Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 365 Q & A with Jeb Blount

Summary

Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing on Sales Pipeline Radio. Jeb Blount is no exception!

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

If you’re not already subscribed to Sales Pipeline Radio or listening live Thursdays at 11:30 am PT on LinkedIn (also on demand) you can find the transcription and recording here on the blog every Monday morning.  The show is less than 30 minutes, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities.

This week’s show is entitled, “Sales Strategies that Unleash the Power of AI“ and my guest is Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy, Inc. and the co-author of a new, best-selling book, “The AI Edge”

Tune in to:

• Discover how AI is revolutionizing B2B marketing and sales.
• Learn why AI-generated emails could harm your brand.
• Find out how to leverage AI for smarter prospecting.
• Understand why the human touch still matters in sales.
• Get tips on increasing your active selling time.

Listen Now | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript BELOW: 

Matt: Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. I’m your host, Matt Heinz. Super excited to have you all here. Thank you for joining us. If you are here live, in the middle of your work day, work week, we’re super excited that you’re a part of this.

If you are watching or listening on demand, thank you so much for downloading and subscribing to Sales Pipeline Radio. If you found us somehow on accident, on purpose, I would love to have you stick around.

You can find every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, past, present, future at salespipelineradio.com. Always trying to feature some of the best and brightest minds in B2B marketing to help you think better, market better, sell better. Very excited to have back on the show, Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy.

Jeb, how you doing, man?

Jeb: I’m doing pretty good, man. It’s been a long time.

Matt: It’s been way too long. Since you’re in your studio, I assume it means you’re home, which means that is a rare event. Because I feel like every time like I see or hear from you, you’re an airport or in a boardroom somewhere. For the half of a person who doesn’t know Jeb Blount is, just quickly gives an introduction yourself.

Jeb: I’m the CEO and founder of Sales Gravy. We’re an international sales training and Go-To-Markets consulting company. We work with sales teams truly all over the globe, everywhere except for Antarctica, but I’m working on that. And you’re right. I do travel a lot. I think I’ve spent 154 nights so far this year on the road.

I’ve had a couple of months where I’ve been able to focus and write, but next week, all the way to Christmas, I’m going to be pretty much gone.

Matt: I’m a lifelong marketer. I didn’t carry a bag until 16 years ago when I started a business. And then once you have your own business, you very much are in sales.

And as a lifelong marketer, I try to spend as much time as I can learning about sales and learning from people that are sales experts. And when those people ask me, like, who are the people you read and listen to the most, of the top five people, two are on that book right there [points to book on Jeb’s desk]. You and Anthony Iannarino, who I’ve just learned a ton from.

I have no idea how you, with all that schedule, have time to churn out the volume and quality of the books that you do, you’ve written a number of amazing books around prospecting, selling strategy. You had a book around selling in the pandemic. And not surprisingly, the new book is focused on how to leverage AI in sales.

There’s so much noise around AI overall in business and especially around sales. I was told a year and a half ago that by now physical sellers, inside sales, BDRs would be gone. Hasn’t happened. Those that aren’t using AI, I think are quickly at a disadvantage.

Tell me a little bit about your perspective and what you’re seeing in sales relative to AI.

Jeb: Yeah, it’s true. Let’s maybe back up. We’ll talk about marketing and sales and AI and how it all fits together. So when we think about AI currently at the pipeline side, so from marketing all the way through sales, and as you are clearly aware, and you talk about with your audience all the time, sales and marketing from a merger standpoint is way different than it was say, 25, 30 years ago, where these were two separate entities and separate silos.

These days, there’s a mash where Marketing flows into sales because you’re so responsible for leads and lead generation. And then salespeople, they own a little bit of that inbound lead generation themselves through their work through personal branding and getting out in social and supporting the marketing function.

And when you get those two things working together really well, it’s powerful. When my marketing team, my sales team are all working in the same direction and we’re looking at the world as one funnel or, one path for prospects. It works great. I think AI right now, from an impact standpoint, is having a greater impact on marketing than it is on sales.

And the reason is that with, with marketing in particular, when it comes to lead generation, you’ve got content creation, which is something that AI is pretty good at with some human help, human shepherding. So you’re able to create a lot of really good content with fewer human beings because AI picks up a lot of the heavy lifting and the humans are able then to use their creativity to further craft that content to make it more powerful.

I think AI is doing a really good job in terms of signaling intent and helping us understand where to target and micro target prospects that are moving into buying windows that they may not even know they’re moving into the buying window but their breadcrumbs that they’re leaving online or giving those clues and smart marketers are able to grab that information and they’ll build marketing campaigns around that. We’ve even seen it just in your ability to work in social, which is again, inbounds for content creation but you know I’ve got one person doing the job that I would have had to have 10 people doing even three years ago in order to create the volume of, say, video content that we’re able to build.

Now, humans built the video content to begin with, but AI does a very good job of mashing it up. And there’s a great deal more, in terms of the way that AI is able to look at the entire marketing and inbound top of the funnel landscape. When it comes to sales it’s a little bit of a different animal.

This idea that AI is going to take over sales, or you’re going to need fewer salespeople because of what AI can do. It’s absolutely ludicrous and we’ve already proven it. So you recall that ChatGPT hit my radar hard. It was already out there, but January of 2023, we all woke up and we essentially had let AI out of Pandora’s box.

It had opened. And we started seeing what it could do and I would never forget this because I was laying in bed (I talk about this in the book) with my wife we’re about to go to bed, but we’re on our phones which is what couples do when you’re when you’ve been married for 30 years, and I just I I typed in to chat gpt.

I’d read an article about it in Wall Street Journal I typed in “hey write a story about Mr. Wilson’s foxhounds and the swamp cat, Bobcat” or whatever and this thing pumped out this story and I showed to my wife and she’s go, there’s no way even a robot wrote that. I mean, she was like completely, there’s no way robot wrote this.

I knew at that moment that things had changed. We’ll flip forward a couple of months and what do you have? You’ve got tech entrepreneurs who are going out to sales teams and saying, AI will handle all your prospecting for you, which essentially meant that we are going to deploy spam bots to send email to people.

Well, AI didn’t sleep. So it can do this relentlessly. And within nine months that group of people essentially has killed one to one prospecting via email. It’s almost dead. It sells teams everywhere. No matter where you go, they will tell you that it’s dead. Now, bulk email, the type of email that marketers typically do that are built around newsletters or in e-commerce, they’re built around particular products, that hasn’t necessarily yielded less results.

Our bulk email that we’d use as a marketing channel is doing just as well as it’s always done before. But prospecting emails, you’re lucky if any executive opens them anywhere because of the way we look at AI.

When we know a robot did something, everything else that looks like that becomes suspect. So we just ignore it all. I’ve had people tell me that we’re going to get rid of all the BDRs, that all the outbound prospecting is going to be BDR. Now we’re talking about the robots are going to call people up and they’re going to have conversations with them.

There’s a couple of companies out there doing that, that will end badly too. There’s another company that is duplicating their sellers voices and then using that to send voicemail– that will end badly too. Because the robot will overdo everything. And I’m going to give you a really good example of this, Matt, that if you’re a marketer and you’re listening to this, this should shock you because it will break your brand with executives like me.

So I get this email, and I’m very very suspect of of AI generated emails. I usually know when they are, and I just delete and block them. And I want you to hear what I’m saying. I delete and I block. So in the old days you would just delete. Now I delete and block, because I don’t want to get hit by AI generated emails.

So, I get the subject line in. I opened it because the subject line was intriguing. I turned around, was talking to Yuli who is our producer and I’m having a conversation with them, I turned back, I got six additional emails with the exact same subject line from six different companies who were all using this AI bot from some tech company to do their prospecting. And suddenly I realized, oh crap, it was an AI that sent me this email. So everybody else got deleted and blocked. If you’re a marketer, pay attention. I blocked you. I blocked your URL. So you no longer have the ability to do any marketing to me via email because you’re done forever.

And I would have never done that before the age of AI. I would have just deleted a salesperson’s email and they would have gone away eventually. And maybe they would have come back to me down the road when the buying cycle was better, but I would just, I would signal my disinterest by the delete. But because you’re a robot, and I know that you are relentless and I know that it is disingenuous because you’re not a real person.

And I know that no one actually invested in it. In fact, I don’t even know if you are a real salesperson. And that’s one of the things that’s begun to emerge– we’ll grab an email that we’re interested in and we start trying to find the salesperson on LinkedIn and they don’t exist.

Or if we find them, we know that it’s a fake profile. Those type of things for your brand kill your brand. And that tells an executive, I’m not going to do business with you anymore. But imagine how many times your top line URL gets blocked. And you can even do those funny things where you create another URL that you’re sending an email from, but even that’s going to end up getting blocked and you’re going to be chasing that whack a mole.

So this idea that you’re going to replace your sales team with a robot is being proven out again and again. It’s absolutely ludicrous. It’s not going to work. So what we have to start thinking about when it comes to AI for salespeople is how are we leveraging AI for salespeople to take a burden off of their plate so that they can go spend more time in front of customers having real life synchronous conversations, which is what we do best and is where you as an organization are going to get a true competitive edge? That’s what we need to start thinking about.

Matt: Yeah, until robots sell to robots, which, hell, might be down the road somewhere. Until that happens, we still want to talk to each other. We’re still social animals that want to engage with each other. The volume of stuff going out right now. It is a hundred percent true, and someone last week described it to me as The Great Ignore. We have created this problem where we have conditioned every decision maker to ignore virtually all of what we’re sending them. You may have an authentic, good story to tell, but you’re not starting from scratch building that reputation. You’re starting from a negative position that other people have put you in that you still have to dig out of.

Your book, “The AI Edge”, and this concept of save time, sell more. When I think of that, I think of the old days when someone would spend 30 minutes researching a prospect to leave a 45 second voicemail. That doesn’t scale well. That 30 minutes of research needs to now be almost instantaneous.

You think about the jobs to be done to be a successful seller. How do I increase my active selling time? How do I get on the phone in live conversations with more prospects more often? The job to be done to get me there– the prospect research, the intent signals, the reason to call today versus yesterday– to me, those are some of the key components of how me as a sales rep, whether I’m an enterprise AE or a BDR, this is how I can think about AI to really, juice my impact.

Jeb: And I think that’s where we start looking at the holy grail of AI for salespeople is you come in in the morning and AI has done a beautiful job of scouring intent data, taking a look at the signals coming off your own website, looking at even just your responses. Like marketing does an email blast, bulk email, and you look at the responses to that. What are the click throughs on that? And you’re looking at social, you’re looking at all these pieces and you’re looking inside the CRM and you come in as a salesperson and it says, here are the 25 prospects that have the greatest probability of moving into a buying window with you now, call them.

And there’s companies that are doing this today. I’ve got a couple of clients that are doing it, but they’re, they’re doing it through a lot of mechanics that aren’t capable of pulling together all that disparate information. To me, that’s the holy grail, because from a modern selling standpoint in the United States, at least, we’ve been doing this since 1900, industrial type selling.

But for 125 years, we have sucked at building lists. We’re terrible at it. And we’re still terrible at it. So AI can do that. That’s something that your salesperson comes in the morning, they’re not doing research, they’re getting in front of the customer. The thing you can do, and we have a couple of prompts in the book is, okay, let’s just say that I need to go out and and build a message for a particular segment.

So I could take staffing, for example, and say to my AI… And your AI is going to be built more and more. I just had to do a really wonderful tour of SalesLoft and they’ve built AI into their sequencing platform. If I go in and I say. I’m calling on mid sized staffing companies between 25 million and 100 million and I’m making cold calls to them, and I’m looking for some ideas for the challenges that the CEOs are [put in your role] are experiencing in these type of companies. Can you give me five? In 15 seconds, maybe even less, you’ll have five.

Then now this is what’s important, and this is where salespeople fail and this is where marketers come into play, because marketers have to guide this and teach this. It has to be part of your entire development process to teach your salespeople how to use their intuition and be thoughtful about how they take a message like that.

Once you get those messages, now in our world, the fanatical prospecting world, we’re going to build because statements. You should meet with me because. So we would look at that and say, okay, we’ve got five of these things. How do we mix this up and match this up, stepping into the prospect’s shoes, using our human intuition, our human advantage to say, this is what we want this message to say, because we think this is going to have the greatest impact on getting them to engage.

This is going to evoke the emotions that we’re looking for to get them to respond to us. ChatGPT or Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot any of these large language models that are kind of built in the same thing can give you that information just like that.

Salespeople, we have to use our ability to then go through that and build messaging. Somebody explained this the other day. it’s the difference between coming in and staring at a blank page or coming in and someone is giving you all the words that you need. And you just need to put that puzzle together that speeds us up.

And even from a marketing standpoint, I use this type of thing now when I’m building course descriptions, like I go in and I use Claude most often for that cause it’s really good at course descriptions. And I’ll go, give me a course description for this. It’s never cut and paste. It’s always take the course description and then make it better.

Lean into what we know as humans and lean into that intuition. But it shaves off an hour. Think about it, you’re building a 200 word course description. It takes an hour to two hours to build that right if you’re starting from a blank page.

I direct this to marketers because I really believe marketing has got to own a lot of this getting into the sales organization, but we have to teach our sales people how to use these models that way in order to get that time, even through pre call planning, but we have to help them get that rhythm down, or they’ll spend all their time with a robot and no time with their clients, which are doing right now already with your technology. They’re spending all their time on technology and no time with clients. So we just got the same problem in a different format.

Matt: You just a couple more minutes here with our guests today on Sales Pipeline Radio, Jeb Blount, prolific author speaker, trainer, and author of the new book, The AI Edge which you can find on Amazon and all other fine retail bookstores online, bricks and mortar, et cetera. Earlier you were talking about what I’d interpret it as the difference between lists and relationships– the difference between own land and rented land. The fact that if we are trying to trick prospects into engaging with us, then you might get a few people that convert on that, but that’s not a long term strategy.

If Google goes and changes their algorithm all of a sudden your search is screwed, right? I mean, there’s so many places where even on LinkedIn, so many people in our industry, flock to LinkedIn and spend time there that could go away tomorrow. So what are you doing to build relationships and credibility as an individual sales rep, as a company for your brand so that if Google went away tomorrow, if LinkedIn went away tomorrow, the relationships, the brand you have built, the reputation and trust you have with that customer, it continues to exist. So tactically you can say, well, build your list. You’ve been a proponent on that forever– BUILD YOUR LIST so that you have the direct relationship, but there’s still a difference between a mailing list and a relationship. Talk a little about that.

Jeb: Yeah, that’s the ultimate message of this particular book is that salespeople are not going to go away because when people are trying to make complex buying decisions, they need your help. And a robot can’t do that. A robot’s not going to help them make that final decision.

So our job is to go out and build relationships. Our job is to have synchronous conversations. And everything that we’re doing around AI should increase the number of synchronous real time conversations we’re able to have with people. And there’s really a couple of mechanisms for that. We have the phone, we have video, and we have in person.

And that’s how we’re going to have those conversations. So as a seller, your human advantage is your ability to have empathy. It’s your ability to, as you say, build the relationship versus the list. It’s your ability to demonstrate that you are a consultant. I mean, essentially, that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to move themfrom a place where we’re selling them something to we’re an advisor that allows them to step into making a decision. We have to understand that in every interaction with another human being, they’re making five core decisions on their buying journey about us.

And that is, do I like you? Do you listen to me? Do you make me feel important? Do you understand me? Do you get me and my problems? And do I trust and believe you? And you have to answer all five of those questions in order to get people to either advocate for you on a buying committee or to buy directly from you. And the whole promise of AI is that it allows you to flip the switch and really change the current balance, which is, and Matt, you can catch me if I’ve got my number wrong, but I think that salespeople are spending somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of their day doing things that are non sales work activity and you can start spending 60 to 70 percent of your day doing things that are sales activity. That is having conversations with other human beings. That’s what we’re good at. And by the way, people are starving for it, even though sometimes it doesn’t feel like they are because they keep you at arm’s length.

But the more that we do that, the better it’s going to get. And I’ll leave you with one thing. If you are a purely inside sales organization you better by God, get good at the phone quickly, because as you said, and I love what you said, The Great Ignore, I’m stealing that. It was great. But they’re ignoring all of your other channels.

You’re you’ve got that. If you’re in field sales, as much as I’m not a big fan of prospecting by foot, because it’s so inefficient, suddenly they can’t ignore you if you’re standing in their lobby. They can’t ignore you if you walk up on the back dock and you start talking with people. So you’ve got to get out there and get face to face with your, with your customers. That’s back.

Matt: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with you. I know Anthony Innarino agrees with you on this as well. I will tell you this year I created a quarterly goal of a number of calls to chief marketing officers. And for me, doing a regular habit of outbound prospecting is a new muscle.

It’s not cold calling. These are people that have been following our content, people in our CMO community. It’s still an outbound call. It’s still an an unplanned call. It’s my second best source of pipeline this year. [yes]. Right? It’s literally the phone, not zoom, not video– phone calls. So for anyone that thinks like the phone is dead for anyone that says that people aren’t working, they’re working from home, they’re not answering their phone. I’m here to tell you, even the chief marketing officers, it works. So, that’s I think going to be a huge differentiator for people that are not just looking for the shortcut, not just looking for how do I do more faster, cheaper? How do you do more better? And I think that’s a huge theme of your book.

So folks check out Jeb. You can find him on LinkedIn, find him at salesgravy.com. He mentioned courses. He is a fount of content and resources and advice and best practices. Definitely go to Amazon, get The AI Edge. Jeb, I know you’re super busy. Thank you for grabbing a couple of minutes and doing this with us.

Jeb: Thank you so much. I’m so grateful. I appreciate it.

Matt: Absolutely. Well, thanks everyone for watching and listening. We’ll see you next time on Sales Pipeline Radio. Take care.