The Biggest Sales Shift Since the Internet | John Barrows & Peter Grant

[music] Hey everyone, and welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect and I think make a positive impact on the world around us.

Now, today's conversation is with Peter Grant, who is the CRO at .com, which is yo.com, where he's helping [music] fast-growing startups and global enterprises achieve real ROI on their AI [music] deployments. He's also a four-time unicorn operator. He's uh got a track record of driving hypergrowth at companies like Salesforce and Seibel. And now he's bringing his expertise to one of the [music] fastest and most competitive categories in tech, which is enterprise search. He's a proven revenue leader who's helped some [music] of the most successful software companies thrive from the early stages of development to maturity and IPO. [music]

And boy, does he have a lot of experience in this space as far as hypergrowth and what he's seen out there. I think he's around the same age as me, a little bit older maybe. So he was right there when the internet was popping [music] and, you know, right there at the beginning ages at Seibel. So he comes from a military background too, which I think [music] gives him a very unique perspective. And we talked about a lot of stuff as it relates to AI and this new world of [music] sales and, for instance, like, you know, pilots, pilots, or or trials [music] and and where do they fit, right? And how fast and easy it is for customers to find out information and what is ROI in this world that is so fast-moving that none of us can predict, you know, the next six months what's going to [music] happen.

Uh, talked about his frameworks for diagnosing problems as a CRO and what he looks for, right? People, and then the market fit, and a few other things. [music] And also how hiring is his number one focus because you hire the right people, you train them the right way, and a lot of the other stuff takes care of itself. So, there's a lot to unpack with this one. He he jammed a lot of value into this conversation, and we talked pretty fast here. So, hope you're ready for a good one. Let's make it happen. Peter Grant, welcome to the Make It Happen Monday podcast, my friend. How are you doing today?

>> I'm excellent, John. Great to see you and thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today.

>> Yeah, thanks for coming on, man. I've been I've been interested in this conversation since it popped on the calendar as far as, first of all, your experience is pretty uh significant with a bunch of the companies that you've worked for and seen a lot of stuff going from zero to a billion and unicorns and all the fun stuff that we can get into. But more importantly now, the kind of your experience in AI with you.com and and what's happening in the marketplace right now, which I am extremely curious about from a sales standpoint. So we're going to get to all that. Uh, but Peter, I always love to start these podcasts off with kind of your origin story, stuff that we can't find on LinkedIn, like where'd you grow up, parents, what influenced you to, you know, and then, you know, school, what'd you get into, and then how'd you stumble into sales here? Because everybody has their own journey getting into this profession.

>> That's really deep. Yeah. So, uh, I grew up in England, so I'm English. I'm not Australian or Kiwi.

>> Often get confused over here. Uh, I live in the US now, but I'll get to how I came over here. Um, I had a pretty standard education. I actually didn't go to university. I joined the military, which is not on my resume, so it's not on my LinkedIn, so you wouldn't see that there. Um, and I had aspirations to sort of go into special forces, but unfortunately, on that journey, got injured, and I couldn't achieve my goal and what I wanted to do. But I was pretty successful as a young soldier as for air control. So I used to bring in all the basically the artillery, the mortars, and the ground attack aircraft onto targets. Um, but I did that at a very young age. A lot of responsibility, like at 20 years old. Served in Northern Ireland um as well. But I came out the military. A friend of mine said, "I think you'd be quite good at sales." [laughter]

>> Really?

>> Yeah. And yeah, I was quite good communicator, quite good building relationships with people. Uh, trust is really important to me as well. So, you deliver on what you say you're going to do. But the military is really important to me because it gave me gave me respect for other people. I came from a pretty uh uh small village, wasn't exposed to big cities, different ethnic backgrounds, different educational backgrounds, and everything else as well. And you get all co-mingled into the military, and you you basically have to fix problems, and you have to come together as a team. Yeah. Um, so it taught me to do that, how to behave as a team, gave me some leadership skills as well. So had quite a lot of responsibility, as I said before, at a young age. And I don't know why, but I'm in my 50s now, but it hasn't left me in 30 years. And also the other important thing is that 24/7, 365, always on work environment, which you need in a startup, especially in today's environment with AI. I just don't know when to switch off um from that point of view. And um, but that's that's the military for you. We get paid to work literally 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and our salaries is is not, you know, 9 to 5. That's how it is worked for us. And I've just always [clears throat] had that mindset. So that was a good round for me. I came out. I actually went into publishing first. I sold advertising. And that's really hard to do. You don't physically sell a product. It's not like I sell you this water bottle because you're thirsty. You need to drink, right? You have a need for it. It's quite easy to sell it. It contains the water. He's got 1.5 liters in here, and they keep you hydrated for most of the day, etc. You start something on a page, as soon as someone's gone past it, he's dead. Yeah. So, you have to sell a vision. You have to sell the readership. You have to sell the promised land and the art of the possible and everything else. I worked for a company called Reed Elsevier and did some excellent sales training there. Things like AIDA, attention, interest, desire, action. So you learn all that in your sales processes and everything else. And then in '95 um the worldwide web sort of came along, actually a bit before then, but it's become more prevalent in the UK, and I thought, this is really cool. This is something I really would like to get involved with. Um, and I didn't have an academic background, but I was I was running a local cricket club, and someone that played cricket for me was working at ICL Fujitsu, and they were looking for a different profile of person, looking for entrepreneurs to come in. And I'd try various things, I don't need to go into it, but I had various businesses, and as a young 24-year-old, I just wanted to be an entrepreneur, wanted to be the next Richard Branson, and I'd failed. But I had this opportunity to go to ICL, get trained. Long story short, I did. Um, I went in as a new technology sales manager, and I said to product, "What does that mean?" He said, "We don't really know. We've never had one before, but you're going to sell all this internet stuff and deliver this stuff by, you know, over the internet into stores, and we're going to do this thing called home um work, workplace shopping, and home shopping." And this was basically back then where you would go onto the internet and you would basically order something from Tesco's or Sainsbury's or Marks & Spencer, like Walmart, and then some pickles would go in store, and they would basically pick it for you, and it would get delivered to your house. We do, everybody does it now, right? But back then it was brand spanking new.

>> Yeah. And I and I read in a magazine that Tesco's were having customer sat issues because basically you got a CD ROM because it's like product catalogs you can do over the internet with a dial-up modem back then. Most of the people on this podcast going, "What the hell is that?" But it was a dial-up modem. You put it into your computer, and he gave you the product catalog, and you would pick it. And what the pickers would do, if they couldn't find the goods, they would substitute it for something else, and it was having a lot of problems and and customer sat issues, and they wanted to improve all of this. So, long story short, Tesco's were not a customer of ICL Fujitsu. They wouldn't do business with us because we had M suspenders, we had Sainsbury's, and we did all their what's called EPoS systems for them. These are like 50 hundred million pound deals back then. So significant deals, and they would never touch us. But because we were part of Fujitsu, we had a flat-screen computer that just came out, like imagine an iPad but about an inch thick. And I thought, if we could put that on a trolley and we could tap into the RF network in the store, we could send it live to the pickers in the store. So I went to the solutions team. A long story short, and I kid you not, we got these batteries. We went and got Tesco's trolley. We welded on a little computer to it, right? We welded on an RF network, and we tried it in store, and I got an initial order of £30,000 for about $50,000. And I skipped down, I never forget, down the corridor with the order from the fax machine like this. Oh my god, I've just got into Tesco's. That turned into six million, which turned into roughly 100 million in total orders over a period of time. I won the ICL innovation award at the whole company.

>> Wow. But that set me on my way for solution selling. And then my boss, who was my mentor, he left, and he went to a little company called Reek. It's called Cyborg. It's called Seibel. And um, I phoned him up one day. I said, "Why have you not taken me with you?" And he said, "Because you're doing so well where you are." And I said, "Get me out of here." It's like working for the, you know, the government. I was a big company, and everything else. I just, for me, it was just a grounding and everything else. And I I managed to get myself into Seibel, which was very, very hard, and I'll come back to that. And um, it was tough. It was really hard. However, being ex-military, the way it was run and the discipline that we had, I hadn't experienced anything like that in civilian street before. So I felt I was back in the military, and I liked it. I like the accountability. I like the teamwork. I like the professionalism. And I like the fact that everybody around me was better than me, and I had to pick up my game. The amount of reading I had to do and study, etc., to become an expert and understand basically proper IT, and then we was having perpetual software. And long story short, I got the media market where back in 1996, John, you tried selling a multi-million dollar CRM solution to newspapers when we were using flip cards. Basically, I would go, John Barrows, like this, write our words here, call you up, "Hey, John, do you want to buy some advertising there?" Go to then and she really transformed your note. Go away, phone down, go back to the back of the list, and pick up the next phone. That was that's you. And I grew up with that because I came from publishing, so I knew it. But luckily for me, Reuters was in my patch. And those days, didn't have, you didn't really scour the internet. You read all the the trade magazines. So, you were looking for what people were doing, what they were talking about. And they were looking to transform their sales organization, which was approximately 700 sellers. And I thought, there's an opportunity here. Long story short, got in there um, did a pilot. I believe did a, didn't do a pilot with them actually, got in there um, and then as I was in the sales process, they wanted to add 1,200 uh customer service people as well. So um, the order basically became a multi-million dollar order, and it was the largest single transaction anybody did of CRM at that time uh without doing a pilot um that we went for. So we, yeah, we did that, and then that turned into um significant revenue pull-through for our partners and everybody.

I'll just pause actually as a question.

>> Yeah, just curious on that one uh point question on on the pilot, right? Because I think a lot of reps get lazy using a pilot, get lazy using a trial because they're like, "Oh, just test test it out and check it out." What What's your kind of approach to pilots, non-pilots? Like, was that a conscious thing that you didn't want to give it to them, or was it just the sales process that you were going through?

>> It was it was a sales process we were going through back then. Remember, this is perpetual software, so you had to install it, configure it. It's not like SaaS where you can just stand up an instant tenant for them, and it's pretty much out of the box, you can get going. So you didn't have this what we now call PLG. You didn't have this premium model to penetrate and and everything else as well. But I think it's more important, it's an interesting question because if you're if you're further along in your journey and you have ref your product market fit, you have preference ability, then you can push back on the pilot and you can use your existing customers to negate having to do a pilot. If you have to do a pilot, you only do a pilot if you know what success looks like before you go into the pilot. Yeah. And what's really important is you you basically have that documented. Yes. It's not and it's not subjective, right? Is and it has to be realistic in the time span of the pilot. Is it a week, two weeks, a month, or whatever? You're not going to close a million-dollar deal if it's a CRM system you're selling, right? But will you have a a good view of your forecast? Right? Will you get all your activities in there? Will you not miss any follow-ups and everything else? You need to control what it looks like and be realistic with the customer. And Tom told me that, Tom Seibel. So when we would do it, he would sign off every single contract, he would check it, and he would put himself in the position of the buyer, and if he didn't think he was getting value for what he was spending, yeah, he said, "No, no, go back and redo it. We the KPIs aren't correct." Right. So we were very, very um focused on making sure that was getting the customer aligned.

How do you think that plays in today's market with AI? Right? Because what I'm seeing right now, and I'm sure you've seen, you know, Challenger Sale, Challenger Customer, and then JOLT effect, right? And JOLT effect is high, you know, highlight the indecision factor, and how it's because there's just so many options right now, and things are moving so fast. And and so risk is the big issue of making decisions right now. People are too scared to make a decision because nobody got fired for not making decisions. People a lot of get people get fired for making bad decisions. And so in this world of AI, AI, where things are changing so frequently um, part of it is like, you almost have to, you have to do the like, at least in some reps' minds, they have to do the demo because the client's like, "I am not going to implement anything until I see how this works." So I guess what, how do you think it plays right now in this very dynamic market that's changing drastically? I mean, you were in one that was changing pretty drastically when, you know, '95 and the internet was hitting, but I, and I was there too. I graduated uh college in '98, right? So I came a little bit maybe a little later, but I was, you know, but that was that was kind of like, "Huh, this is interesting, right?" Like, "Okay, oo, that's weird, right?" But you dipped your toe in it. People doubted that it was even going to be a thing. You know, I remember news of people being like, "Oh yeah, it was a fad." AI is obviously not a fad, and it's moving faster than anything I've ever seen in my entire life and career, and it's disrupting things faster than I've ever seen. So with a with a kind of a pointed uh question on that, the how are you selling, or how are you helping sellers sell, or or seeing sales evolve right now as it relates to AI and the risk factor, and is demos, trials, those type of things, are they now necessary to leverage as opposed to something you should avoid?

>> I think we could spend the whole podcast just talking about this. If you if you go back to perpetual software and when SaaS came along, perpetual software, we didn't like doing pilots because it was so complicated and it was difficult to do and and everything else. When SaaS came along, and back then was called utility computing, but when the SaaS came along, you could stand up an instant. You could configure it really quickly, right? And you could do a very fast pilot for them, and you could control the set success, as I said about before. But always your end game was to sign a 12-month, 36-month contract, whatever it may be. Yeah. And you just move a lot faster through the sales process than you would before. With AI today, there's a new saying called the fear of committing too early, as you just quite rightly said. And people are so scared because things are moving so quickly and changing, they want that optionality. So we're in search, right? So for us, from a pilot point of view, we want, we need to control the narrative, right? And specifically what we call the eval set. So when you're doing search, you need to understand what people are searching for and what type of answers they want to get back. This is called the golden data set, right? So grounded in the truth, because AI basically hallucinates. So what you're, what I think you're seeing is an acceleration of consumerization in the enterprise. We always spoke about it with SaaS. Mark Benioff was would lead this, but I don't think it really happened, but now it is. Right now, it absolutely is. So what you're seeing in accounts is you're seeing all your competitors are in there, and everybody's doing these point solutions, different use cases, and everything else as well. And the problem is, technology now is not so much as a differentiator as it used to be. It's more your go-to-market, your brand distribution, your actually your customer success, and things like that. That's sort of differentiating you. So that's what people are looking at as well. You made me successful, and are you going to innovate and grow at the speed that I need, and people need, and especially the VCs need to get used to the fact is they're going to run month-to-month contracts, right? A lot of the big deals, like really big deals that we do, they don't like committing for 12, definitely not for 24, 36 months. We have a few of them in the more institutional type, like the universities. How, but enterprises that are moving really quickly want to try things. They want that optionality, and you just need to change your mindset to do that, right, with with them. And you need to continually keep innovating as well. But you also need to, but what doesn't go is, what why are you doing this, right? Why are you doing it now? Why you doing it with us, right? Yeah. What does success look like for you? Yeah. And then solving that particular use case, that problem. And then obviously, people like to buy solutions as opposed to buying point uh point solutions right now. Said something that really um they can grow with you and they can share that vision with you. I think that's super important.

>> And and is that so that's what I'm seeing too, is like these point solutions. I can't, I can't, I don't understand how the big platforms don't ultimately win because now historically with SaaS, let's go back to Benioff and Salesforce, right? I trained every rep there. I was with them from 2010 to 2020 and had a blast doing it, right? And and for Salesforce, it was like, okay, there was a point solution first of all, money was free, grow at all costs, so people really didn't care as much about overlap of tech stack details. And you Salesforce would see a point solution that was was good, and they would either build it themselves, but it would kind of be like 70% of the functionality of whatever that point solution was, or they'd buy it and they'd try to cram it in, and it just wouldn't, I mean, some of them did well, but most of them didn't. [snorts] Now with AI, at least theoretically, like these platforms can just say, "Hey, go build me that feature," and all of a sudden that feature is done. Now, I know it's obviously much easier than that, but how we go through these phases, and you've been through them just with me, where we go from mainframe computers to individual computers, then we go to the cloud, and then we come back, right? And and we're in a consolidation zone right now where everybody's kind of going back to the platform, trying to cut down all their additional expenses, non-necessary point solutions. So, how do you survive if you're a point solution right now and not a Salesforce, not a Microsoft, not a, like, how, how do you survive from a sales standpoint in this in this environment?

>> It's super tough.

>> Right?

>> And that's that's why we pivoted, right? So, we were we were a GPT.

>> Yeah.

>> And we were a really good GPT, a good research GPT, but we do not have the resources that OpenAI have, that Claude, Anthropic have, for example. So, we don't want to compete with them. Right. So then you have to think about, you have to think about your ICP, right? So not everybody wants to go on Anthropic, not everybody wants to go on um, OpenAI for for example. So we find a sweet spot in what I call the sort of upper mid-market, lower enterprise space. And we find it there for a couple of reasons. One is that um, they're not getting the attention from OpenAI, Microsoft, and all these people, right? So they're not getting the love to put around them to make them successful. And more importantly, they can't influence them. Whereas they can influence a company of our size to grow. And there are many more companies like that than are rather big enterprise companies as well. So you do a lot more smaller deals. I say smaller, I'll come back to that in a moment. But that's one area. The second area is like the speed that OpenAI is developing. You look at Claude co-work. I just looking at that today, Claude Work, what it is, Co-work. But the fact is that can go across your whole desktop for you and do a lot of things. Automate it, MCP, connect to all the sorts of stuff, right? You're like um, I don't want to be in that blast radius. So then you think, yeah, how can I serve those people? And that's why we've gone to this AI infrastructure, building a web index for AI agents so they can proficiently and accurately answer any domain question. So we can serve the beast, basically, right? And we can be the pixel and sharpers for the particular marketplace. And then from there, we can extend, expand to building a vertical index, right? So a general web index is a mile wide than an inch deep. A vertical index is more an inch wider than a mile deep. It's like going to your primary or your GP, if you're English, right? Your general uh doctor, right? And he or she will know everything about medicine, but they're not domain experts. They know you got a bit of a cold, you got a sinus problem, they'll give you, you know, a bit of antibiotic or whatever it may be. Yeah. You got a heart issue, right? They're going to refer you to a cardiologist. You got a cancer, you know, your prostate problem, you go and go to a urologist. That individual has studied for years and knows everything about it. Well, agents were going to be the same, right? So, you got to look at where the putt's going, right? And you got to be able to pivot really quickly, right? And you got to see the writing on the wall. And that's what we've been doing. We called it chaos internally, and it is. And you know, your planning is not a year out. It's a quarter. And if you're lucky, it's six months for what you're doing right now. But you've got to see what's happening, what people are doing. And yet, what's really different here, John, if you think about when when we were at Salesforce, we didn't have a HubSpot license and a BIZ license and, you know, Marketo, all the, we didn't have all these as salespeople to see what our competitors were doing. But we can all use Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, and all these other licenses to see where they are, how their products are performing. Yeah. And make sure we're keeping abreast, or decide, "Actually, I'm not going to win that distribution battle. I need to I need to change my strategy." So that's we we've gone through it. We've pivoted very, and you have to do it very quickly as well.

>> Yeah.

>> Faster now than ever. And and so so how do you look at ROI then? You brought that up, and you know, it's it's, you know, strategy sessions of a year out, two years out, nobody can look two, two months out. So my my struggle right now is I've always had a little bit of an issue with like the ROI calculators and all that other stuff unless, you know, especially the generic ones. Um, nobody really believes them. But right now, how are you looking at ROI? And, you know, is it even a thing? Because ROI theoretically is, well, not theoretically, really is, is the investment today for the potential return in the future. And with the future being so uncertain, how are you even coaching people or or thinking about ROI right now? Or is it more COI, cost of inaction, or or current problem? We're trying to fix this right now to save new, and and the future is the future is we're just going to evolve as it goes. What's your thought process on that?

>> Yeah, it's a good, it's a great question, and it is hard to track, right? Because the obvious ROI when especially talking about productivity is hours given back, right? So if you if you if you take a salesperson from the research that I did before I actually came here is 20 is reps only spend 23% to 28% of their time actually from the customers. So why is that? What what else are they doing? Well, most of them are doing, hopefully, they're doing research on their customers. Right. They're doing, unfortunately, internal meetings. They're getting trained on new product stuff, and everything else as well. Right. Yeah. And kept up to speed. A lot of that with AI is going away. Yeah. So it gets into what where AI is really affecting the sales process, right? Then you look at your bell curve of your top performers, right? What's actually happening? Are we are we bringing the lower performers up to the middle tier, and the middle tier up to the top tier? What I think the research I've seen is actually your top tier getting even better, right? Even better, right? And your mid-tier maybe, but the honest here, and and the biggest problem is actually engagement and training. Is there's a big AI literacy problem of people not understanding the power of the models and what you can do. So what we do in you.com is we basically track all the usage and we do all the training as well. So we train you to be a domain expert in your field of expertise by using LLMs and how they're going to help and support you. And then whilst and so we take you from fundamentals all the way through to mastery of a partner called Pair. Absolutely amazing what any company does is embeds it. But it's role-based training. This is not Coursera. It says Peter Grant, CRO, U.com. It will go out to web index, our web index. It will find basically similar JD's and job roles and situations that a CRO will be in in a tech firm, and it will give me tasks to solve that I have to do using the technology, and then it will mark me, and then it will certify me, then I can post it out. So that's the first step is getting everybody up, addressing the AI literacy. As it does it, it will then say, "Well, how much time did you save doing this, right?" And so if you're preparing for a really important meeting with a CXO of a of a of a Fortune 1000, there's lots of information out there, but you'll probably spend two or three hours with doing the research, doing the report, writing it up, having to send it to your boss, and everything else. That can be done like that now. And it's a lot more comprehensive. It's more accurate. And not only would it give you the information, it will give you a strategy, right, based on what they're doing as well. And that's where it starts to come in the ROI. And now it affects your win rates. It affects the deal volume you can do. And if we're XCRM guys, John, so if you remember, it's all about the quality of leads that come in, right? Can you improve the quality? Can you improve the win the upsell, excuse me, the deal size, right? Can you improve your win rate over your competition? And can you reduce your sales cycle? I think all of those from an ROI point of view are better if you embrace AI and use it properly.

>> Yeah. And I think that's the the the augmentation piece and and the heavy lifting of the research, but that that human being the last mile. And one of the things I'm really concerned with right now is I've been searching for this answer and I don't know if it's out there. You know, the all the work that you and I did when we were young, right? All the grunt work that that those cards and writing down the notes and all that stuff that that gave us the context that gave us the business acumen that gave us the ability to have this conversation without a script. Now all of that junior stuff that junior reps or or pick a profession would do is getting done better with AI. So so there's one piece of that which is to me is where are the fundamentals going to come from? And what are the fundamentals anymore? But then the other danger factor here is I think for people like you and me who have the context and who who are curious. This is a superpower. It's wait, tell me more about that. Give me because I can say, "Oh, uh, yeah, I used to spend five hours doing that research, but now I can do it like this," 'cause I can tell it what to do and where to look and why it's doing that. But we've gone from a search engine to an answer engine. And and for those of us that are curious, that's a good thing because it's cool. "Tell me more." But for the vast majority of people that that latter half of the bell curve who are quite frankly lazy and they take the answer, they they gives them the answer and they copy paste and send. I feel like AI is could either accelerate the top 20% and and it does from a learning standpoint, but also [ __ ] in a lot of ways the people that are lazy who are just going to get the answer, right? Like, "Oh, instead of me going through the process of doing my research on the account, prepping up my my point of view for the QBR and and thinking through my strategy, it's like, "Oh, just give me the strategy for this." Great. There's my strategy. And and we're skipping this whole learning. We're skipping this whole acumen phase here. So is is are you seeing the same thing? And and for those people who might not be the intuitive enough to be like, "Yeah, no, I know exactly how to use this stuff for the right reasons." How do you suggest they use it so that they don't get replaced by it?

>> Yeah, I mean, it's called pseudo-intelligence, and our our brains over the years, they they've developed the human brain. Yeah. And it's like a muscle, and if you don't train, if it doesn't have to work things out, it gets lazy, right? And you this pseudo-intelligence is accelerating that for the people that aren't embracing this hybrid model of using the AI to do the legwork for them, but still questioning it and using it more as an assistant to work with them. Yeah. And getting the full benefit from it and and educating them on stuff they didn't know that they can bring value to the customer. Right. It's one of my rules of enterprise selling. They have to add value every single time to the customer. If you just do what you said, you just go go off, do it, bang, and send it, they will know. It's so synthetic the way it goes through, and you will get found out very, very quickly, right? Which is why you need to, as I said, go through the training, go through the certification, and it's a continuum. It's not one and done because the models keep getting better every single time. You amazing developers, or even people like you and I, via coding, can do stuff that you could never imagine that you could do before. You have to constantly be learning and keeping abreast. But that to me, right, is exciting.

>> Yeah.

>> That's why I'm in this space. I wish I was 25 again. But but that's the mindset everybody needs. If you don't have it, go back to that 23%.

>> When I talk to CEOs, they want to double their revenue, not their headcount. That's frightening, right? That is fright. And and I'm afraid I think there's a winter coming for a lot of people that are not going to get with this. You know, 300 million jobs at risk from a billion knowledge workers, and if it is happening faster than you think it is, right? So, you you have to get back to your point, you have to see how you use it and and how it makes you better at doing your job and adding more value to your customer.

>> Yeah. And how you can basically almost use it to what I say to a friends of mine who aren't really into it and they're in the job market right now and they're not they're struggling, you know. So, I have an accountant friend, right? And he was out of work for 9, 12 months, whatever it was. And and I asked him, I was like, "Hey, um, so where are you with AI? Like, you know, what's your skill set with this?" And he goes, "Oh, well, you know, I I used it to, you know, update my resume." And I'm like, "Oh, dude." I go I go, "Look," and he's 50 like me, right? And I said to my friend Jeremy, I said, 'Jeremy, you have to be able to walk into uh an interview and say, "Hey, I've been messing around with AI quite a bit, and I've actually been able to automate 80% of what I do." Like, I've I've been able to automate all of it because it it's that much better. However, the reason you're going to hire me is because that 20% I've got 30 years of experience to tell me that when it produces this that it's not right, and I have to check that, and I can so I'm going to be far more efficient, but that last mile is where I add the most value." And I think that is like all of us have to have that conversation. Like if you are a process person where you are putting, you know, following the process, that's why I am so scared for sales reps because most sales reps, quite frankly, are are process monkeys. You Oh, okay. Let me qualify now. Let me set up the demo. Let me bring in my SE. Let me now, you know, get the like, and and they're just following a process. They're not engaging. They're not adding value to your point. And so the the value of a sales rep is getting squeezed where the client now has access. We've all heard that by the time somebody comes to us, they're already 60 to 70% of the way through the process, whatever. But that was that was more that was such an overused stat. And that was also one that was, you know, an inbound, like somebody who was genuinely interested, did their homework, and reached our handle. Now, you could get uh a cold call from an SDR and go, "Yeah, that's kind of interesting. Why don't we set up a call with an AE?" And five minutes before that call with the AE, I could jump into ChatGPT and say, "Tell me what I need to know about this client, about this software, how does it align with my strategy? D what questions should I be asking to make sure that this is worth my time?" and come in so prepared that if an AE then sits and asks you bland questions, you know, forces you through a generic ass demo, can't answer your technical question, has to wait for an like that conversation's over.

>> Yeah. I I'll give you a really good I'll give you a really good example. So, I hired um a new guy, and he joined on a Monday. And on a Thursday uh a partner of ours, a very well-known partner in in here on the West Coast said, "Hey, we we've got um one of the world's largest cruise lines coming in, and we had a renewal with a partner. So, they're a partner, but we're also a customer." And they said, "Oh, we've got a slot for an hour. Would you like to come and meet the suite for them?" And I went, "Yeah." And it happened to be in this new rep's territory. And like so on the Thursday night, he said, "When's the meeting?" I said, "Monday. We're going to have to work over the weekend to be prepared for the meeting, right?" And I said, "We can go with the pitch and what we do and everything else." And he said, "Oh, yeah, let me let me prepare some stuff for you." Long story short, he used our ISS. He he he mapped the whole guest journey for a cruise line, what it would be for search, what it is now for this particular customer, and what it would transform like if they had enterprise search. He created all the swim lanes, all the use cases, and everything else, right? He then rebranded the whole presentation to them. He created a mobile app to vibe code all over the weekend. Yeah. We went in there, we were the only vendor got invited to their HQ after they met everybody else who's in this space because of what he's b he's literally three days in our company. He did all of that using our technology. Oh my god. And I call it Don Draper-ing. Why didn't he imagine? Right. So we open the presentation, right? And we would literally walk back from their customers and how they would experience our technology. And I thought, this is freaking amazing. So we we do a lot of that now with everybody. We go into to show them the art of the possible because it's like, you know, when when I've always, like you've been on the precipice of new technologies. We are always ahead of our customers. They don't know, most of the due respect, what they're good at running cruise lines, hotels, car companies, you know, whatever, right? They don't know necessarily what the technology can really do and how it can transform their business. So you have to give them that vision. And this AI just accelerates and helps do a lot of that. And to your point earlier, you you don't do a 50 discovery calls now before you show the demo and everything else. You don't need to. When I was at Salesforce, we were market makers, right? No one knew what we were doing. How we, Yeah. But here you don't need to. GPT is your best marketing part. 10 billion dollar marketing budget, right? So you don't need to. You need to say why you're different. How I'm going to change your business. Down. I'm going to add value to you. You have to do it really quickly.

>> And help them figure it out. This is why what my thing is is

>> like it's not necessarily as much about your product or service anymore. It's how you partner with the company to help them figure out what they're help them evolve. To your point, they're experts in this. They're not experts in what they're trying to accomplish. Which is why I'm, you know, for a lot of the smaller mid-market companies that I work with, I'm like, I personally recommend that every company created their own internal GPT basically like you.com, right? So, so they, so that but their own internal that is effectively an SE. So now when you and I are talking, 'cause there's all these tools out there now that are like, you know, surfacing up like, "Oh, John, he just said this, so here's a couple of talking points," and it's like, don't do that, right? Don't pretend like, you know, there's on my screen and then I'm going to regurgitate a question from AI. So let's learn out loud with our customers. And so one of the things I suggest is, you know, obviously not configuring the software or whatever it is, but but enough to answer the vast majority of technical type questions or run scenarios. And when that question comes up, instead of the rep saying, "Hey, you know what, why don't we schedule a call with my SE in a week?" It's actually, "That's a good question. You know what, Peter, look, let me share my screen here. We have our own internal, you know, GBT effectively. It's our it's SE. Let's let's ask it some questions." Because you might not know the questions to ask, but I do. And That's kind of what I bring to the table. It's not how awesome our product is 'cause it's going to evolve really fast. It's not the features and functions like it ever like it ever has been. It's our ability to communicate the EQ side of the house to get that person to trust that we are going to be that partner, whoever solution that is going to help them evolve and figure this [ __ ] out as we go. And I think that's the agility and the transparency factor of being able to leverage AI and admit that IQ is effectively over. You know what I mean? Like anybody can vibe, code, prompt, whatever the hell it is to get whatever answer they want. But it's the EQ component of being able to understand that, help guide people through this, that I think is going to be the differentiator. Am I am I on? Are you saying the same?

>> I think, yeah, I think partly you are. I also think the profile in our space, right? The profile of the rep is changing as well, and the ratios are changing as well in the go-to-market model. So we're still the rep profile first. Um, we look for more technical backgrounds, right? So they can naturally hopefully have a good IQ anyway, but but but they need to have that EQ as well, but they need to be able to understand the power of the technology to your point earlier and the value it can bring to that customer, and the customer can say, "I trust you. I'm going to go on this journey with you." On the ratios, the go-to-market orgs got fat and lazy about six or seven years ago, John, right? Just pre-COVID, right? I was seeing, you know, there's a great, there's a great VC presentation like to get $36 million in revenue, I think it was, was costing like 28 million or something like that, right? And now it costs like, back then it was costing like 50. So the economics weren't working because you had one AE, one SE, one SDR, but those are the rate WTF, right? My day it was like one one AE, three sorry, what? Three A, three AES to one SDR, and the

same for pre-sales people. What we're seeing now is a 6:1 ratio rather than the 3:1 ratio because you have a more technical seller. To your point, anybody can find codes, spin something up, know what questions to ask, and all those sorts of things as well. So, um, and that has, that has an impact on the unit economics.

Totally, as well. On, on, yeah. So I think that those are the sorts of changes that we're seeing.

Let's go back to kind of your experience as a CRO and and as much as you've seen, right? Because you went from CRO to then CEO, which gives you a different perspective on the CRO role. And right now, with things moving as fast, how does a CRO know that it's it's the sales, the the sales motion is the challenge, the the the market is the challenge? Like, how do they figure or the strategy is the ch? Like, when if things aren't working right now, what's your approach to diagnosing the problem to identify? Is it product-market fit? Is it things are just moving too fast? Is it risk? Is it the sales reps that we have? We don't have the right pro. How do you diagnose coming in as a new CRO? Because CROs right now, I think the average CRO stays like, I don't know, 14, 15 months or something like that in their position. So they have to make it, they have to make changes fast and they have to be more adaptive than ever before. Do you have a framework or an approach that you use to help diagnose problems and and adjust quickly?

Yeah. I mean, the first framework is obviously the the quality of the people that you're working with, right? To begin with, that's that's the number one in tech, right? You have to be the best of the best and you have to invest in them. You have to enable them. You have to do everything to make them successful. And hopefully, you work with people, especially, and it's everything's situational, right? So when you're pretty early from trying to build and scale and everything else as well.

The second thing is, you said the market. So what is that market doing, right? Is it exploding? Is it contracting? Is it slow moving? Are you in US utilities? I mean, I forget Tom Seville saying to me, Peter, never walk away from a utility company run. Yeah. Because, you know, regulated, really hard to sell to in that particular market, right? So, yeah. What market you selling into? What the dynamics of the market? Yeah. Uh, and then how do they buy and everything else?

Then it's your product. Yeah. So, is is it is it a great product? Is it got lots of foiblesss in it? Now, in the olden days, if you had the right people in the right market, the product wasn't so important because you could sell around it. They, those days have gone, my friend. They have completely gone because there's consumerization, GPT, the speed it moves at, and everything else as well, right? And then it comes down to timing. Are you in the right, are you the right market at the right time with the right crew? And I've been in the wrong, I've been with the right people with the right product, but just the wrong timing in the market before, right? And doesn't matter what you do, you know, you can't believe your own BS, right? You can come out of these hypergrowth companies and you can think, I need to sprinkle some gold dust and everything's going to be fine, right? But you need everything working and going in your direction. So I would look at all of those things first.

But the thing is, I people say to me, Peter, what makes an amazing salesperson? Is it a great communicator to be able to pitch, knowing all the product? Yes, all those. But actually, it's two ears and one mouth, right? You need to listen to what the customers are saying. You need to go and do win-loss reports, right? Win-loss is really important, I think. People forget to do it nowadays. The amount of companies I advise or I've been to and they're not doing an impartial win-loss. For those that don't know, if you lose a deal, you basically get somebody to go in there had nothing to do with it and they have a set of questions to find out why you lost that deal. You, you know, and it can be kept confidential. But the important thing is you will learn so much from that and why you won. Why are we winning, right? May not be the reason why you thought they bought from you. They may be buying for another reason, right? But that then uh permeates through into your marketing messages and everything else as well.

So I do that, I said that assessment of the people, assessment of the market, obviously the different verticals we're sending into, is it the right ones for what we're doing and everything else? The ICP, all those sorts of things. You'd have to look at everything there to make sure. And it might just be a timing issue, right? Or it could be an execution, right? Or it could be the product isn't quite working where maybe, or it could be, like you said, the salespeople are just not doing the fundamentals. So then you get to the performance man, performance management. So what are the fundamentals? Yeah.

When I, when I started selling, you had to do 20 calls a day, five meetings a week, right? Get one proposal out.

Yep.

Yeah. And I don't think that's changed much, Joel. That's people say it's, oh, sales is, it's still a numbers game, my friends. You still have to put there's the quantity and quality. And the one thing that I can, the one thing that you can absolutely control is the quantity. The quality we can work on, but the quantity, it's just putting in the in the effort. So they, and but the challenge that I've always seen is the reps, they might do the or the teams or the companies might do the quantity, but they don't learn anything from the quantity. It's just quantity. And that's why I'm a huge fan of A/B split testing everything and having an agile framework to test intros, to test messaging, to test questions, to processes, all of that stuff so that you can continue to evolve, right? Now, because what worked six months ago at this point is not working anymore at this point.

No, exactly. And and and I think so so going back, you know, so certain rules that I have, right, is obviously betting on people, right? Is the the hiring process to me is very, very important, right? Go back to what I said right at the beginning of this podcast, right? I want to go into special forces and unfortunately I got injured. But that's the hardest selection process in the world, bar none, as a job interview. And I have the same mindset when I'm hiring people, like what we put people through, the questioning, the panels, and everything else as well. But that's just getting in, right? Once you're in, it's all about enablement. It's all about training, right? It's all about boot camp, right? It's all about certification. It's about passing as well. If you don't do that, then you're setting them up for failure. I call it train hard, find easy. The very famous Russian general came out with that saying, but I use that in my, in one of my rules, right? I think that's very, very important. And because to your point earlier, this market's changing at such a rapid rate, instead of doing two boot camps a year or whatever, we will do that. But we also have a person dedicated just to sales training enablement, our new product releases, the like, literally in a weekly cadence for the reps, which may overengineer, but you have to when the market's changing. And you know, my number one thing is that these as a salesperson, you have to be a domain expert. Yeah. And you're only going to get that if you're studious and you and you have that appetite to learn. And why wouldn't you want to do that in this market? It's so exciting, right? That's the type of people we look for. I look for passion, energy, because you can't coach that, right? Everything else you can coach, right? So, if they've got those fundamentals right, and they've got that learning mindset, then you need to enable them to make sure they can go through to execution. Then it becomes a performance side, what they're actually doing, the inputs, etc., to get the right sort of outcomes, uh, that obviously you're looking for.

Love it. It's funny because, uh, I don't have, have you ever heard of, uh, the group Service to Software by any chance?

I have not.

So Service to the number two software.

Okay. Look at that. Yeah.

Uh, you might want to take a look at them based on your background because I've partnered with them and it takes, uh, military veterans and trains them and helps them get into tech and SAS, uh, sales.

Yeah. I have heard of an organization that does that here in the US. Yeah. Yeah. I have that. So they actually take my training, get certified, and then get placed into tech because I've always said that the military and service, like they, you know, you have these kids who are, you know, scared to pick up a cold call 'cause they're scared to get yelled at. And then you have, you know, a military veteran who's just had bullets whizzing by their head and, you know, stress is a whole different thing. And they follow process. They, they go. So I'm like, I'm a huge fan of military, uh, transitioning into sales because I think they're better suited than most to actually be successful in sales in a lot of ways.

[snorts]

Yeah. No, I, I, I mean, the sales process itself is actually one of my favorite interview questions. I say it's broken down to five, five components. So you basically got prospecting, qualification, running the deal, closing the deal, customer success, right? Management afterwards. And I'd say, rate yourself on one to five, what you're best and worst at. So you number one, you're the best at, and five, you're the worst at. And you can't have all ones, right? So you.

Yeah. So, so and and I and I think through my career, right? So, the number one skill you need is qualification in sales, right? So, but you also need to be as whether we're talking about startup, early growth, for everybody, for context, you also need to be really good at prospecting, which is to your point, is picking up the fail, right? Which, which is the dying art, dying art. But I used to love it because I grew up in ad sales, right? So you, yes, you get all the rejection, but as soon as you get someone on the hook, that is so exciting. Right? The middle bit is boring, and the closing is actually an anti-climax, especially if you're in enterprise sales with long sales cycles because it's so emotional when you finally close it, you're like, you need that hit again to find a new one. Yeah.

Yeah. And then you have to get back after. I mean, I think that, you know, I was told earlier in my career, you know, never let the highs get too high or the lows get too low. So, it's like, you know, you have that long sales process and then all of a sudden you close it and you do this, yay. And it's like, nope, nope, nope. Don't get too excited. You got to get back after it because next quarter, next month, you got to keep going. And that, and that's the thing that I'm like, again, just watching the evolution of sales and the mentality it takes to be successful in sales. And, you know, I feel like I tell my dad every time I, I say, you know, work ethic and those type of things. We're lacking that work ethic or the C, to your point earlier, the curiosity, the why wouldn't you want to be constantly learning in this environment because it's, it's quite frankly, it's so easy. It, it's so much easier to quote unquote learn right now if you're curious. But if you're just somebody who's just trying to cash a check, go through the motions, man, I am, that's why I am massively optimistic for those of us who are curious, who who have the work ethic, and who want to get better. I think this is an era that we're going to be insanely valuable for for both the client, for us, ourselves, and everybody else. But I am in, I am insanely pessimistic for everybody else, quite frankly.

Yep. Yep. And I agree. I agree.

And I Well, I have some younger salespeople in their in their mid-20s who work for us and I absolutely love and adore them, right? I just love their enthusiasm, their drive, their intellect to what they're trying to do. I think, God, I wish I was like that at 25. I think I probably was, but not as smart as them. I just, I just love helping guide them not to make the mistakes that I made. But it's so, it's so encouraging to see people like that coming through. And as you say, the people that that don't have that, unfortunately, um, this may not be the right profession for them in the next 12 to 18 months.

And I don't know what profession will be at at the end of the day. I mean, I look at every role. I look at doctors. I look at lawyers. I look at, you name it. And the ones who are just kind of part of the machine are going to just be part of the machine or are not actually not going to be part of the machine because the machine's going to actually do it for them. I mean, this vibe actually last. I'm curious on your your take on agents because quite frankly, I am scared to death of agents. And I'm pretty progressive with like, all right, I'll try that, you know, like, let's see what this is all about. But the idea of letting this thing run wild on all the tabs that I have open and have access, you know, I have LastPass for all my passwords. So I'm pretty much auto-logged into almost everything on my desktop. And and with agentic AI coming and, you know, all those different things like where where are you at right now with that? Because that is the line I'm, I know I'm eventually going to cross it where I'm just going to say, fine, my my iPhone is going to basically know every, it already knows everything about me, so might as well just tell it to do [ __ ]. Um, but I'm, I'm holding on to that one. Where are you on the agentic piece of this, which is just like hands off. It does it better than me. I can go grab my coffee or lunch and it come back and everything's great.

Yeah. I may be a bit too trusting. I like the younger generation. They tell everybody everything, right? And um, there are two types of agents, right? So there's an action agent, there's a research agent, right? So, um, a research agent, and they still, they're both agents, right? So that will go down into the LLMs and it will do stuff you don't even know what it's doing, right? I would do reasoning, chain of thought, do research. It will make decisions. Do you need to read this? Do you need to see this based on the prompt and fanning the prompt and everything else as well? And then obviously, if there's the agentic ones. And by the way, the research ones go down. We think we think of agentic as being left to right because we think of workflows, but these things go down. They fan out and do various things. They come back and they bring back what you, they think you need to be presented with. Then there's the agentic ones. Some of the stuff that we're working with our customers is they can go and book for you, you know, restaurants, hotels, all those sorts of things. But because they have memory, they know what you like, what your preferences are, and they're going to get better over time and everything else, right? And to be honest with you, I think it's, there's almost levels, isn't there, of automation. You will let them, you will start to trust them more and more, John, as they do certain things for them. There'll be guardrails on them that you want them to do. But, um, yeah, booking with stuff like travel and and and just being able to tell it, you know, but this is a, this is the people got to get used to the whole, the whole interface with a computer is going to change quite rapidly.

Yeah. The human interface is changing to be completely conversational where I can just talk. I can talk to, you know, a friend, say, hey, can you book me a flight between here and Miami, right? I want to go, you know, on this particular airline, but it knows that already, right? So and it knows I fly in a certain class and everything else as well. And all it needs is my credit card and it's going to actually book that particular flight and it's going to do it, right? And I, I think so I think I want to be there because I'm lazy in some ways, [laughter] from that point for doing those types of tasks. Yeah. But I think there there's going to be, um, a trust, you know, of how how much on the whole journey you let them do, right? So when you're planning a trip, there are multiple things we go through to plan it. Is certain things going to get automated quite quickly and other things where I might just have to push the the final button myself as a human. But I think in 12 months, I'll probably laugh at what I just said. And.

I same here, man. That's why I'm like, I'm so scared right now. But then I think of the early days of the internet and like the idea of putting your credit card and buying something online was like, are you out of your mind? There is no chance. And then it was like, all right, I'll buy something for five bucks. I'll buy something for $10. And then and then all of a sudden I buy a Tesla. You know what I mean? For for like, and it's the same thing with SAS. I remember vividly back at Salesforce's days like everybody was like, "Oh, like Oracle was like, oh, you know, this SAS stuff is cute and adorable, but when you want to make a big boy decision, you're going to, you're going to need, you know, infrastructure, right?" And then all of a sudden, I think it was State Farm that signed a $150 million contract with Salesforce and just blew the top off of that that whole theory. It was like, "Nope, huge organizations are now in the cloud." And and it just took a, and and I think the uncomfortable part here is I've been saying this a lot. Historically, we would, we would that that was a gradual evolution. It was okay, you know, today I'll spend five bucks. Six months maybe later, I'll spend a hundred bucks online. A year later, I'm going to, okay, now I'll buy a, you know what I mean? Whereas now it's like it, it's, it's, it's happening so fast where it's like, I, I see, I look at this agentic stuff and I'm like, we've only been really, really like neck deep in AI since a year and a half, maybe. You know what I like that the public has? And we're already where we are. And so who's to say that literally in two months, I'm not just like, yeah, you know what, AI just [ __ ] do everything I wanted to do, you know what I mean? Like.

No, no. I mean, the way I describe to people, if you go back to the internet days, is Google took five years to get to 100 million users. GPT took less than 60 days. That's 30x faster. In that, in that, in that 25 years, we've had a digital platform, e the internet or the worldwide web. Half or 56% of the Fortune 1000 disappeared because it didn't transform fast enough. That's why you know, like your, you know, your Blockbusters, the famous one, Kodak, all those sort of people, wars, etc., right? In the UK, this is 30 times faster. That's why I'm so passionate about AI literacy, getting in the hands of everybody, showing the power of what it can do, John, for your business. Because if you, if you ignore it, unfortunately, you're going to be a dinosaur. And and the future's not rosy for you. And go back to your earlier statement, right? What are you going to do? You're probably going to be a plumber or something. No disrespect to plumbers. Very, but those are the sorts of things that that have not been recorded, like what we do as white-collar workers, right? That that cannot be identified. Yeah. At the moment, right? So, that's a safer bet for you to go for.

I recommend kids right now who don't know what they want to do, be a plumber, be an electrician. I mean, with the amount of data centers that are being built right now, you can print money as an electrician at this point and you'll never be out of work. Uh, but white collar, yeah, white collar, you're in trouble. So if you don't jump on this train and start becoming fluid in AI, uh, fluent in AI. So I think it's a good place to end there, Peter, because I think there's, like I said, I think there's optimism for the ones that that that are willing to put in the work and are and are curious enough to go there. But, you know, for everybody else listening, you better get off your ass pretty damn fast. So, Peter, talk to us a little bit about what, uh, you.com is doing, what you're doing, how people can find out more about, uh, what what you're working on right now so they can, uh, because I, I really do think that your you.com and what you're doing with enterprises, you're probably one of the only organizations I've seen that has been truly successful implementing AI at the enterprise level, um, without the, and and keeping the NR at a level of, you know, recurring versus people just trying and bailing after six months on some failed experiment. So, how can you, how can people find out more about what you're working on?

Yeah. Yeah. Go to go to.com obviously, but you.com/business, you'll find out there. There's two sort of main parts of our business. One's the API business, which is basically where we're building this index or index for AI agents. We believe that every human will have 20 to 30 agents. They will go complete tasks for you. They need context. They need domain expertise, which means they need to go after a web index or a vertical index to call it to bring about that information, right? To make you more informed as a human. Um, that's a huge part of our business we do. But we're also known for enterprise search. So that's external search, internal search is called private RAG. So private retrieval augmented generation. RAG is really hard to do, right? So most people will try and do it themselves and they will get to 80% accuracy, right? But that's not good enough in the enterprise, right? This non-consumer product, you need to be 95% plus in the data you bring back and the and the augmentation generation inference that you're doing effectively. To do that, you need special skill sets and technology that we have, right? And that's where we really excel and we do it on an industrial scale, you know? So we would take all of your data, all from DataBricks, some Snowflake, CRM, unstructured, semi-structured, structured data, right? Bring that in, vectorize all that information so you can have a conversation search over it. And you can then mash it up with the outside search as well. And that's the raw power of what these systems can do.

Love it. Awesome, my friend. Well, again, thank you very much for coming on. I think, you know, we should probably get back together another couple of months to see if any of the stuff that we're talking about is still relevant again, right?

Exactly. Great to meet you, John. Thank you for your time.

Likewise, Peter, and thanks everybody for listening. Hopefully, you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. Like I always say at the end of all these podcasts, go out there and make somebody smile today. Because no matter how bad your day is going or how bad you think it went, if you make somebody smile today, you know you had a good day. And the world needs a lot more of that right now. So, thank you all very much and I'll see you on the other side.

[music]

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