Bowen: Yeah, I’m new to the BTS family. I just joined the company about four months ago after my company Wonderway was acquired. So as part of the acquisition, we rebranded as Verity. and in a nutshell, what we do is we build an AI sales coach.
Rick: So, wow. I love how you say so matter of fact that you built an AI sales coach when most of us are still trying to figure out what AI is, I’m wondering if you could tell me just a little bit more.
About kind of the process behind doing something like that and the work that it’s doing for salespeople and sales leaders today.
Bowen: Yeah, for sure. So, the key idea behind the product is that it operates the AI sales coach operates very similar to what a real manager would do. so the way it works is that it integrates into calling tools like Microsoft teams zoom and also calling call center dialers like ring central and what it does is it records the sales conversations that reps are having, and analyzes those conversations to give them real time feedback off the call.
So, what it will do is after each call, it will summarize the call and give them feedback around what was the main strengths and weaknesses they had on that call, and then it will aggregate the data across all of the calls. To show them what are their consistent areas for improvement so that we can share that with the rep and also with the manager so they can speed up the time that it takes to figure out what the team needs help with and track the improvements of how things are changing over time.
Rick: Wow. And I would also think since you’re aggregating so many calls versus just the occasional ride along, it would help sales leaders. And even the sellers themselves understand where they’re getting stuck without as much bias.
Bowen: Yeah, 100%. I mean, one of the biggest challenges we see is that I think coaching is one of those important, but really urgent things for most sales managers. I think most sales managers would like to do coaching, but they really have the time for it. And it’s one of those things that always gets deprioritized.
So, when we speak to customers, most sales managers we speak to are probably listening to less than 1 percent of the sales calls the reps are having and what that means is that when they do go to have a coaching conversation, they’re kind of shooting from the hip or that they’re guessing about what the gaps are that the sales reps have.
So one of the big benefits here is that by analyzing not just one call, but all of the calls that we’re doing, we can really start to iron out some of those anomalies like every rep has a good call or a bad call and by analyzing enough calls, we can smooth all of that noise out.
And we can really identify what is the consistent strength and weakness that people have. So, I think this is great for the rep because we can focus on the most important things and for the managers, it’s also good because it can save them a ton of time listening to calls. I think if a manager was going to do a really good job of call coaching, they’d probably have to listen to, I don’t know, maybe five or six calls to try and figure it out for themselves, but using AI, we can now do that work for them so they can jump on that conversation and already have that legwork done for them so they can just focus on coaching on the things that matter.
Rick: Well and it’s that the things that matter part that I do think is the hardest, even if I know as a sales manager, how to coach to something and even if it’s important enough to me to take the time to do it, getting the diagnostics right, I think is really hard. So, this feels to me like something that, dang would be super helpful to me.
Cause I’m still a sales leader, even within our business. Well, cool. So, I guess the other thing that just popped into my head, I understand the call center context because we all get that whole, our calls are recorded for quality and training purposes. How are we doing that? As sellers, how are we doing that? Basically, maintaining privacy or providing the right kind of notification to the customer in that kind of environment.
Bowen: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, I think it’s important to understand that we aren’t the first company to record sales calls. I think, as you said, in the call center space, this is very mature. They’ve been doing it for. Since I can remember, but even in the B2B space, there’s been quite a few companies that have popped up in the last 10 years or so, that have been recording B2B conversations as well.
And in fact, more than 50 percent of B2B companies are already recording the sales calls to make this like GDPR compliant, all the sales reps need to do is they need to inform the customer that they’re recording the call. So, you just need to ask the consent and then once you record the call, then it’s actually, the property of the company to do with it, what it likes.
So, I think it’s important to understand that we aren’t really pioneers in the sales call recording and analytics space, but what we are pioneers in is using generative AI to analyze the calls. So up until a year ago, the only way up until generative AI was released the way for doing sales call analytics was around keyword analysis.
So basically, you take a transcript, and you could count how many times a certain word was said. and then you try to figure out if there were positive words or negative words and try and give feedback around that. But it was very, very basic, but I think the key breakthrough that has come out since generative AI in the last two years is that we can now actually understand the context of what’s being said on the call.
And we can start to have an opinion about what they did well or what they can improve and that was just something that wasn’t possible until the new technology came out. It was just released.
Rick: I feel like I’ve heard a few times is these generative AI models are only as good as their data set that feeds them. Given that so many organizations, well, actually I was about to say, especially in the B2B space, but really any seller they feel like their sales technique or processes is many times, both art and science. So how do you train your AI model to reflect me, my sellers, my goals in the marketplace right now?
Bowen: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, from our side, we definitely focus more on the science. I think the reason is that it’s easier, but I think it’s also the thing that’s the easiest to train the easiest to coach on. So, the way that our product works is that, pretty much all of the customers we’re working with, they have a sales methodology or a sales playbook that they want their sales reps to follow.
But I think it can be a huge challenge getting people to follow that playbook. So, what you can do with our product is you can set up, you can customize the coach for what it should be coaching them on. So, you can set up a process around different types of calls, it could be different calls in the sales process.
How you want people to handle their cold calls, the discovery calls, the demos, the negotiation and then the coach will coach them against that playbook. So, the thing that we’re really focusing on, I’d say, is that science or that process of how do we get everyone up? How do we find those people that are maybe the B players, how do we coach them to become a players in the team by getting them to follow that consistent process? I think there is a truth to the art and sales and some people have the gift in the garb and things like that. But I think that is much, much harder to train on.
But it’s much easier to move the needle on getting people to follow the right process and following the right steps and having a successful call. So that’s really where we focus.
Rick: So, I can’t have a conversation with the AI expert without asking the question. So, what do you think is next? What do you think next with AI in the world of coaching?
Bowen: So that’s, a big question. I mean, at a broad level, the big conversation in the industry is this tradeoff between general purpose, large language models and more specific smaller models. So, I think we’re reaching the point where, like at the moment, there’s been the release of ChatGPT everyone knows about ChatGPT and Claude and these big large language models.
But there’s a big conversation going on in the industry, whether that’s going to be the future, especially in the B2B space, will we be using these general purpose large language models? Or are we better off switching to maybe more focused models that are the purpose trained just for the purpose that they’re serving.
So, this is a big topic for us because we are looking at this, we’re building our own models and we’re also testing them against the general purpose models and from what we’ve found, our own train models are just not able to perform at the same rate as the general purpose models. But I think this will change in the next couple of months.
So, this is something we’re constantly checking. Is training our own models and comparing them against these general purpose models because as soon as they’re good enough, I think that this will be a big game changer because it’ll make it much cheaper to run these models and perhaps, we might end up in a situation where you might have smaller models that are working together to solve problems at different stages in the process.
So, I think on a macro level, I think that’s probably the biggest conversation that’s happening in the industry at the moment. When it comes to sales training and sales coaching, I think the big conversation is what do we automate? I think everybody that I’m speaking to is interested in AI and many companies are running different experiments, but trying to figure out what are the best areas to apply AI in the stack is a challenge that I think a lot of people are trying to figure out for themselves.
So, in my opinion, where I think AI can provide the biggest impact is doing those super repetitive tasks that are very clearly defined and it’s just doing the same thing over and over again or doing really boring tasks that nobody wants to do or tasks that, as I mentioned before, urgent, not important.
So, I think this is where coaching Is an important one, but maybe something that people aren’t doing very well. And I think it’s an area where we can provide a lot of impact. I’ve seen some companies that are also looking at how can they replace salespeople in the process? I think we’re still quite a while way away from replacing salespeople entirely.
But I do believe there will be elements of the process that will be automated quite soon. So, repetitive outbound processes, maybe some inbound sales calls. If it’s just very simple interactions, and very, very basic repetitive interactions, I think these will be automated very, very soon.
Yeah, coming back to the question, what a company is struggling with, it’s about everybody sees the potential, but everyone’s still trying to figure out where to start and I speak to many people, many sales leaders that are a bit confused. I’d say like they’re little bit hamstrung.
They don’t know where to start and many people are hanging back and not doing anything. And I think that is the worst approach you can take because you just have to get started and learn and as the models evolve, I think you need to be prepared to adapt but not doing anything is just going to cause companies to fall behind in my opinion
Rick: Well, it is very interesting to me because as someone who sees so many sellers from so many different industries, and because of the role that I play at BTS gets multiple sales emails every day, one of our BD leads came to me and showed me an email from a client that said, please tell me you guys aren’t doing AI emails.
And I was like, well, I’m not doing AI emails. This is actually really you and I say that because I am curious as to your thoughts and I’m sure it’s premature and I’m sure on some level, we’ll figure out what works, but I almost think of when people started installing kind of that phone tree to get you the information you needed for our hours of operations, press one for our, you know, and you’re just like, by the time I’ve pressed my eighth number I’m ready to hang up.
And I would think it would be somewhat the same for I’m making a decision that could cost me my job am I really best served by AI automated response. I mean, that’s basically the world that sellers have been playing, especially in the B2B environment for years. I’m curious because on some level, I’m already seeing from clients and even in my own life, a level of backlash against the amount of outreach that AI enables.
Bowen: Yeah, talking about SDRs are outbound Salesforce just released an AI SDR. There’s a small startup that just raised 20 million to build an AI SDR to do outreach. I’ve spoken to some companies that are using them.
And the first feedback I’ve heard is that they’ll kind of boil the ocean to one customer said they’ll burn down the orchard to get one up was the analogy that they used, and I think that’s terrifying to consider that most people are already overwhelmed with emails and then maybe this is going to take it to the next level.
So, I think there’s clearly room for improvement. I think it’s going to come, but I don’t think it’s there yet and I think there’s some companies that are experimenting with it and to your point about people losing their job. I still believe that companies should be doing experiments, but they should be keeping them small to let go of your whole team and implement an AISDR and then get that done. That surprise afterwards would be a very bad move, but to run a small controlled pilot to see within a very controlled segment what results it can give and to take that into learn, I think is not a bad move.
So again, AI is very new for everybody. I think the companies are trying to figure out where to apply it in their stack. The startups are also trying to figure out how to best apply it and I think the best way to do this is to run a variety of different pilots in the business, and just get started because, as long as you can limit the downsides, you need to be in the game to learn.
I don’t think you can sit back and wait for everyone else because you’ll just be too far behind. If you do that, it might be.
Rick: No, it makes good sense. and I also completely agree the incremental approach is always better, especially with Salesforce’s than just pushing the reset button and dealing with a year of repercussions, at least, of that big push. I think that those are all very interesting conversations to continue having. So, I’ll definitely want to have you back as we continue to learn more about what AI can do in sales, obviously so much of what we do at BTS goes beyond just the commercial organization. So, I’m wondering if you’ve now that you’re part of the broader family, so to speak, what your vision is for potentially other use cases?
Bowen: So, it’s no surprise that sales training is just one aspect of what BTS does. I think that the majority of their practice is more focusing around leadership training and coaching. So, we’re running some of our experiments of our own as part of our vision is now that we’ve figured out how to do sales coaching, we’re looking at how we can also provide coaching to leaders.
So, coaching to first line managers around how they can have better coaching conversations with their teams coaching them on how to have their team standups better and also executive level coaching. One interesting insight we’ve seen is that very senior leaders, if they’re doing big presentations to the board or the executive team, they often practice those presentations many, many times over.
and they’re very, very uncomfortable, usually doing that in front of other people or exposing themselves to critical feedback. So, one use case we’re also exploring is providing a safe place for leaders to practice their presentations and giving them that instant feedback so they can iterate and nail that pitch.
So, I think the we’re starting in sales coaching, but the application at a broader scope what we’re doing is really conversation performance, and how this can be applied across all sorts of different types of conversations in the business. So, we’re starting with experiments now, and we’ll be looking to roll these applications out next year.
Rick: Wow. Well, I’m sure some of our clients are like I want to be in one of those experiments, but they’ll have to get in line behind me, at least when it comes to that presentation coach, just the very second, you’re ready with that. I’m your favorite guinea pig. I promise. but anyway, I appreciate so much the time you’ve spent with us today, and I’m really excited to see how this continues to evolve.
I mean, at least from my perspective as a sales marketing leader for years and years and years, that diagnosing the what, when it comes to sales coaching, has always been the hardest part, and it sounds like you’re solving that for a lot of people. So, I strongly believe that’s a big help to folks.
So really appreciate your insights, I really appreciate your time and, like I said, we’ll have to have you back soon.
Bowen: Great. Thanks for having me on the show.
Rick: Thanks for joining me today. It’s always a pleasure to bring to you our Fearless Thinkers. If you’d like to stay up to date, please subscribe. Bios for our guests and links to relevant content are always listed in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch, please visit us at bts.com. And thanks so much for listening!
