welcome to the AI in sales podcast Im your host Victor Antonio in this episode I speak with Oleg rogue insky CEO and founder of people dot AI now people dot AI is the peoples AI platform for all business activities to help sales marketing and management by understanding the activities that drive revenue in this episode Olek talks about his personal life for founding the company and the gaps that exist between.
what sales people say and what sales people do Oleg also shares some interesting data points and insights that the company has discovered by working with other large enterprise companies and their data he also set some parameters on who can use people dot AI and why all this and a stunning I mean stunning fact on how quickly the AI platform can predict whether a.
salesperson will make it or not lets jump into it Olek first question to you by the way thank you for being on the AI in sales podcast the question I have for you and maybe most people who are not familiar with your company people dot AI tell us a little bit about the company and really how the idea came about about this company here you know what I started my career in 2006 I was in Montreal and I was actually in inside.
sales for company called ends time technologies which ended up going public later and you know I was I started as a BTR I had to enter all my activities in the CRM I had to maintain the CRM I hated it but I was doing because I built it and then next thing that happens is I started running a team of videos and our CEO grounded me for a week.
together with my whole team to go clean out Salesforce we spent a week leading up we didnt make a dent in it it was so bad so fast-forward 10 years later I and in the meantime that company went public was sold to Open Text I worked for another company built out a sales team I then I started my own company called symmetry ax built out a sales team and.
now I was trying to use CRM to understand what whats going on and you know what 2016 I sell that company I look back nothing changed in 10 years between 2006 in 2016 in terms of how you work with the CRM nothing and so as I was thinking what my next move is going to be I was like well.
that prom is clearly painful I felt it I know what it is and it is something that Im passionate about solving I started looking into why nobody is so big before theres a lot of technological reasons why nobody has told it before I guess what AI is now here big data is not here you can solve the problem that was impossible before with new technologists now so thats how people AI get started and thats why I selected this problem.
so in other words you can you can really feel the pain because youve lived it I think thats the best I mean thats the best way to develop a product isnt it now for those of you who for those people who are listening to this podcast who whove never been a BD are in SDR you know talk to me about some of the things that werent being entered correctly that were frustrated you yeah absolutely do is they are actually people works not just with inside cells.
we are deployed across tens of thousands of salespeople right now across inside sales outside sales of field sales sales engineers services support implementation customer success so anyone who touches a custom god and so across all these functions lets focus on any kind of sales you are supposed to go and meet with customers right and these customers you communicate with.
them by email where we set up meetings in your calendar you have conference calls like this one and every time there is a call theres probably one to sometimes five sometimes you walk into min lose 10 people in the room for every one of those 10 people youre supposed to then go into CRM and fill out 1015 twenty-five fields so yeah one hour meeting but then you with that meeting.
you acquire for a self I call it a one hour of sales debt okay theres no way to like go bankrupt and I mean most of the salespeople at some point just give up and go think upon the dead and say look not gonna do it youll be selling oh and three deer and so thats how I got there thats interesting I was talking to the ladies we literally put back cams behind sales people hmm we calculated that on average we manually counted what youve been doing all day on average a sales person.
spends anywhere between 17 to 30 percent of their time entering stuff into one of the systems marketers the analysts recently calculated twenty twenty seven point seven percent of sales persons time is spent on administrative tasks absolutely absolutely I think thats actually being conservative I think its being conservative Ive seen studies that said yeah yeah and by the way think of the data that did get into the system and the opportunity costs associated with losing some deals because the data didnt get into the system pretty incredible for example training people youre not creating breadcrumbs by which someone.
can get on board very quickly increasing the risk something happens with a salesperson they get in a fight with a manager walk out or they get poached or whatever it is they leave guess what theyre rolodex listen to them those are the connections they used you paid them hundreds of thousand dollars to build over five years all the knowledge about the account lives with them literally every new salesperson that starts in a company typically why sales rep so long three six nine months its not because theres so much to.
learn typically if you have six months to learn your product something is wrong with your product during forensics on stuff that the previous guy in the girl in these accounts had been doing but didnt leave any notes about no I might wait the point you touch on I I wrote in my book sales ex machina which talks about how a ice change in the world of selling and in there I talked about how.
conversations are now the new assets for corporation and I think people dont get that and what you just basically outlined is exactly whats in the book that your your speed to value training somebody to get somebody quicker up to speed has less to do with the products they have to learn and more to do with reestablishing I love your phrase the forensics going in there figured out whats what and in reconnecting and then.
trying to get back into the customer which is very tough is it you would know better yeah or like yeah yeah it is a question yeah I want to ask you this because I was introduced to you to Roy run on e EE over at course dot AI super nice guy and he said something that just kind of made my my head spin and Im gonna Im.
gonna give you the Pete that the data point he gave me let me know what you think of it because I think youre on the same page he said that only five percent of the conversations salespeople have with clients actually make it into the CRM Wow and so people like I want you to put some flavor on this from put some put some meat on this thing because this is important because I think.
theres something here what does I no theres something here and that is that these salespeople lets talk about the outside salespeople you know are going out having these conversations and I think youre one to ten analogy was fantastic that they cant capture it and as you say they go into debt in terms of time because they dont have time to put all that in there you know so what are some of the.
solutions out there what are some of the thought processes to try to at least mitigate this and you know improve that number electronic communications should be absolutely capture thats why course and people AI have such a good match together course is the best in the world at capturing conversations via voice turning them into data which we then pick up from them but also get from email from calendar from chats from other written communications and turn it into we capture it we put in our place.
but we also run a small set of analytics and turn it into not just text we turn it into context of why these conversations happen who is the outcome which competitors were mentioned which products youre not upselling are you saying the right thing I using the latest messaging so all that stuff within one message but also you can zoom out how do you communicate as a pattern are you getting back to people in time.
are you talking to the right people are you talking to c-level executives or are you only doing director level sales knowing that in your business the chances of you get a deal that what the director is zero thank you nobodys tracking buying groups like do I have the right set of people at the table on their side but also on my side the sellers group I love that thought so lets pivot off without because I love that in terms of identifying the right.
buying groups or the right buying clusters you know how does people say I just helped you know you know sales people really wrap their arms around the right people identify those and then work with marketing so we identify the right people who dont know but looking at the people who you have who you are talking to we stitch together all of the communications identify for the people youre talking to we tell you hey look you have these four people on the table typically also need the CIO here and security you dont have those right now.
now go get it grunt I love that if I could help just clarify this for people listening cuz this is exciting we think and that is basically youre saying look theres five to seven decision-makers you typically have to talk to within a large enterprise system right thats there it is there you go and so knowing who you have to talk to checking off.
those boxes so to speak but then layering on top of that as you say the conversations that are happening through emails through voice calls maybe even like a conference call like this so no boxes we also tell you how much involvement engagements you need from each one of those players to get it done so just saying yeah thats what sales until now have been like yeah great like you maybe this area once but a signal that out of seven calendar invites see you did not show up on five hmm skip.
three conference calls Ive sent him 18 emails I got one response there was three words that is the context that those managers do not see controls their apps and thats because it never gets into any of the forecasting systems okay great he responded to me awesome videos gonna go yeah I get you Ive been a sales manager before so I know how that feels I wanted to ask you nobody is looking is future right and then your future future of your forecast is in your calendar yes yeah if its a mid stage yeah right now.
youre going to quarter quarter is ninety days you dont ever say oh and a 45 you probably wont have in this quarter yeah the obviously video is quarter mm-hmm yeah I was listening to an interview by a gentleman from cog means this is on your on your YouTube page and so for those of you who listening yeah you know go check out.
people dot AI on their YouTube page I have several good interviews on there and he said something and I want to highlight what you just said about Ill call him the buying signal signals that you get from your customers and he said something I wanted maybe kind of clarify what he was saying he says if the he said his average reply time was down he got his average replied down to a customer down to eight hours.
and he saw a 40 percent lift in conversion and then he made another statement where and I think it was a second dip video where somebody says look I look at the number of calls I make to get a meeting and I know that I have to be at fifteen not at four and if Im having lets say actual meetings with these decision-makers I know I have to be at least ten meetings every.
quarter as opposed to three these are some interesting signals you know add some add some clarification to what that means for people listening because I think thats really interesting response time so you have your inbound leave flow info please come in which leaders case is much more likely to convert the one you call right away or the one you called in three weeks right away so the time to respond is very very important and it is long it should be one hour yeah actually should be five to ten.
minutes really get it down to five youre great yeah however nobody why is why is it so hard to track with its easier cuz they sit in the office theyre on the phone you you kind of know whats happening there you have more system like outreach or sales lost that that you can track it by but with field reps who are driving from one meeting to another flying etc if you.
dont have a strong if it says motion or if it lead gets routed to a steel trap you have zero way of knowing did they follow up on time etc and if you have policing them really hard on that you know what theyre gonna go in to split the leave to follow it up disqualified thats what happens when you really drive the behavior and so having the actual factual data on whether they follow up my child was that a phone call.
did did they connect or was it an email was the email actually targeted and personalized did the inbound lead request and the email contains similar keywords this kind of stuff is is what you can set a salehs on hey I want you to do this kind of follow-up within this timeframe with this kind of content when did it comes in go and if you dont have to manually you just work with reps to make.
