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On today’s show, Fred meets with Eran Rozenfeld, Director of Digital, Data and AI at Matrix and recipient of the AI & Selling Effectiveness Award at this year’s IEPS Annual Sales Excellence Awards. Learn more about the award event here.
Find Eran on LinkedIn.
ERAN’S TIP: “Use the AI machines for the 80% to get the right messages and insights, and then bring yourself into the last 20% to shape it the right way so it will work.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Eran Rozenfeld with Matrix, it’s great to have you here. Congratulations on being one of two of our second AI for Selling Effectiveness Awards. We’re going to be giving that out on April 29th. We received applications from, Zeev, a pretty good chunk of companies. I think we started with well over 100. This award is recognizing a company that is helping the sales process by using AI and how is AI making their sales process, whatever it might be, at various stages go more effectively to help the company grow more revenue and grow more business. It’s great to have you here, Zeev. It’s great to have you here, Eran. Zeev, tell us a little bit about Matrix and why you’re so excited to be sponsoring this award.
Zeev Wexler: Matrix is a wonderful company, and Eran is a wonderful leader. Why I’m so excited about Matrix is they practice what they preach. Matrix themselves actually help other companies with AI. They’re incredible on layering data and just an incredible technology company, but themselves they use artificial intelligence in their sales process, in the process of identifying their ICPs, in the process of doing the research, preparation, and also reaching out and creating a stage for their sales professionals to actually use artificial intelligence in ways that help them.
I’m really excited that a company that really understands AI and helps with data and AI for other companies actually uses that for themselves. That’s why we were very happy to give Matrix this very well-deserved award, our second annual. We’re excited to hear exactly what Matrix is doing with artificial intelligence and to show the community that artificial intelligence is here, it’s time to use it in sales, and it’s not just chatting with ChatGPT.
Fred Diamond: We’re going to be talking to Eran in a second about what Matrix is doing, but I’m also very excited because at the award event, we’re going to be announcing a very special offering from the Institute for Effective Professional Selling with Viacry and our good friends at Funnel Clarity, which is designed to help companies apply great ways to use artificial intelligence to grow the sales process. I’ll hold off on some of that until the award event, but it’s going to be a lot of great AI for Selling Effectiveness.
Eran, it’s great to have you here. Congratulations again on receiving the award. Zeev and I and the team that evaluated the companies that were doing things looked at a lot. A lot of companies, to be honest with you, Zeev, we saw this last year too, they weren’t really quite using AI the way that we want companies to begin to use it. Matrix was. Eran, it’s great to see you. Tell us a little bit about Matrix and give us a little bit of an introduction into some of the things, and I’m really excited to hear you and Zeev engage in some of this as well.
Eran Rozenfeld: Matrix is a system integrator. To Zeev’s point, we are supporting customers with almost everything technology-wise. Since we are a multi-billion-dollar company with about 17,000 employees worldwide, we are ranked I think number eight in the US, which gives us the opportunity to work with all sizes of businesses and support them with all type of technologies, such as cloud, cyber, data, and AI, which we’ll talk about today, a lot of financial services that we support in customers, and many more.
On the data and AI, which is the practice that I am with in the US, it’s pretty fascinating what’s happening right now. I had several calls with Zeev in the past and so on. To your point right now, it makes sense that a lot of customers or even companies that provide services, are still not utilizing AI tools. This is great to see you guys promoting that and helping customers understand or organizations understand how they should be using AI tools. The reason for that, that you don’t see that enough right now, it is because we are still in experimentation and piloting phase. A lot of the AI large ambitious projects doesn’t really work well. But what we find that works well is the approach where you go and you find those specific winning use cases, you tackle those, in a very short period of time you bring those quick wins in an organization, and you move on and utilize the next use case with AI model or with tools or what not.
I’ll give you the highlight right now and I’ll let Zeev touch base on that, but I’ll be happy to share with you at least four steps in the sales cycle where we are utilizing AI and where we are helping customers utilize AI. It could be from the lead generation and prospect discovery, through the outreach and sales engagement, the assistance with meeting, opportunity management, all the way to proposal generation, replying RFPs and bids and so on. I’m happy to dive into those, but that’s what we see in the market, this is what we’re supporting customers. Of course, we’re supporting customers to do the same, not just with sales processes, but with their HR processes, the operation processes, and many more. But happy to talk today about how we use it in order to create better effectiveness of our sales processes.
Fred Diamond: That’s what we’re hoping to hear. We’re going to be hearing about that on April 29th. Why don’t you get us started? You mentioned there’s four things you want to briefly address here. Let’s start with number one.
Eran Rozenfeld: Every sales process starts with the lead generation, discovery, prospect, and so on. With the tools that you have out there today, without going to specifics, because as you probably know, things are changing on a weekly basis right now. But the tools are there and the ability to customize AI models is out there as well, the ability is there. Even if you look at the lead generation and prospect and discovery, it starts with mapping your market, understanding your addressable market and what’s available out there.
With the tools, with the AI machines that are out there, putting and explaining exactly what are the services or the products you’re providing, analyzing the ICP, the ideal customer profile, analyzing the personas that you’re chasing. Adding some more flavor on where should the AI help you to look for those personas, and how do I look for CIOs right now, or CTOs, and which company sizes and flavor or industries or vertical they are in. Are they on LinkedIn right now? Are they publishing, are they moving, are they participating, are they publishing articles and whatnot?
Putting all of this knowledge into the machine and asking the machine to look for the right prospects for you, to analyze why this is the right prospect, and maybe add to that, which are the events that those prospects are participating in, and many more. The bottom line is, instead of putting so much human power and so many hours to do that in the traditional way that we all know how to do, use some AI machines to save some time here and get better efficiency and better focused leads and prospects so then you can move on to the next stage with that.
Fred Diamond: Zeev, you’re dealing with hundreds of companies, maybe even thousands by this point with all the work that you’re doing to get out there, lead generation and AI.
Zeev Wexler: Basically, everybody needs to understand right now, and I think you and I spoke about this in the past, it’s not about output, it’s about outcome. It’s not really about having AI tools just do output, “My AI tool sent a thousand LinkedIn messages today.” That makes no sense. What works with AI is analyzing what worked for you in the past without AI and utilizing AI to really enhance that, to make that into a 5x. Looking at things that your Salesforce did successfully, that your system did successfully, and now automating that, and now you basically have a bunch of agents, a swarm of agents in your pocket that act like you, that do what you do, what works for you. It’s not just output, it’s about outcome and about results and about taking advantage of this incredible technology to move forward.
We’re moving into a token economy. Right now, we measure output of AI by tokens. Now again, it’s not about output, it’s not just about doing emails, but the output that a salesperson can do in a year can be measured by a few million, let’s say 20, 30 million tokens. That costs, from an AI standpoint, a couple of 100 bucks. Now you as the sales professional can efficiently focus on the relationships, can focus on reading the room and understanding everything that’s going on in the market instead of figuring out data points or doing research. All of that now is being utilized by AI, and if you do it correctly, like Eran and Matrix do, you give your sales force and yourself so many more opportunities to make outcomes in the market.
Fred Diamond: Eran, you said there’s a second thing, as we’re moving through things that you’re doing at Matrix to optimize the selling efforts of your organization.
Eran Rozenfeld: Now you’ve got the leads. You’ve got the pipeline and this is the first stage of leads and you have hopefully better leads and you did it in a short period of time, so you can reach out to more, etc. But now you can use the AI machines, and our sales force can use the AI machines, in order to have a better personalized outreach and sales engagement. On a traditional way, you know that when you have a pipeline, you want to analyze each one of the leads and understand where they’re coming from, what do they do, what is the type of message that I should use with them in order to engage, or which event I should meet them and whatnot.
Use the AI tools now to have this more personalized, more accurate, more focused in order to get better rates on results, better engagement rates. That’s what we do with that. It’s not just about sending thousands of emails, but who are the right people? What is the right message that should work, and use the AI machines in order to measure that and to get better rates, as opposed to what you did before, which is very, very manual, very, very hard to measure and monitor. Now with the tools, you can do that and have the second stage of engagement, better rates, better success towards the third one that we’ll talk in a bit.
Zeev Wexler: This is something really important. I know Eran and Matrix do this, but you need to utilize the tools, but not lose your voice in the process. I see so many salespeople just sound like ChatGPT, or sound like Grok, sound like Claude. You need to maintain your voice. It goes to the point that I had before of doing what works, and I can do that too. Analyze what types of messages work, create a persona for yourself, teach the AI, how does Eran, how does Fred, how do they speak? What is my tone? It’s really, really dangerous. We need to rely on these tools, and everybody that knows me knows I’m a huge AI fan, but we need to do it with keeping our truth, keeping our tone, and keeping what makes us unique in the market. We created the success, AI can enhance that, AI can make that bigger, but it’s a big danger and I see it happening all over the place where AI is overtaking the voice of salespeople, sales professionals, and that is not the right way to do that.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. We see that all the time. Customers, unfortunately for the sales professionals, they can see through that. Everyone’s getting trained on seeing through that. I love the way you just said it will further optimize who you are as you begin to work with the AI, to train it in your voice, your understanding. One of the things we talk about all the time at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling and on the Sales Game Changers Podcast is that you need to bring insights to customers and value that they don’t anticipate you’re going to bring, but that you need to bring it, because otherwise there’s of little value that you are bringing them.
Eran, you said there are two other things that we looked at as part of the application process for the AI for Selling Effectiveness Award for 2026.
Eran Rozenfeld: Absolutely. I think that even before I touch the third point, it’s super important, this human touch. I don’t think that we are in a phase right now that is all AI. I think that we need to be smart about how to use AI properly, smart in order to support our processes, and to provide us the best ROI that we can get from this technology that is available.
The third part that I chose to speak about today will be how the AI tools can assist our sales force with meeting and opportunity management. Now that we have the leads and we know how to now analyze properly and get the opportunities in place, etc., there are so many things that we do as sales that can be supported now with AI. I’m not talking about just preparing information like sales enablement, documentations, and PowerPoint, PDFs, etc., definitely things that takes you a while now. Use the AI machines 80% of the time to get the right messages out there and then go bring yourself in and the last 20% shape it the right way so it will work.
In this phase with the sales assistant, etc., we will use AI transcribes calls, there are so many tools out there, use those tools, not just to save the information, etc., but also to get the right sales insights and explain to the AI machines that you’re working with and keep on training them what are the insights that you’re looking for and how to translate those insights to my next steps with your opportunity. Now I have a machine, I have co-workers in a way that works with me, smart ones that can support me and get the rates of moving this opportunity from an opportunity to an actual proposal and move to the next stage in the process.
Zeev Wexler: This is really brilliant, Eran, and this is an advice I want to bring down to earth level. Artificial intelligence is like your co-workers, but it’s like your junior co-workers. I hope I’m not going to hurt anybody’s feelings, that’s not my goal, but I want you guys to visualize this. AI is like a brilliant junior employee, junior co-worker of yours, that English is their second language. They’re brilliant, they know how to do things, but they can’t really put things the way you want it. Just like you would work with a junior team, a sales assistant, an assistant, you need to massage what comes out. You need to train them of how you want things to be and you still have the oversight. Oversight is crucial with AI.
AI is still on the level where it’s our helper, but it’s not something we just let run autonomously and say, “Go do all these things.” That’s where a lot of mistakes happen. Treat AI as a brilliant, incredible, young co-worker that you want to grow inside the company, but that co-worker, English is not their first language, which for me and Eran it’s not. Understand that there’s nuances that the artificial intelligence doesn’t understand and you need to bring that in. It can do a lot of the heavy lifting, but you are responsible for the outcome, you are responsible for the quality, and you’re responsible to bring the nuance into it that only you know.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point, Zeev. Actually, at the end of the day, you’re responsible for everything. We like to say that even people who are working for companies, you’re the CEO of your career. I love the way you just explained that and brought that out, that how can AI help you as the selling professional and as the selling professional leader, and we have a lot of people who are leaders listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast and who were involved with the Institute for Effective Professional Selling or managing a large number of people who need to also utilize this for them to become more profound leaders, more effective leaders, and helping their company’s goals.
Eran, I know there’s one last thing that you guys have done to implement AI to help the selling process move quicker. Why don’t you wrap up the show briefly with that?
Eran Rozenfeld: We got all the way from lead generation to optimize the messages and now better engagement and understanding insights, and so on, to prepare to this next stage I’ll talk about. I’m sure that you guys dealt with other things that AI can help with, but I’ll touch on the AI for proposal generation, pricing, and bidding. You got a great machine that can help you do some research, understand historical data, market signals, what pricing should I go with, and so on, and you can automate that process.
I would not say fully automate, because again, this is where really the salesperson needs to spend the time with, but use the machines now to research for you, to prepare the proposal for you, to even help you with RFPs and preparation over there, and allow the machines use the 80% where then you come and you put the 20% where you have all the insights available, smarter insights that are available for you. The coworkers that we talked before that are there for you to support you, all you need to do now is place that part of personality by the sales person, make sure that you stepped it right to have a better win rate.
Fred Diamond: That is excellent. Zeev, any final words for us to bring it home here?
Zeev Wexler: Guys, we’re recording this on the first day of Q2. AI needs to belong in your process in a safe way with guardrails, but you cannot sit on the fence anymore. Sales and AI, you and AI is the new sales standard. There is no going away. There is no going back. The same way you can’t do business without an email, a computer, and a smartphone, you definitely cannot do business in the future without artificial intelligence done the right way. That’s why we’re showcasing companies like Matrix and people like Eran that really do it the right way and all of us need to get off the fence and do it with ethics, with guardrails, but utilize artificial intelligence.
Fred Diamond: Absolutely. Once again, congratulations to Eran Rozenfeld and Matrix. On behalf of Zeev Wexler, my name is Fred Diamond and this is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo