Session 1

Well, welcome everybody. We are off to the races here with our second webinar on the Buzz Word of the Year, ai. Um, welcome everybody. Welcome Gloria. Great to see you. Um, today we're gonna be talking about specifically, you know, where you can automate your outreach with ai. This is a pretty cool topic because this is an area, um, that JB when we do the intros, but jbs gonna be talking about that you're, you're actually seeing things work. Um, we're in the early game here.

Obviously a lot's gonna change over the next 12 and 24 months, but, um, you know, it's, it's interesting to see what is and what's not working. We're gonna be talking a lot about what is working today. Um, just a few housekeeping items for everybody. Uh, common question, is it being recorded? Yeah. With Crowdcast platform, everything's automatically recorded. Um, same URL I'll put it here.

Um, we will send out an email, obviously, to everybody that registered and, and did attend, but anybody on your team that you think, Hey, you know, they can't make it, they probably interested in this. Um, from a sales perspective, maybe it's some of your B CIOs that, um, or account managers, maybe it's somebody actually in the executive leadership team that can't make it.

Just send them over that URL and shortly, literally shortly after the, um, end of the webinar, it literally is, is ready to go for replay. Alright, so that is all I have on housekeeping at the moment. Uh, in terms of webinar one that we did, the only thing I just kind of wanna recap about it, jd I'm gonna come to you and then we'll do intros in a minute after this recap Mm-Hmm. Uh, and then I, I'll set the stage and then we'll do some interest.

But webinar one, we, uh, one of the highlights I thought that was really interesting, you know, was the stat around, um, Gartner. And that, you know, they really, you know, this is a, a, a, a trend that's been going on for some time now. This isn't new. That each year with the amount of information available on the internet, so much research is done as a buyer. And think about it in your own life, right?

Before you engage or even just do a purchase without ever experience, you know, working with a sales rep. Um, and so we're seeing this phenomenon where, um, 43% of buyers now want a rep free experience. And JB we probably could guess that next year it's even gonna be higher.

But there was one anomaly in the data, and I want to ask you about that anomaly where, you know, people that did buy rep free, I'll let you kind of extrapolate this on their remorse and what does that mean for true sales professionals and people that take this craft, you know, really seriously. Um, what, what does, what does this, what does this mean? So give us a little insight on that. Yeah. I actually think it means great things.

Uh, I, I think the, it means that average sales reps are gonna get smoked, uh, and, and we're watching it happen right now, and they're around average reps are irrelevant. Like the, the, the year, uh, this is the year that the no value interaction between sales and client is the, the tolerance for it's gonna be zero.

Because when I can go to something like a Chachi BT and I can then take your website, put it into that website, and ask it questions about your product, and I get better answers, more contextualized answers for me specifically, then I can some rep who's gonna ask me some dumb ass bant questions and drone through a PowerPoint presentation, like all those reps are already irrelevant in my opinion.

But for the good reps, I think it's actually fantastic because it's just because the good reps always evolve. The good reps always evolve, they always find ways of adding value to the client. We always hear that trusted advisor thing, right? They are very few sales reps who are actual true, trusted advisors, like the ones that bring value to the equation and aren't using all these sales tactics to try to close people, right?

They're actually genuinely care about what the client needs, and they're helping 'em make decisions. And sometimes that decision is not for our product or service. Those are the best sales reps out there, and those ones are gonna thrive in, in, in the future. The ones who are going through the motions and just checking off the boxes, they're the ones getting replaced. And quite frankly, I I, I'm glad. Yeah.

And, and JB you know, it, it, the, uh, the anomaly I was talking about, could you just really quickly talk about that, that there was this dichotomy in people that did go rep free. There was a remorse. Oh, Yeah. Right. The, uh, Piece for the people that weren't on Yeah, the, the, of the 43% that wanted a rep free environ, uh, rep free experience. And this is B2B sales, by the way. And it was an average of millennial. It was, uh, uh, uh, boomers, gen Xers and millennials.

So when you say, yeah, it's gonna get worse, 'cause that wasn't even Gen Z included. But the, the benefit, the positive side of it is that of those 43% that wanted a rep free experience, they, they had a 23% higher regret rate, right? Which means they regretted the purchase more when they did not have a sales rep involved, which tells me there's value. It's just we gotta reshape what value looks like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright, so let's set the stage here for this particular webinar.

And I did some research on this and I thought it was really interesting. And I did research on, you know, the terminology around AI and sales and AI and marketing. And you typically think of these two disciplines. I don't know about, you know, you Jim, but, and Charlie, we've all been in this space from a sales side for many years.

And you typically, you know, these, these, there was friction between eye to eye, um, and, and maybe the goals and objectives, even though, you know, both wanted ultimately sales to flow through. There was kind of this, you know, again, parting of ways and how to do things and why you would do things. Um, what's interesting about the data that's showing right now, it says for market, I'm just gonna read, look down and read this.

'cause marketing, the leading use cases, we're creating content, analyzing and reporting on data, learning how to do things, conducting research for sales. The leading use cases were very similar, coming in at, um, uh, uh, creating content and, uh, for absolutely for sales. The number one, by the way, that was number two for sales. The number one was analyzing leads, actually analyzing the quality of lead flow, et cetera.

And because these AI tools now can look at different pieces of demographic data, they can actually provide algorithms that say, Hey, this type of subset of information is a better lead than this one. So, really interesting stuff. So that's setting today's stage where we're gonna look into specifically what areas of outreach are being automated, why, and why they're beneficial for MSPs.

And I think also, again, I, I foresee here, I'm gonna ask Jim this question after intros, but Jim, I'd love your thoughts post intro on the following. And that is, do you feel some MSPs will really run with this? And, you know, this could be another delivery area for them, consulting for their customers. So with that, JB I'm gonna let you kick it off on a quick intro of yourself, who you are, what you do, and congratulations on just being, uh, awarded or nominated to speak at Dreamforce.

That's a big, big, uh, thing to when salesforce.com says, Hey, we want you to speak. So Yeah, thanks man. Man, I'm excited. I'm speaking at both in inbound and Dreamforce this year, so, uh, and they're back to back. So nice. Uh, but yeah, I appreciate it.

Uh, you know, John Barrow's, CEO JB sales here, uh, do sales training for the most part, work with a lot of tech SaaS companies, Salesforce, LinkedIn, box, all them I train their sales organizations have been doing it for the past 10 years, having fun doing it, and trying to evolve and not get replaced by ai, but try to figure out how we can evolve and, and at least leverage it here. So, Yeah.

And shameless plug, you were in the MSP space for many years with Jim, uh, at Thrive Networks, and so you ran sales there. Uh, Jim, how about over to you? Yeah, Jim Lippe, CEO of SaaS alerts, as you mentioned, Andrew, I've been in the MSP space 20 years at this point. Uh, started as an MSP, uh, CEO of Thrive Networks. Uh, John and I worked together, uh, there.

And, um, you know, 2012 I joined the dark side, the vendor side, uh, and, uh, you know, been places like Kaseya and Independence it, uh, before joining SaaS Alerts. So excited to be here. Always, uh, a good group here. Yeah. Really good to have you, Charlie. Good to have you with us, bud. Tell us a little about yourself. Yeah, so, uh, I'm currently the CRO at Roost. Uh, roost is an automation platform focused on the MSPs, so it's purpose built for MSPs.

Um, I've been on the vendor side for about, you know, 25 years, you know, focused on, um, you know, certainly on, you know, all the channels. Uh, but the last 10 plus very focused on, uh, MSP. You've worked with Jim in the past, uh, you know, at thought leadership side. Then when, uh, we dragged him to the dark side on the vendor side. But, um, you know, definitely, uh, you know, love, love, love the space and, and love to see how we're evolving here. Yeah. Good.

Well, in chat, uh, Sean Goss, great to see you. Yeah, you were a little late. You, you get no dessert, but yes, it's all being recorded. The URL that's in there is actually the same URL that you're on right now. And the way Crowdcast works is as soon as this is over, we give it 10 minutes. It's a rendered, and it's available right at the same URL.

So, Jim, uh, um, real quick, your thoughts, like, do you feel this could be a discipline for MSPs like that really grab onto this and can, you know, maybe use it as a wedge into accounts, um, that really understand ai? Yeah, I do. I think anything around, I think digital transformation at this point, let alone AI is an opportunity for MSPs to win and use as a wedge. Yeah. And I highly encourage MSPs, by the way, to start looking for more wedge solutions.

You know, when John and I, you know, were selling at Thrive Networks, you know, we grew that business really successfully. That being said, you know, we would win on average maybe 25% of the time, but 75% of the time we walked out with zero zero. We spent good money to get the meeting, to get the lead, to get the meeting, psych ourselves up for the meeting we deliver. And then, you know, after 60 days, we find out that we didn't get it. Mm-Hmm.

So one of the things I've learned in the software space is that software companies are much better creating wedge devices to get something in play with a customer and then develop that relationship over time to get more and more wallet share. Mm-Hmm. Right. So I would encourage MSPs, whether it's mastering AI and bringing that to the table for their customers. Um, cybersecurity is obviously, you know, super hot.

Anything around digital transformation to help them consult on that and help their, uh, customers understand how to leverage, uh, you know, more digital channels. I think all this all in play at this point, you should be leveraging that to get more accounts on the sales side.

'cause too many times, you know, you go in and again, you, you either gain that, you know, $8,000 a month account, which is awesome, and we're all high, high fiving, but the vast majority of the time you're walking out with zero. Yeah. Figure out how to convert something in the, from those conversations. Yeah. It's really interesting point, Jim.

And, um, and, and as, as you were saying that, I was thinking to myself, it's something all MSPs sitting on this call are very intimate with from, from their side buying. Because if they think about whether it's ConnectWise case data, whatever, they become really masterful at buy solution X. Well then ask yourself, how many Y Zs, you know, one, two threes from that same vendor are you buying now? And by and large, you know, it's, it's really fascinating how their portfolios have grown.

And when you speak to MSPs, you know, going from two solutions, A PSA and an RMM Jim, when we were first getting into this business, to now the average being 40 tools slash solutions, uh, it's, it's pretty, pretty phenomenal. Yeah. And when you can do that, you drastically reduce your, you're cac your customer acquisition costs. Yes, very true. Charlie, um, before we jump into today, I, I like to always kind of take a step back, right?

Um, there was folks on here like Kurt Hicks who I remember was at the first, we used to call it Partner Summit, uh, that was the first IT nation back in the day.

So there's people that have been here for a long time, and we get the, the notion of the Glen Garry, Glen Ross salesperson and, and that whole, you know, but, but I think it's important to, as we lead into where we are today, using AI to really, you know, generate leads and outreach to kind of maybe just walk us kind of through a little bit of evolution of where things were starting in there, just banging phones to then we get involved, you know, in the, you know, nineties with CRM and you know, now we're, you know, right before this, you know, evolution of ai, you know, we had automation with platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce, but kind of just maybe walk us through where, where we got to and where we are right now.

Yeah, I think it definitely used to be very much a volume play, right? You wanted to get as many, uh, many calls out there, you were constantly iterating on, um, you know, basically what the pitch was. You know, we all know whoever was successful. Um, you know, we, we kind of leaned on that person, see how we could, uh, replicate that. Um, but, but it was a lot, like, to Jim's point, it was, uh, it, you know, there was a lot of, you know, door slammed, phones hung up, no callbacks.

Uh, you know, I know everybody on this call's probably done call blitz days. You know, you'd have those so many times, and now you're, you know, now you're trying to figure out like, you know, what are they actually calling on? And you know, I think you, you kind of started off talking about how like, you know, you had that friction with sales and marketing, and that was a lot of it, right?

Because what you were doing was kind of, I guess, the best that we can do, which was, Hey, we just need to get in front of people when you to talk to people. So there was always that friction of, Hey, you know, marketing's gotta get us enough, you know, basically leads to call out on. And then, you know, it was the sales jobs that were challenging. I used to always, always joke around when you had too many leads. It was like, what did they do up, you know, upload the phone book. Right.

You know, because, you know, we'd go look at it and you'd get people that would be, you know, calling all day. They did make their 200 dials and get nobody. Mm-Hmm. Right.

And then, and then, you know, um, like you said, as you start adding CRM as you are, you know, start adding, you know, access to phone systems where you could start listing in on people's calls to see, you know, what they were actually doing, shadowing those or look at the data of, you know, the person that, you know, had 200 calls, but a hundred of 'em were the same number. Right.

You know, they were calling their mom at work, or they were, you know, they were going through the, I mean, you know, j you know, jbs laughing, but we all know we, we've all all seen that. Um, yep. And, and so you get getting from that to start looking at the data a bit more, um, you know, to, to kind of where we are today, where, you know, the, the one thing that I'd say anybody that's either been in sales or led a sales team is, you know, how much time do they actually spend selling?

That to me is always frustrated the heck outta me. You know? And that could be, you know, admin stuff, licensing, follow up on stuff that, you know, really you're paying that person, they're not making any money, so they're p****d off. Um, so, you know, right now we're getting to the point where we really, you know, dig in a lot more with what the data looks like.

And, um, you know, because of, you know, just how people buy, how they've changed, where, you know, by the time you get in touch with them or they get in touch with you, they already done other homework. Like you guys are talking about leveraging ai, you know, it's so easy to find out. Uh, but they already know the basic stuff. So, you know, you don't even now have to go through that.

So that's where like, you know, you, you guys were talking about getting that great salesperson, but, uh, you know, I think now that's where we're at is really getting these, getting the right salespeople, really good salespeople, and giving them the time to do what they do well as opposed to doing these other things. So I think, you know, that's where we're kind of seeing automation come in. And, and certainly AI is, uh, is getting big. I think the key is knowing how to leverage ai Yeah.

About like, you know, plugging a website in there, figuring that out, what questions to ask. Yeah. We're gonna talk something about that shortly with jb um, Jim, um, you know, I was thinking as, as Charlie was talking, you know, my first job was with a DP, and, you know, I think about why hit banging doors and, and phones mattered back then, because again, we were the information source, the internet didn't exist. So we actually had some value talking about what we were doing.

That's an expensive proposition. And you mentioned customer acquisition costs are commonly known as cac. And, you know, it's a, a term we hear a lot in obviously the SaaS world. But if you put your MS P hat back on, you know, knowing how most MSPs will work off referral, but there's a subset that actually have outbound teams have structured sales. Can you just give us a sense, though, just how expensive customer acquisition is, if it's done inefficiently? Um, and, and, and why this matters?

Yeah. I mean, so first of all, there's a lot of MSPs that really don't invest a lot in sales, which is why they don't have great results. Um, both from a mental bandwidth perspective and also from, you know, cash outlay. But, you know, I go back to the days at JB and I were at Thrive, you know, we would spend $300 for a meeting, like that was our CFO. Calvin basically allocated $300 for us to get a meeting an in-person meeting with Somebody. And this is almost 20 years ago though, Jim, too.

Mm-Hmm. This is exactly 20 years ago. Yeah. So that's, that's not just 300 anymore. No, exactly. Yeah. I, I joined Thrive told me about Cam graduating, now it's 20 years ago, Jimmy. S**t, man, I'm feeling old, but 300 bucks is for a meeting. Yeah. Right? And then that's, I mean, then you close a deal, right? And now you still have to pay the commission on that deal. Right? And keeping in mind that you're only going to close 75 per, excuse me, 25% of those meetings.

So you take your, and we, our goal was 30 meetings a month. Wow. So you take, you know, essentially 75% of 30 meetings we're paying $300 a month for down the drape. Right? Right. And, and we, We haven't paid a BDR yet. We haven't paid the sales rep yet. We haven't paid commission yet. Right. So, yeah, cost of sale is real. Um, but if you do it right, then you're gonna get the return.

And, you know, JB was like the master at like creating this like massive, That spreadsheet Excel, Excel spreadsheet. Right. We used to like diligently keep going, um, conversations Of every channel for every touch and Everything. Exactly. But that's, that's how precise and diligent you need to be to stay on top of it and to really measure the effectiveness. So it's all one continuous, you know, workflow. Yeah.

JB I'm gonna come over to you, but I just, again, I'll close the thought, Jim, not all MSPs charge for onboarding as a project. And so your cost of sale continues if you think about it, right. Too, until, you know, could be literally four months from the date of that signature where maybe the first dollars start coming through the door. And, you know, it's, it's possible that in a model like that you could be six, seven months in before you actually break even.

And, and when you take into account all the costs involved, Right? Yeah. Same thing on a sales rep, by the way, just to throw it out there, not just the customer, but like, if you hire a sales rep, you're probably not profitable on that sales rep for at least nine months, uh, depending on what their role is. And so that's why it's so important to lifetime value of customers, retain your employees as long as possible. 'cause otherwise you're just throwing money out the window. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

We could have a whole webinar, uh, just on, uh, MSPs that have hired BDRs or outsourced their telemarketing or hired three sales reps and it never working. Uh, that's a whole different webinar jb Great point. So why jb Why should MSPs be excited about Al let's get into today? Yeah. And specifically in the areas of sales and marketing. Let's get this on an upbeat level.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the, I think it's actually great for MSPs because you, you had kind of set the stage, you know, and Jimmy had think said it, which is MSPs historically, you know, they're there. A lot of 'em are engineering driven, right? And sales is a need. Like they have to have it. But it's, it's something that is just not natural from an NSP. Like, I think the reason that we succeeded at Thrive was, 'cause I had no idea about technology.

Like, I, I was the quote unquote VP of sales, and I knew nothing about technology. All I knew was sales. And so that's all I did, right? But when you're a founder and you're an engineer, it's kind of, I wrote a blog post a long time ago called, you know, the Founder's Dilemma, which is the engineer that goes out there and kind of builds a company and has that passion to create it and gets all those people involved early on.

And then hands it off to a VP of sales who doesn't have the passion, doesn't have the insights, and then it tends to fall apart. And then they try marketing and everything else. So I think now is actually gonna be the golden age for MSPs using, uh, ai. Because I think on the front end, specifically on the lead gen side of the house, um, and we'll talk about some of these tools, but there's some tools that I'm watching right now. I, I used to roll my eyes at personalization at scale.

Like you used to hear these cadence tools, like the sales loss and the outreaches and that type of stuff. And you'd hear personalization at scale. And I would just be like, cut it out just because you changed the name, the title and the email. You know, it doesn't mean that it's personalized. But now what I'm watching is you can gen, you can really do some true personalization at scale.

So you can use AI to identify your ICP to come up with the real nuances and then go look for those and then automatically generate emails. And then they go right into your system and they, you know, you could put your calendar link in there and all of a sudden people are setting up meetings for you as the leader of the organization to take the call that is already pre-qualified. And it's not like an inbound lead, right?

It's an actual hand raiser saying, I mean, it's not like it, it's an inbound from a outbound campaign. So between inbound marketing events and the AI that can be used to really help hyper profile and, and really customize, I think you could get away with not really doing, not really having to hire too many sales professionals and go through that, what you just mentioned there as far as, you know, hiring somebody three months later, dumping 'em and trying to figure somebody out.

I think if you optimize this the right way from an engineering standpoint, you can engineer a pretty good funnel right now. Yeah. And that's exciting. We're gonna talk a little bit about, like, the engineers geeking out JB they can actually get involved for the first time and probably get excited about being involved with sales because of some of the things they can, scripts they can write, and just different stuff like that.

So I wish I was an, I wish I had an engineering background 'cause I'd be a lot further along in AI than I am right now. You know what I mean? Because it's, 'cause it's, it's a different mindset, right? It's, it's telling the machines, it's the input versus the output, right? So, and, and we can get into that, but I, I think it's actually opportunities are huge right now for the MSPs to take advantage of this. Um, I think it, I think it's massive.

So you, you mentioned like the front end of the funnel, automating the front end Mm-Hmm. So before, um, we get into your perspective on that. Yep. Can you, again, let's assume our audience doesn't know what front end of the funnel means just for a moment. Yep. And then can you talk to us about how AI can help in that area? Yeah. So the front end is, is just like the identification and outreach to your ideal customer profile, right? Which is the customer.

I think the one thing that I see a lot of companies make a huge mistake on is they'll get a very broad, ideal customer profile with very basic demographic information, right? So they'll go on to ZoomInfo or any one of these lists and they'll say, okay, we support companies between 10 and 200 employees, uh, in these regions and in these industries, right? And they'll get this massive list that is okay at best, right? And then they'll just start hammering away at it.

Whereas the, the better approach is quality over quantity, right? You get super tight on exactly who you provide the best services for, and then you come up with messaging and you surround them from a messaging standpoint. So, and we'll, I know we'll dissect this, but you gotta figure out who your audience is first. And it's not everybody. And that's the problem. I think we a lot of, and we did this, Jim will, you know, jump in on here, but we, we chased bad revenue for a long time.

Like we would take projects because we needed the money, right? Even though we were looking for recurring revenue and every project we did would suck away from our ability to go service the clients that actually produce that long-term lifetime value of a client.

But we did it right because anybody, we had computer problems, we were there, you know, I would drive all the way out to Western Massachusetts and sit in a, you know, an hour long sales call for five stupid computers that had a virus on 'em because we needed the money at the time. Sure.

And that is the, that is the biggest waste of time and energy that an MSP could do, is focusing their sales efforts on clients who are either not gonna buy or who, if they buy, they're gonna be a pain in the ass and probably gonna churn after a while. So right now, using AI to be able to identify those and target those so that you're spending your sa your very expensive sales resources on the right clients, that to me is, is what the game changer's gonna be all about. Yeah.

You, me, you, you mentioned a huge point and JB I would not consider myself a guru in marketing, but I I I've been really reading a lot about marketing and the, your who, right? Yeah. Quote unquote, your WHO is just so important. Um, and we'll talk, you know, you talk about niching and the specificity of who that persona is, or they call it an avatar. The more specific right? The more ideal your messaging can be to that avatar. Is that fair? Absolutely. Think about it, right?

This is why, and this is the, the, the connection I'll make. Why do we hate spam? Right? We hate spam. 'cause mostly it's irrelevant. Like, mostly of the stuff that hits our inbox is completely irrelevant, and I don't care about it. Mm-Hmm. So I don't even think about it, right? But why do I like Instagram? Well, guess what? Instagram, I've trained this algorithm, you know what I mean? I've up upvoted ads, I've c I've liked certain things. I've stayed on things longer than other things.

I've gotten rid of other stuff. So now almost every ad on Instagram that I get, I'm like, Ooh, that, that's cool. Like, that's cool. Like, I, I want that. I didn't even know that was a thing. Give it to me. Right? So, so Instagram knows me. Instagram knows me better than me for crying out loud, right? Right, Right. I brought off at Instagram is off the charts, like, it, it's unbelievable. And, and I'm actually, I'm happy about it.

So, so think about that from a standpoint like mass marketing, who cares? Versus that algorithm knows exactly who I am and they are. And so now I can go on Instagram and say, I just want this exact type of person and I'm only gonna offer that thing to that person. Well, your conversion issues are gonna be through the roof. And that's from a marketing standpoint, we can now do that from a sales standpoint. Yeah. Wow. Really, really interesting. Great analogy on the Instagram.

I didn't think about it that way, but it's fan, it's a great way for us as MSPs to really think about this. Um, so great, great stuff. Charlie, um, Roos does a lot of automation. This isn't a shameless plug, I just more so wanna understand what you're hearing from MS BMSP community.

Are you starting to hear more things like historically, like you think of roost as an RPA robotic process engineering, like, Hey, automate my onboarding, automate my offboarding, automate, you know, this integration with Office three six M 365. But are we starting to hear the drum beat for, Hey, I've got HubSpot, Charlie, can you, blah, blah, blah, this A Absolutely. I think it's, you know what, uh, what JB was talking about, it's, you know, these guys aren't experts at this.

So we're actually helping them. And certainly as we, we build out the platform and the workflows is just make, make sure they're actually leveraging a tool that they're paying for. That's one of the easiest things that we can do.

But certainly, um, you know, when you look at just, you know, that segmentation, targeting specific, you know, when, when they're doing either targeting or retargeting somebody that they already have in their database that they've reached out to or get, gets to the point where, uh, we're trying to help them do what, you know, what Jim was talking about, which is not, not not just win, you know, that 25% make sure that we win more, but we actually probably are gonna have less, less at bats.

Yeah. But We're not gonna be wasting our time on it. So making sure that they're the right folks that, that are doing that. So we absolutely are doing, um, you know, a lot more automation with that to help them out. And Hub seems to be big. Very cool. JB I, I know we're gonna ask you about this, but I'm gonna do it now. If we repeat it, you guys can shoot me in the crowd.

But because Charlie said about around, you know, um, looking at who their cust like, you know, obviously you have all your customers either in your PSA or your HubSpot MM-Hmm. You mentioned something to me offline last night about how AI is really starting to get good at, even if, even if you don't think these customers are similar, why is AI getting, like, where does it really shine?

I've got a hundred customers and you know, these are in healthcare, these are in financial, and they're not alike. Why is it, why is That not necessarily true? No. See that, that's the difference to me between BI and ai, right? bi I remember, like, I, I can't tell you how many BI companies I used to work with in telehealth, their sales organizations. And good lord, they, it's funny 'cause I always joke around. I'm like, oh yeah, you're special. They're like, no, no, no, we're really special.

I'm like, oh really? Let me, lemme guess. You take disparate data sources. You put 'em in a graphical format so you can make decisions that you didn't even, you know, and ask questions you didn't even know you had questions about. Right. That, that type of thing. They're all like, oh my God, are you serious? Like, did you read our website? I'm like, no. Every stupid f*****g BI company on the planet has that same pitch.

And the the falsity of BI was that it did, was able to connect those disparate data sources. But let's be honest, most people's data, you know, data and data out, right? Garbage and garbage out. And most of it's garbage, especially in A CRM. Okay?

The beauty of AI now is, and I, and I am not an engineer and I have no idea how it works, but it's ability to connect the dots between so many desperate data sources at this point and gain real insights into them and let you ask questions about that data that's now real, that's now a novice like me can do that as opposed to having to be trained on like a tableau or something like that. And, and be like, okay, like I think I understand this. Right?

So that's where I think now going back to that front end of the pipeline that we talked about, I, I encourage all of my clients, especially right now, you have to reassess your ideal customer profile. 'cause it's changed period. It's changed, right? The nuance, maybe your ICP hasn't changed, but their ICP has, right? Like who they sell to.

For instance, like when the bottom fell out of the SaaS industry in Q1, like I I, people were like, oh, John, you gotta get outta SaaS, you gotta sell, sell to outside of SaaS. And I'm like, I, I don't know really much outside of tech and I like for me to do that, it's a pain in the ass. So I started looking at SaaS companies SaaS, who sold to sa that that was a fool's err in Q1 and Q2. Like if you were a SaaS company and you sold two SaaS companies for the majority, you were dead in the water.

But if you were a SaaS company that sold outside of SaaS, or you sold to retail, you sold to finance and you sold to whatever, now all of a sudden you are better fit for me. So you can now use AI to stuff all of your customers in and have it run the analytics of, okay, what are the true commonalities of these? Not just based on industry and the basic demographics, but what stage of the business are they? How do they use your tools? Who are the people in there that are using your tools?

What are the, you know, augment, you know, what are the other pieces that are involved in here? So you can get such a true profile of who best gets value from your services and who's doing well today, not just in general because they're the highest revenue of your company, but who's the most profitable? Why are they profitable and all that other stuff. So you can profile that and then go find people like that.

Exactly like that profile because you can, once you profile it with your existing data set, you can then say, okay, go find me a whole bunch of companies that fit that exact profile. Right? And your, again, your close ratios are gonna be through the roof compared to just taking a winger at it. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're spot on. I mean, we, we just redid our ICPs. We did it last a year ago and we redid it and there was definitely big changes. Mm-Hmm.

Um, but then we took it, you know, which I think is, is still something that's important, at least for me, is we wound up going out and interviewing a bunch of the guys that fit in that cp so we got more contextual data that maybe just doesn't show up. Um, and we saw a lot of those commonalities. So, you know, nine outta 10 of those lined up exactly as you were talking to 'em. So I think it's definitely something that you, you, you shouldn't just, you know, like you said, it changed big. Yeah.

All of a sudden in Q1. Like you gotta, you gotta re-look at, you know, who you're targeting. One more point as it relates to what Jim said, like when it talks to like these wedge services, right? And getting like Hal having something to sell them, right? Well, if you have a new wedge service that might be a slightly different ICP than what you're used to, right? So, so you wanna look at it and say, okay, well out of our entire client set here, who would be best suited for this service?

And you can start to use AI to be able to do those things. You know, I'll, I'll give a great story to this Jim as I segue to you. 'cause I, if I said be an MSP again, Jim, I want you to take on now that you have this data, how would you go after the avatar, et cetera. But I, I, I, I probably the person that comes best to mind for this is, um, Carl Bmore out of, uh, Arizona.

Well, they have several locations now, but I remember like eight years ago and Carl was like, you know, well we won't work on co-managed, you know, they see us as a threat. And you know, I look at their ideal customer profile today and the type of revenue and the security assessments that they're doing. They're way up market and you know, the types of companies that they're onboarding and how they initially wedge their way in, you know, 'cause they're excellent at doing security assessments.

Um, so, so it's just interesting. That's what one thing that just came to mind, Jimmy as you said, that how things change over time. But because Jimmy, most MSPs Yeah. Most not all rely on referral using this now to really look at that data is important. And if you could, what would you do with it? If you were running an MSP today, Jim, how would you go after your avatars and et cetera? It's a great question.

So how would I use the data today, uh, to essentially, uh, first of all, I want more leads, right? And I want higher quality leads. So let's just start with, you know, the problem that we're trying to solve. Um, so to get more leads, what I would do is, um, I would probably like the, we collect a lot of data. First of all at SaaS alerts, right now it's all security data. Um, and, uh, we can come up with trends and bench kind of benchmark different types of industries and, and business.

I would use that and say, and then leverage it in the prospecting process. Like, does this sound like you? Right, Right. And relate it back to my ICP. It's like, okay, I know I'm going to go after these folks. How do I get more in? I go after I go after them with messaging that's going to make them feel like I understand their, their business.

Because now I have real information about, um, how I can relate to them, Which is, so by the way, Jim, just to interject, which is you, you, I, you, you kind of couldn't, I don't think you could have hit the nail better on the head. And I hope the MSPs are really honing in on this. People buy because you know their world. And now if we connect that data and understand that, hey, you know, here's a trend in healthcare.

Here's a trend in financial, here's whatever, you know, whatever, you know, specific avatar you're, you're leading towards Jim, uh, I think more than ever, you know, we talk challenger sale more than ever. You can now start to put out information around, hey, you know, here's the trends we're seeing in this industry. Does this sound like you, could you foresee this coming in your business? This is what we're seeing with top organizations in this industry, right?

Here's how they're leveraging ai or here's how, you know, they're using, you know, sec their security assessment to look at their supply chain and get better. You know, um, cus you know, stickier with their customers 'cause they're getting ahead of the curve, whatever it may be. But is is that where you're going? Totally. I mean, I'll, I'll give you a very specific example. I mean, you know, Andrew, that we're releasing a new feature set tomorrow to existing partners called Fortify.

And Fortify allow e essentially allows the m ms P to better manage the M 365 tenant. And you, and you do it in an automated fashion. So it assesses what you have, right? You look at your Microsoft security score and then it tells you the things that you have to do to improve that score. Well, within the next 30 days, what we'll we're gonna be able to do, 'cause we just need more data in it.

And MSP will be able to say, you know what, I've got 10 law firms, this is their average Microsoft security score. Do you know what your score is? If you know your score, do you know what you have, have to do to improve your score? Right? Yeah. Like now I'm the managing partner, or I'm the, you know, chief ops person at a law firm. Like that could actually pique my interest because they probably don't know the answer to the question. Mm-Hmm. Right?

And we always want to know how do we compare to industry norm Exactly. Or best in class. Here's what best in class law firms look like, Right? Right. So now we're able to say, take real benchmarking information that you've collected from your own dataset. Right? Right. Like, if you're on SAS alerts, this isn't a plug for SA or I'm just using an example. But if you're using it the right way, you're looking at that benchmarking, you're saying, okay, you know what? I wanna attack law firms.

I'm gonna look at that data set and I'm gonna apply it to the law firms in my prospect icp. Yeah. Really good stuff. Really Good. And create content.

So another part of that adjacent to it is now you can create newsletters and content for law firms from as it relates to I, and you can say to the chat GPT or whatever, act as a legal expert in the AI field of about, you know, technology and write me a blog post on the top things that law firms should be paying attention to from a security standpoint.

And within five seconds you'll have a sick ass blog post or a sick ass newsletter that you could just automate and send out to these people and they'll think it's the best stuff they've ever read. And it'll take no time for you to do it. Really, really interesting. And we're gonna talk about prompt and engineering soon, jb which I think is kind of like a lead into that. But let me ask you about, again, gathering insights on, you know, air coding gathering insights on your target market.

Can you talk to us about how folks are using or how you're helping folks Mm-Hmm. Where you're seeing best in class use AI for this. I I mean, it's a lot of what Jim said, you know, it's, it's, it's all about curiosity. That's the cool thing about this stuff. I I wouldn't look at this stuff for the answer. I would look at to, to spark the curiosity and, and really start to educate yourself because, you know, you can, you can learn a lot, especially sales rep.

I'm gonna, I'll make this very relevant to sales reps, especially new sales reps, right? Like if I'm a new sales rep selling to CISOs or in, in the security space, like you brought up Challenger sale, it's like, look, I love Challenger Sale, but I got myself in trouble a little while back, you know? And I was like, when Challenger was pretty hot, I stood up in front of a crowd of like 2000 people. I was like, could y'all do me a favor and stop teaching 22-year-old kids how to be a challenger?

Please. Like, like, I'm sorry. Unless you have some business acumen, you can't be a challenger, don't you? Especially in the IT space. Like Jim, remember how many times like we pretended like we knew what the, we were talking about without Dylan, you know what I mean? And like I'd walk in, I'd be like, oh, so you know, not DHCP Router, darter, dirt, Dirt. And it and it's like, it's like engineers sit there and they're like, oh look at this adorable little sales rep. Oh he is trying.

Oh he is cute. And they give you just enough rope to hang yourself. And then they're like, anyways, pap pap, right? Yeah. Now JB have to interject here because the best was when they would take you down the hallway to their server closet Yeah. And show you where it's like, oh yeah, router of the line. I dunno what the hell is going on? And you're showing me like, no, I'm selling you. My engineer's gonna come in and take care of it.

Yeah, I don't, I have No idea what I'm looking at right now, but we pretended like we did. But the beauty is, is now you can educate yourself on that very quickly, right? So twofold, you can not only educate yourself on the industry and the personas, but you can also educate your, like let's talk about meeting prep. I can actually take your website, your 10 K, whatever it is, throw it into one of these tools and say, gimme a summary act as a sales rep, right?

Again, we'll talk about prompt, but act as a sales rep and tell me what I need to know about this company, about this 10 k, about this annual report, about this security assessment that is relevant to what I'm selling. And you can put your website in their website in and say, act like this and tell me what I need to know about it. And it'll summarize that stuff for you. And then you can, and what questions should I ask this person when I'm going in to meet them?

And you will come across like, you know what the hell you're talking about. And again, you don't want to know, I'm never gonna be a challenger to tell you I know more than you, especially in this space, but my questions tell you whether like Jim said, like show me you know me type of thing. Like do you know my world and are you educated enough to ask a contextualized question that I will then answer? And I'll basic example here, I used to be a priority based seller, right?

I always believe that when, when, you know, as when your CEO stands up in the beginning of the year, if I cannot tie my solution one or two of those priorities, right? And says, Hey, these are the things that we gotta do to be successful this year. If I can't tie myself to one of those good luck selling anything a significance, right? But the unfortunately way that I used to get there was by saying dumb stuff. Like, tell me about your priorities, right?

And when you say dumb stuff like that, you usually get dumb answers. And so now fast forward before chat GBT, we used to do this report every year where we would pay some kids three to $5,000 who are way smarter than me to go out there and research. And we have this great paper that we always put out at the beginning of the year of the executive priority sheet. And it was the top priorities of the top executives in the top industries.

So tech SaaS, you know, you name the industry CEO priority 1 2 3 CFO priority 1, 2, 3, right? And every time we drop it, people are like, oh my God, this is crazy value. 'cause it allows you to be more relevant and everything else. I don't have to spend three to $5,000 to do that anymore. And you don't have to wait for it to come out in January. You can go in and say, tell me you don't do this with CHATT BT because it's 2021 and beyond.

So you have to have some plugins to it or you have to use like a BART or something like that. But you can say, tell me right now what CFOs in the legal industry are dealing with and the main challenges that they're faced with as it relates to AI in today's world. And tell me what those are and it'll give you such intel that you can then be curious about and educate yourself out and everything else. So I think that's where we can expedite our education now a lot faster.

'cause I don't have to read a 10 K anymore. I don't have to read a full PDF that outlines every single thing you want. I don't have to scrub every aspect of your website to look all the nuances. I could just tell Chad one of like these AI tools to go do it. J jb we got some great questions, but you, you've been touching on something called prompt engineering. Yeah. Why can you define it for the audience? Yeah.

And why is this the arguably one of the most critical and and exciting pieces of automation? And then I'll take a, we'll get through a few questions. Okay. I, I've got so many questions for you guys. I know we're gonna run out of time. But this is a, an important piece, David. Yeah. This is why I think engineers should be so jazzed about this is 'cause it's, it's literally coding, but in, in a, in an, in an easier way.

So prompt engineering, it's no longer, we don't have to think about the output anymore. I don't have to think like, oh, what would I write now as far as like, what, what, what blog post should I write? Or what email should I write to this person and think of creating this brand new thing. Now it's the prompt that I tell the machine to do to get the output that I'm looking for. And the better your input is, the better your output's gonna be.

And you can train these machines to sound and act like you. So the more you work with these things and the more you understand prompt engineering, the more you can get these things to start to produce some insane stuff. So I, I've used this example a couple times. A very simple one that you wanna do is you always want to tell that the, the machine act as, right? So in my case, I would say act as a sales expert in the sa in the SaaS industry that does sales training.

So first that's what I want you to act like then based on what I want you to act like now, what do I want you to say? Right? And if you can get tight on that, which I think quite frankly connects far more with an engineering mindset than it does a sales mindset, you're gonna start to get some stuff there.

You, once you get that prompt, right, then it's a plug and play, then you put names of companies in that prompt and it automatically generates emails, it automatically generates things that you can actually use. But you gotta kind of work a little bit to get that prompt to where you need it to be. What made me me smile about this, Steve, number one, man, I think for culture and an MSP, this, you guys could really build something special here in front.

Like you've talked about, like this is a, a hackathon, but a different kind of hackathon. Like this is one where you sit the team down, grab some pizzas after work and go, okay, you know, you know, who do we really wanna be talking to? Oh, we really wanna be talking to CEOs in this industry or managing partners in this legal industry. Act like that person and who's gonna come up with the best, you know, answers outta those prompts. Right?

Well Charlie actually brought it up, um, when you said, and, and actually the stat on this, Charlie just came out with, um, uh, Salesforce's, uh, state of sales report. 28% of a sales rep's time is actually spent selling 28%. Okay? I mean, 72% of the time is basically admin crap. And the breakdown here is prioritize, prioritizing leads, researching prospects, preparing and planning, generating quotes, manual, entering customer data into sales administrative tasks. Like guess what?

Every one of those things that is on that list can be addressed by Chachi PT or an AI tool. So what I, you know, with the hackathon, what I'm recommending all my clients is exactly what you said Friday afternoon, two to four, pick one of those topics, meeting, prep, research account, whatever, follow up like those, whatever it is.

And then have everybody just hack it out, like give some structure to it and break it up into teams and say, Hey, whoever can figure out how to optimize that component of the sales process using one of these free AI tools out there wins the day. Now what you're doing is you're increasing job satisfaction. 'cause you're allowing the kids to play with the tools, right?

And, and ideally if you find some techno tech, AI tech that's free and uh, and does something better than what you're currently using, well now you've reduced your tech stack and you've reduced your spend. Yeah. So this is the transition, right? Um, quick, quick, lemme go to a quick question here. This is one that I wanna bring up that Brad put in here, which is how do I start, you know, using AI to analyze, you know, my PSA data?

Um, first JB and then Charlie and, and Jimmy, any comments on this? You know, one of the, obviously the concerns of throwing it into a pub, like a chat GPT, can you talk about, Hey, go ahead. You know, throw all your stuff in there. What's the, why do public companies go up to, to the chat GPTs of the world and, and where are we gonna start to, you know, be able to, once we see these more proprietary tools that aren't internet facing, kind of. Can you kind of walk through that?

And by the way, one of them is gonna be at, uh, shameless plug, Jim at, at write a Boom. Uh, it's called Nine Mines. Mm-Hmm. Uh, that's gonna be there. But, but talk to us about why this is a Brad. Great question, Bradford, but why is this a delicate dance when it comes to your own data? I'll jump in real quick.

It, it, it, that's why a lot of these huge companies are putting the brakes on it and they're not allowing any of these tools to be used on-Prem because theoretically what you do put into this now all of a sudden becomes public knowledge. And so that's why if you be like, it'd be cool to be like, Hey, take my p and l and throw it in here and gimme some insights on how it can be more profitable. Like that sounds like a great idea.

Unless you're a publicly traded company and you put your data in there and now all of a sudden your p and l's on the internet, basically. Now, is somebody gonna go in and say, could I have X, Y, Z companies? P and l? Probably not. But it's there. And so that's what these companies are freaking out with. So that's why you need your own, A lot of these bigger companies are creating their own LLM, which is learning language model. 'cause these learning language models are basically the internet.

Microsoft has theirs, uh, Google has theirs and everybody else. And so I think what you're gonna start to see very quickly is a lot of these large companies create their own LLM that can have their own data set on it. Then they can start to do that stuff, but they're not gonna do it on the public internet. JB not to correct you, but like, I don't think there was concern with the, like a public company p and l 'cause it's obviously accessible, you know? Well, yeah, Sorry, that was a bad example.

But, but like, but is it the more so like their data, right? Like, hey, analyze my customer data across these sets and throw it into, you know, a publicly a public. That's what they're concerned with, Right? That's the concern. I don't know how valid the concern is 'cause I don't know the nuances of the technology. 'cause to me it sounds a little weird that, that Oh, okay. Because I think most information's out there anyways.

It's like when everybody told us Snowden was, you know, remember when Snowden told us all like, oh, the, you know, the NSA is watching us and everybody freaked out about it. I'm like, shut up. I had all these friends be like, oh my God, they're watching us. I'm like, have you changed your passwords yet? No. Shut up. Like, we all, like, for the most part, most of our, most of our information is out there, so, but I get the fear. Yeah. Yeah. Dirty Wise Web. Jim, any thoughts on this?

So, and, and you, you know, not to put you on the spot, but you have any thoughts as we go through this? You know, we've got about five minutes left. I'm gonna touch on a few other questions here. Yeah. You mean, uh, being able to put PSA information into chat should b say?

Yeah, Or in general, like, you know, even just like, why, you know, if your SAS alerts or, you know, just be a co you know, be a PS be an MSP, what, what concerns you might have and, and if you do, um, and what would you be wanting to see, you know, in terms of maybe an a a a an LLM, you know, that's internally facing, you know? Yeah, I mean, again, all the, the major AI tools out there right now are designed specifically for like the public internet. And this is all our data, right?

So like back when we were at M Ms P and everything was some ConnectWise. Like, that's the last place I'm gonna put it. Um, I mean, you should be able to, right now, I, I think ultimately what's going to, and JB was kind of alluding to this, we're going to get kind of private AI models for our own data sets. Yeah. And that's, that's where that's going to really, you know, help I think o on the internal stuff. Um, so that just my read.

Um, but there's certainly a lot of really great information that you can be leveraging from your existing tools, uh, if you spend a little bit of time, you know, to put some good information out, like I talked about before, from a benchmarking perspective to, um, un to get people to understand that you know them. Yeah. Yeah. Charlie, how about you? Anything come to mind here?

Yeah, I mean, the only thing that I think is gonna be a challenge, and I think it's gonna be a problem that they need to solve, is how do you control what people are doing, right? So we have a lot of access controls, but you know, I, I've read a bunch of articles about people putting their code in there, Right?

To see, you know, to, to either fix the code or to validate it or, you know, so now, you know, to J'S point, it's kind of like in there, do I know, like, you know, can somebody go figure out, you know, somebody else's secret sauce by looking at the code? You know, I don't, I don't know, maybe, but what are you gonna do? I think that, that, that just creates another opportunity for somebody to figure out how do we manage that?

Uh, and then even if you have it in your own instance, that'll be someplace else somebody goes to hack. Right? Right. You know? Right, right. You know, if everything's in that one vault, right, you know, you're not, uh, you know, you're not gonna fool around. You're gonna go straight to there. So I think it's, you know, it's definitely valid. But I, I think right now, this is one of those things where people are just so excited with the gains that, um, they're probably not as worried about it.

You know, it's just making things a lot faster for us. Um, and, and as smaller companies, if you're an MSP, you don't have to be a marketing expert anymore. You don't have to know how to write content. And, you know, you don't have to be the best writer in the world. So, you know, you see what's going on with the, uh, with the strike in Hollywood, right? Everyone's nervous that, that, you know, we're gonna be able to, you know, you're gonna put people outta jobs because of it.

And I, and I, and I look at it the other way, is just another revolution. Yeah. Figure out how you, how you evolve with that, and you will absolutely have a job. Yeah. Really good point. JB, um, last few minutes here, um, I'm gonna go one other question, but JB I really appreciate you joining us. How, how can folks, you put your TikTok, but how can folks get a hold of you?

Are you working with MSPs, you know, for folks that want to, and you know, is some of this content and your weekly, or whatever, you know, calls with, with MSPs and stuff like that? Talk to us about that. Yeah, put my email in there if anybody else. I, I just put a bunch of links in there of some of the tools that I'm playing around with, just to kinda get the wheels going as far as the functionality and some of the things that are out there.

Um, but my email, if anybody has any questions about that stuff, are you gonna hit me up on, on any one of those tick channels, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter? Um, but yeah, I'm, I'm, look, I, the biggest thing I'd recommend everybody is just start playing around. You know, my, my two last things I'll say here is when people ask me, John, how do I get started with chat GPT? I say, you know what, you know, that's a great question to ask Chat GPT, right? Go in and say, I'm a 47-year-old man.

I live in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm the CEO of a sales training company, and I don't know how to use chat. EPT, what should I be doing? And then just go down that rabbit hole. And, and what Charlie said, I think is extremely valid. The, the, the best analogy I have right now is if every, if everybody's seen Hidden Figures, you know the movie Hidden Figures, where they went to na, NASA, and the women remember those women that were called the computers, right?

And they were way in the back, right? And the head of the computers came by one day and there was a huge IBM mainframe that was in NASA's main office. And she looked at it and it was called a computer. And these women were called computers, right? And she looked at it and said, holy crap, that's gonna replace us. So she had two choices. One is to go back to her team and say, Hey, we gotta get better. We gotta be better at math. We gotta be faster at math and try to beat it.

Or she did what she did. She picked up the manual and she figured out how to use it and turn it on. And then she trained her entire team on how to do that. So when that sucker went on and the IBM re people didn't even know how to use it, guess who became indispensable? They went from being a thousand percent replaceable to indispensable. 'cause they're the only only ones that could use it. And that's what I'm encouraging everybody right now to do, is you've gotta get in the game right now.

'cause if you're not, you're going to get replaced. I promise you, you will get replaced by this tool. This is one of those existential things like everything else kind of internet and DSL and all that other stuff that kinda was like, oh, cool, this is pretty neat. This is one of those hockey stick things that, because this is just gonna compound on itself. It's gonna build on itself smarter, smarter and smarter.

We are, you know, you could look at it as sky net, but at least for the short term, we're in the opportunity stage right now. Mm-Hmm. Good, good, good. All right. I know we're at the top of the hour. Sorry we didn't get to all the questions. Shoot 'em over to JB John at jb@johnris.com. J jt com. Um, um, wanna thank the audience? You guys were great. Love the chat, love the communication. Uh, JB thank you as always for joining. We got one more of these.

Hopefully we'll continue on after that as well. Um, hopefully we can get you to write a boom. I know nine Mines is doing a, um, pre-day event there. Um, Jimmy, you guys are as well. Yours is selling out rapidly. Um, and Charlie, uh, thank you for joining JB thanks. And Jimmy, thanks for joining as well. Wow. Thanks for having time. Until the next one. Uh, we look forward to seeing you all again. Thank you so much.

This will be ready for, uh, live for your team to listen to same URL, uh, in about 10 minutes. Take care, everybody. Have a good one.