Speaker 1Welcome to Revenue Builders hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. This podcast is brought to you by Force Management. Today, a segment from our episode on AI and sales with Brad Scott. Brad Scott is a VP of worldwide sales at Glean, and he's built sales organizations at three of the most pivotal growth stages in tech. Snowflake during its historic scale up, Faiza from a much earlier stage, and now Glean through explosive growth, currently leading a 350 plus person team. That rare vantage point matters for what he's about to tell you. In this clip, Brad cuts through the noise on AI and sales. He explains why most salespeople are setting themselves up to fail, and exactly what the best ones are doing instead to let AI automate the drudgery so that they can actually get better. Let's dive in. Just from an
Speaker 2AI initiative that are going on in all these companies, where is AI failing?
Speaker 3It's a great question, John. And look, I'm a simple animal, so I just try to go pattern match. Like where, so I start with like, where have we been successful? Where we've been successful with customers like Dell and GM and many others is it's a C-level initiative. Very few transformative AI programs happen within companies now. If the C-level initiative is a C-level initiative, it's a C-level initiative. And so when I walk in and I see and understand like the shape of a deal, I can very quickly say, hey, if we have this C-level support and initiative and they're going to go get all the other roadblocks out of the way, we can go do some really interesting things. I mentioned we had our big conference last week, Glean Go, out in San Francisco, and I was fortunate enough to interview one of our great partners, Bain, on stage. And, you know, they have great relationships with C-level executives. And what David talked about was, like, what are the biggest AI red flags that you see? And what we see from a red flag perspective is when an AI initiative at a company goes from a CEO or board-level initiative where you're trying to transform the company and their business outcomes and their processes to a technical evaluation. So what happens in those companies? The CEO says, we want to go do this. The CEO implements an AI czar. That AI czar typically is a CIO who is a technical person with a technical team. he then hands that off he or she hands that off to their team and it becomes this much different game of telephone where it went from you know changing the way the business runs and operates to i want to look under the hood of this thing understand how it runs right and it becomes a much more technical evaluation if you're at that level or below and it becomes a technical evaluation man is that going to be a coin flip for you and your business right because then you could go to preferences and incumbency and all these other things. It also just radically increases the time duration to when those companies are actually going to be able to implement some of these technologies to transform their business.
Speaker 2And isn't there always like another organization inside the company that says we could do this without Lean and without these other companies, we could do it? A hundred percent. Like, look. So Europe, no matter any AI company, whether you're a true AI native company or not, when you go into these companies, there's a whole group of people that think that they could do exactly what you could do.
Speaker 3Yeah. And it's exciting, right? This is an exciting time. AI is exciting for people. And for technologists, especially, they're like, man, I want to get my hands on this thing and I want to build it. So I'm going to go tell my boss I can build this thing. It goes back to the question that you have to ask those C-level executives, which is, man, isn't it better for your team to focus on their core competency? Why not build on or build with our technology? We don't have to be the front door. We can be that context layer for you. But if you're a paper manufacturer or you're building automobiles, you're in healthcare, wouldn't it be better to take this foundational technology and build products and solutions that go directly to servicing your end customer versus having these guys, you know, down in the depths trying to build some of these foundational technologies? And, you know, that's a real personal game for a lot of these folks because they feel like their careers partially depend on it and or they just want to do it really
Speaker 2badly right let's talk about ai and sales five years from now enterprise software companies do they employ more or fewer sales people i've gotten into this debate with
Speaker 3folks i actually think it's going to be more i think it's going to be more people like everyone said oh the sdr is dead right this was like over the last 12 to 18 months but the way i look at it we've got more sdrs at our company in most of my peers companies. And I think what it's going to look like, and we actually have something that sort of a lab within Glean called the Work AI Institute, where we've got, you know, people much smarter than me, professors from Stanford and all these folks thinking about like, what does an organization look like in the future? And I think the sort of common thought pattern is the organizations will be flatter and organizations will have AEs or people in that type of role managing teams of agents under them doing all kind of the legwork and the drudgery but you know it's that whole jevons paradox thing that everyone talks about now where you know the the more and the cheaper ai gets the actual more things happen and the more work gets done and so i think in the relative near term you're going to see a broader uh you know hiring environment that you're going to need more people also like when you have more ai you can push more slop and more crap out. And so I don't know about you guys, but my inbox is disgusting. Like the level of slop and emails and inbound that comes in is pretty terrible. And what's really resonating with people that we're seeing with customers is the IRL stuff, right? The in real life, in person, in your office, handwritten notes, drop-offs, all of those sort of like what's old is new again things from a salesperson's perspective actually differentiate you now the eyes of the customer. And I think if you're just relying on teams of bots and agents, it's actually not what human beings really want or how they want to buy things right now. So my prediction.
Speaker 2helps great salespeople or vice versa? I think it levels the point. If you look back five years from now, how's it going to look?
Speaker 3I mean, I think the best of the best and the best that I see on my team, like they go from, you know, it's like they talk about these 10 or 100 X developers, right? Like the best just become that much better. It's like the Iron Man suit and they just explode. And it really is a force multiplier for them. Because they know exactly what they want. They know exactly what they want. And they can get it from AI and they go. That's right. So all the BS work or the work that like turns them into 50 other people, they can put that into the AI and they can have those AI systems go out and do things for them on their behalf in the way that they want them done. I think it's an opportunity for folks that may be mediocre in that, you know, AI, what it does is it levels up. It takes away all the drudgery. You don't have to go, you know, do the QBR deck or the research, all like the manual labor goes away. And so everyone's sort of at this level. And now, do those people want to use AI to train themselves better, to get deeper into process, to really kind of hone those skills? And so I think it's an opportunity for folks that may be middle of the road to really level themselves up. But when you do have that force multiplier, it's the best people that are going to just get 10x better.
Speaker 2OK, so if you were 30 years old, I know you're like 32 or 33 right now, but you're 30 years and you're an enterprise software salesperson, what would you learn to make sure that you could benefit from AI and it would not replace you?
Speaker 3The best people that I see on my team doing it that are in like that cohort is they have automated their like daily and weekly processes. So their prospecting list, their LinkedIn outreach, their creation of customer value decks, et cetera, all of that happens. So it leaves them all this extra time, right? That productivity leaves them extra time so that they can go learn from the best of the best. And I think back to the first part of our conversation, which is the people in your organization. If you've come to a great company and you've come to a great sales organization, and John, to your point, if you've chosen a great sales leader, man, now you have all this extra time to go learn from those folks, to hone your craft, to study your process, and to take the time that may have been spent creating internal artifacts or sending out emails and maybe get out into the office of your customer to go learn more from them and to put yourself in a position to go win more deals.
Speaker 4Thanks 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.
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