traditional selling approach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, first glad it resonates and you know it's a topic I write about a lot. And basically it all started for me that sentence. Really I didn't say it for the first time.
Speaker 2:It all started from the idea of actually building our company when my co-founder and I we were in sales I'd been in sales for 17 years before founding Line and I was VP sales. He was sales director like everyone else out there. We were obsessed with trying to figure out what makes the difference between really the top great sellers and the rest. We had a very complex motion and there was this one deal one day that just like was completely unbelievable, like one of these really unique deals 440K outbound, closed in 90 days and the AU closed. They just did everything really by the book, like her.
Speaker 2:Her calls really felt like there's no us in the game and she project managed the deal and she enabled all the time the champion and multi-threaded and did everything right. And when she closed it, we basically we asked her what did you do differently? How did you? How do you do that? And well, this friday afternoon we raised the toast and I won't forget that. She basically said it was the first time that I felt that I'm not selling. The buyer is seeing me as if I'm providing a buying process that they pay a premium for and that's kind of for me that was a aha moment.
Speaker 2:it beyond, and I'll put actually the things that are changing aside for a second. I think that it's always been this way. Like the top reps have always been about extreme buyer centricity, they've always been about it's not you and them on opposite directions. They're like an extension of your team.
Speaker 2:They're all about reducing friction, facilitating the process and it feels like they're offering a buying process as a service like a journey that you really pay premium for, and that's why buyers work with them, that's why they spend time with them, that's why they give them access to stakeholders, that's why they can expand beyond just the calls where most salespeople focus on, that's why they guest less ghosted and that's why they're able to really go so deep into the business of their prospect and create a compelling business case and equip them with everything they need to get a bigger deal.
Speaker 1:So I think that was always really the skill.
Speaker 2:It was always that mindset, you know, is driving a lot of different skills, but I think that was always it. But and sorry for going on a long answer here, but you know it's just a deep process and I'll connect it to I think just things change right. You mentioned 2025, 2026, things are changing and the power is shifted to the buyer. I think that's great, that's a great call out and it's the right way to look at it, but they've been changing for a long time. Okay.
Speaker 2:So if you look at, growth at all costs right until the 2021, 2022, it was, you know, Zerp. Money was cheap. We hired REs of under-trained SDRs, gave them the 16 step sequence. Personalization was just, you know, hey, you're hiring, or something like that, Played the first game and then you know we allow the, a hiring or something like that.
Speaker 1:Played the first game.
Speaker 2:And then you know, we allowed AEs to go out there really at rookie level. Here's a script for a demo and here are the questions that you need to ask. And they interrogated and all that, and it worked. Why did it work? It's not that it was what the buyer wanted.
Speaker 2:I don't think that things have fundamentally changed in what good selling is about. I think that things fundamentally changed in the forces right, in the expectations, in the dynamics, in the complexity, so we were able to get away with it. Okay, that's the bottom line there. And now fast forward to today. Think about post-COVID, the downturn. Everyone are now closing their pockets. I read that 79% of buyers say that CFOs are now the new DM and 70-something. I don't remember exactly. How much is CXO involved in every purchasing process? Last decade, the number of stakeholders have quadrupled, no, tripled, sorry. Number of categories grew. The number of buying steps is continuously increasing. So buying is just getting more complex. And now you have another behavioral shift. On the buyer side, where you have Gen Z, the majority of buyers right now are Gen Z, gen. The buyer side, where you have Gen Z, the majority of buyers right now are Gen Z, gen Y okay, millennials and Gen Z.
Speaker 2:They're just completely different digital natives and you have AI now being used to buy and self-service right is the norm.
Speaker 1:So buyers can do so much more without you.
Speaker 2:So long story short, we can just get away with it, things are getting more complex on the buying side. Buyers are more empowered buyers that can easily avoid unhelpful reps and have been burned in the past and will avoid if you just don't do better. So we just have to do better. Okay, buying experience can be just a match. I'm trying. It has to be a strategy, a framework, something that you do across the organization, and selling skills really have to get to that level where everyone learns how to deliver buying processes and service how to be that for their customers.
Speaker 1:That's it. Yeah, you hit on a few things in there and I think what I hope a lot of people heard. One is you mentioned self-service. I'm a former, you know.
Speaker 1:In my book Innovative Seller, I wrote about this concept of we've got I called it VEX which is that we have to be able to account for buyers that are vetted. You know these are buyers that have used your competitor, they used you in the past and they're ready to start at step three. They've already went to chat, gpt, they've done a table, they've compared you and then you've got educated, which is like a flavor of that. Then you have cold and you have self-service and that you need to be able to accommodate all four of those buyer types. Somebody comes to you and says, hey, jake, look, can we, can please? For the love of God, do I not have to get on this stupid qualification call? Like I'm already ready, I've already approved budget. I used you two companies ago. I use your biggest competitor. I talked to five people at this event about you, like, can we, can we please just start at step four? And I think I actually see us like artificially slowing down the buying cycle a lot because we're so used to putting people through our one size fits all conveyor belt. Everybody has to start here. Medpick starts here, you know like, and we, we start everybody, you know, at the very beginning of the process, which I feel is a big issue. And so let's talk about more and more buying happens when the sellers aren't in the room. I saw some stat I've seen 95% of it, I've seen 80% of the time is your spending is not with the buyer that they're making decisions or doing things, not with the buyer that they're making decisions or doing things.
Speaker 1:How can companies better position themselves in this new world where we're expected to do even more asynchronous education? You know buyers need to give. You know we're definitely entering a world of give, give, give, not gatekeep, which is what all of us I mean you've been in sales 20 plus years. I've been in sales. We were all trained the same way Like don't talk about pricing on the first call, right?
Speaker 1:Or like don't do this, like, if they're going to do this, they got to hop on a call. And you're like, hop on a call, yuck, can't you just send me like a three minute video and I can, like you know, scroll it like TikTok or something. Make sure, make sure to subscribe to the channel so you get updated on all of our latest episodes. If you are listening to the podcast, make sure that you get alerts so you get automatically downloaded when a new episode comes out. So how has that evolved? How has that kind of when you're not in the room evolved and what are you seeing best in class sales people and sales organizations doing to compete in that world people?
Speaker 1:and sales organizations doing to compete in that world? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:First of all, I love what you said about you know buyers' expectations and how they're entering the process in various ways, and I think that's a big part of it. So it's not only that less time is spent with us and, by the way, the different stats is just because of in a competitive scenario and non-competitive scenarios. In a non-competitive scenario, it's in that range, the 70%, and in a competitive scenario each vendor basically gets 5% to 6%.
Speaker 1:That's the Gartner study and so, yeah, it's both about less time with us, but it's also about you can't fit buyers into a box, right.
Speaker 2:You have to accommodate the way that they want to buy and each journey is different, each one of their processes, and they go back from stages, back and forth.
Speaker 1:Such a good call-out too, and just to double-click on that before you keep going. The other thing thing that I try to talk I was literally talking to one of our clients. We do this customer journey workshop with them, where we really helped them to get tight on their various stages, so they're very kind of aligned how the customer actually buys versus, you know, their demo completed or some other dumb stage name. Um, and the big thing that I tried to say is I was like, look, salesforce and HubSpot are artificially forcing salespeople to think of sales in 2025 or 2026 as linear. And not only that, they also force us to think of one singular process versus you know, I talk about this in the book too like there's teams of people.
Speaker 1:There's a buying team that needs to see the ROI, like you mentioned, the CFO, and there's an end user team that needs to make sure that you'll get utility and then, like, the department head is usually the overlap between the two right, and I think so many people need to understand that it's okay that it's not linear. I think we want to. It would be a lot easier, gal, if, like it was linear, because it would be like everybody is at the exact same step. They do this thing exactly, but I think that's just such a good call out that the buying journey is not only not linear and people go forward and back, there's also multiple buying, you know kind of cycles that are happening inside the same deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and forward and backwards sometimes. Oh, but they've chosen a vendor. It's in this stage in the CRM. We're now in proposal, but they're now going back to compare a few more vendors.
Speaker 1:Yes, it happens, that's the reality.
Speaker 2:Don't have a. Crm stage, so regionally enforced. So I'll break down the answer. I think there are three things that you can do, so both as a seller and as a company, and it's it's about the training, it's about the process and I think it's about just overall how you're enforcing and thinking about standardizing. So I think let's start with the sales process. So you mentioned because it's top of mind. You just mention it and it's such a great point.
Speaker 2:Like you know, we're doing so many things that just should disappear. Like Band is from freaking the 1950s Okay, it was invented in the 1950s. It's crazy.
Speaker 1:Medic is 96,. For those of you keeping track, medic is 96. Medpick is just a flavor of it, so yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think we're just doing so many things that we just, uh, we need to evolve. The sales process is most is we're trying to build it for forecasting? Uh, we're not building it to facilitate buying, it's not. It's not built for the buyer, it's built for. These are the easiest names for me to remember. For AEs to understand, you need to do a demo, you need to do a trial, you need to do a thing, it's about what I need to do, and then that's creating that push right.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to push someone from this stage to that stage because then my probability goes up, yeah, but the buying journey is the fact that you've done, you're now in a POC or trial, wherever you call it.
Speaker 2:The need that the funnel does not mean that the buyer has agreed that there is a problem that can, that needs to be solved. There's there's enough consensus about solving it right. They might still be at that phase and you're already trying to be at the proof or vendor selection or whatever you're trying to prove without POC. So I think the first it really starts with the sales process. We need to make sure that stage names don't reflect things that the seller does, rather outcomes on the buying side, things that the buyer basically would do, like problem identification or problem alignment or needs assessment.
Speaker 1:We call it, you know it's a good call. We say there's discovery, then the next phase is initial evaluation, which is like hey, we're trying to understand, like is there something here? Then the next stage is formal evaluation. It's like, hey, so we've went past discovery, initial evaluation, I've looped in other people. They also think that there's something here. And then formal evaluation means like we're going into vetting, you know, we're putting together a formal proposal, et cetera, and I feel like those are kind of stage names that we kind of go back to because they kind of fit both sides.
Speaker 1:It helps you to understand like that, because that's how people buy. Like guys, everybody buys the exact same. You get one person on the first call, then they loop in other people and then they loop in more, like it's the same for everybody right now again, but the key that we're talking about is like one is understanding that, and then two is how do you kind of show up for each of those meetings, based on where the rest of the people are, you know, in the process. But the process itself and sometimes it accelerates the initial informal evaluation happen quickly if they're already an educated or vetted buyer. But I think it's, you know companies don't need to overthink it. You know it's. You know companies don't need to overthink it. You know it's like. It's a pretty straightforward way to think about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a pretty straightforward way because, yeah, you identify that you have a problem and then you go and you want to drive consensus and you want to find solutions to the problem and then you validate solutions and like, yeah, pretty much there's a logical way that the buyer buys, buyer buys. But then if you try to make the stage names right about the things that you do in your sales process, you're just optimizing for the wrong things, right? It's not. It's not really catered to to what the buyer is doing.
Speaker 1:So that's one of the problems and also the exit criteria.
Speaker 2:The exit criteria is not the fact that you want to use that they agree to take to do a trial. The exit criteria is that they've uh, you know, agreed on a problem selected a vendor uh, right, it should be about buying outcomes. I think it first starts. These are. There are multiple problems there on the sales process, but I would really start with that.
Speaker 2:But then, in terms of uh and of, course, all of that should be driven by actual buying journey research Like think about how, like research, talk to real buyers, talk to sales people, to the sales team, try to understand and map out all these different conversations, and then the sales process is really about that. And it's not about the main stage, like each stage, could have a lot of different things that you do right.
Speaker 2:So even I'm in evaluation and in that evaluation stage I'm trying to basically help a buyer get to a point where they're selecting a vendor. Then I could do an evaluating that this is a good fit for them in general, that this is something that they want to now move to the final stages with. Then you could have various things that you could do in that stage recommended for the rep. You could send a competitive comparison. You could do a competitive workshop.
Speaker 2:You could do a use case workshop. You could go through integrations with this team and give them choices of a lot of different things that they can do, and then these are baked into the process, processes, selections for the AE to execute. So I think doing it this way it's a bit less natural to some of the junior AEs they need, of course, it's easier to do things in a linear way, right, but it just doesn't work like that. It will just fail and I don't think that there's. I think that the term complex sales was a synonym of enterprise sales. I think that today, complex sales can be mid-market sales, can be even SMB sales 20K, 25k, acv that's still complex sales. We have probably five to six stakeholders on this 100% company buying a 20K deal. That could be a long, complex deal. So it's no different in all of this.
Speaker 1:I think that it has always been a little bit. I mean, it's been like this for a little bit, but, like you said, I think we just have to accept it. I feel like that's part of this, too is like sales leaders. You know it's been like this for a little bit but, like you said, I think it just we just have to accept it. I feel like that's part of this, too, is like sales leaders. You know, guys, wake up. Like you know, like, just accept it Like it is what it is. Trust me.
Speaker 1:If, like, if you know it's like, whenever we optimize outbound for folks, or you know pipeline, you know improvements, it's like, guys, if I could just put together a template and hit send all and it worked, I would tell you to do that. If, like, the buyer journey was just simple and it's like, yeah, you just got to run the process and it works, like, I would just tell you to do that right. And so how do you feel? Like you talked, we kind of hinted around this a little bit, but and then I want to kind of jump into kind of more. Like you know, we'll focus on some of the AI pieces. You know specifically more. Like you know we'll focus on some of the AI pieces, pieces. You know specifically how.
Speaker 1:How does MedPick right in particular? Because I see MedPick, honestly, more than anything now I feel like it's had this resurgence. You know where it's like well, medic wasn't good enough, we need some P's in there. You know what I mean. It's like we gotta gotta add a couple extra little letters in there. But how, how does this fit into this new world? You know, I've got my opinion. I'm curious with you, gal, like how, you know, I see so many people going to it right, how does it fit in this new world, in this world that we all live in selling?
Speaker 2:yeah, and I've. This is actually a topic that I've not given too much thought. I think I have a point of view around it.
Speaker 1:I'd be actually curious to hear why you're so passionate about it, the way that I'm viewing it is.
Speaker 2:It's basically it's a tool. There are a lot of methodologies out there for creating the internal alignment and how you discuss deals, how you forecast, how you run ongoing discovery. I think it makes sense to align on a certain because you need the same language internally. Some people you know we love gap selling, for example, for discovery, so we talk all the time about impact and root causes. We we use that language a lot internally and that alignment and language I think is very important and I think so but I think that the area where this goes off track is when people are using medic to uh to enforce the process.
Speaker 2:So when you get to this stage, you have to have the m. When you get to this stage, you have to have the p like, but the reality is, and I think that's it's. It's the problem. That's really problem. That relates to everything we talked about. You can't put buyers in a cage. Aes don't want to be placed in the cage.
Speaker 2:The best ones will just run away, and I think that just the reality of the buying process today because it's so complex, trying to do that and have that level of rigidness. You're thinking that you're optimizing for forecasting but you're breaking your forecasting because you know the fact that someone could not move a stage. Does that mean that you have the right probability right now for the deal? And yeah, that's what I think is wrong with the system, but I would love to hear if there's anything that you're thinking about.
Speaker 1:No, I think that that's right. I'm okay if it's like well, if we're going to be at this formal evaluation stage, these things need to have happened. That might not be exactly the definition of an X or an M or whatever it might be. In MedPick, I think for me, with a lot of our clients in MedPick, I think for me, with a lot of our clients, we've got a framework we use called intent, and the first is focused on teams, which I teased out earlier, which is this concept that we need to understand where each team is in their buying process as well.
