Doug Dvorak on AI, Professional Selling, and Human Judgment

Transcript

0:03 All right, today we have another episode of Tailwind. Today we're joined by Doug D'vorak. He is the founder and managing principle at the Sales Coaching

0:10 Institute and author of the book AI and the Future Professional Selling. Thanks for joining us today, Doug. Uh, let's just dive in. Oh, move it a little bit

0:19 far further. I couldn't quite see the the There we go. Zoom's messing with you. There we go.

0:25 There it is. All right. We'll also have a link to it and all that jazz. Um, Doug, tell us a little bit more about the uh the book before we hop into the conversation.

0:33 Sure. Well, it's a high honor and privilege to be with your audience, Austin, on the Tailwind podcasting podcast. Excuse me. Three, two, one. On

0:41 the Tailwind podcast, uh, high honor and privilege. A little bit about the book.

0:46 There's going to be a free copy of the book as a PDF audible as well as Audible for your listeners. So, you can put that

0:54 in the link. It uh it's my my gift. But um yeah, I've I've been in tech for about 40 years. Um started, you know, in

1:04 the pre- first inning back when browsers were coming out, Netscape back in the uh early 90s. And I saw the the impact that

1:13 that technology had at that point in time in in in history. [clears throat] And I' I've embraced AI and and the

1:20 impact for salespeople, businesses, profit, nonprofit. it it's amazing and it's

1:27 going to be a a factor of growth and change a 100 or a thousandx um but in the context of professional selling to

1:36 provide deep research and to write buyer personas or have a panel discussion and I'll share with your your audience I'm

1:44 going through some health issues right now and I was watching Rogan and Mark Andre who was one of the founders of

1:50 Netskate now runs Andre Horowits a uh [clears throat] a a equity firm and and um funds a lot of

2:00 technology out in the San Francisco Bay area. He said, which really impacted me, he said, "We are at AGI."

2:07 And for those of you that don't know, that's artificial general intelligence where it's at or is rapidly exceeding

2:16 the human collective human knowledge experience. and he said he had a health issue and he was told by Mark

2:23 Zuckerberg, well this is what I did. So type in your health issue, ask to have a panel discussion with the top five

2:32 surgeons for this specific issue. Type in your test results which I did and I had a

2:41 incredible panel discussion with t five of the top experts on my specific healthcare and I brought that to my surgeon. He said this

2:49 is almost as good or better than what I would tell you. So switching back to to sales AGI and aenic AI where the ability

2:59 of coders or salespeople to leverage agents and then agents upon agents, it's

3:06 going to change fundamentally the the sales role and function. And if you're an inside sales or a sales development

3:15 rep, this is going to really uh increase and impact your ability to be gainfully employed because I'm working with

3:23 companies right now who are deploying generating you know those AI agents

3:29 specifically around revenue ops and and looking to optimize time so sellers can

3:37 sell, hunters can hunt and really replace headcount. Unfortunately, but the impact of the bottom line and I call

3:44 it high C. You if you remember when you're a kid, you drank high C for high impact individual contributors and

3:51 salespeople that can and leaders who CEOs, CRO's that can embrace AI and can

3:58 use it as a a a revenue operations tool that's pennies on the dollar and the

4:06 impact is is amazing. And so what we do at the sales coaching institute, we work with primarily SMB, small and

4:13 medium-sized businesses that are 10 to $150 million that need sales coaching, training, onetoone, one to many, virtual

4:20 or live. But the biggest pillar of our business is interim fractional sales leadership where a company has a gap in sales leadership. They want to hire us

4:29 on an interim basis. Sometimes it turns into full-time, but then we work with that organization to manage, motivate,

4:36 and keep that that cadence going for revenue, operations, excellence, and achievement.

4:43 Yeah. Yeah. The when I was reading your your book, I really looked at like the change management was the part that really captured my eye, but I want to

4:50 dive into that, especially like how it can be related to the fractional work because I think that's where somebody can come in and really lead change management. To me, that's one of the hardest things to do with a business.

5:00 Um, but first I'd love to get your perspective on what the similarities and differences you're seeing from like the browser revolution, you know, having

5:09 everything on the internet and now what we're seeing with the AI. Uh, because you have, you know, you saw both, you kind of have a good perspective on both.

5:16 I would love to get, you know, your thoughts on that.

5:18 Yeah. first trying to get online and trying to use one of those early browsers. And if if any of our your

5:26 listeners recall, you know, DOSS, you know, it was it was really labor intensive and it was cluji at best. And

5:34 then as the technology evolved and the the dialup to cable modems to now the

5:41 pipe being so fat with uh with Wi-Fi and and and just speed it's it's changed everything and uh you know the gooey

5:50 interface to to now really incredible technology and and I was with IBM I was a sales executive with IBM global

5:58 services back in the uh late 90s and the early 2000s and I saw about what people had to invest you know a million dollars

6:06 in a mainframe data centers and the technology has evolved and the the prices have dropped exponentially now

6:15 what you can do with AWS with a $20 per month claude or chat subscription and

6:22 all these online apps CRM it's really brought the power to salespeople power to organizations and it's really been a

6:31 democratic process and democrai because democratization of sales with four pennies and and and

6:40 being really mindful of not going down the IT tech rabbit hole and being just I

6:48 is there business value for these apps but the the power that a a CRM system Salesforce HubSpot ODU I it's really

6:58 amazing but the other amazing thing is how many sales organiz ganization sales leaders are still Flintstones. They're

7:05 not Jetsons. And some are scared, some don't understand it. Um, hire an AI thought leader like yourself, someone

7:14 who can, you know, I I I like the buyback rate. You know, if my hourly rate is X and I can pay someone 25% of

7:23 my buyback rate for an organization, a sales leader, a seale executive, it makes no sense for me to build it. I'm going to buy that skill.

7:31 Yeah. But you can buy those skills for pennies on the dollar through some of the gig apps like Upwork and and I've

7:39 used that and it I' I've got thought leaders around the world for knowing my buyback rate for these technologies on

7:46 CRM learning management systems. I don't want to do that. I want to focus my time where I have the most impact and and the

7:54 most uh ROI for my time and for our top line and bottom line, which is selling and training coaching.

8:03 So, I mean, it sounds like one of the big differences that you're seeing is, you know, it used to be like you had to spend5$10 million to get your servers up

8:10 and running and now it's 20 bucks to get the same like revolutionary power within your organization. So, you may as well start, you know, exploring it, getting

8:18 after it. I love this idea of it being decentralized. I've heard two different tales kind of happening right now. One being everything's going to get

8:25 centralized into like these four big labs, you know, OpenAI, Gemini, all that kind of stuff. Um, but then what I'm also seeing is this other thing which is

8:33 the decentralization where it's like, you know, you can put together an app, build your own company, you can do all these things at a fraction of the price.

8:42 So, we're going to have a lot more hypersp specific niched stuff that's going to be able to come to fruition because you're not going to need $5

8:49 million to build your idea. You're going to need 20 bucks and a little bit of grit to build out your idea. Um, so yeah. So, when it's coming to this

8:57 opportunity, I mean, what are some of the mistakes that you're seeing people make with taking advantage of this this, you know, complete shift in how the

9:05 market works and, you know, the change management that goes into really, you know, grabbing a hold of the AI revolution? Well, I think first thing is

9:13 to be aware and and and be mindful that this change is here and it's a 10x

9:20 tsunami that if if you don't embrace it intelligently, you're probably going to be out of business.

9:26 And that's just the the fact the the velocity with which AI is impacting companies and sales organizations

9:34 uh it's just mind-blowing. So just try to understand how AI can really impact

9:42 your business, increase efficiencies and if if you don't know, ask for some help.

9:47 You can Google AI strategist, AI experts for sales process change management.

9:53 There are some incredible thought leaders out there that are very competent and affordable. So I would say if you haven't embraced AI, do it.

10:02 Educate yourself. YouTube podcast and if there is a place in your organization for AI which there is for either

10:11 operational efficiency or sales excellence and sales operations systems process hire an expert watch a couple

10:19 YouTube videos or a podcast to get educated and then bring in don't don't build it yourself by that expertise

10:27 because expert don't cost they pay they pay yeah what are some do you have like some

10:34 general guidelines on where to start looking first on what people could start doing to embrace that?

10:40 Sure. You know, mastermind groups if you're involved with a chamber of commerce or an industry organization, if

10:48 you're a realer, a plumber, a electrician, you're a small business, you you have associations that represent

10:57 you. talk to the executive director and say, "Do you know anyone that's industry specific on AI thought leadership for

11:06 small multi-unit plumbing organiza companies?" Yeah. And they can generally help you out.

11:15 Yeah.

11:15 So, I would look to the organizations you're a member of and see if they offer any education on AI change management or if they have access to thought leaders.

11:25 Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then specifically for like a sales team when they're looking to say, "Okay, we haven't used AI at all, but we want to get on this.

11:34 We we we buy in your hypothesis. We totally think you're right. I I agree with it as well that you got to start, you know, getting on board with this and it's not too late, but if you wait

11:43 forever, you are going to get left behind. It's like not having a website anymore or something like that." Or even more impactful than that. Um, if I'm a

11:51 sales leader listening, what should be step one beyond just kind of starting to educate myself? where am I focusing on my sales team?

11:58 So, step one is I'd look to your current apps that you are using for CRM, marketing, automation, and see if they

12:06 have an AI plugin or some aspect of AI that you're unaware of that can optimize and make those current tools more

12:14 effective. And do they have AI thought leaders at HubSpot or Salesforce? You know, they do. and whatever marketing

12:22 automation tool. We use HubSpot for my my portfolio of companies. And I was talking to the owner, Rich, and he said,

12:30 "Yeah, we've got this AI tool. Would you like to be our guinea pig?" I said, "Absolutely." It's an AI assistant. So, when you go to my website, sales

12:39 coach.us, it pops up. There was some back-end work that we had to do on FAQs, but it's been amazing what that AI popup

12:48 assistant has been able to do for educating our prospects and customers and then giving more another channel for

12:56 qualified leads. So to answer your question directly, check with your current technology partners. See if there's an AI

13:04 uh option on those CRM, marketing automation, and see if you can, you know, use that and deploy that and then

13:12 see if they have any AI expertise relative to other tools that that are in their their suite of products.

13:20 Yeah. So I mean, it sounds like go to a reputable source, somebody that you already trust, and dive in. start seeing what it's like, get the experience

13:28 underneath your belt to be able to kind of start getting a feel for how this all works. And if you already trust an organization like HubSpot, that's a perfect place to start plugging in and seeing what you can get out of it.

13:39 Yeah, the HubSpot, the Salesforce. Yeah.

13:41 But if you're a small to mediumsiz business and you're using spreadsheets, you know, you can Google

13:48 AI sales consultant, AI sales strategist. Google um and just vet them

13:55 out. You know, just ask for some referenceable recent clients that are not relatives and just, you know, it's it's reference check 101. Talk to them.

14:05 How did how did this organization impact your business? How was their pricing model? Are they reputable, easy to do

14:12 business with? Are the projects on time, on budget? But you can just Google it.

14:18 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, with this being such like a decentralized roll out with, you know, companies kind of being decentralized, do you recommend that,

14:25 you know, also within the organization kind of having it be decentralized, let the team figure it out or having like a center of excellence where you're always bringing everyone together and you're

14:33 trying to have like a a top down like how would you go about um trying to spread out this the use cases within an org?

14:41 Sure. I I I the traditional org chart is a pyramid with the CEO on top. you flip

14:48 it upside down. Customer, then employees, and then the CEO, the the executive leadership at the bottom supporting all the the functions and

14:57 people within the organization. I'm a big believer in in um in in decentralized and I'm a big believer in

15:05 you hire honest, capable, authentic, smart people and then you let them do their job. That's why you hire them.

15:12 That's why you pay them. And I believe that a a good culture um and A's hire A's, B's hire C's, and C's put you out

15:21 of business. Hire A players, have a good executive leadership team in the functional areas of the organization.

15:29 You know, finance, IT, sales, marketing, and then hire great people, support them, give them their strategy, give

15:39 them their KPIs, and let them go do their job. Mhm. Nice. So, everyone gets their $20 cloth subscription and then you go, "Hey, let's start, you know,

15:47 brainstorming." Um, you know, is there any sort of like, you know, internal masterminds that you'd recommend? Is there any like share like structures or

15:55 just kind of like let people grassroots kind of put it together? you know, in in I'm currently consulting with a company

16:02 in in New Orleans and we've got uh 12 sales team members and each of them has their own monthly clog subscription and

16:10 based on the overarching when we did our strategy session um last year we had the

16:17 KPIs and we had an opened discussion on what the quotas were for the company,

16:24 what the quotas were for each AE or SDRs And then we just discussed it if they

16:32 were reasonable could they achieve it what were last year's results what is the ask from the leadership team the CEO and

16:40 then we sort of do it in pods and then we have you know bestcase scenarios outcomes and then you know I use the one

16:49 through one what is the problem give me three solutions and then what is of those three solutions what is your recommendation and why we can do that one-on-one or in a pod group setting.

17:00 Nice. And then with giving it to sellers, I mean, do you have any clear red lines on where they can or can't use it, or is it just get after it, we'll learn from whatever happens?

17:11 Well, no, it's not the wild west. We want to make sure it's it's rooted in common sense business efficiency

17:19 and ultimately serves the customer or client and and makes their customer

17:26 experience uh that much more richer. But if you hire great people, they can use a tool such as Claude and you don't have

17:34 to look at every step. You just here's here's the problem. Give me three solutions. Of those three solutions,

17:41 what's the outcome and why? And then we talk about that in a team setting or on our one-on- ons. And 98% of the time

17:49 they have a better solution than me. It makes business sense. They go and execute it and I don't hear about it and we hit our KPIs.

17:57 Yeah. You know, I've talked to some folks and say like, hey, you know, I want them using it during their prospecting and maybe it can help them with some ideas on the outreach, but

18:06 they're like, I never want the first draft from the AI to go out in an email.

18:10 Do you fall in a similar line or are you, you know, more open to it being that it's okay if they can use it in their messaging?

18:16 No, I think, you know, clearly we we can use uh Claude or chat for the the body of an email, but we want it to be your

18:25 voice. We don't want it all AI. It's, you know, if you're stuck on a sentence or a paragraph or it's more technical than you have the skills, use AI. But we

18:34 want it from the voice of of our individuals opposed to all AI driven.

18:41 Yeah. Yeah. Um, anything else that you'd say? Careful with that part.

18:47 Yeah. You know, uh, AI can hallucinate and hallucination is a fancy word for mistakes. So,

18:55 just because it's chat, just because it's clawed doesn't mean that uh that it's 100% foolproof. You got to read it.

19:02 You got to watch for for um grammar and punctuation and misspellings and tonality and context and voice.

19:13 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Have you heard of the term human in the loop? Sorry. Human in the loop. Uh, no.

19:20 Oh, so it's one that people are using to describe like uh you got to be careful with where the human is in the loop of the AI. So the AI can do a bunch of

19:29 stuff, but where that human is in that loop is really really important. And so like to your point, uh, if we say like, okay, it's fine to use Claude to start

19:38 writing this email and to do the research and do all this, but that human's got to stay in the loop before that send button is hit. And that person needs to be paying a lot of attention

19:46 to, okay, this before it goes out the door is going to represent my voice. Does it accurately represent that voice?

19:52 Um, yeah. and and there you know my content team at the sales coaching institute you

19:59 know we we love claude and co-work and chat and there are other AI tools that

20:06 one can use there's Grammarly for grammar there's hemingway as an editor there's quillbot for uh paraphrasing and

20:14 rewriting tool and then copycape which is a plagiarism detector so those are free or nominal

20:24 and using the goto as clott chat then some of these other tools for writing

20:30 but there's other bolt-on tools to AI you know that that one can use when doing spreadsheets or or other research

20:38 but I like what you said before we started our podcast the the the the Flintstones mentality of a of a highly

20:47 compensated account executive or sales leader going in and research searching via Zoom,

20:55 Info, Google. I It's a It's a wildly ineffective and costly use of time.

21:02 There's individuals like yourself that have a tool it and and professionals don't cost, they pay. And if I can

21:11 utilize tools like you offer or being more deliberate and intelligent of the AI stack that I have opposed to just

21:18 being charmed with every iteration of AI, you've got to be surgically precise.

21:23 But you know the the the the whole AES SDR model is being exploded and whatever

21:30 we can do to focus on our high value sales activity

21:37 which means we got a finite amount of time 9 to5 prime selling time where we can meet

21:44 speak talk to clients we want our support staff or an AI agent to be doing

21:51 some of that nurturing but we want uh Zoom, Teams, or live meeting. The magic happens, the intimacy happens when we're

21:58 live and sometimes when we're on Teams or Zoom to have a minimum of five meaningful sales conversations each and

22:06 every day. to your point, knowing what your ideal ICP is and then looking with your sales leader and team on how you

22:14 can claw back, you know, C and D and E-level activities that AI can help you

22:22 to give you more time so you can truly be a high impact, high value added sales professional.

22:30 So, I I mean, I'm hearing a ton of optimism with AI and how it's going to transform jobs. I'm I'm there with you.

22:35 Um but to somebody who's kind of still sitting in that fear, that uncertainty, the doubt around how AI is going to improve their lives, instead are afraid of losing their job because of it, you

22:44 know, what would you say directly to them to kind of change their mind to get on like this optimistic positive mindset with it?

22:52 Well, yeah. I mean, all the when when when when the first wave of tech back in the 90s and Windows and uh guey

22:59 interfaces and uh mouse and all that stuff, the the we were known as knowledge workers then.

23:07 We're still knowledge workers. But if you didn't get trained in the Microsoft suite, how to navigate Mac or or PCs and

23:18 you just stayed stuck and I can't deal with all this change, you're you're not going to have the skills to be

23:25 employable and it's so much easier today. So, I would say don't freak out.

23:31 Um, every time there's been a significant um technology uh or business change,

23:38 humanity has has uh figured it out. And I think right now we're all the the pendulum in this country has swung. It's all AI. We're all going to lose our job.

23:48 It's going to be way more taxis. There's going to be no more Uber drivers. Uh no, we're going to swing back to reality because all the money is going in there

23:56 and hype. And these companies have to push the hype so they can you know they're going public and and you know it's going to come back to some sense of

24:05 normaly. We're going to still need people. People still need people. And if you can use AI and get some rudimentary

24:13 skills and then just stay up on it for whatever your role is, you're going to

24:19 be fine. We are still I was just on another podcast where um Mike Row from

24:26 Dirty Jobs was on and said we need 400,000 skilled laborers today.

24:35 Not AI agents, electricians, plumbers, mechanics, and these are six figure plus. There's elements of AI that will

24:43 help you, but AI can't meet that 400,000 immediate skilled resources in this

24:51 country. Now, healthc care people, we don't have enough workers and baby boomers are are retiring 10,000 a day.

25:00 It's it's the most exciting time to either be an entrepreneur, use AI to build your own business and work from Costa Rica or having a skill set where

25:09 whatever you are doing, you're a high impact individual contributor. You can work from anywhere basically on your

25:16 time or you can get a job in a company and you're going to be fine. Just be mindful. Don't be fearful.

25:24 There's there's pundits out there. It's the end of civilization, the end of humanity. Okay? I don't need to focus on that.

25:31 I am so I'm a cancer survivor. I'm so excited about AI and and and on uh on on

25:39 drugs and and um the latest that it's going to make humanity better and we're

25:46 going to have more time and it's it's an incredible time to be alive. Will there be some some nent um unscrupulous people and rogue nations?

25:56 Sure. But I I don't think about that.

25:59 The glasses for me relative to AI is is half full, not half empty.

26:04 I love the comparison to expecting being learn, you know, Microsoft suite. Can you use Word doc? Can you use Excel? And being like somebody would look at that

26:12 maybe back then and go, well now accountants will never have jobs because we have an Excel. And that's just not true. And now it's just going, okay, the next skill set for computer literacy is

26:20 AI. Continue to move forward. We'll all look back in 10 years and be like, "Yeah, that was just like learning Word or just like learning Excel. It's just like learning chat." And I'm sure

26:28 there'll be a new version of AI that we'll be interacting with that, you know, we'll be continuing to need to be up to date on just so we can be skilled

26:36 uh operators. Um, and this is not new. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Oh, no, no, no. Please, please, please.

26:41 This is not new. I lived in in rural Idaho in in in the forest and it was

26:48 Boise Cascade big milling and then some environmental laws came in and they

26:55 overnight in in like two quarters this town Macall Idaho was on

27:02 you know on fumes but the the feds the state and the county had a a a

27:10 training program to take those individuals, get them into healthcare, nursing trades. And that was 20 years

27:17 ago. And I ran into a nurse who was in the a male nurse who was in the the the the logging uh paper mill industry and

27:27 his family and he was devastated. He had been there 15 years. He thought he was going to retire, but it was the reality.

27:32 It's not AI, but it's kind of sort of the same dynamics. He embraced the change. He got some retraining and he's

27:38 been fine. The same is true now. If you want to have job security for the next couple decades, embrace it. Don't worry

27:47 about it. And look to some of the the local government agencies, uh workforce development, job training, career

27:56 um uh organizations, nonprofits that can help you transition. The help is out there if you will look and the future is bright.

28:04 Yeah. Uh any parting thoughts before we end this episode? Sum summarizations?

28:09 Anything you want everyone to walk home with? Yeah. Uh, don't fret about AI.

28:14 Don't fret. There's been other big meteors could hit us. Uh, global warm.

28:19 Don't worry. We're going to be fine and and humanity and will be better. Um, be curious. Be curious about this technology. Don't be afraid.

28:29 If you're just entering a a sales role as an SDR and an an account executive inside sales,

28:37 stay curious. watch some videos or podcasts and then my gift to your readers will be a copy of my the future

28:46 of AI and professional selling how artificial intelligence is transforming sales strategy, customer relationships

28:53 and revenue growth. You'll have the book as a PDF or an audible version. So, it's been a high honor and and privilege,

29:01 Austin, to to be on your Tailwind podcast.

29:04 This is great. I appreciate it. Everyone go read the book. I really appreciate you bringing on.