This is the premiere episode of the new “AI and Selling Effectiveness Podcast.” Every other Monday, the IEPS will post a new show with Selling Essentials Marketplace partner Zeev Wexler from Viacry.
The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here.
FeedSpot named the Sales Game Changers Podcast at a top 20 Sales Podcast and top 8 Sales Leadership Podcast!
Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!
Purchase Fred Diamond’s best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now!
Today’s show was the premiere episode with Expert in Digital Marketing, Blockchain & AI for Strategic Business & Revenue Growth Zeev Wexler, President of Viacry.
Find Zeev on LinkedIn.
ZEEV’S TIP: “Mediocre is free. Every off-the-shelf tool by design is mediocre at best. If you don’t have a plan, you’re not going anywhere.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: This is the first episode of a new sub-brand of the Sales Game Changers podcast. Zeev, I’m excited. You and I are starting a new show. It’s called the AI and Selling Effectiveness Podcast. By the way, my partner in this is Zeev Wexler with Viacry. Zeev, good to see you. I’m excited for this. You’re killing it as it relates to AI and sales. I’ve known you for a long time, but I’ve been following your journey about what you’re doing with Viacry. You’re out there speaking all over the place. Every time I talk to you, you’re in California, New York, Virginia, Washington D.C., Maryland, Florida… You’re just on the leading edge of this.
One thing that you and I talked about is not everybody is killing it. As a matter of fact, we were hoping to give out five awards at the IEPS Sales Excellence Awards. We wound up giving up two because we didn’t want to give out an award just to give out an award, and a lot of companies just weren’t cutting it.
Zeev, good to see you. We’re going to be talking about some offerings that we’re making available to people to help them get better utilizing AI in the B2B professional selling process. Introduce the audience, for people who don’t know you, tell us what Viacry does. Tell us a little bit about where you are right now.
Zeev Wexler: Everybody, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m Zeev Wexler. Me and Fred go back many years, and I’m a great fan of what Fred does for the selling community. I’m a proclaimed salesperson. I love sales, but I’ve been in technology for my entire life. In the past 6 years, I’ve been deep into AI. I’ve been in open AI before it was cool to be in AI, before Chat GPT came into the scene. I was trying to sell AI when people were actually looking at me funny, but ladies and gentlemen, AI is the biggest technological change we’ve ever seen.
If I would tell you about the internet a few years before the internet, if I would tell you about the smartphone before everybody had one, I’m sure you would pivot a little bit and do things differently. AI is like the internet times the smartphone. Everything is going to change with AI. We’re going to talk about ‘to do or not to do’, but one thing I want to bring out there, AI is not Chat GPT. A lot of us use Chat GPT, which is great, I love Chat GPT, I use it myself all the time, but that is not AI.
What we do at Viacry is we help companies get a roadmap of where they are today to where they should be with AI. I come from the school that if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably not going to get there. Tools are great. Shiny objects are awesome, but I will trust the great operator with a plan than somebody who has no idea what he’s doing with the best technology in the world. I’ve been developing AI tools for about six years. I’ve spent a lot of time and money developing AI tools for solutions I thought people needed. Some of the biggest ones are in sales.
What I understood is if an organization doesn’t have a roadmap, no tool is going to help. It’s actually opening up to the Wild, Wild West. I want to tell everybody out there: you have a salesforce, they’re using Chat GPT. They’re using sometimes the Claudes or the Geminis, the tools that are out there. Those tools don’t work for you and your company. Those tools work for those companies. Your people are putting sensitive information into those tools. One of the things my salespeople have been using with Chat GPT is they’ve been searching the name of your company, and they’re getting everything you’re putting into Chat GPT.
So, we need a plan, ladies and gentlemen. Fred and I are here to help you get a plan. Selling is amazing and important. We all move by sales. If it’s not sold, nothing moves. AI is a huge part of it, but it needs to be strategic and not tactical.
Fred Diamond: I like the way you said, “The Wild West.” A lot of people do equate AI with a sales tool. “Wow, I use Chat GPT, that means I’m an expert now. I’m getting good at prompts. Someone just certified me.” Things along that way. Let’s talk about the state of AI in selling effectiveness. I mentioned we had the IEPS Award Event. We had our first AI for Sales Excellence Awards. We got a bunch of nominations but when we submitted the nominations to the judging, it was like, “There isn’t a whole lot there.” There wasn’t a whole lot of thoughtful corporate direction. You mentioned Wild West. What’s the state of AI in selling effectiveness?
Zeev Wexler: In selling effectiveness, I see three levels. Almost all of us, up to like 95% are in level one. Level one is the Wild West. Level one is every salesperson using any tool they think, put some stuff into it, get things back, and now, they’re using AI for selling effectiveness. That is better than nothing, I guess, or maybe not sometimes. But it’s level one. It’s 95%. Even the big companies out there, even the companies that produce AI themselves, it didn’t go down to the selling teams. Level one is where 95% are, and that’s just using all kinds of things off the shelf.
I’m going to tell you something and I think I mentioned this to you before in a private conversation. In the selling world today, mediocre is free. In the business world today, mediocre is free. It’s never been like that before. Fred, you and I have been in business for a long time, but today, mediocre is free and you do not want to be mediocre. Every off-the-shelf tool by design is mediocre at best. That is level one. Off-the-shelf tools. Name it whatever you want. Some of them are great, some of them are less, but it’s complete tactics with no strategy in the Wild, Wild West.
What I want to tell people is you don’t understand the risk of running the Wild West within your selling teams, within your selling departments. It is insane to put this type of information into these third-party tools and expect good stuff to come of it. These third-party tools are here for our data. They’re good companies, but their model is to take our data. If you use Chat GPT for everything, I’m sorry, but you’re shooting yourself in the leg.
Then comes level two. Level two is where maybe 4% to 5% of the companies are at. That is strategic customization of data because it all starts with data. If you don’t have your data set up, then you’re not working it right. Some customization and then utilization of these third-party tools but with an agreement to control the data, with some kind of protection and guard lines over it. It’s a knowledge base that you built, but you built it within a different cloud, a different company. Supposedly, it’s protected, but we all know that in cyber and technology nothing is fully protected. But again, level two is great. The companies that are doing level two right now are moving forward. Those were some of the companies that we gave awards to, because they actually customized and created their own knowledge bases. That’s level two.
Level three is the holy grail. Very few companies are on there. That means you basically put the artificial intelligence within your tech stack. It sounds very complicated. To us, it’s like, “Oh, my God. How do we do that?” It’s not that complicated. There are so many incredible AIs that are open source. We can take the code. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes engineers, but then we can bring those things within our tech stacks, within our systems, sometimes our servers, sometimes our protected clouds. However we deal with data on a usual basis. Then we have our own AI that is not a software, but almost like an employee. It’s an employee. It’s our employee. It’s loyal to us. It knows our history, our data, our leadership, our values, and it has a loop that gets better. It learns us all the time.
We talked about Chat GPT, but LLMs in general are this much of the world of AI. Large Language Models are basically a big set of data that then you ask the database what to do. Now, most of us use AI salespeople to write emails, or to answer comments on LinkedIn, and all that stuff, which is great. I’m not saying it’s not a good thing. The problem is when you do it on level one, you lose all authenticity. How many times do you see stuff on LinkedIn today or on emails or on messages that you are clear that this is not a human who wrote this? “There’s no way I’m reading this, or definitely not answering.”
Fred Diamond: One of the challenges right now is if you think about the customer, the customer has access to these tools. Even before Chat GPT, they could go to the internet and find everything they need to know about your company. We’ve heard stats like the customer is 57% down the road, maybe even 70% down the road with finding your features, your specs, how you compare against the competition, even your direction. When I was at Apple, Compaq, and companies like that, we would present to a customer over two days our product direction. Now, the customer can go into any of the AI LLM tools and type in, “What is Apple Computer’s product strategy?” and within five, ten seconds, it’s going to pop out.
Selling professionals, the ones who are part of the IEPS, they know that they need to bring more value than ever before to the customer. A small part of it is creating a really good email, maybe even a really good LinkedIn post, but that’s marketing. As part of this getting better, can companies use AI to help their sales professionals provide more value, not to the customers, but specific customers? If I’m calling on Hilton or American Express and a lot of sales professionals aren’t there yet, they’re not even close, is there a way to use AI to get better?
Zeev Wexler: There are incredible ways to use AI to get better. Again, it comes through closing data that’s really important to you. If you go and actually take that data that you find from your clients and it’s out there and actually close it in a data set, then ask that data, “This is what this company is trying to do, help me craft a sales proposal that will answer their pains,” it’s actually making life so much easier for us. Everybody that’s put stuff on not just Google but Chat GPT, now we can get to that. They’re putting their pains on there. Use that to solve their pain. Just be smart about it. First of all, it comes with collecting the right data. Then it comes to closing it. Then having your own model tell you, “This is their pain. This is what they’re putting out there.” What can I do as a selling professional to solve their problem? How can I bring an offering that matches what they’re trying to solve? We’ve never had that before, Fred.
Fred Diamond: Without even asking the silly question, “Tell me your pain,” which is such a trite, unnecessary… Because customers don’t want to tell you their pain. They want you to come to them with solutions because they also know that things are out there and AI is the perfect technology to figure that out. Then you as a sales professional can bring value. One of the other things that we’re very excited about as part of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, IEPS, is our Selling Essentials Marketplace. A big part of the IES, and now the IEPS, historically, we know all the sales tools. We know all the providers. We know the great speakers. We know the great service providers. We know the great training companies, et cetera.
Selling organizations have come to us over the years looking for best-of-breed solutions so that they didn’t have to do a dog-and-pony or go put out their own proposals to find a speaker, a training company, or the right partner. I’m excited to say that Viacry is an IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace Partner in the AI and Sales Excellence category. We’ve already had companies come to us looking for AI solutions. We’ve been bringing you to them to solve their problems. One of the exciting things besides general consulting, et cetera, is an offering that we’re calling the EVAL offering. Talk about that a little bit. What can companies get when they come to the IEPS? What is the EVAL program going to give them?
Zeev Wexler: You have such incredible clients who trust you and come to you for all their professional selling and effective needs. We basically asked them, “What do you want?” and they told us, “We don’t know.” Then you and I, together with Viacry, came up with a solution. We need a game plan for how we make effective selling with AI. Throughout your amazing organization and amazing clients, we started giving these EVALs. We go into the company, we go into the sales department, and we figure out what they need to do. Where are the risks? Where are the benefits? Where can time be saved? Where can more opportunities of revenue be uncovered?
In addition to that, where can we take the data of what they’re doing and tell them scientifically where they should spend their time? Salespeople, and I’m a proud salesperson, sometimes just like to have meetings and spend time with people who want to spend time with them. The question is, is it driving the right revenue? We’re building a map. We’re coming into companies and we’re telling them, “For the next 12 to 24 months, you need to do A, B, C, and then D to maximize the efficiency of selling through AI.” If you don’t have a plan, my friend, you’re not going anywhere. We’re giving a plan and then whatever tool is necessary, we either use them or build them for those companies.
The goal is to elevate into level three. Of course, you can’t jump from zero to three. One, we’re skipping, but two to three. But that’s where the organization is so important, helping guide the light. It’s the Wild West. Nobody knows what they’re doing and people don’t like to feel not smart.
Fred Diamond: Absolutely. I’m very excited. Again, Viacry is part of the IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace. We have an offering for companies out there who are looking to get to tier two, to tier three, and the reality is they’ve got to get there. Forget about macro-related issues, we’ll address them in a different place. Companies are challenged and selling professionals are challenged with bringing true value to the customer. The customer doesn’t need you if you’re not helping them get to where they need to go. Not just helping their customers, but helping their customers’ customers. It’s gotten challenging since the pandemic for a whole bunch of different reasons. AI is now available implementing it as a tier two, tier three process. It’s something that’s going to help you help your customers get value, which in turn is going to help your company drive the revenue that it needs that is part of the selling organization.
Zeev, one final thought you want to impart upon us? We’re going to be doing this podcast every other Monday. We’re bringing on guests if need be, but we’re going to be hitting some of these critical things that companies need to do to get to tier three and tier two. Give us a final thought here.
Zeev Wexler: Companies, sales departments, and salespeople. If you don’t get with AI, you’ll be left aside. You don’t want to become the people who people buy in spite of. You want to generate revenue. AI is not just for automating nonsense. AI is for reasoning. AI can process data better than any of us put together. There is a compute power behind what you’re doing right now. Every one of you has a scientist next to them, a mathematician next to them, but you’ve got to put it in the right frames. So, I’m challenging every sales department, sales leader, and salesperson out there. Understand that AI is going to take over. It’s not going to take over your job, but somebody else who knows how to use it will take your clients. I’m not trying to scare anybody, but these two quarters coming up are the quarters to adapt to an AI strategy. If you don’t do it, I don’t know what the future holds for you.
Fred Diamond: That’s a good way to summarize it. Zeev, I’m excited. We’ve got great things coming up. I want to thank everybody for listening to today’s Sales Game Changers podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo