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On today’s show, Fred and Zeev meet with Stephanie Jordan, Vice President of Sales and Commercial Operations at World Fuel Services, and recipient of the AI & Selling Effectiveness Award at this year’s IEPS Annual Sales Excellence Awards.
Find Stephanie on LinkedIn.
STEPHANIE’S TIP: “AI should be used to eliminate the friction in your sales process so you can focus on what actually matters. The goal is not to replace the relationship, it’s to give sellers more time to build it and move the deal forward in a meaningful way.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: This is a special AI for Selling Effectiveness Sales Game Changers Podcast. We’re going to be talking to Stephanie Jordan with World Fuel. Her company is going to be a recipient of the second Annual AI for Selling Effectiveness Award that’s going to be given out on April 29th at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling 16th Annual Sales Excellence Award. Viacry is one of the sponsors of that. You’re going to be giving out that award on April 29th.
Zeev, we’re also going to be announcing a brand-new offering from Viacry and our good friends at Funnel Clarity. It’s part of the IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace. It’s a great introduction to AI for Selling Effectiveness, bringing your skills, Viacry skills, in AI for Sales, and Funnel Clarity, our good friend Tom Snyder and Jill Ulvestad, their expertise in sales performance improvement. What do you think about that?
Zeev Wexler: I’m excited. I’m excited about the event. I’m excited about what we’re doing. I’m excited about our new offering. I’m excited about Steph and World Fuel coming in and receiving this award. This is going to be such an amazing event. I love honoring sales professionals that actually understand AI and understand how it’s going to impact. Even in something like what World Fuel is doing, which is selling bulk fuel and a lot of other things, which is relationship-based and very relationship-based selling, they still understand the power of artificial intelligence and how that’s going to move everything forward. I’m so excited about the offering we have with Funnel Clarity. It’s going to be a game changer.
Fred Diamond: Let’s get right to the award. We have Stephanie Jordan here with World Fuel. Zeev, we went through 100 companies that we invited. These are companies that aren’t selling AI, but they’re using AI for the sales process, B2B, business to business, or business to government. We eventually whittled it down to two companies. One is World Fuel. We’re very excited to have Stephanie Jordan here.
Stephanie, it’s great to see you. Congratulations on World Fuel being the recipient of the award. We’re excited for your acceptance speech at the award event. Why don’t you introduce yourselves for people who don’t know about World Fuel? Tell us about what the company does, what you do. Then let’s get into the specifics. How are you using AI for selling effectiveness?
Stephanie Jordan: On behalf of World Fuel, a subsidiary of World Kinect, we thank you for the award. As you all know, changing sales mentality sometimes can be a challenge. To be recognized for the work that we’ve done is really a great honor. As you mentioned, I’m Stephanie Jordan. I am the Vice President of North America, FBO and airport sales, as well as our commercial sales. World Fuel, part of World Kinect Corporation, a publicly-traded Fortune 500 company, is a global energy management company. We cover all three different segments of business, both aviation, land, and marine, with a wide range of fulfillment and solutions. Those could be payment method solutions, technology solutions. My specific area is in the FBO and airport space. To bring that to life a little bit, we deliver large loads of fuel to the FBOs and airports around North America and throughout North America.
Fred Diamond: For people who don’t know what an FBO is, what is an FBO?
Stephanie Jordan: Great question. An FBO, think of it almost like an executive gas station for private aircraft. Any of those corporate aircraft that you see traveling around, they will fly into an FBO, they’ll have hangar space that the FBO can provide, and they’ll get all of their fuel and services there. They’ll pay, they can participate in a rewards program. Very, very similar to what we would think of as a gas station, but it just happens to be for large jets.
Fred Diamond: Zeev, you’ve been doing some work with World Fuel and we talked about some of the things that they’re doing. Let’s get specific. What are some of the things that World Fuel is doing to utilize, again, we’re recognizing you for how you’re using AI to improve the sales process and make it more effective for your sales professionals.
Stephanie Jordan: We actually started a couple of years ago, about two and a half years ago, with the fundamentals, recognizing that this was going to be really a pivotal time in the world and that we wanted to make sure that our sales were leading that charge. We started with the fundamentals of removing the fear factor. We’ve all heard over and over and over, jobs are going to be taken away.
As you mentioned, Fred, our business is very relationship-focused business. I think most salespeople will say that. Specifically in aviation, it is a very deep relationship business. Making sure that the sales team can understand where their strengths are and where they can focus that time and effort versus what they could use AI to supplement the areas that they don’t enjoy doing. That was really our approach to take away the fear, because if it adds value to their selling ability and to the bottom line, sales are about those revenues, then they were much more willing to engage.
The other part of that fundamental is introducing it and keeping it consistent throughout. Whether it’s our monthly meetings, whether it’s our sales managers during their one-on-ones covering pipelines, or our annual sales kickoff, AI has been consistently a part of that, as well as that peer-to-peer training and information sharing, where one sales rep tells another sales rep, “I use this as a tool and here’s my example.” It brings it to life and it’s not that management just beating the drum of you have to do something new because I said so. Really that was a pivotal point where we decided to bring in outside resources and that’s how we connected with Zeev and invited him to our annual sales kickoff meeting to really take it up the next notch, and we were able to utilize him to start to build out agents and I would say move it from a 1.0 AI approach to a 2.0.
Zeev Wexler: In addition, something I love that World Fuel and Stephanie do, they actually educate their clients on AI as well, which is something that I love. There is such a variety of sales people within World Fuel. There are very, very new sales people, there are people that have been doing it for 35 years, so they’ve done a great job of making a status quo of this is how everybody should use it, this is how it’s going to help you, and then taking the actual processes that they want everybody to do and actually putting that into a system that helps the sales professionals do their jobs better and educate their actual clients, give their clients the same education that they give their salespeople, which was very inspiring to me, Stephanie.
Stephanie Jordan: It’s a great point, Zeev. Interestingly enough, we find our customers are in that exact same scenario as our employees, meaning there are some that are either new to the business or have owned the business for years, and interestingly enough, their AI knowledge and AI interest ranges in that full spectrum too. We certainly have customers that are afraid of AI or say, “I’m not sure since we fuel airplanes and there’s so much physical work to how we serve our customers, how can AI help.” Back to the peer bringing our customers together and them sharing ideas of here’s I created this standard operating procedure or I use it for our template so all of our customer service reps have that same voice that we want going out to our customers.
There are so many similarities in the foundational information, the sharing information, and then pushing people out of their comfort. It should constantly be a learning incline and it’s not natural. It’s not just one of those things that you can spend 30 minutes and then, “Okay, I know everything in AI.” It needs to be that constant evolution.
We’re a large publicly-traded company, we utilize Copilot, which I’ve found a lot of large organizations default to that. With that, we’ve worked both with Zeev and on our own internal teams to identify ways that Copilot can be used for brainstorming in advance, researching in advance of a customer or prospect visit, keeping better track of information, organizing information so that it makes it faster to put it into our CRM program.
I mentioned at the beginning sales teams can sometimes be a little resistant. We zoomed in on things that irritate them, expense reports. I have never met a sales person that said, “Give me more expense reports. I love doing paperwork.” Something as simple as upload your hotel bill and ask AI to dissect out the lines, because in our expense reports you have to have the hotel expense separate of the tax bill, separate of any other fees. Traditionally, you had to manually do that, either on a calculator or Excel or whatever. Literally you just pop that receipt in, except you can do it on your phone with one of the AI tools. It really has brought value to them, in addition to what Zeev was saying.
I think the biggest impact where it brings leadership and sales together is that standardization, both from our research as well as request for proposals. We work with a lot of airports. Those request for proposals can be pretty intense. A 60-page document is not uncommon. It has very meticulous requirements that if you don’t meet those requirements, it can be thrown out. Utilizing and building an agent that can take that type of document and parse out the different information that the different critical business partners need out of that RFP, to bring that to life a little bit more is we get an RFP and our supply team needs to know these pieces around the volumes and any seasonality and things like that. They don’t want to come through 60-page documents in order to get what’s typically a page and a half of information for their portion. Marketing needs a portion, credit, and there’s all of these different teams that need this information, as well as we have to be hypersensitive to any deadlines, any question periods, things like that.
The way it used to be done is a human would take that and would take all the time to separate out this PDF document and try to serve it up. A lot of time somebody would not have time, because you get a lot of RFPs in. Then you just have to blast out this 60-page document to all the team members. They’re not as quick to respond. The wasted time was just incredible. Now, to have a standard process that the team can follow, it lightens the burden of our admin so we can actually produce a better-quality proposal in return. It’s a win-win on every front.
Fred Diamond: Zeev, what Stephanie’s talking about here are things that we’ve talked about numerous times on the AI for Selling Effectiveness Podcast, and it’s great to see it in action. There are a couple things. One is obviously improving the existing sales processes. She talked about proposals, etc. Secondly, we talked a lot on the show about standardization. We kept using the term in the first number of shows that we did, the Wild West if you will, and there was a lot of individuals doing stuff. Then we’ve always talked about we want to get to a place where there’s smart, and I want to say standardization from a limiting perspective, but from the ability for everybody in the company to utilize whatever the strategy is the same way to get the outcomes that leadership says we need to get to.
Zeev Wexler: Something I love about Stephanie and World Fuel is the balanced approach, that it’s not just we’re going to use AI to get more revenue, which is extremely important, what we do our business. But we use AI to make it easier for our salespeople, like the mention of the expense reports, so now culturally it’s much easier to bring in because now we’re taking something that the sales force does not like to do, they must do, they need to spend hours doing it, especially with the amount of travel that the World Fuel team has to do, so now we take that off. Now we’re dealing with something that instead of somebody going through a 60-page, yes, we want to increase revenue, but we want to make your job easier and we want to make things not just standardized from the World Fuel perspective or the business perspective, but standardized that you don’t have to waste your time.
One thing I love about working with World Fuel is I got to work with the actual managers, the actual people that do the sale. We broke down processes of how they actually create their research, how they do what they need to do. Then we took that process and made AI simplify it in a way that doesn’t limit anything, doesn’t reduce any of the quality, but makes it instead of a two-hour process, a literal five-minute process, but doing it the way that it should be done. Now, what sales person wouldn’t want to get the exact research that they need to do to go and visit one of their clients, but instead of spending two hours and doing things that are not the things they love to do, but doing it in five minutes, getting the report, and being prepared to sell more, being prepared to enrich their relationships with all of the information that they got?
That is the balance I really, really like, and what I said before, the addition of taking time and breaking AI down to their clients, of educating their clients with what they’re learning about artificial intelligence. I love that balance and I love the standardization from a true bias. It’s not just, “World Fuel, this is how you guys are going to do it.” It’s how the sales team is doing it, how you got wins and successes in the past, and now how can we automate it and make it simpler, easier, and get to the results you want.
Fred Diamond: Stephanie, congratulations again and well done working with Zeev and his organization and to be the recipient of our AI for Selling Effectiveness Award. Stephanie, how have you become a better leader? You’ve obviously embraced this and I love what you’re saying from two perspectives. One is, it’s not just about the standardization, but it’s about if you get as efficient as you can be utilizing AI more effectively, you can then do more empowering things. Like you said for an expense report, if a sales rep is spending an hour or two hours on an expense report, he or she is not spending an hour and 45 minutes prospecting, or working with the customer, or thinking about how they could bring more value to the customer. How have you become a better leader? Obviously, you’ve dived into this. From your perspective, how have you become a better sales leader by going all in with this?
Stephanie Jordan: I think there’s a couple of ways. In our sessions, both on the customer side and the employee side, with Zeev, he really brings to life the importance of what we as humans bring to the table that AI can never bring. I think focusing on that from a leadership perspective, I have been so excited and enthusiastic about seeing the time that it can save, the efficiencies that it can give not only myself but my team and our customers. We should always be driving value to our customers. As a leader, I want to enable my sales team to be able to serve up value. The more value and the more deeper relationships that they have with customers, we call it a win-win-win. Everyone wins.
I think for me it’s the enthusiasm that I have been able to bring around AI, because as an employee, you want to work with someone and in collaboration with someone that keeps that energy, is excited for every day, is constantly looking for ways that we can become better and improve. I just feel like AI is one of the most exciting things that certainly I’ve ever seen. 30 years in the industry, I think this is just a phenomenal time to be in sales and to be in business.
Fred Diamond: I want to congratulate Stephanie Jordan and the team at World Fuel for receiving the IEPS AI for Selling Effectiveness Award on April 29th. Thanks to Zeev Wexler and Viacry for sponsoring that award. Zeev, it’s going to be a great day on April 29th. We’re also going to be announcing a special offer for companies, it’s going to be with your company, Viacry, and one of our other Selling Essentials Marketplace partners, Funnel Clarity. We’re going to be announcing that on April 29th to continue to work with great companies like World Fuel and to help sales organizations become more effective using AI and AI strategies.
Once again, congratulations to Stephanie Jordan with World Fuel. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo