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Today’s show featured an interview with General Assembly leaders Jourdan Hathaway, Chief Business Officer, and Gretchen Jacobi, Chief Revenue Officer. General Assembly was a recipient of the first ever “AI for Sales Excellence Awards,” which were presented at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling on May 1.
Find Jourdan on LinkedIn. Find Gretchen on LinkedIn.
GRETCHEN’S TIP: “Start somewhere. Start small and build from there. Audit your week. Pick something that feels lowest risk to you… and start integrating AI. Just start now.”
JOURDAN’S TIP: “If the early bird gets the worm, the early AI adopter gets the sale.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m excited today. We have Zeev Wexler from Viacry. We have Jourdan and Gretchen from General Assembly. Zeev, it’s great to see you. Now, people have seen you on the Sales Game Changers Podcast in the past. You may recall you were one of my first guests back in 2017, episode number 4 or 40, whatever it was. I had these devices that I really didn’t know how to use and scratched up your table, but you gave us a great show, and you’ve been on a couple of times since then. Thanks for sponsoring the inaugural IEPS AI for Sales Excellence Award. Tell us a little bit about Viacry and tell us your involvement with helping companies utilize AI for sales excellence.
Zeev Wexler: Absolutely. But before that, Fred, thank you for doing this. There’s so much in AI and there’s so much need for AI in sales. You putting this out, putting this kind of recognition for companies, that we all need to use AI better. First of all, thank you. It was a no-brainer to sponsor this because this is exactly what we are preaching to our clients or the people who care. AI maturity is almost nonexistent, but it’s all coming there, and we have levels that we talk about with AI. I want to thank you for putting this on the map. Everybody needs to use this, and I love companies like General Assembly that are leading the way. They’re actually taking the torch and they’re like, “All right, this is where we need to go.” Inspirational leaders like Jourdan and Gretchen, this is so amazing to give credit for companies that actually use AI.
You asked me what Viacry does. Viacry is a bridge between the technology we have today and AI in the future. AI is changing everything. In sales and marketing, and in many other fields, we’re going to focus on sales today, but if you are not getting into AI in 2025, you’re actually being left behind. This is the threshold of where we need to jump on AI. Now, AI is not going to take your job, but another company that uses AI will take your clients. What I’m here to say is, everybody needs to understand AI. Now. It’s not jumping on the bandwagon, Fred. It’s not, “Let’s put a .ai on the end of our name, and that’s our AI involvement.” It’s actually understanding how this technology can make you grow. We help companies figure out how to close their data in a knowledge base that then they can use, not the entire internet, how to use AI to create more savings and a lot more revenue.
Fred Diamond: When we announced the award, we looked at the entire sales process. Where are some places in the sales process that companies should be looking at utilizing AI?
Zeev Wexler: Great question. I’ll take a step behind. Before you utilize AI in sales, you got to look at what worked prior to AI. Take a look at your salespeople, at your efforts, and look at what really worked before AI. What AI allows you to do now is duplicate your efforts. If you analyze that this 10% of your efforts were the most revenue driven, the thing that created the most revenue, that’s where you need to put your AI. On sales, AI can help you create a lot more opportunities. I’ll ask you this, Fred, you have even more experience than me in sales. What do you think salespeople are the worst at? What are their weak spots?
Fred Diamond: Well, it depends on how mature they are in their career. But prospecting is hard, researching, not just researching, but having vital information. One thing we talk a lot about at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling and on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is the fact that customers don’t really need you if you’re not bringing something of value. The value has to be two or three steps ahead of the customer.
Zeev Wexler: Absolutely. I could not agree with you more. We buy in spite of salespeople now if we want to get something and the salesperson is kind of in the way. The AI can take all of the prospecting. Let’s say you want your salesperson to prospect on email and LinkedIn and even voice calls. You can have an AI do 90% of that without losing their mood or changing what you’re doing or doing something different in the voice of the salesperson. Then follow up. What’s easier than follow up? You do a lot of follow up, Fred, and you’ve done sales for a better part of 40 years. Are your follow ups that different?
Fred Diamond: You got to follow up. You definitely need to touch customers, and that’s one of the main things. We used to tell a story where one of our mutual friends, Steve Richard, used to work for a company that did a lot of call recording and they had done millions of calls. I asked them what is the one thing they learned from analyzing a million calls, and they said that salespeople just didn’t follow up.
Once again, Zeev, thanks to Viacry for sponsoring this award. Now let’s get to the real application of this. We have Gretchen Jacobi and Jourdan Hathaway from General Assembly. Congratulations again on being one of the awards first recipients. Tell us a little bit about General Assembly. What each do you do for the company, what are your roles, and why you implemented the AI initiatives you did to get this recognition?
Gretchen Jacobi: I’m the Chief Revenue Officer of General Assembly, which means that I have the pleasure of leading our global sales organization, which engages with enterprise customers and government customers to drive workforce transformation with our portfolio of skills products. General Assembly is a talent and upskilling community. We help individuals and businesses acquire real skills that they need to succeed in this increasingly complex technological era. We’ve been around since 2011. We make tech-centric jobs accessible to more people and we help companies meet their demands for tech talent, which are ever-changing. We’re really excited to be building a center of excellence around AI skills training, and specifically the massive opportunity for AI skills training for sales professionals.
Fred Diamond: Jourdan, how about you? What do you do with General Assembly?
Jourdan Hathaway: Isn’t it great when sales and delivery and marketing are all in alignment? Really happy to partner here. I am the Chief Business Officer at General Assembly. I have marketing, admissions, delivery, product marketing and sales enablement, which is why I’m here, and customer success. All of those things have to be in concert with the sales team to make sure that we deliver on the promises.
Why we came to this AI initiative is, every year we produce this report, it’s called State of the Tech Talent. We’ve been doing it for quite some time, and this year it showed that 70% of business leaders are saying that they don’t have the skills to use AI safely and effectively. I can throw out a bunch of stats and everyone’s got these stats and we’re all kind of swimming in it, but as we talk to customers every single day, we see that 48% of employees are saying training is the most important factor for adoption.
This is true not just of customers in marketing departments or IT departments, or you name it department. This is true of sales as well. This is not only true of our customers who are telling us this every day, it is true for ourselves. It is very much true for ourselves. It was really important for us being a company that pioneers tech skills. It is our responsibility as a pioneer of closing the gap in tech skills to do what we always do, which is figure out quickly how to scale and close the tech skills gap. This is where we’re at today. I’m really excited about this product.
Fred Diamond: It’s very exciting. What’s even more exciting is you’re using it internally. You’re using it in your own sales organization. Gretchen, how many salespeople are impacted by this AI improvement and how has it helped them specifically? I’m just curious, how much of a priority was it for you as the sales leader to have the AI Academy being used internally?
Gretchen Jacobi: As you mentioned, we’ve already delivered this program. It’s been in incognito mode, but it’s really only been live publicly for just over a week, and we’ve already had hundreds of people take this program. But what really drew us to this opportunity is stepping back and looking at the bigger picture and really the entire addressable market of salespeople who need this product.
As we’ve already talked about a bit, but by leveraging AI, every salesperson on the planet has the opportunity to do three things. One is massively decrease the amount of time that they spend on non-revenue-generating activities, which is a huge portion of a salesperson’s time. Two is massively increase the amount of personalization and care that they can dedicate to prospecting and client engagement efforts. Three, ultimately increase their win rate, which is what we all want. I just want to take each of those in turn for a minute.
Non-revenue-generating tasks, those are literally the bane of every salesperson’s existence, CRM hygiene, creating internal decks for decision desk or pricing committee, submitting tickets for legal review, or presale solution support. All of this is important, but incredibly time consuming. With AI, we can now automate or streamline many of those tasks, which is freeing up hours each week for our salespeople to focus on what they do best, which is obviously selling, not submitting tickets.
Second, high quality client engagement and the relationship building that comes from that is what separates a good rep from a great rep. AI helps really scale that personal touch. Whether that’s through, as you mentioned, Fred, a smarter prospect research, or faster email personalization, or surfacing those super relevant insights about that buyer, about that account at the right moment, it’s not just about efficiency, it’s also about execution in your day-to-day and making it useful in your day-to-day. I think that’s the real unlock with AI.
Then third, obviously win rate, every salesperson is here to crush their quota. Every revenue leader is here to smash their goals. Our academy is designed with that in mind. It equips reps with the tools and the confidence that they need to apply AI in ways that drive their pipeline and that help them close deals. Yes, it was a massive opportunity for us as a team, for all salespeople everywhere. It’s a no-brainer because it unlocks that revenue growth for companies and sales leaders and salespeople want it because they can hit their number easier. It’s just a win-win.
Fred Diamond: Jourdan, take us through the AI Academy. There’s three solution levels that you submitted as part of the application that our committee was so impressed with. Give us briefly an understanding of solution one, solution two, and solution three, and how it helps sales professionals, like Gretchen was talking about, be more effective, achieve their revenue goals, et cetera.
Jourdan Hathaway: When we were thinking about the creation of the AI Academy, and by the way, where that came from, spending two decades alongside of sales, one thing I have learned over and over and over again is you better create something that actually solves a problem. You better create something that solves a real need, and do it in a way that provides the quickest speed to value as possible. As we were thinking about all these different fundamental ways that we could create courses, we said, okay, people are at different levels right now. We’re in this interesting maturity curve where some people have absolutely no AI literacy and are scared as heck to even entertain it. Then we have other people that are way on the other side creating entire digital workforce teams with Agentic AI. We said, okay, we got to meet people where they are and chunk it up into these individual components that make sense and meet people at these different levels.
Level one is this three hour, half day workshop. We call this AI Enabled, and it’s an AI enabled program specifically for sales professionals. One thing I want to back up and just say that was really, really important as we thought about the AI Academy is, instead of saying we’re going to teach on AI principles and AI theory and even AI tools and platforms, we said, we need to make this really concrete and applicable to very specific domains. We cannot and should not expect adoption to happen, unless we’re speaking the language of the end user. The context of this conversation is for sales professionals, because this was built for sales professionals in mind, taught by sales leaders and practitioners, for people who work in sales. Very, very specific.
This three-hour workshop, AI enabled sales professional, establishes these foundational AI concepts, includes automation, prompt engineering, AI powered email outreach. You learn how to use AI in workflows, improve engagement strategies, and start to think about how it can enhance efficiency. That’s your three-hour. Then you get into a couple clicks deeper.
Level two, this is a seven-hour workshop. It’s one day, and we call this AI Augmented. You go from AI enabled, now we’re going to get into AI augmented. This is where you’re going to start to look at AI-driven strategies for lead qualification, sales forecasting, workflow automation. You’re going to get into AI insights to refine your decision making, optimize your sales pipeline, integrating seamlessly into different sales processes. None of this is general. This is hands-on learning very specific to the sales professional taught by instructors who are innovating and using AI in this space in a really interesting and practical way.
Level three is going to be our most comprehensive, and this is a three-day accelerator, and we call this AI Superpowered, 21 hours. This is where you’re going to focus on more advanced AI applications, predictive sales forecasting. You’re going to get into deep CRM automation and different process automations and different ways of doing KPI tracking. All of this is going to touch on the different utilizations of tools, but meet each of the sales professionals where they are and their current baseline knowledge. That’s really applicable and drives home whatever the individual or enterprise organization’s goals are.
Fred Diamond: Gretchen, I’m curious. As a sales leader, what do you want from your sales professionals as it relates to AI? Do you want them to become experts where they can go do classes or whatever, or do you want them just to get better? One of the reasons why we changed our name to the Institute for Effective Professional Selling is we had spoken to hundreds of sales leaders and they constantly said, “I just need my people to be more effective.” Effective at prospecting, effective at communication, effective at this, et cetera. Where do you want your salespeople to be as it relates to AI?
Gretchen Jacobi: AI ultimately increases your effectiveness at every stage in your sales process. It’s going to touch every single stage, it’s just where do you want to start? Probably you want to start either at the thing that takes the most time for you, or the thing that is lowest risk for you to start with, so that you can start fast and build from there essentially. Just in terms of how prevalent this is, I can give you an example from earlier today where this would’ve applied, and we don’t currently have this in our workflows, but it’s an aha, “Okay, this is a use case. We should have this in our workflows now.”
We were doing a debrief after a conference that we attended. The sales team attended a conference. We talked about which leads we talked to, which ones had opportunities, who we’re going to follow up with. We’re splitting the follow ups between our SDR team and our sales team, and how personalized is it going to be? Right now, we’re just using basically our gut feeling about which leads to get which priority. Just who we connected with the most, but what if we could upload our notes from those conversations plus the information about the account and the persona, and AI could actually spit out, “This one that you thought was 11th on your list should actually be 2nd on your list.” Still humans in the loop with AI, we’re still at the point where there’s humans in the loop, but you’re like, “That’s an insight that I would never have seen without AI connecting the dots between all of these different platforms and pieces of data.”
That’s from just a conference, not to mention sales teams that are getting hundreds of leads a day potentially where they’re going to have to do the lead scoring and criteria around. But that’s an example where an AD, for us, we call them account directors, or a sales rep is making that judgment call that could be more effective, to your point. It’s not just efficiency, it’s effectiveness with AI inserted into it. Once I get off this podcast, I’m going to go see to how we can do that with our conference follow up leads.
Fred Diamond: Yeah, always getting those leads and then action upon them, not just the follow up. Zeev, what do you think? Pretty impressive, huh?
Zeev Wexler: Super impressive. I love it. There’s another aspect of this. I’m a salesperson. You know this, Fred. Salespeople hate dealing with CRMs. They just are not good with it. They hate it. They do everything in their power to just dismiss it. If you’re not good at something and you don’t like it and there’s a better way to make it cheaper, more effective, like the name of the institute, then why not? What Gretchen said is brilliant, start with the lowest risk. Your mind will be blown by even the lowest risk things that are not that important. How much more effectiveness, how much time saving, how much more opportunity you can get out of this.
Every company needs to look at, let’s take sales, one of the lowest risk factors and try to bring in AI. When you bring in AI, don’t look at it as a software. Look at it as an entity. You’re not just bringing a software, you got to train the AI to be the spirit of, let’s say, General Assembly. There is work on that. It’s not just dumping data. You got to train the AI to make sure that it actually acts as General Assembly. That’s what I think, but I love what you guys are doing. I think it’s amazing.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to congratulate General Assembly. I want to thank Viacry for sponsoring the first AI for Sales Excellence Award. You’ve given us so many great ideas here. We like to end every show with a specific action step, something sales professionals should do right now to take their sales career to the next level, something nice, brief, and concise. Zeev, why don’t you go first, give us an action step for the sales professionals out there.
Zeev Wexler: I’ll give you guys a tool. RAGs are the future of AI. RAG stands for retrieval-augmented generation. Don’t look it up, but look at a tool called NotebookLM. It’s a Google tool that anybody with a Google account can go. NotebookLM will allow you to open a notebook to push some sources of your client and do client research, respond sometimes even predictive analytics in a place that is not risky. Everybody, use your Gmail, go to NotebookLM, open a notebook, put some resources of your client, and see how incredible it is. In today’s age, Fred, we all have dozens of employees.
Fred Diamond: Great. Jourdan.
Jourdan Hathaway: I was thinking about this this morning and what came to mind is if the early bird gets the worm, the early AI adopter gets the sale. Whether that is because your ability to follow up and make sure that you do what needs to be done, or you have systematized something that frees you up to just simply have more conversations, this to me is what AI unlocks.
Fred Diamond: Gretchen, why don’t you bring us home here?
Gretchen Jacobi: I think it can be overwhelming because there’s so much that AI can touch. I would just say start somewhere. Start small and build from there. The one thing you could do is just audit your week. Pick something that you do every week that might be updating your CRM, that might be prepping for client calls. Pick one thing that feels lowest risk to you, that feels like you’re most willing to give up a little bit of control, because that can be a little bit scary at first to the AI tool. Then just ask a couple of people or do a ChatGPT search for what tool is available to you, maybe it’s NotebookLM, and start integrating it. Just start somewhere. Start now.
Fred Diamond: Congratulations again to Jourdan and Gretchen at General Assembly for being the first recipient of the AI for Sales Excellence Award from the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo