Sales Superpowers with Generative AI

Carlos Ponce (00:10):

Good morning everyone. Welcome to another episode of Tech Leaders Unplugged. And today we are getting unplugged on this Friday, the sixth with Peter Mollins, who is the CMO of SetSail. And we're going to be talking about generative AI. Why am I not surprised, right? That we're, we're all talking about generative AI, so this is no exception. And let's see what this, there's in store for us this morning. So Peter, welcome to the show, and of course, Wade also welcome to the show as ever. Thank you for graciously co-hosting. So let's, let's get it started, and let's get unplugged today. Okay. Thank you. So, Peter, yes, welcome to the show.

Peter Mollins (00:59):

I appreciate it. Thanks, Carlos. Great to, great to have a chance to chat with you and Wade.

Carlos Ponce (01:03):

Absolutely. It's our pleasure. So Peter, let's start with, with you, let's start with Peter Mollins. Tell us a little bit about you, your background, where you come from, and your experience, and then we'll, and then we will move on to of course SetSail. But tell us a little bit about your first.

Peter Mollins (01:20):

Sure. Yeah, so Peter Mollins, the CMO of SetSail. We'll talk about what SetSail is in a bit, but I've been in the B2B space for basically my, entire career stretching back to my first internship with Netscape. So that kind of gives you a sense for, for how, how long ago it was. But I've always been with, with tech, tech companies focused on the B2B market from doing mainframe consolidation and developer tools at Microfocus and Borland, you know, right through to sales and marketing technology with a company called Knowledge Tree, which was later bought by SVO and then ultimately by Seismic. And then into FinTech where I was at a company called Spreedly, where we were doing something called payment orchestration and really launching a new market called Payment Orchestration for helping to orchestrate various payment providers for, especially for international e-commerce companies. And then joined Set Sale about a year ago. And just really exciting market, really exciting space and technology around it. So yeah, very happy to be here and to, to share some of some of the things I've picked up over the years.

Peter Mollins (02:31):

Excellent, Peter, I appreciate it. And thanks for telling us a little bit about yourself. And now let's move on to SetSail. What is SetSail and what does it do? What is your value proposition?

Peter Mollins (02:39):

Yeah, so fundamentally SetSail I like to think of it in terms of how our customers are able to take advantage of it. So, you know, if you're, if you're a sales team and you're selling a, you know, a complex deal, you're dealing with lots of different information, you know, from across lots of different people in your company, and you're sending emails, you're having meetings, you're having a calendar in calendars that are going out, you're doing zoom calls, you're having all these various conversations. And especially for, you know, if you're selling into mid-market or into enterprise, it gets really complicated. I mean, you're dealing with dozens of emails across many, many people, lots of different meetings that are happening. You know, you may have other people in your own company who are coming in and having those conversations with your prospects. So, the challenge is that you're so overwhelmed with all of this information from those emails, from those calendars, from those transcripts and those, those Zoom or Gong calls or whatever, that it's, it's virtually impossible for a salesperson to have the context to know what's happening in their deals. So what SetSail does is it essentially, it captures all of that information that's happening across your emails, across your calls, across those calendars, and is able to make intelligence out of it so that you can know instantly what's happening within every deal so that you can take better, better next steps and close those deals faster.

Wade Erickson (04:01):

Oh, you're on mute,

Carlos Ponce (04:03):

Apologize for that. As I said, that's something that I was taken care of. So Wade, I think that what Peter is mentioning, it's we, we, we both resonate with, with what he's saying. So I look forward to your, your questions and mine as well. So, I'm, I'm, I'm going to have a couple be assured of that. So now let's move on to the topic. The topic Peter has chosen by you is sales superpowers with generative AI, the hidden Mine Practical generative AI strategies for Sales teams.

Peter Mollins (04:38):

Right.

Carlos Ponce (04:40):

So tell us why you chose this particular topic and why you felt it was relevant for today's day and age.

Peter Mollins (04:45):

Yeah, so I mean, I chose, I chose ai, ai obviously it's been in the, been in the news for well over a year, but, you know, well over, well over, you know, many decades it's been, it's been a hot, hot topic, but particularly in the last year. And so why I chose it is because there was, of course, a big burst of interest, you know, really back in the early spring where ChatGPT was coming out and the opening eye tools and others in the market were coming out. And one of the things that I found really interesting and compelling about it was there was a lot of excitement around tools like ChatGPT. But one of the things that was really interesting about how this started to develop is there was interest, yes, but where the interest started, to become more real was when people were doing one of two things. They were either talking more about what are the prompts that you need to give in order to get actual information out of the AI or, you know, defined use cases where someone can be leveraging AI more effectively to actually do some specific task. Because if you're confronted with just you know, a text entry bar and you're meant to type in some query, it can be, there's, there's, there's a bit of writer's block. What am I asking? What do I need to, what do I need to know? Like, I think about that, for instance, with, with our own technology, with SetSail own technology, you know, we're aggregating and bringing together all this information that I mentioned from emails, from call transcripts, et cetera, and putting it into, you know, a very accessible data store, whether that's in Salesforce or whether that's in your own data lake, like in you know you know, one of the, the major data lakes like snowflake or Databricks. And once it's in there, of course, you could ask any question, you could say what deals are at risk? Or you could ask you know, what meetings do I have coming up with senior VPs, or which is what's the biggest pain point across all of my top deals? Or, you know, what are the primary motions I need to do in order to advance deals? You could be asking all these various questions about that dataset using, using our technology. But one of the things that I find interesting is how, just like for the rest of the market, it's more real for people when you can define a use case and have functionality that's built around the AI versus it just being a sim, you know, a completely open-ended text bar where you can ask a question. So wanted to sort of talk through some of those use cases here, you know, and kind of go through a few of them that I've seen that have been particularly effective either for our team or for, you know, others in the market that are really that use case driven focus of ai.

Wade Erickson (07:24):

Oh, on mute, mute again, Carlos.

Carlos Ponce (07:27):

See, I need to get back and forth. All right. So, thank you, Peter, once again, Wade I know you have a couple of questions, so I'm going to pass on the mic to you.

Wade Erickson (07:38):

Yeah, so you know, obviously being a sales leader myself in, in the whole I guess the whole life cycle, the buyer journey and prospecting with the teams and of course using CRM systems and the data you know, a lot of these a generative AI systems and stuff, they're trained on a whole wide variety of content, if it's open AI as an example. And then a lot of these, the companies are you know, passing their customer, I mean their own corporate data into the, the analysis as well. Tell me a little bit about your perspective on, you know, having these wide varieties of data here and then the quality of the data and or maybe the lack of quality. Often my challenge is getting consistent consistency in my account executives and SDRs to put data into the CRM system. And if there's not a consistent capturing of that information and there are gaps in that. Tell me about the data quality and how that affects ai.

Peter Mollins (08:44):

Yeah, I mean, that's a really great question. Like, if you, if you don't have good data quality then, you know, AI is, AI is not magic. AI is working off of and training off of a data set, and that data set can be something that you provide or your provider provides or, or what have you. But yeah, if it's not if it's not operating off the right set of data, it's going to be extremely difficult to get good answers out of, not only because it may be misunderstanding how to interpret the data and then bring it back as an answer, but also it just may be missing having blind spots to it. So if I move over to like the sales, to like the sales use case, you're right about the, a number of different things in, in your question. Sales data can be very difficult to get ahold of because as much as we want it to be in the CRM, it really isn't. I mean, you know, I mean, I, I remember, I mean, I don't know if you, what was your first C R M that you used, but I was using act and I was using Siebel, and I was using lots of, lots of different CRMs long before Salesforce existed. So, the problem of getting good-quality data into, the CRMs not new. It's been around for forever. And now I think that that problem's actually been compounded. So it's compounded because now you have not only lots of different teams, but you have lots of different tools that these teams are using. So they're using Gmail or Outlook for their email. They're using maybe Gong or Chorus or some other you know, Zoom, for their meeting recordings. They might be using Outreach and SalesLoft. They, there are all of these various tools that are out there where they're, where they're generating tons of data about there that are in email and all these meetings and the like, and I'm not just saying data like I sent an email on X date to this person, but what was the content of that email? Like was I reaching out to power? Was I reaching out to a certain role in an organization? What was the message that I was communicating? Did I, did I at what point in the conversation, did I bring up a certain fact about who showed up to the meeting? You know, what if you know, I have 10 people invited, but only the most junior people show up to the meeting? There's all of this various data, but the problem is that it's being concentrated within these various tool silos. So I can go into my sales engagement tool and run a report that's great. I can go into a meeting tool or a conversation intelligence tool, and I can get some information about those, meetings that happened. But what I really need is a holistic view of everything that's happening across the deal. All those emails, all those calls, all those calendars, all of those things, I need to put that together. Otherwise, AI is just not, it's not going to be complete. It's just going to be answering a portion of the question. So, I really want to have that,  those data silos broken down and that data brought together so that I can actually ask the right questions. And if you'll just, let me just add one more thing. You mentioned the data quality factor. I think that's exactly right as well. Like, you know, even the best, best-laid plans for asking your SDRs, asking your AEs, asking your CSMs to put all this information into, into, into Salesforce, you're going to end up with inconsistency of the actual doing of it, and you're going to end up with inconsistency in terms of, you know, how they're putting the information in the quality of the information that they're putting in, and the, like, so I might be, you know, really enthusiastic and, you know, fill out tons of information and click lots of different fields and put all that information to the CRM. The next person may also fill it out, but not do it in nearly the same depth. So, then AI is going to, then it may start to bias on some of the responses based on the wealth of data is and the depth of data. So, it's much better to automate some of those data collection processes because you're going to be able to break down the silos better, and you're going to be able to ensure there's more accuracy and consistency across the data that's collected.

Wade Erickson (12:47):

So, it's a change in the demand of the process to collect the data, like you said. And I think as we start to build a tool like AI that is so data-dependent. It drives the importance of process. And you know, humans like you said, this has been a challenge for every sales organization for decades, regardless of the capture tool. It's a, it's a discipline issue. It's a different it's a, you know, different salespeople come in with different backgrounds and different histories and then as we're capturing, you know, using some of these you know, AI-driven summarization tools, like you said, gong or, or any of those others, those conversations are completely ad hoc. And so, you're bringing in unstructured AI-generated, you know, memos and notes. Then further and analyzed by AI then, you know, so yeah, it is just becoming an interesting, interesting world we live in as far as the data and the flow of that information.

Peter Mollins (14:01):

I mean, you're so right about like the, the idea of taking snapshots also because like, if you're, if you're doing like a summary on a call, that's very useful, there's no doubt about it. Like, if I walk out of an hour-long call with one of my prospects and I get a call summary that says, we spoke about A, B, and C, and these were the action items, that is terrific. However, if I want to go into my next forecast call, or if I am now scheduling my next call with that same team, I have to make sure that I have complete context, and that I know what's going on. The most recent meeting is useful, of course, it's useful, but if I'm going to be able to present what's going on in my deal and plan what I should be doing next, my closed strategy, I need to have context on all of those emails that are happening. All of those calls that have happened, not just yesterday, but, you know, the 20 calls that I've had over the last six months with that customer or prospect.

Wade Erickson (14:58):

You know, as you know, as a salesperson you know, you look at how much time you spent prospecting a hunting versus the first discovery meeting through closure. And, you know, I always try to estimate that, and, you know, I sometimes it's 60 to 70% of your time is that hunting and prospecting. And, the need, I mean, our, our communication channels are so crowded and becoming less and less effective, whether it's phone calls, emails, social, and then now we have these big pushes to do personalization and having AI help do that. Where do you see some of the tools in helping with that portion of the sales journey in maybe analyzing the social context of a prospect, parsing that, and bringing that into a personalized note so you can do some personalization at scale? So at least it, you know, we're not spamming people with the same old message because that obviously isn't working. I don't know if it did, but maybe it did the first three years of email right? But, you know, back when people read every email that came in. But so, tell me a little bit about what you're seeing in this space to help with the prospecting and the hunting with AI.

Peter Mollins (16:25):

