This is the first episode of AI and Sales Brief, a new sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
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Today’s show featured an interview with AI expert Zeev Wexler CEO at Wexler, and sales expert Tom Snyder, Founder of Funnel Clarity.
Find Zeev on LinkedIn. Find Tom on LinkedIn.
ZEEV”S TIP: “With the right training and AI, you can take hours, days of work, and put them into 30 seconds and get all the information you want for you to be able to push the sale further.”
TOM’S TIP: “If we can get salespeople to uncover very early on what’s changed that has the buyer interested in considering a new solution, and understand who all should be involved in the conversation, we begin to get a resource that tells us whether it’s a qualified opportunity or not.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: All right, both of you guys have been regular guests on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. You know how this works. We’re going to be basically addressing a question every week that is challenging sales leaders, specifically around how to utilize AI to enable success. Tom, you and I have talked about this concept called the Ghost Town Funnel. My question for you, why do prospects go completely dark after a perfect demo? Why do deals stall in the sales funnel?
Tom Snyder: It’s one of the major complaints of most sales leaders and one of the things that salespeople often ignore. A deal does appear to be moving through the funnel. We get to a certain stage, it’s usually about halfway through, where either there has been a demonstration or they’re waiting to get the demonstration scheduled and all of a sudden, we get ghosted. And the salesperson makes lots of excuses for the prospect, the sales leader gets more and more frustrated, and the sales funnel backs up with all kinds of nonsense. There are several different causes of the problem which are easily avoided if the salesperson understands best practice. The salesperson understands what science has told us about buyers making a complex decision. And two, really stand out in the answer to this question. One, the problem really is the very front end of when the sales cycle starts.
Sellers fail to uncover, and this is the important point, the changes that have negatively impacted their status quo, meaning the buyer’s status quo. What are the changes that have caused the buyer to begin to view their current solution as non-optimal, their current solution as perhaps frustrating, getting a little long in the tooth, no longer meeting the current challenges? We don’t uncover that, and as a result, we’re not really sure where’s a live opportunity and where there isn’t. Compounding that problem is the fact that sellers often remain single threaded. What could be more fun than talking to somebody who’s engaging and excited to talk to you or interested in your solution, or always answers your phone call and your emails? What could be better than that? And we have no idea if that individual has any authority, if that individual is a lone wolf crying in the wilderness of otherwise satisfied people using a solution. We have nothing. We just have an interesting new friend.
The thing is, if we can get salespeople to uncover very early on what’s changed that has you interested in considering a new solution or what change would you like to implement to do better than you currently are, now we begin to get a resource that tells us a piece of the puzzle as to whether it’s a qualified opportunity or not. The next thing is to figure out; do you have any colleagues who feel the same way?
Now, that’s a little bit crass the way I phrased it, but the idea is, are there other folks in your organization, particularly those in some leadership positions, who recognize the same frustration or aspiration you do? If you could get sellers to simply uncover change that may be happening outside of the company, change the company may want to make, and you could get them to understand, who all should I get in touch with? Who all should I start a conversation with? What are the list of people that I can get, have a pretty good idea, have influence on the kind of decisions I care about? I’m so much further ahead now.
The primary reason sellers have not ever been doing that traditionally is A: they’re not trained in what sales excellence requires, and their own company encourages. Quick, put it in the funnel. Quick, let’s close it. We stay riding our single thread, only to be disappointed that the deal goes dark. We don’t have the training and we don’t have the research time to find the answers. That’s what’s causing the problem.
Fred Diamond: Yeah, that’s a huge problem. One thing I remember is a sales leader of mine years ago said, “Fred, we have enough friends”. You mentioned, you get through to somebody, all of a sudden you have a new friend. He goes, “we have enough friends. We need customers”. So I love the way you described that. I love the tee up here to Zeev Wexler. You’re one of the top sales experts on utilizing AI, to be more effective in the selling process. Give us some of your insights on what Tom just said.
Zeev Wexler: Love it. So, first of all, these are the two biggest blocks for why sales get stalled, and with the right training and AI, now you can solve that. What do I mean by that? If you basically take these questions and load them onto an AI system, the AI within minutes, if not seconds, can go through all of the issues.
What can block your sales, the changes that are happening, the company, what is going on with them, and give you a brief that would take you hours, maybe days in the past to create, looking through every resource and really equipping you with what is the knowledge that you need and what is the knowledge that that company is going through right now as it pertains to what you’re trying to sell to them.
The other question, it’s even easier, the artificial intelligence system, if you prompt it correctly and know the right processes, can create exactly who you need to talk to, who’s involved in the process, who has authority, who has budgets, what they’ve done in the past. In today’s world there is no “it’s too hard, it’s too much time”. The company leadership wants it to go into the pipeline. But you can build with the right training, the right knowledge, the right expertise like Tom provides, you can build a system that can do that literally within seconds. You can take hours, days of work and put them into 30 seconds and get all the information you want for you to be able to push this sale further.
AI is the special weapon if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s a waste of time. But if you know exactly what it is that you’re doing now, you have a power multiplier, a 10x that will make you really good in the process and make the sale go further to the place that you understand whether you get it or not.
Tom Snyder: I have spent decades in the industry of training salespeople on what science really tells us works and not myths or anecdotes or whatever. One of the most amazing things that I have learned from Zeev, it blows my mind, is the speed and depth of information that’s essential to know that you can now get in literally a matter of seconds. It’s incredible because one of the things, you know, the well equipped, well researched salesperson will, by virtue of simply that information be differentiated.
If you marry that to the techniques that best practice tells us, it’s amazing. What Zeev does is the, I hate to use this because it sounds trite, but it’s literally the magic elixir of getting your salespeople to not just learn, but to embrace and master best practice. Because it’s like their constant coach, their constant assistant. It’s literally mining information. It would take you hours and hours to find yourself, that is so valuable, but no one has the time to do it. And getting this done correctly is magic. I’ve seen it happen.
Zeev Wexler: I’ve seen it happen with so many companies, Fred, of how you take this. And now salespeople love to research because it takes seconds. Now leadership knows they have all the information they need. They now are equipped to do more, to close in higher percentages, to do things better, faster, cheaper, right? Better, faster, cheaper is the solution, the best solution for everything. If you know how to do something now, you can make it happen so well, and it can really revolutionize your sales funnel.
Fred Diamond: Absolutely. Everybody reach out to me, Fred Diamond, or Zeev Wexler or Tom Snyder. We have a great solution available from the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, bringing two of the greatest minds in sales, performance improvement and selling effectiveness. Using AI to help your company achieve your goals. All right, gentlemen, this is the AI and Sales Brief. Every Monday morning we’re going to be tackling a question that revolves around this. And the goal is to help you and your company become more effective as a selling organization. My name is Fred Diamond.