This is an AI and Sales Brief episode, a 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: “Do not just look at tools. Look at the entity you are bringing into the organization, educate it, and keep the knowledge inside your organization.”
TOM’S TIP: “The key is creating that value prior to the sale. The current demand from customers across B2B and B2G is, ‘Help me make a better decision. Help me understand my own world better through your sales process, and I will award you my business.'”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Welcome to another episode of the AI and Sales Brief, a sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. I regularly bring on two of our experts, Tom Snyder and Zeev Wexler, to talk about how B2B and B2G selling enterprises can more effectively use AI to improve sales performance.
Tom and Zeev, as you know, the Institute for Effective Professional Selling spends a lot of time with major OEMs, their ecosystems, and their channels. We keep hearing that VARs, value-added resellers, and solution providers are struggling for a number of reasons. Many buyers are asking what value the channel and value-added resellers actually bring to the equation. So let’s talk about the role that AI and sales best practices can play here. How can AI help in the ecosystem?
Tom, you and I have talked about this many times. You are a frequent speaker at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling’s Sales Stage Live programs, which we regularly host in a hybrid format. We see people in the channel, and it is getting tougher for a number of reasons.
Tom Snyder: This is a phenomenon that happens periodically in sales. Sales as a profession tends to drift a step or two behind the expectations of its customer base. This is a vivid example of that. When customers turn to value-added resellers and ask, ‘Where is the value added?’ you are seeing a symptom of a larger disease: being out of step.
The irony is that these VARs have the expertise, insight, and experience to create value for decision-makers. The key is creating that value prior to the sale. The current demand from customers across B2B and B2G is, ‘Help me make a better decision. Help me understand my own world better through your sales process, and I will award you my business.’
Tom Snyder: It is about how you sell, not just what you sell. Too many VARs are still trapped in the mindset of saying, ‘Look at this fantastic technology. Isn’t it incredible? Don’t you want some? We’ll implement it for you.’ There is a tactical path to creating value before you sell anything. It is not just an aspiration. There are very specific skills and behaviors involved. Harness that, and you have half of the equation. The other half of the equation, the piece that allows you to truly dominate the marketplace, lies in what Zeev is about to explain.
Zeev, give the audience a sense of how AI can accelerate what I just described.
Zeev Wexler: Beautiful. Resellers and VARs are often focusing too much on reselling and not enough on adding value. You now have tools that can research your market, your prospects, their competitors, and what is happening around them in moments. This is information that many salespeople often do not have the time, knowledge, or ability to gather on their own.
Now you can come to prospects fully equipped with the information they need, not just to buy your product, but to see you as someone who brings value. You want to become someone they can call when they have an issue and ask, ‘What do you think about this?’ Instead of spending a week researching, you can use an AI tool, combined with your own knowledge and expertise, to equip yourself with the right information.
I think many VARs are focusing on reselling and forgetting that their first job is to add value. If you create a plan for how you are going to bring value to your prospects and clients, and then build an AI system around that knowledge and process, AI can do the heavy lifting. It can give you the information you need so you are truly adding value rather than simply pushing product.
Sometimes the product is needed, but before the product is needed, you have to show your value. Value comes before the sale, as Tom said. The work that used to take two weeks can now take six minutes, and the quality is not lower. It is probably higher if you train the AI correctly. Every salesperson needs to build a system that helps them provide value. It is easier today than it has ever been in history.
Tom Snyder: You are the wizard of truth when it comes to the future of sales. Zeev and I have noticed that early adopters in this area are dominating their marketplaces. If you do not move quickly, you may not be in business, because that is the power of marrying best practice with AI.
Zeev, I would love for you to comment on the difference between having a corporate AI initiative for sales and simply relying on tools like Salesforce AI or outreach AI. It feels like everyone in the world now has some kind of AI tool. Can you speak to that?
Zeev Wexler: Absolutely. When you bring an artificial intelligence system into your business, stop thinking about it as SaaS, technology, or software. Think about it as bringing an entity into your business. That entity needs to be trained, educated, and tested.
The problem with most organizations is that they keep buying tools. They buy one tool, then another, and the tech stack keeps growing. Soon they are spending thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on tools. What many people do not realize is that behind the scenes, many of these tools use similar or even the same models.
A tool may give you a shortcut, but that shortcut does not necessarily include your knowledge, your expertise, your company’s experience, or your special sauce. Because of that, the tool may not do enough for you. Instead of simply bringing in tools, you need to bring in an entity, then educate that entity in what makes your VAR unique. How are you bringing value? How are you successfully selling? Then you grow that entity.
AI is not a magic wand. It will not come in and solve everything automatically. AI empowers what is already working for you. If something was not working before, AI is not going to fix it on its own. But whatever was working before can be strengthened with experience and knowledge to actually help you.
Companies that keep buying tools left and right, and then stop using them because they do not work, are missing the point. It is not about the tool, and it is not just about the technology. It is about bringing in an entity, training it, educating it, testing it, and then making sure your team knows exactly how to use it.
I think we talked about workflow on the last show. That tool, or entity, needs to be educated in your workflow, what your company does best, and how your company creates value for its clients. Do not just look at tools. Look at the entity you are bringing into the organization, educate it, and keep the knowledge inside your organization. In the future, many of these tools will go away. I would even say 90% of them. Do not rely on things that may disappear. Build the knowledge within your organization.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Tom and Zeev. Ecosystems and channels are under pressure right now as customers look for easier ways to get access. It is no longer just about transactions. It needs to be about helping your customers figure out the right solutions, and there are many ways to use AI to do that.
If you are looking for solutions that can help you use AI to improve your selling process, improve the ability of your selling professionals, and strengthen your channel, reach out to me, Fred Diamond, Tom Snyder, or Zeev Wexler for more information about how we can help solve those problems.
My name is Fred Diamond, and this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.