This is an episode of the “AI and Selling Effectiveness Podcast.” Every other week, the IEPS posts a new show with IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace partner Zeev Wexler from Viacry.
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Today’s show featured more ideas on how organizations should be using AI. Zeev and Fred brought on Cvent VP of Sales Operations and Enablement Franci Hirsch to discuss how they are leading the way in AI for selling effectiveness application.
Find Franci on LinkedIn.
FRANCI’S TIP: “Before you invest in tools or declare that AI will transform your work, take time to educate yourself. Even a few foundational courses can give leaders the knowledge and confidence to inspire their teams to act.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We’re going to be bringing on our good friend, Franci Hirsch. She’s the VP for sales operations and enablement at Cvent. Franci, we’ve done a lot of shows in the past with Cvent sales leaders such as Brian Ludwig, Darrell Gehrt. Zeev, I’m excited. Franci’s company, Cvent, was one of the first recipients of the Institute for Effective Professional Selling’s AI for Sales Effectiveness Award. We gave that out earlier in May at our 15th annual award event. They’re doing some great things with AI.
Zeev Wexler: They are, and this was something that surprised both of us. We got so many applications and we went through them and we could not give awards because they were not a good practice of how to use AI in sales. Cvent was one of the two only companies. We wanted to give three, four, maybe five awards. We ended up giving two. One of them was for you, Franci, because you guy really put an effort and there’s a plan behind it. We were amazed on how many companies did not do that. We wanted to bring you on to really share on how you do this for Cvent and maybe share so other companies can learn about what you need to do. We still know that everything is a work in progress, and you guys are getting better day by day, but we cannot wait to hear about how you guys implemented AI in sales.
Franci Hirsch: I’m excited to be able to talk about some of the best practices, if you could even call them best practices. AI is moving really fast right now, so they’re best practices today at Cvent in terms of how we’re using AI.
Fred Diamond: Why don’t you give us a brief introduction. Tell us who you are. For people who don’t know about Cvent, just give a little intro to Cvent. Then let’s get started talking about some of the things that you’ve already done to receive the award. Then we’ll get into some details about how you’re managing everything organizationally, and then some advice for people watching the show.
Franci Hirsch: I’m the head of sales operations and enablement at Cvent. Cvent is a software company specializing in event management and hospitality technology. We have literally 25,000 plus clients worldwide. We power some of the largest events in the world. We work with some of the largest hotel chains in the world. Everything from a 10,000-person conference to a 200-person event, to the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. We do everything in between. I have personally done pretty much anything you can do in sales, and I think that’s why I have the job I do, which is focusing on operations and enablement, so training, revenue operations, sales planning, and then sales systems, which is why I’m here today.
AI for us has been, it’s not really a journey because we’re still on it, but we have had to move really, really fast. Where we were when you think a year and a half ago to where we are now is completely different. AI before was something that we talked about. I personally didn’t really understand it. All I knew of it was ChatGPT. Then we just started hearing it from vendors. They were going to be using AI. I had to do a fair amount of research on my own, but then I went to a lot of our vendors, which I’m sure we’ll talk about, to find out what are they thinking, what are they doing? That’s how I became educated as an executive. I learned from what’s in the field so that we could implement it.
AI at Cvent means a lot right now. Certainly, there’s the product side of what we do, which is to help our customers take advantage of it. But then internally at sales, it’s mostly productivity-related resources. How do you move faster? How do you make it easier? How do you sell more? What are all the things that we can do to integrate into people’s workflows as well as help them have better conversations with customers. We’ve been focused on that. Then we’re also focused, which is more of the generative AI piece, we’re really trying to focus more on the agentic AI piece as well. That’s something that’s even new even in the last couple of months that we’re trying to stay ahead of. It’s all of those pieces working both with our vendors as well as internally to develop tools so that way we can make people more efficient.
Fred Diamond: Zeev, Franci just talked about the agentic side of AI. Give us a little bit of a perspective on what that means. Then, Franci, I want to ask about some of the specific tools that you’ve implemented that were part of your winning our first award.
Zeev Wexler: Let’s start with agentic. What is agentic versus the things that we know? Agentic AI is basically when we give an AI rules, guidance, but also permissions to go do things for us. It’s not like a chatbot that we tell it, “Hey, what is this?” and the chatbot responds to us. It’s basically an entity, an agent, agentic AI is just a fancy word for agent. It’s an agent that we send to do our bidding based on a very strict guideline. Agents of AI, agentic AI, has so much room in sales, marketing, and so much else, and it’s basically an entity that goes out there and does things for us.
Now, Franci, I loved what you said about the journey that is still going. AI is moving so fast, so fast, and we got to teach ourselves, we got to ask our vendors, how have you been able to manage it? How have you been educating your team to keep up with everything?
Franci Hirsch: We’ve been asked, boards ask CEOs, CEOs ask executives, we ask our customers, we ask our employees. Everybody’s trying to figure out what we’re all doing. I think Cvent has tried to do a good job helping us go fast, but also not encouraging us to duplicate effort. We have an AI council at Cvent that looks to see what people are doing. Most of it is very encouraging. It’s trying to encourage people, give people ideas of paths they can go down.
I think while we don’t want to duplicate efforts, we also want to move fast. We want to try things fast. I think our organization has told our executive team, move fast, fail fast, figure it out because this is an ever-evolving field. I appreciate that type of flexibility and I encourage companies to offer that to their executives and their employees, because it’s really important as we’ve tried to figure out what works for us. I think that’s one thing.
The second piece, as I mentioned before, is we talk to every single one of our vendors that we work with, whether it’s Salesloft, ZoomInfo, Microsoft, everybody, to find out what are they doing, what are they using. We want to learn from them. Then what are they incorporating in their products?
Fred mentioned it before, Salesloft, they have email writers. We have ways through Glean that we use to create presentations. There are so many different things that are customer-facing that we’ve allowed our salespeople to do, but it’s still a work in progress. We are still trying to figure it out. Normally, we try to be very strategic about saying, “Hey, we’re going to evaluate things in a certain order. We’re going to look at things based off of our roadmap.” When it comes to our systems roadmap, it is, “Let’s try and figure it out. Let’s just make sure we’re gathering the information.” I think that’s how you scale this, which is, it can’t be the wild, wild west. You can’t just let everybody do everything all the time. You want people to try things out, but you’ve got to be able to understand and capture that information. I actually have somebody on my systems team now that is 100% dedicated to AI, 100%. That’s a new change because I realize unless it’s someone’s job full-time, it’s just always going to be a piece of what they do. I think those are some of the big things that we focus on and why we’ve hopefully been able to be recognized for this. Hopefully we’ll be recognized in the future for bringing an AI leader.
Fred Diamond: I’m sure you will. As we’re talking about this, the IEPS has a couple designations. We have our Premier Women in Sales Employer and we have our Premier Sales Employer, of which Cvent has been recognized every time. Of course, our new 2025 list is going to be published later on this fall. I’m sure Cvent will be on both lists. The reason I’m bringing that up is, premier organizations do not just implement tools, because it’s very easy to buy tools and throw them in. I’m just curious what type of feedback you get from the ground up. You gave a great answer before where you talked about the board goes to the CEO and the CEO goes to the exec team and the exec team from leadership. As sales leaders, we invest in tools and we want our people to use them, and we invest in the tools that we think are going to be most valuable. I’m just curious, what has been the ground-up response to the new direction to utilize these AI-related tools?
Franci Hirsch: The good thing is that in addition to sales operations, I also manage all sales training. We have certain pieces that no matter what we train on, there are red threads that have to be taken through everything. One of those, it’s always been systems. It’s always been, if we’re teaching on prospecting, what are the tools that can help people prospect? If we’re teaching on giving presentations, what are the tools that we have that can help enable that, that are hopefully embedded in workflows. It’s no different with AI. Everything we do now, there’s an AI current that runs through it. What are the tools that they can use to make them go faster? It’s not even something extra, it’s embedding it in their workflow.
Now, the feedback from the sales force is largely positive. People like it. Let me give you an example. We rolled out ZoomInfo Copilot about eight or nine months ago, and it has been met with rave reviews. I highly, highly recommend it as a tool. It takes all the different data sources that we have, including call transcripts and call summaries, and it creates these account plans that are aligned with selling methodologies, that are aligned with the research that we want them to do. Within a click of a button, call plans are created telling you what their next best sale is, everything that you would need as a salesperson. I think the idea is you’re going to do this work on your own, we’re going to help you do it, we’re going to get you 80% of the way there because AI still needs to be tested. It’s not a human, it’s not perfect, it needs to be tested, but we’ve done a lot of the legwork, the stuff that you don’t want to do. Now you can apply that lens that we hired you for, that creative seller lens, the challenger, and apply it to that. I think that’s been a really big success story.
