Burn The Playbook

Sales Is Being Rewritten. Are You Ready? | Graham Hawkins - Founder/CEO SalesTribe & Qoos.ai

• Digital Rebels Consulting

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In this conversation, Marc Crosby and Graham Hawkins explore the evolving landscape of B2B sales, emphasizing the need for sales professionals to adapt to the new buyer journey, which is increasingly influenced by AI and digital tools. They discuss the importance of visibility in the sales process, the necessity of understanding customer motivations, and the shift from traditional sales funnels to more dynamic approaches. Hawkins shares insights on leveraging buyer intent data, the significance of multi-threading in stakeholder engagement, and the future of sales leadership in an AI-driven world. The conversation also highlights the role of innovative tools like Qs.ai in enhancing sales effectiveness and the importance of continuous learning and adaptation in the sales profession.

Graham Hawkins Bio

With more than 34 years of business experience in executive B2B sales and sales leadership roles, Graham Hawkins is a highly experienced and versatile business executive with proven strengths in strategic business development, go-to-market planning, and sales and marketing.

Graham has worked in the UK, Australia and across Asia Pacific as a representative of some of the world’s most innovative IT, telecommunications, finance and media organisations. Graham has an MBA (Exec) (Distinction) from RMIT and is a member of Golden Key International Honour Society for high-performing business students. Graham is also a part-time lecturer and student mentor in the RMIT Executive MBA Program.

Graham has extensive experience in developing, mentoring and leading highly successful sales teams while driving multi-channel sales engagement strategies that dovetail with the new Age of the Customer.

Today, Graham is the Graham is the Founder & CEO of SalesTribe, and Co-Founder of the world’s first AI-Guided Selling platform – Qoos.ai  

https://salestribe.com/

https://qoos.ai/


Takeaways

Buyers are completing much of their journey before engaging sales.
Sales strategies must adapt to the new buyer-led era.
Visibility in the buying journey is crucial for sales success.
The traditional sales funnel is becoming obsolete.
Multi-threading is essential for engaging multiple stakeholders.
Understanding customer motivations is key to effective selling.
AI is transforming the sales landscape and freeing up time for relationship building.
Sales leaders must evolve to support both human and digital teams.
Data-driven insights are critical for identifying high-intent buyers.
Personalized outreach is more effective than cold calls or emails.


Titles

Rethinking Sales in the AI Era
Navigating the New Buyer Journey


Sound bites

"We learn nothing from the win."
"Data-led everything now."
"Opening is the new closing."


Chapters

00:00 Rethinking Sales Strategies
02:11 The Evolving Buyer Journey
05:27 Visibility in the New Sales Landscape
08:29 Reimagining Sales Funnels and Pipelines
11:27 The Importance of Multi-Threading
12:58 Understanding Customer Motivations
14:2

Views expressed are our own and do not represent any organizations

© 2025 Digital Rebels Consulting. All rights reserved.


SPEAKER_00:

We'll be right back. All right, welcome in. I'm Mark Crosby, and this is Burn the Playbook. Every week, we rethink the strategies that actually move the needle, not with any fads or gimmicks, but unlocking growth in markets where everybody looks the same. This show is for ones willing to challenge the status quo and the ones that want to build something truly different. Today's guest has done exactly that, especially in sales, and we're going deep into the moves that help them stand out, win trusts, and grow on their terms. Graham Hawkins is a B2B sales specialist with a contemporary view on how sales must align to the new buyer-led era. Recently voted by Crunchbase as one of the world's top 25 sales leaders, Graham is an Amazon International bestselling author, LinkedIn Top Voice Award winner in 2018, and today he is the founder and CEO of SalesTribe, and he's also the CEO and co-founder of the world's first AI-guided selling platform, Qs.ai. Welcome, Graham. Thank you, Mark. Great to be here. Appreciate it. And let's just jump right into it because I would love to hear more about your journey. Obviously, you've been in sales for over 30 plus years and have a lot of experience. And I would love to share that with the rest of the world, especially beyond the tech industry, because I know that at least the segments that I serve in manufacturing could probably learn a lot about how to sell better. One of the things that keeps coming up, at least in my feeds and things like that, is that the buyers are pretty much 60% of the way there, 70% of the way there, 80% of the way there. before they even want to talk to a salesperson. So are we getting to 90% as far as just they don't need salespeople anymore? How do you see it today? And how do we change our sales and marketing approaches to adapt to that?

SPEAKER_01:

It's an unbelievably complex story, Mark. As you know, I've recently published a book called Deep Selling, How to Drive Growth in the Age of AI. My co-author, Mark McAuliffe, in this particular book, has just finished a six-year PhD in digital transformation and sales leadership. A lot of the research that Mark has done has gone into the book, obviously, but it's fascinating to see exactly what you said. It's how much of the buying journey is being now before that buyer ever engages with a vendor or a supplier. Forbes put some stats out recently that nine out of 10 B2B buyers are now using Gen AI. I did a keynote just a little while back in London where I outlined all of the activities that a B2B buyer goes through, Mark, all of those routine repetitive elements of the buying process. And I cross-referenced this against Claude and DeepSeek and the various others as well, GPT. And it said to me, and this floored me really, it said that 60 to 70% of B2B buying will be automated or become, you know, or done by an agent within the next 18 months or so by 2027. Oh, wow. So if you think about that in context, what are buyers doing? They're landing on perplexity and they're saying, give me the top three suppliers for the CRM system. We need a new CRM. And they're getting all of that research done and all of those recommendations made before they ever speak to a salesperson. So what happens? Sales guys, we all come in late now. We come in when the buyer's already selected their preferred supplier. So yeah, I think to your question, lots and lots of B2B buying is being done in the dark. We don't even know what's happening. They're leveraging GPT and everything else, all of the Gen AI tools to make vendor selections. And so as a salesperson, I show up with limited opportunities to

SPEAKER_00:

influence the outcome. Yeah, and that's a good point. And I think also it probably was a little bit easier three, four years ago because you could just go to that same process. as far as just putting in a Google search and understand what they're being exposed to. I think now it's a little bit more challenging because, you know, they're putting in a variety of different types of prompts and you don't know if they're going to be a one line prompt or, you know, a full page prompt and you don't know what that output is going to be. So I think you're going kind of in a little bit more of the dark and you have to be more prepared, I think, as far as just answering any objections, answering any potential hallucinations, because you don't know what that journey is, you know, as clearly or they never really was. is clear, but it's going to get a little bit more muddy as far as when you're using artificial intelligence and which platform, because, you know, who knows what direction they went down. So I guess with that said, I mean, I think that there's probably a way to probably maybe prepare against that a little bit, maybe by doing your own GPT searches kind of in the same way. So at least you can, at least when you get to the meeting or you have a call, you're a little bit more prepared in the same way. But what would you recommend like a salesperson does utilizing AI to kind of put yourself in the customer's shoes before you actually have that conversation with them.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, listen, I've always preached the whole visibility at the beginning of the buying journey. If you're not visible, you don't exist. And so I think some of the onus now comes back onto the marketing department too. And so it should, right? We're all one, should be one, sales and marketing together. But one of the first questions that came out, Mark, from the keynote that I delivered recently was, so what do we need to do as a business to make sure we're showing up in those GPT searches or the gen AI searches. So we've moved from SEO to GEO, generative engine optimization, right? So that's the new big hot topic apparently. Yeah, SEO was the thing, wasn't it? How do I make sure I appear on that first page with the blue links? People spending lots and lots of money on search engine optimization, search engine marketing to make sure that you're visible when that buyer starts their research in the dark. Well, now, as you said, now it's about, well, how are we ensuring as a business, we do appear in the searches on GPT? And one of the tips I heard recently, which was logical, someone said, you need to make sure you understand the questions that your buyers are asking. So back to your point about the prompt, what are they prompting GPT or others about? And how do you make sure you understand exactly how your business can solve those problems? So yeah, it's a different world, totally different process.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think so. And I think that also leads to, you know, one of my thoughts recently and also just something I've employed in my sales career is understanding the buyer's customers, understanding what problems that they're trying to solve. So I think if you can, you know, take that a step further and understand, you know, that side of it, it'll probably get you a little bit further than just understanding your immediate buyer. You really need to take that, you know, to the next tier and understand who is their customer and how are they trying to solve their problems. And I think that prepares you a and probably gives you the keys to what that prompt might look like, I think. And that might be the way to go. One

SPEAKER_01:

of my favorite catch cries is we all have to learn how to sell smarter in a world of smarter buyers. Simple little approach, but yeah, and the buyer's getting much more sophisticated about the tools they're using, the research they're leveraging, the information they're getting about suppliers. So as sellers and marketing people, we have to get a lot more sophisticated ourselves in how we do things. One of the things that we're doing with Qs at the moment, Mark, you alluded to at the outset, was simple old MedPick training. I mean, everyone's talking about MedPick, but getting really clear on the metrics that your buyers are using to measure the value, value realization, the value that your product is bringing, both pre and post sale. So it's one of the things I've neglected personally in my career. I haven't been anywhere near detailed enough with that kind of approach. We have to now. We absolutely have to.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And then that kind of leads me into my next question as far as when we're in Salesforce, we're in HubSpot and we're a sales rep and we're entering in our... Is that even appropriate anymore as far as what that looks like? And then I guess the same thing for a sales funnel. I mean, does the sales funnel look like a typical sales funnel or does that have to be re-engineered as well? Two

SPEAKER_01:

things there. Firstly, I've got to shout out to Brent Adamson, who you and I both know. Brent's got this wonderful concept called the customer verified pipeline. And I know you're aware of this, but I've moved completely away from that old idea of pipeline progression and listening to the seller give their gut feel or their intuition about things. Brent's concept of the verified pipeline is all about what actions or reactions is the customer taking that verifies that this deal is moving in the right direction or it's moving forward. So that's the first thing to say Back to the funnel question, I read that great book by, and now the name escapes me. I'll come back to the name of the guy who wrote the book, but The Flipped Funnel. It's a wonderful, simple concept that that used to be the funnel where you put a whole lot of stuff in the top and you push it all down as hard and as fast as you can and you close as many deals as you can. Obviously, hopefully, those sales fall at the bottom of the funnel. First thing, most people have a leaky funnel. There's all sorts of problems with that approach. And secondly, that idea of just put a whole lot of rubbish in the top, that spray and pray kind of mentality, that's being pushed to the side now and being replaced by that idea of being a lot more focused, narrowing the focus. So the flipped funnel, we've gone from that to that, right? And so we should. We're in this new era of product-led growth and subscription models, consumption models. The prevailing business models of the time almost require that you have to land and expand through the funnel where the dynamic is a much longer engagement with each buyer, hopefully. So I've spent 30 years doing the traditional approach, just put as much rubbish in the top as you can. Three to five times quota in your pipeline, Mark, all that stuff. It's a flawed approach, particularly now. So yeah, I love the flipped funnel concept.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. I agree, certainly. And I think beyond that, one of the other things that typically comes up as a gatekeeper or the procurement won't let me talk to anybody else. And there's this concept that I've heard about multi-threading. Are you familiar with that as far as what that looks like in your world?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, certainly am. In fact, excuse me, frog in the throat. Certainly, yeah, with the Q's platform, we're addressing that particular problem around stay engagement, so multi-threading. How do we make sure we're getting across those 11.6, I think Gartner said, 11.6 buyers in most complex B2B sales scenarios? So yeah, and yet LinkedIn came out with a stat recently. You probably saw it, Mark. Most sellers, I think 78% of sellers are single-threaded. I believe it, yeah. Yeah, they've got their one champion, they've got their one account contact, and they rely too heavily on that one person. So multi-threading, absolutely critical.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think another aspect of understanding your customers is an activity that I believe I heard you talk about, I forget it was a dozen years ago when you did your MBA, about how you went out and you spoke to buyers and tried to get a better sense of, you know, basically why they buy from you, right? And I don't think that that's probably deployed enough as far as a strategy from a sales perspective is really, you know, getting down to asking your customers point blank. Like, why do you buy from us? Is it pricing? Is it quality? Is it speed? Is it me? Is it the executives? Like, what is it? So why do you think that, I guess we don't see more of that and people just default to surveys, NPS scores and things like that to try to understand their customers? Yeah, we

SPEAKER_01:

pay lip service to that, don't we? And I am guilty of this myself. I've got a friend down here in Sydney, in Australia, Kian McLaughlin, who set up a business some years ago, a around win-loss analysis. And so he dives into this whole area in a very deep way and has built a software platform that can help companies get that better understanding of why we win and why we lose. But yeah, we very rarely go out and talk to the buyer about what did you enjoy when you dealt with us? Were we easy to deal with? Was there friction in the process? If so, where? Let's get clear on what sort of buy experience we create for our buyers pre and post sale. So yeah, check out Trinity, which is Kian's company. They do a terrific job of win-loss analysis. Others are doing this stuff as well, but yeah, most companies don't do any of it. Right.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Yeah. It's certainly a good activity to go through, especially, well, both of them, whether you win or whether you lose. I think most people just get the win. They throw their hands up and they say, yay, and they move on to the next one without taking the opportunity to really find out why. Yeah. You learn nothing from the win, right? You learn

SPEAKER_01:

zero.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Because if you want on a particular, I guess, aspect of that business, you need to keep nurturing that through because the next step is to keep the customer.

SPEAKER_01:

100%. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep. Back to the prevailing business models of the time. It's a different dynamic now. It is. Speaking of a different dynamic now, as it relates to your first book, you have three books, correct? Yeah. And so what What's changed since you wrote your first book to your most recent book as far as what selling looks like? I know there's been a lot of changes, but what's been the biggest shift? Maybe it's AI, maybe it's something else, but as far as the thought process that went into writing the newest one, how did your mindset change? Yeah, really interesting.

SPEAKER_01:

The simple answer to that is AI. When I published this one, Mark, in The Future of the Sales Profession, I published that in 2017. And that was the result of the MBA biobehavior study that I did. The fascinating thing about that is, and the hint is in the title, I looked into the future and I thought, what's going to be happening in five, in 10 years for B2B salespeople? And I was clearly way off. I could not have imagined how quickly AI would take hold in the last couple of years, really. And so, yeah, I think I certainly underestimated how quickly all of this would accelerate. But it's all fairly, if you step back and think about it, Mark, it's all fairly predictable in a way. I mean, anything that's routine and repetitive is going to be automated. One of the key tenets of that book was if you're a generalist salesperson, if you're down at that low end of the commodity curve in a transactional or a package solution type sale, then you will be automated out of the business. There's no question. So the challenge for salespeople is to become that deep domain expert, that specialist, that consultative salesperson that the buyer will actually value. So getting up the commodity curve, if you like, is a really important point. But yeah, that book, 2017, my mindset has totally changed again now, given how quickly AI is advancing.

SPEAKER_00:

It is. And I guess with that said, would you say that, I guess the typical sales job, is that in jeopardy no matter what industry? I mean, if it's a commodity product, generic product, should you, I guess, upskill yourself and try to figure out how to leverage AI to do something else? Or what does that look like? Well,

SPEAKER_01:

I think we should upskill ourselves irrespective. There's so much happening now in every role. And Mark, I often laugh, and I know you and I have talked about this before, but I often laugh that For some reason, it's the sales profession that thinks that it's the only profession in the world that should never change. I still come across sales leaders who are doing what I was doing in 1989. It's that numbers game, always be closing, all of those old-fashioned approaches to the business. So, yeah, we should all be changing no matter what and upskilling. But even more so now, I think if you are one of those– transactional sellers doing high volume kind of stuff, then agentic AI is coming for your job, no doubt. The nice part about it though, Mark, I think when you look at, I've delved into, I'm sure you have too, the average sales activities breakdown, daily breakdown of sales activities. Depending on who you read, it's between 20% and 30% of your daily sales activities are spent actually selling. True. There's all of this other stuff that a B2B salesperson does from order processing to quoting, to filling out the CRM, to attending internal meetings and all of that stuff that's just, to be honest, it's fluff. It's wasted time. So I like the fact, and this is the positive spin here, I like the fact that AI is going to free us up from a lot of those routine repetitive tasks and allow the salesperson to do what we do best, which is build trust. It's build relationships. It's those human things that I think the really savvy, successful sellers of the future, if you can get all of those human elements combined with the AI and get that nice, not juxtaposition, but that nice thing working together, then you're going to be very valuable.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think so. And I guess even to take that a step further, if we're automating positions, what does the sales manager look like? Since I think a lot of those jobs are probably a lot of spreadsheets and reporting out and analysis and insights and things that frankly, you know, AI can do. So I haven't read any statistics as far as those go, but have you heard anything about that or do you have an opinion?

SPEAKER_01:

Look, I've got an opinion about everything relating to sales, but I haven't specifically written too much about the sales leader role or read too much about the sales leader role. It's obvious that the spreadsheet jockey that I worked for many years ago, the boss who sat in the office and just looked at the forecast and then Monday morning grilled you on your opportunities, that role is dead. More and more of today's sales leaders are actively out there with the team, building relationships and helping out in that servant leadership sort of capacity. So yeah, the role is definitely evolving. And now when you think about the agentic workforce that's coming, it's going to be a case of that leader being a true servant leader, which is there to help not just the human workforce, but the digital workforce as well. I mean, I was fascinated, Mark, to read recently the guys at Workday, great company. They're building onboarding now for agents. So as this swarm of agents comes to the workforce, they are going to be onboarded into most companies the same way a human is or in many ways the same way a human is. Interesting. This whole explosion of agentic AI, I think salespeople will probably have two or three of their own agents that they might bring with them. I know salespeople right now who are working on little agents that can go off and do this and that for them, do some research, buyer identification and productivity. So yeah, maybe there's a situation in the future where the salesperson brings their agents with them and that's what you're getting. You buy the whole package.

SPEAKER_00:

I know you say you have a lot of opinions. One of my opinions right now is around buyer intent. And I know I've seen a lot of tools out there that they give you a percentage or they give some signals or something like that that's based on research and AI and things like that. But do you feel that's an effective, I guess, tool to use or a measurement or what do you do with that? It's got to be, hasn't it? It's got to be.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, data led everything now. I I'm never again chasing a low intent, no intent buyer. I think we've all wasted so much time and company resource doing that kind of activity. Go back to the spray and pray type thing. Trying to convert a passive buyer when the passive buyer's shown zero intent, that's insane, utterly insane. So yes, we have to use the data. We have to use the signals. I call it the hi-fi custom High fit, high intent. You've got to find those customers and work with those exclusively and go deep with those customers. That's the whole premise of this book is to go deep. Mark, I've spent... You're embarrassed now. I've spent probably 25 years being a mile wide and an inch deep in all of my accounts.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I know the feeling. As far as getting a mile deep and using AI, Q's is one that you can use. What are some of the other favorite tools that you have today to use AI in order to get a mile deep?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, great question. I've stumbled across perplexity recently and I love using that just to get insights and research into companies quickly. Obviously, I'm a huge advocate for Sales Navigator. I frankly don't know how anyone can compete if they don't have Sales Navigator because account IQ and the account mapping, the relationship mapping, all of that good stuff that comes out of the box with Sales Navigator and then where it's going as well. I've seen some insights into the future roadmap for for LinkedIn Sales Navigator. So yeah, those two in terms of research, understanding the market, getting some intent. Then you go into platforms like Clay, getting those signals and those insights. There's another company down here in Australia that's popped up recently that's doing some pretty cool stuff around intent. I'll mention those at some point. And then the other one that I've stumbled across recently, which I love is Trumpet. Trumpet out of the UK. digital sales rooms. Mark, you and I have been around the game a long time. First rule of sales, differentiate. How do you stand out in this crowded, noisy marketplace that we're all in now? How do you stand out? How do you differentiate? And I love what Trumpet's building insofar as I can now engage the buyer in a much in a much more enjoyable way with a trumpet digital sales room or pod as they call it. So yeah, look, there's a ton of tools that are popping up and platforms. The Q's platform that we're building at the moment is trying to address the challenge that salespeople spend too much time chasing deals that are never going to close. 40% to 60%, according to Matt Dixon, 40% to 60% of deals end in no decision. How do we remove that wastage that goes on inside most companies? So lots of tools, lots of platforms, but it's got to be about the data, hasn't it? I

SPEAKER_00:

say data, by the way, you say data. digital tools, AI tools, whatever it might be. And I think that Q's kind of ticked a lot of the boxes, even just the UX of it, user experience, as far as just how easy it was to use the integration into CRM. And so, like I said, I've used other tools and they're kind of clunky or didn't work well, or they spit out something that I already knew, or I could just Google it. But how does Q's set itself from the pack and differentiate amongst all the other AI selling tools? out there.

SPEAKER_01:

Great question. So we started with what's the problem, obviously. You start with the problem that you're trying to solve. And I mentioned one of them, which is good old qualifying. How do I make sure I'm not wasting company time and money chasing deals that are never going to create any kind of return? So qualifying seemed to be the number one thing when we did the research. Brent, myself, and Darren Watts, the three founders of the Q's business, went back and spoke to a whole lot of buyers. And they told us, mostly CROs, heads of sales, they said, yeah, our sellers are chasing too many of the wrong types of customers. So let's address that problem if we can. And the second one, which we've touched on already here today, is that multi-threading piece. So how do we get insights into the stakeholders that are influencing the purchase decisions that we're involved in? So we began building this platform with those two things in mind. How do we help sellers become more effective and more efficient at how they sell, how they qualify, and also how they... engage their stakeholders. So that's where it started. And we feel like we're at phase one. There's so much more we want to build and so many different directions the platform can go. But what the market's telling us, Mark, no surprise, is that Salespeople are really struggling now just to start a conversation. It used to always be closing. Well, now opening is the new closing. How do I open a conversation with a buyer who's got access to information? They're educated. They don't want to hear from me. They'll reach out when they're ready. They'll show intent when they're ready. So yeah, starting conversations is a big challenge. And so by giving the The salesperson insights into stakeholder personality, persona information, pain points, metrics, all of those things is enormously valuable for the salesperson to create a unique engagement. I'm not just reaching out with a generic message anymore. Everything has to be hyper-personalized. So that's kind of where we're focused.

SPEAKER_00:

I think one of the things and one of the classic sales activities as far as training is role playing. And you kind of just have to learn by repetition and by having a conversation. So if there's a new salesperson out there and they are looking at queues, especially if it's in the CRM, how is that going to help me, I guess, get those reps in? Is there anything within the platform that does that?

SPEAKER_01:

We haven't built a role play specifically into it yet, although we're talking with a It might be a logical bolt on at some stage, but you're right, building that muscle memory and getting sellers to understand that the buyer has changed now and whatever you thought you were doing previously, rethink it quickly because if the buyer's showing up having done 60, 70, 80% of their research and they know exactly what they want, then the old approach to selling, which was discovery long winded qualifying process. And those sort of activities have to change pretty quickly. So yeah, that's what we're trying to do with Q's is to help create the guardrails, if you like, and remove some of the guesswork, Mark. I mean, we touched on it earlier with Brent's customer verified pipeline. So much of what I've done in my career has been guesswork, gut feel, intuition. Is this deal moving forward? Have I got a good relationship with this customer. We're trying to bring with queues the guardrails that can help remove that guesswork.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And probably saves a lot of time too, because if they haven't had the time to read a dozen different sales books or look at a bunch of different videos or whatever that looks like, the answer is right there. They don't have to do any more research because, hey, what's the next step? There's the cue.

SPEAKER_01:

Correct. Correct. Yes. Play on words, cues and prompts. Next best action is where we're going with this thing pretty quickly. But you're right. We built a large language model. We put all of the IP that we could from the books, et cetera, into that large language model. So that a salesperson can get the answer quickly. By the way, here's the other thing. The sales leader's role was largely a coach role, sometimes a player coach, but The coaching that occurs inside most businesses is negligent. It's negligible, I should say. It's very, very small. So having cues there as a little co-pilot helps the salesperson when the boss is too busy or they're out doing something else.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, because I imagine that in a lot of sales organizations, you get onboarded for a day, maybe a week and have at it. And where did your coach go? Because he's probably busy dealing with forecasting and trying to solve other problems. within the organization.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's fascinatingly rudimentary, isn't it? When you think back about, you know, here's your territory, Graham. Here's a week of training. Now off you go like a little coin-operated robot out into the territory and don't miss your number, Graham. Quick, hurry, close that deal, Graham. More, more, more. And

SPEAKER_00:

I imagine that this Q's update, you know, as, you know, six months, 12 months as, you know, trends emerge and obviously they're emerging very quickly. And, you know, I was kind of thinking about it today. You have three books. If I were to start writing a book today, by the time It's probably going to be, you know, outdated by the time, you know, someone has a chance to read it and I'll have to like start on the next book as soon as that one's done. So that's got to be a benefit of having that, you know, on your platform as far as just live information constantly getting updated. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

That's the plan where we're going to be looking at making sure it's current and it's relevant and it stays, you know, stays up to date.

SPEAKER_00:

Nice. Very cool.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

All right. Well, I'm looking forward to using that myself more often. Like I said, that's kind of just where we got connected was just like me promoting it and just loving it and just tagging you and all that. And anyone that asks about, hey, how do I provide learning management to my team in a more effective way? My answer is always cues, cues, and more cues. Love it. Thank you, sir. Good stuff. But let's move on a little bit to our next segment called Burn It or Build It. This is where we kind of separate some game-changing ideas and the ones that also need to go away. There's a lot of trends, I think, even on your LinkedIn feed. You know, this is dead, that's dead. But let's really, you know, let's figure it out real quick as far as just burning something. We need to get rid of it or build it. And then give me a little bit of a why. So we'll come to the first one, AI conversation intelligence tools. You know, tools like Gong, not picking on them, but burn it or build it.

SPEAKER_01:

No, listen, I'm very much in the build-it camp here. I think Gong is a wonderful platform and has brought amazing new insights to lots of companies around how the salesperson is conversing with the buyer and what's happening, what's the dynamic of all of that. So I love those tools. I think, yeah, definitely build on that. I think where it's going potentially around the role-playing that you mentioned before is really important to build muscle memory and to make salespeople more effective.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. We kind of already touched on this a little bit, but as far as generated AI for outreach and discovery, and let's maybe just focus on discovery, burn it or build it. I

SPEAKER_01:

think definitely build it. There's enormous value in being able to speed up that research process that a salesperson does through discovery. I was just yesterday, again, on perplexity, typing in what's the most important thing to a CFO who's running an insurance company right now? What are the key metrics that they're measuring? And within five seconds, I've got five bullet points that are really important bullet points, two of them, by the way, things I've never heard of. And I'm about to go and have a meeting with this person, and I can have those five things in the back of my mind all written down so that I can reference them, and I sound immediately like, I know what this person's world is. I mean, go back to what the solution selling book many, many years ago, I think it was in the 80s. The two things that a buyer is looking for from a salesperson, empathy and authority. How do I very, very quickly these days establish that I understand you? You're my buyer. I understand you. I empathize. So I think, yeah, tools like Perplexity and all the other gen AI tools that can quickly give me information is wonderful. So build it for sure. Build it. Got it. Sorry, on the other hand, quickly, the generative AI in the outreach, so anything that looks like scaled outreach, burn it quickly. I have no time for these email sequences that allow me to send emails you know, more and more emails and more and more connection requests or more and more in-mails to people. I think that's just impersonal, intrusive, and nobody likes it. So burn those things. Brent's got a great way of saying, a lot of those tools allow me to do more and more of what matters less and less.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. And yes, I'm very against those automated tools too. I refuse to use them. I've gotten previews of them, but I'm not a big fan. And every time I get a DM or an email that comes directly from something like that, it's just very frustrating because it takes more of my time to delete those and block them.

SPEAKER_01:

We can see it immediately too, can't you? I don't know what it is, but you can tell straight away, is this a hyper-personalized email to me or is this just a broadcast message from a bot?

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. Either way, I'm deleting it. Yeah. Which leads me to my next question, cold outbound. And I guess I'll break this up into two ways. Cold outbound emails.

SPEAKER_01:

I'll try to be diplomatic and I'll just say waste of time. I'm a CEO of a small company. I get bombarded with all the usual rubbish that we all get bombarded with. I don't respond to any of them. I just divert them straight into the other folder. So anything that looks like it's cold, anything that looks like it's not relevant, it's not personalized deleted. The return on any of that stuff, Mark, is so low now. Why would you have a human doing that stuff? Right.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. The next cold one is going to be telephone. A lot of people, I guess these days, new generation, they don't even know what a telephone is, but there's still a camp that believes that cold calls, picking up the phone and dialing somebody, works. Burn it or build it. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01:

burn it. I burned it 10 years ago. I haven't answered a cold call in 10 years. I haven't done a cold call in 10 years. I've been a pretty vocal opponent of cold anything really because it doesn't take much to warm the cold call. Do a little tiny bit of research. I call it the two by two. Take two minutes, find out two things before you try and send any cold email or make a cold call. So warm the call up before you do it if you have to, but The modern generation, I've got teenage kids, Mark, they're not answering the phone. They're not responding to cold emails. If it's not completely dead, it's almost dead.

SPEAKER_00:

Gotcha. Yes, I agree. Which kind of leads me to my next question, which is for this generation, which is personalized video prospecting. So I'm not going to send a cold call or a cold email, but I'm going to do a short loom. Maybe it's 30 seconds, kind of doing the same thing, but it's short form video. Differentiate yourself as far as all these cold callers and cold emails. Burn it or build it.

SPEAKER_01:

I'll build it for sure. Love it. I do this myself. I use Vidyard. Any target prospect that is, you know, really interesting and within my ICP that might be showing intent, a little video introduction, a grabber, something that gets their attention, as you said, differentiates pure gold. Nice. Love it.

SPEAKER_00:

I agree. Build it. Let's do it. That's the end of the Burn It or Build It segment of this show. So let's just give one final takeaway for our listeners. We've covered a lot of ground from the beginning and the middle and the end. I'm sure that we could probably talk for another hour or two and probably unpack a lot of those topics, maybe for another day, perhaps on another show. But if I'm a VP of sales and I'm driving into work tomorrow or probably not driving, I'm probably sitting at the desk What's one question they should ask their team to expose and change legacy thinking and sales?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we could talk an hour on this one too. I'd say two things. Firstly, if I'm a sales leader in any kind of business now, it doesn't matter what industry, you've got to start to think seriously about how are you measuring, managing and rewarding your sellers? The game has changed. It's never going back to the way it was. And if you're expecting behavior A, then don't reward behavior B, right? So get the rewards aligned, get the compensation aligned, get everything aligned around total experience, that is total buying experience. Give your buyers the experience they now expect. That'll be the first thing. In amongst all of that, You now have to also question how are we developing our salespeople? Given this new agentic world that we're entering and artificial superintelligence is around the corner, how are we developing the skills of our sales team to make sure that they stay relevant? Go back to the average sales daily breakdown of activities. Those activities that I spent most of my career doing, irrelevant. I need to be learning a whole lot of new skills around mostly those people skills, the EQ and the building trust and rapport and all of those things become even more important, I think, in this AI-dominated world. Yeah, I agree. Those would be the two things I would say.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Sounds good. How do people get in touch with you? And are there any other events that you're speaking at this year? And what's the best way to get in touch with you?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, listen, I'm delighted to be over at Inbound again in September in San Francisco this year. First time they've run it, HubSpot. They've run it in San Fran. It's normally in Boston. So speaking at that one, I've got a gig over in Slovenia with Petra Wagner. So Petra, I think you know Petra from Sales Booster Yeah, so I'm heading over there and back to London in September as well. So yeah, but in terms of finding me, LinkedIn, that's where I spend most of my time.

SPEAKER_00:

All right, sounds good. Well, thank you for the time today. It's been great chatting with you. I'd love to chat a little bit longer if we could, but I will send you on your way and hope everybody got something to take away from this. So thanks again. Thanks for having me, Mark. It was a pleasure and we'll do it again sometime. All right, cheers. Cheers. That's how you burn the playbook. If this conversation fired you up Don't let it in here. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Share this episode with someone who's tired of playing by the old rules. And if you're ready to challenge your own sales approach, let's connect. Find me on LinkedIn at Mark Crosby or head to digital rebels, consulting.com to see how we help B2B teams when differently until next week, keep burning. What's not working and keep building. What is.