Speaker 1:And where I think MedPick falls down is, to your point, the execution, where you are training reps subconsciously to think that there is one decision maker, that there is one champion and there is one economic buyer. And it's not how it works. Today. You are in a room you mentioned this there is a room happening where the person who has the highest job title is sitting there and they're looking at a person who's two layers below them and says Tim, what do you think Tim's like? I don't like it. They're like fuck it, we're not doing it, and I think that that, to me, is the gap that I see that too many people are by overly focusing on this concept of a singular individual, on this concept of a singular individual.
Speaker 1:You are forcing salespeople to not think. How people buy today is maybe a simple way to put it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I haven't thought about it. It's something that I'm speaking about a lot. Well, I'm sure your clients too.
Speaker 1:I mean you gotta be careful there, right? Your clients are like what do you mean MedPick? I got you know what do you mean? Medpick isn't that's what. Careful there, right? Your clients are like what do you mean MedPick? I got it, I got you know what do you mean? Medpick isn't that's what we use, right? So I get it and, like I said, I think there still is a place for it, but you have to deploy it in reality land, which is the fact that these individual people don't exist.
Speaker 1:They don't exist. There is no one economic buyer, it exists. There is no one economic buyer, it doesn't exist. Yeah, so as long as you have that, that idea of like, okay, who's on the economic buying team, who's on the the decision making team, that I can get down right yeah, I can get yeah, absolutely, there's a buying group the buying group has different level of power, have different levels of influence.
Speaker 2:Sometimes the above the line that has power and can't actually kind of get a budget would not be as influential even as someone below the line that just has so much political capital within the organization and has so much pull that everyone will listen to. Like we have the fact that we do at Align, we do PLG right. I feel it so so much on the day to day. We had a deal last quarter that was going through a multi-billion dollar acquisition. The CFO said no purchases it's coming from the top.
Speaker 2:We're inquired cannot buy anything One of the senior strategic AEs director title. But that's a guy that's kind of signing multi-million dollar deals. Every deal is like multi-million dollar deals Basically went up scheduled a meeting with the CFO. Told him hey, I need more rooms in Aligned. Now Like I'm closing these deals because of. Aligned improving my win rate and everything. I need this. Now let's find a way.
Speaker 1:And he brought the deal. Okay, that guy closed the deal. An AE.
Speaker 2:So definitely the fact that, like and we even had deals where we weren't speaking to the director level was behind the scenes and a group of AEs strategic AEs did everything on their own. The VPs because they're strategic AEs the VP and director, they trusted them so much. You just lead it, build the business case, even experience a little bit what it is to be on the buying side, and they just brought the deal right. So in the medic world the way that you're describing it, that old thinking of, there's that single DM sitting with a cigar, with a suit, in a room calling the shots. Then that thing does not even suit in a room. Right, yeah, all the shots. Then you know that thing does not even pass into a pipeline, qualified pipeline.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. All right, let's talk a little more AI. So how do you see AI impacting this customer journey? Right, and, by the way, everybody, if you're you're getting down with the podcast, you're enjoying what we're talking about make sure to subscribe to the channel. We've got some links that we're going to add in below, too, with some additional resources around this kind of concept of customer enablement. So if you're somebody who's really geeking out and wanting to learn more, definitely do that. Make sure to subscribe to future episodes as well, for sure. So let's jump into the AI piece. Where do you see generative AI or tools you know enabled with generative AI enabling this further and you know whether it's in your product or what you're seeing in your own sales org? I'd love to get your kind of tactical take on that. Yeah, absolutely so.
Speaker 2:I think we all a little bit lost it with everything that's going on with AI. I think we lost critical thinking to the fear of missing out and what we're seeing. You and I just talked about it right before we started the episode a little bit.
Speaker 2:I think there's either too slow to understand that we need to do like. This thing is happening and everyone needs to think about it and everyone needs to adopt it. So I think we have that end of the spectrum. I think we have the other end of the spectrum of people running like a headless chicken, like just you know, trying to do everything. They're either going for the easy button, like things like an AISDR before I've ever, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah outbound sucks or outbound sucks. Let's hire an AI employee to hit send, all on the exact same template. We haven't figured out messaging. We haven't done it once.
Speaker 2:Let's do this. So we're looking for easy buttons. Again, critical thinking issue we're thinking automation, let's just automate everything. But. But we just talked about it. The problem is the same. Buyers aren't answering. You're doing more on. They're doing more buying on their own. Buying is more complex. You're trying to automate everything because it's just, it makes sense. That's what you do with ai, or or they're just looking at the easy fixes and just saying, hey, we can build these agents and these agents. Maybe let's do that, but but you know the way you really make good by good decisions overall the business is applying critical thinking.
Speaker 2:What are the problems that we're trying to solve? Why are we trying to solve them? What are the? What are the root causes? And, yes, then start saying how can we solve it with ai? Find me a solution with ai. I just had this conversation today with my uh vp, customer success, and she was talking about how she built a lot of these agents but she wants to now take them into n8n and make, take them to the next level and implement them. Then I asked her that I told her hey, what's?
Speaker 2:right now the biggest critical thing in your mind? What's kind of the biggest challenges right now? I need to hire. I need to hire ASAP. I want to get to that level of quality that we need right now in CS. Just more hiring will do Okay and what else. So we started going down that rabbit hole and then we understood which agents specifically would make sense right now to implement.
Speaker 1:To go and solve the problem.
Speaker 2:So I think we first have that either formal problem of moving too fast on things, or just not realizing that things are happening, that we need to move fast and we're not moving fast enough.
Speaker 2:And then, practically speaking, I think, as part of that a lot of us just go after all these easy agents, all the things that just save AEs time, but I think that the problem is still the same problem. You need to use AI, probably to do better instead of doing more, and a lot of companies are trying to use it to do more.
Speaker 2:Let's free up their time from updating the CRM and doing a lot of stuff, but then you freed up their time to just send more of these crappy emails or do more of these demo interrogations or not enable buyers properly. So what did? You gain really by freeing up their time. So that's how I'm thinking about it, and I think there's a lot of ways that you can use AI to just do better research. You can build strong POVs before you enter an enterprise account. You can prepare for meetings better.
Speaker 2:You can know, everything about every stakeholder before every meeting. Throughout your process, build account plans. Your outreach can be much smarter Like using things like.
Speaker 1:More customized, right yeah, your outbound emails and every follow-up email.
Speaker 2:You can just use it to help you write.
Speaker 1:That's the table stakes I think you know, in buyer enablement that's a lot of what we're doing in our product you can build business cases.
Speaker 2:You could build competitive comparisons, roi even have it go and draft a poc success plan, customer success plan, following the call and not only do things faster for you but do it better. And I think it's getting to a point where it can really give you good advice, like we're experimenting with this a lot, we're going to launch a lot of things in these areas, but think about not just not just what happened in the call, not just the call summary, but where I'm, where am I right now in the deal and how can I unblock this right. Here is the situation.
Speaker 2:Or how can I right now get this through the finish line on time by the end of the quarter? I want to hit the target.
Speaker 1:Where are?
Speaker 2:they at, and what are the different moves that I could do? I think there's a lot If you fit it with enough information and you prompt it the right way and you build everything right. There's a lot there.
Speaker 1:I agree. Yeah, I mean, that is to me probably the area I think that is least utilized is we call it scenario planning in particular, which is AI, is very good at taking in a lot of different key variables. And again, I think the other thing is it also then is marrying your internal information with external signals too. Like you know, it's scraping. I'll give you a good example. We were doing an example.
Speaker 1:We've got a custom GPT called competitive deal intelligence. If you guys go check out, you can sign up for a free trial on meetjourneyai. We've got all these different go-to-market assistance, but the competitive deal one's a really interesting one. It's like, hey, I'm a sales rep, I work at SalesLoft, I'm trying to push Gong out of this account, help me build the play for it. And it went and it scraped.
Speaker 1:And it saw that this company, literally a week ago and it was the most beautiful timing, how it worked out literally a week before put up a job posting for a gong program manager. And so it's like, hey, you need to seed the point on conversational intelligence, you need to do this that, like gong, is obviously embedded blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Instead, you need to do this, focus on this, attack them on their engagement platform, attack them on analytics and like this is where you win. Like, I'm a big fan. Like, like. We will never create a static battle card, ever again, ever, because by the time your enablement team one takes three months to build it Two. By that time, the company's already, you know, released 18 new features.
Speaker 1:So, it's like you know you can't keep up, but the scenario planning AI use case is absolutely one that everybody should be doing on every single deal. I cannot stress it enough, just like how big of a game changer it can be.
Speaker 2:Hey, I make strategic company decisions using AI. I don't let it be a decision for me, but it's structuring the information. It helps me think about it, it helps me structure thinking. Structured information, research, like all of these things are incredible. Yeah, definitely do it, and I couldn't agree more. I think that the whole funnel of going to product marketing or enablement, wherever, is in charge of all that stuff, and then it's outdated and it's not tailored, that's going to disappear from the world. I think, and you know, that's part of the vision for our product. Beyond just bringing everything into one place, it's all going to be like an Ironman suit for the modern seller the entire execution is going to be powered by AI, and part of it is that buyer enablement.
Speaker 1:Content is going to be just so tailored, based on information from public sources and information from all of the internal conversations to just draft these resources directly in the environment where you sell, where you run the sales process, which is that that's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and like we created a platform, meet Journey. It's that you know how we look at. This is these assistants are almost, like you know we call them digital teammates that you know there's kind of the Iron man suit analogy. But I also think it's more of like you know your Avengers strategy, where it's like you're Iron man and you know this one is your Captain America, you know. This one is your Hulk, you know. And like they all do different things Right. Like this one is really strong at account research, you know, and then you've got your what's that guy? Account research, you know, and then you've got your what's that guy? Nighthawk, you know. He's really good at annual report summarizing, you know. And Black Widow she's really good at social media post writing. You know what I mean Like that's kind of how I think about this is that these teammates, the future is we're all going to be surrounded and, like you mentioned, as an executive, I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 1:You know I use generative AI. I've probably spent three hours Friday night, you know, working through our kind of Q4 project management for my chief of staff. But we're all going to have these digital teammates that go do stuff for us and do work and you're going to have to learn how to. You know the people that know what they call delegate and elevate. Right, you delegate and elevate, and that is the future is we're going to delegate to these assistants. You know these different people to do these things for us. So we should therefore be having richer conversations, more structured conversations, because, you know, kind of taking this whole thing full circle, nobody is going to want to talk to a salesperson if they can't add incremental value to the conversation. Yeah, if you cannot add incremental value above and beyond what I can read on a piece of paper or a video I can watch, that's a one size fits all demo why would I want to talk to you? I don't, I would prefer to talk to you. I'm this kind of high horse gall.
Speaker 1:I really feel like most people only want to talk to the customer success people, because that's the people they're going to interact with anyway.
Speaker 1:That is the person who's got to make sure I actually use the product and it's successful, not the salesperson who's going to. Hey, I feel like every buyer should ask this one question in the very first call Are you going to hand me off at the end of this if you close the deal and if the answer is yes, you should say, hey, not a problem, jake, I love that. On the next call, I need the CS rep I'm going to be assigned to, because I need to make sure they actually know what the heck they're talking about and that they're involved from day one. That is what every buyer should do. That and every sales team should be prepared for that, because that is how people actually want to buy. I want to talk to the person who's going to make me successful with a product and you know, also like the days of the sales rep having to go get a solutions engineer for some basic, stupid question, dead like yeah just put that person on the phone.
