Why AI Won’t Save Your Startup - and What Actually Will

Why AI Won’t Save Your Startup – and What Actually Will

Guest:

Kirk Drage – Startup Coach, Co-founder of LeapSheep, and trusted advisor to over 200 startups worldwide.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of The Chat, Kirk Drage dismantles the myths that derail early-stage founders-starting with the idea that AI can shortcut the hard work of startup traction.

From founder accountability to GTM strategy, Kirk shares battle-tested insights on how to validate your market, build systems before scaling, and stop burning cash on solutions no one asked for.

This episode is a must-listen for any founder who wants to get to product-market fit faster-without wasting months (or millions) building the wrong thing.

Quote Highlight:

“AI will scale whatever you’ve got, good or bad. If your process is broken, AI will just amplify the mess.”

– Kirk Drage, Startup Coach & Co-founder at LeapSheep

What You’ll Learn:

• Why traction, not tech, is the real startup test
• The costly difference between AI and automation
• How to validate your idea without writing a single line of code
• Why most GTM strategies fail before they start
• The founder mindset shift that separates traction from chaos

00:00- Terry:

Welcome to the chat. Come behind the inbound scenes of some of the world’s fastest-growing companies for the past 10 years. As chat metrics. We’ve had an exclusive inside view of how these industry leaders are revolutionizing inbound marketing and sales. Across diverse sectors. Each week, we bring you conversations with top minds in marketing and sales who share insider secrets and strategies for driving inbound success.

Join us on the chat, your front row seat to the future of inbound.

Today on the chat, we’re joined by Peter Strohkorb, an internationally recognized sales acceleration expert, author of the One Team Method and Smarketing, and a champion of bio focus in modern

01:00-

Selling. With over 25 years of experience at Global Giants like Canon and 3M,

Peter now helps B2B service businesses ditch outdated sales tactics and embrace modern biocentric strategies. He’s been named as Salesforce Blazer top influencer and is on a mission to help companies sell smarter, not harder.

If you want practical game-changing insights on how to boost sales, revenue, and engage buyers more effectively, this episode is for you. Thanks, Peter. Welcome to the chat.

Peter: 

Thanks, Terry. Thanks for having me on the show. Glad to be here.

Terry: 

Your work consistently emphasizes sales and marketing collaboration. What’s the single biggest mistake companies make when trying to align these two teams, and how can they fix it? And a quick follow-up question, which I’m sure you’ll cover.

Why is that important?

Peter: 

Yeah. Okay, so let’s start with the last question first. It’s, it is pretty obvious that if you have a sales function and you have a marketing function that you want them to work together because, let’s face it that, marketing

00:02:00-

Is what attracts sales into an organization. And, we want to get the best from both functions.

Unfortunately, once organizations to a certain size, they tend to put marketing and sales into separate silos, and that then stops the immediate communication between the two functions. And, you get that disconnect. I, We’ve been talking right now for more than 20 years.

And no amount of AI or automation or tech has actually solved this problem because it’s actually a, a human problem. And, when we create those silos, we give them a leader for each silo, and the leaders might talk to each other, but it stops the communication between the silos equally.

In a small business, happens, a lot of business owners sales and marketing. They think they’re one of the same thing, which actually, if you think about it, it should be. just two ends of the same banana. But, but unfortunately, they don’t understand the role that marketing plays and the role that sales plays and how they should interact.

Yes, I’ve been a champion for quite a

03:00-

Few years now and written two books about it, as you mentioned, about bringing sales and marketing together and making the whole organization focus on the customer, not on what we’re selling.

Terry:

And it’s not done on purpose, is it? It’s almost, it happens through for a whole host of reasons, but it happens. I’ve seen most often quite innocently with best intentions to try and deliver the best business outcomes. Yep.

Peter:

Yeah, that’s right. So we, the problem is that I think the problem starts off when we try to give them KPIs, and the KPIs are not aligned. So the KPI for marketing might be the number of leads. and and. Marketing very reluctantly wants to be gold against revenue because they g,o that’s sales job that’s out of our control.

We don’t wanna be held to account for that part of it. But then what happens on the sales side is say the salespeople, and I’ve heard people say that verbatim to me.

04:00-

The Salespeople often say, We only want leads where the customer’s ready to buy now. And so they, then the finger pointing starts where sales goes, the leads we’re getting from marketing are not really ready, and sale and marketing goes, we’ll give them all the leads and they’re just too lazy to follow up.

And you get that usual conflict, unusual, sorry. Unfortunately, unusual contact, conflict.

Terry: 

It’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s always, for me, it’s all been this transition over the years of sales used to be the only way of selling, the only way of getting your product to a market. it was, if you think way, way back, it was going and knocking on people’s doors and saying, Hey, will you buy this from me?

Effectively, the old door-knocking method, the way that it’s. Progressed now is that we understand that some of those doors we are knocking aren’t gonna be ready now. And so the salesperson’s job was to do much more of that nurturing and manage the relationship ongoing. And that, as a function in itself, can be quite difficult.

And depending on the length of the sales cycle, not a skillset that everybody can have. And I think in

05:00-

My mind, that’s why you see this original breakaway of sales and bringing in marketing, the advertising side of things.

Peter:

What happened was that somebody decided that salespeople are too well paid and expensive to do lead gen, they said, either let’s outsource it to somebody. automate it through a tech stack, or give it to marketing to do right, or any combination of these three above. And, this is where the problem starts because then sales doesn’t feel responsible for the lead gen anymore.

And let’s face it, things have changed since the 1980s when people used to actually pick up their phone and talk to you, right? And, I know plenty of outbound call center managers who tell me that they used to have three minutes to convince somebody that they’re actually interesting to, to listen to.

That’s then gone down to one minute and 20 seconds, and now they’re telling me it’s less than 10 seconds. If you can’t their imagination, capture their interest, within eight seconds, you’ve lost

06:00-

Them. And the other problem is that, of course, nobody answers their phone anymore to numbers that unrecognized because we can now see the numbers that are calling.

Nobody responds to voicemails, and nobody and everybody hates being texted out of the blue because that feels like I’m being ambushed and harassed. equally, email, I’ve got, email goes straight into the spam folder, and I was in a

in round table yesterday where we talked about how 3% open rate is actually a great number,

Terry: 

Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Peter:

Nine 97% just either don’t read it or just dismiss it, right?

So that’s not really efficient. Which then leaves us with social media, and we know, we all know what pitch slapping is, right? That, where somebody connects with you on say LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever, and the first thing they do after you accept the invite, they go, ah. Buy my stuff.

And that doesn’t work either anymore. So I feel very sorry for anybody that has to generate leads, in any sort of numbers, because it’s a lot of

07:00-

Work for not a lot of return at the moment. And I take my clients hard to do that, effectively.

Terry:

It’s really interesting from our perspective with the changes that are coming, particularly around AI searches. we sit in clients’ websites for their inbound traffic and at this stage we haven’t seen any major impact anywhere with regards to the traffic decline that’s been, cited that’s gonna be coming with.

with these AI searches, and I know that not all of our clients have optimized for AI searches, so I’m, wondering whether it’s not here yet, it’s not happening yet, or whether, the AI searches are still so reliant on the Google search itself, the search engine, that it’s filtering virtually the same things that Google’s filter, it’s surfacing the same thing that’s Google’s surfacing to the top, but it’s something that I know it’s on, on everybody’s mind at the moment.

That lead gen component, whether it’s from a marketing perspective, cold outbound, or cold outbound, it’s definitely getting harder and harder. It’s certainly much more expensive. Marketing’s much

08:00-

More expensive than it’s ever been. The cost to advertise, even the cost of decent SEO, there’s plenty of cheap AI-driven SEO.

I haven’t seen that drive too many results at this point in time. But yeah.

Peter:

And we have, we’ve had the buyer, the, the, this bias, journey for a long time where we talk about how the buyer decides when they’re ready when they’re ready, who they want to talk to.

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

And the lead inquiry, all of us, all of a sudden comes outta the blue to a sales rep who has not spoken to this person before, but they super informed about what they want to buy because they’ve done their homework before they contact the salespeople.

So there’s all sorts of statistics going around saying, up to two-thirds of the sales decision-making is already completed before buyers contact a sales rep. But then that’s not enough to just wait for people to come and talk to me. Organizations need to go and be proactive, reaching out as well, and solicit that inbound traffic.

and somebody in the Roundtable yesterday

09:00-

That they expected AI to do all that. So they said there must be a function out there where AI researches more ideal prospects. Finds out the ones that have a budget and are ready to buy now, and only give me those leads. And I said, What app is that?

What app does that? And he

No, that’s my dream.

Terry:

Yeah. U utopia.

Peter:

That’s,

Terry: 

Crazy. Crazy. It’s one of those things that I’ve seen some tools that we’ll do, look for intent signals, engage on LinkedIn. There’s not, I haven’t seen any really that I’d look at and go, oh yeah, I can see that. That’s, that’s,

something that I would feel comfortable in running my LinkedIn messaging, for instance. yeah.

Peter: 

I wanna mention something that’s super important in this context, and that is, everybody says about finding the right people to outreach to. And that’s a challenge in its own right, as we just discussed, but very few actually know what to say that effectively engages them when you do catch someone.

10:00-

When they do answer the phone, when they do reply to their email, when they, when they do respond to your LinkedIn outreach, right? And a lot of organizations make the mistake, and this is what bio-focused telling comes into it. A lot of organizations make the mistake of talking about what they’re selling, right?

So we’re selling CRM, we’re selling IT services, we’re selling, and they expect the buyer right there in that moment when they only got eight seconds to make the mental arithmetics to translate for themselves what it means to me, what you are selling, right? What’s in it for me from what you’re talking about, right?

Terry: 

Yep. Yep.

Peter: 

I teach my clients to just save them that effort and just talk about what you’re selling from the buyer’s perspective. This is what you’re getting. And then you can go into storytelling and talk about a case study where it’s a customer that was similar to your buyer or to your pro.

made a decision, and how they made the decision and came out of it. I also teach my clients

11:00-

Storytelling is in sales because we’re hardwired from when we were sitting around the campfire wearing loincloths and living in caves to convey stories, to convey information as stories, and that’s why it’s in our DNA, and we still respond better to stories than to facts and figures today.

Terry:

I assimilate with the fire, gazing at the end of the day and grunting side of it.

Look, it’s so true. the storytelling, storytelling side of things. Do you think that’s where the biggest mistake is, that they talked about themselves too much rather than what they offer? That’s the single biggest mistake.

Peter:

The Americans, very unkindly, call it showing up and throwing up.

Terry: 

Yeah.

Peter:

And so that nobody wants to be pitched at, nobody wants to be sold to. wants to be advised not to make a mistake.

Terry: 

Yep,

Peter: 

wants to be helped to make the right decision.

Terry:

Yep.

Peter: 

Wants to be helped to avoid risk.

And who do they want,

12:00-

That helps somebody who they perceive as a bit of an expert in that particular field.

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter: 

So again, my clients learn to present themselves as that expert with something to say that’s relevant to the buyer and to hook them at the first point of contact into a conversation, not a sales pitch.

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah.

I’ve always found that having a level of curiosity and picturing yourself as solving a problem, as a, for the client as opposed to trying to sell your product, delivers far more value for both parties, even if it means that we are not a viable option. If I’m able to help and tr and introduce them to a solution, whether that’s a person, a company, or otherwise, then that’s a value give that at some point in time, karma, whether it’s with them or someone else, or referral.

I think that’s the better approach to take then than the pitch slap and show up and throw.

Peter: 

Yeah, look, the a big thing that comes into this there is, is trust building. Trust, right?

13:00-

And we all know that trust is earned over time. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it can be lost in a heartbeat. I wrote an article earlier in the year about the three stages of building trust with buyers.

And, if you like, I’m happy to enumerate those three.

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah. Please do.

Peter:

Hurdle is that you need to build rapport. So you need to engage with somebody, and they actually might, they actually need to, find you interesting. Then the second one, once you build rapport, then you can earn their respect, and when respect, when I say respect, respect about your knowledge.

how your insights, your expertise as we discussed just then, right? And then once you give them good advice, even if it’s against your own interests, as you mentioned, right? If even if you find our product or service is not does not suit them right now for this purpose, you’ll be better off saying that and earning their respect and then ultimately their

14:00-

Trust by doing the right thing by them so that the next time they remember that, they’ll come back, and then you win the second deal even if you lose the first deal.

Whereas if you sell ’em the wrong thing and they find out afterwards, you’re probably not never gonna get another sale.

Terry: 

Correct. I agree. I.

Peter:

But you lose the ball.

Terry:

I agree, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. I find that often the rapport-building component at the beginning, depending on how you’re engaging with people, and sometimes if it’s posting content, for instance, you don’t get the opportunity to build that rapport. The trust piece comes a little bit, the credibility piece comes a little bit sooner because you’re sharing insights and sharing knowledge.

And sometimes the rapport is almost serendipity in terms of, you’re finding some common interests after that initial engagement or initial discussion, with regard to the insights you’ve been sharing. So sometimes I find those first two can flip around depending on the, on,

Peter:

Agree.

Terry: 

On the agreement. Yeah.

Peter: 

Yeah, Yeah.

Terry: 

Yeah, and I find that,

15:00-

Serendipitous, rapport tends to be a lot deeper and a lot more, more sincere than the attempted rapport at the beginning as well. It depends on each person’s personality. I find a lot easier to talk and share insights and try and solve problems, before getting to know which footy team you like and all the rest of it.

And it’s it’s almost like you scratching in the sand, establishing your credibility, whether it’s actually worth having a further conversation or not. And then get to know each other a little bit better after that. It’s a bit reverse. It’s a little bit more, I find, of the us the way that it’s done in the us Get onto business, and then let’s have a chat about who we are after that, if we find out it works.

Peter:

Actually there’s a, there a a couple of illustrations about how different cultures in different countries conduct sales. And, and I’ll happy, happy to send you that the image later. And that, it’s quite interesting because for the Australians, it’s a bit of small talk first, and then we talk about the footy and the family and the weekend and stuff.

And then eventually we get around to business, whereas for the Americans, apparently, it’s

16:00-

Like going hard, it literally says a fight ensues, and then they said resolution and purchase.

Terry:

Yeah.

Peter:

So, we think that all people buy the same way and in the same steps and sequence, it’s not the case.

Terry:

No, that’s right. And, look, I’d love to have that. If you send that diagram through, I’ll put it in the summary of the on podcast when we publish it and the blog post the.

Peter: 

Terry, what, just while we’re at, while we’re talking about building rapport, there’s actually, one of my clients has a tool called Salesly Prep five. And I’ll send you a link to that as well. which is basically replicating. So you and I are old enough to remember visiting customers in person,

and as a salesperson. And, when did you do your preparation for the meeting? When did you do it?

Terry: 

When,

Peter: 

Yeah,

Terry:

Generally, the day before. The evening before or the morning of? yeah.

Peter:

Most reps used to do it in the customer’s car park while they’re waiting to go inside.

Terry:

Yeah. Yeah.

17:00-

Peter: 

And

Terry: 

I’m a little bit more OCD than that.

Peter:

And so you’ve got five minutes to prepare yourself. And so this, that’s why this app is called Prep five, ’cause it gives you five minutes to prepare for a call or a first meeting, or a contact.

Terry: 

Oh, very good.

Peter:

AI-driven. So it gives you all public domain information about that person that you’re meeting so that you can build a bit of rapport and have a bit of banter with them, to get to know them better, and to engage with ’em better.

Terry: 

Yeah,

Peter:

A link to that as well.

Terry:

It’s actually that’d be great. I’d love to see that. We’ll include it for sure. I have to say one thing about dealing with the US, and that’s where the majority of our customer base is, and where most of my dealings have been over the last eight or nine years now. I don’t know so much about the fight component.

Definitely get on with the, get on with business and then, it’s really, if there’s value in a conversation beyond that, we get to know each other a little bit better. But it’s, it. I find that it, in terms of personality types, it actually suits my personality type a lot better as well.

Peter: 

I find it a lot easier to actually do business in the US, where we’re

18:00-

Having those business upfront conversations and then get to know each other as opposed to here in Australia, which it’s exactly as you say, a little bit different in cold calling.

Terry: 

You don’t necessarily get the opportunity to build rapport at the beginning of the cold calling. it’s, It’s much more down to, I think you’ve gotta be asking that poignant, very, relevant and thought-provoking question as in those first state seconds,

Peter: 

Yeah.

Terry: 

Other, otherwise you don’t get on with it.

But Yeah.

From a US perspective, there is a big difference, maybe not as extreme as you’ve, as you’ve outlined, but it’s a different order.

Peter:

Also difference between East Coast and West Coast. I find that the East Coast people are just going bang. whereas if you do that with the West coast people, they feel a bit offended. So I’ve made the mistake of hurrying some West Coast people along in a seminar and, and they know they wanted to chat, and I thought, no, if I chat, that I won’t give them value.

So I said, let’s come back to the business. And, they said, no, that was very unfriendly of me. yeah.

19:00- Terry:

Look. We’re all human beings and have different experiences and behaviors that we’ve grown up with, and just mold us differently. And I think just being aware of that there is a difference and trying to judge your audience. I think that’s key critical is just to be aware of it and, and judge the audience and try and, it’s the old, I think the most successful salespeople I’ve known would be, have a bit of chameleon in them in the terms of, to talk about mirroring and not specifically mirroring, but it’s more about making sure that you are speaking the same language and, in tune with the person you’re talking to

Peter:

We

Terry:

Is the key.

Yeah. Yeah. Your book marketing talks about selling smarter, not harder. What’s the most effective strategy today for boosting sales without simply working? Oh, very Good. Very Good. Just, just hold it up a bit closer to the camera, there, and we’ll get it, we’ll make a snippet. Okay. Very good.

Thank you. Got it.

Peter: 

All right, so what was the question? Sorry.

20:00- Terry: 

It was about book marketing, what’s the most effective strategy today for boosting sales without simply working more?

Peter:

Okay, so this, this is the whole philosophy that I teach my clients and there is what you’re selling is not as important as what you buyers is perceiving their buying.

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter: 

Example, yesterday in the round table we were talking about, selling, UPSs on uninterruptible power supplies, for hospitals and schools and industrial purposes.

And yes, you can talk about the UPS itself and how many kilowatts it is, and how long the battery lasts and all that sort of thing. But really what, what the hospital wants to know is. Will it keep my patient alive if the power goes down during an operation during surgery, right? Will it,will it be reliable in the sense that we haven’t used the thing for five years?

Will it actually kick in when it’s needed? and so then you can say, let’s test the battery and let’s do all that

21:00-

Sort of thing to make sure that the outcome is right for you.

Terry: 

Yep. Yep.

Peter:

Tech works.

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

And, and so we were talking about that the, nobody really wants to know how all the tech works, like all the ones and zeros and all the,the cogs, merging together, right?

But they want to know, it, stop from something bad from happening? Will it, will it present? Will it, avoid a risk that I’m taking? and in sales, by the way. We don’t talk enough about avoiding risk. we all talk about,the benefits, but we don’t talk about, managing risk and how we can mitigate risk with a solution or a service or a product.

Terry:

And, I think one, one thing that is greatly overlooked is identifying the status, the risk of the status quo

Peter:

That’s right. Yeah. And the

Terry:

That. the cost, Yeah. you a classic example with that battery. you gave the example in the hospital, in The, industrial area,

22:00-

Industrial businesses. Is this going to help me make sure that I continue my production so that I can meet my output requirements and not have liquidated damages?

For instance?

Peter: 

Yeah.

Terry: 

It’s much deeper. It’s there to bring it back to the simple analogy; it’s nobody’s interest in the drill. They all wanna know they all, they’re buying a hole.

Peter: 

No, they’re not buying a hole. They’re buying a picture on the wall.

Terry: 

True. True. Very true. Yeah.

Peter:

But to come back to the risk, we know that people buy with the logic with the head, and that’s where the business case comes in. and all the, the ROI and all those rational things, we also know that we buy with our heart, and when you have makers making a decision in terms of whether they’re gonna go with you or with somebody else, or somebody else’s product, they will not just look at the business case.

And they will not just look at the ROI, they will also look at, this make me look good,

23:00-

Or is there a chance that this can go pear-shaped and I’ll be in trouble?

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter: 

So there’s a very much a personal element to every purchase decision. And as sellers, we don’t buy into that enough. So I teach my clients to look at the.

The personal benefit and the personal reason that they should buy as well as the rational reason they should buy.

Terry: 

And so how much of an impact do you think that has on, in selling? More

Peter: 

Sorry,

Terry:

So how much of an, how much of an impact do you think, so boosting sales without simply working more, how much of an impact do you think it actually has on boosting sales?

Peter:

Okay. it certainly will help you to streamline your effort, because one of my philosophies that, again, I teach my clients is to have to look for fewer but better opportunities.

24:00- Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

We’ve all heard about Spray and Pray,

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

That was so very prevalent in the In the last decade when automation came really into its fall, we could just spray everybody.

10,000 emails could go out, or a hundred thousand emails could go out. Actually, I think that’s ruined this sales game for everybody because nobody listens to those things anymore, right? So

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

Sensitized people to that outreach. But if you focus on fewer opportunities, bigger opportunities, and do a better job engaging with them, you probably will spend less time and effort and money, but you will get more sales.

So your selling becomes a lot more efficient if you know how to do it.

Terry:

Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you talk about the better quality. We see that all the time when we first engage with an organization, their sales team will be. Overburdened with trying to get back in touch with form fills and having meetings where there’s people not turning up to meetings because when

25:00-

The SDR has done the qualification; they skipped over one or two particular questions because they’re getting paid based on the meetings or getting a bonus for the number of meetings that they book.

And when we come in and effectively take over the form, the whole form fill process, you see the number of leads drop dramatically. The SDR function, the inbound SDR function, almost disappears. And the meetings that are booked now are with sales-qualified, fully qualified. And so this impact of less leads but higher qualified leads ends up with More pipeline and more revenue outcomes.

and the re.

Peter: 

Totally. Yeah.

Terry: 

The really shocking thing is that often the sales cycle is shortened. Now, live chat software providers will tell you that live chat deals will close quicker, and they’ll say it’s because there was a chat, et cetera. I think it’s actually much broader than that. I think that because when it’s done properly, the level of qualification means that there’s

26:00-

Less activity in the pipeline, but it’s higher quality activity, which means the salesperson can be much more focused on doing the right things or following all the right steps in the sales process to actually get a deal closed

Peter:

Yeah.

Terry:

Opposed to, and will pay more attention to it, knowing that it’s more likely to close as opposed to having all of this stuff just flowing through into their pipeline that’s not qualified properly. So I think that it’s a two-sided thing. Yes, they’re getting better deals, but it’s the fact that they’re actually executing better is what’s closing it quicker.

Peter:

Do a better job on fewer leads and fewer opportunities.

Terry: 

Correct.

Peter:

But, not only does it help the salesperson, but it also improves the buyer experience the buyer buying experience, right?

Terry: 

Absolutely.

Peter:

You do a better job looking after them and really interacting with them as opposed to racing from one opportunity to the next.

And the other thing that will happen for your sales leaders is that their forecast will become a bit more reliable and less of a lottery. And you have fewer rubbish opportunities that just keep drag are.

27:00-

Dragged on from one month to the next, but will never close in your CRM.

Terry:

And there’s the two outlying, I guess, KPIs that are impacted. The greatest is return on ad spend because once you can refine it down to those deals that are coming into the pipeline and are qualifying nicely, you go back and look at where the source of those deals are coming from. And so you’re able to adjust your ad spend accordingly.

The fact that you’re converting more will just simply re improve your return on ad spend anyway. And at the other end, your client acquisition cost drops dramatically. Less effort through the process means less costs associated with it. And all of a sudden, you’ve got those two, those single two KPIs, particularly for businesses that are heavily inbound marketing focused.

The impact on the EBITDA line is. multiples of 10, when you can impact both of those to that level.

And I’ve mentioned that the buyer will get a better buying experience, but also, let’s

28:00-

Not forget the poor salesperson who will actually be less stressed because they got fewer balls in the air. Absolutely. Absolutely, it’s a win-win. It’s really one of those things that, this FOMO of businesses when they’re starting and when they go through a rough time, and they try and get everybody into more activity, more of the same will, will get us better results. It is, it’s a bit like the definition of insanity, really trying to do more and, expect that you’re gonna get more of the same and expect to get different results.

It just really doesn’t happen. And in fact, it will, it can decrease, results. So conversely, the things you’re talking about and that we’re talking about that improve outcomes, if you push the other way, you don’t do them, and you push more of the same, but it’ll actually deteriorate outcomes when you’re trying to do something differently.

It’s, it’s, it’s a struggle, and it’s not easy to overcome when the leadership team is under a lot of pressure to perform and market conditions might be changing. That’s really tightening up the budget and their purse strings, but.

Peter:

This is a com very common thing that you’re [00:29:00] mentioning to Terry. And that is that, all sales leaders live in a very short term world. Yeah. One month to the next, one quarter to the next.

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

Feel they don’t wanna risk changing anything because it might worsen the results and make them look bad.

Terry: 

Yep, yep.

Peter:

So we’re stuck in this thing where we try to do more of the same things that we know aren’t working. Instead of changing the tires on the car while it’s moving and, and it is possible to do that. You’re just gotta know how to do.

Terry:

You do. And look, it’s often not their fault. They’ll be pressured in such an environment. They’ve only got so much experience themselves and knowledge, the one, there’s several reasons why people don’t reach out for help, but reaching out for help is what makes the big, can make the big difference.

The reaching out for help and getting a different perspective, getting a different process, getting a different idea on how to do things, learning some new skills or gain, or gaining some new frameworks to be able to share with the team. I think anyone that’s in that super pressured environment that, of finding that they’re up against a brick wall, and

30:00-

It doesn’t; they feel like it doesn’t matter what they’re doing is not really making a difference.

They should be reaching out to somebody, somebody like yourself, Peter, even to, in terms of getting some advice on what are the next steps, how can I make a change? We get so bogged down in the forest, in the trees, it’s almost impossible to see the forest. I had this conversation yesterday with a marketer who made a few comments about our business, and I was like, I’d never even considered that.

And we, we are very focused on growing our business at the moment. So I’m stuck in the forest doing a lot of the doing and two ideas that just really blew my mind that I hadn’t even considered because they were very different to what we’re doing now. Not sales-related, it was marketing-related, but it’s, it’s the same perspective.

When you’re under a lot of pressure, it’s hard to take a step back and take a breath, and think more removed from the situation. At more of an executive and strategic level. You get forced into the tactical day-to-day.

Peter:

You get tunnel vision because the pressure’s on to deliver on the sales target from the,

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

The Americans called quota, and

31:00-

And so you just get hyper-focused on that, and you actually. Drop the ball on a whole bunch of peripheral things. Instead of looking at the bigger picture.

And that this is why I’m saying that it’s hard to change the tires on the car while it’s moving, but it is possible and you can do it incrementally and there’s a structured process.

Terry: 

Absolutely. Absolutely. that what you just mentioned about the sales environment being such short term, it’s almost, it’s not almost, you’re as good as your last month’s results. And at the beginning, at the end of every month, and at the end of every quarter, everything just starts again from scratch.

You’ve got a fresh slate and not necessarily a fresh slate. You’re left over with what you’ve got to work with. And if you don’t have a strong pipeline coming through with good qualified leads the, the pressure every single month when that revenue number drops and you’re heading into a new quota or new sales target, it’s, it’s, look, I’ve been, we’ve been there, Peter. You know what it’s like, it. can be a pretty stressful

32:00-

Environment to be operating from if you are, if you don’t have that pipeline coming through.

Peter:

We mentioned a lot in sales, you mentioned a lot, going from hero to zero every month.

Terry: 

That’s okay.

Peter:

Off zero revenue again. And you may have smashed your sales sided last month, but you still go back to zero the next month.

Terry:

Interestingly, one of the businesses that I’ve managed in a prior career, one of the challenges they had early on in their systems and processes was that the managers would hold back, invoicing.

Peter: 

Yeah.

Terry:

They’ve, Yeah. That’s right. Sandbag it. They would hit it, hit the target, 5, 6, 7 days out from the end of the month.

And so they would just dribble enough through invoicing towards the end of the month to let everybody look like everything looked okay, and hold a couple of really big invoices back so that they’ve got a good kickstart to next month. And that’s not really good for anybody either. It might take a little bit of pressure off the salesperson or that particular manager that’s doing it.

but it’s not good

33:00-

Because it just, all it does is hide the bigger issues that need to be, need to be resolved. So

Peter:

There

Terry:

Anyway.

Peter:

of examples of where KPIs create unintended consequences.

Terry: 

Yeah. Yep,

Peter: 

I’m reminded of when Telstra first moved there, their call center to India; they thought, What KPIs will we give those people in India that answer the calls? And they said, okay, we’re gonna, we’re gonna measure their productivity.

are gonna measure how long that take to resolve a customer’s problem. And they gave them, I think, three minutes.

Terry:

Yep.

Peter:

And so what that, and that sounded like a good idea at the time.

Terry:

And we all know what it felt like on the other end, though, didn’t we? Don’t we all have experienced that, whether it was Telstra or someone else.

Peter:

So what happened was that, if the customers complained, couldn’t be resolved within three minutes, the person in India would just hang up they didn’t wanna fall into the negative area of extending the call beyond three minutes. And the customer who’d been waiting probably in the queue for a while to get on the phone,

34:00-

had to start from scratching again with somebody else.

So I thought it totally had the opposite effect to what was intended.

Terry:

And I can personally say I’ve experienced that frustration on a number of times, and really the biggest time that I experienced it was around about 2015 when we kicked this business off, moving from a large corporate, Monday morning comes up, I needed to get something done with my phone. I thought, Oh, okay.

Hang on, Terry. You are the help desk now. There’s no one else to call. So I went through that exact same experience. I think over a three or four-hour period on that first Monday morning when we started this business, in frustration with Telstra and a call center that

Was that exact example.

Peter: 

We got too hard; they would just hang up.

Terry: 

I was ripping my hair after three hours of this. It was like, I ended up finding an Australian technician, a guy in, in Melbourne I was in at the time, and said, Please, can you help me? This is the problem I’ve got. got it sorted out locally. But literally it was, I’ve experienced it.

Pull your hair out. I’m surprised I’m not bolder than I am. So

Peter:

So, that was just an example of how

35:00-

KPIs can create unintended consequences for the customer.

Terry:

Absolutely. Many organizations struggle with the integration of sales and marketing, and we see it all the time. Often, we’ll move in, we’ll have marketing as our first touch because they own the website, but we act as an extension to the sales team. And we’re that fluid and need a connection between the two.

And it’s surprising sometimes the level of. I won’t say necessarily conflict, but separation between the two. A reluctance to enga for marketing to engage sales or vice versa. If we’ve come into sales as the touch first, touch point, a reluctance to engage, marketing. What role does leadership play in fostering a truly collaborative environment?

Peter:

They’re the key, frankly. And I’ve seen many organizations, large, small, and multinational, where the teams themselves try to align themselves better and, co, elaborate a bit better. But there’s an impetus from the top

36:00-

Down, it’s not going to last.

What I’ve seen work is where individual marketers have aligned themselves with individual sales reps on a one-on-one personal level.

Terry:

Yep.

Peter:

What really well,

Terry: 

Yes.

Peter:

For those people that who went to that effort. Whenever the two respective parties hide in their own silos. will bring them together unless there’s an impetus from the top. The other thing is that, speaking about impetus from the top, what I talk about in the book is that a lot of organizations try to alliance health and marketing the wrong way around.

They go technology process people in that sequence. ’cause they’re hear that, that all they have to do is buy an app and license, pay for a license, and the miracle will occur.

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

But as we discussed earlier, it’s actually a people issue that they’re not working together, So I say it’s people first, process second, and then technology to support the above.

Terry: 

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Look, every chain.

37:00- Peter:

That’s a matter for leadership to address. And it’s not something that somebody from can do

Terry: 

Every change management piece I’ve ever been involved in, it that I’ve seen, and those that I’ve seen fail and those that have been successful, have all been, the root cause has been the people for both the successes and the failures. And in fact, it’s where those managers have overlooked the people aspect that the biggest failures have been.

I watched one implementation back in about 2009 of SAP into a state business that overall was, you’re talking multimillion dollar, $9 million implementation, and then an impact, total impact of the first month of $19 million, which was wound back after the first 30 days because they hadn’t managed that piece up.

the front, the human piece in terms of the change management, proper training, adoption, et cetera, et cetera.

It was a case of changing the tech and expecting everybody’s just going to, walk the line. It doesn’t, it just doesn’t work

38:00-

Like that. Human beings are two individual

Peter:

I’ve seen the same thing with an ERP implementation at one of the very large multinationals I’ve worked at where, the the business leader got up in front of, it was a town hall meeting, so with all the staff there, and he said, and I remember this exactly what he said. He said, We’ve planned everything to the nth degree.

Nothing can go wrong.

Terry:

Famous last words.

Peter:

Famous last words. Exactly. and the thing blew out to three times the time and twice the cost, or the other way around. I forget now. And then in the end, there was a lot of finger-pointing between the technology provider, the integrator, and the project manager,

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

It was just a bun fight.

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

The warehouse had to run on paper for a month, for a year because the ERP system just didn’t work. the message here, everybody is sort out your people first. Then, define your processes and processes by the way that the people actually agree to not that they’re forced into,

Terry: 

Yep.

39:00- Peter:

And then support that those processes with technology.

Terry:

Yep, yep. And look, an old one of my bosses used to say half tongue in cheek, if you can’t change the people. I think there’s gotta be an end, an understanding or an acceptance that not when there’s a wholesale change in an organization, not everyone will adopt it.

Not everyone will come along for that ride. And that means that there will be some people potentially changing in the business. It’s an unfortunate fact. but it’s part of that change management process. And if you don’t, if you don’t deal with that, that can be the cause more damage than not.

Peter:

I was just about to say that I’ve seen in many organizations where the change management is you will bloody do this, and that, that then causes, active or passive resistance and it actually it takes a lot longer to then implement the change than if you just brought the people on board in the first place.

Terry:

There’s a little quadrant of assessing the team members that you’ve are gonna be involved in this change management process. And that’s the organization that have to change the people in the organization. And one of those boxes

40:00-

Is champions and the other ones is terrorists.

And you better believe it. Terrorists exist in organizations that will go out of their way to derail. How do you think these things get derailed? They don’t just go off the rails because people are blasé with it or they don’t care one way or the other. It’s the terrorists that will take it off the rails.

Peter:

Yeah. And some of those terrorists sit in very senior positions. close to retirement. They don’t wanna rock the boat before they shuffle off.

Terry: 

Absolutely. Absolutely. You talked about earlier about automating outbound and this AI to take over entire functions. It is a huge part of modern sales. Many companies do get it wrong. What do you think is the right way to balance auto-automation and personalization to keep outreach effective

Peter: 

Okay, so let me ask you a question. if somebody sends you an AI-generated email first time contact, right? Can you sniff that? It’s act, actually ai.

41:00- Terry:

At this stage? I would say I can, for 95%, I’ve seen 5% that are very good, but 95% I can, yep.

Peter:

Okay. So I think that people use AI, sorry if this is. Not polite, but what, people use AI in a very lazy fashion. They just

Terry: 

Oh.

Peter:

That AI will do the right thing. I just type something into chat, GPT or Gemini or whatever, and whatever comes out I’ll, I’ll just use because AI knows best,

Terry: 

Yep. I agree.

Peter: but there is a certain tone to ai unless you tweak it and you do all the things that you talked about to get that to that 5%,that where people know this is not generated by a human being.

for example, I get on LinkedIn, I publish articles and and post posts and there’s always this handful of people that respond right by with some comment. And the comment sounds so burn that I just know it’s not a person. I still reply because it helps with the SEO LinkedIn, but,in the end, we’ll, we’ll end up with a [00:42:00] world where se, where, AI will talk to AI and no human will be involved.

Terry: it’s, it’s so funny. I.

Peter: to answer your question,it’s far better if you include a human element in the, in AI and not just rely on it totally to do it

Terry: I,

Peter:

Thing.

Terry:

It’s funny, I’ve in a couple of times a week, I like being involved in LinkedIn. I like commenting on posts and there’s at least a couple of times a week where someone will come back to me, and this sounds like ai. And I’m like, really? You go, I’ll have to change my, my normal, my normal tone. But I think that there is a place for AI in terms of lightening the workload, not necessarily that final piece of interaction and not, we get asked all the time, how have you got a business, live chat agents, you can just get an AI bot to do it these days.

And valid question. go and do that if that’s what you want to have your high-value prospects engaging with as a first touch to your organization. Sure. but I think that there’s,

43:00-

And we wouldn’t do that on from our perspective, not at this point in time. We’ve been working with AI for probably 18 months to two years now, and we’re still not at the stage with any of it.

We’d let it loose on any of our clients, and we certainly would never do it without a joint agreement.

Peter:

Yep.

Terry:

But there’s places where we use it in the backend for our business. But I think from a sales perspective, there’s ways it can be leveraged to help with, reduced effort in terms of things like building lists of, prospects to reach out to identifying specific attributes or points of conversation you mentioned before about building rapport, things that might be relevant, whether it’s a personal or a business, aspect, whether it’s a particular post that they’ve done somewhere, a comment they’ve made on a post somewhere where their business has been mentioned in the news, et cetera, et cetera.

The best practice is to do deep enough research on your prospect that you have a good enough understanding that you can have a valid conversation as though you know them. that takes an extraordinary amount of time. I’ve seen SDRs that

44:00-

Spend so much time, they do more. It takes longer to do the research than it does to do the outreach.

I think AI helps a lot as far as that, and there’s some very, there’s some good tools. There’s some very complicated tools, which, the poor SDR I think, is moving more into; you’ve gotta be a rev ops expert to be able to use some of these tools. But I think AI is there to help more from a research and preparation, and suggestion rather than actually executing the output.

As soon as you get somebody that sees that they believe it’s not a human that’s interacting with them, I think it has much more of a negative impact than a positive one.

Peter: 

Okay. It depends. I think people actually accept speaking to a bot if it’s clear that it’s a bot.

As

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

Bot pretends to be a human being; I think that all trust goes out the window. And we talked about trust earlier, right?

Terry: 

Yes. Yep.

Peter:

The thing that, so I’d just like to come back to a couple of things you mentioned there.

One is that yes, I AI will be very good at, helping with automating the repeatable processes.

45:00- Terry:

Yes.

Peter:

Be very good and it’ll get better in finding information that is not easily found by human beings and collating that and sorting it and making it digestible. it will also get better, I think, at interacting with human beings to the point, I think down the track where you can’t distinguish whether you’re talking to a real human being or whether you’re talking to a bot.

But that takes nothing away from the human not wanting to be tricked.

Terry: 

Yes.

Yep. I agree.

Peter:

Be Duke, we don’t wanna be held like a, like some sort of idiot that, we don’t know that we’re talking to a bot. So I think it’s okay to say I am a bot and I’m trying to help you to do the right thing.

For example, on my next website, I will have a bot that you can interact with and you can ask questions. you might not feel comfortable asking me because you don’t wanna look silly or you don’t wanna look like you dunno what you’re talking about.

Terry: 

Yeah.

Peter:

And you, the bot, can actually help you to prepare for a real call with me, and it’ll be a better conversation.

So

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

It’s actually meant to help you to

46:00-

Decide, do you wanna talk to me, yes or no? What do you wanna talk about? Prepare yourself to, for that con conversation and not feel silly or, asking dumb that you might be asking dumb questions, make you feel comfortable to talk with me.

And that’s totally fine.

Terry: 

Yep. Yeah.

it’s really interesting. We have done some research now in the last 12 months, where we’ve gone through with a number of our clients and tested the impact of. The live chat that we had, the way we set it up with a flat bar, and say that there’s a person in there that made it obvious that they’re actually talking to a human being

Peter: 

Yeah.

Terry:

The bubble shape itself, where it’s just a small round circle versus the one that’s obviously an ai where it’s got a bot in there.

And we found that, chatbot, which is the bubble, not a AI robot type thing, but a chatbot where it’s just the bubble itself and it’s not certain, whether it’s a person or a, or a chatbot in behind it. There’s a 30% reduction

47:00

In engagement with the live chat

Peter: 

Are.

Terry:

Where you put a robot in there to obviously indicate that it’s AI or a little brain, signal that it’s ai.

We’re finding that there’s 50% reduction in engagement across our client base. And look, I’ve got a caveat that by saying. They’re reasonable deal sizes. We’re not dealing with companies that are selling, $20 t-shirts in an e-commerce store. We’re talking about probably a minimum of $15K USD deal sizes.

And so starting at that most, and I would say the average are probably.

Peter: 

I don’t wanna talk to a human being. Yeah,

Terry: 

The up around the 90, $90,000 lifetime value of those clients, potentially with the deals. And it’s very strong that they do want to talk to a person. or it’s probably stronger that they don’t want to chat with AI or a bot.

And I,

think that comes from bad experience in the, the whole history of live chat. Live chat, great with people in there, very hard to manage. Okay, somebody come up with the idea, let’s

48:00-

Shove a chatbot in there. Chatbots, good. This will be the dream outcome. We’ll do all the work. They’ll do all the work, and we won’t; we will just get the leads.

The problem with that is they’re very difficult to get right and have a good experience with the chatbot. So it’s just created this bad feel for chatbots, in particular, AI’s coming out now, and I think AI is polarizing. People, they either do want it or they don’t want it, and trust it, or they don’t trust it,

Peter: 

I was just going to comment on that. And I think it’s, it is also a generational thing. I think, people more like our age would, prefer to talk to a human being and ask ’em questions and get a bit of, to and fro going on. whereas I can see to my own kids that they don’t actually like talking on the phone.

They don’t like talking to a human being that they are not very good at small talk. they, they’ve lost that social interaction, skill.

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

So they actually probably would prefer to talk to a bot because who cares, right?

Terry:

It’s not so much it’s a bot. It’s the me It’s messaging. It’s messaging. If you have a look today at the generation that’s coming through now, they live in this messaging world, whether it’s Messenger,

49:00-

WhatsApp, Snapchat, Facebook, what, whatever it is, it’s all messaging, text messaging. And I think the point that I would bring from it, it doesn’t matter whether in that moment there’s a person on the other side, an AI on the other side or a chatbot on the other side.

As long as it’s giving a relevant and two-way. messaging conversation that’ll deliver outcomes. Where you get into strife is where the AI’s not giving the right answer or the chat bots put them up against the brick wall and asking for email contact and all those sorts of things.

it’s much more in the setup and the constraints or what guardrails you’re putting around, that, that tool or that technology that you’re using. But I’m with you. If you think about what happens with the generations coming through, they are much less to get on a Zoom call, they’re much less likely to hand their email address over and be annoyed, with an inbox they want answers now and chat away.

And I think any business that’s looking at using their website for or does use their website for lead generation, has to

50:00-

Come from it. From that perspective of, as the younger generations come through, they’re more and more inclined. To do their work and research with their thumbs as opposed to anything else.

And particularly, you talked earlier about the two-thirds of the buyer’s journeys done before they even get in contact. Where do you think they do that? They do that in their peer networks, their groups, their communities, but they also do it on your website. And so if there’s someone there that they can message with on the website in an anonymous and safe fashion, then you are hands down going to be converting a lot more than what your competitors do.

Simple as that.

Peter:

Analysts like Gartner have been saying for a long time that the trend is towards buying without speaking to a salesperson,

Terry: 

Correct

Peter:

Service.

Terry:

Correct.

Peter:

So there’s apparently a trend out there where even large purchases, large value purchases, high value purchases are going to be made as an e-commerce transaction online.

Terry:

There’s, I’m involved in a Slack group. PLG product-led Growth Pro. Product-led growth is how they phrase it. You can just go and sign up without even having

51:00-

To having any involvement with the sales process. And companies love it because they don’t have to pay for sales team, supposedly.

And the organizations love it because they can do their research and just get onboarded. there’s a whole lot of infrastructure you need to do in the middle then to make sure that they’re onboarding process and the customer support, et cetera, et cetera, is all there. And in terms of everything that happens before that person signs up effectively has to complete the sales process for you.

And so it’s not like a lazy B2B website that says, Hey, this is what we can do for you, chat with one of our team. It’s like here we’ll be answering every question that you’ve got and dealing with all of your objections, and get you to a point where you are happy enough to actually sign up.

and put the credit card out. We’ve done exactly that. We’ve done a, I’m running a soft launch this week. It’ll be a couple of weeks ago when this comes out. I might even put an addendum in to see how the results were that, that’ll be interesting to see. but doing a soft launch this week

52:00-

Instead of a sales process to actually offer that as virtually a SaaS signup.

Peter: 

Yeah,

Terry:

It’s super lightweight, light touch. We’ve taken everything we do from an enterprise customer and offering it for smaller customers just to go through and do a signup process without touching it all. So it’ll be, it’ll be interesting. We’ve got some, we’ve had some signups already and it’s working quite well.

So we will see whether it’s worth a broader launch beyond this, little two week campaign we’re running. But I, think you’re right.

Peter: 

I’ve mentioned my next website, which is in, in, production, and that’ll have a self-service signup function as well.

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter: 

I think gone are days there’s no price on your website and you’ve gotta actually, contact somebody and speak to somebody before they even tell you how much it is, how many zeroes,

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter: 

ten

or $10,000?

Terry:

Yep.

Peter: 

I think those days are gone. It’s just too big a hurdle for people to, to jump through that. Just say, look, if you’re not ready to tell me what, how much it is, I’m not gonna talk to you.

Terry: 

Yeah, I agree. I agree. And the challenge often is that if you haven’t got your own pricing strategy sorted

53:00-

Out yet, that you need to assess every single individual client that comes through, then your business probably isn’t really that scalable just yet. Or maybe you’re playing in a very,

small pool, small pond, and it is very one-on-one, if you’re in the super enterprise space.

I get that.

Peter: 

Yeah. Very niche joke.

Terry: 

Yeah, very niche. Very niche. But anything that, you looking at from a potential scalable perspective, I, think you need to have that as an offer. I think both so that those clients that wanna engage and have further conversations, you can, but also give them the opportunity to get in.

So we’ve done something that we’ve never done before, and that is offer a free trial. there’s a cost associated with what we do. It’s not SaaS, it’s people in the backend. So every time we touch something, there’s a cost associated with it. And my, concern in the past has been you offer free trial, you get too many free trials, signups, and then you do all the work and don’t get the benefit in the longer run, et cetera, et cetera.

But it’s just the usual founders fear, I think, or the, the manager’s fear of,

Peter:

We can.

just a matter of mitigating your risk in the sense of not being taken advantage of. in the sense that you need to really

54:00-

Pre-qualify those opportunities and only offer that free service to somebody who’s, who just wants to put their toe in the water before they buy.

And this is why I don’t get SaaS companies offering a demo first.

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter: 

So I’m having a conversation with a, with a hopefully future client on Friday, the owner is hellbent on doing a demo first before anything else, so that the customer knows what it is, what they’re getting, right? But as we talked right at the beginning of our conversation today, they’re not buying a technology, they’re buying an outcome.

And so they wanna know, what problems does it solve for me? How does it work? How quickly is there, is there ROI? And then of course all the personal emotional aspects of, will it make me look good? Will it help me mitigate my risks and all that sort of thing. I actually advocate that you should do the demo last once you’ve agreed on what you actually, what the client or the pros, prospect actually wants to achieve.

And then you can show them in the demo how your tech addresses that, that issue, right?

55:00- Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

And so I think that the my my hopefully soon client will, currently putting the cart before the horse.

Terry: 

Yep, yep. Look, I think so that’s almost the process of, if you haven’t done proper discovery to understand the real problems that they’re trying to solve. it’s like the, the bog standard discovery that just goes through all of the features. you, the prospect that you’re showing it to will be asleep once they’ve seen the one that’s relevant to them.

Peter:

And then you’ll lose them. And then it’s how you make them feel, where you don’t make them feel interested or interested in, or important because you’re just rattling everything off instead of just focusing on the things that are important to them. That reminds me, it’s, it is actually a, a mindset of the owner ’cause that it’s their baby, right? They’ve, like you, you’ve got Chat Metrics and you’ve developed the product, you’ve developed the business. And it’s your little baby, and you’re so fascinated that the little baby exists and how beautiful the baby is.

You wanna talk about the baby. But your buyers don’t wanna talk about the baby. they wanna talk about what’s in it for me, right? and so it’s actually a, a

56:00-

Hard thing for a business owner to, to disassociate themselves from it and look at it from the buyer’s perspective first.

Terry:

It is. Absolutely. It is. We’ve recently redone our website and changed the; we’ve reduced a lot of the copy that was in there. There was, I’ve probably gone over the top too much, but our aim there is very much to be talking about solutions and outcomes and problems that we solve as opposed to the actual way we go about doing it.

Sure. We mentioned the way we do it, we have to do that because there’s gotta be some clarity and understanding. but, so yeah, that’ll be interesting to see how that goes. And we don’t get a lot of traffic anyway. We, our focus has been on that cold outbound, growth. So we do get some, some traffic from that ’cause we start to shift to more of a marketing effort ourselves.

We’ll see how that traffic goes. It’s increasing nicely over the last couple of months, so fingers crossed that works. Yeah.

Peter: 

Aussie innovation, making it big.

Terry:

We’ll see. We’ll see. bigger, no, maybe not big yet, but bigger than where we were yesterday. That’s the main thing. Yeah.

Peter: 

It’s

57:00-

Right direction. That’s good.

Terry: 

Peter, look, there’s e for the sales leaders that are listening now, and our audience is a mix of marketing and sales, I’m sure there’s been some interesting eyebrows raised, so far from our conversation.

If, for the sales leader that’s listening right now, if they could take only one action this week to improve their sales process, what would you recommend?

Peter: 

I would say, look at your marketing material, your website, your collateral. Look at the first word in each paragraph, and if it says we or the company name, think about how that resonates with your audience.

Terry: 

That’s, so that’s for the marketers probably. They own the website,

Peter:

I think it’s for the salespeople as well, because they should go to the marketers and say, can you switch this around and make it more buyer-focused rather than product-focused?

Terry: 

Right. Yep,

Peter:

And, in large organizations, you’ve got product managers who think that everybody’s fascinated with the

58:00-

Product and they don’t understand that the buyers, why the buyers are not.

That’s a bit by the buy,

Terry: 

That’s right.

Peter:

But, I would, okay, so if you want something that’s totally dependent on the salespeople, only, I would say whenever you do your first outreach, think how you show up. Do you show up as somebody who just wants to make a quick sale? Or do you show up as somebody who wants to help the buyer make the right decision and mitigate the risks and not

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

And look good in the process?

Yeah.

Terry:

Yep,

Peter:

And if you change your mindset from, I must sell to, will help. Happen

Terry:

Yep. Very good advice. Very good advice. And it is, that’s the mindset. It’s the mindset that you enter into those calls with. And so then my last question is, and I’ll ask you about if there’s anything that I haven’t asked you yet, but my last question is, what’s the one piece of outdated sales advice that needs to die, and what should replace it?

Peter:

That it’s all a numbers game.

59:00- Terry: 

Yeah. Very good. Okay.

Peter:

We, as we talked about very early in the piece, we need now to look at quality versus quantity. No, no more spray and pray. No more up and throw up,

Terry: 

Yep.

Peter:

Make it about the buyer and how you help them to come out better than before they met you.

Terry: 

Absolutely. Thank you. Excellent. Now, is there anything that I should have asked that I haven’t asked you yet?

Peter: 

Yes. How can people get in touch with me?

Terry:

Of course, we’ll have all of that covered on there, we’ll have all the relevant links and everything on there. what’s your preference in terms of people getting in touch with you? I

Peter: 

I’m everywhere, so they can get to me on LinkedIn. They can reach out to me on via email. There’s any sort of the social media posts. You might actually wanna have a look at my YouTube channel. I’m posting a number of life lessons for business owners and sales leaders.

these

Terry:

Very good.

Peter:

That I’ve learned more or less the hard way myself, and I’m passing on help, sales leader, s and business owners to get on, to improve their business, and not having to repeat

01:00:00-

The mistakes that I made in the past. So there’s currently 13 or 14 life lessons there, and I’m recording more every week.

And this is on my YouTube channel advisory. Yeah.

Terry:

Excellent. Thank you. We’ll make sure that your LinkedIn, website, and YouTube channel links at the bottom of the podcast and the other communications that we do about it.

Peter: 

I,

Terry: 

Peter.

Peter:

Sorry. There’s one other thing. And that is, speaking of AI, I’ve been experimenting with AI and I’ve actually, cloned myself in ai. So there’s a bot that was trained on a million of my words from my two books and from 220 odd articles and podcast interviews like this one, the YouTube, et cetera.

it’s totally trained on, on, on my stuff, on my selling philosophy and how I would do it so that people can go and ask the bot questions to find out what’s bio focused selling all about, does it work for my business? what difference will it make and how should

01:01:00-

I go about it? They don’t have to feel that, they’re being sold to because the bot won’t sell to them and they can knock themselves out and ask all the seemingly silly questions before they speak to me.

And that’s on the website under Ask Peter.

Terry: 

Well, a very good look at, there’s another example of where AI can help with the sales process that helps, potentially qualify in or qualify out prospects for you, but also help them prepare better for that initial conversation as well.

Peter: 

Exactly right. It’s my alter or my digital twin or whatever you wanna call it. But, it’s, it’s not prone to hallucinations because it’s purely trained on my million-odd words.

Terry: 

Yeah, very good. Very good. Peter, look, it’s been an absolute pleasure today. The insights, that you’ve shared. Like I said, I’m pretty sure that there’s, there’s a few of the audience here, both on the sales and marketing side, raising eyebrows and making copious notes if they’re not using their AI note taker to do that.

So thank you very much for coming on the chat today and wish be all the best and look forward to catching up again.

Peter: 

Thank you, Terry. And by the way, I’m happy to take offline

01:02:00-

Questions from people listening to your podcast.

Terry:

Wonderful. Thanks very much, Peter.

Peter: 

Thanks again for having me.

Terry: 

Bye.