Yeah, yeah. So, definitely, as you said, there are some really great tools that help with the personalization of emails and also just help, with better writing of emails. Like that's, that can't be overlooked. Is something as fundamental as having something that's grammatically correct and tone-wise is strong. So, you know, you see, see, you know, companies like, like lavender or copy ai, where they're really good at helping you to, to formulate really strong you know, written emails that, that are compelling. And then, like, you also see that like there's, just to kind of take your example to the stream, I mean, you see things like TVIs, for instance, like a personalized video where you're able to use AI to, to generate, you know, videos that you can share with prospects where you're describing the problem and describing why it matters to a particular target, and yet have that personalized at scale. So, you do definitely see a lot of technologies that are working, to help on that prospecting. And to make that easier. There are a lot of other elements too that really, really come in to support that. You know, so you have, you have tools that are like Apollo or Clay or ZoomInfo and others where they're using AI to help identify intent or help to identify the, the right persona types and ICPs that you should be reaching out to. So, helping you to identify not only what you want to message to them, but who within that set, you want to narrow it down to and focus on, for reaching out to. So absolutely from the prospecting perspective, just a ton, a ton of, a ton of solutions that are out there that are using AI to, to, you know, either to, to take you and multiply you or to on the converses, to, to filter out the noise and help you to focus on, on you know, what matters, whether it be the right person, the right company, the right market, etcetera.

Wade Erickson (18:20):

Yeah. I think that you know, definitely as a company that is you know, somewhat in a, you know, highly competitive service that some might call a commodity, you know, that means that we have tens of thousands of potential companies that use a service like ours. So isolating not only the in-market folks where you're using the intent data, You know, and, and visitors to your website that didn't leave any residue of a form fill or anything like that. Trying to, you know, figure out where is the best person to message. So yeah, I'd like to pivot a little, oh, go ahead.

Peter Mollins (19:08):

So, I'm sorry. I was just going to say, you're totally right. Like, I think that there's, there's a new, there's a new appreciation for this sort of inbound plus outbound, or all bound, I guess you could say the approach to, to, to targeting where it's not, it's not about bulk emailing thousands of people, although, you know, in some, in some cases, that can work. I mean, I'm not saying that it's a, it's totally off the, off, off the page, but in terms of like, from the inbound perspective AI's helping as well for, for, for you to become an influencer yourself. And so that could be generating ideas for you to post on. It could be tools like video editing tools to make it really simple for you to produce, you know, podcasts or light interviews where you can get content out that's valuable to people and so then your inbound becomes you know, less about SS e o and more about publishing, you know, your journey, publishing your learnings, publishing information. That's helpful. You know, kind of getting back to the roots of what, what inbound was all about is, you know, being able to provide value. And I mean, I ran a podcast myself, for about a year, and this was before a lot of these AI tools came out, and it was extremely difficult to get it done. I mean, it was more time for me to edit and publish, the content to LinkedIn and elsewhere than it was to produce it, and yet now you have tools that are AI-driven that can slice up a podcast or slice a slice up a video interview into its key moments, add, you know, TikTok friendly labels to it that could be shared easily. You know, it just has made, has made the process of creating so much more joyful, and it's, it's so much easier to get that out there. So I think those are really key things for, for, you know, sellers themselves wanting to brand themselves and to also to get value out there so that, you know, people will want to come to them and will want to do business with them. So yeah, I think that there's just, there's, there's a lot of opportunities there that are, that go beyond just simply writing better emails and bulk sending them all, but it's also on the value side and being able to provide value to your targets.

Wade Erickson (21:19):

Excellent, excellent response. This is very timely for, I think for a lot of folks that are, you know, just trying to, you know, you know, 2023 has been a tough year for a lot of folks, I think, in the tech sector and that is in sales. And so if it's okay, I'd like to pivot a little bit to you personally. You've been in the marketing space most of your career. You know, what, what interested you at, at a young age to be in marketing? And tell me a little bit about, you know some of the folks here are trying to, you know, look at their career and make that jump into a CXO role. And so tell a little bit about what you think was instrumental in being able to make that jump from an SVP or VP to a chief, a marketing officer, to kind of guide some of the folks that are watching the show.

Peter Mollins (22:13):

Yeah, yeah. That's a great question. So, in terms of getting into marketing in itself, it's, it's funny, like I started as a kid, my favorite thing to do was I would write stories. I would just write poems which you know, poems short stories and the like. And I just loved, loved doing that. And that's what I really enjoyed about marketing and how I got into marketing is because, you know, fundamentally marketing is, is about understanding your audience and being able to tell a compelling story that moves people to take action. And, and so that's storytelling at its root. And so, you know, I think I'm doing honor to my grade three teacher, Mrs. Wilcox, who encouraged me to go into storytelling. And I think that it may be a different type of storytelling. It may not be publishing a book of poetry, but it's it is still in that same vein for the move from SVP to a C role or even director or VP to another role. It's, really interesting how I, to me, find that the bulk of my time is spent in a different way than it was when I was at the VP level. And it's principally about making other people as effective as possible and as safe and valued as possible. And that's what I've, I've attempted to do. And that comes through being very clear about what goals are, being clear about the paths to get there, being transparent about when I, I feel like our strategy may need to be adapted and the like, and just being able to work with the team to help solve their problems, get things out of their way, versus, you know, sitting down and, and, you know, doing, doing things. It is much more about helping others on your team to do their job better, and hiring and hiring the right people, making sure that, you know, you're bringing the right people in. So, I think that's, that's been the biggest shift for me at the C level is, is focusing on how, how you can help to enable and equip your team to, to just be excellent.

Carlos Ponce (24:38):

Peter, we're coming up on time, but I still, don't want to end the conversation without asking. Well, one question, one more question. When I first started to communicate with one of your collaborators with Sam, well, he was and I heard about what's the way that SetSail, the value that it provides to people in the sales and marketing space. So, I mean, for me, because I've been in, I'm not an engineer by known by any stretch of the imagination, but I've been working like in with tech companies for many years, right? Almost, almost 20. So for me, it was easier to get a grasp of what SetSail was about, right? So because I've been like, I've grown with the space itself over the course of almost two decades, however, there might be some cases in which folks with a more traditional mindset might be kind of, let's call it reluctant to, due to a lack of a better word, to adopt especially AI. When personalization, obtaining data, you know, things like these. So what would you say to these folks who might be on the fence about actually adopting AI and implementing it into their strategies or tactics and everything that they're doing in sales?

Peter Mollins (26:08):

Yeah, I think that's a very important question. To me, I think, the best way to address that is to think of it in terms of the use case. What is the value that you're getting out of it? And so, putting AI aside for a second, when I, when I think about what Set sale does and the sort of the emotion that it's helping to, to confront, I think of the feeling that, like, I've, I've also headed up sales teams, and I know the feeling of walking into a sales meeting and being unprepared, walking in, and I got back to back to back sales meetings, and I walk into one and I can't remember where we are. Did we get that into legal? Who is the, who's my champion here? What's the, what's the main thing that they're looking to address? And when you don't have that under control, that is a terrible feeling because you are going to slow down your deal, you're going to jeopardize your credibility, and worse same thing as if you're going into a forecast call. Now we talk about, you know, moving up in, in an organization, if I'm a director of sales and I walk into my pipeline call and I don't have complete control over what's happening within my deals, and I walk in and the CROs or the CEO is on the, the line, and I'm not able to say what's really going on within my deals, that's painful. And that's not a good recipe, for promotion. Now, if I edit at my fingertips, just the distillation of all those calls, all those emails, all those calendar invites, everything that's happening within my, within my sales deals, and then that displays mastery, it's not only great for internal, but it also helps me to keep those deals going and display confidence to my, to my prospects. So really, I think of it in terms of like an emotional resolution, which is I'm helping to resolve that fear and, the challenge of not being prepared, not being ready for that next board meeting, prospect call, customer call, pipeline meeting, etcetera, because I, now, I have all the information, all the context about what's happening in my deals. So, to answer your question, I'd like to put AI aside sometimes and just say, you know what, let's focus on what the business results are and what is the feeling that I'm going to get from solving that problem.

Carlos Ponce (28:17):

Great. definitely. Great, great answer. So, Peter, it's been a pleasure and it's been great to have you here on Tech Leaders Unplugged. So I really thank you for having shared your insights and your expertise with us and, and our viewers. But I'm going to ask you to stick around as we go off the air, I have a very quick announcement to make. We're going to be the next guest that we have here on Tech Leaders Unplug is, excuse me, is Stian Rognild. He's the CEO of a company called Aquaticode. And the topic is going to be AI and machine learning in aquaculture. So as you can see, you know, there's, there's also other areas in which in technology that are also relevant for our own survival, which is food, right? So, we're going to be having the conversation with Stian on October 11th. That's next Wednesday. So join us here on Tech Leaders Unplug at 9:30 AM Pacific and stay tuned for more on tech leaders unplugged.com. With that being said, again, thank you so much, Peter, and thank you Wade as ever, and we'll see you next time.

Peter Mollins (29:34):

Great. Thank you.

Carlos Ponce (29:35):

Bye-Bye.