Session 1

Hey, everybody, welcome to this surviving Sales automation webinar, first of three that we're gonna be doing, and hopefully we'll be doing a lot of stuff with, uh, John Barrows over the next year. Um, I would certainly like to JB do a lot more with you and, you know, certainly have you become a main stage mainstream, uh, in the MSP space. Obviously, you cut your teeth in the MSP space, so, uh, we'll certainly have a lot of chat going on in the, in the green room.

I'm gonna give this a a few minutes, but while we're, um, while we're waiting for some folks to come in here, give it, you know, one or two minutes, you know, again, just like a cyber call, if you've ever been to those, please, uh, comment and chat. Uh, keep the chat lively. If you have a question, throw it into the ask a question section. It'll be easier from a moderation perspective. Questions are often, is it being recorded? Welcome, Andre. Is it being recorded? Exact same.

Anything in Crowdcast, the beautiful thing about it. Same URL that you came here and, and you're watching right now. All you have to do is copy that URL, um, and, uh, and, and see it again and welcome. Um, and yeah. And, uh, by the way, John is up in your neck of the woods. Jim may be as well right now. I don't know if he's in mass as well, but certainly got some company there. And I'm with jb I'm in New York today. You're in New York, Jim.

I'm usually, literally, I'm usually like five miles away from jb. Oh, okay. Okay. Fair enough. Um, let's see. Some things that, um, are going on here in the background, uh, in, in the, in the chat, um, are like, Jim, you know, while we wait for people to come in, um, good things and bad things with ai. Right. You know, on, on the positive. We're seeing incredible, um, things in terms of velocity. And we're gonna be talking about a lot of that today. That can happen, uh, as a result of ai.

You, you have some concerns though, for the future generations, um, correct? I do. Yeah, I do. I don't, so, you know, John has, you got, you guys have kids. I mean, I've known, first of all, John for 20 years. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. So, and you know, he is got Charlotte, his daughter, I've got Cam my son. Look, there's gonna be a lot of positivity around what AI can do.

I think for a lot of MSPs specifically, over the next, you know, one to five years, a lot of people are gonna be able to do things they've never been able to do before. Yeah. Which is really, really cool. And it's gonna be great for all of us in what career we have left. I look at it through the lens of my 18-year-old son. Yeah. Cam, who's graduated from high school in a couple weeks, and what the AI revolution is going to do for him and what it means for his life.

And quite honestly, it scares me. Mm-Hmm. Scares Me a lot. Um, what it could mean for future generations. Yeah. Well, let's hope though, you know, just like we, a lot of us got scared, I'll play devil's advocate or, or your CTO's side. Chip back, chip back. Like, you know, just as we were all, were scared about automation from RMM, it's gonna put our engineers out of business. We're not gonna get paid. Who knows? We'll, it'll be an interesting, interesting to see where this goes.

Let's, like you said, Jim, maybe it's a bit, it's a huge boon for everybody in the MSP space. We'll see, I think it'll certainly, if, if it's embraced right by the MSP community, I, I certainly think we can do some amazing things with it. So, alright, so it's about four after we're gonna get started. Um, my name is Andrew Morgan. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your time. I'll introduce our guests momentarily. I'm just gonna set the stage for a moment.

And you know, it, obviously, it says surviving the cells of evolution, how do you add value? But really, I want you to think about this in a few different lenses. One is, you know, what can a computer do? Or rather, what can you do a computer can't? And, and, and, and think about this, over the past 10 years, we've seen stats and these stats continue to move this way. And, and one of those statistics is that buyers are increasingly doing due diligence, right? JB before Mm-Hmm.

They ever even make it to you, right? The internet has provided such a gauntlet of information and outlet for you to do searching and get up to speed on, uh, really what it is you want to buy, do, review, do demos, all these other things, right? And this is really before the ai, uh, revolution has started. Um, recent stat from Gartner was over 40%. I think 43 suggested that buyers don't wanna speak to reps. They want a rep free experience.

But interestingly, there is some remorse in that, um, that there is still value. Like those buyers that didn't want a rep involved actually felt more remorse than those that did. So there is still value there. John's gonna talk a little bit about that. And, um, in the last thing I'll say is we are seeing if you watch, you know, anything financially related, right? You know, a press release or rather an earnings call.

I think Google, uh, uh, recently in their most recent earnings, uh, announcement, they said ai, I think it was something like 180 times. Yep. Right? Wasn't it? Something like that. JB Yeah, it was absurd. Yeah. And Microsoft, you know, they recently, their initial salvo is they launched something called Viva Sales. Um, and that, and so it's an application with embedded, uh, generative AI that'll help salespeople and sales managers.

And then following that close behind with Salesforce, uh, launching, uh, Einstein, GPT. Um, so there is a lot going on. The context, I want to frame that you to look at this also is as MSPs, right? What are we going to do from two aspects, right? One our own sales, right? We've struggled historically as an industry selling, let's be honest, um, number one. So let's look at it through that lens.

Number two, look at it through the lens of what is it that you could be doing to engage with your customers and change their businesses with ai? Okay? It's gonna be very sales centric today, but I want you to look at it through those two mechanisms. And with that, let me introduce, um, our guest. So first, John Barrows. jb wonderful to see you. Thanks for joining us. Great. If you could share just a little bit about yourself, and we'll go around the horn and get right on into it. Uh, yep.

So, uh, John Barrows, CEO of JB Sales here. And, um, uh, for relevance, like Jim said, uh, uh, was the fourth person on board at Thrive Networks, uh, ran sales and marketing. Um, Jim came on board, and then we led that up to be the fastest growing company in Massachusetts for a few years in a row and sold it us to Staples. I took some training, it was called Basho when I was there to help grow the team, and it actually helped us.

So we sold to Staples and I got fired, um, because I'm not a corporate guy. Um, uh, that's, uh, I ended up joining that sales training company and then went off on my own. And, uh, now do training for companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn Box, Dropbox, uh, Okta, Amazon, Google, all the fun ones. So, uh, get to try to stay on top of this stuff as much as possible. Awesome. JB and thanks. And I put your, your company in the little green call to action.

I'll switch that up with some stuff from RUS during it as well. Um, Jim, thanks for joining us as always. You got a little background in the MSP business also. Yes. So first of all, it's great to be with the three of you today, some friends I've had for a long time in this space. And thanks for everyone joining. Uh, yeah, I've been in this space since 2003. Um, you know, JB said he was a fourth person at Thrive. I was the 24th and became CEO, and then we sold that Staples.

So I always say yes, I've been on the software side of the business for 10 years, but I started out on MSP side, so I definitely understand the challenges MSPs go through every single day to grow their business. And, you know, after I left Staples, you know, slash thrive, uh, we, you know, I, I went on to join Independence it, and that's where I met Chip Buck and Seth Bostock. And then I, we sold that, and then I went to Kaseya and I was there for four and a half years.

Uh, had a good run there and left in 2021 to be CEO of SaaS alerts. And, um, we just did a deal last September. Uh, we're now an insight portfolio company, So yeah. Excellent. Excellent. So you got some MSP perspective as well, Charlie, you've worked with a few MSPs in your day also. Welcome. And, uh, yeah. Talk to about yourself, Charlie.

Yeah, it's, um, yeah, so I've been, you know, I'm currently a CRO at Roost, um, but I've been around, uh, the space, say IT space and the underside for, uh, just almost 25 years at this point. Spent the majority of that time, uh, at Webroot and, um, you know, spent quite a few years, uh, trying to figure it out at Webroot. And then, uh, magically found the MSP space connected with Jim through that journey. And, um, you know, really just was able to grow that business.

I was part of an acquisition there. And then, um, you know, after, uh, being at Carbonite for seven months, got another acquisition, spent some time at, uh, Axian Wells re rebuilding that, um, you know, just that brand within the MSP space. But, you know, definitely have enjoyed, uh, this is probably the best space out there from a channel standpoint. Yeah, I agree. Alright, so JB let's start off with you, um, sales teams, um, historically, right?

Do not embrace technology, certainly not the on the forefront, and you certainly can give us some perspective on that. Mm-Hmm. Um, why is it that they should consider embracing generative ai? Why is, you know, a sales team probably really well suited, right? Take the fact that it's gonna change dramatically a sales team and structure, but why are they so well suited for it? I think there's a lot of the, uh, a lot of the activities that sales reps actually do are easily automated.

Uh, there was a report that came out from Salesforce, uh, the, actually the recent one, their state of sales report that says, and we've all heard this number too, that, and I'm looking at it right now, that only 28% of a sales rep's time is actually spent selling. The rest of it is, and I'll break it down here, 9.2, prioritize.

Here's all the areas, prioritizing lead opportunities, researching prospects, preparing and planning, generating quotes, proposals, and gaining approvals, manually entering customer and sales information, administrative tasks. Every single one of those things that I just mentioned can now be automated with ai.

So, realistically, if you look at it that way, we can now get back 70% of our time to spend more time talking to the engaging with the customer, doing the hot, doing the human things, right? That question of what can we do that a computer can't, it's getting harder and harder to answer. The good news is, as long as there's still a human on the other end of the equation, we have a chance, right? I did this back in, back in 2017.

So there's this one email that I, when I trained, when I first started training this called the YUYU now email, it was all about being a super specific, going, like doing research on an account, firing off a very tailored email to the executive and getting referred down and right. And back 10 years ago, that s**t worked like a chart. I mean, I got emails back from Mark, heard, I got responses from Mark Benioff, I got all sorts of crazy stuff, right?

But back in 2017, somebody sent me an email that was an artificial intelligence email written better than I ever could and faster than I ever could. And it was based off of my training. And I, I almost freaked out. I was like, holy smokes. And at the time I said, you know, uh, Gary Vaynerchuk, right?

For most people know Gary V uh, he has this thing called a four D session where you can go to his office, you spend like 10, 15 grand or whatever, you go with 10 other entrepreneurs and all of his executives come in and share with you what the, what they're doing with some of the best and brightest brands in the world, right? And then Gary comes in at the end and does a q and a. And I said to him, I said, and that was right around the time I had gotten that email.

And I was like, we're screwed, right? And, and I said to him, I said, Gary, I got a question for you, man. Like, I, I just saw an email that was written better and faster than I ever could. And so where does that leave us as sales professionals? And what he said stuck with me to this day, he said, don't worry about beating the technology. You're not, you're not going to beat it. It's, it's going to beat you. So, but be the last mile.

He goes, let the tech do all the heavy lifting, but write, you know, let it, let it do the research, let it write the emails, let it come up with this script, whatever. But right before it goes out the door, make sure you humanize it. Mm-Hmm. Because as long as there's a human on the other end that then we're, okay, look, I will say once computers start buying, that's when we're screwed.

But as long as there's a human buying, there's a chance for sales reps, we just need to reshape what value says. You said that before that, uh, 43% on average wanna rep free experience, but of those 23% had a higher regret rate. So when they bought without a human, they regretted it 23% of the time more. Which tells me there is a vital part that we play as a sales professional in this equation. It's just different.

It's not blasting out generic template emails, making generic stupid calls, asking dumb ass bant questions and play on demos and offering discounts to get the deal. That's not what a sales rep needs to be doing these days. Yeah. Divvy. Just for those out there, can you just ban just the acronym Real quick? Oh, yeah. bant, sorry. It's a, it's a old school qualification method, which is budget, authority, need, and timeline, right?

So, so it's like, hey, do, and, you know, idiot sales reps will say, do you have budget? You know, are you the person that can make the decision? Is this, you know, uh, is there a timeline? And if, if one of those isn't checked off, then it's not a qualified opportunity. It's a terrible way of qualifying, but it's an old school, right? There's other stuff like medic, right, which is medic or Med pick, which is different ways of doing it too.