Again, the feedback is great. Same with some of the email writers that we’ve created for people through little chatbots and things like that where people can, instead of having to write first-hit emails or prospecting emails, they take the prompts that we’ve given them, and within a click of the button, they’ve got their communications ready to go. You take that, couple it with cadence tools like Salesloft, you’ve got prospecting tools through ZoomInfo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it’s one workflow for them to work through, which has been really well received.
Zeev Wexler: This is great and I love it, but what have been more of the challenging things? Have you gotten anything that was like, “Hey, I don’t know about this,” or any people that were, “I’m not refusing, but challenged with using these tools?” Can you tell us a little bit about the other side as well? I love hearing that it’s mostly positive.
Franci Hirsch: It hasn’t been perfect all the time. We’ve had some challenges. I think when we first started creating tools to help people write emails and conduct outreach, a lot of the feedback we got was, “This isn’t written by a human. This is written by a bot. This doesn’t sound like me.” There’s a lot of that and we’ve had to actually work with AI pieces of our platform to figure that out, and that is still a work in progress. There are a lot of people that don’t like using it for that. But I think when you’re trying to achieve scale on a lot of things, there are use cases. We’re an events company. We invite people to events. Well, a lot of event invites don’t need to be written in perfect, perfect personal language. You can take most of it, genericize most of it, and then add a couple lines in that that are your own. We’re figuring out what the use cases are.
I think proposals are another one. We’re still trying to figure out how to create proposals and automate the use of proposals through AI. One of the biggest challenges that we face, and I think any organization, sales or otherwise, in order to use AI well, you have to have a really, really solid data source. I mentioned training before. Well, this is where the operations team comes in. Everything’s got to be documented. The data sources have to be very, very smooth, easy to understand. Because if you don’t have a good underlying data source, then the AI is not going to tell you to do the right thing. I think that’s the other part that we’re still spending a lot of time on, and we’ve invested even more in documentation and more ways to codify what it is we do and what’s best practice at Cvent. That way our AI is giving that back to us in the right format.
Fred Diamond: I’m just curious, a little bit off topic. We’re a customer of Cvent. We love using the software. Matter of fact, we have a couple events coming up. I was just looking at the Cvent app this morning. It’s highly critical, a lot of events. They’re a big part of a company’s year for not-for-profits, there are the annual big thing, so there’s a lot of risk in getting it right. I’m just curious, and you may not know the answer, are your customers coming to you looking for more AI solutions in your tool? Has that been overwhelming? As I’m asking you the question, I realize that’s taking away a little bit from sales, but I’m just curious if you have any access to that.
Franci Hirsch: I do. They’re not as separate as you think. Our customers have events as part of their engagement, so do we, we use it for leads. These are important parts of the sales process on both sides, and we’re doing a lot. It was certainly a huge part of our product rollout at our recent user conference, Cvent CONNECT. We are working on a lot right now through CventIQ. What that is for us is taking the things that make Cvent so great, our industry knowledge, our ability to personalize, taking all of those things and then adding AI on top of it. What does that mean?
That means attendee-facing chatbots that you can use, predictive modeling for registration and attendance. To be able to give people insight into, “Hey, this is what these types of events we think will generate for you in terms of attendance, and here’s what’s going to happen if you expand them here, expand them there.” There’s certainly AI email intelligence for events, just writing the emails for you to make it go faster so planners don’t have to keep doing this. Personalized attendee recommendations.
I’ve got probably 20 or 30 that I can go through, but it’s all aimed at a few things. One is helping you generate more people to come to your event and then helping your event, the experience itself to go well. For example, you’ve got an event coming up. We can generate a session-level summaries. AI can generate those to people. You can immediately post them on the website and you don’t have to do really any extra work. It’s exciting, and that’s only on the event side. That hasn’t even gone to the hotel side and what we’re doing on planner search and venue search and all of that.
We’re getting a lot of questions right now, but I’m going to go back to what I said before, we go to our vendors to find out what they’re doing so we can take best practices and then we can share. That’s what customers are coming to us for. They want to find out what are the best practices from an industry leader and the same thing. It’s just like the AI council. It is a lot of sharing of information fast and getting ideas fast and moving fast.
Zeev Wexler: I love that. I got three major things. The AI council is number one, and Fred and I have preached that to every company, to have an AI council. I heard from you that the board leadership, CEO, is pushing you guys to move fast, not be afraid of doing mistakes. I’ve heard as you are part of the training, that you bring in AI into the training. Can you give a little bit more of advice, for both leadership or even the people that are doing the work, how to adapt and adopt AI better based on all the amazing things you guys have done in Cvent?
Franci Hirsch: People will use something if it makes their life easier. It’s facts. Even people who are resistant to change, resistant to technology, they will do it. I think showing people how it can be done, integrating things into their workflow, I often say on my systems team, workflow is the North Star. That is a North Star. Don’t give somebody something else to do. Make it part of what they do day to day. I think that’s the piece. I think also educating people on what AI is.
One thing I’m really proud of at Cvent is we have developed a really, really strong AI training curriculum. Again, it’s hard to train on something that keeps changing, but we started at the foundational level across all Cventors, which is what is AI, so that people understand what is a neural link. All those things that most people don’t understand, just the basics. Then training on our CventIQ and our AI products, the products that I just described, and then the sales pitch, which is how do you then make it come alive to customers and the product pieces.
We have a five-step training program that we’ve put together from the foundational level at Cvent down to the sales rep. I think when you do that, the thread that goes through everything, you’re going to get the adoption that you want. It also encourages leaders to make sure that they’re getting educated and making the change that they need, because I think that’s really where it comes from.
Fred Diamond: Franci, before I ask you for your final thought, your final action step, Zeev, is there anything else that you want to say? I just want to remind people too, the last show that we did, we talked about our EVAL program, the Capgemini EVAL program that’s available from the IEPS and Viacry. Basically, Viacry consultants will work with your organizations, do a complete audit of your sales and AI tools, strategy, implementation, existence, etc.. Zeev, do you want to give us a final thought on that and something to wrap up what Franci just said before we ask her for her final action step?
Zeev Wexler: I just love what you guys do. I love that you guys have both leadership and the ground level involved in this. Guys, AI is a moving train and it’s moving fast, but you don’t need to be afraid. You must jump on the train because you cannot stay in the station. Yes, it’s moving. I love that you guys are doing everything with training. I think education is step one, and hearing that you guys have what I call an AI governance board and you have a different name for it, it’s amazing. You got to have smart people guiding where the train is moving forward. The fact that your6 leadership and you guys push, don’t be afraid, mistakes will happen, and use your own training sandbox is amazing. I think Agentic AI is going to do so much for Cvent, and I see you guys using it so much already.
It’s beautiful to see, and I think you guys are a beacon for other companies to jump in. AI is not going anywhere. AI is going to change everything. The only way to do it is start, the only way to do it is basically play. What we recommend to everybody, our clients, is you got to try it. If you don’t try it, you don’t know what it is. You got to educate and you got to give people the license to try it and make mistakes, because if not, you’re just not going to grow. But I salute you, Franci and Cvent. I think you guys are doing all the right moves, and I know the journey’s long and I love your leadership and what you guys are doing. It’s just amazing. You’re a beacon to show other companies what they need to do. The maturity level of AI in our market is about 1% and it’s so awesome to see companies like you show the way.
Fred Diamond: Franci Hirsch, thank you so much for being on the Sales Game Changers Podcast. You’ve given us a lot of great ideas, a lot of things that sales leaders can think about implementing. Give us one specific action step that you recommend people do after listening to today’s show or reading today’s transcript.
Franci Hirsch: Before you start investing in tools, before you start saying AI is going to change the way you do work, educate yourself. I took the step forward when I just took a couple of classes on LinkedIn Learning that my company offered for free on AI for leaders, because I really felt uneducated compared to a lot of the people that were coming out of college who had just been using this for a while. Think like social media back in 2009. I didn’t really know this, but then everybody knew it right away. Now, hopefully this will be more impactful than social media in a positive way, but I think that’s important, which is take the step. It doesn’t take much, but really understand the foundational piece of it. I think leaders especially will find themselves a lot more motivated to inspire their teams to act. I think that would be my one piece of advice.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great bit of advice, is just dive in. Like Zeev and I talked about, and Zeev and I talk about this on the AI for Selling Effectiveness Podcast, is it’s like a language. You need to get deep. Any type of athletic thing that you’re going to be doing, you just got to do. The more you do, the more you learn and then the more you can figure out ways to apply it to help your business grow.
Once again, I want to thank Zeev Wexler from Viacry. I also want to thank Franci Hirsch, the VP of sales operations and enablement at Cvent. My name is Fred Diamond and this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo