Speaker 1Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast, hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. This podcast is brought to you by Force Management. In this segment, Alex Varel from Cerebris gets candid about a shift that's already underway. The gap between sellers is no longer just skill or effort. It's who knows how to work alongside AI and who doesn't. He shares what that looks like in practice and why expectations for seller productivity are changing faster than most teams realize. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2There's a provocative idea circulating that I hear people say that a significant percentage of software sellers today are really at risk, whether it's a year from now, two years from now in this new world. Like, first of all, what's provocative about it? I know that it's, you know, for somebody like me, it catches my attention. Where do you think that's coming from?
Speaker 3One example right now, like Jimmy Lee, my RevOps guy, this is our third company together. You met Jimmy in London a while back. And, you know, he trained like five or six agents over Easter weekend while his family was asleep. He gets up at like four in the morning and just goes down a very curious path. And he does. And he trained four or five agents that are looking at, he's got one for voice of the customers, product feedback, going through JIRA tickets and things like that. He's got one for some forecasting. He's got another one to monitor solution architecture work. And he's got six that are in the works, right? So think like 10 inside of a week that is going to augment his productivity immensely. They are going off and conducting tasks on his behalf. I'm going to. Build and train a few this week myself, get hands on keyboard and I think the understanding how to augment your own productivity and your profession matters no matter what, especially for sellers. And if I can imagine like my daughter is a sophomore in college in two years time, I would really encourage her to go into an interview and almost like an artist would lay out a portfolio. Yeah. Of work that they've done, or if they're a model, they showed like the shots that they've done. I want her to come and show the agents that are multipliers of herself, extensions of herself and show what she can bring to the table that equals the productivity of, I don't know, five or 10 humans, her plus her, her agents. And I think, you know, sellers have got to get really curious about this space. Those that are potentially at risk are those who. Don't have hands on keyboard experience and don't know how to augment their productivity or supervise, um, uh, agenda, gay eye in their job, right. To just make them more capable. Um, the great thing is though, I think humans are going to crave, I just got back from London and Stockholm meeting with prospects and customers, by the way, the tech in Stockholm is incredible. I don't know. I did the minds. They're brilliant. I met, I don't want to call it, uh, specific logos, but, uh, what's happening in Stockholm is fascinating. Um, humans are going to crave sellers, interpersonal and interpersonal capabilities and communication skills, and just being face to face with them with the email is dead. It's just been taken over by AI slop. And, you know, like we're going to crave some human fallibility and some misspellings and, and custom made emails. And, and face to face meetings. So I think it's two parts, um, that really matter getting hands on keyboard, knowing
Speaker 2where you wound up today, but you've had discussions with me in the beginning where you would say you, you called it, you said imposter syndrome, you said cap, I'm feeling exposed, like walk me through that experience and how you had to level set yourself because if you stayed in that exposure world, then. You would have just gotten, you know, and the people that are funding this and the people that are, you know, they have certain ideas about playbooks and the way software sales was done. Just give me your perspective on that. And, and you're, I, I think you're calling it like a technical athlete is really what we all need to become.
Speaker 3I think that's it. I mean, there was a tweet. I don't want to, I don't want to name names, but there was a tweet that kind of rocks my world from a highly influential person who I love and admire. And he basically. Said that, like, I'm seeing these traditional software leaders go over to AI native companies or AI centric companies, and they're trying to transfer their playbooks and they're just getting creamed. Like I'm paraphrasing. And so I think there is like a adaptability and situational awareness when you, when you come into an AI native company, or if you make a big pivot from, you know, being a heralded software seller into something like representing. You know, the world's fastest inference, the world's fastest compute. There's a lot to learn and you have to, and you all encourage this in your work and, and, you know, in John's book, like you got to come in and really assess the situation. You know, it's like John, when McMahon, when he talked about coming in and you know, you assess the talent, right. Assess the situation around you have a really good understanding of strengths and weaknesses and vulnerabilities around you. What can you affect? What can you not affect? Um, and I, I came into the company and I'll never forget the first executive meeting. It's like four of the five co-founders or they walk in, I'm just sitting in this big kind of room and four of the five co-founders come in and then there's Natalia, there's Angela, there's Jessica, these unbelievable product leaders and machine learning field leaders. And it's just really quiet. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is, this is really intimidating. Um, and I realized that there was a steep learning curve that was going to be required and that I didn't want to jump to conclusions too soon. Right. And that I was going to have to go out and try to scale this thing and attack the market. And I was going to have to hire sellers for sure. But the sellers were going to come into the same situation as me, because this is novel territory. I went and pillaged Snowflake. And I, I, cause I mean, what an incredible company, like they, you know, they had a very different novel architecture and they, they trained elite sellers. I'm like, I love that profile combined with EMC because I love killers from Boston. I think the whole EMC sales culture isn't like, you know, the, the, the, the folks that have come out of EMC, but I found this sweet spot. I'm going off on a tangent of like Snowflake plus EMC. And then get in here because they have, they have the intangibles, they have the skills that are transferable by pillars that have to, no matter the technology, we're going to have to go out and attack the market and generate a pipeline. We're going to have to have the courageous ability to qualify the pipeline. We're going to have to stay on top of mastery of messaging. We're going to have to manage the ICP, which is extremely dynamic in this space. By the way, we can talk about that, but I have to manage the territory and prioritize the territory and then fifth and final, no matter where I'm at, I'm going to have to deliver an accurate forecast.
Speaker 2Right.
Speaker 3But I knew I was going to bring, which is thousands of years old.
Speaker 2So I love Johnny and I have these podcasts and we say, the more things change, the more they stay the same, but explain to us the nuances that basically, if you, if you have a static playbook with all of those things and you try to bring them into an AI centric company, you're dead. Yeah. It's almost what you're selling. It's the speed of adaptability.
Speaker 3That's, that's right. That's right. Those are constant. Those five pillars, they, they, they persist no matter where you are, but, um, the customer and how the customer buys is different and you're coupled with a machine learning solution architect. And so you have to understand how you're coupled with that person. And, um, and I don't know. I don't know if that's terribly different from, you know, partnering with a solution engineer across a different piece of technology, but the way that these models come out every week and the way that companies are formulating compute strategies and the way that they're formulating, how they're going to leverage new models and what they build on top of them. Um, the funding that is going around to these AI native companies that are disrupting traditional enterprises. You know, you have to think about like, am I going to need, you know, the software capacity model where I've got to have this many bodies in the Northeast, this many bodies in the West, this many in North central, et cetera, et cetera, and EMEA and APAC, you know, where really is my ICP, um, granted all the dynamic, constant changing, uh, in this, this AI landscape. My, my inclination is just to go attack the enterprise market with this crew and attack the fortune 500 and the forbes 2000 but what's really interesting are the extremely well capitalized ai native companies that have just emerged in the last 6 12 18 months right have really come out and disrupted the whole scene and so we have to keep our ear to the ground on the innovation velocity around different companies that are very well capitalized and determine you know where to invest our time in them versus a fortune 500 that's scared for their
Speaker 4life that maybe moves a little bit slower thanks for listening to today's episode if you enjoy the content please subscribe rate and review the show to help us reach more people this show is brought to you by force management where we help companies improve sales performance executing the growth strategy at the point of sale check out forcemanagement.com for more information you
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