Speaker 1:Why like and again, we've got ai assistance to just do that anyway. It's like it just tells you in real time like, yes, we can integrate with this azure layer from an infant. It'll just do it for you. I just feel like the salesperson of the future has got to be this kind of superpowered Avengers mindset where they are adding so much value when they are in that 5% gall that they become indispensable because they are such experts. I love it so much.
Speaker 2:I'll add a few more things to this. First of all, this is the biggest why now, behind the entire message of this conversation about buyer-centricity, experience, buyer enablement, whatever you call it right, like if a buyer right now can use ai to take your freaking deck and build a better business case, to take your deck and your competitive deck and build a competitive comparison. If they can do all these things, which are the skills of the, the good seller, right? That's? That's where you're trying to facilitate the decision and to enable them and equip them and influence, you're losing influence. So if all your value is is to provide product information that anyone can just find, drop all the assets that your product marketing created, which, okay, just put them on the website for me and then push to the close, then it's commodity, like it's just.
Speaker 2:It has to die. That's transactional sales. It just has to disappear from the world. I think we're going to level up the motions. I think every salesperson is just going to be have that complex selling skills. So I think all of these things exactly should happen. And then I forgot the second point.
Speaker 1:Don't worry about it, we'll put it in the show notes afterwards.
Speaker 2:So last thoughts If I want to be successful a year from now, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I remember, we can edit this a little bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course we can edit it.
Speaker 2:All right, so why?
Speaker 1:don't you just go into, like, why don't you just start my second point and then just go into it?
Speaker 2:yeah, so my second point you talked about how do we?
Speaker 2:optimize the five percent. But there's another thing I'll add to that is how do we expand, how do we drive the conversation that's happening around about us when we're not there? How do we expand the salesperson, make them influence the rest of the 95? And the way that you do that is by focusing on their async selling skills and their champion enablement skills and their multi-threading skills right, all of these things that you can do to drive more influence, the more that you're offering buying processes as a service, right, it means you're more of an extension of their team. So now you're part of. How do I pitch to the CFO? Right, you're part of. Who should I even involve here? Okay, and how do I approach them? So you're part of. Who should I even involve here and how do I approach them?
Speaker 2:So, you're part of even how do we now agree that this is really the problem here that we need to tackle Now? You're getting into these intimate conversations because you're offering a better experience. You know you're offering a better experience. So just by doing better and by driving these enablement tools, by focusing on in the between conversation skills, you're basically expanding your influence, you're becoming more valuable and going beyond that. 5%.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. I think that's a good point to wrap up on, but I'm going to ask you one last question, which is where is this headed? If I said, hey, in a year or two years from now, what are the things out of what we just talked about? If you had to pick, maybe one or two, what would you leave people with as like, these are the two things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think it's one. Instead of buyers using AI alone, salespeople will have to bring them into their own AI workflows that they facilitate. That's one. It means that you have an environment where you have AI working for them. Then you're not afraid of it and it's doing the things that they will do with their AI, but just better, and you're orchestrating it. I think that's one thing, and the second thing is just what we said right now you just have to do better. You have to offer buying process as a service. It's just non-negotiable. You just have to do better than the AI empowered buyer.
Speaker 1:That's the point? I think so, and you have to understand that if you're not using AI to understand what buyers are finding out about you too, go do that right now too. Go say, hey, if you were going to buy my product, what would you compare? What do you think buyers are doing? How are they talking about it? Is there a competition, et cetera. So I think that's a really great tactical something that somebody could go and act on right now. So that's a wrap. Thank you, man. I enjoyed the conversation. I think we covered a lot. I think we got deep into you know the details on why people should start to think about this. You know kind of buyer-centric journey, some tactical ways that they can leverage AI and and just also mindset shift, you know, to meet people there. So big thank you for joining me, man.
Speaker 2:I really enjoyed it. Yeah, me too. Thanks so much, it was fun. I think exactly, yeah, we touched both of us. Good point.
Speaker 1:Love it, man, all right. Well, thank you, Appreciate everyone for listening and we'll see you on next week's episode.
