#219 – AI's role in the future of sales learning and coaching (Part 2) w/ Patrick Trümpi

Full episode transcript: 

​Please note that transcription is done by AI and may contain errors.

​

 

George: Hi everyone. George here, the editor of the Sales Transformation Podcast. This week on the show we've got part two of Phil's interview with the co-founder and CRO of Task base, Patrick Tru P. If you haven't listened to part one yet, I would recommend you pause this episode and go listen to that one.

First. We rejoined Phil and Patrick as they start discussing what makes a good sales leader. that said, please enjoy part two.​

​

 

Phil: So you're saying it starts really with a, with a leader, you know,

Patrick: defining it starts with the

Phil: leader. What, what the playbook, um, should be.

Patrick: I talk to leaders every day, right? And we ask them, Hey, what do you have already? Like, how does your sales playbook look like? Uh, I mean, I have our onboarding presentation, I have a notion page, and then you see this notion page that nobody ever logged in that is like,

Phil: yeah, yeah.

Patrick: That's how it looks.

Phil: So that's starts to, that's often where you start. I mean, that tells, you know, in itself, that tells an interesting story, doesn't it? Because, uh, I mean there's a couple of things on that. I, I agree with you. I think the, The idea of leaders, having a strong, carefully thought through playbook of how best to sell their solutions into the market.

I would say I would agree that it's incredibly rare, um, that they would have that. I also think that a lot of them, you know, and uh, I'm sure you've come across is a lot of the leaders were accepting good salespeople, that they're not necessarily good leaders. I mean, that's in itself a very separate kind of conversation.

Does the best sales person make the sales leader?

Patrick: I think it's something that people like to talk about. Um, in my case, okay, I don't want to brag, but I was always the best sales rep and I was the first time, first person to be promoted after three years of being an individual contributor.

Okay. I, I have no idea if, well, do I know if I'm good leader? Maybe so. I mean, I've not always been, that's for sure. Like, it's also something you have to learn over. I've been a leader now 10 years or something. So first five years I have not been a good leader either for, I don't, I didn't, I didn't come very naturally.

I do think there are some skills. Let's take active listening again, active listening as a leader, fantastic. If you are a good active listener, sales rep and you're a good active, le active listener, you're going to be, you have some skills or some stuff that you will make your good leader as well. Uh, we talked about challenger sale before, right?

Phil, in Challenger sale, you have the second most successful besides challenges. The lone wolf. You have these salespeople who don't really know what they do, but it kind of works what they do because they do a lot with character charisma and not, not just relationship, but they also have the right kind of pushiness and I don't know, something like that.

If a person like that who doesn't understand themselves, haven't read any books, that's a thing because if you read books, you understand what works and why it works. You don't, when you just go on with your day and it works. You never learn. So if you, if you, if you promote the lone wolf, it's not gonna, I mean, no, it's not gonna work because you, you need to be good at coaching and active listening and solving problems for your team.

That's what you should be doing. And then, yes, I, I agree. I mean, the story is just also appealing right now. Best sales rep to pro. I'm sure it worked a lot of times that the best sales rep has been promoted and then was also really good leader because it was a good active listener. But I'm also sure it worked.

A lot of times it was not working at all. I'm not sure you have, maybe you have some data on it, Phil, actually, but, um, if, if, um,

Phil: I dunno if we've done a sort of scientific study on it, but I'm, I mean, you often hear that comment being made, um,

Patrick: yeah. Yes.

Phil: Uh, so of course if you've got a leader who doesn't really understand how they've been so successful. Because I quite often find people struggle with that. What's made you, what's made you successful? And they, you know, they give you one or two sentences, but you're looking for a whole lot, lot more than that really. Um, or they may say, well, it's, it's that resilience or whatever.

It's difficult sometimes to get your hand on something that's been, that you could sort of truly use. So I think the idea of, of committing to a, a playbook of, of some sort, um, I think is, uh, is hugely important. And there are all sorts of different types of playbook. I mean, I don't know. When you talk about a playbook, do you follow a particular style of playbook or is everything completely bespoke to the kind of clients that you work with?

What's been your experience in developing the playbook?

Patrick: Yeah, I mean, um, it is, if you are a, if you're a startup, you gotta, the thing is the playbook is something that also evolves. And that's also the crucial part, kind of, you know, you start, you build something, you have a bit of an idea how to do it. You have to have a start with an idea and then use it in practise and see what works.

Like the sales process is the best example. You think about a failed sales process. You can't very much come up with it. Like, okay, um, what, like intellectually, you know, you can lay down something out from best practise, you can do that. But then you have to think about, okay, where can I go faster? Where can our clients, can I help our clients make a decision or buy foster from us?

And, and you take your lost, your five foster clients and try to build this in. So you have a combination of practical examples and then, you know, okay, these five clients were the fastest ones. Let's, um, let's try and put that into a sales process so that the sales reps recommend the steps that we recommended there.

That's one of these. So it builds up. But part of the sales playbook are, for instance, objection handling, right? Our, uh, AI coach tracks all the calls and we'll see if clients ask some tough questions, and it will propose an, a new objection into the playbook if it finds something like that. And it will also propose a good answer to it.

So that needs to live because obstructions change, products change, the value proposition changes. Or if internally we have a, usually there is an internal town hall where the CCPO or likes the chief product or somebody in the product team explains new features, always record these calls as well, and add the new features afterwards automatically to the playbook line because it's transcribed, you know, you can, and that needs to live.

It just needs to live. It's quite, I mean, the first version, it's not, you know, it can be very extensive. Uh, but the first version can start with, okay, which is what we, what is our ideal customer profile? Who do we, if we do outreach, uh, well also if we, if, uh, we get a lot of inbound leads, what is our ideal customer profile?

How do we do the first client interaction? How do we, how do we do it differently from an inbound lead versus somebody we call call? How do we do the first meeting there? What are the pains we want to talk about? What pains does our product solve? There are lots of things actually we can usually take from the website of the client and add into the playbook, which already helps, and then continue from there.

but these days it's very easy actually. I mean, to build a script, a discovery script, you start, um, you use our AI coach to build a script. It takes my content. I could probably also publish a book, Phil, at some point. Um, well, I think it's great to, would it be you,

Phil: your AI agent that would do it

Patrick: now?

Yeah, that's a good point, because I think it's a collaboration because how I write my, my sub, I have a substack, I have, uh, well, the substack alone probably would be, I don't know how many, probably four or 500 pages in a book. But how I write it, I talk an hour into like, you know, from voice to text, and then I say, take all that and put it into prose.

Put it into, yeah,

Phil: yeah.

Patrick: Put it into prose. Because writing wasn't my strong suit. Uh, like just sitting down and writing is such an emotionally, so that's why I think it's, well, you wrote it in 2020, Phil, which means you wrote it and you also have a doctor, uh, doctors, right?

Phil: Yeah. Well it started, uh, 15 years ago, I had to synthesise thousands and thousands of conversations, and I did it like, wow, that's quite cool it out and cutting it up, putting it on a wall, trying to see where the patterns were.

So there was no such thing as, as thematic analysis and, uh, yeah,

Patrick: yeah.

Phil: But, um, but even actually when we did it, uh, last year, um, of course we used AI to do the thematic analysis. I think you still need that, uh, human touch, uh, to come up with. Um, you know, you could just go with the words that are being suggested, but actually the word intellectual authenticity did not come outta the thematic analysis.

It came through looking underneath, uh, some of the other things that were being said. So can I, uh, I've got a couple of questions 'cause I know that you are, um, I mean, you might want to say a little bit about, um, task base and, and what it's been set up to do. But in terms of, of, um, the kind of looking at sales conversations and looking at different ways.

For example, you've mentioned objection handling. Is this something that happens in real time or is it something that happens afterwards?

Patrick: good question for you. You tell me. I like,

Phil: yeah,

Patrick: I like the question. Let, I, I let's dive because, uh, I get that sometimes from clients and here I'm, uh, I'm, I'm the challenger sale, and I tell them,

Phil: okay,

Patrick: no, we don't do that.

And I don't think it's a good idea. And I can even on top tell you from experience, it doesn't work. Hey, doesn't, it doesn't work life. Like if life we give you hints, Hey, the client said this objection. Here's the best answer. PE salespeople hate it because, and honestly, prospect for prospect is horrible because the only thing authenticity matters, we talked about authenticity, is the sales call.

That's where you shine, that's where you can react, where you have to, you know, and you can't, we, we, we had a feature like that in 2021 when we built the first recording tool out of Switzerland. Not the first in the world, but the first, uh, the first time I got into sales tech and, and AI and training and coaching, um, for sales reps.

And we had this feature that like, you know, in Microsoft teams, there was this, uh, this, this guy or this, this AI coach who said, are you talking too long now? Or you do this? And people were so distracted, they were always looking here. And you can see that I'm looking here now. Can you, and, and it's so. It was really, and sales reps hated it.

They didn't use that feature, so we actually got rid of it really quickly again.

Phil: Yeah.

Patrick: And I also think now I'm not sure for how long we are still going to do the conversations as sales reps. I hope it's for another 20, 30, 45, 50 years or so. But we don't know. Right? Maybe the new generation is just like, I'd like, I prefer to talk to ai.

I don't want to talk to humans anymore because AI is more honest. AI is, gives better answers, whatever, right? It could be the case. We don't really know that. I know that your generation and my generation, we do like to talk to people and I hope it stays like that. I know psychologically it's, it's better and it's healthier to talk to real people.

Uh, even, even better talk real, not like this in, in a video call, right? But, so I hope, I hope sales reps have the pleasure to do the talking and listening for a very long time still. So I think that that's what sales reps should be focused in and no help. Like, okay. I can tell you if I have, if you have a really good, difficult question, Phil, I do have an AI coach who can help me and I can type it in, but I do this transparently, right?

I don't have this,

Phil: okay.

Patrick: That only works honestly, if, if you are, uh, in a, in a call centre, people don't see you. You are only on the phone and your answers are fast. Because if you have to read something for five seconds here, and that's why the conversation is breaking and it's not authentic anymore, and it's just feels not good.

That's, that's, you don't want that. Um, so that's what we don't do. And I also advise strongly against implementing these tools for,

Phil: right?

Patrick: I mean, it doesn't work. Your sales reps are not gonna adopt it. That's, uh, now, um, now, yeah, so we focus on, um, on everything around like a coach. Okay? Coaching is skill development.

Like I said before, we take the sales playbook. If the, the companies don't have one, we help them build one in a week rather than months, uh, to have like playbook, sales processes and everything. So they, they have that. Then we derive the skills that sales reps need. From the playbook, like, you know, in the playbook, it's like, okay, there are lots of discovery question.

Okay. The, the sales rep need to be able to discover and quantify impact. Something like that usually comes out, right? So that's a skill. And then we have like 20 skills or 25 skills that sales rep need to excel in. And, um, our AI coach tracks all their calls and sees if they are good at some and good at all and not good at all.

Phil: Okay. It does some sort of announcements.

Patrick: Exactly. So I got a, an 80 now out of a hundred in active listening. So that's one that's my strongest skill, but I only have a 15 even or now, 24 actually because of the AI coach helped me develop it in, uh, quantification problem quantification. That's one of the difficult things for sales reps to do.

So it, and now the AI coach ch, focuses on three and helps me with feedback to improve me. So it sends me proactive messages after a call through Microsoft Teams or Slack and says, Hey Patrick, you have listened to your call. Here is one thing that you did really well. And here is one thing I would improve.

I would ask that question differently next time I would say this. And here's your progress on your skill. Like very sharp, very quick, very so that people actually read feedback, that they actually get it and they actually adjust their behaviour.

Phil: Yeah.

Patrick: Because if not, they'll be, they'll be definitely contacted by the AI coach again.

So it's a proactive coach that helps me, but also helps me, not just my skill development, because one thing that we realised is sales reps, you know, uh, how many people like learning tools? Not many, like learning tools don't work. Generally about 5 to 10% of people actually like to go in and do a course.

Same. I mean, we are very successful with this learning because it's on the job. But you can even be more successful if you help your sales rep also get their job done. That stuff that they don't like. And I don't do anything anymore that I don't like. I have to, I don't have to build any more presentations.

I just tell the coach, Hey, you've, you have the call from, uh, with Phil, uh, these three last calls that I had with Phil, can you build a PowerPoint presentation from it? And by the way, can you also, uh, create a proposal for it? Can you, can you, you know, it can basically, it does my job. Can you it fill automatically?

The CRM obviously that's in a very easy case. It's already been there for some time. I don't think you necessarily need to do that anymore because if you have the context from all the calls anyway, why the ads? But so it helps reps get through their day, helps them prepare the meetings, send a proactive meeting preparation before the meeting, think of this, Hey, ask this question reminds me of my coaching before the meeting.

Writes all my follow up emails obviously as well. And basically helps me prepare for my one-on-ones with my sales rep tells me, okay, this is the coach focus you should have today, because they struggle to improve on that. And, and that's what I would do. I would do a role play, uh, on this case and blah, blah, blah.

You know, like, uh, human coaching is still necessary when we talk about coaching and learning for accountability. But also sometimes you gotta put, put this in, put it into practise and, uh, get, get, and that's sometimes, yeah. Uh, it's, it helps on top.

Phil: It does. I was talking to a, a leader of quite a large company the other day and um, and she said, you know, one of the things that worries her most is knowing what's going on with the thousands of conversations that are taking place every single day with their customers, you know, across, you know, managed Europe.

And I, I, now, I think, I think that sort of having, knowing that there's some kind of process in place, you know, through the technology type of solutions you've been talking about, knowing that that coaching is there to help people. Sort of being coached through the process is, uh, is a great relief for, you know, for a leader like that who, who has his wife's.

Yeah. I mean, and the reason why it surfaced was because she asked for some samples of, um, outreach emails, and they were so, so badly written that, um, uh, that she was appalled, you know, and, and, and thought, no, no, no wonder you're getting fairly poor conversion rates of this sort of outreach emails to, you know, customers wanting to take it onto the next level.

But when you start to multiply, you know, if you've got a team of 50 and each of them are doing, you know, so I didn't know how many calls a day and you multiply that figure, you've got an awful lot of conversations taking place or, or emails or written, written communication, as I'm sure you, you'll look at written communication as well.

Communication

Patrick: everything. Yeah, everything.

Phil: So it sounds, sounds, sounds you're in a very interesting niche.

Patrick: Yeah, no, that's right. An email. And I guess also this leader, you know, you have to define what is a good email. I wrote, uh, cough 30 page article on called Cold Emails. What they consist how you first start, you write your first sentence, what's the structure, and then people in that work with task base, they can say, Hey, can you write me an email?

Can you write me email templates? And it'll take the content from me. It'll take the context of the organisation, the problem, and then will write an email script. Because I'm pretty sure a person, like as a sales leader, when they say, ah, my reps don't write good emails, well you probably don't give them the means either.

You don't give them templates, you don't give them, uh, a coaching, how to write an email. They don't get coaching anyway. So, and it's, it's, you're right, a lot of leaders, they know, ah, I should coach my team. It's the first thing they don't do. And it's a very, a big relief knowing that here something is coaching them all day, basically.

You know, it's like, it's quite a nice feeling to know that's, I, I have that off of my back. Partially if things don't work, I have to come in. As I said, human coaching is still necessary, but a lot of leaders don't have the knowledge either. You know, not a lot of leaders didn't read the a hundred books that we have.

And a lot of leaders they have actually no clue. Yeah. Like these leaders we talked about as well, right. The, the Lone Wolf leaders, those the best sales rep, um, that gets, uh, promoted and actually has no idea why they're good. So how they coach, how can they coach best? They can't.

Phil: Hundred percent.

Patrick: Yeah.

Phil: Yeah.

Hundred percent. So I mean, clearly, uh, huge benefits of the productivity you get with using different AI tools. You've mentioned proposal writing and follow up emails and things like this. Um, and I, I would be interested to know what your point of view is about. I mean, AI has been around for some time, either in chat GPT form or you know, Claude or whatever.

Um, what is your, what is your sense of the, um, what's the word I'm trying to say of, of the take up of these tools across the different selling organisations that you're in contact with? Like, we've got these tools out there, and actually some of them are quite simple to use and you can do phenomenal things, you know, with them.

Is there a gap in terms of takeup of AI amongst the world of sales? From your experience or

Patrick: takeup? What do you mean? Is adoption You

Phil: mean adoption or the adoption? Yeah, adoption. Yeah. It's sort of embedding it into their way of working because you know, it is a bit of a, it's, it, it's a, it's a skill issue.

You know, that there may be certain people who true, just don't know how to do it, even though it's simple to do and you can get amazing results from it.

Patrick: Yes. And you need, we coach people as well on that. Like even on that, that's why like this AI coaching for us coaching is also coaching people to use AI effectively.

Because, and for that you need a proactive coach where somebody, you know, our team can also send messages from our coach to some reps and say, Hey, have you thought of, uh, telling me like I could look for a, a lead list for you? Um, ask me that question. I can help you with that. And stuff like this. So that is one thing that actually our AI coach does.

What we see is the adoption of AI is pretty low because every tool single handedly has like this, this, you know that everywhere, right? This AI assistance to the bottom right? But you don't really try, you don't really know what it can do. You don't really know. Ah, I said you never use these, uh, you don't 'cause they're not connected as a sales rep.

And that's what we do, kind of, we have one chat interface on teams or Slack where sales reps already are anyway, and chat.

Phil: Yeah. And

Patrick: we, so you can ask anything. You can move your CRM deals, you can prep your, you know, you if the more use cases you cover, the faster reps build a trust. It's like when I ask a question, it gives me a good answer.

If you do that five times, people are not going to stop using the tool. If they ask five times. And it's a really good answer, spot on. And it helps me prepare my calls. The feedback is spot on. They are there forever. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but that is the difficulty I would say, like connect all the things and most, yeah, you have agent for Salesforce, that is just Salesforce, but that doesn't help me generate a lead list with phone numbers and email.

It doesn't help me give me, it doesn't give me feedback on my calls. It doesn't coach me become better. It doesn't, it doesn't do so many things. And then you need a different tool. No, you don't wanna, um, like all these tools, and as you say, there are some use cases like, uh, yeah. Building presentations called Design as an example, is a super

Phil: Yeah.

Patrick: They're so good in one thing and they, they take so much of your pain that you, you, you, you use it, you continue using it. And, uh, but as a, as a tool for an organisation, in order to be that you need to connect all the stuff, provide so much value through one single chat interface that the reps get.

Like, and that's, yeah, that's a, we have the adoption problem for sure. Sales reps aren't using AI the way they could. Not even close. I mean, what I do with the ai, I have no, I don't know anyone who is using it so heavily.

Phil: Well, I'm, I'm sure you, you, you're probably using it much more than any you should be anyway, given what the business is doing.

Yeah. So can I ask about, you know, you've got organisations like Gong and you've got Outreach and some of these other providers, I think, know, sort of, if you're looking at the space in which you're operating and you're looking at some of these other sort of brand names that are quite well established, you know, what, what would you say that, that you are doing, which perhaps is slightly different, you know, to what some of these other tools are enabling salespeople to do.

Patrick: Yes, yes. So I can, I can, uh, tell you a few things. Now, the first one. Is the, the sales, the coaching part, like the skill development that I, now, I explained it two times how we do it. Gong is the tool that just gives you feedback on one single call. It doesn't take into consideration where my skill is as a rep.

It doesn't take into consideration, uh, that it's the eighth meeting with that client and that we are already quite far and that we blah, blah, blah. And it doesn't take, um, and it doesn't take the sales playbook. There's no sales playbook on Gong. There's nothing like that leaves a document that is actually the best practise you can define like scorecards and Spice and Medic.

But these scorecards are so basic. It's like a, a, a prompt against the transcript. He has the, the rep asks about medic, what has he discovered about Medic? It's very basic. Um, what we do technically isn't possible since longer than like nine months. Nine months ago, our product was absolutely crap. And then in, in March we launched a newest version thanks to the newest technology that was there.

And it suddenly, the quality was so good. Like because we have the account history, we have the sales reps, scale, skill, history. Um, and so the feedback that you get from us actually leads to improved skills. We can prove it improves the skills and we can prove that the improved skill leads to more revenue.

Gong doesn't, can't, never can do that. They can't do that yet. They haven't figured out the learning part. That's the one, the first thing, the second thing is gong, if you buy Gong, gong is still in the old world of building software. So you have a dashboard, right? A dashboard. A deal dashboard,

Phil: yeah.

Patrick: Where you see all the deals and you get that dashboard and even though maybe one button you don't like or one feature you never use on this dashboard, maybe 10 features you never use on this dashboard because they try to build it for every single, like they try to find the, the, the, the most common denominator and build a dashboard that for most people is usable.

Right?

Phil: Right.

Patrick: Um, and that doesn't work. And that is like, today you can do it completely differently. We have an AI first approach where we give you a, a dashboard. But you can chat with our coach as a CRO and say, Hey, I want the dashboard. I don't want this button up there. I want it away. Yeah. And I want also to evaluate the, the, the five deals, lost deals that we lost and why we lost.

Can you put that to the dashboard and it'll create you that dashboard completely differently? So every CO we do provide, um, kind of templates and, you know, that people can start from scratch or not start from scratch, but they have something that brings value. But if they don't like certain things, they just adopt.

So it's like we vibe coded on the go, change it for you personally, and it's a chat that you interact with. It's not a, a user interface, not buttons that you have to click and hear and you know, it's just, it's completely individualised in, and that is massive. Um, that that's what AI can do today. That's the second one.

And for Europeans, we are focused on Europe at the moment. And one thing that we do. In transcripts, for instance. You get company names, you get names. Now we, before we store that transcript, we take out the names, uh, we take out the company names, we anonymize, so anonymize the call transcript and then we store it, which means then you can, you know, you can store that the storage is safe.

Like there's no data protection struggle. Because if you store, if you tell me Phil in a sales call that you have a dog and, uh, that you love walking with your dog in the height park or something, you know, if you tell me that I've got some private data on you that could land in, in, that could land and it as in the transcript, right, but actually is not allowed to store that private information somewhere.

And if you really want to do it privacy wise correctly, then we do it like this gong. No way. That's why Gong actually, I think, I mean they're not so successful in Europe. Um, they're very successful in the us US is an easy market and the uk, right? Because, uh, English only, or language wise as well, by the way.

I mean, it's good nowadays, transcription, everybody can transcribe even Swiss German because, uh, open AI builds super transcription model. So easy to to to do that. Um, but yeah, that's the, like this, this, and oh, the, the last one I forgot actually is this sales playbook first approach that we have. We go from the sales playbook.

Uh, we don't just, you know, here's your technology piece and now fill it out with scorecards and stuff that is kind of different from anything else. The sales playbook has an impact on a lot of things, not just the recordings and the the summaries, but it's got a lot of import and it needs to live. It adopts, and I can, as a owner of the playbook, I can, I can say, yes, I want to add this to the playbooks.

Go has none of this kind of process in there. It's just, it's cumbersome to build it up and to, to do that. And that, that's why now with ai, some companies, I hope, like us, like we attraction is really good, really crazy at the moment. You can come in with something very different that is from a user perspective, so much easier to use, much easier.

Um, and that's, that's quite fun. That's kind of the change that we're in right now and see

Phil: how,

Patrick: how far we get.

Phil: It was very exciting. Um, so I'm conscious of time, Patrick, and, and of course, um, we will put in the show notes, um, below, um,

Patrick: yeah,

Phil: information of how people can reach out to you, um, if they listen to this podcast and feel as though they'd like to have another conversation.

Um, but I, I, I wonder whether we could. You know, sort of what do you see the future? Uh, are you able to look five years from now and have a, an idea of where, where is AI going to take us, you know, uh, in the sales world, what, what, what do you, what, where do you think we'll be five years from now?

Patrick: Um, I'm really bad at, uh, at predicting, honestly.

Uh, usually that's, that's quite a good, that's a CEO job. And our CEO does a really good job at knowing what's coming next, what's the next, okay. I think, uh, we talked about a few things. So one thing is sales rep will have one coach, hopefully a coach, not an assistant, but one thing

Phil: Yeah.

Patrick: That they, they, they interact with not hear something here, something in the CRM something there, one and a chat and everything is in that chat.

If I want to see my dashboard, the chat will pop it up. I see my dashboard and I can even adjust the dashboard on the spot if I want to adjust it. I think that is, that way of building software is really the way it's gonna be built. What I cannot predict, but I, and, and I say the next two years, yes, our sales reps, we will still do the calls, but honestly, I mean, the technology is pretty far, right?

If you give your feed, then your sales playbook that you worked on over the years and suddenly say, Hey, ai, uh, agent. I say agent now because it's, we, we, we substitute the sales rep. For me, an AI coach helps the sales rep improve. An AI agent is somebody that's like, okay, either a sales rep or an AI agent, but then you can say this Dear AI agent, here's our sales playbook, all the hundred pages, learn through, uh, a time of five years of doing selling at our company.

Take this and go sell two calls, blah, blah, blah. It could in five years, definitely could work. And I have no idea. Uh, I mean, what I see is that what I do see, like from a, but I'm not sure if it's generational thing. What I do see is people don't, like, don't like a lot of things, like contacts with ai, cold emails with ai.

If you see that's AI written, you feel cheated. You feel like, ah, you don't want to invest time to actually research me, to personally reach out to me. Um, you know, that's why cold calling is now hugely successful again, or more successful than cold email because you know, it's a person now, you know, it's a person.

Even though in the US it's also agents. But if a, an agent calls you, you're like, you don't even value my time. Go away. You know that I see a little bit that people are like, oh, AI stuff. You don't value my time as a client. I don't wanna be your client if you don't value my time.

Phil: Yeah.

Patrick: And that is an interesting thing psychologically.

And we will see how strong that is in general. And if it's strong, we'll have a job still in five years. That's great. Um, talking to clients, mostly,

Phil: most buyers that I've interviewed, uh, you know, but things can change. Five years is a long time, isn't

Patrick: it? It is

Phil: a, uh, so they couldn't imagine the situation, particularly on a sort of complex, uh, type purchases where they've made, let's say, a big ITE, you know, decision and, uh, being at the board meeting and talking to the MD about the decision that's been made, not being able to answer the question, well, have you actually met anyone from this company?

Yeah. So they're kind of saying that for the complex deals, um, they could not imagine. They may, there may, you know, maybe a lot of AI to, in a buyer seller stuff has gone on before, but they still, they still value that human connection. And I suppose coming back to this IA versus AI balance, uh, between intellectual authenticity, It's, it's true. What extent does a buyer look for that intellectual authenticity in, in conversations? and can you, can you train an AI agent to be intellectual, uh, to have that sense of instinct? And, you know, I don't know. At the moment, I don't think it's there. They can help, but, uh, they're not there to the extent that, um, that we define this term sort of intellectual authenticity.

anyway. Well, Patrick, we'll see, we'll see. Interesting. It's been the most interesting conversation with you and, uh, I admire the, uh, the way you've taken your business, uh, uh, forward. It, it sounds a very exciting future you've got. And, and, uh, just thank you very much for taking past in the Sales Transformation podcast.

Patrick: Thank you very much for the invitation, Phil. I really enjoyed the conversation. I also got some interesting points and we'll definitely read your book.

Phil: Well, I'm very glad you've said that. Yeah. Yes. I hope you do. I'll be interested to know what your feedback is. You have read it. Um, so once again, uh, details if any of you'd like to contact Patrick could just look in the show notes and, uh, and uh, yeah, it's been a great conversation, Patrick.

Thank you. Yeah, bye-bye. Thank

Patrick: you as well.

Phil: Yeah,

Patrick: bye-bye, Phil.

​