It's a decent framework, but it, it's, again, it's just droning through the basics of just asking basic questions, giving basic answers, and droning through presentations. That is absolutely the day of, the days of the no value interaction between sales and customer are over. Yeah. The client has zero tolerance for it at this point.

And, and I think, you know, Jim, Jim, I'm gonna go to you, but I think if, for you all listening, think about your lives, I I think we've all, we, I think we've all experienced that, you know, no value email, that, no value phone call. So think about that and your reaction to it, right? That's, you know, something that should be telling, right? And are we in our own businesses doing that, right? Because if we are as John as you just said, right?

We can set up, you know, AI to go, Hey, I wonder what John Barrows is interested in, right? I wonder what he writes about. And I can start to then actually with ai, have a much more meaningful conversation with John Barrows than you know. Mm-Hmm. Just sending John, Hey, I just wanted to check in with you. Mm-Hmm. So, JB I'm sorry. Uh, j well, so first, JB thank you for setting the stage, John. Um, I'm gonna move to Jim.

Jim, um, you, you know, kind of prefaced early on your concerns, uh, of AI and we get it. But, you know, you run a sales organiz, you know, company, but has a sales organization. Are you embracing it? And if so, have you started to, or if not, what are you thinking about? Yeah, definitely. So I, I think, like I said before, my concerns around AI are like in the future, you know, like 10, 15 years out.

Um, not, but I think it's a great opportunity for MSPs and other companies in the short term to, to actually get better at things. Right now, quite honestly, they suck at, uh, I can't tell you how many emails I get. I was mentioning this before, how many emails I get every single day. Mm-Hmm. That start with quick question and then it's some lame email that is a template that someone put together and just blast out.

That is not, that's not compelling to me, that is not engaging me in any way, shape, or form. But now, you know, if someone actually can leverage some of the stuff that we're talking about, you can, you can understand what would be compelling to me Mm-Hmm. And actually start to engage in a conversation that would make sense and actually get me to, to respond in some way, shape, or form. We at SaaS alerts, you know, we're our go to market team is, uh, the sell better company.

I mean, we, we participate in John Barrow's sales training. Um, and the funny thing is, like before everyone was talking about, you know, ai, most recently, there are certain things John's been preaching for a long time, right?

Which actually leverages automation, just not necessarily in the way that we're kind of thinking about it now, but there's been tools out there that John's been preaching for a while, like hour and stuff that you can scrape the internet, you can find things out that are going to compel your prospects to actually engage with you. Mm-Hmm. So, yeah, we've been following the JB sales training process now for a while. We're gonna continue to do that.

'cause I also know that as AI evolves before it replaces us, John's gonna come out with some pretty good stuff that we can continue to leverage that way. And this isn't just me, you know, pumping John's tires. Like he and I have been friends for 20 years, and I personally believe to this day, after literally dealing with probably 10,000 plus MSPs, I've never seen another VP of sales in this space that does it better than him. Thanks.

So, first of all, if you're an MSP, you should definitely be listening to what he has to say on the sales side. But that's why I'm also confident that we're gonna be able to not just leverage this stuff right now, but in the future, you know, be able to leverage some of the AI components and automation that are gonna make our sales team better. I, I'll be the first one to tell you. Like, and I know I have some of my sales folks listening right now, we don't have the best writers going, right?

So don't need 'em. Like, you know, punctuation is, you know, not their best friends sometimes. So, or structuring something that is compelling. So being able to leverage AI specifically for those, you know, writing exercises makes a ton of sense for us. Right. Alright. So Charlie, how about on your side, you know, you are an automation firm, right? Yeah. You do a lot for MSPs on whether it's onboarding or something like that, but how are you guys using it?

Or are you going to embrace it on the sales side? Yeah, but I think it's, you know, what, what, uh, JB started out with, right? It's, you know, anybody that's run a sales team have been part of it is, you know, actually making sure that your people are selling the majority of the time. I mean, it's been a thing certainly for the companies I've worked for over the years as you, and, and really, it's just getting better incrementally.

So, um, you know, using automation for us, we, we, we feel like it's, it's, it's limitless. Um, and there's a bunch of things that we can do to take those mundane tasks that you're doing every day. Like, you know, Jim said is, if, you know, if now all of a sudden we're just building out that messaging and what those email templates look like, instead of having somebody go through it, sending it over to marketing, have them clean up, then you send it out.

By the time you get it out, you know, you really need the next one at that point. So that's not really valuable. Um, so I think things like that and, and things that I, I've always found, and I'm sure you guys do the same, so Jim talked about the bad experience of, Hey, I get these same emails coming in, but then you'll get some good ones where it's like, you feel like they actually read an article that you were part of, right? Mm-Hmm. And then they have some context around it.

And, and so, you know, we, we all have a little ego, right? So it's like, oh, okay, well, they've read, read something that I talked about. Um, so, you know, how do we go and get better at those things? Um, but for, for us, like, I've always worried about sales. I've always had sales teams that, you know, even with challenges, I always believed if we got an at bat, we'd, we, my bigger concern was always the people that we never got to.

And so, if you look at us on the msp, we do a really good job from a standpoint of going to these events, getting in front of 'em. That's why that, like, you know, Jim's saying about that human side of it, that's been a big benefit to us. But, you know, I always looked at everything else to what we do our website and what I view as our, our window shop, right? We're ai, they've been doing this stuff for years. Um, so, you know, for us, um, we are putting together a lot of automation.

We're living internally to manage leads, to manage SLAs around, you know, when these guys, you know, actually, are they following up? Then, as you know, sales leaders, you guys can appreciate this, JP, is you don't miss your SLA, we give it to somebody else, they close it and then, you know, you p**s off the rep. But, uh, again, um, so, you know, those, those are the things that, that we're looking to leverage, I think it is good.

Um, you know, to Jim's point, I don't know that it's gonna impact us, um, at our career level, but it's definitely something that, uh, you know, we have to be concerned moving forward. Cool. So, hey, jb, so, you know, for MSPs out there, right? Mm-Hmm. That, whether they have a sales team or they are, you know, it's an owner led sales model. Yep. You started to talk about the administrative task, like high, I forget the exact figure, it was very high. It was something like 70 something percent.

Yeah. It's, uh, 28% of the time selling, and then the rest is pretty much admin. So we know that when we look at these things like repetitive tasks, it could be automated. Yep. You're, you're, you're sitting in front of an MSP. Yep. What, what pro what things would you tell 'em to start doing? Like, Hey, I want you to have more time focusing on, in front of your customers, automate this, this, and this. And here's maybe some things that I would recommend doing to get that automation underway.

Yeah. I mean, first and foremost before anything is, you gotta get really, really tight on your ICP. Like, you gotta get so specific, I, I'm sorry. On, on a, on your ideal customer profile, right? Right. Okay. So, so like, who's your tam? Right? And, and unfortunately, most people do a very generic list of companies between this size and this size and this revenue in these industries. And then they got this massive list, and then they just start going at it.

These days, you have to get so tight on who you are the best fit for, like all the nuanced details of it. What stage of the business are they, what, you know, what technologies are they currently using? Who's the competition in there? So getting really a good understanding. And by the way, you can use AI to do that these days. You can point AI at your existing database and say, go find me all the characteristics of my best, most profitable clients. And then what do those look like?

And then flip it over to say, okay, now go find me. People like that. So first and foremost, I think you really have to understand who you are best for, right? 'cause otherwise, you're just gonna spray and pray like everything else, and AI is not gonna help you. Um, then I would actually start investing in some of these, these tools, right? Um, I mean, there's tools like Jasper, uh, Regi, ai, uh, even the outreaches and the sales loss of the world.

They're putting these artificial intelligence tools into their systems to actually find and write full cadences. Like, I'm not talking about just doing research anymore. I'm like, uh, with open. So there's chat GBT, that's, um, that's, uh, you know, whatever. Uh, then there's auto GPT. Now what auto GPT is going to do is chat GBT. You prompt it, then it, you, it gives you an answer. You then prompt it again, you give it an answer. So you can get tighter and tighter on a single prompt.

Auto GPT ties all the prompts together, and it does it, and it learns from itself. And it builds, right? So, for instance, I I, right now, I can go in and you gotta train the model a little bit. But I can go in right now and say, Hey, auto GPT go into my existing database, find me the characteristics of my top most valuable clients. Then go find me a list of a hundred companies that fit that profile.

Find the VP of sales, get their contact information and write a seven to 10 touch sequence of emails of, of why my value proposition is best suited for them. And it'll do it. It'll go here, then here, then here, then here. And it'll write it all out. Now, will it be absolutely perfect? No, that's the last mile component of this. That's the right before it goes out. You gotta check that, see if that's aligned with what your value proposition is and everything else.

So I would be, it's a question on what tools to invest in right now. Because whatever tool you invest in right now is probably gonna be obsolete in the next six months for crying out loud. So what my recommendation to almost every organization is, is turn your sales, turn your organization. Forget about your sales organization, but turn your organization into a lab. Basically, treat everything like an experiment.

And if you want to increase employee satisfaction, let the kids play with the tools. 'cause us as leaders, there's no way we're gonna stay up to date on what's happening right now, or being able to determine what's right and what's wrong, and us dictating to our team what they need to do these days. That is short term. The, the, the, the job satisfaction of that component when these kids know that they're gonna get replaced if they don't pay attention, is zero.

So they're gonna go find new jobs. Anyways. So I turn everybody into a sales lab, and it's like, all right, pick one. Like of all those pieces of the sales process that I talked about that are, you know, potentially could be used for ai, pick one of them and then do a, like a, you know, like a hackathon, like in engineering and coding, right? The coders get together and do a hackathon.

We'll do a sales hackathon on Friday afternoons from two to four, and just pick a certain topic and say, let's nerd out on this. Let's go find a tool, a free tool chat, GBT, whatever it might be that can solve that problem. I'll give you a really quick one, then I'll shut up. Uh, we all pay a ton of money for tools like ZoomInfo, for, for data, right? For contact information. You don't have to pay for that anymore.

There's tools out there that you can get really high quality contact information, email, phone numbers, and all that other stuff for free using some of these tools. So if you wanna reduce your tech stack, increase employee satisfaction, and find ways to create efficiencies in your organization, do a hackathon on let's find the tool that actually gets us the best data. Let's compare that to the ZoomInfo data. Let's see if it's good enough. Great.

If it is fantastic, we're gonna reduce our cost and we're gonna start to drive more revenue. So that's the type of thing. 'cause if you are not iterative right now, if you are not creating an agile framework for your organization, you're getting smoked like straight up if you are not agile and are testing and trying, because what worked, what worked six months ago, what worked two months ago is not working right now because things are moving that fast. So that's the way I would look at it.

And there's one last piece is if I didn't have a sales organization, I might outsource it. This is where I, I never used to be a fan of outsourcing, but now with all the tools that are going on right now and how automated and personalized they can get, there's some really good outsource solutions, uh, that can outsource your sales for you and do it at scale. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Courtney, you bring up a good point. Look, there's security risks with any tool, right?

It's not just, you know, letting it loose on your, you know, your, your database. And it's like, you know, the majority of solution talk about this on the cyber call a lot, and I hate to say it, but the majority of vendors, you know, think about the vendors you use today. How many of them have a trust center on their website and talk about their secure code principles? Talk about, you know, their internal compliance, how they do their secure.

So I'm not trying to be sarcastic, it's a fair question, but I would say today, as, as a whole, you know, there's not a lot of MSP doing a lot of due diligence on the vendors they use today as it's, Um, and your, and your data's not your competitive differentiator period. Like, I'm sorry. Like whatever you think is proprietary to your Yes. The security of you getting hacked and those type of things is important.

But if we are trying to think about like, trade secrets or how we do things that, that cat's out of the bag. Yeah. Like, you just need to run with this. Yeah. I think she meant more so their data, their proprietary data, but in PII and things like that. But, okay, Jim, so, um, you know, MSPs historically, you know, sell on referrals. Like there are, again, it's gonna be direct, right? Very few sales driven MSPs. It's how do you get your customers referral?

How many prospects are in your database? Not a lot, you know, it's, it's those types of things. So I see this as a potentially a boom, right? For MSPs increasing their prospects that they never had in their PSA before. Um, you could also do things like we talked sort talk about, like, Hey, Jim, I noticed that, you know, you're interested in, you know, for example, college football, right? I, I noticed you, you know, were, you were really proud of, you know, what your son did.

And, you know, you wrote this article, right? So I can start to now hone in, but are there, are there other areas that you, you know, maybe you recommend MSPs, how, how they might use this positively, right? To build databases to, to start to curate content. Yeah, definitely. So all the above, basically.

I mean, one of the things that, you know, John and I worked together at Thrive, we would literally spend hours and hours and hours in a conference room walking through our ideal customer profile and trying to aggregate basically our hit list, right? That's what we called it, our hit list. And that was me and him and our, one of our marketing specialists, Mike Platts, uh, going through, like, at the time, it was like done in Bradstreet, I think. Yeah.

Uh, and like pouring through SIC codes and like, certainly it's evolved since, you know, 2004. But you can basic now, like John said, you can basically plug in, okay, this is my ICP, go find it, and I need in this state, this state, this state in this state, right? Or in these zip codes. And now you have your list, like literally what used to take us weeks to put together, you can basically do in a day.

And there's so many smaller MSPs out there that have been essentially either not successful hiring salespeople and developing a sales engine, or kind of just afraid to pull the trigger on hiring salespeople that this is an opportunity now to do a lot more with less, whether it's creating your list.

You me, mentioned content, Andrew, like now, basically like, instead of hiring a, a marketing person to sit there and write blogs and content for you, it's all online that you can just curate through, you know, these different AI platforms and boom, you've got it. Like, and it will curate it for you based on exactly what you're looking for. So these are all the ways, and there's many more that I'm not even thinking of, right? Mm-Hmm.

You mentioned, you know, outsourcing, you know, is a viable opportunity right now. Like we played around with that to augment our sales team back at Thrive. Like we try, try different, you know, BDR services and stuff like that. And inevitably what would happen is they start out great. You know, you, you spend a month or two getting 'em up to speed and investing everything you've got in terms of understanding the value proposition.

And then they come out and they start calling and they kill it for a month, and then they go, you know, and it's because they, they took all, you know, they, they picked all the low hanging fruit Mm-Hmm. To extend the contract a little bit longer, and then, then you're done. But I think now with what's out there, that option becomes probably a lot more viable, like JP said. Yeah. So, yeah, there's bottom line, you can do a lot more with less these days.

And that certainly is a big advantage for some of the smaller folks that are fighting other headwinds right now, you know, in terms of large private equity rollups and stuff coming in and undercutting them on price and creating a lot more scale. So there's certainly a lot of advantages that can be had, um, from, from what we see right now. Yeah.

Charlie, I'm going to do an a, a audible on the question to you, 'cause Jim, Jim said something that made me think about it, and a question that I think you would be able to really talk well about. There are, over the years, 20 plus now in the MSP space, for me as well, I've asked countless MSPs about, have you hired salespeople? Right? And have they worked out, right? How many times have you had the conversation of, yeah, we spent a few hundred grand on this, we let 'em go.

We tried it again, we let 'em go, we outsourced telemarketing. It didn't work. We spent 60 grand on that. I mean, on and on and on and on and on. But you know, again, I'm looking at this as a glass half full thing, right? Building databases, profiling, et cetera. I mean, can this help? Right? And, you know, where we can focus on these, you know, building, you know, who to call, you know, why to call, et cetera.

And then as JB has said, you know, let's start, you know, focusing on how to sell, right? Because this other stuff that we used to have to pay, you know, BDRs, SDRs lists, outsource. We can figure out ways to do that now. No. Yeah. It's, I mean, that was always the most exhausting thing, right? I mean, anybody that's been in sales for a minute, if they said that they always had the best, you know, BDR team, and it was real smooth, and they got unbelievable results, is absolutely full of it.

'cause even when you finally get it going a little bit, you've burnt them out, the good people. And if you didn't, at least bring 'em up in the organ and, and, uh, try to promote them, they were just gone because they had had enough. And so, I, you know, I, I've, I first want to admit I've started and stopped it that, that process many times.

So, you know, when JB starts his company about how he's gonna go and do this and outsource it, I think everybody would probably sign up today on this call, uh, because it truly is it if, if you can, if you could sit there and just make it that easy for people where they're coming in and you know that the data's good. I mean, everybody's bought a list, right? You know, we all get those. I, you know, I, I could, I could get everybody's list according to the emails I get. Uh, sure.

Same thing with you, Jim. And it's like, is after a show, you want everybody from the conference? Hey, you want all the, you know, ConnectWise, the, all these things, but, you know, but ultimately it's like, you know, you may have most of that anyhow. It's not that valuable if you don't know what to do with it. Um, and I think, you know, for the MSPs, I think it's, it's potentially even more challenging.

So somebody that comes in and really owns that is, I mean, just a great, great business idea, um, for you to go out and do it, and then at least you can, instead of doing, like Jim said, every time I've outsourced it, it's always like, this months of just spending a ton of money. You know, I've, I won't say who, but I've had companies where they've invested, you know, 300 grand and they've sold, you know, $20,000 Yep. In a RR.

And then you go back and talk to that vendor, they're like, yeah, we're almost there. Just give us three more months. And that's all their job is. Their job is just to extend it, but they're really not making any changes. Um, they're not the best representation of you. And frankly, calling out the MSPs is a tough one if they're doing that, because, um, a lot of times they don't know how to speak to an MSP and what drives them. Yeah. So, You know, speed and then those guys move. Yeah.

Well, I, I mean, I just think about this. JB I'm gonna ask you the next question, but Charlie, I was just thinking about it, you know, and you know, and, and MSPs do this, MSPs, you know, they'll do an a lunch and learn, they'll do a, you know, and, and, you know, or as a vendor, right? You're sitting there speaking to somebody, you scan them, you're putting in notes.

Well, if I know for example, you know, John Barrows, you know, he comes by my booth, we're talking, he's looking at my software or whatever, whatever. And, you know, we start to get into an AI conversation, right? Again, I want to now go and search, you know, John Barrows and, and ai. Oh, wow. I, and I, and I put it way up, you know, by the way, in the beginning, you know, John just put out a blog. John's got 400,000 followers on LinkedIn.

He put out a, you know, a, this, you know, he's not a technologist, but in no time he created John Barrows 2.0. Right? Now, if I all of a sudden give him the standard email, think about this as an MSP, you have a lunch and learn, you do it on security, right?

You have a bunch of people come in, you know, and then you, you could really tailor your messaging to them had you asked them a bunch of questions, versus, Hey, thanks for coming by and, you know, at lunch and talking about our security, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like everybody else. So with that, JB I want to talk about, you know, two things. You know, sales used to be formulaic in nature, X emails, x phone calls, et cetera, et cetera. I'm gonna kind of have you touch on that.

But more importantly to that, I'm gonna quote you, I paraphrase you that you've said to me and others numerous times that AI will make average salespeople obsolete, good salespeople, better great salespeople, incredible. Something to that degree, jll, let you've, I'll let you clean that up. But why, why, first of all, why is the average salesperson done, right? I mean, let's put it this way. It's, it's kind of like, um, you know, pick a historical thing, right?

When, when the electric drill came out, you have a, you have a architect or some, a construction worker who's sitting there with their hammer and hammering nails and doing a good job. And they're great at, you know, they're good at what they do, but they refuse to innovate. They refuse to do all this other stuff.

Then you can take a good, then you take one of those people and you give them an electric drill, and they're gonna smoke everybody else because they're willing to adapt to the electric drill. They're not sitting there saying, oh, that's just a fad. That's not something. You know what I mean? So it's the same thing with this. It's, it's, and, and look, you could be good. You could actually be above average.

But if you're not above average with the mentality of, I need to evolve here, let's put it this way, the best players on the planet want to be coached, right? Like, then let's use Tom Brady, whatever you think of him. Now, Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time. I don't care what anybody says. The hardest job in the NFL was Josh McDaniel's job. You know why? Because Tom Brady forced him to coach him. And if he wasn't, then he would be, he would be gone, right?

It's, it's the best players out there. The best employees out there want to get better. They want to evolve. They realize that sales isn't a zero sum game. Sales is like golf. You can't hit a zero. You can always get better at golf. You can always get better in sales. And so, for those that are thinking that way, you could actually be slight. You could be an average sales rep. If you adopt this technology, you're going to be a well above average sales rep.

But if you're a good sales rep and you don't adopt this stuff, you're gonna get smoked. You just are. And so that's the point that I'm trying to make to these people, is, and, and you know, Jim, I I I, I want to be as optimistic as you are, is that you and I are gonna be able to write off in the sunset. And this s**t isn't gonna affect, affect us. I think we have maybe two to three years left of being relevant, um, before this stuff really takes over.

The good news though, for us, is that for those who do pay attention, I think it's the 80 20 rule. I think it's the Pareto principle here, that the 20% of the people that are gonna be able to leverage this stuff are going to excel at a level and become almost indispensable. But the 80% of the people that are the laggards, this is different than every other technology. Don't tell me. This is like manufacturing days. Don't tell me like this is any of this.

This is iterative, and this s**t is learning on top of itself, and it's learning faster and, and compounding its knowledge faster than we've ever seen. So don't tell me that this is gonna be, ah, you know, it's not gonna affect everybody. It's going to affect everybody whether we like it or not. So you either, I think you have two options right now. You either jump in with both feet and you say, I'm gonna try to figure this out, and I'm gonna try to ride this wave as long as I can.

Or I'm gonna unplug everything and go live on a beach in Bali and ignore it all. Because I don't, I just don't think there's a middle ground anymore. I don't think there's an option for you to sit down and say, eh, I'll ride this out. You know what I mean? Well, this isn't gonna affect me too much. I'm gonna ride this out. 'cause you will wake up one day and you will be t period. I completely agree with that. And you know, my, I have a twin brother, and we have this debate.

He is not in the technology industry, but he, you know, oh, we, we adapted, you know, through the industrial of our revolution. And like you, you look at history, and we humans have always evolved around automation. I'm like, this is way different. This is automation that builds on itself. Mm-Hmm. So can I, can I make a quick point on this? Yeah. You know what happened the other day? An AI bot was asked to do something, to create something.

It was smart enough, it reached a limit that it couldn't do physically because it was in a computer. So you know what the sucker did? And it was smart enough to do it. It went on TaskRabbit, it created a, a post so a human could do what it couldn't do, posted it. The human then did the task that the machine needed to keep going and then implemented it and kept moving. Mm-Hmm. So right now it is smart enough to use humans. Mm-Hmm. To do what? It can't do that.

So, John, The, the, uh, the days of, you know, we, we know the book Crossing the Chasm. Mm-Hmm. It's like, let's every, but look, let's let the the daredevils go across first and then, you know, not, not a, not probably the best approach on this thing. No, No. That's why I say just like my, my biggest, like, I'm not trying to fear my here, but I'm dead serious when I think everyone should just sign up for chat GBT for 20 bucks and just start doing things.

Like, literally just start typing in, write me a poem. What should I have for dinner tonight? I want to talk to my daughter. And I'm a little confused on how to talk to my 12-year-old daughter about, you know, how scary AI is. What should I say? Like, just do anything to start getting used to this stuff.

Y you know, it makes me think, Charlie, um, you know, I'm gonna ask you about automation, but it, again, John's just making me think, one of the biggest challenges we have in security, right, with companies MSPs have getting their clients to adopt security is culture. Right? I, I mean, just maybe you start using chat GBT with your clients about, Hey, we're gonna have a contest. Mm-Hmm. How do we build security culture in your company?

I, with this, I think it's a great, do you wanna say something JB or I was just gonna like, I like the security component of this scares the crap out of me. Because think about it. Hey, chat, GBT, go find me all the, you know, uh, All that, You know, cybersecurity threats in the world, and write me a code that can get through whatever it is, right? It's like, Yeah, well, we look and the same thing though can be used from a positive perspective. Yeah.

There's, there's, there's the yin and yang here. So, you know, again, I don't want it to be all, and I know you're not your antenna, you monitoring sox, security operation centers are using it very effectively. Mm-hmm. Right? To look at metadata. Hey, when you see this type of X, you know, escalate. This is a false positive. Don't, you know, we've been, so, so it's not all, and, and again, these are areas that you can use in your business for service tickets.

Um, but Charlie, from an automation perspective, right? Roost is doing a lot of things around onboarding backups, right? You're incorporating a lot of this, in essence, into what you do. Are you seeing MSPs start to ask about this in terms of, Hey, can I look at my security stack and see overlap? Can I, you know, look at my customers and see gaps? Um, can roost help me with this?

Are you guys starting to think about those things and, and are, and, and are more sophisticated MSPs thinking about that kind of stuff? So yeah, it, it's not that many, but it's, that's where it's leading, right? You know, if you look at, um, you know, the way that the platform is built, it's very much as, you know, bash you've, you've, uh, we've, we've worked with you before. It's, it's, you know, as simple as if you could think of a process, you could automate it.

So it's something that you could manually do. We could automate it. And, you know, some of the things that they're getting to today are the ones that you would expect, right? The low hanging fruit is how do we use, you know, AI to almost make that customer experience better from a support standpoint, right? So if, you know, like, like Jim said, we don't have the best writers in the world. A lot of times we outsource things, you know, how great would it be?

And, and we all know how our customers engage with us, right? They give us these very detailed, uh, emails or, or support tickets on what's really happening. We know that never happens, right? So now, you know, instead of that back and forth to and fro, wouldn't it be great to say, Hey, you know, based on what you've said to us, we don't know which version you have, but here's how you fix it in version 1, 2, 3, right? Here's some of the things that you could do.

And it's just, you know, it's quick. It's not, you know, it's not time-based anymore, right? So you don't have to have somebody sitting in the seat actually answering it. Uh, people are a lot more happy you to do something else, but that it's very well written and it's consistent. So the experience from that, that standpoint is, um, you know, is a bit off the charts. You know, the thing that, um, you know, you know, you were talking about like putting things in there.

I dunno if you guys saw this article about, um, vendors, you know, putting code in there to check their code. Mm-Hmm. Oh, And We're having conversations every single day as about how we're leveraging ai. I mean, just had a conversation this morning about all the cool things that we're gonna be able to do to make our product better. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, absolutely. A hundred percent. Again, positives on this. Can there be negatives? Will there be negative negatives? A hundred percent.

But again, as MSPs, I'm hoping we look at it as glass half full. Jim, you and I, um, you know, talk a lot about challenge or sale or, or fans. For those of you that don't know Google challenge or sale, basically high level. Um, and this is something John does in his own version, right? Very effectively, it's why he's the sales trainer to the companies. He talked about. We need to, if we're gonna, if someone's gonna listen to us, we need to teach them something, right?

We need to say, Hey, Jim, by the way, you know, companies that like yours, that are, you know, monitoring SaaS applications, did, you know trends on compliance are going this way? And let's just say Jim didn't know that I'd probably have Jim's attention now, I better be able to follow through with that and my solution, be better, be able to, you know, solve that problem. But Jim, again, I'm thinking this is where ai, you know, you could use those types of things, right?

Like find areas and trends here, chat, GPT, tell me the trend here for compliance-based healthcare organizations, what are they going to have to deal with? Thoughts on that, Jim? And can it be used, you know, in that? Yeah, Definitely. And again, this is one of the areas that I think MSPs have struggled, well, actually most people on the sales side have struggled with for years, which is right. Calendar sale has been my opinion, so successful.

And at the time, it was written kind of revolutionary. JB actually is the one that turned me onto that book many years ago. There's so much data out there that you can now harness to educate people. And that's really what people want. They want to be educated in the sales process. You are the expert. Don't forget that you are the expert. You're educating them. When you educate them, you put yourself in a position of authority.

When you have authority, you can actually get people to do things, right? So you follow the chain. And like, it's one of the reasons why we produce our sass e report, Andrew, you know, it like, or SaaS application security insights, because we're collecting data across the board from every account that we're monitoring over a year. And then we're publishing that for MSPs to use. I don't, I don't think many of them are using it the way they should be using it, right?

Like, We tried, Jim, we tried, Yeah. They, they should be looking at that data and, and picking it out and saying, okay, I'm going to use this stat in my next sales presentation, right? To get people to think, you know what, wait a minute. Like 34% of all files out of one drive are share shared externally to my organization. And a vast majority of those are done anonymously and they don't expire. Let's talk about the ramifications of that. Mm-Hmm, right? Like, what does that mean?

You can use that data to have really great conversations. So maybe chat GBT can actually teach people how to have those conversations. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. It teaches curiosity. That's the thing. That's the benefit. Like, if you are curious, chat, GBT is insane. 'cause all you have to do is think of the question, think of the prompt, and then it, the amount of information that it sends back to you, and then you get to go, Ooh, I didn't know that. Tell me more about that. Like, tell, clarify, clarify.

I mean, the amount of stuff, if you're looking for it at, for the answer, I think you're looking at it the wrong way. If you're looking at it to, to generate insights and interest and be curious. I think it's a, it's a superpower tool. Can you give an example, JB, of how you might use it to like, well, a quick example for me, like, is it written, you know, I was gonna write a book, right? Like it's called, this is sales.

And I had the chapters written out, but I was sitting on it forever, right? And one of the chapters is the History of Sales. And I was, I wanted to start in 1898 by the guy, you know, this guy in St. Elmo Lewis came up with ADA and all this other stuff. So, but I'm like, ah, what do I know about the history of sales? I gotta Google it, I gotta read some other books and all that. So I was like, huh. I was like, Hey, Chachi pt, write a book. Um, from the perspective of a se you know, of me.

And I put my link in there as far as LinkedIn profile on the history of sales, uh, with the profile of it being like a high school kid going into college before they have to, you know, potentially make that decision and start in 1898 with the history of sales, chapter one and, uh, with St. Elmo Lewis and bring us through into today's world and how cha and how tools like chat, GBT are impacting the impact sales. This sucker wrote a full blown chapter that I was like, holy s**t.

And I, and, and, and half of the stuff I had never even thought of or, or heard of before. And I was like, and I was like, oh my God, I didn't know that was a thing, but now let me go research that thing. Because the problem is, is it's, it's, it's taking, a lot of people are taking whatever chat GBT gives 'em back as gospel, right? And they're like, oh, there's the answer here. You go wrong. The internet is like 50% of it is total garbage.

So you have to realize where it's extracting the information from. But if you are curious enough to then go look for the source, go find out where that's from, do some due diligence. You are now educated on steroids. You can take any book, you can summarize that book and say, gimme the five key highlights of that book. I don't need to know. I don't have to read the whole thing anymore. Lemme this. Yeah. It really is. Wow. But you can't look at it as replacement.

You have to look at it as augmentation and to be used as a superpower for salespeople and, and, and everybody without being replaced by it. 'cause if you're just prompting and getting a response and hitting send, you are replaceable, period. Well, I think that's one thing though, uh, Jamie, that that everyone's gotta figure out and they have to figure it out quick, is how do you leverage it, right? Because you just gave great examples of, you know, putting all that information in.

If you just started in 1898 mm-Hmm. And left it at that like, you know, you're not gonna get what you, what what you would expect at it. And I, and I've seen that myself. Um, you know, I, I did something and my daughter has suffered from long covid and I put something in there to like say, Hey, you know what would be a great essay for her to get in college on it? And it was like, they lived in my house for a year and a half, Right? Wow. Wow, wow, wow. JB I know you gotta run in a few minutes.

I put in your offer. Thank you for that to anybody that's attending and we're gonna have you back for two more times. Um, can you, you probably have one more question for you JB and that is, um, maybe you can condense two things. One, you mentioned that entire teams are gonna get ripped and replaced.

I'd like you to maybe riff on the why there and where you see that investment now changing in companies from these, you know, we're gonna put all this money into this one company to more nim you see nimbleness as the next phase. Can you talk about those two trends? I just think we're moving into a, like VCs, I talked to a lot of VCs. They don't know whether to put 50. Like you usually have to put 50 million to a company to build a engineering team, build a sales team.

They're not doing it anymore. 'cause you don't need the engineering team, you don't need the sales team. They're taking 50 million, they're giving it to a million to 50 companies and saying, let's see, because I think we're moving into a world, and this is why I do think, and I'll finish on this, that MSPs are in a great spot because we are moving into a world where you can be massively efficient and massively profitable with a small team of people and tons of technology.

I went from 18 people down to two and there's a reason for it is because I can now make just as much money at a much higher margin with much less people. So that's where I think we need to go. And I do apologize, I have to bounce on this. Um, thank you guys for everything on this one. And if anybody has any informa, I I'll give you all free content too. If you check out the website, you don't have to buy anything from me. Uh, I'm here to help so you can hit me up on anything.

Thank you guys for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it. Um, let's see. Uh, Jim, uh, let's see. Charlie, let's just see where we, just trying to think, You know what I'm looking forward to. What's that Jim Forecasting? Talk to us about that. What do you mean? Charlie's Laughing? 'cause he knows if you've ever run a sales team before, the one thing people can't do is forecast. Right? But forecasting really is just probability, Right?

So this is something that AI should actually end up be. Like you have to build out the model for it, but making sure that the right inputs are in. But over time, AI should be able to really dial in forecasting, Right, right, right. Yeah. And that's what I'm excited as, as someone that, you know, has to report frequently to a private equity firm that's our sponsor about where are the quarters gonna come in.

You know, it's, you know, asking our salespeople, you know, sometimes, and sometimes things don't come in like we think, Right? All right. Having that capability I think would be looking forward to Actually Yeah, Hundred percent. Yeah. They, they, they, it'll get rid of the sandbaggers. I don't think they, uh, the, the sandbaggers and the people that hap have happy years, right, Jim. Right, exactly. Computers know how to sandbag. That's a good thing. No.

Well, again, I want to thank Jim for you, uh, and coming on Charlie as well. Um, the next, um, uh, webinar we're gonna do is really looking into how, like the, how, how you can automate outbound sales. And so again, you know, uh, my good friend Ted Hallsey out there mentioned today. Ted, it's great to see you that, you know, this is more 3 0 1. Again, our intent is to, I I think we can jump right? I think we can help MSPs jump ahead here right? On things that they were doing, uh, or not doing.

And then, so we're gonna, we're gonna, that's our next one. We'll, we'll, we'll get out the dates on that. So Charlie, thank you for coming on, being in your hotel room there at MSP Decon and again, Robo, always good catching Up. Yeah. Tha thank you to all of you that joined in today to listen. We sincerely appreciate it. I hope you found it valuable and look forward to the next one. Take care everybody. Thanks Everybody.