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Today’s show featured KnowlegeNet.ai CEO Mehdi Tehranchi and CRO Nick Caruso.
Find Mehdi on LinkedIn. Find Nick on LinkedIn.
MEHDI’S TIP: “A salesperson now has knowledge of everything. That’s what AI has done. Now put that knowledge into action, that’s up to you. The salesperson needs to take that and take action. I think that’s the biggest use of AI, no matter which AI you use. It has to be actionable.”
NICK’S TIP: “If you’re not using ChatGPT right now, I highly recommend that you just use it and play around with it. The analogy I made is that recorder. Use the recorder just to get better at it and then challenge yourself. If you’re a manager, look at what your team is doing and saying, “Can I make this more efficient?”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Today I’m interviewing Mehdi Tehranchi and Nick Caruso with KnowledgeNet.ai. AI comes up pretty frequently, if not all the time. We want to get deep into it. you guys specialize in solutions for sales professionals. We get sales professionals who listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast. We get a lot of sales leaders, typically in the B2B, the business to business, and the B2G, business to government, space. As a matter of fact, I referred to this before, we recently did a show with Jim Kelly who runs public sector for Dell, Dell’s public sector. We spent almost the entire time talking about AI and how his sales organization is using AI and how they’re using it with customers, et cetera. I’m excited to have you both on the show. We’re doing today’s interview in the mid-summer of 2024, and we’re going to get deep into this a little bit.
Mehdi, why don’t you introduce us to KnowledgeNet.ai? Give us a introduction to yourself and to Nick, and then let’s get started.
Mehdi Tehranchi: Thank you, Fred, for the introduction. It’s wonderful to be in this program and I was looking forward to sharing our thoughts with the sales leaders. Hello, sales leaders. This is amazing where we are. AI has really been a force behind multiple different functional groups, but more than anything else, sales. Sales has that parameter of variability. The dynamics of personalities, changes, budget, finance, you say it, is in sales, and that’s the prime ground for AI engine to tap into all that information and make sense for you and augment your already sales force, who is dealing with all that, but in a random basis. That’s where I like to start.
As an introduction, myself and Nick, we were in a startup before that grew from three people to about 300 people before we exited to Nuance Communications, voice of Siri, and it became now part of Microsoft. That as a background, we stepped out and said, “What are we going to work on next?” Before AI became AI and everybody had a little bit of AI in their application, we actually started graph theory, and we are all engineers. We started understanding relationships, understanding how we all impact each other. One of our past customers and investors stepped in and said, “Why don’t you apply this to my business?”
We go, “Really?”
He goes, “Yeah.”
We said, “Let me take a look.”
The more we applied that graph theory, understanding of relationships to his business and put ChatGPT when ChatGPT became what we know today, you could actually have a conversation with the graph, with the relationship, with all that data. You can ask questions and get answers. You can get analytics. That’s where we are now. Imagine all those relationships in a nice organized fashion, put the ChatGPT and start asking questions. That relationship becomes really live in your sales operation, in your recruiting, in your training. Now we have organizational AIs that are plugged into group.
Nick Caruso: As Mehdi mentioned, we’ve been working together now for about 15 plus years. Fred, before the podcast started, we were sharing some war stories together and we’re both from the DC area, actually all three of us are. If you’re in the DC area, the intelligence community is very big in this space, a lot of investment. Actually, my career started in the US intelligence community and a lot of the technologies we were working on 25 plus years ago in the war on terrorism has now been commercialized. A lot of that technology now is coming out of AI. Before when we were trying to find the bad guys and use all the technology to do that, that technology now can be used to find “the good guys”, the customers.
What I like to tell people is 25, 30 years ago, we were collecting enough data to fill the Library of Congress every couple of hours. Sifting through that data was a huge problem for the US intelligence community. A lot of technology was developed around that. That technology now is available in the commercial space. What you’re using in ChatGPT, a lot of that did come out of the US intelligence community and the work on that.
I’ve been both an engineer and a sales leader now for about 20, 30 years. As a sales leader, one of the biggest problems I always had was how do I allow my sales team to harness the institutional knowledge of the organization? Fred, you’ve been in sales for a while, right? Imagine a sales rep that had access and knowledge and comprehension of every case study, of every part number, of every success story, of every win. You’re having an entire podcast on sales success stories. Imagine if that was available instantaneously to every sales rep to be able to leverage, to help close a deal. We are at that place now where sales professionals can do that and sales managers can do that. It’s a very, very exciting place to be at right now.
Fred Diamond: I’m going to ask the basic question that whenever somebody mentions AI comes up, will AI replace me? Will AI replace sales professionals? Before we get into how they could use it, Nick, why don’t you take that question first? Then, Mehdi, I’m interested in your answer as well.
Nick Caruso: When you think of AI, you hear the word artificial intelligence. I say no, throw the word artificial out. It’s augmented intelligence, and it’s all about augmenting that sales professional to be so much more productive. There’s an interesting curve, a chart that you can see, and it’s around worldwide productivity per country and the amount of dollars that get produced per person, per country. The countries that excel back in the ‘60s, maybe there was $50 per hour. Now we’re up to $125, $150 per hour. It’s all about allowing that professional to now their value to the company is not $150 an hour, but now $500 an hour. It’s all about augmenting them to be so much more productive. That’s where AI really is transformative.
Mehdi Tehranchi: A hundred percent, augmented intelligence is the key area where AI is going to be effective. I add another AI to Nick’s AI, is accelerating intelligence. Ability for you to know your institutional knowledge allows you to cut down the amount of time it takes for you to actually make that decision, get in front of that customer, and win them over. Sales is a lot about emotional decisions and AI lacks the emotional side of that intelligence. I think this is truly one of the areas that you cannot replace with an AI as being just artificial intelligence.
Fred Diamond: Let’s get specific here. Give us three case examples where you have seen the tools and the technology in place that have really made a difference. There’s so many. We talk on the Sales Game Changers Podcast every day about the entire sales process, and we’ve been doing the show for seven years now. Of course, things have changed, things are morphed, but we just did a show last week on relationships, and how meeting somebody for lunch can help you grow your business by building that trusted relationship. Give us some examples, specific examples. You don’t have to mention the company of course, but applications of AI. You guys are on the front edge of this. Tell us where it’s being used greatly to help the sales professionals be more valuable to their companies.
Mehdi Tehranchi: First of all, knowledge of AI goes through the full sales cycle all the way to closure, and then doesn’t really stop there. It goes through the customer success and customer life. The one that is my favorite is ability for me to actually give a richer response back to my customers. Ability for me to know what was said in the last meeting and who met with my customer never fails me to be surprised with a prepared salesperson to step up and be able to help the customer. Besides all the rest of this warm introduction, making your emails better, making it shorter so you’re doing the fast response, I think the completeness of a response, ability for you to actually step out of that shell and be confident before you get into the meeting, is the number one effect of KnowledgeNet.ai. When we see customers, when we see our sales customers, sales executives use this, step into it, and free themselves from all these spreadsheets and rest of these time-consuming processes to be prepared.
Nick Caruso: On that, Fred, I’m sure you’ve been through sales training or SPIN training and so forth. I’m sure a lot of your audience has as well. I’ve certainly been in my fair share of companies where you go through a few days or a week worth training and then you go back and you try your best to implement that training, et cetera. One of our enterprise customers came to us and said, “Look, can we leverage AI to help steer our reps ahead of every meeting? Before every meeting we want AI to go out and look at all the emails that were exchanged back and forth with a customer, interface with our CRM system, interface with our customer support system, go out to the web, go out to the news, search the customer.”
A side note, once I was joking, I was on a pipeline call with one of my sales reps and they were forecasting something and I said, “Did you know that they declared bankruptcy a day ago?” How does a sales rep get access to all this knowledge in preparation for a meeting? Meanwhile, they have four or five meetings a day. It’s impossible. How do you do it in a SPIN selling way, or how do you prompt them?
We worked with an enterprise customer to leverage AI to go out and gather all this information, bring it back, and then surface that knowledge to the sales rep minutes before the meeting. Then based upon the outcome of that meeting, feed it back into the system and then suggest the sales rep the next steps and action items. That’s just a fantastic example of accelerating a sales rep, they don’t have to spend their time doing that, but really accelerating closure of that pipeline for them.
Fred Diamond: That’s great, getting that information at the fingertips right away. Just a basic question here. Mehdi, you mentioned before you could use AI to write better emails, and I see LinkedIn posts that drive me nuts because they obviously were generated by AI. Is that an issue where customers see things, documents, or emails that were obviously generated from AI? Where are we with that? I know, Nick, when we did a little prep for this call, we talked about we’re in this, what was the term that you used?
Nick Caruso: The Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment. If you’re familiar with the hype curve, everyone gets excited and then they realize it’s just not where it needs to be. Then you’re in that trough and then you slowly come out of it.
Fred Diamond: A lot of people say AI is great up until the last mile type of a thing. Talk about that. Are customers attuned to what may seem like an AI generated document response? Does that turn them off, or is that not really a thing? Or where are we with that?
Mehdi Tehranchi: I like to think of AI as an efficiency factor rather than end product where I write an email, click send and send. The difference between the two is if I’m using AI for efficiency factor, I can cut off pieces of my process to get 20 times better in my process as an overall. Not just writing an email, but maybe this meeting, maybe we have a meeting recording going on, and then with one click, it gives me a true summary of action items. Who was there, what was talked about? Did we talk about the product? Did we mention pricing? How wonderful would that be if that was two seconds of a click and it went to my CRM, versus if it was 10 minutes of my time typing this meeting away and then forgetting something and the rest of my team is not informed properly. That’s what I’m talking about. When it comes to AI, think about AI getting yourself to be 20 times more efficient rather than that email I’m going to send and click and this thing. If you are doing that, just like you mentioned, LinkedIn messages that are generated by an AI, a hundred percent, you are failing the mission.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about sales leaders. What are they getting from you? What are they pushing back on? Give us some insights into when you’re dealing with sales leaders, what they’re looking for, what they’re accepting, what they might be pushing back on, and able to be able to utilize the technology more effectively.
Nick Caruso: Here’s another use case, Fred, of a sales leader come to us and they said, again, we institute SPIN or whatever, “Is my sales team leveraging that methodology correctly on calls?” We’re on Zoom calls now, everything’s being recorded. They were spot-checking and looking at recordings of their sales reps and seeing if they were performing. That’s a classic great example of using AI to go in there and say, “Okay, here’s the best practices that this company has implemented.” Is the sales rep doing that? That’s a great example of accelerating a sales leader’s efficiency of engaging with sales reps.
Mehdi Tehranchi: I’ll go back to my focus on training. A big part of sales is always, always, always training. One of the best sales leaders that I worked with before came in with a training methodology and focused on grabbing the whole sales team and saying, “I’m going to train them.” This is exactly the opportunity where you have material, you have methodology, you have method of overcoming obstacles, and it’s all sitting in a PDF file somewhere. How you make it go live is through AI and ability for AI to be at the fingertips of your salespeople so when they are asked, “Hey, I don’t have budget, what can I get in pricing?” You can ask your AI assistant, which is what we do in KnowledgeNet, “How do I deal with a budget problem from a customer?” Three questions, ask these three questions from them, and you can overcome this.
Now, if I was a rookie sales guy, I have no idea. If I was maybe a little bit better in my sales experience, I would reach out to my superior and say, “What do I do?” This has the opportunity to actually make all that static material sitting on the shelf from your marketing, from your methodology, come back and be useful at your fingertips. Training, training, training, if I go back to AI being most effective within sales area.
Fred Diamond: Where are you guys getting brought in? Are you guys getting brought in by the CEO or the GM of the division, who says, “We need to bring this to make people more effective?” Are you being brought in by sales leadership, by IT business leadership, the CFO? Nick, why don’t you go first since you’re the CRO for the company, where’s the entry point for your tools, KnowledgeNet.ai, with an enterprise company?
Nick Caruso: Our platform is really agnostic to any, not necessarily sales. It’s really harnessing the power of the brain of your company, the knowledge within your company to effectuate change. Our SDRs, our sales professionals, we go after salespeople because that’s the biggest impact that we can make right away. We are definitely going after the sales leaders. Like any good salesperson, we usually sit back and listen first to the pain points that they’re having and then see how we can adjust from there.
But you did bring up an interesting point, which we’re seeing a monumental shift in the last couple of months actually, which is when we do get to the CEO, their light bulb goes off and they’re like, “Wait a minute, how can I use AI? Because I’ve heard a lot about it.” It’s really fascinating to me how few people have actually used ChatGPT. They’ve heard of it, but they haven’t actually used it, or they don’t know too much about AI. Once you can actually start having a conversation with the CEOs, not only do they see a huge impact to sales, but throughout the entire organization, especially manufacturing is a big space that we’re seeing a lot of success in as well. It’s been a very, very interesting ride.
Fred Diamond: Mehdi, what are you seeing? Are you seeing the same type of response or what are some things that are taking you aback by that?
Mehdi Tehranchi: C level is definitely the right level that understands and sees the efficiency factor, the 20x efficiency of AI is top-of-mind at the C level. I think the big difference that they’re looking for is ease of implementation. AI is this complicated complex. You got to get prompt engineers and you got to get super-duper $300 per hour type of people in my staff in order to get this done. Do I have the money? That’s the problem that C-level wants to solve.
Where we have focused is to get it started within 15 minutes, get you the results on that same timeframe within few hours, have an ROI, read the contacts, read the emails, don’t bother the users. One of our customers, to give you an example, the C-level suite, 25 people were using KnowledgeNet and the next thing they came back with, they said, “We want it across 700 employees,” and this was working with IT, not with the 700 people, and have that deployed across 700. Then one by one they learned and they started using. Ease of use, don’t bother my operation, just give me that 20x efficiency. That’s what we do in Knowledge.
Fred Diamond: Nick, I want to follow up with something you just said, where you mentioned that a lot of people haven’t even typed into ChatGPT yet, which kind of blows me away. I’m going to guess most people listening probably know the history, when it came out and all those kinds of things, but why is that and what do people get wrong about AI right now?
Nick Caruso: AI is a huge term. It means lots of different things. Before ChatGPT, I was in the AI space for 20 to 30 years. But a lot of times people think of AI right now in that ChatGPT space, so I’ll limit it to that perspective just for right now. I view large language models, which is what ChatGPT is, to be like a musical instrument. Just like all of us in second or third grade, we got our recorder and played a couple tunes on it. It doesn’t mean that we were musicians by any stretch of the imagination. A lot of times people are logging into ChatGPT, they type something in, they get something answered, and they, “Okay, now what do I do with it? How do I implement this for my company?”
I’ve seen people buy the enterprise version of ChatGPT and then they’re like, “Okay, well I gave it to all my users, they’re not using it. Therefore, it must be terrible, or it must not be effective.” It’s this transition period right now where we’re getting through this phase of disillusionment by people because they’re like, “I can’t play Mozart with this recorder I got in second grade. I must not be good,” and that’s not the case. It requires you to really, like any musical instrument, the more you play it, the better you get at it. The more that you learn about it and the more that you get trained and you work with professionals, you will definitely get the outcome that you want to do, but you need the resources to do that. I’m sure yourself, Fred, you’re probably getting more and more proficient with it every day the more you use it. I know even for myself, I’m completely amazed with some different use cases that are coming up on a daily basis. It’s really fascinating.
Fred Diamond: Mehdi, KnowledgeNet.ai, I get emails every day from tool suppliers who are bringing out new tools and I wanted to learn about yours. I saw some of the applications, which is why I brought you on the show. Why is KnowledgeNet.ai different? What is unique about it? You gave us a little bit of your background and Nick’s background and how you got to this point, which was a great story. But I’ll give you an opportunity here to pitch KnowledgeNet.ai. What type of company would want to look into it and why is it different than what else is out there? I realize, Nick, you’re the CRO, but I want to see what Mehdi has to say first and then you can throw in your two cents as well.
Mehdi Tehranchi: Where we focused on the design of the AI was really around understanding and feeding the brain more so that it can become smarter, more agile, understands your environment better. I think this is one of our biggest differentiator. Just to give you an example, our customers have come and said, “I want 10 years of emails to be read through by KnowledgeNet.ai. Go read all the conversations, go read all the emails and train the engine in order for it to be smart enough for my environment.” We have personality analysis plugged in. We have ability for you to get 280 million records, phone numbers, emails to be plugged in. We’re connected and synced with LinkedIn so you can have an AI on top of LinkedIn. Our biggest focus has been let’s make sure just like any other little baby, we feed as much information to this brain before we start asking questions.
The second distinguishing factor is really ease of use. You will feel it once you install it. It’s running wherever you are, in Outlook, in the browser, in your CRM. You don’t have to go and get another AI for proposals, it is at your fingertips, literally. It took us years to figure that out, but I think we are one of the first AI engines that actually make it easy, make it really smart, but put it at your fingertips.
Fred Diamond: Tell us about the LinkedIn aspect, Nick. A lot of people who are listening to the show saw my LinkedIn post about it, introducing you guys. Give us some insights into how it works on top of LinkedIn. Give us some insight into that.
Nick Caruso: KnowledgeNet is a big brain. It taps into a wide range of data sources, your corporate email, your CRM, et cetera. One of the early things that we did was tap into your LinkedIn network to use that and suck in the data from your LinkedIn network. When people use LinkedIn, they use it on a personal level, and it’s not really available for the entirety of the organization to leverage. What we do is, as a business, all your different employees can sync their LinkedIn into the brain and now I have access to my team’s network and their connections, which is phenomenal. Now when I’m preparing for that meeting, and that’s one of the stories I shared earlier on, when I’m going into a meeting, it’s very insightful to know that the brain surfaces knowledge out of my own network, but also surfaces those relationships and those connections with other people within my organization’s network. That’s incredibly valuable.
Fred Diamond: What might be some of the data I would want to get out of LinkedIn for people who are listening to today? It’s great to see that I have all this additional connections to my coworkers’ networks, et cetera. What might be three questions I would ask LinkedIn to utilize the tool to get something?
Nick Caruso: Mehdi had alluded to one of the differentiators of our platform is you can use our platform while you are in LinkedIn. You don’t have to switch to a different tab or something like that, or you’re in your CRM or Outlook or whatever. Now you’re in LinkedIn, you can use our platform to have a conversation with our AI assistant. You can say, “What are the typical pain points of this person that I’m interfacing with?” Who in my network beyond what LinkedIn knows can you surface from that AI assistant?
What’s always amazing to me is that our platform will tell me, “Mehdi emailed this person two years ago and had a meeting with them,” while I’m in LinkedIn. Of course, LinkedIn doesn’t know that, but because our assistant is smart on everything that’s going on with the business, it can provide that knowledge to me. It can recommend to me the most relevant pieces of case studies or marketing material that’s relevant to the profile I have in view in LinkedIn right now. As a sales professional, I don’t have to connect all those dots. The brain does that for me.
Fred Diamond: That’s mind blowing. To make sure I understand that, so let’s say I’m a new sales rep with the company and I’m calling on Joe Smith, who’s the VP of IT at a company. The KnowledgeNet.ai tool can see if someone else in my company had a communication with him via email 10 years ago, and it’ll come up at my fingertips.
Nick Caruso: That’s absolutely correct. It’s those hidden connections and hidden knowledge that imagine there’s this really smart brain that is your companion wherever you go now, and it makes your sales rep who is two weeks into the job being able to harness the entirety of that corporate knowledge.
Fred Diamond: One of the challenging things in sales is for salespeople to communicate examples, like case studies, things like that. It used to be you had to get them the documents, a PDF or on the web or whatever. They had to take the time to read it. Now I guess what I’m hearing you say is I could send at fingertips 10 examples of how our customers used our technology in various industries that I as a sales professional can quickly and readily communicate.
Nick Caruso: You’re absolutely correct. Imagine, which is what we do, the power of saying, “In one of these case studies on page five, there’s a quote from a person that happens to be a secondary connection to the person that you’re talking to right now.” Imagine connecting the dots and solving that for them. That’s the power of accelerating performance for sales professions.
Fred Diamond: That’s mind blowing that they can find communication, because most of the customers, and we talk about this a lot on the Sales Game Changers Podcast, a lot of your customers have been doing a same or similar job for 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years. I’ve interviewed sales leaders at companies like Oracle and Microsoft who’ve been at those companies for 20, 30 years who’ve been dealing with the same customer. They’ve grown together, et cetera, and they’ve gotten to know each other. But let’s say that person leaves, but there’s still 30 years of history and the customer is still there. Because unlike salespeople, customers don’t want to jump around for the most part. If you’re in IT, you want to work at the same hospital or financial services or government agency or hospitality, whatever it might be, for your career. Now salespeople may jump around because technology is so dynamic, and companies get purchased and people move, et cetera. But having that institutional knowledge that you could get at your fingertips, that’s amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. Wow, this is great.
I wish we had another hour to talk, but we don’t because we’re coming to the end. I want to thank Mehdi Tehranchi and Nick Caruso with KnowledgeNet.ai. Congratulations on getting this tool to market. I look forward to people getting to use it more, getting to access this huge brain that you’ve been describing, and sales professionals, you got to be deploying this stuff now. I’m blown away, Nick, when you said before that there are people in sales who are still shying away from the most basic ChatGPT, which is the most basic AI there is. Hopefully you’re going to start getting in. Hopefully you’ll listen to the show and you’ll understand that. Congratulations again on the success.
Give us your final action step. You’ve given us so many great ideas of what people can be implementing and how they can be shifting what they see AI as being. Give us an action step that they should put into play right now to take their sales career to the next level.
Nick Caruso: If you’re not using ChatGPT right now, I highly recommend that you just use it and play around with it. The analogy I made is that recorder. Use the recorder just to get better at it and then challenge yourself. If you’re a manager, look at what your team is doing and saying, “Can I make this more efficient?” You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Nick Caruso on LinkedIn, I’m pretty easy to find. In fact, I get this so often, I’m going to be posting every couple of days tidbits and ideas of how to leverage AI technology, these 30-second suggestions for you.
Fred Diamond: Mehdi, bring us home.
Mehdi Tehranchi: What I am really psyched up about is a salesperson now has knowledge of everything. That’s what AI has done. Where before we couldn’t know everything, just ability for you now, put that knowledge into action, that’s up to you. Still the salesperson needs to take that and take action against it. I think that’s the biggest use of AI, no matter which AI you use. It has to be at your fingertip. It has to be actionable. I think that’s what we have brought to the table.
Fred Diamond: Yeah, it’s all about execution. Once again, I want to thank Mehdi Tehranchi and Nick Caruso with KnowledgeNet.ai. My name is Fred Diamond and this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo