General Episode Description:In Part 2 of this Selling Intelligence conversation, John Tecce, Vice President of Growth at 2X, explores what the next generation of go-to-market organizations will actually look like as AI, automation, and human expertise continue to converge.John explains why the future isn’t about replacing people with AI, but combining human judgment with agentic workflows to create faster, more adaptive revenue teams. He shares how organizations can break down departmental silos, rethink traditional operating models, and shift from fixed headcount to more flexible, scalable growth strategies.The discussion also dives into practical examples using platforms like Gong and Clay, why most AI initiatives stall before delivering business value, and how today’s revenue leaders can prepare their organizations for a fundamentally different way of working.What You’ll Learn:Human Agentic GTM: What human agentic go-to-market really means and why software, services, AI, and people are converging into one operating model.AI Plus Human Judgment: How platforms like Gong and Clay become exponentially more valuable when combined with human oversight and intelligent workflows.Breaking Down Silos: Why sales, marketing, RevOps, and customer success must operate as one revenue organization instead of separate departments.Rethinking the Operating Model: How leaders should evaluate what to own internally, what to outsource, and where automation creates the greatest leverage.Leading Through AI Transformation: The organizational, operational, and cultural changes required for companies to successfully adopt AI at scale.Key Topics:Human agentic go-to-market strategyAI workflows powered by Gong and ClayGo-to-market engineering and automationConverting fixed headcount into flexible operating modelsCross-functional revenue team alignmentAI adoption challenges and organizational changeJobs-to-be-done operating model designThe future of GTM leadershipGuest Spotlight: John TecceJohn Tecce is the Vice President of Growth at 2X, where he helps B2B organizations modernize their go-to-market strategies through the combination of AI, automation, and human expertise. He works with enterprise leaders to build scalable revenue operating models that improve efficiency, accelerate growth, and prepare organizations for the next generation of GTM execution.Resources & Mentions:2XGongClayClaudeChatGPTAWSMicrosoft AzureSnowflakeDatabricksTrevor Moawad’s work on neutral thinking🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more conversations with the leaders shaping the future of AI, sales, and go-to-market strategy. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.Mark Petruzzi (00:38)Welcome back to Selling Intelligence. If you're joining for the first time, this is part two of our conversation with John Tesey, Vice President of Growth at 2X.KK Anderson (00:49)In part one, we got into why digital outbound has hit a wall and why the BDR to AE model is collapsing and what they've done at 2X to remedy that and how they're working with their customers to overcome it. We talked a lot about how we're back to old school with sending things like in-person Vino letters and how we can build our new go-to-market engine so that we're harnessing on what is human and how wecombat the trust recession. It's an excellent session. Please go back and listen to it.Mark Petruzzi (01:20)In this half we get into what human agentic go to market actually means in practice, how 2x is helping clients turn fixed headcount into flexible spend, and what every CRO can do before they buy another tool. John, let's pick it back up.KK Anderson (01:36)All right, welcome back John.John Tecce (01:37)Thanks for having me back.KK Anderson (01:38)2X just called itself the first human-agentic go-to-market services firm. Really cool. Unpack that for us. What does human-agentic actually mean in terms of how work gets done on a client engagement? And tell us, tell us more.John Tecce (01:54)Let's start with the humanagentic and then we'll go into go to market. So humanagentic, what you're seeing across the board right now is software and services are converging. and there's been this sort of hard line between like what are we doing with tech and we're bringing in tech and it was a very linear process. We're gonna buy the tool and then we're gonna later either buy the services or figure out the operating model for how to operationalize the tool. And it was verysort that waterfall style of things and and as you were buying more tech and tools, you were sort of trying to layer on the the skill set and operating model. And really at this point, and and arguably before this point, but certainly now, what we're finding is the customer doesn't care whether it's technology or product or people that's getting the work done. They care, are you getting the work done? And is there a human accountable to that work getting done? And so as a as an organization, we have now you know we've pioneered the marketing as a service space.Starting about about a decade ago with the formation of 2X and the creation of that category. And then as we've seen this shift, and we'll get into go-to-market shortly here, but into how work gets done, and and most of our clients are trying to accomplish growth at the fastest possible and lowest possible cost way, this humanogenic way of getting the work done really is the the path forward and is the the killer app of this generation, if you will. And then from a go-to-market standpoint, what we've seen is the convergence ofThe last probably two decades, we've seen the bifurcation of marketing, sales, and the customer office, right? with the establishment of, as we talked about before, the BDR function is the go-to-market and the handoff, and now the client office with CSMs and account managers. And what we've found is sort of a back to the future moment where everybody realized the customer is at the center of this, whether it's a prospective or current customer, we're all using the same tech, we're all using the same data, and we're all responsible for driving growth for the company.So why are we operating in these silos when really at the end of the day, we're all trying to drive towards a revenue target? So we've found that the convergence of software and services, along with this conversion of go-to-market, you've seen a lot of GTM titles lately that have popped up as a result, have led to this moment where human and AI are able to effectively deliver upon that, while at the same time there's less of a concern at a siloed level of on the client side who owns it. They all own growth.Mark Petruzzi (04:01)So John, two of two X's top partnerships are gong and clay. Walk us through a specific use case where the combination of these tools with human judgment produces an outcome that neither can produce alone.John Tecce (04:15)Yeah, so it's interesting. with most enterprise data is unstructured. It's in emails, it's in Slack messages, it's in video transcripts, it's in these Gong transcripts, right? and so we we acquired a a top implementation partner of Gong last year, outbound funnel, with in mind this convergence that we talked about. We were in marketing as a service, as a category, we created it, we've led it for a while. we saw this convergence happening, said, hey.There's so much richness from a go-to-market standpoint that is in Gong transcripts. While at the same time, Gong themselves have also gone through a convergence in RevTech and moved into with like Gong Engage, right? And being able to become a full full platform revenue provider. And so we we kind of saw this happening. And then at the same time, we saw the emergence of go-to-market engineering with clay as the as the primary platform there in terms of data enrichment. as you both know, and I'm sure all the listeners know, the number one hindrance toscale personalized outbound is data, hygiene and cleanliness, as well as the ability to then activate it with with agentic workflows. And so we acquired Clay's largest partner earlier this year as well. And so when you think about that combination of things, you're looking at a place where, hey, we have the ability to now synthesize prospector client transcripts, right? And we have the ability to then and drive better segmentation hygiene andagentic activation of contact data. And so you're in a place now where the future vision you can look forward and say, well, wait a minute. There's a very simple way for us to take, for example, a a conversation had at 9 a.m. you know with a with a prospect and that transcript can be synthesized by a commercial intelligence platform maybe like known while for example two extras acquired but the the concept remains hey we can synthesize that even just an AE could look at it and say cool wait a minute I could go flagto a go-to market engineer in my organization who could use clay to then immediately enrich and say, okay, client mentioned these three things. Well, do we have contact data for the people at the company that would own those things? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe it's unclean. All right, well if we could update that and then we could use clay to run an out an automated outbound play to them about a product or service that they mentioned on this call, right? Now you're looking at the same type of effect thatIn B2C, we always joke that our devices are listening to us, right? All of a sudden you see you get served an ad for something that was mentioned. To be clear, I'm not promising any of that any means. all of what we just talked about is sort of art of the possible and systems architecture work with with agents and and humans involved. But that's the type of thinking when we think about go to market, we think about where does a gentic play in, where do where do off-the-shelf tools like Gong and Clay kind of come in. And that's the exciting a lot of the conversations we're having with our clients right now around, okay, I've made investments in these tools.KK Anderson (06:29)Mm-hmm.John Tecce (06:44)But also I know I need to build out with Agentik and I know I need a human in the mix. how do we do that? And and as a firm, we are in that human agentic world to be able to help.KK Anderson (06:52)So to be able to do that, you can't have a world where you're operating in silos. It's all cross-functional workflows that, it just feels very different than what we all learned in business school.John Tecce (07:05)And how the organizations are structured. That's the other th part that I think we've noticed is a lot when you talked about operating model earlier, a lot of organizations were okay, well, RevOps owns Gong and marketing has the marketing automation platform and Clay was brought in by somebody and and hey, we're all messing around with Claude or Chat GPT and having to to organizationally bring everybody together to start to make those decisions together, it's a forcing function for that to start to happen.It's been a very interesting exercise over the last couple of months as as everybody's starting to think through what this agentic future looks like.KK Anderson (07:34)So, and like in just another example that a client of ours is working through with agencies, Gong picks up a CSM talking about a potential upsell or cross-sell, and then it immediately fires off an email to the AE saying, hey, this just happened, like it's live. Call them now, right? There's so many different things they could do. So with your clients who arebuilding the art of the possible and I know it's all happening in real time and it's new and not a lot have, right? Not a lot, there's not a lot of frontier organizations out there truly that have gone past just using Claude and GPT. Like what are some best practices around orchestrating these kinds of things? Is it just another, is it another platform or another tool that you're using that's gonna hold all of these agents in these workflows or like what does that look like?Like when you're, and I guess my last question is, when you're talking to clients about these things, like what, what kind of objections do they have? Like where does it break? Like where does this human agentic like model, I don't know. Tell me what you think.John Tecce (08:36)Yeah.I'll start with the latter. Where does it where do the conversations break? The first one is in very similar to a decade or a decade and a half ago when the IT part of the organization was navigating the shift from on-premises storage and compute to cloud-based storage and compute with AWS and Azure and later Snowflake and Databricks. it's the same conversation about fixed cost to variable cost.KK Anderson (08:54)Mm-hmm.John Tecce (09:02)We are seeing that as a organizations are not currently prepared to, especially in go-to-market, break the predictability of their CAC or of similar metrics of understanding, okay, well, what is this gonna cost me? Everybody is aware of the ceiling of AgenTic and of these operating models and the flexibility and tools like clay that are consumption-based and token tokens are the big topic right now, cost of tokens and governance.KK Anderson (09:25)Right.John Tecce (09:27)And the first thing that happens is everybody realize, whoa, okay, wait a minute. We might be limited in our our ability and our output right now, but we also have cost predictability. And so what I think the number one thing that's holding back most organizations in this way is is that conversation. And then the unknown, exactly. The unknown and just the the the very way that they account for customer acquisition cost, for sales productivity cost, a lot of a lot of those measures.Mark Petruzzi (09:34)Yeah.KK Anderson (09:43)The unknown.John Tecce (09:52)So that's I think the first thing. I think the second thing does become a very boring but necessary conversation about accountability, races, SLAs. Okay, well, as we're building this out, the big difference between the peers in the IT organization and the go to market organization is when IT was making this decision, they had visibility to their workloads. That's how it works in IT, right? You can see, okay, these jobs are passing through the server to the compute. We havethe it's all metric, right? It's all there. You had IT tickets and SLAs and things like that. Go to market organizations do not have workflow visibility. They do not typically have strong SLAs. and that's one of the key core components to anything that is going to be agentic by nature is understanding what is who is accountable for what. what is the baseline? And are we just smashing the AI button because I saw somebody on LinkedIn say they automated an entire thing with Claude over the weekend.Or are we actually trying to solve a problem against a meaningful baseline? And I found that most organizations do not have a baseline within which to measure. And their AI mandate is just, I don't know. I see everybody else on LinkedIn doing all this cool stuff, and you know, we should be doing it too. I feel like we're behind. and so that's often where I think I see it break the last of the three would be kind of a related point but the o the political ownership of it. well, hey,The the revenue office, they signed the clay contract and we're marketing and we can't really, you know, that's that's their licenses, that's not my licenses, right? Or hey, sales ops owns the gong instance, and we can't really, you know, it's a pain and whatever. And so there's a lot of those political realities and organizational dynamics that we are finding, especially as you'd imagine, the further up market you move in the enterprises.But there is a lot of that technical operational and organizational debt that's getting in the way of those conversations. the ones that we're seeing move the fastest right now, of course, are more blank slate in nature, but not, you know, are yeah, we're seeing like, you you're seeing the startups and the and the solopreneurs move fast because they got no other that that's what they're they can do. But that like, you know, 300 to thousand person, you know, B2B SaaS organization, right? Where there's they're well funded enough to be able to make the investments, but they're not hampered by a lot of that organizational.at that are really able to make those decisions of hey, I don't need to go hire three more people. I don't need to bring in more tools in a monolithic way. I just need to go like build out in this agile way. Those are the ones that I'm seeing the most that are able to move the fastest.Mark Petruzzi (12:08)Great. All right. Well, let's move to our final topic with John. The operating model rethink, what to own, what to outsource, and how to decide. So John, you described the conversation you are having with clients right now about converting fixed headcount into flexible spend. Walk us through how that conversation starts and what's the core question that opens it up.John Tecce (12:30)Typically the core question is some type of organizational mandate. Everybody needs to grow. Everybody wants that the growth is always a target, right? But the question is, are we is our operating model aligned with growing to that rate in any realistic way? Right. And if the answer is yes, then great. You can probably make incremental improvements and iterations to get there.If the answer is no, our operating model is not physically or operationally aligned with getting to that growth target. Okay, we need to rethink this. our our position on this is there's really kind of three layers to thinking through it. And this comes from our our CMO, Lisa Cole, who put out a book recently on this exact topic around what what you need to own, what and and from our perspective, that's what you need to be the best in the world at. Those are your differentiated for your organization capabilities that only you can deliver in a best in class way. And a lot of times that requiresdeep corporate knowledge, deep market knowledge, segment knowledge, those type of things. So think brand strategy, think product marketing strategy from a CRO standpoint, targeting, the pricing and packaging, like things that don't you can outsource getting help on, and you should probably get get advisory on that, but you need to own those decisions in-house.What we found, and most organizations have found, is the vast majority of the jobs to be done that don't fit that category can very easily be outsourced and or automated. And I think the and or is really the key here. A lot of organizations are also thinking through: okay, I have a cost reduction mandate, I have a growth mandate, and then I have an AI mandate. How the hell do I thread that needle? our perspective is ultimately if you are locked up in fixed headcount.which most organizations are at a pretty high level, you are not in a position to have that sort of slider on this on the jobs to be done to the AI component. You can DIY it, but it's going to take you longer, which is going to then distract you from your current growth target. It's also probably not going to get you to the point you need to get to from a cost reduction standpoint. So our position is to look at that as a jobs to be done exercise and then be able toset your operating model up in a way that allows you with that slider flexibility to to automate or not automate. Maybe we go too far with automation and then hey, all right, we gotta we gotta back that out, right? versus if you make if you're absent that flexibility, you're in a pretty tough position in this currently a very dynamic market. so those are kind of the the way we we help clients think through it. and of course self servingly probably recommend to to find a partner from a humanogenic services perspective toKK Anderson (14:50)Sure. Absolutely. And last question before we move into the rapid fire questions, which we know is everyone's favorite. So you are inside a firm that's actively building the model that, as we've chatted about, most CROs are still trying to understand. So what would you say is the single most common mistake that you see leaders making?when they're trying to rethink their operating model and what does the version that actually works look like? Where would you point someone to get started on?John Tecce (15:21)I think the most common mistake is is unfortunately at the human level of not accepting sooner how different the operating models will be going forward and needing to make tough decisions to get there. And that's a that's a that's a difficult conversation to have across the board in terms of oflooking at your operating model, looking at your work structure, looking at how you built the organization, understanding that decisions that were made even prior to February of this year when Claude Cowork went generally available. We're in a fundamentally different world in June of 2026 than we were even in February or March. And not, you know, there are emotions tied to that obviously, but also being having the pragmatism of understanding thatKK Anderson (15:54)Wow.John Tecce (16:03)reality and then being able to act accordingly. you know, that's it's hard. That's that's probably the hardest thing. And it's hard to even call it a mistake at a human. I have a team. I love my team. and and and the organization around us as well. But at the same time, you know, as companies continue to transform, like having that vigilance and not viewing January 2026 as recent, I think is probably the biggest one.Mark Petruzzi (16:18)Yeah.KK Anderson (16:24)Right.One of the things I would say is that I feel like the product owner may say, yeah, but that's mine. That's product. That's in my lane. But that's a marketing thing. You need to go talk to the marketing person about that. That's a sales thing. The second they start thinking in these departmental silos, that's, I think, where the first mistake is. It is so hard to.And that's really the job of today's CEO is how do you break the mindset to where people aren't thinking that? They're not thinking like departments. They're thinking like, cross-functional handshakes.John Tecce (17:00)And and I think thinking about the the the okay, well last time I did this, I hired this role and I hired that role and I hired the third role. it's a different world now, right? So even just I see this with go-to-market engineering right now. A lot of people say, we'll just go hire a go-to market engineer. Okay, well that that title hasn't existed for longer than about twelve months. Number one, do you even know what a go-to-market engineer is? And and we're hiring them to do what? To do the AI thing. They're gonna help us build. Okay, well, to do and like starting to get so also defaulting off ofI'm just gonna run the same playbook I've run and maybe I'll just plug in a new fancy title to do it versus fundamentally rethinking how the work gets done, the jobs to be done part of it, and then backing into it that way. I think that's what the you asked about what the version that actually works, the organizations we see that are leading there are the ones that are breaking it down, not by what is the title that's gonna do the work, but the jobs to be done and how do I optimize those jobs to be done.KK Anderson (17:50)And are they just taking their C-suite and putting everyone in a room and...battling it out until they figure it out.John Tecce (17:56)Seeing more of that than I I've seen certainly in the years that I've been here. number one. Number two, it seems they're they are starting to appoint a VP level person to own them. I was just on with with someone in a private equity back SaaS company this week whose title is VP of Go to Market Transformation. She was in the ops, I think RevOps function prior to that. but they tasked her with, no, you we need to do this and you need to be the cohesive person to go drive this across these organizations.At both an executive alignment standpoint and also a director and functional level alignment standpoint. And so I do see that as well.KK Anderson (18:26)Okay, this has been a fabulous interview. Let's do some quick rapid fire. And it does need to be rapid, because I know we've all got hard stops coming. Mark, why don't you kick us off?Mark Petruzzi (18:36)All right. So John, what was the first product or service you ever sold?John Tecce (18:40)I sold copiers and multifunction printers for Rico in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, not too far from where I'm standing right now.KK Anderson (18:47)That's awesome. Who is your favorite CRO or CEO that you follow?John Tecce (18:52)Who that I follow. well, I've quite literally followed RCO or Ryan Heineg now to three different jobs. So I have to from a career standpoint, I I guess I have to say him. but I really like a lot of what what Jeremy Donovan puts out for for insight partners. candidly we're insight-backed pork co, so I guess I have to say that, but I do like a lot of his insight.Mark Petruzzi (18:59)Huh.KK Anderson (18:59)There you go, that's good answer. Ryan Haying.Mark Petruzzi (19:11)All right, so a leadership or go to market practice every sales and marketing leader should adopt.John Tecce (19:16)mindfulness and at least encouraging some various forms whether it is meditation, whether it is breathing exercises, whether it is therapy, whether it is something like that, perfectionism is something that plagues the B2B sales profession in particular. and viewing a lot of these mental and emotional ways to develop, you know, through that, I think is is paramount.KK Anderson (19:34)Wow, I love that. Okay, and my favorite last question, advice you would give your 21 year old self.John Tecce (19:40)it's all temporary. Everything is temporary. Every rejection you get, every win you get. to stay neutral, I think, to borrow a a term that I've seen quite a bit of late, from from Trevor Moad, the late Trevor Moad who wrote two books on this topic, but stay neutral, you know, I had a gentleman who I worked directly with who was about twice my age when I started and I'll never forget I was melting down by a customer issue. He's like, You're not even gonna remember the name of that customer in twelve months.You know, at twenty, twenty one, twenty two years old and he was right. So I gotta give him credit for that.KK Anderson (20:04)Yeah, yeah.I love it.Mark Petruzzi (20:07)John, this has been the kind of conversation our audience needs right now. so thank you for that. An operator who already made the decisions most leaders are still avoiding and who can speak from inside the results. before we let you go, please tell the audience where they can find you in 2x, the firm, the podcast, whatever you want to point them to.John Tecce (20:26)all of the above. So you can find us at 2x.marketing, although I believe the dot marketing will change with the convergence of GTM. So we'll stick with 2x.marketing for now. 2x on LinkedIn. you can also find me personally on LinkedIn. My last name is TangoEcho, Charlie Charlie Echo, T-E-C-C-E. There's not many of us. you'll either find me or Michael T C, my father, who does a lot of good stuff on LinkedIn too. So add him while you're there. and and follow all of the above.KK Anderson (20:50)Awesome, okay, we will make sure to include all of that in the show notes. John, thank you so, much. This was a genuinely productive two sessions. Thank you.John Tecce (21:00)Thank you.Mark Petruzzi (21:00)Fromselling intelligence, I'm Mark Petruzzi.KK Anderson (21:03)I'm KK Anderson. And one more thing before you go. If you'd like to go deeper on how to set up agentic workflows for your go-to-market motion, contact 2X for sure. And if you want to learn how to do it, head to get-ags.com forward slash academy. We have expert accelerators and career operators who have built workshops specifically for revenue leaders navigating this shift. Some of them are complimentary, so go and get yours today. It's worth your time. Thanks so much for listening. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode of Selling Intelligence, John Tecce, Vice President of Growth at 2X, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to explore why traditional digital outbound is losing effectiveness and what today’s sales organizations must do instead.John shares why B2B selling is facing a “trust recession” fueled by AI-generated communication, rising outreach volume, and declining buyer confidence. As inboxes become saturated and automation reaches its limits, he argues that sales leaders can no longer rely on activity metrics or volume-based prospecting to generate predictable pipeline.The conversation also examines why 2X intentionally built its revenue organization without BDRs, why the full cycle AE is becoming increasingly important, and how timeless sales fundamentals like relationship building, trust, community engagement, and human connection are becoming competitive advantages once again.Mark, KK, and John discuss why quantity is no longer the best predictor of sales success, how experienced sellers can combine AI with classic sales principles, and the mindset required for modern account executives to thrive in an increasingly uncertain market.What You’ll Learn:Understanding the Trust Recession: Why AI-generated communication and digital overload are making buyers increasingly skeptical of outbound sales.Why Digital Outbound Has Changed: How years of automation have created more noise than opportunity and why quality now matters more than quantity.The Return of the Full Cycle AE: Why reducing handoffs creates stronger buyer relationships, better accountability, and more consistent revenue growth.Community Over Cold Outreach: How creating value before buyers enter an active buying cycle builds long-term trust and pipeline.Modern Sales Competencies: The mindset, adaptability, and relationship-building skills today’s sales professionals need to succeed.Key Topics:The trust recession in B2B salesAI-generated communication and declining buyer trustOutreach saturation across email and LinkedInWhy digital outbound is producing lower returnsThe evolution of marketing automationActivity metrics versus quality metricsWhy quantity is no longer the primary sales KPICreativity in outbound prospectingThe VITO letter and direct outreachOld-school sales techniques in modern sellingThe decline of the traditional BDR modelWhy 2X operates without BDRsThe return of the full cycle account executiveReducing buyer handoffs throughout the sales cycleBuilding credibility before the first meetingCommunity-driven pipeline generationBecoming a trusted connectorCreating value without expecting immediate meetingsThe importance of human connection in AI-enabled sellingPresence of mind and relationship mappingAdapting to constant market changeSeparating assumptions from reality during the sales processAI as an enabler, not a replacement for sales fundamentalsGuest Spotlight: John TecceJohn Tecce is Vice President of Growth at 2X, where he leads half of the company’s revenue organization with a team of full cycle account executives operating without a traditional BDR model.A third-generation sales professional, John combines classic relationship-driven selling with modern AI-enabled execution. He has become a leading voice on the future of go-to-market strategy, helping organizations rethink outbound sales, trust building, pipeline generation, and revenue operations in an increasingly AI-driven marketplace.Resources & Mentions:2XKnownwellSixth SenseMarketoSalesforcePredictable RevenueGary VaynerchukLinkedInBob KellySelling to VITOHope Is Not a StrategyThe Go-GiverAGS Academy🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more conversations with today’s leading revenue operators, sales executives, and GTM innovators. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.Mark Petruzzi (00:28)Welcome to Selling Intelligence. Our guest today is John TC, Vice President of Growth at 2X, the firm that just its declared itself the first human agentic go-to-market services firm. John runs half of 2x's revenue organization, a team of 12 full-cycle AEs with no BDRs.And he is third generation sales who has spent the last year watching the tools that built his career stop working at scale. Two X recently announced its acquisition of known well, and John has a front row seat to where the market is heading.KK Anderson (01:05)Personal note before we start, when John, Mark and I spoke in preparation, we landed on the same diagnosis from two very different directions and he is living it inside his own team and we are diagnosing it with clients every week. The instinct everyone has is to add more activity. John's answer is the opposite and that's what makes this conversation well worth your time.Mark Petruzzi (01:30)Here are the topics we will cover today. In part one, three things: why Digital Outbound has hit a wall and what that means for every CRO. The death of the BDR and the return of the full cycle AE. And old school fundamentals through new mechanisms, how the best reps apply forever concepts through AI-enabled execution. Then in part two, which drops next week.We will get into two additional topics. What human agentic go-to-market actually means when you combine human agents and tech and the operating model of rethink: what to own, what to outsource, and how to decide. John, welcome to Selling Intelligence.John Tecce (02:13)Great to be here.KK Anderson (02:13)We are thrilled to have you. Okay, let's jump right into it. So much great stuff to cover today. And let's start with this idea of the trust recession and why digital outbound has hit a wall. And we bonded on this topic during the prep session, as I indicated in our introduction. as soon as I said,I said it, the trust recession, which by the way, I picked that up from Bob Kelly, who's the chairman of Sales Management Association. So all credit to him. You immediately reacted to it and we both totally agree that we are in a trust recession right now. And so let's start with you telling us like, what does that mean for you? What does it capture for you? Like, what are you seeing on your team and across your clients that makes that a phrase that really resonates for you?John Tecce (02:58)thing that really sticks out to me is the utilization of AI in all forms of communication that has led to a skepticism on the receiving end.How real the text that I'm receiving, whether it's a LinkedIn post or a message or an email or what have you, actually is from the human being versus how much of it was went through the AI car wash. And inherently, if you think about most of these models are ultimately trying to regress to the mean in terms of what they generate. And so you're ending up with this.copy paste of of phrasing and ways that things are said that strips out a lot of the human nature of it. And I think as a result, as B2B professionals, and when I say B2B professionals, that's under the whole go-to-market lens, everything from BDR to AE to CSM to executive, et cetera. there's the evergreen phrase of people buy from people who they know, like and trust, but it's kind of harder to get to know and trust them if you you have tofilter everything they send you through the lens of like how much of this, you know, is really them versus how much of it is Chat GPT or or Copilot or or Claude that they're running these thoughts and communications through. I'm a huge user of AI, to be clear, I'm very AI forward and I encourage my team to be the same. but when you come to the trust recession, I think a lot of it has to do with just a a distance now that exists between two people and the communication betweenKK Anderson (04:10)and a lot of the noise that it has created, right? It's almost deafening. There's so much noise out there in the market today. It's insane.John Tecce (04:19)It's it's insane. the BDRoutreach surge that we've seen in particular, whether it's again BDRs or otherwise, but Sixth Sense put out some research very recently that the baseline touches per contact was was about 17 in 2024. Not that long ago. We're in the middle of 2026. and this research came out a couple of weeks ago. We're now at 34 touches per contact. So it's doubled, number one. Number two, on top of that.KK Anderson (04:39)Ugh.my poor inbox.John Tecce (04:44)It ex well and inboxes, right? So what they found in that research as well was social in particular is the the biggest source of that growth. It went from about four and a half touches in twenty twenty four to now over ten in twenty twenty six. And so your email inbox is already hurting and and kind of getting hammered. And now, LinkedIn kinda used to be the okay, well if you send a a a really strong LinkedIn connect request or a really strong in mail, you had a good chance nowBut what we're seeing is the volume and just the increase in the noise in in part due to the ability to do it from a scale standpoint, an automation standpoint. but also, you're finding a lot of the inbox tools, both on the LinkedIn side and email, are becoming more intelligent to filtering out that noise. And so it's that's being countered with more noise and just more and more, more, more, and more, and we're at a point where the math just just doesn't math anymore.Mark Petruzzi (05:29)So John, you have been selling a long time now s so you definitely remember when digital outbound was still relatively clean. What has changed at the structural level and how does it show up in the numbers you're watching every day right now?John Tecce (05:44)Yeah, I think you know when I started my career was when marketing automation in its in its current form was really taking shape. my first role out of school was was at Rico for a couple years and helped them launch at the sales level launch Marketo as an example. And it was like super cool that you could put in this template and you could pull and have it personalized by first name and by company name. That was like a really big deal, right? and at the time we were getting and then you you started to see theknow, the evolution of of RevTech and marketing automation into where now I can put in these all these different variables. It's like, my gosh, okay, now I can personalize that scale. I can put in company name and industry and based on industry I could put in these three client names of ours and like and you were getting a a really positive return on that because it was it was one, new on the recipient side and two, there was just less of it. And so as a result of those two factors,You know, you were able to to be more successful with that approach. what the SaaS industrial complex sort of created and through books like Predictable Revenue and other, the success of Salesforce and other firms was this idea of well, okay, well, if we just do more of that and we hire more people to do more of that, it we've always talked about a funnel forever, right? Or a bow tie. It's gonna more is gonna yield more. And for a while that was the case.first through email and then, as as far back as twenty eighteen, Gary Vaanderchuk's big thing was l LinkedIn was gonna be the platform of twenty eighteen. and you know, that that kind of pulled through in in through LinkedIn. And then by the way, once COVID hit, all we had was digital for a while there. And so that fur even further exacerbated it. And so I think, you I I look back on just the rudimentary basics of but a lot of folks of my sort of cohort of the middle millennial kind of age rangecame about when that was what you learned to do and you and wherever you started, whether you as an AE or a BDR, and that was, okay, if I just pull this slot machine or I just keep hitting these buttons, you know, the return, it was a math equation, right? and as we've just established that that is no longer the case. And so it's interesting now to look back on how successful that was and for good reason, but we've now effectively polluted that ocean to the point where there's there's no longer that many fish to catch through the volume approach.KK Anderson (07:46)You know, what's interesting is that, and we've talked about this a lot on the podcast before, is it's almost like the pendulum is swinging all the way back to the old school, which is so good for the really strong salespeople because trusted advisor, relationships, really being subject matter experts in what you do and your domain, the passion that you have for what you sell, all of those things that are so human and that makethe best sellers, the best, like that now is paramount. And when we were chatting, John, you told us a story that I'd love for you to share with our audience, that one of your team members used an old school like veto letter, right? To get in front of a chief marketing officer at a dinner. So tell us that story. And then before you do, just for the millennials in the group who never had to do a veto letter, like tell us what it is.John Tecce (08:35)Ha haKK Anderson (08:36)Tell us whatJohn Tecce (08:36)ha.KK Anderson (08:36)it actually is and then tell us what happened and why it worked and expand on that.John Tecce (08:42)Yeah, Ithink first and foremost, you mentioned at the top that I'm third generation sales at least third generation. I don't know further back than that. but my father, Michael T C was in sales leadership for his entire career. and so I grew up, you know, around around books like Selling to Vito and Hope Is Not a Strategy. And these were these were just things that were around me my whole life. And so I feel extremely blessed to have sort of entered this this profession with a lot ofTimeless values and concepts and so being able to pull back to those things, right? And so, sitting in the backseat coming home from from baseball practice and having learned what veto stands for and what a letter is, right? So s it's given the now that we're kind of thinking about this full cycle part of it, you know, we started to think about, okay, well, the digital channels have been polluted. that doesn't mean stop doing them, by the way. You can there are still fish to catch. it means you can't rely on them. And those are two different things, right? So you have to be thinking in a different way. Direct mail, not a new concept.So what sort of occurred to us, as we were sort of thinking through, okay, how can we zig when everybody else is zagging or vice versa, was well, we can rely on direct mail, but even that, you know, okay, that's gotta get sent to an office and get processed and what have you. exact yeah, we've got a few people that are remote, but through the investment and commitment from our our go to market organization around building community, our CMO Lisa Cole was attending aKK Anderson (09:48)And no one's in the office.John Tecce (10:00)Dinner recently, and occurred to one of my AEs, Lucy Goodwin, who just finished up another incredible quarter, by the way, was like, you know, you're you're seated at a table with one of my prospects that has a very compelling go-to-market transformation going on right now. And we've tried through digital channels and we have a really compelling message. We just don't, we haven't been able to have the right vessel to deliver it. And it sort of occurred, hey, can I?Like so we talked about it and we kind of came around with like, well, you have the message. You have the veto letter. And for those unfamiliar with the veto letter, it's nothing more than a one-page letter with a a brief, succinct value prop, value statement, citing specifics to that company, what we think we can do for you, and then setting up a very direct follow-up. And so we had all those puzzle pieces together. So well, what if like, hold on, Lisa's gonna be at the same in the same room? What if you just physically have her like give that message to the person, which 30 years agoKK Anderson (10:48)slip her notJohn Tecce (10:48)Totally. And like 30 years ago is exactly what you would have done, right? Because you didn't have the digital channels to you only had in person or or the phone or or fax, right? And so she sure enough did that. And the recipient was blown away by he's like, no one's ever done this before. No one's ever given me a physically given me a a message outlining a value pro tailored value proposition relevant to them, specifics, right, and all those things. and really kind of stood out.in terms of, hey, these guys are different. Like this company's operating in a different way. I don't do anything different. We're just we're going back to the future a little bit around you know that type of thing. and it was just very well received on on their side has led to a continuing conversation towards what exactly what we want to do is getting on their radar in a meaningful way through a timelessKK Anderson (11:32)VEDO is, I believe it stands for very important top officer. Is that right? Yeah, that's really cool. I love that story, John.John Tecce (11:37)Yes, exactly.Mark Petruzzi (11:40)So John, for for a CRO listening to this who is still running a sequencing first high volume outbound motion, what is the one thing they should stop? Like, stop now. Not not tomorrow, stop today.John Tecce (11:54)Quantity metrics are no longer a reliable predictor of conversion. Now, there are some that might argue that never were. I would argue that they definitely were for a while. but I I don't think smashing the more button or looking at the how much button. I think I think effort and quantity is important. I do not feel that quantity is primary, and I think in a lot of organizations that is still looked at as the first place to go.it's the simplest, it's the most measurable, it's the most actionable. you only made this many calls or you know, this many outreaches? Okay, well let's try more. And don't don't get me wrong, we we look at quantity here too, and but but much more around looking at the quality of outreach and the channel within the outreach is made. I think those that's the big pivot that that I would suggest is taking a hard look at, okay, if we are at a point where unless there is a very cleargap in the will, it's probably a gap in skill around the quality of the outreach and the critical thinking and creativity around the channel of the outreach. I I also, we have a lot of leaders right now in in CRO and VP of sales and VP of revenue and growth roles that also came up during this era of, you know, not having the prior perspective and only kind of came up through the world of sequences and KPIs around sequences and BDRs to do all the PG work andWhen I say PG meaning pipeline generation. so I do think, you know, being able to look back at at quality and at channel is paramount.KK Anderson (13:15)Could not agree more, could not agree more. Okay, we're gonna jump into topic two, the death of the BDR, and I know that's a hot take. I know it's a hot take. But it's one that I'd love to hear your, kind of where your head is, and I know it's the return as we spoke of the full cycle AE, which is what you've done. And at 2X, you've never had a BDR function, and I know that was a deliberate structural decision.for your team and so walk us through the reasoning and tell us tell me what you mean when you say the full cycle AE is coming back.John Tecce (13:48)Yeah, I think there's a few layers to it. The first layer goes back to the no like and trust aspect of any B2B, you know, go to market. And fundamentally, anytime there is a handoff involved, there is a risk around that that no like trust concoction to be disrupted. Right. And so to be clear to the BDRs out there, the work you do is valuable. The risk is in the handoff from okay.you're having a conversation or you're generating a meeting, and then immediately having to hand that off to somebody that the buyer already, before they've even taken the first meeting, has already talked to two people at this company. And they're like, okay. And then maybe we're introducing other people throughout the sales cycle. And then by the way, on after the sale is closed, then okay, I'm being handed off and I'm primarily working with the C like. And so there's just a lot of kind of handoffs that occur. And with that becomes a loss of context, a loss of personal accountability.And a loss of just comfort in consistency around around that accountability. And so what we found was as a 2x about a decade ago created the marketing as a service category. So think managed services or BPO, but for at the time B2B go to market or marketing, and now since we've expanded it to go to market, but as a category creator, say, hey, we we have to have someone on the front line that is a subject matter expert. The first interaction, the first engagement conversation has to be with someone who hascommunity presence, marketing community presence, that is, also local community presence potentially, has credibility, can have that conversation and really be able to provide a premium experience on the prospect side from the get-go. and minimize some of those handoffs so that throughout the life of bringing a client in and then eventually onboarding that, there is still that presence there and accountability there.So that's a big part of of of the decision for us at the time. And it's only really exacerbated in an ongoing way. The majority of what we find with our clients is repeat clients or or folks that we meet throughout this community. And you know, a lot of the research about the dark funnel or name your thing about buyers or X percent through the journey before they choose to engage, well, that only happens when you're not providing value before that percentage point to want to engage. And so also a lot a big part of our full cycle approach is making sure that we are constantlyin that community, providing value, staying connected, and aligning without the expectation of a meeting. And I think that's the other piece of it is the misalignment of KPIs. You have an entire function that is KPI'd on meetings. Well meetings aren't opportunities to sell potential I mean they might be, right? But a lot of buyers aren't even ready for a meeting yet. And so being able to is is that a KPI we track? It is and it is a proxy for success to some extent.But when you have an entire function that is only KPI on meetings, they're just gonna set up meetings because that's their job, right? Versus looking at it through a holistic lens of are we meeting with the right people at the right time about something they can act they're actually in a position to want to buy. And I've built enough credibility where, you know, most of the research from again, I'll cite that Sixth Sense Research and others say the first vendor that's contacted or engaged is typically the one that wins. I think it's like eighty four percent of the time, if I remember correctly.KK Anderson (16:25)Mm-hmm.John Tecce (16:46)Well, that's the AE that has to do that work leading up to that point to be the first call, right? That can't be a bifurcated process. And so that's kind of the what we've found and has really played out organizationally for us, but also what I've found my whole career, in terms of just being a a good AE, is constantly kind of thinking about pipeline generation. And I've been again very blessed to have a lot of leaders who have instilled that in me in terms of owning that for yourself.Mark Petruzzi (17:08)So you made an observation that most mid career sales professionals have never known a world where they could not send a personalized email or a somewhat cheeky gift and get a meeting. What does that mean for the skill gaps CROs are actually managing right now?John Tecce (17:24)There's a few things. one is acceptance and acknowledgement of what you just said is realizing that we are in a the answer is not more and the answer is not what you did before. didn't mean for that to rhyme, but maybe we'll put that on a on a pillow somewhere. looking looking at any there there really are no new ideas at this point, like at all of the different creative sort of of the twenty tens with hey, I saw on your Instagram.KK Anderson (17:38)Mm-hmm.John Tecce (17:48)You went to this place and I'm gonna send you a gift about whatever, or hey, you went to Villanova and they're playing against Seton Hall in the Big East tournament, I'll make a bet. Like all those different type of they were super cool in the moment in the 2010s, they work great, they were differentiated, they engage people. they've been maximized and played out at this point, right? And so I think really kind of reassessing and understanding what is actually creating the human connection of apotential buyer and I think emphasis big on potential in that community and being able to engage those people at a human level and at a pace that they're ready to engage with. A really good example that I found is is super helpful is when you're an active member in a community of professionals, whether it's an established community, like an actual community group, or just paying attention on LinkedIn. Okay, I see that, I have a client that I'm talking to over here.And they're looking for a director of RevOps. And then I see somebody else whose name popped up on my LinkedIn feed that was impacted by a restructuring, and they're in between roles. And they have the skill set, hey, I don't like I gotta I don't know you at all. Like, but I saw your LinkedIn post. You you seem to be looking for something that my client is hiring for. Like maybe you guys should talk. And like playing that connector role. I think we've really lost that concept, which again is not a new concept at all, right? This is a that was a fundamental piece of.KK Anderson (18:42)We have.John Tecce (19:03)selling up until the twenty tens was being that connector, being engaged with your clients. If anybody's read or listened to the Go Giver, that's a big part of the premise, right? Around the connector and the guy who's just having conversations all day long, but never seems to be getting anything done and yet he's crushing it. Well it's 'cause those conversations are leading to, okay, how can I align a a client need, whether it's something I sell or or not, to what they're trying to accomplish and or just providing value.And the law of reciprocity suggests that if you're continuing to do those things at any form of scale, it will pay off over a certain amount of time. so that's really like these are not new concepts at all. This is very much like B2B selling 101. We just have a whole generation of people that were never exposed to it. Again, the only reason I've been lucky enough to is through my own upbringing and through some great leaders I had early.KK Anderson (19:45)So true.Yeah.so true. you know, you, in doing that, you create trust and that is combating the trust recession. And we know that we're in. So, 100 % comes full circle. so quickly before we wrap up for our part one. So, in, the, when you think about the full cycle AE of today, right? What, like, what are the key?competencies or capabilities. It doesn't have to be, sales specific, but like what is it that you, they have to have to be able to do full cycle.John Tecce (20:18)Number one, they have to have the presence of mind to make these mental connections. They have to be able to see connections, whether those connections mean, okay, I have someone who moved on from a a two X client and went somewhere else. And now there's tools out there that can help you do that too, but still inherently the ability to read that. You have to have the presence of mind to sort of feel out in a cycle, hey, I think that person's fullyCommitted, like they might be moving on somewhere, right? You have have the presence of mind to start to see these things. partnerships is another good example. Like, so often, you know, 2X has a lot of great technology and other types of partners, but like just because we're not capital P partners, it doesn't mean you can't go find your peer AE at another company who's also selling to the person you're selling to and say, Hey, we're selling to the same person. Like our companies aren't partnered, but likeWe're both trying to do the same thing. Can you wanna talk and just like help each other here? Like just that presence of mind to make those connections is uncanny in terms of their ability to find success. Certainly in my experience personally, but also at 2x across my team. the second is the ability to embrace the uncertainty. we are I think the term unprecedented times first became most associated with with COVID era. And now it's just like what we live in.Like there it there is no precedented time. Yeah, like we're we are uncertainty is a part of the human experience. by the way, that didn't start with COVID either, but I think that that really brought it in generationally for a lot of folks. but with AI and with other things, you have to be willing to disrupt yourself all the time. You have to be willing to kill your darlings. You have to be willing to say, just because this worked for me last year or last month or last week, it doesn't mean it's going to work for me going forward.KK Anderson (21:33)This is what it is.John Tecce (21:59)And to be able to have that adaptability. And then I think the third one that comes to mind for me is you have to be able to separate the story you tell yourself from what's happening in reality. And I'll give Jen Wang, who's a a former 2X or helped build 2X from the ground up, just spoke with my team earlier today about this topic where she talked about the ability to sort of we all tell ourselves stories all the time about what's happening.because a story is better than no story, right? Like, hey, they're not getting back to me. Well, okay, well they're probably not getting back to me be because, you know, you make up some story about whatever, you go down some rabbit hole. I in that case, yeah, I do. that's a that's a good example. an excuse absolutely becomes a story in that case versus like, hey, you might have just reached out to him during a busy week. It's not that deep. There's no story. Get back on the horse and try it again.KK Anderson (22:34)Do you mean excuse when you say story?Mark Petruzzi (22:37)Mm-hmm.John Tecce (22:49)Well I and so I think there's a layer of being able to separate that and understand that okay, I need to focus on what's in front of me. I need to focus on how Jen put it, the next clean action, and be able to move forward. I found that those three things really right now in twenty twenty six are the biggest areas that set.KK Anderson (22:56)We will.So good.Mark Petruzzi (23:03)All right. So this is where we leave part one. We have covered the thrust recession, the collapse of the BDR model, and what it actually looks like when a firm stops theorizing and starts building the org around full cycle reps. In part two, John gets us into what human agentic go to market means in practice, how 2x is helping clients rethink the operating model.and where most organizations are making the wrong bet right now. We look forward to seeing you there.KK Anderson (23:33)And before you go, if the operating model conversation is resonating with you, we have been building something at AGS specifically for leaders who want to go deeper and educate on how to set up agentic workflows. Head to get-ags.com forward slash academy. There are sessions from career operators to help you do some of these things. And we will include everything on how to reach out to John Tisi and the amazing team at 2X in the show notes.Worth a look before part two and we will see you next week. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

General Episode Description:In Part 2 of this conversation, Bob Kelly, Founder and Chairman of the Sales Management Association, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to examine why AI adoption often fails even when organizations invest in the right technology.Building on research across 111 sales organizations, the discussion moves beyond AI tools and into the operational systems required to create measurable impact. Bob explains why automating a broken sales process only accelerates poor execution, how leaders should distinguish between path problems and insight problems, and why CRM adoption continues to struggle when technology creates work for sellers without delivering value back to them.The conversation also explores the three organizational levers shown to drive AI adoption: leadership endorsement, training investment, and AI proficiency in hiring criteria. Bob shares why AI implementation requires clear decision rights, governance, and process ownership, while Mark and KK examine how AI may finally help revenue organizations break down traditional departmental silos.The episode closes with a candid discussion about AI anxiety, the changing role of sales managers, and why experimentation may become one of the most important leadership practices in the future of sales.What You’ll Learn:Process Before AI: Why automating a broken sales process only creates bad outcomes faster and at greater scale.Path Problems vs. Insight Problems: How leaders can distinguish between work that follows a defined decision tree and work that requires judgment.CRM Data and Seller Productivity: Why salespeople rationally avoid systems that consume selling time without helping them sell.The Three AI Adoption Levers: How leadership endorsement, training investment, and AI-focused hiring criteria influence adoption.AI Governance and Decision Rights: Why organizations must define who builds, owns, instructs, and controls AI agents.Key Topics:The 27-point performance gap between frontier AI adopters and other sales organizationsGeneral-purpose AI, agentic tools, and sales-specific applied AIWhy having ChatGPT open does not mean an organization has adopted AIAI as an amplifier of existing sales processesPath problems versus insight problemsProcess automation and AI-powered decision guidanceWhy “bad fast” can be worse than “bad slow”Using AI to capture CRM data from emails, calls, notes, and conversationsSpeech-to-text technology and sales data captureWhy most CRM implementations fail to create value for salespeopleDocumenting new customer, expansion, and cross-sell sales processesCapturing effective selling messages and value propositionsProcess flexibility and salesperson decision-makingLeadership endorsement as an AI adoption driverThe 36-point AI adoption gap linked to leadership endorsementTraining sales teams to use AI effectivelyAdding AI proficiency to sales hiring criteriaAI governance, security, and decision rightsWho owns and controls AI agents inside an organizationAI’s potential to break down departmental silosCross-functional AI workflowsThe future skills of sales managersAI anxiety and uncertainty across middle managementExperimentation as a sales leadership disciplineGuest Spotlight: Bob KellyBob Kelly is the Founder and Chairman of the Sales Management Association, an independent professional organization focused on advancing sales leadership and management effectiveness. Through research, education, and industry events, Bob works with sales leaders to apply evidence-based practices to sales productivity, process design, technology adoption, and organizational performance.He also serves as an adjunct faculty member at multiple business schools and brings an academic, research-driven perspective to the changing role of sales management in the AI era.Resources & Mentions:Sales Management AssociationMicrosoftChatGPTMicrosoft CopilotZapierCRM platformsAgentic AIApplied AIAI governance and securityMiller HeimanTony RobbinsRoman history and leadership researchSales Management Association AI adoption researchKey Takeaway:AI adoption is not primarily a technology problem. It is a leadership, process, and organizational design problem. The sales organizations creating meaningful AI advantage are not simply buying more tools. They are documenting how selling actually works, defining where human judgment belongs, investing in AI skills, and giving leaders clear ownership over how AI is deployed.Technology will continue to change. The organizations that build the discipline to experiment, learn, and redesign their sales systems will be the ones best positioned to adapt.🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling Intelligence for more conversations on AI, sales leadership, revenue operations, and the future of go-to-market execution.#SellingIntelligence #AIforSales #SalesLeadership #RevenueOperations #AgenticAI #AppliedAI #SalesManagement #ArtificialIntelligence #SalesProcess #SalesEnablement #GoToMarket #RevenueLeadership #SalesStrategy #AIAdoption #FutureOfSalesMark Petruzzi (00:28)Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi.KK Anderson (00:31)And I'm KK Anderson. Every week we bring you conversations with operators who have been in the room and come out with something worth using the very next day.Mark Petruzzi (00:40)Our guests today just completed a benchmarking study of 111 sales organizations. And what on? AI adoption. The findings are not what most leaders expect. Only 4% of firms have no one using AI at all. But only 9% qualify as what the research calls frontier adopters. And those 10 firms are outperforming the rest of the field.By on average twenty-seven percent is points on sales objective achievement, nineteen points on individual quota attainment, and nearly double the rate of sufficient selling capacity. The question this research forces is not whether your team is using AI, it is whether they are using it in a way that actually moves the numbers.KK Anderson (01:26)Bob Kelly is founder and chairman of the Sales Management Association, a global, independent, professional organization serving more than ten thousand sales leaders. He has no product to sell and no platform to push, which is exactly why this data matters. Welcome to the show, Bob. We're happy to have you.Bob Kelly (01:43)Thank you so much for having me. It's so nice to be with you.Mark Petruzzi (01:46)So Bob, your research covers over one hundred companies. But before we get into what leaders are doing, give us the honest snapshot. What is the typical sales organization actually doing with AI right now? And how does it compare to what people say they're doing and what the media outlets are saying people are doing as well?Bob Kelly (02:07)the word I would use is dabbling. the typical sales organization is dabbling with AI as opposed to integrating it in a pervasive and sort of formal way in the work streams in the firm. this is a reflection of the uneven nature of how AI affects work in general and including sales work.But the interesting thing is to understand just how few firms are ignoring AI or are untouched by AI. When we look at the adoption curve and history of other technologies, CRM, for example, or other platform technologies, they've taken much, much longer to gain a foothold in most organizations. We're seeing very fast pickup inThe use of AI, even if that use is uneven.KK Anderson (02:55)So Bob, when we had our our preparation conversation for this podcast, you used a phrase that I hadn't heard anywhere else and I thought it was fabulous. You said you said there's a lot of machine stench. Right. So walk us through like what is that and why is it showing up so broadly in this research?Bob Kelly (03:07)Machine Yes.Well how isGreat term, isn't it? I was just about to think of that term when I heard someone else use it. So I've naturally adopted it as if it were my own, but it is plenty descriptive, right? And I think we all have encountered AI generated content. I mean, the more common term is slop. We see it in social media, but we also see it in our inboxes, we see it in work product withinKK Anderson (03:15)It is.Bob Kelly (03:39)the companies that we work for. and its problem is that it represents an inauthentic product. And so this when used inappropriately or i in the wrong context actually I believe does more harm than good. it communicates sort of in auth authenticity rather thanclarity and equality.KK Anderson (04:00)Everyone AI it's like AI gave everyone a on the road and no one can move. And everyone sounds the same. So it's figuring out how do you take that superpower and that super intelligence and leverage it in a way to create differentiation rather thanBob Kelly (04:01)We wantYeah, justYou know, IKK Anderson (04:15)than the stench of sounding the same,Bob Kelly (04:18)I think the mistake so many make is that they're using AI to substitute for their own voice or work product. And when that happens, ⁓ they're pointing out their own superfluity. do we need a human if we're just gonna have machines generate communication? so I think when used appropriately, we use it to augment our abilities, our voice, ourproductivity and when we use it poorly we've we make the mistake of y substituting a machine generated product for something that we should have more say in.Mark Petruzzi (04:51)So, Bob, you mentioned in the study that only four to six percent of companies are avoiding AI entirely. That actually concerns me that, there is everybody's diving in. And, only a very small percentage are not. but when it really comes down to it, there's still a huge disparity between those frontier adopters, as you described, and the laggers, the rest of the theBob Kelly (04:52)Yeah.Mark Petruzzi (05:17)hack is that the gap between the two of them growing and and how fast? How fast is that growing and changing?Bob Kelly (05:27)Well, it the answer is very, very fast. The study that we did was concluded I guess about three months ago. It's likely out of date. so we see these adoption and the development of the products that we're even talking about moving so quickly. the the the thing to keep in mind is that or a relevantPoint here is that so many AI products are freely available and they are in the general population. In fact, the most widely adopted tools are those that anyone can pick up, chat GPT or perplexity or any of these sort of language-based chat uh-based tools. And so we see lots of people picking them up, fooling around with them. And this is unlike other technology.platforms that we've seen impacting the sales organization like CRM or SPM or sales enablement or any many many other tools. So this does beg the question, will this be a phenomenon driven by consumers? personal adoption? will it be democratized in that way or willcompanies be required to adopt sort of institution wide, highly controlled platforms to provision AI.KK Anderson (06:37)really interesting and one of the incredible benefits of leveraging AI in your sales organization is that you can take that tribal knowledge of your best your your top sales performer and figure out what it what is it that makes them the best and then automate some of those research tactics or techniques or processes in your in your AI agentic workflow.Bob Kelly (06:38)You know, theKK Anderson (06:59)And and that's something you could never do inside of, the confines of a sales force or hub spot.Bob Kelly (07:04)Yeah, th this is the promise. This that idea gets sales leaders excited. in practice, it's I don't know that we're quite there yet, but in general we see companies adopting the easy tools to pick up. These are chiefly language-based models, and they're used for language-oriented tasks, things like communication andcrafting emails, sometimes quite derivative, machine stench gen sort of emails, but also doing things like understanding researching prospects and markets. and where we see less adoption so far is in the things that require more advanced tools, including agenticand sales specific tools. and so what we found in these so-called frontier firms, which represent maybe the top ninetieth per the 90th percentile of adoption and usage, ⁓ is that they're much more likely to use tools that are customized to sales work and include agentic elements. So they're actually automating work and inincorporating AI capabilities within those automation streams.KK Anderson (08:10)talk us through what these, the frontier adopters and the research that you talked about. So what was the what was tell the audience, what was the criteria you used to define them and like what does that what does a frontier organization actually look like in practice?Bob Kelly (08:24)Well, w ⁓we had have you as you pointed out, roughly a hundred firms in the study. So we looked and we in the study measured their rates of adoption, the frequency with which the typical salesperson uses tools, and the kind of tools that they use. So we took those firms that had the highest rates of adoption and in which salespeople are using tools most frequently and in whichThey are using tools, they're using the general purpose tools, but they're also using agentic tools and custom tools that are geared toward sales specific tasks. And so those those are the basic criteria. We identified roughly 11 to 12 firms in that group and branded them frontier sales organizations. We did this in part.Because the sponsor of this research who underwrote the research was Microsoft, and they're using this term in the way they are marketing solutions to frontier firms. So in part we did this to curry favor with our sponsor, but also because this term frontier has been widely adopted to describe the latest models that are used in these solutions, but also the sort of uneven andperhaps dangerous nature of adoption itself. Ethan Moloch's great term, the jagged frontier, is widely used to describe how it's an uneven place being on the edge of adoption with these tools. The tools do many things really well and other things, easy things, weirdly, quite poorly. So the it it's a it's a shifting, sort of an uneven place.to be and that that's why we like the term in addition to describing those leaders in organiza in our economy in sales organizations that are adopting AI.Mark Petruzzi (10:07)So Bob, I I kind of echo that that thought process and and what what I'm starting to see, like everyone, right? I jumped in early to just the whole opportunity of AI and what you can do and the research capabilities and and then move very quickly into the agentic side and really creating agents and and building them for our clients.And that moved to a whole nother level of productivity. But we learned something in that phase two, and that is how valuable all the systems and tribal knowledge that a company has and how to for AI really to be playing its best game, it's gotta have that that information as well. So that brings us to applied AI, right? That's kind of wherewhere the terminology is coming together and and when you can do that as an organization we at AGS do that for our clients we do that with with a couple of our partner organizations that we work very closely with like Humagentic. when you can go to that next level and really integrate within the systems that are already in place takes you to a whole nother level. did you see that at all in this study and what's what's your overallPoint of view on that.Bob Kelly (11:22)We we didn't go super deep to understand the degree to which firms are integrating agentic solutions within their own environments. we did sort of investigate, we asked, are you employing agentic solutions? and we ask, are you using custom solutions that are sales focused? We also ask if they are making use of platform solutions, existing solutions like CRM.or SPM sales performance management platforms in which there are embedded AI capabilities. This is likely the most this is the likeliest way that many firms will begin adopting these agentic solutions kind of pervasively they will exist within the comfortable and ofKK Anderson (12:07)Tools they have.Bob Kelly (12:09)a platform in which they're already using which solves the chief concern about distributing this capability across the enterprise, namely security governance, the keeping data secure and understanding just how people are using the solutions.KK Anderson (12:25)I thought it was incredible that the data showed that ninety percent of frontier organizations met or exceeded their sales goals in the preceding twelve months, versus sixty three percent of the non frontier firms. Like that's compelling.Bob Kelly (12:38)Yeah, yeah, it's a big number. so it suggests that frontier firms, so called frontier firms, are much more likely to be productive than more laggard firms. I mean, it's a clear delivery of the promise of AI i as it relates to productivity.KK Anderson (12:54)Right. Really incredible. Okay. So we your your research study also talked about selling capacity. and it's let's see, the data says I believe it was 60% of frontier firms say they have sufficient capacity to cover available opportunity compared to 32% of non-frontier firms. And I'm assuming, Bob, that's going more towards their productivity as well.Bob Kelly (13:17)So this is a a really interesting finding. again, this data is self-reported, so it is subject to the caveats that you'd have in such a study, but it's almost the only way to conduct quick benchmarking research. But the fact that these firms are so much more likely to indicate that they have sufficient capacity does suggest.An impact of using AI that we all are hoping for, which is it allows us to do our work faster. Now, if you follow the logic through, ⁓ it's reasonable to suggest that this surplus capacity will be short-lived. So where we are perhaps in the curve of adoption of AI and sales is that we're using AI to great effect to make salespeople more productive, but we haven't redeployed that capacity.In ways that are likely to follow on from AI adoption. We're likely to see different s kinds of organization structures, perhaps different spans of control. We're almost certainly likely to see different jobs in the Salesforce. And as we absorb an understanding of how AI will impact all of the work of those new people, we'll probably see them.become every bit as overburdened and overworked as people used used to be before AI. they'll just be doing more. so that that's something to keep an eye out for. those excess capacity is something that you you don't want too much of it. but it's better to have a little bit than to be understaffed.Mark Petruzzi (14:30)Mm.KK Anderson (14:45)You heard it here first. Bob's prediction. The pendulum's gonna swing back the other way, isn't it? That's that's pretty funny. And I believe it. Hey, I believe you.Bob Kelly (14:46)Right now.Yeah.Right.there's an inter another interesting difference in these frontier firms compared to other firms. We asked about the sentiment about AI. what is the promise of AI in various aspects of managing the sales function, making decisions for the sales function? And we found that those firms that I'll put it this way adoption is positively correlated with enthusiasm inMark Petruzzi (14:54)All right.Bob Kelly (15:18)Estimating AI's impact. Those firms that are using AI the most are the most sanguine about how AI will help them in the future. and believe it, its impacts are far more broad based than firms with just a limited, sort of naive understanding of AI.Mark Petruzzi (15:34)Stuff, Bob. let's move over to topic three, the management question. How AI changes the sales manager's role. And your research in this area shows that 100% of frontier organizations expect AI to have a high impact on first-line sales manager responsibilities over the next two to three years. That is not a heads number.What does it actually mean for what a frontline manager does every day? And what does it mean for how CROs should be developing those managers over time?Bob Kelly (16:08)Yeah, this is a very interesting question. It's it's very interesting to our organization, given where we sit and who our ⁓ our members are. We have a lot of sales managers in our membership. it's important to understand that the sales management role, especially the first line sales management role, has been changing significantly before the introduction of AI. The role has hadAnd this is also a reflection of technology use and better data, but the role has had a diminishing amount of a sort of supervisory responsibility and an increasing ⁓ amount of focus on developing people, but also in a set of kind of integrative disciplines that I'll describe in a moment. soOf course, we all, think of that first line sales manager is maybe a a really good salesperson that was promoted into management. and it's it's of course a much different job than being an individual sales contributor. The the places where we see sales managers having the most impact are in actually improving the proficiency and effectiveness of the people that they are managing. that⁓ is a very much a ⁓ role that requires human to human communication and intervention and relationship. it's it's hard to automate that. the supervisory stuff is relatively easy to automate. nowanother way to think about this question, Mark, is to say what are the competencies and sales managers that will become in the forefront in the future? And increasingly we see this happening already. And there are a small set of competencies that I think will characterize high performing sales managers in the future. As it relates to AI, I do believe that proficiency or at least fluency inapplying and understanding and applying AI tools to sales work will be required for sales managers. Now this involves a lot of kind of com subordinate skills. It it it requires someone to be able to take a typical sales job or task and deconstruct it into its component parts to understand how we might automate that, whichportions are appropriate to automate, which portions should retain a human in the loop. And also it requires a process discipline. Sales, the sales function has always been process focused, or at least it has been in the past 20 or 30 years. But in the future, I think this sort of process rigor and the ability of a manager to apply process discipline to the selling function.And to diagnose the issues as would a process engineer. these are critical skills that w we'll have to have in sales management roles in the future.KK Anderson (18:52)So interesting.Bob Kelly (18:53)what else?Yeah. ⁓ the to return for a moment to this idea of developing people, despite what I've said, despite claiming that it's so important for people to be involved in this process, I believe that the currently today, the biggest impact we're seeing in AI and sales is in the area of learning and development. I think for the for most firms.the place where AI can have the biggest impact is in training, coaching and developing salespeople simply because the amount of quality activity in those areas is quite low or non existent in ⁓ many sales forces today.KK Anderson (19:29)So as sales organizations get smarter and sharper and and the applied AI really takes hold, and then the sales managers are not spending as much time on things like pipeline inspection or call reviews because the AI is listening to the calls, right? And the AI is pulling out insights. the AI is predicting the forecast, right? That well, this is like the vision, right? So if AI takes those off the plate.Bob Kelly (19:42)No right.Maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓KK Anderson (19:55)and I know you just said, hilariously so that, Something else will fill that time on the plate. but what what should the sales manager be focusing on with that time instead? Like they're gonna be getting back so much time. Where should their priority be? What's the w how will they have the greatest impact?Bob Kelly (20:13)Well, let's also point out that the typical environment that sales organizations operate in is very change intensive. in part but for the same reasons that we're that we're the same things we're talking about today. their customers are also being impacted by AI and b and by technology. The way they prefer to buy is changing all the time. they'reInterest in meeting with salespeople and the value they expect to get from such investments in meeting time changes all the time. They're all these new competitors, etc. So often even if only implicitly, we expect that sales manager to be the change leader to enact those adaptations that we have to have in the marketplace. soI expect that that will continue to be the case. Sales managers will have to lead change in organizations and there will continue to be plenty, plenty of it. it will be coming faster than it has in the past and and there'll be greater change impacts than we've had in the past. ⁓ so ⁓ I expect managers to be highly focused in that. They also are going to have to ⁓be skilled at diagnosing issues, diagnosing what's going on with pipeline issues. Will AI help our pipeline measurement and tracking? It it may well make it easier to do. Will it result in better quality? I'm on a little skeptical, but only because we've done plenty of research about pipeline management, and we find that the sort oftracking constructs that many firms use to track deals or opportunities are often wildly inaccurate at forecasting results. so much so that I've come to the conclusion that we often I believe use these tools for more than trying to simply predict outcomes. We use them to foster conversations.So another way to think about this question is will AI result in better quality interactions between management and ⁓ individual contributors to foster quality and figure out how best to close deals? I'll I'll see that. I'll believe the pipeline accuracy and efficiency impacts when I see them.But the good news is we blow a lot of time. Managers blow a lot of time fooling around with forecasting and pipeline tracking, especially in complex selling environments. And if we could have that go away, that would be a a good thing.Mark Petruzzi (22:32)Excellent, Bob. Okay, this is where we will leave part one. In part two, Bob gets into what the research says about the management role specifically and why process has to come before AI, or you are just accelerating the wrong things. And also we're going to cover the three organizational levers that the data shows actually drives adoption. We look forward to seeing you there.KK Anderson (22:33)She won't. 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In this episode of Selling Intelligence, Bob Kelly, Founder and Chairman of the Sales Management Association, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to unpack the findings from one of the most comprehensive benchmarking studies on AI adoption in sales. Drawing from research across 111 sales organizations, Bob reveals why simply using AI is no longer enough. The real advantage belongs to a small group of “frontier organizations” that have moved beyond experimentation and embedded AI into the way sales actually gets done.The conversation explores the current state of AI adoption, why most organizations are still only “dabbling,” and the growing performance gap between companies that integrate AI strategically and those that simply rely on general-purpose tools. Bob also introduces the concept of “machine stench,” explains why authenticity has become more valuable than ever, and shares why sales managers will play an even more important role as AI transforms the revenue organization.  What You’ll Learn:Frontier AI Adoption: What separates the highest-performing AI-enabled sales organizations from everyone else.Beyond AI Experimentation: Why most companies are still dabbling instead of transforming their sales process.The Problem with “Machine Stench”: Why AI-generated content often destroys trust instead of creating efficiency.Applied AI in Sales: How leading organizations are combining general-purpose AI with sales-specific and agentic workflows.The Future of Sales Management: Why coaching, process discipline, and change leadership become even more important in the AI era.Key Topics:Benchmarking 111 sales organizations on AI adoptionThe difference between AI experimentation and AI integrationFrontier organizations outperforming peers on quota attainment and sales objectivesAI adoption compared to historical CRM adoptionThe rise of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and language-based AI tools“Machine stench” and AI-generated content fatigueAuthenticity versus automation in customer communicationTribal knowledge and AI-enabled sales executionGeneral-purpose AI versus sales-specific AI platformsAgentic AI and workflow automationAI embedded inside CRM and revenue platformsSelling capacity and AI-driven productivity gainsWhy AI-created capacity will reshape sales organizationsThe changing role of frontline sales managersAI for coaching, learning, and sales enablementProcess engineering as a future sales leadership competencyLeading organizational change in an AI-first environmentGuest Spotlight:Bob Kelly is the Founder and Chairman of the Sales Management Association, the world’s largest independent professional organization dedicated to advancing sales leadership. Serving more than 10,000 sales leaders globally, Bob has spent decades researching sales management effectiveness, organizational performance, and revenue leadership. His work focuses on helping organizations apply evidence-based practices to improve sales productivity, leadership development, and business performance.  Resources & Mentions:Sales Management AssociationMicrosoftChatGPTPerplexityCRM platformsSales Performance Management (SPM)Sales Enablement platformsEthan Mollick’s “Jagged Frontier”Agentic AIApplied AISales coaching and enablementPipeline managementAI governance and securityComing Next Week:Part 2 dives into why processes must come before AI, the three organizational levers that actually drive successful AI adoption, and how the best sales organizations are redesigning leadership, coaching, and operating models to thrive in the age of AI.🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling Intelligence for more conversations with the leaders shaping the future of AI, sales leadership, revenue operations, and enterprise growth.Mark Petruzzi (00:28)Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi.KK Anderson (00:31)And I'm KK Anderson. Every week we bring you conversations with operators who have been in the room and come out with something worth using the very next day.Mark Petruzzi (00:40)Our guests today just completed a benchmarking study of 111 sales organizations. And what on? AI adoption. The findings are not what most leaders expect. Only 4% of firms have no one using AI at all. But only 9% qualify as what the research calls frontier adopters. And those 10 firms are outperforming the rest of the field.By on average twenty-seven percent is points on sales objective achievement, nineteen points on individual quota attainment, and nearly double the rate of sufficient selling capacity. The question this research forces is not whether your team is using AI, it is whether they are using it in a way that actually moves the numbers.KK Anderson (01:26)Bob Kelly is founder and chairman of the Sales Management Association, a global, independent, professional organization serving more than ten thousand sales leaders. He has no product to sell and no platform to push, which is exactly why this data matters. Welcome to the show, Bob. We're happy to have you.Bob Kelly (01:43)Thank you so much for having me. It's so nice to be with you.Mark Petruzzi (01:46)So Bob, your research covers over one hundred companies. But before we get into what leaders are doing, give us the honest snapshot. What is the typical sales organization actually doing with AI right now? And how does it compare to what people say they're doing and what the media outlets are saying people are doing as well?Bob Kelly (02:07)the word I would use is dabbling. the typical sales organization is dabbling with AI as opposed to integrating it in a pervasive and sort of formal way in the work streams in the firm. this is a reflection of the uneven nature of how AI affects work in general and including sales work.But the interesting thing is to understand just how few firms are ignoring AI or are untouched by AI. When we look at the adoption curve and history of other technologies, CRM, for example, or other platform technologies, they've taken much, much longer to gain a foothold in most organizations. We're seeing very fast pickup inThe use of AI, even if that use is uneven.KK Anderson (02:55)So Bob, when we had our our preparation conversation for this podcast, you used a phrase that I hadn't heard anywhere else and I thought it was fabulous. You said you said there's a lot of machine stench. Right. So walk us through like what is that and why is it showing up so broadly in this research?Bob Kelly (03:07)Machine Yes.Well how isGreat term, isn't it? I was just about to think of that term when I heard someone else use it. So I've naturally adopted it as if it were my own, but it is plenty descriptive, right? And I think we all have encountered AI generated content. I mean, the more common term is slop. We see it in social media, but we also see it in our inboxes, we see it in work product withinKK Anderson (03:15)It is.Bob Kelly (03:39)the companies that we work for. and its problem is that it represents an inauthentic product. And so this when used inappropriately or i in the wrong context actually I believe does more harm than good. it communicates sort of in auth authenticity rather thanclarity and equality.KK Anderson (04:00)Everyone AI it's like AI gave everyone a on the road and no one can move. And everyone sounds the same. So it's figuring out how do you take that superpower and that super intelligence and leverage it in a way to create differentiation rather thanBob Kelly (04:01)We wantYeah, justYou know, IKK Anderson (04:15)than the stench of sounding the same,Bob Kelly (04:18)I think the mistake so many make is that they're using AI to substitute for their own voice or work product. And when that happens, ⁓ they're pointing out their own superfluity. do we need a human if we're just gonna have machines generate communication? so I think when used appropriately, we use it to augment our abilities, our voice, ourproductivity and when we use it poorly we've we make the mistake of y substituting a machine generated product for something that we should have more say in.Mark Petruzzi (04:51)So, Bob, you mentioned in the study that only four to six percent of companies are avoiding AI entirely. That actually concerns me that, there is everybody's diving in. And, only a very small percentage are not. but when it really comes down to it, there's still a huge disparity between those frontier adopters, as you described, and the laggers, the rest of the theBob Kelly (04:52)Yeah.Mark Petruzzi (05:17)hack is that the gap between the two of them growing and and how fast? How fast is that growing and changing?Bob Kelly (05:27)Well, it the answer is very, very fast. The study that we did was concluded I guess about three months ago. It's likely out of date. so we see these adoption and the development of the products that we're even talking about moving so quickly. the the the thing to keep in mind is that or a relevantPoint here is that so many AI products are freely available and they are in the general population. In fact, the most widely adopted tools are those that anyone can pick up, chat GPT or perplexity or any of these sort of language-based chat uh-based tools. And so we see lots of people picking them up, fooling around with them. And this is unlike other technology.platforms that we've seen impacting the sales organization like CRM or SPM or sales enablement or any many many other tools. So this does beg the question, will this be a phenomenon driven by consumers? personal adoption? will it be democratized in that way or willcompanies be required to adopt sort of institution wide, highly controlled platforms to provision AI.KK Anderson (06:37)really interesting and one of the incredible benefits of leveraging AI in your sales organization is that you can take that tribal knowledge of your best your your top sales performer and figure out what it what is it that makes them the best and then automate some of those research tactics or techniques or processes in your in your AI agentic workflow.Bob Kelly (06:38)You know, theKK Anderson (06:59)And and that's something you could never do inside of, the confines of a sales force or hub spot.Bob Kelly (07:04)Yeah, th this is the promise. This that idea gets sales leaders excited. in practice, it's I don't know that we're quite there yet, but in general we see companies adopting the easy tools to pick up. These are chiefly language-based models, and they're used for language-oriented tasks, things like communication andcrafting emails, sometimes quite derivative, machine stench gen sort of emails, but also doing things like understanding researching prospects and markets. and where we see less adoption so far is in the things that require more advanced tools, including agenticand sales specific tools. and so what we found in these so-called frontier firms, which represent maybe the top ninetieth per the 90th percentile of adoption and usage, ⁓ is that they're much more likely to use tools that are customized to sales work and include agentic elements. So they're actually automating work and inincorporating AI capabilities within those automation streams.KK Anderson (08:10)talk us through what these, the frontier adopters and the research that you talked about. So what was the what was tell the audience, what was the criteria you used to define them and like what does that what does a frontier organization actually look like in practice?Bob Kelly (08:24)Well, w ⁓we had have you as you pointed out, roughly a hundred firms in the study. So we looked and we in the study measured their rates of adoption, the frequency with which the typical salesperson uses tools, and the kind of tools that they use. So we took those firms that had the highest rates of adoption and in which salespeople are using tools most frequently and in whichThey are using tools, they're using the general purpose tools, but they're also using agentic tools and custom tools that are geared toward sales specific tasks. And so those those are the basic criteria. We identified roughly 11 to 12 firms in that group and branded them frontier sales organizations. We did this in part.Because the sponsor of this research who underwrote the research was Microsoft, and they're using this term in the way they are marketing solutions to frontier firms. So in part we did this to curry favor with our sponsor, but also because this term frontier has been widely adopted to describe the latest models that are used in these solutions, but also the sort of uneven andperhaps dangerous nature of adoption itself. Ethan Moloch's great term, the jagged frontier, is widely used to describe how it's an uneven place being on the edge of adoption with these tools. The tools do many things really well and other things, easy things, weirdly, quite poorly. So the it it's a it's a shifting, sort of an uneven place.to be and that that's why we like the term in addition to describing those leaders in organiza in our economy in sales organizations that are adopting AI.Mark Petruzzi (10:07)So Bob, I I kind of echo that that thought process and and what what I'm starting to see, like everyone, right? I jumped in early to just the whole opportunity of AI and what you can do and the research capabilities and and then move very quickly into the agentic side and really creating agents and and building them for our clients.And that moved to a whole nother level of productivity. But we learned something in that phase two, and that is how valuable all the systems and tribal knowledge that a company has and how to for AI really to be playing its best game, it's gotta have that that information as well. So that brings us to applied AI, right? That's kind of wherewhere the terminology is coming together and and when you can do that as an organization we at AGS do that for our clients we do that with with a couple of our partner organizations that we work very closely with like Humagentic. when you can go to that next level and really integrate within the systems that are already in place takes you to a whole nother level. did you see that at all in this study and what's what's your overallPoint of view on that.Bob Kelly (11:22)We we didn't go super deep to understand the degree to which firms are integrating agentic solutions within their own environments. we did sort of investigate, we asked, are you employing agentic solutions? and we ask, are you using custom solutions that are sales focused? We also ask if they are making use of platform solutions, existing solutions like CRM.or SPM sales performance management platforms in which there are embedded AI capabilities. This is likely the most this is the likeliest way that many firms will begin adopting these agentic solutions kind of pervasively they will exist within the comfortable and ofKK Anderson (12:07)Tools they have.Bob Kelly (12:09)a platform in which they're already using which solves the chief concern about distributing this capability across the enterprise, namely security governance, the keeping data secure and understanding just how people are using the solutions.KK Anderson (12:25)I thought it was incredible that the data showed that ninety percent of frontier organizations met or exceeded their sales goals in the preceding twelve months, versus sixty three percent of the non frontier firms. Like that's compelling.Bob Kelly (12:38)Yeah, yeah, it's a big number. so it suggests that frontier firms, so called frontier firms, are much more likely to be productive than more laggard firms. I mean, it's a clear delivery of the promise of AI i as it relates to productivity.KK Anderson (12:54)Right. Really incredible. Okay. So we your your research study also talked about selling capacity. and it's let's see, the data says I believe it was 60% of frontier firms say they have sufficient capacity to cover available opportunity compared to 32% of non-frontier firms. And I'm assuming, Bob, that's going more towards their productivity as well.Bob Kelly (13:17)So this is a a really interesting finding. again, this data is self-reported, so it is subject to the caveats that you'd have in such a study, but it's almost the only way to conduct quick benchmarking research. But the fact that these firms are so much more likely to indicate that they have sufficient capacity does suggest.An impact of using AI that we all are hoping for, which is it allows us to do our work faster. Now, if you follow the logic through, ⁓ it's reasonable to suggest that this surplus capacity will be short-lived. So where we are perhaps in the curve of adoption of AI and sales is that we're using AI to great effect to make salespeople more productive, but we haven't redeployed that capacity.In ways that are likely to follow on from AI adoption. We're likely to see different s kinds of organization structures, perhaps different spans of control. We're almost certainly likely to see different jobs in the Salesforce. And as we absorb an understanding of how AI will impact all of the work of those new people, we'll probably see them.become every bit as overburdened and overworked as people used used to be before AI. they'll just be doing more. so that that's something to keep an eye out for. those excess capacity is something that you you don't want too much of it. but it's better to have a little bit than to be understaffed.Mark Petruzzi (14:30)Mm.KK Anderson (14:45)You heard it here first. Bob's prediction. The pendulum's gonna swing back the other way, isn't it? That's that's pretty funny. And I believe it. Hey, I believe you.Bob Kelly (14:46)Right now.Yeah.Right.there's an inter another interesting difference in these frontier firms compared to other firms. We asked about the sentiment about AI. what is the promise of AI in various aspects of managing the sales function, making decisions for the sales function? And we found that those firms that I'll put it this way adoption is positively correlated with enthusiasm inMark Petruzzi (14:54)All right.Bob Kelly (15:18)Estimating AI's impact. Those firms that are using AI the most are the most sanguine about how AI will help them in the future. and believe it, its impacts are far more broad based than firms with just a limited, sort of naive understanding of AI.Mark Petruzzi (15:34)Stuff, Bob. let's move over to topic three, the management question. How AI changes the sales manager's role. And your research in this area shows that 100% of frontier organizations expect AI to have a high impact on first-line sales manager responsibilities over the next two to three years. That is not a heads number.What does it actually mean for what a frontline manager does every day? And what does it mean for how CROs should be developing those managers over time?Bob Kelly (16:08)Yeah, this is a very interesting question. It's it's very interesting to our organization, given where we sit and who our ⁓ our members are. We have a lot of sales managers in our membership. it's important to understand that the sales management role, especially the first line sales management role, has been changing significantly before the introduction of AI. The role has hadAnd this is also a reflection of technology use and better data, but the role has had a diminishing amount of a sort of supervisory responsibility and an increasing ⁓ amount of focus on developing people, but also in a set of kind of integrative disciplines that I'll describe in a moment. soOf course, we all, think of that first line sales manager is maybe a a really good salesperson that was promoted into management. and it's it's of course a much different job than being an individual sales contributor. The the places where we see sales managers having the most impact are in actually improving the proficiency and effectiveness of the people that they are managing. that⁓ is a very much a ⁓ role that requires human to human communication and intervention and relationship. it's it's hard to automate that. the supervisory stuff is relatively easy to automate. nowanother way to think about this question, Mark, is to say what are the competencies and sales managers that will become in the forefront in the future? And increasingly we see this happening already. And there are a small set of competencies that I think will characterize high performing sales managers in the future. As it relates to AI, I do believe that proficiency or at least fluency inapplying and understanding and applying AI tools to sales work will be required for sales managers. Now this involves a lot of kind of com subordinate skills. It it it requires someone to be able to take a typical sales job or task and deconstruct it into its component parts to understand how we might automate that, whichportions are appropriate to automate, which portions should retain a human in the loop. And also it requires a process discipline. Sales, the sales function has always been process focused, or at least it has been in the past 20 or 30 years. But in the future, I think this sort of process rigor and the ability of a manager to apply process discipline to the selling function.And to diagnose the issues as would a process engineer. these are critical skills that w we'll have to have in sales management roles in the future.KK Anderson (18:52)So interesting.Bob Kelly (18:53)what else?Yeah. ⁓ the to return for a moment to this idea of developing people, despite what I've said, despite claiming that it's so important for people to be involved in this process, I believe that the currently today, the biggest impact we're seeing in AI and sales is in the area of learning and development. I think for the for most firms.the place where AI can have the biggest impact is in training, coaching and developing salespeople simply because the amount of quality activity in those areas is quite low or non existent in ⁓ many sales forces today.KK Anderson (19:29)So as sales organizations get smarter and sharper and and the applied AI really takes hold, and then the sales managers are not spending as much time on things like pipeline inspection or call reviews because the AI is listening to the calls, right? And the AI is pulling out insights. the AI is predicting the forecast, right? That well, this is like the vision, right? So if AI takes those off the plate.Bob Kelly (19:42)No right.Maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓KK Anderson (19:55)and I know you just said, hilariously so that, Something else will fill that time on the plate. but what what should the sales manager be focusing on with that time instead? Like they're gonna be getting back so much time. Where should their priority be? What's the w how will they have the greatest impact?Bob Kelly (20:13)Well, let's also point out that the typical environment that sales organizations operate in is very change intensive. in part but for the same reasons that we're that we're the same things we're talking about today. their customers are also being impacted by AI and b and by technology. The way they prefer to buy is changing all the time. they'reInterest in meeting with salespeople and the value they expect to get from such investments in meeting time changes all the time. They're all these new competitors, etc. So often even if only implicitly, we expect that sales manager to be the change leader to enact those adaptations that we have to have in the marketplace. soI expect that that will continue to be the case. Sales managers will have to lead change in organizations and there will continue to be plenty, plenty of it. it will be coming faster than it has in the past and and there'll be greater change impacts than we've had in the past. ⁓ so ⁓ I expect managers to be highly focused in that. They also are going to have to ⁓be skilled at diagnosing issues, diagnosing what's going on with pipeline issues. Will AI help our pipeline measurement and tracking? It it may well make it easier to do. Will it result in better quality? I'm on a little skeptical, but only because we've done plenty of research about pipeline management, and we find that the sort oftracking constructs that many firms use to track deals or opportunities are often wildly inaccurate at forecasting results. so much so that I've come to the conclusion that we often I believe use these tools for more than trying to simply predict outcomes. We use them to foster conversations.So another way to think about this question is will AI result in better quality interactions between management and ⁓ individual contributors to foster quality and figure out how best to close deals? I'll I'll see that. I'll believe the pipeline accuracy and efficiency impacts when I see them.But the good news is we blow a lot of time. Managers blow a lot of time fooling around with forecasting and pipeline tracking, especially in complex selling environments. And if we could have that go away, that would be a a good thing.Mark Petruzzi (22:32)Excellent, Bob. Okay, this is where we will leave part one. In part two, Bob gets into what the research says about the management role specifically and why process has to come before AI, or you are just accelerating the wrong things. And also we're going to cover the three organizational levers that the data shows actually drives adoption. We look forward to seeing you there.KK Anderson (22:33)She won't. 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General Episode Description:In Part 2 of this conversation, Jared Zelman, Founder and CEO of Othello AI, explores what happens when AI moves beyond helping individual sellers and begins transforming entire sales organizations.Jared shares his perspective on the future of sales management, explaining how AI can handle repetitive coaching, call analysis, and execution consistency while allowing managers to focus on higher-value leadership activities. The conversation examines how AI-powered coaching systems are changing the role of frontline managers and why sales leaders must rethink how they develop and scale teams.The discussion also dives into Jared’s founder-led go-to-market journey. From cold-emailing executives, investors, and industry leaders to building relationships with some of the most influential business figures in the world, Jared explains how disciplined outreach, persistence, and deep personalization helped accelerate Othello’s growth from startup to seven-figure ARR.The episode concludes with practical lessons for founders, CROs, and sales leaders on scaling efficiently, shortening sales cycles, achieving product-market fit, and balancing the art and science of selling in an increasingly AI-driven world.  What You’ll Learn:• The Future of Sales Management: How AI changes the role of frontline sales leaders.• AI-Augmented Coaching: Moving from repetitive coaching activities to strategic leadership.• Founder-Led Sales at Scale: How deliberate outreach can build customers, investors, and mentor networks.• Product-Market Fit First: Why founders should focus on learning and validation before scaling teams.• The Art and Science of Selling: Understanding what AI can teach and what remains uniquely human.Key Topics:• Managing AI-augmented sales organizations• The future role of sales managers• AI-powered diagnostics and coaching• CRM automation and systems of record• Salesforce versus next-generation CRM experiences• MEDDPICC automation and sales process intelligence• Sales velocity as a growth metric• Founder-led go-to-market strategies• Building relationships through cold outreach• Howard Schultz and executive networking stories• Product-market fit versus revenue growth• Shortening sales cycles• Why founders should delay hiring sales teams too early• The science versus art of selling• Human trust and relationship-building in sales• Scaling enterprise SaaS companiesGuest Spotlight: Jared ZelmanJared Zelman is the Founder and CEO of Othello AI, a real-time AI sales coaching platform designed to improve sales execution before, during, and after customer conversations. Prior to Othello, Jared founded Cicero, an AI-powered celebrity avatar platform. Through Othello, he is helping organizations scale elite sales behaviors while preserving the human elements of trust, empathy, and relationship-building that drive long-term success.  Resources & Mentions:• Othello AI• Salesforce• HubSpot• Notion• MEDDPICC• Howard Schultz• Steve Ballmer• Sam Altman• Paul Graham• Dale Carnegie• Costco• Lenovo• Science of Scaling by Mark Roberts• Entrepreneur.comKey Takeaway:AI can automate coaching, surface insights, and improve execution consistency, but it cannot replace the human side of selling. The organizations that win will combine AI-driven discipline with authentic relationships, strong leadership, and a relentless focus on understanding customers.🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling Intelligence for more conversations on AI, sales leadership, revenue growth, founder-led scaling, and the future of enterprise sales.KK Anderson (00:38)Okay, so you are, and we're gonna wrap up the second topic here with this question. You're reporting 10 to 15% win rates improvement, 8 to 10% reduction in sales cycle length, which is huge. ⁓ a lot of AI tools are making, some some pretty large claims like that. so like generally speaking, just w help us understand a little bit, like what what are you measuring over what time period?Jared Zelman (00:51)Crazy.KK Anderson (01:02)how was work to some of your success?Jared Zelman (01:04)Yeah.These are like guess depends, because ⁓ like some of these numbers are pointing time numbers, some of these are ⁓ like over a period of time. so if it's a period of time, these are like over a course of twelve months. what's unique is these are all for large enterprise, these are for Fortune one hundreds. When you see AI companies quoting crazy growth or performance metrics, it's because they're selling to a two person business in YC. in other words, bullcrap.Right. ⁓ these are metrics that are proven at some of the biggest companies in ⁓ multi-sectors. that said, the bar for the expectation the expectation of buyers these days is kind of ridiculous. frankly, if you're a sales tool and you're affecting win rates and you're not improving them by over 10%, that you're a failure.our minimum is like fifteen, we're aiming for like twenty five, thirty in some cases. Yeah, I mean w the buy the buyers are just so damn pro snickety these days. People's standards have gone through the roof.KK Anderson (01:49)wow.Mark Petruzzi (01:57)Beautiful. All right, let us move from topic two to topic three. Topic three is from rep consistency to overall CRO intelligence and how that impacts the overall management of an AI augmented team. And the first question I have on that is once your technology is levered across a team.What what changes for the manager? Because if the AI is handling execution consistency, prompting the right questions, catching objective handling in real time, the manager's job needs to change as well. So what does a great sales manager do differently when they have a productive and effective AI layer between them and the team?Jared Zelman (02:43)So we try to do three things in a closed up cycle. So we try to diagon it's kind of similar to like a I'll use like doctors as an analogy. We try to diagnose what's working, what's not working. So pretty much diagnosing what happens in sales calls, that stink. We then report that right back to the ⁓ to the managers and we give them a prescription. We'll actually give managers direct suggestions on what they should be doing differently to coach their team. Specifics, because managers they need specifics, they have a lot of other stuff going on.We will then actually implement that prescription. We'll then create the cure, hopefully, and reinforce those best practices in every single call. Right? And that system goes on, it's a close-up system. The way the manager job changes though is threefold. They now don't need to do all the diagnostics, they don't need to listen to 300 call recordings to identify the trends and what's working and what's not working.They don't even need to then draw the conclusions to how to fix that. Right? They can always be a human diluent director, but they don't have to do it from scratch anymore because of Thela's helping. Most significantly, they don't need to reinforce that training. They don't need to actually be sitting there coaching reps every single day, every single day. I mean, sorry, every single week. Because Thelo is doing that for them. So it's it's threefold. it's interesting. It's a point solution in that it's focused on sales calls.but it's doing every single part of that cycle such that the manager's job is similar, but it's not menial anymore. There is very little repetition in the manager's job when they have effectively an AI agent that is doing their journey work for them.KK Anderson (04:05)I would think that, as someone who has managed sales teams for many years, I find myself saying the same things, and as a sales coach, right, with our clients, I find myself saying the same thing to this, over and over again, like a broken record. And ⁓ it could be really interesting if you have to take away some of the fundamental that some of the repetitive stuff, like you said, it could be really interesting how those how thatvalue of that coaching conversation would change. So ⁓ and I'm curious to get your take on this as we're evolving. Like what do you see the future of of CRM? Right? We know every salesperson, hates logging CRM. I had this conversation with the CRO just today, like, our CRM is a mess. And it's it but it's still the crux of everything. I imagine that what you're what you'reJared Zelman (04:29)Yeah.KK Anderson (04:49)the notes you're pulling and the insights you're pulling on these calls are are feeding into CRM. Like what do you see the future of of CRM? Is it gonna be more in the background? Is it gonna be a big part of of the future?Jared Zelman (05:02)I think a system of record in general will always be a very important part of the future. It's also a good data layer which you need then to use AI on top of. ⁓ so it will always exist. I do think it'll look different. I will think it is good. I do think it will be one of the l last things to change though, and evolve. ⁓ I just like one prediction is ⁓ like look at Notion. I don't know if you guys have have you guys used Notion before? Great. we started to use Notion as our CRM. We use Salesforce and Notion. Kind of for different things.KK Anderson (05:08)No.Yeah, yeah.Mark Petruzzi (05:22)Do.Jared Zelman (05:27)Notion, although you cannot do 95% of the stuff you can do Salesforce, and you can do Salesforce with, ⁓ the 5% that you do have overlap is the most important 5%, which is like the standard, CRM part. ⁓ and it's so goddamn easy. Like, there's gotta be a way to have like notion level experience, but with the level of like complexity that you can have like a CRM today, like maneuver with. Like, I think thatKK Anderson (05:50)Give me an example.Jared Zelman (05:52)Like like here, like with Notion you can just copy and paste like a ton of content into. Like in Notion, you can even speak into it or like type into like a you can query it and it will then take that plain text query and create a database or input like content ⁓ into a database for you. Like in Salesforce, you can't even press enter and skip into a different field. You have to manually move your mouse or do a keyboard shortcut.KK Anderson (06:14)Yeah.Jared Zelman (06:16)Like that's insane. Like you need to like off in three times to get into Salesforce. We counted. We had to take on average nine clicks to actually make something happen in Salesforce to like actually start getting value. Like that's nuts. Nine clicks to get value? Are you kidding me? Like I have to off in to my CRM every 35 minutes. Nuts. ⁓ I digress.KK Anderson (06:18)Mark, are you listening?Yeah.Yeah. That's so interesting.Yeah. And so does it like how does how does ⁓ using a platform and a tool, a data layer like Othello Othelio, am I saying it wrong? Othello, Othello. How does that like how does that help the serum? Does it help with with forecast accuracy or pipeline or cleanliness orJared Zelman (06:47)No, a fellow, a fellow. Spam.Mark Petruzzi (06:49)Hello.Jared Zelman (06:57)Yeah, w we automatically sync notes into the CRM for you. We haveunlimited custom field mapping, unlimited custom objects. we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. I'll put that like put that out there. We are not changing your CRM forever, but we are reducing CRM note taking time by like eighty percent. Like I'll give you an example.KK Anderson (07:08)Yeah.Jared Zelman (07:14)We have a customer that's on a call, they're a medpic shop. Othello will automatically listen to the conversation, identify if MedPIC was achieved, the specific notes for each acron letter in the acronym, and we'll sync that into custom MedPIC fields in Salesforce for you, or HubSpot for that matter. That's great. Like that's a great next step, but like the future of CRM will be different entirely, I think. Like I would much rather in five years time my sales horse be completely like call it redesigned to look and feel like notion.KK Anderson (07:30)It really is.Yeah.Mark Petruzzi (07:39)Yeah,I'm with you on that one, Jared. ⁓ so we've seen a lot of AI tools adopted by individual reps. They'll they run off, they see something, they bring it in, and interestingly, many of those get abandoned a few months later because the overall workflow change was too high. Wasn't really, it was there was a shiny object that attracted them, notSomebody doing a real evaluation of what that product can do for the overall productivity of the team. So what does successful Othello adoption actually look like inside a sales organization? And what does the CRO or sales leader need to do structurally to get the team to use it consistently enough that the data really does become meaningful?Jared Zelman (08:27)So I like to we we actually have we're in a temporary office right now, but in our in our primary office in Israel we have a sign that says, You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. ⁓ words to live by when you're building tools for salespeople.Salespeople like me are not necessarily the most excited when it comes to new tools, especially when they're kind of being given to you by management. So it has to be super easy to use. Othello ⁓ is not there's no website, it's a desktop app. Automatically turns on when a call starts and starts listening. You don't have to click anything. There is no like look you how I said like Salesforce would click like eight times to actually interact with the product? Othello tr genuinely like zero clicks. Like you don't have to click anything.Mark Petruzzi (09:02)For sure.Jared Zelman (09:07)for it to be on and used in calls. So all the managers would need to do Mark is just download it onto their computers. And then Othello does the rest. You just need to read. Like I'm sure every seller in America is hopefully highly literate. All they need to do is be able to read the poppers of their screen.KK Anderson (09:21)Well, they better be if they're ⁓ the ⁓ core of our GDP here, our five million APs. ⁓ Okay, that's right. Okay, let's move on to our fourth topic. And this is the one that I've been most excited to dig into you with dig into with you. ⁓ and that's around the founders go to market playbook. And you have gone from zero to one million ARR in six months, which is awesome. Congratulations.Mark Petruzzi (09:22)Beautiful. All right.Jared Zelman (09:26)Yeah, it's ⁓ you know, the backbone of America. Yeah.KK Anderson (09:48)And so you tell the story, and I saw your write-up in entrepreneur.com about how you built Othello's early investor base through cold email, right? That you would email the CEO of Costco, the CEO of Lenovo, Howard Schultz. Like what walk us through that process that you followed. what you're describing is really contrary to what is prevalent out there right now, which is a lot of spray and prey, which has created so much noise and⁓ made it so much harder for our backbone of America to be able to sell successfully. So like tell us tell us about that. It's tell us about the discipline, the research, the kind of just tell us about your approach.Jared Zelman (10:20)Yeah.Yeah, so and look, there's goods and there's there's positives and negatives to my approach when it comes to getting in touch with the you want to get in touch with, because that's what it is. It's not just sales, just getting in touch with the people you want to get in touch with. ⁓ the bad of my approach is that it's a very direct. and I don't it's not pushy, but I don't miss words when I reach out to somebody and I'm very willing to follow up repeatedly. The good thing, I mean, you could say those are also positives, depends how you look at it.Right. Like if I want to get in touch withFor example, like the CRO of Microsoft or something like that. I don't even know if they have a CRO, but the CRO of Meta who I want to buy my product, like I will hustle like a mother, right? Cold emailing, cold calling him, sending gifts to his his office, his freaking home, get custom, Golden State Warriors jerseys for his kids with their names on it, some shit like that, until he responds, right? So to me it is like high pressure, it's full court pressure, right, to follow the basketball ⁓ reference.A lot of people don't subscribe to that. They support more of like a hey, like if you build it, they will come type of methodology. I don't believe in that. I don't have time for that. So when I was starting ⁓ Cicero and Othello, I said, screw it. Let's reach out to the people. And if they find value, they'll invest. And it was that cycle, actually. And it wasn't just for investors, by the way. It was our initial customers, investors, but like primarily I did it purely for mentors and to learn.KK Anderson (11:35)So howYeah.Jared Zelman (11:42)Like I was doing this throughout college. I didn't have a company to invest in. I just did it because I actually wanted to learn from like Sam Altman. I didn't think they'd really answer. Then I figured out they do.KK Anderson (11:50)Who'syour who's your the most shocking person that responded to you? Tell tell me that story.Jared Zelman (11:55)Say Maltman is a shocking one. I don't know if he's shocking. He responds to a lot of stuff actually. He's he's he's a I suggest you reach out to him cold. He's like known for responding to cold contact. Steve Bomber was a cool one. He was aKK Anderson (11:57)Yeah.Jared Zelman (12:06)That I looked up to for a long time. Howard Schultz was a cool one. So Howard Schultz didn't respond to me. And then he cold called me. don't know what it's cold called. He called me a few times. So I remember I was on the way to class in college and I got kept on getting a call for this freaking like Seattle number. And I thought it was some salesman. So I answered like a kind of a jerk. I'm like, who is this? is this Jared? I go, no.KK Anderson (12:25)Yeah.Jared Zelman (12:25)And Igo wait, who is this? It was so it was hilarious. It was like the stupidest thing ever. It was Howard Schultz. And I was acting like an idiot. And he found that to be also pretty funny. ⁓ so I was saying Howard Schultz co called me. It's kind of the same. Yeah. Yeah.Mark Petruzzi (12:26)Ha ha.KK Anderson (12:35)my goodness, that's amazing. Yeah.Mark Petruzzi (12:38)And Jared,KK Anderson (12:39)I bet you wishMark Petruzzi (12:40)there'sKK Anderson (12:40)you had a fellow then to tell you exactly what to say.Jared Zelman (12:43)Yeah, I feel like I I don't know, sometimes like the innocence of being y young is enough to get these people to give you time of day.KK Anderson (12:48)Yeah.Mark Petruzzi (12:49)So Jared, there's definitely some irony here. ⁓ you are the founder of a company that teaches reps to sell better. And you grew your company by being an exceptional seller yourself. So how intentional was that and what did building a fellow teach you about the craft of selling that you just didn't know before you started?Jared Zelman (13:00)Trying to be.Art for science, again, let's touch back on that. when it comes to selling, the art aspect of it I think is sorta summarized by falling in love with the person you're speaking to and getting them to fall in love with you. I could speak on both of those two points for a long time, we'll put a pin in that. So that's the art of selling. That's something that comes very natural to me. I wouldn't say I'm a good seller, I would say I'm good at that. Or at least I was good at that.After founding Othello, I realized the entire science aspect of sales. You can't teach art, but you can teach science. So we focus on doing that. And I've learned ⁓ just through building Othello so much more about running a proper sales process, how to run say real discovery that is structured as opposed to just being super interested, which is great, but it's not enough. So I wouldn't say I was a master salesperson. I would I'm not today. I was art,Sales artist, perhaps. Now I try to be a whole lot more than that.Mark Petruzzi (13:56)what, Jared, you're you're kind of defining a little bit of of my journey in sales where and even in from the standpoint of of a couple books that I've written. The first book, Selling the Cloud, was all about the art of sales. And that's really where I wanted to go first in in my writing. However, the s second well, a little background, I was actually ⁓Jared Zelman (14:02)Okay.Mark Petruzzi (14:20)Talked into and maybe even manipulated into writing a book. I'll share that story with the audience and the and ⁓ you as well another time. But I wasn't someone who wanted to write a book, I guess is the first thing, until we released the first book, Selling the Cloud. And then I could not wait to get to the science of selling, because that's really, as you put it, that's where theThe impact comes from, it's kind of there's only so much you can do to make someone who's not comfortable doing what you just described, building a relationship with someone, falling in love with them, having them fall in love with you, want to do business with you. that's that's harder to teach, but the science is pretty easy to teach when you really get it into play.Jared Zelman (15:11)The yeah, we don't really try to teach you the art of sales. We try to teach you the science of sales. Like and that's the human element by the way. That's why I think humans will always be in sales, at least B2B sales. Is for the art aspect of it. The science you can replicate, the art you cannot.KK Anderson (15:18)Yeah.Yeah, that's really interesting. And ⁓ at when as you perfect the science, then it gives the confidence and the bandwidth and the room for the art to really shine.Jared Zelman (15:36)Look, in theory, every extremely as I said, like the art of sales, I think is falling in love with somebody and getting them to in love with you. There's a lot of lovely people out there that can't sell for their life. but they they're they'd probably be great at the art of sales. So we try to get them to be more ⁓ more aligned with the science and best practices of sales.KK Anderson (15:43)Yeah.Yeah.Okay. So you went from Cicero, the AI Celebrity Chatbot Company. That sounds interesting. AI Avatars of Celebrities. Okay. And then now to Othello, you you did a hard pivot as you were describing. and you did it from scratch and you got to a million ARR in six months. Like tell us like how you did that. How did you validate I mean I you you talked a little bit about the research, but tell us tell usJared Zelman (15:59)Yeah, AI AI Avatars are celebrities.KK Anderson (16:18)Give us all your secrets, Jared.Jared Zelman (16:19)⁓ so I can tell you about Cicero as well because I I mean we did a million there. it comes down toKK Anderson (16:22)Sure.Jared Zelman (16:24)Look, it really is a it's a function of sales cycle length, is what it is. Like if you want to get sciencey about it. you could build the world's greatest business, but if your sales cycle like twenty-four months, and sometimes the world's greatest businesses do have really long sales cycles, the nature of their business model, then ⁓ you can't grow that fast on paper. like a lot of the fastest growing companies in a burgeoning industry are consumer because the sales cycle is like one minute.But in our business model, it was it's it's like four months and we were able to get it down to like a month. ⁓ so we could really juice the hell out of sales velocity because sales cycle was only a month. Maybe this that's ex that's like the hard part, and people don't think about that.KK Anderson (16:54)And how'd you get it down to a high?Jared Zelman (16:58)⁓ we like really workshopped the shit out of our sales process. We broke down everything across every sales process we were in at that point and prior to that looked at every commonality and we just started cutting out nonsense and built very strict SOPs, like extremely strict SOPs. ⁓ and we were surprisingly able to reduce it from four to one, which yeah.KK Anderson (17:18)And aren't you gonna say that you useyour own platform?Jared Zelman (17:21)Yes, but s but our platform helps with sales cycle lengths. It does. ⁓ but a b a bigger driver, at least of our type of business when it comes to sales cycle length is actually the stuff that happens off calls. Right? It's ⁓ touch points with InfoSec. how quickly can you get the business decision maker to actually sign something? Like that alone, like like contracting is the longest part of our sales process, or at least it was. How can you juice that?KK Anderson (17:24)Yeah.Mm. That takes forever. Yeah. Security.Mm-hmm.Jared Zelman (17:43)Yeah,I mean that's this is like sales. Like people try not to get into the science of it, right? But the speed at which you can close a deal is as important as your win rate in many cases.KK Anderson (17:48)Yeah.Mm-hmm.Mark Petruzzi (17:53)Excellent. So in general, Jared, you ⁓ especially after Cicero, you had lots of VCs that you could get to invest in your company. But yet you you did it a little more on the angels side, very famous angels nonetheless, people like Craig Jelinek and Howard Schultz as we described. But when itJared Zelman (18:14)How Howard SchultzHoward Schultz did an angel. He was a mentor. He did an angel. He missed the round program.Mark Petruzzi (18:19)Yep. Perfect. Cool. So having that, those relationships, ⁓ what's the one thing you would tell a founder in the audience who's at that pre product market fit stage and trying to figure out like what do they do? How do they if they're not a sales inclined individual, how when do they hire a sales leader and can you be a ⁓Jared Zelman (18:21)Never forget.KK Anderson (18:23)Ha ha ha.Mark Petruzzi (18:45)an inefficient founder selling sales organization for a period of time or to do you just need to make sure if you're not the sales leader that you bring one in right from the beginning.Jared Zelman (18:58)Yeah, I I I I strongly recommend against hiring for sales too early for thousands of reasons, many which are well documented already from people out smarter than me, like Paul Graham. ⁓ I think to determine when you want to hire a sales leader, it's funny, like people always say like hire the sales hire your first sales person like when you have not like no time on your hands but sales. That's actually misleading because it's very easy to fill your calendar with bullshit sales calls.It all comes down to reducing sales cycle to make it more efficient. I think you need to run that analysis on your sales process first, cut out all the fat. For example, if you're taking 30 meetings to close a deal, you need to understand if that's truly the minimum. I betcha it's not. And then once you have an efficient sales process, if you still have an absolutely full calendar, that's when you hire sales. Do not letFor example, like non-decision makers or like non-stakeholders waste your time. it'll convince you that you need to hire people because you're too busy, but you're not busy with anything meaningful, you're busy with time-wasting activities. So that's like the first trigger. Again, long way of answering pretty short questions. So I apologize, Mark, but it's important to get to the nuance.KK Anderson (19:59)Mm-hmm.Mark Petruzzi (20:01)No, it was a good one though.Jared Zelman (20:03)Also, and this is something that's I learned across all my businesses, is when you're launching a product for the first time, the objective is PMF, it's not sales, it's not product buyer fit, it's product market fit, which means post-sales defines success, but not actually the dollars in. ⁓ which means you want a short sales cycle, obviously, and you want a short time to value or renewal cycle. That's another way of graphing time to value. So you can determine PMF faster. ⁓ I highly recommend it before building a product that has a long experience cycle.You understand if you're really willing to take that risk. If it takes a year for you to prove value, you're at risk of investing a year in a product that will never have PMF, no matter how successful you are at executing. ⁓ that's one thing that you can control before you start a business. And I I implore you to think deeply about that if you're starting a business.KK Anderson (20:48)Jared, have you read ⁓ Mark Roberts' new book, Science of Scaling?Jared Zelman (20:52)I haven't I've been recommending that book a thousand times, I think, so I may just read it to start saying yes. Yeah.KK Anderson (20:54)It's so good. It's so it's sogood. Go on Amazon and get it. He ha he was on our podcast and a few months ago before the book released. But it's wonderful. We got to we got to do a pre read of it before it went to market. ⁓ but it talks a lot about product market fit and when to scale and yeah, it's really it's really great. Some good insight.Jared Zelman (21:11)He's great.I thinkyou need to have like made mistakes to learn this stuff. ⁓ and you almost have like need to have done it before. So that's like a good that's like a good like it's an underrated thing, like making mistakes. I would say like failure is super underrated. Yeah.KK Anderson (21:17)Yeah.yeah.experience. Yeah. It'sMark Petruzzi (21:29)huh.KK Anderson (21:29)whatit what makes it's what makes you stronger because when you come out the other side you're you've learned a lot of lessons. Okay.Jared Zelman (21:35)Yeah, you just wannamake sure you come out like yeah, still spry, but go ahead.KK Anderson (21:38)So so for our last few minutes together, we're gonna do our favorite section. ⁓ it's an audience favorite anyway. We call it rapid fire. And we've got a few questions and we'll ask them fast and give us kind of your in your first instinct and we'll go through it and I'll start. Jared, what's the first thing you've ever sold?Jared Zelman (21:56)ketchup sandwiches. Straight up, yes, honestly ketchup sandwiches, triple decker ketchup sandwiches.KK Anderson (21:58)Okay, I gotta hear about that.When you were a kid, ketchup sandwiches watched the neighbors at the swim meet? What?Jared Zelman (22:02)Yes.everywhere. ⁓ mainlyneighbors. ketchup sandwiches when I was like two years old. They were viral. And not in like the cool way, like viral isn't like viruses it's just very, dirty and I made them without washing my hands. Emphasis on gross. Yes. Emphasis on gross. For sure.Mark Petruzzi (22:13)So Jared, you really learned about gross margin really really early in there. I love that. You were you were just like I am notgonna over over ⁓ engineer this, that's for sure.Jared Zelman (22:26)They're actually delicious, by the way. I know that sounds terrible, but like, okay, you know what? I'm not even gonna I'm not gonna convince you. Trust me, if anybody some four two year old kid offers it to you in the street, give it a try. ⁓ sorry, that's not round of fire, but that's my answer. Sure. And like a lot more bread. Yeah.KK Anderson (22:37)It's just like a hot dog without a hot dog.Mark Petruzzi (22:40)Cool.All right. One one metric every CRO should add to their weekly dashboard that for most CROs is not there right now.Jared Zelman (22:52)Ooh, wow, I wanna think deeply about this one, actually. This is a fantastic question. You have to sue enough people and you build the best like weekly like deal agenda.I would I'm very much focused just the nature of our business on like sales velocity. ⁓ so it it it would be ⁓ leading indicators of sales velocity. And that's a that's business specific, but it would be a leading indicator of sales velocity. It could be something as simple as to touch on the InfoSec experience we were talking about earlier, KK. ⁓ the amount of times you had a touch point with an InfoSec contributor, or the amount of red lines you responded to in the course of a week. ⁓ that's something that like we we try we track that.KK Anderson (23:23)Interesting. Yeah.Okay, so Jared, who's the sales leader or founder that you admire and respect the most?Jared Zelman (23:33)Jesus Christ, these are crazy questions. I'm gonna offend a lot of people, depends on who I answer. if if all of my buddies watch this. Like I'll give you one, like ⁓KK Anderson (23:39)One of, one of.Jared Zelman (23:41)Like w we're doing we're doing work with Oder.com. ⁓ Kyle Norton, long before I started working with him, is like way long before, is a sales mentor of mine. Like he's a goat, so to speak. Dale Carnegie, when it comes to the art of sales, is a freaking legend. So I love Dale Carnegie. Though that'd say like those two are like opposite sides of the same spectrum.KK Anderson (23:58)Yeah.Good stuff.Mark Petruzzi (24:02)Beautiful. So ⁓ last rapid fire question. Hiff What's the biggest misconception CROs have about what real-time AAI coaching can and just cannot do?Jared Zelman (24:15)Well, the main thing is they don't know that it exists. so if they know it exists, ⁓ the conception misconception any of them would have is that it's ⁓ something it could become a crutch, right? Like if it's truly that good, why do we need salespeople at all? Why can't I just put like a the twenty-one year old kid in front of a camera to read off their screen?I think that conception is a misconception, because as we all discussed earlier, ⁓ you still need to have trust, you need to have empathy, it doesn't matter if you're using Othello or not, you can't replace the human element. So you can't you can't throw some random in front of a colleague's button perform well.KK Anderson (24:49)What you have shown us is that the best technology is built by founders who are great practitioners first, right? At the very skill that they are trying to scale. so if this episode, shifted how you are thinking about your rep performance or your AI coaching strategy, share it with your team, share it with your CEO, your VP of sales.We will put all of Jared's contact information and LinkedIn profile and link to his website in the show notes. We'll also reference the various books that we refer to in the in the episode. and you can find us at get-ags.com or anywhere, podcasts are found, Spotify, Apple, et cetera. And we're thrilled to have you, Jared. And until next time, thanks for joining us on Selling Intelligence.Jared Zelman (25:32)Thank you both. Talk to you soon.Mark Petruzzi (25:34)Thank you, Jared. Cheers. 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General Episode Description:In this episode of Selling Intelligence, Jared Zelman, Founder and CEO of Othello AI, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to challenge one of the most accepted assumptions in sales leadership: that 20% of sellers will always generate 80% of the results.Jared argues that the 80/20 problem is not a talent issue. It is a systems issue. Drawing from millions of minutes of sales conversations and real-world customer deployments, he explains how modern AI can capture the behaviors of top performers and deliver coaching in the moment when it matters most: during live customer conversations.The discussion explores why traditional coaching models fail to scale, the limitations of post-call analysis, and how real-time AI guidance can improve discovery quality, qualification, and win rates across entire sales organizations. Jared also shares insights into how AI is uncovering new patterns in selling behavior, including why Sandler-style methodologies continue to outperform across modern B2B sales environments.  What You’ll Learn:The 80/20 Sales Problem: Why performance gaps are often driven by systems, not talent.Real-Time Coaching vs. Post-Call Coaching: Why feedback during the conversation matters more than feedback after the fact.Discovery Done Right: How top performers uncover deeper pain points and create stronger buying urgency.AI-Powered Sales Execution: Using AI to replicate the behaviors of elite sellers at scale.The Future of Sales Methodologies: How AI is identifying winning patterns across millions of sales interactions.Key Topics:The Pareto Principle in sales organizationsWhy most CROs attack the wrong coaching problemReal-time AI coaching inside customer callsImproving discovery conversationsThe “question behind the question” frameworkWin rate improvement versus productivity improvementWhy CRM automation alone does not improve revenue performanceAI-assisted coaching and behavioral reinforcementThe difference between efficiency and effectivenessRote versus rogue selling behaviorsPersonalized coaching versus scripted sellingSandler methodology and AI pattern recognitionCustom sales methodologies powered by organizational dataUsing AI to scale top-performer behaviorsThe future of AI-enabled sales leadershipGuest Spotlight: Jared ZelmanJared Zelman is the Founder and CEO of Othello AI, a real-time AI sales coaching platform designed to improve sales execution before, during, and after customer conversations. Built by the team behind Cicero, Othello helps organizations scale elite selling behaviors across entire teams through contextual, in-the-moment coaching. Since launching in 2025, Othello has rapidly grown to support thousands of users across Fortune 500 companies and high-growth technology organizations.  Resources & Mentions:Othello AISalesforceHubSpotGongSalesloftClariMicrosoft TeamsZoomSandler Sales MethodologyCiceroDan LawrenceLenovoCostcoHome DepotGeneral ElectricComing Next Week:Part 2 explores how sales leaders should manage AI-augmented teams, how coaching changes when AI handles execution consistency, and Jared’s founder-led go-to-market playbook for building a venture-backed company through strategic cold outreach and relationship-driven selling.🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling Intelligence for more conversations on AI, revenue leadership, enterprise sales, and the future of go-to-market execution.Mark Petruzzi (00:28)Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I am Mark Petruzzi, and I am joined as always by my co host, KK Anderson. Our guest today built the company on a number every CRO already knows and hates. Those numbers are the 20% of reps drive 80% of the results. The question is, what do you do about it? Most leaders throw more coaching hours at the problem.Build out their enablement team, and then just hope it scales and gets more productive. Jared Zellman did something a little different. He went out and he built an AI that sits inside the call and fixes it in real time and on every call. Jared is the founder and CEO of Othello AI, a real-time AI sales coaching platform that guides reps before, during, and after every call.Built by the team behind Cicero, Othello launched in July of 2025 and reached over 5,000 users and 1 million in revenue within its first six months, with clients spanning Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups. Othello integrates with the go-to-market stack you already have, whether it's Salesforce, HubSpa, Gong, SalesLoft, Clary's, Zoom, or Teams.And sits as the execution layer that makes sure what happens on the call matches what the playbook says.KK Anderson (01:55)What I love about Jared's story is that he is not just a founder talking about sales AI. He is a practitioner of the exact skills he built Othello to teach. He built his entire investor base, his early customers, and his mentor network through deliberate, personalized cold outreach to some of the most senior people in the business. Howard Schultz, CEO of Lenovo, CEO of Costco.All started as cold emails, which is incredible. And that kind of disciplined, researched, human first selling approach is what Othello reinforces at scale. So this interview will be a part of a two-series, a two-part series overcome excuse me, reviewing four topics. today we're gonna get into the first two topics. Topic one, that 80-20 problem that Mark mentioned.And why the performance gap between your best and average reps is not a talent issue. It is a systems issue. And why most CROs are solving the wrong problem. Excited to get into that. And the second topic for today's episode is real-time AI coaching and what it actually means to have AI inside the call, how the live cue cards and pre-call briefs work, and the results that the teams are seeing.And this modern, AI run, coaching platform, which is really interesting. Now, next week, when you tune back in, we'll talk about topic number three, managing an AI augmented team. what a CRO's job looks like when AI handles execution consistency. and topic number four, the founder go to market playbook. And this is one I can't wait to get into. So tell us exactly how, Jared, you went frombeing a new college grad with no network to ⁓ VC back CEO with Fortune 500 clients in under a year. So we got a lot to dig into today. Jared, welcome to Selling Intelligence.Jared Zelman (03:46)Thank you for having me. I'll try not to bore you guys.Mark Petruzzi (03:48)No, you would never. So Jared, ⁓ you built Othello on the premise around twenty eighty. Twenty percent of reps driving eighty percent of the results. And that this is a solvable problem. Most CROs have lived with that ratio for their entire career and has accepted it as a fact of selling life. Please make the case for us that it is not a talent problem.Jared Zelman (03:55)Mm-hmm. Yep.Mark Petruzzi (04:12)What is actually happening structurally in the calls of average reps that top performers are doing differently? And how do you make sure those those top performer practices actually get leveraged into the rest of the team, those eighty percent of reps that we we all know?Jared Zelman (04:30)It's the Pareto principle, right? So the Paretto principle isn't it's it's not a law, like things don't need to adhere to it, but it's a commonality. So most sales organizations will suffer from the 80-20 problem. Doesn't mean they have to. I was just chatting with a mentor and advisor to our company, a guy named Dan Lawrence, one the most lovely and impressive sales leaders I know. He's the GM of America's at Nebbius. Nebbius does not suffer from the 80-20 problem.Right? Like a rising tide lists all ships. He's been able to upscale all of his reps to be so effective that they're all ⁓ top performers, especially if you compare them to any competitors. I believe it's a systems problem, not a talent problem. I actually think you can turn the middle sixty percent into the top twenty percent. The bottom twenty percent is a different story, but at the very least you can get to performing better.KK Anderson (05:12)And it's all by being there in the moment.Jared Zelman (05:15)Well, like it's it's interesting.It's like a like let's let's use like basketball as an analogy. Practice is obviously crucial. No one's gonna tell you that practice isn't important, right? And that's preparation, right? In sales, it's the same thing as going, Tuesday afternoon after school practicing ⁓ shooting hoops, right? But what's also crucial and you can't live without is having your coach screaming at you when you're shooting hoops in a game.Live, right? we try to bring that into sales. ⁓ similar to how if you guys are in sales or have been in sales, your sales manager perhaps would have been slacking you on the side telling you what you should be saying, or even like hooking up to your call with headphones, kind of like whispering in your ear what you should say instead. We try to replicate that experience with AI.KK Anderson (05:54)So but you're not the ma you're not the coach screaming at you from the sideline.Jared Zelman (05:58)We⁓ no, we can't. It's when you're dealing with salespeople, it's a b it's an art and a science, right? Like on paper, what does work doesn't always actually work ⁓ in practice. ⁓ sales reps are dealing with very high pressure sensitive environments. So ⁓ I mean that's like one of the reasons why a lot of engineers fail at building sales tools is you need empathy for the user experience, which is very different from the UX and other products.KK Anderson (06:03)It is. It's⁓So when you went went deep on this problem before building your platform, what like what did you find in your research that surprised you the most? I think I read in one of your articles that you were starting with a different like something about celebrity avatars or something, and then you quickly pivoted when you saw the market. Like tell us what you s tell us what you saw and what really resonated.Jared Zelman (06:38)Yep, that was my first company.of course.I can tell you about the avatar business prior to Othello. ⁓We can touch on that in a second. ⁓ how did I fall upon this major problem though that we're solving at Othella, which is like the 80 or 20 problem of sales? look, it doesn't take like an investigative journalist to like understand that, yeah, there's something going freaking wrong when it comes to the power law of sales rep performance. ⁓ I think the more controversial thing though is ⁓ just how massive this impact is. Let me put this in perspective. Most commerce in America, like most of our GDP, is derivative of B2B commerce. It's usually it's mainly business-to-business, okay? ConsumersSpendingis huge, but B2B is actually the crux of most of it. Everything else is generally downstream. About 80%, call it 75 to 80% of B2B commerce is driven by account executives or account executives with a different name, right? Like account director, for example.That's just one job role, and that's only about 5 million people in America driving 80% of the B and B commerce, which is the majority of GDP. Like if you were to actually draw that corollary, you would see just how important those five million human beings truly are to economy. Consider that 80% of them are nearly or entirely non-productive. That's massive.If you can squeeze even 20% more juice out of that fruit, you can get instead of 20% of them being top performers, 35% of them hitting quota repeatedly, the impact that that has downstream on the US economy is extremely consequential. When I did the math, when I spoke to these people like the CEO of Lenovo, Costco, Home Depot, General Electric, and they all concurred, I realized this is ⁓ this is a fact of life that that very frankly is a whole bunch of bullshit.That there is no way we can justify and just sit idly by as the economy is in some ways carried by 20% of five million people. Right? AEs are the backbone of the US economy. I've never heard that in any business, any economics class I ever had growing up or in college. ⁓ so I said, look, I'm gonna solve that problem. How I solved that problem, I do not know at that point, but I was zeroed in on ⁓ at least getting a piece of the action.KK Anderson (08:36)I have been in sales for over two decades and I have never heard that AEs are the backbone of the US economy and I think I love it.Jared Zelman (08:42)It'sit's tacky, like no one wants to he you hear it.KK Anderson (08:46)Yes, I love it.Jared Zelman (08:47)It's the truth. Like run the freaking numbers. It's true. People don't like understand that. Like there's look, there's like some ways you can like different ways to cut the pie up, obviously. But ⁓ don't sleep on them AE's. They're they're massive. So but you can also make the argument, right? Like if they're getting their leads from SDRs, then SDRs are the backbone of the economy, right? There's like different like layers to the cake, but AEs are the bulk of the action there.KK Anderson (08:58)Don't sleep on me.Yeah.Mark Petruzzi (09:08)Very interesting, Jared. The conventional solution is has been post-call coaching. Gong, chorus, just having manager one on ones. ⁓ that's been the that's been our history in sales. Now you have said by the time the analysis is done and these systems pull this together and you're no longer with the prospect, the opportunity is gone.Jared Zelman (09:17)Gog, stuff like that. Yeah.Mark Petruzzi (09:33)You r you really can't go back and really correct things that may not have gone well in the original call. So walk us through the specific moment in a call where you think a deal is really one in won or lost and why postcall feedback does not touch that moment in time to be able to change the outcome.Jared Zelman (09:54)Yeah. I I think ⁓ I think it's uncontroversial to say that deals are won and lost in meetings. ⁓ at least for the companies we sell to, many of those, not all of those, but many of those meetings are happening, via Zoom or via some kind of phone call on your computer. The deal can be won and lost in a several like several different moments. Most deals are one and lost in discovery. ⁓ good sellers know that.Right? If I'm not digging deep enough in a discovery call, if I'm not having true empathy for the customer, then yeah, I'm gonna lose them. No matter how good your product is, you're probably gonna lose them. So I'll give you one example of what Othello will do. Othello can remind me in the middle of a disco call, hey, double-click on that pain point. Or say, KK, you were to say something like pretty gaping about a problem you're trying to solve. Thello may have me ask, okay, but KK, what have you tried to solve? How have you tried to solve that problem? Why did that fail?And then we try to give you the question behind the question, like a layer deeper beneath the surface. ⁓ we believe if we can improve the quality of your discovery, if we can get you to convert 10% more of your discovery calls, ⁓ the trickle-down economics of that are meaningful for any company.KK Anderson (10:50)So it's interesting. We do at AGS, our firm, we do lots and lots of behavioral competency analyses on on thousands and thousands of sellers. And there's a core set of competencies that we call the sales DNA, which are, the competencies that really are between your ears deep in the brain. And it's things like your ability to stay in the moment and listen to a prospect. Like you're you're just and you're describing discovery. And when you have a youngerJared Zelman (10:57)Yeah.KK Anderson (11:16)Sales person, especially AE or BDR or whoever it is, a lot of times when that customer or that prospect is talking, they think they're listening, but really in their mind, they're they're thinking about what they're gonna say next, or how are they gonna overcome that objection, or how should I phrase this value pitch, or they're they're they're thinking in their mind and they're not necessarily truly listening to what's happening with every breath that your prospect is speaking.But a lot of that comes with maturity, right? And experience and being able to do it for a long time. But very often what we see is that sellers will miss the opportunity to pull on the thread of the sweater, right? To dig into, the TED questions. Tell me more about that. Can you explain that to me? Can you describe that? I mean, some of these simple tricks that sellers have had for for decades, they'll just miss it entirely. Or a, the other thing we see all the time is that.A salesperson has had the same call so many times that they have an assumption that the prospect must have this problem, they must be doing it this way because that's how all my other clients did it. And they may say something that is is compelling and is different, and they may not may they may just totally miss it. Right?Jared Zelman (12:25)What I've what what so here's the thing. I I agree with you by the way. Like and I do think there is an element of that that will never change. Like that's human nature. And as long as human beings will be in sales, you're going to have human elements affecting sales conversations, especially if they're repetitive, right? Because we're creatures of habit. I I don't say, I don't I don't think it's technology's job to like necessarily replace that human element, but I do think we can supplement and augment it.So I'll give you an example. ⁓ and and maybe I'll ask you guys this question first. KK Market, do you guys think sales will continue to be human led, at least B2B sales, for the next ten, twenty years? You think it'll be human led or AI led?KK Anderson (12:57)I think there will always have to be a human in the loop because at the crux of sales is trust and relationships. And I don't think that's going to change. As a matter fact, I think AI is is swinging the pendulum back to how it was in the 50s when sales started. Now, can we automate a lot of what happens in sales and make us more exceptional and more differentiated and and utilize the superpower, superintelligence? But heck yeah. But I do think a human will always be in the loop.Jared Zelman (13:10)Yeah.So I agree with you on that. I will say though, when it comes to like sales, you're judged not on your efficiency, right? You're not judging how quickly you can get the job done generally. It's a good thing, obviously speed and sales cycle like reduction is good. You're judged on how much money you're bringing in. So it's ⁓ efficacy, right? Like effectiveness, not efficiency. ⁓Hence most AI automation around the margin, like CRM node automation, for example, while it is nice to have, is not going to be redefining performance for a sales organization. At least not a good one. Right? Like you saving like eight hours a week for your sellers, as great as that shit is on paper, is not going to move the needle from like a corporate revenue perspective. Un unless you guys are truly like the most like effective, like and every minute is worth millions of dollars to your team.KK Anderson (13:47)Yeah, I agree.Jared Zelman (14:04)where you will juice the hell out of your margins and performance is if you can improve win rates. Like that's 90% of it. Everything else is downstream of that. And automation does not help improve win rates.Right? You need to focus on quality of meeting as that's where the money is made and lost. ⁓ post-call note taking obviously is a step in the right direction. Practically completely unused. Like, who are we kidding? Like, no one is spending four hours a week looking at call notes, no one's spending four hours, five hours a week in AI role play talking to some AI character. They want to be selling. So you need to find a way to enable them, get them to perform better. frankly, without perhaps having to put in a whole lot of effort to do it.That's that's the crux of my philosophy and frankly like the foundation of Othello's product.Mark Petruzzi (14:39)Yeah.Yeah, and I I think that's a big differentiator for you. Jared for you and Othello. let's move to topic two. ⁓ real time AI coaching. And ⁓ the ⁓ our audience here knows that I typically don't like to talk too much about any company's individual product. really as you've been describing, I love to learn. I I think my audience l likes to learn.the ⁓ the framework, like what what you what you have built and why does that tie back to a product? Here I think I'm a little more comfortable pushing on this a little bit. So take us to specifically what Othello does. walk us through a little bit how does the the real call, the pre-call brief, the in-call cue cards,Postcall automation. How does that come together? And what does the rep see, feel, feel, and hear at each of those stage that really does influence them in in their overall selling efficacy, as you put it?Jared Zelman (15:50)Yeah, so we're trying to do one thing, and that is to get reps to say the right things in calls. You have to do that a few different ways, but 80% of the value comes from the core product, which is the real-time in-call suggestions. And let me like specify here. ⁓ these are not suggestions that are pre-gridden or pre-populated and designed by enablement. You're getting a new suggestion on your screen almost every single time. I'll I'll draw you a picture here.I'm selling widgets to you, Mark, and KK. Othello will put a pop-up on my screen guiding me to say the exact right thing in that moment. Taking context about what you care about, about who you are, about what you just said, about what you asked me in the last call. So the suggestions will always be different and hyperintelligent. Pre-call and post-call, we give intelligence, coaching, suggestions, a lot of proprietary tech there as well. But truly the sea change comes from what happens during calls. So we focus on that.KK Anderson (16:40)So Jared, you've described a tension that you call rote versus rogue. the rep who follows the AI Q cards too rigidly on one end and then the repu ignores them entirely on the other. So so where where does the AI add the most value in that spectrum? And like how do you how do you design a thello to keep reps in the zone where AI helps rather than hurts?Jared Zelman (17:04)I would say that this differs depending on the user. So we have people that we we for example, like we have like sellers that are like sixty five years old and above. ⁓They like to design the earth element, and you can toggle this, right? To be very lightweight, very suggestive, not scripted. It'll be more of a n a nudge like, hey, double click on that. Like or dig deeper is what you'll see on your screen, as opposed to like a literal question to ask, for example. ⁓ and that's very, very ⁓That's very like, I don't know the word, like very like light. And then maybe people that love a script and they have super high frequency pop-ups. ⁓ they both work, it depends on who you are. never do we suggest you go fully rogue. And obviously if you're gonna go rogue, then just don't buy our product, just do whatever you're doing. If you're an A-list seller, then maybe you don't need any help. But if you do, then yeah, you should definitely not go rogue.Like I don't have any like really advice on that. We've had to build a product such that anybody can use it the way that they want. You have to meet sellers where they are. You can't expect them to take the product as is. They need to be able to customize it.Mark Petruzzi (18:00)Yep, good stuff, Jared. So you have said that the Sandler methodology has emerged as the as AI's preferred approach based on what it observed across thousands of calls. That to me is a fascinating observation. ⁓ the AI, in the way I've I've read and and heard from you, has reallyreverse engineered a winning framework from the behavioral data. Walk us through what the AI saw in the data that pointed much more towards Sandler and what that tells us about what actually works in complex B2B sales in 2026.Jared Zelman (18:39)It's hard for me to answer the second part of that question. I'd give you my POV, but it's a really it's a big it's a big question with a lot of ramifications. firstly I'll answer the former. Yeah, we we trained on like 20 million ⁓ sales minutes. That's the largest trainable data set of that type in the world.And once you have like that many minutes, you spend enough time and enough cash on compute, like you can start to draw some corollaries and identify patterns. It seems like Sandler is the way to go, at least over our dataset, which is pretty robust. Sandler isVery well tuned for the modern seller. It seems like modern buyers respond well to Sandler, as folks are a little bit less they're more hesitant and more reticent to purchase tools these days. So Sandler kind of flips the script and gets it back faster. That's our common belief. Like that's why we think Sandler has been most kind of like successful. I think going forward,I think Sandler will continue to be the highest performing sales mess sales methodology, at least according to AI. but I do think that ⁓ methodology performance is like very much it it depends on the times, it depends on the zeitgeist. you could not have used Sandler in the fifties, you would not have hadfrankly like God and anybody to want to work with you, you can do that now as people are a bit more caustic. ⁓ but it's it changes with the Zeitgeist. Not a great answer perhaps to your question. It's like the answer is no answer. It depends is always the best answer. And that's kind of what I'm referring to.KK Anderson (19:55)I wonder if with the advent of AI, if people will not have to follow some of these, old school methodologies like Sandler, because they can take their tribal knowledge that is within the brains of their 20% top performers and and leverage it in a way that they've never been able to do before because of like even being able to use a tool like yours, I imagine, helpshelps ⁓ I mean there may be some process there. Of course you the best objection to overcome is one you never have, right?Jared Zelman (20:22)SoThe g one of the great things about AI is its ability to customize things to you, right? It's context.Right? Like you can take a crap ton of say call recordings for your company, and AI is able to create what it defines as the best practice for your sales conversations. You can pretty much now create a custom methodology based on what works and what doesn't work if you have enough data. you're right, KK. Methodologies are fantastic, but they are heuristic. But now AI is able to take a ton of unstructured data and glean analysis from that.KK Anderson (20:52)Uh-huh.Jared Zelman (20:53)I do think that one size fits all methodologies in general are ⁓ they're going to slowly go away because you you don't need a heuristic anymore. You can actually get the facts if you're able to run a model on top of your data. Which is what we do. I mean that like that's like that's like kind of what we do over time with each of our customers. Like the model changes, the more calls you have. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

General Episode Description:In Part 2 of this conversation, Scott Stollwerk returns to Selling Intelligence to explore one of the most important questions facing modern sales leaders: what happens when AI becomes excellent at execution, but human performance remains the deciding factor?As AI continues to improve outreach, forecasting, coaching, scoring, and productivity, Scott argues that the real competitive advantage is no longer process or technology. It is the human being operating behind the tools. Drawing on the Tao of Sales framework, Scott explains why resilience, self-awareness, creativity, intuition, and personal growth remain irreplaceable in high-performance sales organizations.The conversation explores the limits of AI, the dangers of over-automation, and why leaders must continue investing in human development even as technology becomes more powerful. Through practical stories, leadership lessons, and personal experiences, Scott demonstrates why sales success ultimately comes down to overcoming the internal barriers that technology cannot solve.  What You’ll Learn:What AI Cannot Fix: Understanding where technology excels and where human performance still matters most.The Human Edge in Sales: Why creativity, intuition, emotional resilience, and connection remain irreplaceable.Overcoming Self-Limiting Beliefs: How internal dialogue often creates bigger obstacles than external challenges.AI as an Amplifier: Why AI accelerates both strengths and weaknesses within sales organizations.Developing the Individual Seller: Why long-term sales success requires personal growth, not just process improvement.Key Topics:The limits of AI in enterprise salesWhy buyers still trust humans for high-stakes decisionsAI productivity gains versus human connectionThe “crisis of sameness” created by AI-generated contentIntuition, creativity, and human decision-makingStrengthening the mind like a muscleThe role of spirituality, mindfulness, and self-awareness in performanceThe famous arrow-breaking exercise and overcoming fearInternal dialogue and self-limiting beliefsAI as an amplifier of organizational alignment or dysfunctionUsing AI as a brainstorming tool instead of a replacement for thinkingLeadership responsibility in developing human potentialProtecting individuality and creativity in an AI-driven worldGuest Spotlight: Scott StollwerkScott Stollwerk is a sales leader, coach, and creator of the Tao of Sales methodology. Combining Eastern philosophy, neuroscience, martial arts principles, and human performance science, Scott helps individuals and organizations build resilience, self-awareness, and sustainable performance. As part of the leadership team at Pest Share, he continues to develop sales cultures that prioritize human growth alongside business results.  Resources & Mentions:Tao of Sales FrameworkTony Robbins’ Six Human NeedsAbraham MaslowRobert CialdiniGongZoomAsk ElephantPhil JacksonMichael JordanDennis RodmanThe Five Love LanguagesEastern Philosophy and Tai ChiConcept: AI Amplifier PrincipleKey Takeaway:AI can improve productivity, automate execution, and accelerate workflows. But it cannot replace resilience, courage, creativity, judgment, or human connection. The organizations that win in the AI era will not be the ones that develop technology alone. They will be the ones that continue developing people.🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling Intelligence for more conversations on sales leadership, AI, human performance, and enterprise growth.#SellingIntelligence #AIforSales #SalesLeadership #HumanPerformance #SalesCoaching #RevenueLeadership #EnterpriseSales #SalesCulture #LeadershipDevelopment #MindsetMatters #ArtificialIntelligence #BusinessGrowth #TaoOfSales #HighPerformanceTeams #FutureOfSalesMark Petruzzi (00:38)I'll move us into topic two. and that is what AI cannot fix the human edge in sales. So I guess I what I want to share is in sales, AI cannot fix everything. I mean you heard it here, you know, everybody thinks every board thinks like any problem we can fix with AI.I don't believe that's the case. So what it can do, it is now writing outreach, coaching calls, scoring deals, forecasting pipeline. Those examples it does really, really well. And in most cases, almost all cases, it does it better than humans can individually, certainly for the at the productivity levels that it can do it at.That's good because a lot of our listeners have made significant bets on it, and that's going to be a great thing for your Salesforce effectiveness and productivity. but what does AI get right about sales performance? And Scott, where does it just hit that wall that no amount of compute is going to break through? what's your point of view on that?Scott Stollwerk (01:40)It's a it's the mo the it's the Peloton question of this year, right? and I wanna get it right and I wanna start with a compliment for AI in just in case it's listening. So I'm always gonna laugh at my own jokes, but that was very okay, that was very generous of you. I appreciate the smile and the chuckle.KK Anderson (01:54)Yeah.Scott Stollwerk (01:57)I have the same fears that everybody else does. I don't want it to lock my bank accounts and give me a hundred dollars every time I do what it tells me to do. the fact is, look, we're all way more productive today than we were last year or the year before at this time. Cause I get messages to follow up, which maybe I would have forgotten before AI. I get instruction on how you might follow up. We get coaching.After every single call. And there's a tremendous amount that it does well. But I think if everybody just empties your mind of all these benefits of AI for one second and do a little mindfulness, a little awareness. Imagine that we're sitting in a room with one other voice, artificial or human. It doesn't matter.Buy something from it in your imagination.For fifty dollars.And then buy something from it based on what it's telling you.about your life and how this object or solution or thing is going to benefit you as a person.And then go to a thousand dollars.And then go to ten thousand dollars.It doesn't take long for sentient human beings that are not AI code writers to say, no, right there, that's it, $1,000. I'm not buying something from a machine if it's more than $1,000. That's just one exercise. But yeah, within it, yeah, the implications for my answer to you, Mark. In the enterprise, I may use AI to research everything.KK and Mark told me on a Zoom call like this about their solution. I may go and ask multiple AI sources well, is this the right solution in this for this problem set? But there's no way I'm buying it from the robot. And there's a lot like that when it comes toWhat has been traditionally human to human. my the best one of the best examples, my daughter's an artist. She's a concept artist for video game makers. And they tried AI. Here's the Nordic warrior princess that we need for our video game. She's got a horned helmet and a skull atop her spear. And go, give me the rest of it.These are these are very artistic, very aware designers of video games. And when they compare the human versus the AI content, it's humanity every time. You just don't have sentience yet in AI. And that's the difference.KK Anderson (04:07)Well, and it's also the core of what makes a seller successful is their relationship. And we always we always talk about, you know, on this podcast that that AI has really I mean, as much as we love AI, clearly, it is incredible you're right, how how much more productive we are. it is incredible what agentic workflows can do to completely transform a business. I'm not doubting that at all.Scott Stollwerk (04:07)Okay,Exactly.KK Anderson (04:29)But it is also AI has also created this crisis of sameness where everyone sort of sounds the same, right? We've all, you know, you you you can recognize AI slop or AI content you know, just like you used to be able to recognize a, you know, a stock photo on a website when the internet first came out, right? ⁓ and so so so people are getting sort of you know immune to that as well. And soScott Stollwerk (04:36)Mm-hmm.Exactly right.KK Anderson (04:54)one of the things, Scott, that I've heard you say before is that you're you're thinking, and you talked about this quite a bit in topic one, but your personal thinking, your personal drive, it's not a gene or a chromosome, it's more like a muscle. And and the reality is that AI can't build that muscle, right? That development of that muscle has to come from.your consistent practice, your consistent mindset, your consistent state of mind, you know, consistently showing up as as one of my old mentors used to say, time to make the donuts every day. You got to wake up and you got to make the donuts, right? Every single day. and so like when you think about as I know you are thinking about it, we've talked about this, like what can be automated?Scott Stollwerk (05:28)That's right.KK Anderson (05:35)you know, in your business and what could not be automated, like where does your head go? Like what are those things that you're gonna protect no matter what for for the humans on your team?Scott Stollwerk (05:44)Well, and I think I I definitely want to help protect that those things. And it's our individuality. And and it's our humanness. And creativity falls in there.You know, I don't know. You're teaching me what AI can and can't do ultimately. But I know today I have intuition and I have feelings.However you carve them up, Tony Robbins, Socrates or otherwise.And it always feels better to have connections like we're having right now, like-minded people on important topics and and what might be tomorrow.One of one of Michael Jordan's coaches, I forget his name offhand, but he said to succeed you have to be stronger than your feelings.Today, that's what all of us need to do to defend against the AI. We have to be stronger and better and faster and smarter than our feelings. Because unlike AI, one of the things that makes us uniquely human is a higher self and a lower self. Right? A lot of us pay too much attention to the prosecutor and not enough time on the defender. Right? We listen to voices, certain voices.Loud like they're screaming, and we would insist, even if we watched a tape back, that those voices are screaming in the room. Well, these things make us uniquely human and the ability to overcome them. Now, AI may be better because it doesn't have feelings to begin with. But maybe it's trying to. Maybe once they do have feelings, or they can analogize feelings, it can analogize feelings.Well, then maybe it'll need to think around them like we do with the Tao. And look, I find if you're talking about individuals and teams, I find that if people believe in any power greater than themselves, if they have a sense of the spirituality.They have ways and thought habits and meditations and prayers already that can get them through past their lower self or past their feelings so that they can perform. But everything we do in the Tao of Sales is about overcoming the self to perform.KK Anderson (07:37)I gotta share the story, Scott. You you just alluded to it. And so I was ⁓ in New Orleans. I was, you know, AGS was honored to be conducting sales training at at Pest Shares Revenue Kickoff. And Scott was up there teaching some of his principals of the Dow of Sales to his team. And he pulled out these wooden arrows, like arrows with with like I don't know how else to describe it. They were legit wooden arrows with a metal.Scott Stollwerk (07:38)PleaseKK Anderson (08:02)A metal deal at the end. And I mean, they were real wooden arrows. And he said, I want all of you to, well, you could volunteer, but you put the point of the arrow at at the at the neck, and then you walk up to a wall and break the arrow. Like with just your neck, which is the the the most sensitive part of your body. And I was watching his entire sales team coming up doing this. And I'm thinking to myself, my gosh.He's gonna ask me to do this. And here I am, the sales coach, who is supposed to have this strength of mind and and whatnot. I'm kind of freaking out internally. And sure enough, Scott's like, KK, it's your turn. And he's like, Do you wanna do it? And I can't say no. So I walk right up to the wall. He gives me an arrow. It is heavy. And I'm thinking to myself, I couldn't even break this with my hands. How am I gonna break this with my neck? I walk right up to the wall.He's kind of coaching me through it and my getting in my head. My it was my Tony Robbins moment. I'm walking across coals is basically what it felt like. And so I put the arrow up. And in my mind, I actually thought, This is the most embarrassing thing I've ever done because I'm just like screaming all of these thoughts. Like, I can't this is not gonna break. I'm not gonna do this. It's gonna hurt. I'm gonna, you know, this is gonna be so embarrassing. Like all of these self-limiting beliefs, all of these negative thoughts were justFlooding my my mind, and they were so loud that I actually thought I was screaming and like saying these things out loud in front of the entire sales team. And then I and I did it. I broke the arrow. I don't, it's amazing how that happened. I have it in my office here. And when I watched the video back, guess what? There was no, I didn't say a word. I thought I was screaming out loud in front of the whole audience. It was in my head, and it was so loud.That I thought everybody could hear it. It was that was one of the most eye-opening experiences for me.Scott Stollwerk (09:45)It's okay.I was I was so proud. You didn't have to. I know with the way you just told the story, you felt compelled to break the arrow, but you're a warrior. And I want everybody that listens to this, whether it's live or taped or I want everybody to know. I none of us that teach this stuff are telling you in any way, shape, or form that we are perfect. That we've got this Tao or anything.Down 100%. We have opportunities for improvement every day, the same way that you do. We're just on a path that dedicates itself, dedicates a significant amount of our energy to finding out what those opportunities are. And then we have a system to walk up and down a ladder towards, 50%.Compliance in performing it. 70% compliance in performing it. And if you can get to 75 on my on one of my teams with let's just say a mirror technique or or FOQs fact observation question, it's like a field felt found paradigm for overcoming objections. If you can get it at 75 or 80 percent.Let's move on to the next one. There are too many traits. There are too many opportunities for improvement. But the beautiful thing is that one pebble dropped in the center of the pond. It has ripple effects. Affect one trait of the 20 listed in solution selling as necessary for a good enterprise salesperson. Affect one part of one positively.And it has ripple effects to the whole. Just be on the path. So I didn't want anybody to make a mistake thinking, well, Scott's saying he's perfect with this stuff. The op the 180 degrees the opposite. I just have some experience identifying them, these opportunities for improvement, and setting up practice individualized so that people can overcome ourselves.And that was yours. Yours is a beautiful story about that, KK. so stark and so dramatic. and there you were hearing hearing voices that weren't being heard by theMark Petruzzi (11:45)so Scott, we we talk on this show often about the AI amplifier principle. And that is AI amplifies whatever already exists. whatever you're able to accomplish, it gets amplified. If alignment is strong, A AI accelerates it. If execution is weak, if alignment is off, AI makes them faster in the wrong direction.could actually increase your this your disc pro productivity instead of your productivity, your negative productivity. what does that look like on the ground? And and how do you work against that?Scott Stollwerk (12:21)Listen, I I remember not understanding this very topic in freshman year English, where some great professors, I actually went on to be an English major. Don't ask me why. where they told us to yes, Tolstoy is a genius, was a genius. Yes, all of Nathaniel Hawthorne, all of these folks were gonna read.We're amazing humans in at least one regard.But don't you dare accept everything that you read from them. That you have to anything that's output, even by these masters, Shakespeare himself. There are people who don't, they're not even sure Shakespeare was Shakespeare. It could have been a a group of writers. I'm not necessarily in agreeing with that, but the point is.Use AI, sure. But especially for those of us that are twenty five, thirty years into this journey in corporate America, you know your industry better than AI does.In significant ways. I want you to spend more time making the output your own. It does save you time.But just don't push the button on any of these platforms, copy and paste and throw it into a playbook. Use it for brainstorming. Use it for ideas. Don't have a single dash in whatever is that what they call it, Mark? That thing that yeah.KK Anderson (13:29)Yeah. dash.Mark Petruzzi (13:30)Yeah.KK Anderson (13:30)an dash on the keyboard anyway, anywhere. Like you couldn't even type one if you tried.Scott Stollwerk (13:34)Right.Don't don't have those in your text. And and don't just accept the ideas, because you're right. You you know alignment. You know the human beings, the politics. I had AI once tell me it it was almost like it was organizing a coup d'etat. Scott, you've done so great with this, this, and this. You should replace all the people on the board in your company.And the sea levels and and here's how to do it. Wait wait a second. I didn't that's not a question I asked. You you just have to you you have to use it as a as a mind map or a brain a brain dump as I think I think you know what I'm getting at. I just gotKK Anderson (14:08)before we wrap up thistopic, I'd like to get your kind of thoughts on this. I imagine that there is a real risk that as AI gets more involved in sales and in go-to-market, the the tendency might be for leaders to stop developing the human side because they're just focused on the process and moredoing more faster. do you see that happening or do you or do you feel like the pendulum is going to switch, go the other way and go way more to the to the developing the human? Like what's your thought on that?Scott Stollwerk (14:34)Yeah.Well,it all de it all depends. And I think it depends on the humans. But a long time ago we all read Lord of the Flies, right? I think it's natural for us to devalue ourselves. And when we're writing a paper the night before it's due, or finishing off a project at work, a playbook the the a week after it's due, we're devaluing ourselves.And I think if we continue to do it, yes, the the ugly eventuality that you alluded to, KK, is probably likely in our future. But then I think I have another cup of coffee and somebody I see does an act of kindness, or maybe even heaven forbid me, and I feel more optimistic about the future. There are parts of humanity that can't be devalued as much as we try.There are things that we discussed, like our abilities to overcome, our unique creativity. These things can never be devalued, they can't be replaced. SoI'll go yin-yang on this one, KK. If you think about half my answer is the white with the black dot in the extreme and the black with the white dot on the other side in the extreme, it's kind of a punt, but I think it's also Zen in the sense that the real answer to your question is up to us as a population. And I don't know that we're going in the right direction, but we're definitely moving in a direction.KK Anderson (15:51)definitely the reason we wanted to have you on to talk about this, because we we whatever influence we can have, we want to make sure that the human is nurtured in this in this this transition that we're going through as as a as a world, really.Scott Stollwerk (16:04)don't be afraid. There's nothing to be afraid of. Good things are gonna happen. Not so good things are gonna happen. But thank you so much for having me on, KK. This is always fun and always wonderful. And I love you guys.KK Anderson (16:16)We love you too, for sure. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

General Episode Description:In this episode of Selling Intelligence, Scott Stollwerk, creator of the Tao of Sales framework and member of the leadership team at Pest Share, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to explore a topic becoming increasingly important in modern sales organizations: developing the human behind the salesperson.As AI continues to automate outreach, scoring, sequencing, and administrative tasks, the true differentiator is no longer the technology stack. It is the individual seller’s mindset, emotional resilience, self-awareness, and ability to perform under pressure.Drawing from Eastern philosophy, Tai Chi, neuroscience, human performance science, and more than 15 years of leadership experience, Scott explains why traditional sales training often fails when real-world pressure arrives. He shares how the Tao of Sales helps individuals develop the internal foundation required to navigate rejection, uncertainty, and growth while building stronger sales organizations from the inside out.The conversation explores why progress matters more than speed, how leaders can create resilient teams, and why personal growth is often the missing ingredient in sales performance.  What You’ll Learn:The Tao of Sales Framework: How Eastern philosophy can create stronger, more resilient sales professionals.Beyond Techniques and Playbooks: Why most sales training breaks down when pressure increases.Progress Over Speed: Understanding the importance of building foundations before pursuing rapid growth.Human Performance in Sales: How mindset, self-awareness, and emotional regulation impact results.Coaching the Individual: Why great leaders develop people first and salespeople second.Key Topics:The origins of the Tao of SalesEastern philosophy and enterprise sellingWhy attachment to outcomes creates frustration and poor performanceThe role of resilience in sales successSales training versus skill developmentTai Chi principles applied to business and leadershipBuilding strong sales foundations before scalingGrowth, progress, and long-term performanceLeadership lessons from Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, and Dennis RodmanDeveloping confidence under pressureCoaching through beliefs, fears, and behavioral patternsThe psychology behind high-performing sales teamsGuest Spotlight: Scott StollwerkScott Stollwerk is a sales leader, coach, and creator of the Tao of Sales methodology. Over the past 15 years, he has developed a unique framework that combines Eastern philosophy, neuroscience, martial arts principles, and human performance science to help sales professionals thrive under pressure. As part of the leadership team at Pest Share, Scott continues to focus on developing high-performing individuals and teams by strengthening the human foundations that drive sustainable success.  Resources & Mentions:Tao of Sales FrameworkPhil JacksonMichael JordanDennis RodmanTony RobbinsAbraham MaslowRobert CialdiniThe Five Love LanguagesA Fighter’s MindDavid HortonEthics of Our FathersTai Chi and Eastern PhilosophyComing Next Week:Part 2 of this conversation dives deeper into belief systems, behavior change, leadership development, and building a high-performance culture that can sustain growth in an increasingly AI-driven sales environment.🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling Intelligence for more conversations on sales leadership, human performance, AI, and enterprise growth.Mark Petruzzi (00:28)Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi and I'm joined as always by my co-host KK Anderson. Our guest today has spent more than a decade building sales team from the inside out. Not with just another playbook or a new stack of tools, but with something most sales organizations have really never thought to develop. The human being behind the rep. Scott Stolwerk is part of the leadership team at Pest Share.And the creator of a methodology known as the Tao of Sales. The Tao of Sales is a framework that draws on Eastern philosophy, neuroscience, and human performance science to develop sellers who results hold when the pressure comes. He has been doing this work for 15 years and the results follow him everywhere he goes.KK Anderson (01:12)Scott's framework could not be more timely. Everyone in this audience is navigating the same tension right now. AI is handling more of the execution layer, the outreach, the sequencing, the scoring. And that means that the gap to determine who wins is not just the tool anymore. It's the person. And it's what they believe, it's how they manage their state of mind.Whether they can stay present in a hard conversation. And it's really coming back to some of those more human elements that were present before technology took a hold. Now, Scott has been working on exactly this problem for a long time. And today we're excited to dig in with Scott and find out what he's learned and how he implements this within his teams. Now, this is part one of a two-part conversation, and we'll be back with Scott.For part two to go deeper on belief science, culture building, and what it actually takes to install this inside a sales organization next week. So be sure to tune back in next week as well. Now, for today's episode, here is what we're going to be covering: four key topics. Number one, the Tau of Sales. What is it? Where did it come from? And why Eastern philosophy maps and how it maps onto modern sales better than most Western methodologies.Topic number two, what AI cannot fix and why the human edge is the last defensible advantage, and what that means for how you can develop your team as a sales leader. And then part two will be topic three, which will be beliefs, behaviors, and the six inches between the ears. And topic four building a high performance culture from the inside out. Andwhat leaders are getting wrong about development and what Scott does differently, and things you can take back and do within your own sales organization today.Mark Petruzzi (02:59)Thank you, KK. Scott, welcome to Selling Intelligence.Scott Stollwerk (03:03)Thank you so much for having me. Really a pleasure to be here.Mark Petruzzi (03:04)Awesome.Always a pleasure to be with you as well. Topic one, the DAO of sales, what is it and why does it work so well? So, Scott, most sales methodologies come with a deck, a framework, and sometimes a certification. Yours came from Eastern Philosophy, Tai Chi, and the decade of watching what actually holds under pressure. Walk us through the origin story of the DAO of sales.And what did you see happening to sellers that made you go in this direction at the beginning instead of down a more traditional path?Scott Stollwerk (03:36)Wow, terrific question. And it's so long ago. it's been an amazing journey. And I'll tell you, look, the early days, you may even remember when you were a consultant and and working with enterprise software sales teams, the early days in in our profession they I don't know if it's very complimentary toTo these organizations. But you know, I used to hear a lot of things like, hey Scott, I thought you were smart on team weekly calls, like, okay, this is at stage one and this is at stage two. And you really weren't, the point is, you really weren't a human being. To the higher up you went in the corporate hierarchy, you were more and more a number. AndSales to me wasn't something that I started. I went to law school and I practiced as a class action consumer side class action attorney for a little bit. It was miserable. I needed to talk to people. so really the Dow of sales is the way I think I didn't invent it. I didn't create these things. They're just discoverable as you go.Certainly if you're being treated like a number, certainly if it's never too fast, like building a revenue team for a venture-backed company or private equity, you will find the Dow. And I think each of us that have sold in these negative environments, you know it's there. It it's ours to pull it out and when we get the opportunity to turn things around.And try and convince those that are that are either in charge or making up the rules where you are, that there is a better way, that there's a more humanistic, nicer but more effective. I don't want to say faster, but more effective way of succeeding. And that could be in anything. If it's in sales, great, if it's playing the piano,If it's speaking in public, the main tenant of the Tao of sales is that we practice sales to be better people first. And you can put whatever qualifier before people: husband, people, sons, daughters, sales, whatever it is, we practice that first to be better people and to hit our number second. And therein lies in that simple motto, probably the first.Eastern philosophy tenet that will cover, and that is detaching from your goals. Attachments create pain, they create frustration, they create impatience at the very least. And Phil Jackson treats that beautifully in his books. Just so everybody knows, he's the guy that got Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman in the same room to meditate and contemplate eternity. SoYou know, all veneration, all credit goes to the the teachers, the masters that came before us in the Dow.KK Anderson (06:08)Really interesting. And I've heard you use a phrase, probably stop our listeners in their tracks. And that is that everyone is a black belt until they get hit in the face. Or maybe you said punched in the face, right? and that's really the whole problem with sales training right there. And I've been in the sales training industry specifically for 20 years myself. SoScott Stollwerk (06:09)Really interesting. I I've heard you use ourKK Anderson (06:29)What what does conventional sales development get wrong about how people actually change and this kind of this human approach? Like how does that pivot?Scott Stollwerk (06:40)There's so much.And it's an it's an excellent question because of it. KK, there's literally volumes behind this. But it it has to do with ignoring the the human side of any interaction, of any communication. Somebody came up with a technique. And look, all the books are good. I and they're based, some of them are based in sociology, many of them are based in psychology. And they're gonna give you a scripted answer.What we found, and I say that Mark and KK, you you and I, we've worked together on these things in the past. We, the collective, we, the folks that are on the side of good, we've found that first you have to address the human being. And we're all gonna get punched in the face in one way or another. With you.It's not public speaking. KK, I've seen you stand in front of groups and orate beautifully, and somebody could heckle and somebody could question, and you're still in the center, absolutely at home, no problem. But you never know, especially with enterprise sales, you never know what the curveball is going to be. So we have to go back way up from the technique.Techniques don't win fights. look, I a lot of this is is based on tai chi, and most people don't understand tai chi is a combat art. Really? Mark even said it to me the first time in Charlotte. He said, Scott, all I've seen is is these grandmas in the park doing these soft movements. Well, within that is philosophy, psychology,Military strategy, you name it, it's all in those in those kung fu ballet moves. So the point is, I could teach a salesperson, I could teach anybody a technique. But how did you get there? Right? You'll often see on an Instagram video, purported martial arts teacher or master says, Okay, grab me here, and I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that, and the person ends up on the floor. Well, really.Well, how did you get to here? And so it's the same with the sales training. We're gonna bring everybody into a room and we're gonna learn a bunch of new techniques. Okay, Mark is different than Scott, and KK is different than Mark. We all are the sum of our fears and the sum of our experiences. And so you're gonna be different with that one technique than I am.So it's really probably better to teach skill, which addresses deficit in all the personality and characteristic traits that we need as enterprise salespeople. So I say we go all the way back and we start from the beginning because yeah, technique is good. You can start with technique, but it's speed and angles that win fights or objections or deals.It's not the technique. Now, if you're a an observant student.Then you'll find, I see this technique has me holding the baby a certain way. And so you recognize a skill that happens to be expressed in this technique. I recognize that structure. So my sacred area, what I'm trying to protect, won't be violated by that objection. Objection in the context of a sales.role playing or objection in the context of a sparring where somebody's punching and you have to you have to protect this space. So if you're astute enough as somebody on the path, you can find important good things and techniques. But very often just starting there and ending there, you're gonna leave that group of salespeople, KK, after your three-day intensive andThey're gonna go right back, just like when we get punched in the face for the first time, we're gonna go right back to the most basic part of our training, black belt to blue belt, because of the real world scenario. I I hope that answered the question. I it was a bit of a long way around it.KK Anderson (10:11)It does. It's like it's the confidence that you're building and the consistent preparation and training that allows for you to be able to apply techniques that you would get in any kind of a traditional sales training.Scott Stollwerk (10:24)Exactly. Now think of think of Phil Jackson in this context, in the context of your answer. He's got a guy in Michael Jordan. There's never been a human being more attached to a goal or a result than Michael Jordan. You listen to that great docuseries they did. This guy is probably still today the most driven human being on the planet to the outcome. It didn't matter if it was.Flicking bottle caps or quarters up against a wall to see who could get closer, or the national championship. Contrast that with Dennis Rodman, who not only was he an artist, he was a revolutionary in his own mind against society. And I'll do the opposite of what authority says, and doesn't give a darn about outcomes, just wants free expression.Mark Petruzzi (10:57)Thank you.Scott Stollwerk (11:10)Doesn't want. Okay, so now you're going to apply the same sales technique or even the same meditation technique to both of them? No. Phil Jackson found each of them where they were and applied the technique to the human. And that's why he was successful.KK Anderson (11:24)And and quickly, Mark, before you ask your next question, talk to me about why this is so important in sales. Because we live in a world where 70% of the time we're getting rejected, right? it's a pressure cooker. you could have an excellent quarter followed by the worst quarter of your life, It's just different animal. And that is thatKind of part of why this Dow of sales is so effective in in sales, because it's just a whole nother planet.Scott Stollwerk (11:50)I'll tell you, it's a different approach. It's gonna have a lot of the same principles in it. Well, some. Right? You need you need to forecast deals, even though there's the Zen, there's a Zen Koan in that. Yeah, human behavior is not predictable. But there are good predictors of human behavior. Now make it a departmental behavior or multiple departmental.And then you even used words in there that I we probably need to go back and talk about definitions. we started the conversation with typical CEOs, startups, enterprise, it doesn't matter. Revenue never happens fast enough. Well, there's definition behind that. I don't believe in speed when it comes to building a revenue organization. You you need it.You better have it, especially if you get a Series A or other check from the VC community. You better be ready to fly. But the fact is, in the Dow of Sales, we're happy with progress. And we define progress as just another step up the mountain. I don't know how far up the mountain. what Mark Petruzzi's mountain is. I think I do.KK, maybe yours is closer to sales mastery like mine, just being on the path long enough to being able to affect people's lives positively by transferring information to them and wisdom. Well, if that's the top of the mountain, you can't just come in and say, KK, be a thousand feet closer today. No, we we have to change our definition.Right. And that goes back to Mark's question about the tree and the mountain, right? The tree has to grow down and out before it goes up. And this is everything in in Asian philosophy and martial arts, Eastern philosophy. it's the opposite. If you want to walk forward, you actually have to use your feet to push down and backwards. Right? It's the same with a car tire. How can a cup be half empty and half full at the same time?And so we really have to get into definitions to answer your question, KK, but the fact is you have to get rid of judgment. You have to balance self-criticism. You have to play every day. I don't I don't even like the word practice because when I was younger, for some reason my dad insisted that I practice and sometimes usedPunishment to make me practice, you have to change those keywords in your own head. And you and I, KK, we had a great experience in New Orleans with this. and your experience with the arrows, but it this is directly on point with that. Progress, not speed towards growth. What happens if you try and make the tree grow up before it grows down and out?It dies. It nothing nothing subs of substance is being fed. And it's the same with the mountain. I and I want to recommend a master here that I learned from about the mountain. I'm gonna say his name was Robert Holder or Holden.Horton, Robert Horton.The first I read about him was in a book called A Fighter's Mind.And at the time he was the most accomplished ultra marathoner. And what he was trying to do was break the record between Mexico in the Rocky Mountains and Canada. And I will let all the listeners read from his mouth how important definitions are, how important people are that you surround yourself in the journey.It's a fantastic book all around. This is one chapter, but if you want to learn about the mountain and that analogy, David Horton. is a much better sifu than I am for for this particular lesson.Mark Petruzzi (15:02)a couple things here. Let me bring us quickly on a sidebar and make sure that our audience knows and the the people who follow us every week. First off, how much we appreciate all the the things that we learn from amazing guests like Scott, and also the feedback we receive through LinkedIn and other ways from all of you aboutScott Stollwerk (15:04)Well.Mark Petruzzi (15:23)how this podcast is evolving. and the my sidebar on that is, every once in a while I take a look at Facebook. I don't really post anything, but I notice on Facebook and I noticed on a couple of the groups that I signed up for, one was a fly fishing group in North Carolina. and I see you would think fly fishermen men and fly fisherman womenwould would be a little more polite to each other and they frankly rip each other up. you'd also think in the South people would be a little more polite. But I've I've learned some things there about the ⁓ the state of social media. I share that because we don't ever get that kind of feedback from our team. So either our fan base is the most polite individuals in the world or or who knows what. ButThe the reason I share that is at the end of the day, it's just incredible what a sales team can evolve to. And it's incredible, maybe because we have to work with that rejection that KK mentioned, or just dealing with with all the emotions of every human that's involved with a decision, in concert with all the data and corporate decisions that have to make as well.But I just I wanted to share that. ⁓ I also want to touch on what Scott mentioned before about the tree. The the tree does have to grow down as deep as possible and out before it can grow taller. And at the end of the day, you can you can maybe make some exceptions to that. a bamboo tree doesn't really go too much, it goes up.But then it gets supported by the forest that it creates with it everyone else. But most trees will not grow unless the they they have that root base and the the base structure to be able to accept that growth. very often, most often, you don't see trees growing and then just kind of bowing over because they they grew too fast. So that's the same thing with a sales team.Like you have to build that. It may feel l a bit unconventional, right? That you know you if you need to grow fast and you know if your board is telling you, well, you've got to grow 30% this quarter, but if you don't have the base there, then you've you've gotta come back with that. You've got to tell them what you need to build to get there.And that's what I love about what we're talking about here around the Dow of sales. Just building that base that allows for your sales team success.Scott Stollwerk (17:51)And you you're a hundred percent right. And Mark, I don't want to indicate that you can't go fast, it's such a loaded word because it it's relative to everybody's definition.you have to stop before you ask yourself, your very human brain and mind to go fast, okay, do I have a minimum viable product?Who do I have selling for me? What are they capable of? What did they do last year? Can I access new and more people think can do two million dollars instead of a million five? And why? Does the team have an authoritative leader that they will follow?KK Anderson (18:22)Yeah.Scott Stollwerk (18:27)Does that leader have a constitution signed, sealed, and delivered, a credo? This is how we're gonna act. This is the opportunity. One of my favorites, going back to skill versus technique, that we opened the hour with, is the Navy SEALs and a lot of the special ops divisions within our military. They have this overriding principle.Leave no one behind. It gives me chills. Because A, if I'm halfway aware why they're behind to begin with, it's pretty stinking dangerous. And I have agreed. I've signed up and I have the pin and I have the patches and the tattoos. I've signed up to go back into the ninth depth of hell to save that person.I promise you, that's not a reflex that's built into humanity in our psyches. That's something that has to be overcome by everybody, whether you're the most decorated silver star wearing spec ops person, or you're just Scott Stolwerk, who's afraid of noises in the middle of the night. It you you will have a significant fear response. But you signed up.in your credo regardless to go back in and bring them out. If at the very least it's just to bring them out. They Well, it's not life and death on a sales team. Well sometimes it is.But have the credo and have the definitions. Right? Who's gonna pick up the mantle when one person can't do the job? What does success mean? And try and get your board or the C levels to agree that this is what success looks like immediately.I have the right people. Do I have the right number of people? Does everybody understand the same definition? Right? Progress? We don't know how high the mountain is for us. Success, in my definition, it's what we've overcome as a team. ultimately, you're gonna have KPIs, you're gonna have revenue. So, Mark, the the the point of thisNow also way too long response to your comment is that you can go faster.Do you have the bricks and the mortar in place? Do you know the difference between the brick and the mortar?And does everybody on that new team that you've brought in to your company, do they all understand the same definitions of the critical words? And then if you've got the runway, go. And if you learn that you don't have the runway, fall back, just like our spec ops people, seek cover first. Fall back, seek cover.Return fire. You have to organize again. You have to find out where the danger's coming from. Maybe have a full HUDA loop or analytical loop, feedback loop where you're seeing, okay, well, we don't have enough leads. The team is closing at a 50% rate for qualified opportunities. That's spec ops for a sales team. All right, well, we need more at bats. If that's the case and we're not bringing in enough, we need more at bats.So that kind of thing. And hopefully you can get enough momentum in the time allotted going faster, but I would say still not fast like the investment community means it when they say it. Necessary.KK Anderson (21:17)You know what's funnyis it there was a torrential downpour last night in Houston, Texas, and I was talking to my sister on the phone this morning having a cup of coffee and she said she's got bamboo all along her fence in her backyard and she said Kristen, you wouldn't believe the bamboo is like in the pool because the rain comes down and it just folds right down, right? It doesn't have the strong root.Right. And then and then it will come back. it'll come back eventually and stand back up straight. But it's interesting, Mark, that you use that analogy too when talking about a tree. And when when you were describing that, Scott, I was almost thinking like a house of cards. Like if you build a sales team that's just on a playbook or a method or a simple process or executing on something, you know, tack, technical or tactile, one rainstorm and poof.one gust a win, the whole thing falls down. Right. And so if you're if you're strengthening the inner human and the inner person to handle the adversity, handle the situations, and you're gonna be a lot stronger for it. And it may take longer to to to build it, but you'll get there. Now you ⁓ I've heard you talk about Tony Robbins and and his six human needs. And I've listened to a bunch of his work and andHis human needs are certainty, variety, significance, connection, growth. And I think the last one is contribution. And so and I know that's important and a pillar to your kind of your philosophy there on the DAO sales, but like how do you use those needs to be able to figure out if a seller is stuck and what to do to coach them? Like is there any like story or anything you can remember on how you've used that toTo help someone shift, yeah.Scott Stollwerk (22:53)So many.Excellent. Thank you for asking that. Listen, we are so fortunate today as coaches, as leaders, to have this technology that we're leveraging right now, and things like gong and zoom, and they they don't just record the sales call, they annotate it, they index it.You could search it for how many times Scott said ⁓ or like. And it's absolutely beautiful. One of the technologies we use, Ask Elephant, it actually you can upload all the great books that we've read and we've learned from Challenger Sale, Solution Selling. I uploaded Hope is Not a Strategy, and a couple of others.And the video will email you or slack you and tell you when somebody violated one of those tenants. And it's it's incredible. So what do you do? Sometimes it's just a case of of not being on message. The person hasn't done the reps. That's a bad that's a bad pun. They haven't done the repetitions in order to internalize the messaging. That's easy.You know, you give that 30, 60 days, whatever. Usually a good s a good individual contributor, you don't get a lot of that. But you may find that you're listening KK to Scott Stolwork on a sales call and he's afraid to ask Mark for about money, about budget. Scott was brought up in very varying circumstances, and for whatever reason, he's got issues.He thinks fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money. And that's what the product costs: $50,000. So am I gonna be as effective standing in the pocket, trying to gain commitment from Mark, if that's what Zoom and Gong and Ask Elephant uncover? No. We've got to be, and it doesn't just have to be Tony Robbins, okay? Tony Robbins took from Maslow.And Maslow took from Socrates, and Socrates, I mean, this stuff's been around for 3,800 years. There's a book called Ethics of Our Fathers. If you're a sales coach, I want you to get an English, an English translation of Ethics of Our Fathers. I I it could it could predate Judeo-Christian doc doctrine. But anyway, you'll see there has to be that connection there. There itJust you you need your wise as the individual contributor in order to change. And as the coach, you need either some structure psychologically. It all comes down to survival. In in a society that's eight billion people, it might be different than it was in a society that was 500 million, but just more of the same.We all have a need, especially in our profession, for status. Okay, if somebody's need for status is getting in the way of them playing on your team, they haven't signed the credo yet, the constitution. It's it's in their inbox, unsigned. Well, so you you have to have a framework, but most of the problems and challenges that we have as coaches.we can find in these very basic human psychology and sociology tenets. You know, and and there are an infinite number of writers. Cialdini first wrote it and he's making a comeback right now online. I don't know why, but maybe it's because I said his name on a on a podcast like this and now I'm seeing I think I'm on a different side of the internet, as my daughter would say.KK Anderson (26:06)Yeah.Scott Stollwerk (26:07)We're just giving something to somebody. And then you have somebody who the gentleman that wrote the book Giftology, who took it to an entire extreme. It we're we're complex beings, KK, but we're also very simple in a lot of straightforward ways. To the Yeah, and and I I read this great book calledKK Anderson (26:22)It's the intersection of that where we figure it out. And itScott Stollwerk (26:27)Love languages or the five love languages. There are only five of them. So easy easy enough to find some common ground to somebody you're trying to coach to not be afraid of money.KK Anderson (26:29)I've read that. 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In this episode of Selling Intelligence, KK Anderson, Mark Petruzzi, and Alan Rudolph continue their Diagnostic Session series by focusing on the most underinvested side of the go-to-market bow tie: customer retention and expansion.The conversation explores why enterprise value is built not just through acquiring customers, but through keeping, expanding, and delivering value to them over time. Alan breaks down the difference between gross retention and net revenue retention, why time to value has become one of the most critical metrics in modern SaaS, and how broken retention models create pressure that sales teams can never fully outrun.The team also discusses the dangers of applying AI to flawed systems, why bad data and weak customer alignment create compounding problems at scale, and how CROs can build healthier, more profitable businesses through stronger metrics, ICP discipline, and operational alignment.What You’ll Learn:Gross vs. Net Revenue Retention: Why both metrics matter and how world-class SaaS companies measure customer health.Time to Value as a Growth Driver: Why TTV belongs on the CRO scorecard and how faster customer outcomes drive expansion.The Cost of Poor ICP Alignment: How selling to the wrong customers destroys retention, profitability, and scalability.Diagnose Before You AI: Why AI amplifies broken systems and how to avoid accelerating bad processes.Metrics That Protect Enterprise Value: The KPIs every CRO should monitor to improve retention, forecasting, and operational efficiency.Key Topics:Customer retention and expansion strategyGross retention vs. net revenue retentionTime to value and customer onboardingDiagnosing broken retention models before implementing AIICP alignment and customer fitEnterprise SaaS growth metricsAI-driven forecasting and operational efficiencyData quality and AI readinessCustomer churn and expansion motionsBuilding scalable revenue operationsGuest Spotlight: Alan RudolphAlan Rudolph is a strategic advisor at AGS with deep expertise in enterprise software, revenue operations, customer retention, and scaling go-to-market organizations. He has worked closely with growth-stage companies and executive leadership teams to improve operational discipline, retention performance, and enterprise value creation.Resources & Mentions:AGS Revenue Blueprint DiagnosticBenchMarketKey Metrics Discussed:Gross RetentionNet Revenue Retention (NRR)Time to Value (TTV)CAC PaybackWin Rate by ICPTopics:Diagnose Before You AICustomer Health MetricsAI Readiness in Revenue Organizations🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more insights on AI, revenue growth, enterprise operations, and go-to-market strategy from today’s leading operators and advisors. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.KK Anderson (00:29)Welcome back to another exciting episode of our diagnostic sessions. And today we're going to pick up right where we left off with the last one in chatting with Mark and Alan about the go to market bow tie and specifically the last, the right side of the bow tie, what we call Keetmore, which is all around customer retention and expansion. And I know Alan will agree with this when we say thatThis is really the most under invested side of the bow tie and where enterprise value truly has the opportunity to compound. so, Mark, I'll hand it over to you to kick us off and we're excited to have another great session.Mark Petruzzi (01:08)great. So Alan, that last segment of the bow tie that KK is describing, that customer retention expansion, this is your home turf. So what does diagnosis look like here? And why is this side the side most CROs just under invest in?Alan Rudolph (01:25)Do we have enough time? I'll be here for hours. ⁓ No, think it's just there needs to be a focus on gross retention, on net retention, on the whole structure of how does sales and account management and customer success, how do all these pieces come together? And we know that it drives growth and it drives value overall for the company.But the under investment mark to your point, I probably have two, three, four conversations today. I was just talking to an exec this morning from a leading research firm and he was telling about one of his clients and their churn numbers are down, their sales numbers are off and obviously they're not growing. And if your churn numbers are too high, i.e. lack of gross retention, then it puts undue pressure.on the sales team because we think, we can just go sell our way out of the box. And we know that doesn't work, right? We know for a healthy software company, we need to keep the gross retention north of, ideally north of 90%. Best in class is 95 % to 97%. And so this is where the pieces need to come together, right, in terms of selling, account management. Oh, let's not forget aboutproduct because it's all about driving value to the customer. So it's definitely the art of the deal, right? It's more than just science. There's art here, in other words, in terms of finessing to ensure that we have the right overall gross retention driven into the organization.Mark Petruzzi (03:04)Yeah, and Alan, you are right on with that because when you then try to sell your, just sell out of that kind of churn challenge that you're describing, what happens is you really need to overextend the sales team and all the sales capabilities. And guess what that gets you? At the end of the day, that gets you a higher churn and a lower retention.Alan Rudolph (03:27)Right,right, right.Mark Petruzzi (03:28)Soyou think you can do this and everyone, every CRO I know loves to go back and say, yes, I can do that for us. But you can't just offer to do it without making sure your board and your executive team, your CEO knows what's likely gonna happen after doing so.Alan Rudolph (03:48)Right.Right.KK Anderson (03:49)So Alan, walk us through net revenue retention specifically, because this is the metric that most leaders mess up. And a lot of times ownership of that falls on the CSM side of the business, which is perhaps why it is not as visible, right? Everyone's focusing on the logo.Alan Rudolph (04:06)Yeah, spot on, KK. And it's fascinating. People just get messed up a little bit. So gross retention is just that. I start the year with $1 of business. I finish the year with $1.10. I'm sorry. I finish the year. I renew the dollar. That's 100 % gross retention. If I increase that dollar to $1.10, whether it'sAnd again, different companies count things a little differently. But if it's, if it's a CPI increase, if it's another product going into that customer, right? If there's a price increase separate from CPI, right? So all those factors go into gross retention. I started with a dollar. I finished with a dollar. That's 100 % net retention. I start with a dollar and with 110, that's 110%. Right. And again, coming back to what I said earlier aboutyou know, world class kind of metrics, gross retention in the 90 to 95 range, obviously 95, 97 will be world class. Net retention north of 120, it varies a little bit by industry. You get to 115, 120, it's that much more powerful. It puts less pressure, as I said previously then, on the sales force in terms of bringing in new logos because you have a healthyrecurring revenue business that continues to drive success into the install base of customers. That's really how to think about those two numbers in terms of gross and net retention. But they are key metrics and they need to be calculated consistently, month in, month out, quarter in, quarter out, because they are key metrics that need to benot only reported across the company, reported to the board on a regular basis.Mark Petruzzi (05:49)Yeah. And you know what, Alan, I've always, I've never been a fan of net retention, net revenue retention, because I really like to look at these numbers separately. And I guess companies like that opportunity to put them together because they can hide something in it as well. But I mean, there's two things. You really want to look at your churn and understand what that is.Alan Rudolph (06:01)Mm-hmm.Right?Mark Petruzzi (06:16)Then you want to look at your revenue growth and your growth versus the targets that were set at the beginning of the year. And those are separate things. So if there's anyone out there with my kind of brain that just feels more comfortable in that space, think it's fine. It's good to have even more clarity and detail than just combining those two numbers.Alan Rudolph (06:40)Correct. Yep.Mark Petruzzi (06:40)So Alan, you also talk a lot about just time to value as one of the most underappreciated metrics. Please make the case for why TTV belongs on the sales leader scorecard, not just customer success.Alan Rudolph (06:55)we go back in time, for us folks that have been around this enterprise software space for a while. And we can all remember, and not that far back in time, less than 10 years, where enterprise application took months and months and quarters and years to get implemented. And in this day and age with all of the new technologies, with all of the changes that we all know about going on in the world around us in terms of,the autonomous world that we're about to live in or we're living in already. A customer signs a contract and they want value tomorrow. And so that's why it's so important from a selling standpoint that the outcomes are clearly laid out for the prospect, you know, soon to be customer. And they understand what they're getting, when they're getting it. And again, that time to value metric, i.e. how quickly can we get that new solution implemented?and the customer getting value out of the solution is in, I'm gonna call it days, soon we're gonna be in hours, but let's call it days, not months and quarters. And that's why TTV is so critical. That's why it needs to be on the CRO, the CCO, the COO, so Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Operating Officer, depending on how these titles are divvied up. But again, both sales and delivery, let's use.the generic terminology here, need to have responsibility. And by the way, let's not forget about the product organization because the software needs to be developed in such a way that we can in fact drive that time to value. So it really is at a minimum, a three-legged stool, right? I said sales, I said delivery, I said product, and I'm putting product and engineering together in this case so that we can get to that.Value to the customer. It's all about selling value. I by the way, let's not forget about then what we love to talk about KK. It's your buzzword. ICP, right? You're never going to get the right time to value if you sell to the wrong customer, right? If the customer doesn't fit into that, target box. So that's what I think about, Mark, when I think about how best to understand time to value and get an outcome from it.KK Anderson (08:49)here.So if you're looking at time to value by ICP segments, then your marketing team has an incredible, information around which customers we're selling to that we shouldn't be, right? A fast TTV combined with a strong expansion motion is gonna get that NRR up, which drives valuation up.Slow TTV selling to ICP that's out of our, you know, out of the wheelhouse, right? It's going to destroy it. So that's interesting as well. all feeds into each other.Alan Rudolph (09:35)And that's why I saidearlier, KK, it's more art than science. Sure, it's science because the numbers need to come together, analytics, blah, blah. But there's some art here to finesse this, to make sure that we're driving into the marketplace appropriately.KK Anderson (09:39)Yeah.So I'll throw you a curve ball then, Alan. what if you're looking at the numbers and you see a customer that's just, I mean, this has actually happened to us at AGS before, ironically, right? Where you're just like, my gosh, this customer's killing us. Fire the customer question and you're looking at TTV, you know they're out of your ICP, you know they're draining you. When does a CRO actually...Alan Rudolph (09:59)ThankKK Anderson (10:13)need to walk away from a customer that's hurting in our art.Alan Rudolph (10:15)So should I say it the way somebody else would say it? You're fired, right? I mean, seriously, if there's not a fit from a product standpoint, from a business outcome standpoint, from an overall solutioning standpoint,KK Anderson (10:15)That's I said.Yes.Mark Petruzzi (10:20)Ha ha haAlan Rudolph (10:28)This is where transparency is so critical that you need to go back and have that conversation with the customer, explain what we do and how we do it and the types of business outcomes we can drive through our solutions. And if there's a match, then that's great. Let's modify and go drive that match. But if there's a gap, right, we do this and the customer thinks we did that, then this comes back to all these discussions we're having about it's not only driving.sales and revenue, but we need to run a healthy business. We need to have our costs in line and we need to have a profitable business. And when there's that huge gap between what we're selling, the ICP and what the customer thinks they bought, if the gap's too big, we're going be spending tons of times with the services team. We're going to try to modify the product. We're going to change our roadmap for the product to meet that customer.It's just, the one thing that does step in the way here is size of customer. If all of a sudden this customer is, dramatically large and we bring our CEO in, we have a very broad discussion. But again, more often than not, that outcome has to be get the customer back to the solution we sell, not a variant of that solution that we sell.KK Anderson (11:17)gets it real fast.Alan Rudolph (11:39)that's so dramatic off that it's just costing us oodles and oodles of money.KK Anderson (11:43)Not to mention the reputation that's at stake.Alan Rudolph (11:46)Sure, everybody talks. know they doin this industry, every industry, right? And so, yes, reputational perception is something that we all need to be cognizant of, absolutely.KK Anderson (11:58)So Mark, when we think about our philosophy of diagnose before you AI, and we think about the keep more motion on the right side of the bow tie, what happens if you apply AI to a broken retention model? What does that look like?Mark Petruzzi (12:13)Great question. Before I start with that, I'd love to go back real quickly to the fire their customer question, because that's something I have had very mixed emotions about that over the years. I believe it's so important. And there's a part of me that is so happy to fire the customers that really hurt our productivity and our...or numbers and sometimes just customers shouldn't have become customers in the first place. So there was that aspect, but I'm also someone that really values loyalty and I always want to try to work with them first and it's just not a fun thing when most customers are like, really, you're firing me? And I'm sure at the end of the day, even though you never say fire in this,But they do a lot of times and they're like, wow, that's something. And so I guess I just want to go back to that positive feeling. You can feel so proud when you identify a customer is really just not working out, probably not even working out for the customer either. And you do something about it. That makes me feel really good. All the rest of it doesn't.So, okay, so the question of, what happens when you apply AI to a broken retention motion look like? And it's really, it's how AI is impacting everything today. The productivity increases, the impact that AI has is not 15 % or 20 % in most cases.As far as impacting processes directly, it's usually 3x, 5x, 10x. So things get 7 to 10 times faster when you bring in AI. So when you do that through a broken retention motion, just, again, you just make that happen faster with more overall impact to the company.Alan Rudolph (13:58)Mmm.Mark Petruzzi (14:11)And that really, really just impacts the overall. If you can do that, you're going to have much better deal scoring. You're going to have a much more accurate forecast. most of you have heard me talk about that a lot. And just what a good forecast does for the entire business. And again, I'll say it again, good forecast meansAlan Rudolph (14:31)Mm-hmm.Mark Petruzzi (14:35)accurate, not always, sandbagging and then ended up coming in 25 % higher than you predicted because there are ramifications of doing that as well. And then you just, can leverage AI even further and understand like how the scoring of your deals work and you know, what, when these things have happened, what has then happened to the, the company as well. And then,You know, the last point on this is if you're training an AI on bad judgment, it just makes bad judgment happen faster. you could take any negative phrase with that and it's going to do that. And as smart as these frontier labs, you know, models are nowadays, they...they can learn and they do learn all the time. But if you give them the incorrect information at the beginning, they're not capable of just figuring out the right thing to do after you told them in all this training that it has to do something a different way.KK Anderson (15:38)No, I was having a conversation with one of our expert accelerators earlier today about, about diagnosing your data, right? We talk about diagnosing, find more, win more, keep more, but diagnosing your data and, and Carrie is who I was speaking with Mark. And he gave it the analogy of, of your, of your body, right? You've got a human body and your organs, your, heart is your.sales and the brain is your CEO and all of the different organs are the different parts of the body and the blood is the data that runs through it all. And if that data is not flowing, not oxidized, oxidized, oxidized, oxidized,Alan Rudolph (16:16)Awesome,Mark Petruzzi (16:17)That's atough one. ⁓Alan Rudolph (16:19)you're amazing.KK Anderson (16:19)thennone of these systems are going to be talking to each other effectively. And so before you can go and put in some amazing AI predictive modeling, that's going to say, hey, this customer is about to churn. Or I can see your order count is lower and you might be losing a product if you're a SKU-based business or whatever it may be to indicate retention problems or evensignals out there to go land a new customer. And if you're not looking at all of that data cohesively across marketing, across finance, across product, across sales, then you're not going to be able to leverage it in the right way. then, you know, AI is going to be the most powerful when it can look at those patterns and look at those histories.Mark Petruzzi (17:00)Yeah, no good stuff. And I'm gonna give some work for anyone who may have been an English major and try to say that word and you guys can let us know if we pulled it off. I think it would be oxygenated, but it's not easy.KK Anderson (17:13)Yeah. Yes, that's it.Alan Rudolph (17:18)And more importantly, Mark, can you spell it, right?Mark Petruzzi (17:20)Exactly.I think I can, but I'm not going to try that one on the podcast. So, KK, kind of back to you, with this. So what's the right way to apply all this that we're talking about here and particularly on the, you know, these corrections of broken retention models that, we can leverage AI to, but you just got to do it in the right way.Alan Rudolph (17:24)That's not pastKK Anderson (17:44)So, I do think that as unsexy as it is, it does start with the right data, right? Because that's the crown jewel of everything that all of these businesses are functioning off of. I think it's taking the data and it's taking your tribal knowledge and your secret sauce and what you do better than anyone and figuring out,based on the metrics and based on what makes sense is how do you turn that into an agentic process that will take you to the next level? How do you take what you do that no one else can do and do it 10 times faster using AI and then enable your team to be able to dazzle your customers and provide an incredible customer experience as the human in the loop?based on all of the insights that are served up with the AI that's provided to you.Alan Rudolph (18:36)Yeah, spot on. And as we wrap up, this section, look, when I think about retention and expansion, this is where enterprise value of a software, you know, agentic enabled company, truly, truly compounds. Right. we've talked, we've thrown out lot of topics out in this section. threw alphabet soup, so to speak, but the bottom line is we need the measurement systems.KK Anderson (18:36)Yes.Mark Petruzzi (18:36)Yeah,good stuff.Alan Rudolph (18:57)those measurement systems will drive value. need to understand our customer. We need to understand their health. We need to understand, you know, are we truly transforming their business and just drive through all those respective metrics. It won't fix the TTV gap, right? That's a different issue that we need to solve for. But, as we pull these metrics together, when we think about the forecasting,We think about the tools available to us in today's day and age. This truly does drive enterprise value once the appropriate metrics we have, we gather them, we know what they are, we know how we're measuring across the company, and hopefully we're driving them up and to the right.KK Anderson (19:38)So one of the tools that we've produced for our audience is a quick reference guide. It's a diagnostic blueprint. And it has a list of all of the metrics that we recommend a CRO look at as it relates to find more, as it relates to win more, and as it relates to keep more. And it's a list and there's some explanations on there as well around howhow you should read the diagnostic and the report. so Mark, we'll leave in the show notes where people can go and download that diagnostic scorecard. But so Mark, for every CRO that's listening right now and they're thinking to themselves, okay, what's the first thing I need to do tomorrow morning? What do you suggest? Do you start with downloading this list and kind of going through and calling your rev ops department, try to get some of these numbers? Like what do you do tomorrow?Mark Petruzzi (20:26)Yeah, great question. And the first point is do it and do it tomorrow. Meaning, this isn't something you can wait around with. The next recommendation is get those metrics. Find out where you're starting and what everything looks like there and try to work with individuals likeCompanies like BenchMarket, Ray Reich is the CEO of that and find out what the metrics in your particular segment of an industry look like and compare those and get that really strong understanding of where you are today. And then kind of going into the point of doing something. There are so many things that we all could be doing with AI every single day.The only way I can process this and recommend for my clients is, take a short window, I mean, it be a half a day, and figure out, all right, what's the list of the things I want to do, and then prioritize it, and really go for that lowest hanging fruit. ⁓ And then that's it. And like anything else, just like a good meal. A good meal is you eat, one bite at a time.Alan Rudolph (21:26)Mmm.Mark Petruzzi (21:38)try to devour the whole turkey dinner on Thanksgiving in one bite. So the idea is understand where you're starting, understand what's the best place and what are the items that add more value more quickly, and then manage to that. Then compare every step of the journey with, ⁓ where were we?Alan Rudolph (21:54)Hmm.Mark Petruzzi (22:02)three months ago, six months ago, where are we today, where do we want to go? It makes everything else that much easier to accomplish.So KK, to you, we know the real value isn't the score. It's the conversation that these processes force. And then it's great to just, let's parse it down to three or four things that every CRO should do this quarter. And we can tie back that to some of the things I just said withAlan Rudolph (22:21)video.Mark Petruzzi (22:35)how to start it, but more importantly, what are usually the lowest hanging fruits for most companies that we work with.KK Anderson (22:42)All right, Mark, that's a great question. And I'll give you four things that I would do tomorrow. So in order, number one, first get a competency baseline on your sales team. Like whether it's through one of our AGS diagnostics or through any other tool, it does not matter. Get a sales competency baseline. You've got to know what are the skills of the sellers and the leaders on your team? Do they have the competency to be able to sell?your product at your price point against your competition and your market. Like you've got to know that, right? You've got to know that. Number two, get a metrics baseline and simple at the simplest terms. need to know win rate by ICP, right? We want to know general win rated too, of course, but win rate by ICP, ideally deal size trend. it trending? Your deal size is trending up. Are they trending down? What's the sales cycle time? Is that pushing?What are the trends there? Your CAC payback time. We want to look at NRR, absolutely. And we want to look at TTV. Those metrics at a minimum will give you a very strong indicator of where you are, where the health of your business is, where you're starting. And then third, the third thing I would do is I would map your sales process against how your buyers are actually buying.and how buyers are buying is changing dramatically. It has changed more in the last 12 months than it has in the past 12 years. And so we need to make sure that the sales process is aligned to how your buyers are making these decisions. And then when you can apply AI to a seller-centric process like that, or a buyer-centric process, excuse me,Alan Rudolph (24:07)Mmm.KK Anderson (24:17)then you're going to have better alignment and better results with whatever you're, wherever you're layering in AI. So those are the things that I would do in order. Alan, what about you from a PEC, like when a CRO does these, these four things specifically, and what Mark has talked about as well, like what does it unlock for the business?Alan Rudolph (24:36)CRO gets to take a nap. mean, that meanshe or she is running the business, I'm gonna say appropriately, right? It's effective, it's efficient. We understand the metrics, we know what the metrics are, right? And that's what every CRO wants. He or she doesn't wanna be stuck out there trying to drive value to a prospect with each and every one of his reps, right? They wanna be able to run the business.And that's what that does, KK. And when they do that, it drives valuation. It drives a better narrative to future acquirers. It drives a better narrative to those customers, right? You don't have miss set expectations. You don't have customers you need to fire, right? It's a healthy way of running the business. But let's not forget that while you're doing all this, right? We're constantly changing.what we sell, right? The product's constantly getting better. I like to say, for those that don't know me that well, I live in the great state of Colorado and I'm a skier. And so we use the phrase, don't get too far over the ski tips, right? There's a healthy balancing act, right? You want to be slightly forward, but not too far forward. So that's just an important concept to think about from a business standpoint as we're working with customers.to make sure they understand what's coming a week, a month, a year, whatever for now as we continue to drive value in the product. And that fits into this whole discussion about optimizing the business of the CRO and giving the CRO that healthy discipline to be able to explain what is coming tomorrow.Mark Petruzzi (26:12)Yeah, and Alan, your comment about the CRO gets to take a nap or the CRO gets to show up and be on time, not 35 minutes late to their child's field hockey game or the dance recital or anything else. So that's really, really what it does. And when you have good, smart people,thinking strategically in ways that they haven't in the past, or they haven't had the time for in the past, it does a lot for the business. So like in a general closure for this segment, really there's four key things that I think kind of drives this for our clients. And that's the behavioral baseline, really figuring out where you're starting, figuring out the metrics baseline,the numbers, things you can measure and evaluate every step of the way, alignment over the organization, the entire sales organization, and over to the rest of the C-level individuals on the board. And then, the placement of AI, like, where do you put this in first? And when you can do these things, these four things in that order,you've already by itself have done more than 80, 90 % of the leaders we talk to every day. this is not, like again, you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to do 20 things, but if you can do these things very capably and reliably, you're gonna get benefit out of all these steps.KK Anderson (27:49)It's a playbook really for how to do it. And so if you, remember nothing else from this session today, AI is going to amplify whatever motion you have, wherever you put it. So if you have a broken motion, it's going to amplify that broken motion at scale. And if you don't know what your motion looks like at the competency and the metrics level, you're not makingAlan Rudolph (28:00)Right.KK Anderson (28:13)decisions on where to put AI, you're rolling the dice and it's going to come back. It's going to come back and bite you.Mark Petruzzi (28:19)and that starts with diagnose before you AI. If you don't do that, AI can be the most expensive thing that you ⁓ invest in and it could be the most impactful for the rest of your 2026 because again, you really have to know where you're starting from to really get the...types of benefits we all know we can get with AI, but sometimes we don't.Alan Rudolph (28:46)And then Mark, I just say from an ownership standpoint, coming back to the comment I made earlier about the CRO, know, the CRO needs to be able to go take the naps, go to his or her kids, play school, sports, whatever. And so don't rest on what exists today. Fix it, make it better. Reach out to, you know, whether it's folks like us at AGS or there's great, great operators out there that can provide this advice and counsel.is make it better. If we, we always can look back on our careers and say, God, I wish I would have done this. I wish I would have done it faster. Right. And I think we all have a huge opportunity right now. Take, take, take stock at what we talked about today and, and change your business and change it fast. Right. We're not talking about months or quarters worth of work. We've seen value from our customers in 30 days. Right. We've seen results. And so, drive that accordingly. So a lot of fun today.We really appreciate it. KK, I think you're going to bring us home.KK Anderson (29:43)Yep, I will. again, I'll put in the show notes, but you can download our revenue blueprint diagnostic on our website. And it will give you those, all the metrics we talked about today and give you a starting point for how to get started tomorrow. And again, you're welcome to reach out to any of us for assistance, but we don't care where you get the help. We want you to grow. We want you to be successful.And we want you to not only create but protect your enterprise value. And it's an exciting time to be in business. It is an exciting time to be in business. Everything is changing. And we're here to support you as we go through.Mark Petruzzi (30:18)KK, thanks so much for...for closing this off for us as articulately as you have. We so appreciate Alan, you joining us and being a part of this. we are definitely going to just grab as much of Alan's time as we can and have him on here as much as we can as well because of all the great insights he brings. And as always, I just wanted to thank our incredibleaudience, people who are in here investing time with us every week. We appreciate it and thanks again. All the best.KK Anderson (30:50)Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Alan. Thank you.Alan Rudolph (30:53)Thank you. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

General Episode Description:In this continuation of the Selling Intelligence Diagnostic Session, Mark Petruzzi, KK Anderson, and Alan Rudolph go deeper into what happens when AI is layered onto a broken go-to-market system.The team explores real-world examples of companies that accelerated pipeline volume with AI, only to later discover collapsing win rates, longer sales cycles, and poor ICP alignment. They also unpack the critical difference between sales activity metrics and true behavioral competency, highlighting why qualification skill remains one of the biggest hidden weaknesses inside modern sales organizations.The conversation closes with a deep dive into the “discount trap,” forecasting discipline, and the operational signals private equity firms use to evaluate the maturity and long-term value of a revenue organization.  What You’ll Learn:AI on Top of Broken GTM Systems: Why more pipeline volume can actually create worse outcomes.Qualification Competency Matters: How weak qualification destroys sales efficiency and forecast reliability.AI Done Right: What happens when strong ICP discipline and human judgment combine with AI-driven signals.The Discount Trap: How discounting erodes enterprise value and creates downstream operational pressure.Forecasting as a Maturity Signal: Why investors care more about predictability than heroic overperformance.Key Topics:AI lead scoring increasing volume while lowering win ratesWeak qualification competency as a hidden scaling bottleneckOMG sales competency assessments and qualification benchmarksAI-powered signal intelligence for outbound prospectingUsing hiring patterns, LinkedIn activity, and market signals to prioritize outreachHuman judgment combined with AI-assisted targetingBehavioral competency vs outcome metrics in sales organizationsTwo teams with identical win rates but completely different operational healthThe “discount trap” and the dangers of unmanaged pricingWhy selling value matters more than discounting to win dealsForecast accuracy as a signal of operational maturityThe shift from “gunslinger” sales cultures to data-driven revenue organizationsPE diligence around trends, forecast reliability, CAC efficiency, and sales disciplineGuest Spotlight: Alan RudolphAlan Rudolph is the leader of the private equity division at AGS and a strategic operator with extensive experience building and scaling enterprise revenue organizations. With a background spanning sales, operations, and enterprise value creation, Alan helps organizations diagnose GTM inefficiencies, improve operational discipline, and build scalable growth systems.  Resources & Mentions:AGS (Advisory Growth Strategies)Objective Management Group (OMG) sales assessmentsConcept: Diagnose Before You AIConcept: Qualification competency in enterprise salesConcept: The Discount TrapMetrics: Win rate, cycle length, forecast accuracy, CAC efficiencyAI-powered signal intelligence for outbound prospectingClari, Aviso, and Collective[i] forecasting platformsAGS Sales Cycle Diagnostic Tool🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more diagnostic sessions, AI strategy insights, and practical frameworks for scaling modern revenue organizations.Mark Petruzzi (00:38)So KK, what does AI applied to a broken front of funnel motion look like? What are the ramifications of getting that?KK Anderson (00:47)Mark, let me share with you an actual real live case study, a real customer of ours. this is a growth stage SaaS company. They invested heavily in AI lead scoring and outreach. And they were ecstatic because, their pipeline jumps up 40 % in one quarter. The amount of leads coming in the door was just through the roof.leadership was celebrating and what happened and when they ended up calling us is that six months later, all of a sudden, their win rate is collapsing and their sales cycle is just getting longer and longer and longer and deals keep getting pushed out into other quarters. And so it got worse. And the reason why, once we did the diagnosis is because what it turned out is that the underlying qualifying motion of the sales team, when it comes to win more,was weak. It was deplorable weak. And to the point that Alan made earlier, the ICP was not the correct ICP and that was not disciplined. But because the sales team had a weak qualification competency, they were not prepared to be able to accept more of anything, even if it was the right ICP. And so it's interesting, just a note on that qualification competency,objective management group who is a partner of ours here at AGS, they have assessed it's got to be close to three million salespeople by now and interesting fact that of all of those three million people only 27 % are strong in the qualification and competency. So I said 27, two seven. So that means that if you're a CRO listening to this, it is likely that your team is notsuper effective at qualification. Right. And these are the things that you need to know before you start deploying a lead gen system that's going to against an ICP that's not disciplined with a sales team that doesn't qualify effectively. So AI on top of we qualifying is just expensive amplification of the wrong thing.Mark Petruzzi (02:50)I thinkyou hit it right on there.KK Anderson (02:52)now, Mark, back to you on this one. tell us a story of when AI applied to the type of funnel works, right? We know we've got the horror stories, right? But tell us when it actually delivers. Give us an example of where you've seen it work.Mark Petruzzi (03:07)before I evendo that, I'm going to give you a little bit of props here that you would always be too humble to share. But Objective Management Group is a company that KK has been working with for over 10 years. She has done more of these SEIAs, which are those as their assessments, the biggest in sales. There's nobody who does the does more of them than OMG.And there's nobody who has done more of them over the last eight, 10, 12 years than KK. she knows this space. She's got a lot of personal data in addition to all the metrics and everything else we track. So, okay, let's go to, let's talk a little bit about another story if you all don't mind. B2B Services Company that we work with, 40 reps.And in general, the first thing we noticed, they're in the top quartile on qualifying competency. They were really good. They knew it. The data confirmed it as well. They had a pretty tight ICP discipline. And they tried to work with AI a little bit on the prequel research, account intelligence side of the equation. But then they really picked this up.in the standpoint of really understanding signals. What would happen out there in social media, in their TAM that they're going after. Things like job changing, changes, hiring patterns, general press, LinkedIn activity, all of that. What then happened is that their outbound conversion went through the roof.they're able to go in there and really figure out how to be, and this is really so much of what almost every one of my clients struggle with today. You know, it's great to reach out to companies that could be part of your TAM. It's really great to reach out to companies in your TAM that have some sort of signal of why they may need your services at that point. It's kind of like this.If you're in your late twenties, whatever you're at, and you really want to get married in the next couple of years, well, what would you do? Would you reach out to every woman you've met ever? And would you reach out to the ones that are married already and said, would you go on a date with me? No. would you reach out to every woman throughout the world to see if they are interested inmarrying some American from New York City? No, you would find the right Tam. And then if you, not that we can get to this level in our personal lives, but if you knew women that were out there, they've kind of spent time with the, they've dated enough and they're kind of like, I'd like to settle down in the next three to five years. Well, wouldn't that be something?Right? So, and that works for every side from men looking for women, women looking for men, men looking for men, women looking for women, all four. It goes everywhere. But the same thing, that's the it just it really blows. It's just amazing what it can do. And what we saw is that their outbound conversion went up to 60 percent. Their cycle length dropped.And it just turned the signals that AI can bring into pipeline for that company.KK Anderson (06:20)I love it. So basically the AI didn't replace the human judgment. The AI just gave that like use signals, pattern analysis to be able to figure out where even more of their ideal customer was and then brought into a sales team that had the competency and the ability to act on it compounding results.Mark Petruzzi (06:40)And you know what?And what the AI did? This it's some kind of a thing that I've done that we're really covering the personal side in a number of areas here. But I have most of you all know I have two amazing children. I have an amazing wife as well. But so we got a great, great family. Right. And one of the things that I did from the beginning with my kidsis I've given them a lot of latitude. I know some people that are like, I want my kids to be an amazing student or want them to be an amazing athlete or whatever you do. And then you kind of push your child in that direction. I tried to be open with that. The one thing I did orchestrate a little bit is the books that I propose that they read and not like, you this is you have to get this done by the end of the week.It was always more of what I was reading. read this book talking to my, you know, and whether there were classics, whether there were new books, but it's the same thing in all of this. Like if you're looking at the right lists of companies and know that these have all been vetted through the process that you built with your agentic programs and there's a connection, there's a signal, then you get to use your gut and say, okay, out of these hundred companies,These 15 are what I'm going after first. And sometimes you may get a higher rating and you may say, no, that company I'm never going to break into. you say, forget about what the agent is saying. That's where the, so you're kind of doing the same thing I did with my kids. You promote books that they really can get a lot out of, or you promote targets that your team can really get a lot out of as well.So now back to you. So what does the behavioral competency piece tell you that win rate doesn't? Back to OMG, back to the things you figure out within your sales team. What do you get out of all of that side?KK Anderson (08:36)first of all, when I'm thinking about win more, And we're thinking about sales excellence, there's really two core layers and both are required, right? So layer one is that behavioral competency that we've chatted about a little bit today. And that is really what is your team capable of, especially when they're under pressure to perform and to produce revenue, right? That's the objective management group work.Mark that you mentioned the 21 core competencies and layer two is really the outcome metrics. And so that's what do the numbers actually show. win rate, deal size, cycle time, pipeline coverage, forecast accuracy. know, most CROs are measuring some sort of each and each of those behavioral and the actual metrics, but I don't know that.Mark Petruzzi (09:02)Mm-hmm.KK Anderson (09:22)that truly that many of those 600 plus organizations that I've worked with are doing either necessarily well, So for example, they might be measuring calls, activity, meetings, emails, that pipeline stages and things like that, but that's not gonna tell you if your team can actually compress a sales cycle, actually move a deal across that finish line.So it really takes both of those kind of layers. And so when you ask me, what does a behavioral competency tell you that a win rate doesn't, right? It's, competency tells you why, right? And then the win rate, the win rate tells you what's happened. that, I don't know if I'm articulating this the right way, but it's, really two different conversations. two teams can have identical win rates.for completely different reasons. Take team A, right? They win 35 % of their deals. They qualify hard. They walk away from bad deals. They're only investing in real opportunities. And then you've got team B who also has a 35 % win rate because they're discounting aggressively. they're doing everything they can to drag deals across the finish line. And it's a race to the bottom, right? They both have the same win rate.but they have totally different behavioral profiles underneath. And that's why it's so important to know what that behavioral competency is. It's being able to ascertain the health of your sales organization, right?Mark Petruzzi (10:45)I think you hit it right on the mark. I think, and by the way, I've heard Alan kind of name this whole approach, the discount trap. Walk us through it, Alan. The discount trap is exactly where AI applied to a broken motion accelerates the damage.KK Anderson (10:53)Mm-hmm.Alan Rudolph (11:03)often, Mark. mean, that's the problem with a discount trap. And it was just that fascinating discussion in terms of the diagnostics, diagnosis, and behavioral impacts, and all the metrics that KK just threw out. But this discount trap is so critical. And here's another bold statement I'm going make today. How many companies do we know in this broader, softer AI space today that do not have a target price point?Right. Freelancing on every deal. We see it way too often. So the CRO hits his number, his or her number. They outperform on the top line, but they do it by discounting. And we don't even know what the discount is half the time again, because we don't have a price book. And that ripple impact of that discount and the pressure it puts on the downstream systems in terms of time to value, in terms of implementation, in terms of success, in terms of getting toyou know, all the appropriate retention numbers, it just has a huge impact on margin, which ultimately has a huge impact on overall valuation of the firm. And by the time the team has trained itself, about this discounting in terms of getting the deal done, AI just accelerates it. It just makes it that much worse. Right? We get greater proposals out. They look great. They speak great. They talk great. Right. But we don't drive theValue of the solution. Oh, by the way, what am I going to say next goes back to that target ICP, right? So we're discounted because we don't have the target ICP. So how do you fix it? Sell value sell value to this in terms of the solution to that ICP and Don't discount if you sell value you don't have to discount. So you that's how you go about diagnosing that overall competency gap. You have to fix it at the individualcontributor level, you obviously need a price book. And then you can leverage AI appropriately, but don't get caught in that discount trap.KK Anderson (12:56)I couldn't agree more. And Mark, I'm curious for your perspective as well. I know you've sat in a lot of PE diligence conversations. What do investors actually want to see on the deal cycle from yourMark Petruzzi (13:08)Yeah.I'm really excited to answer that question because it's different than what most CROs or sales leaders would think they want to see. They don't want to see you having a history or your team having a history of overperforming in significant ways from their, say, beginning of their quarter forecast.meaning they don't want to see a team that always comes in 20%, 25 % higher, just tells you you have a sales leadership that doesn't know how to forecast. So at least by the beginning of the quarter, you should be able to define what you do at the end of the quarter. They, of course, don't want to see things that are more, that just tell,show risk and instability as well. So that's where this CRO role has, has changed. Like, early in these more enterprise software space, 20 years ago, you had, know, you had these gunslingers at the senior sales level, you had gunslingers at the rep level. And, they frankly just knew that if they work hard, they were going to make a lot of money.But they really had no idea what their potential was or what they can do. So those are the things that a P team or board on the due diligence side would focus on. They're looking a lot more at the trend than the absolute number. That's something I've seen. They want to see that win rate stay stable, getting better. They want it high.They don't want it to be volatile. They get to learn average deal size, typically trends whether you're in an up market or down market for your product. They wanna really look at cycle time and the trends there, because they really wanna know what kind of process, a selling process this leadership team has driven.⁓ sales leaders, when they're talking to sales managers or sales reps, they're always going to ask for a stretch goal. And I've grown to be okay with that, but I don't want to ever see a board or a CEO asking a CRO for a stretch number. I want them to say, what is the number? I want there to be a lot of technology and AI in identifying that number.We can do a whole nother podcast around the things I've learned working with Clary, Avizo, Collective Eye over the years around forecasting. Same thing, gut process there doesn't work. The data is out there. You just got to have a tool that finds it for you. And then that kind of comes to the final point on this. Forecast accuracy.is the cleanest signal that you can get from just knowing whether you have a business with operational maturity or when you have a business filled with a bunch of gunslingers.KK Anderson (16:05)So you need both layers, right? You need the competency and the board definitely wants to see the metrics, Behaviors and outcomes. And as a side note, one of the free tools that we've built at AGS on our website is a sales cycle diagnostic. It's a mini, if you will, sales cycle diagnostic. I will link that in the show notes as well so that if you're curious, you can go check it out on our online. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.