sure theres compliance otherwise theres no way to know correct correct and I like you said something now and I read something on VentureBeat that you wrote and has and so it was interesting and I just jotted this down but I wanted to repeat your quote and just kind of clarify for me you said by leveraging AI we instantly provide full historical analysis of yourself sales teams data helping you understand which behaviors.
led to desired outcomes and you said the word behaviors and lets talk about that because we know that behaviors will drive your outcome every time and so tight time both together for me how the system really pushes a salespersons not so much to monitor their behavior but maybe even guide them into how to close a deal more effectively correct okay we literally just did analysis for four.
company that was recently acquired the multi-billion dollar company and recorded all their salespeople into successful and successful new successful successful we can have existing success once again etc guess what colors dont intersect huh people start out of the gate like a rocket ship unsuccessful kind of very very slowly and then they plateau very quickly you can know that a salesperson was not going to make it with 99 percent statistical probability day 17 day 17 days Wow and so that just hit me by the way I just I just got a.
pause here for a second cuz I just hit me you know cuz usually the standard in selling its like well after 90 days youll know but youre saying 17 with a 99% you know confidence love or mercy by day which direction this person is going because guess what in the data set over 50,000 salespeople there has been only a handful of change of direction.
interesting right right and so when youre looking at those without revealing your secret sauce because I know the secret sauce is always in the algorithm right but what are some of the things that success successful salespeople do right out of the gate meetings they go straight into having a lot of meetings talking to customers if you spend first two months learning the product and going through whatever and not talking to customers youre done and then should go out of the gate and feel it without fear sell your product yes.
youre gonna make mistakes just put them I correct you but through maximizing the interaction and through shadowing keep on being on coaching meetings when other people are selling while youre there you will learn the tribal knowledge way faster which was gonna make you much more successful person create the right impression people will be helping you more I mean dont be a lone wolf be a team player go out team will help you first and then you know what help other.
people by the way the amount of coaching reps give to other apps directly correlates with success of these events interesting so so then you can do really want say that again Im sorry you can if youre coaching others youre gonna do really well and guess what its not a chicken and egg problem people would do even start coaching from the beginning and Im doing well every time I mean some of these things are saying this Im loving this conversation because some of the things youre pointing out a very counterintuitive to common knowledge.
right or common sense right the you know Ive been there where youre told you know study the product for the first month or two then go out there and but Ive also seen people use that as a crutch for not setting up the meeting because theyre really afraid of selling this is and in their mind theyre saying Im building up my knowledge base to have the confidence to go in there I.
love what you said go in there youre gonna make some mistakes the key is to actually set up the meetings and I love your tribal knowledge statement and again you know if you create that culture that environment where people are sharing helping each other supporting each other again counterintuitive in the world of selling sometimes engineers typically the best practice place is near is the ship the production they want hmm gotta get something out there thats working they.
want to get the feedback to get the feedback right away beep beep are the team hmm how its just people different go out there and represent your product they want yes you want to know anything but someone makes me well and youll hear them youll hear what customers say youll build a relationship that be honest they have new its my day one you know what Im here to help you there it is there it is I love that tell me how this is helping and Im gonna go three.
levels here but mostly the first one could tell me how your AI system is really helping executives the c-suite make better decisions about their sales team or their marketing teams we just went through that if I can cut your enterprise ramp 10x which is 17 days versus nine month thats massive thats powerful yeah I mean the the cost of that and the benefit of their is its positive its so big its hard to capture especially we have 3,000 salespeople to.
manage second of all full visibility across your whole organization through a single view of can account the customer base six tell me everything thats going on there for castration whats happening third ability to deploy SFAs on specific behaviors so you can basically make sure that the raps on your teams own are behaving in a consistent specific way but coaching is happening and enablement is happening with the right standards of treating a customer I happening and so on and so on and so on.
all of that is really hard to do when you have five layers of management below correct no more and finally as a management the amount of data we should be getting is really really big none of those people are getting it so the data youre getting about how to improve your app how to improve your win rate how to hire better people okay tell me what are the the characteristics of my top performers or what are the things in common across the people I fired in the.
first 90 days look at that during the interviews right and by the way what I love about that is I I preach always youve got to quantify your value dont put it up here quantify it you know its either tell me how its gonna increase my revenue reduce my costs or expand my market share time to one of those three and were good and I think I mean thats thats amazing what youre talking about cuz if the data can help me do that I can make better.
decisions as an executive and Ill return to the marketing side then mid-level managers DSMs the asuras whatever theyre in for them the interesting part is a clean out the time of their absolute thats beautiful managers do like it turn on press the bottom and get extra 20% capacity in your without hiring anyone that is that is pretty powerful thats sweet ha and then second of all see how your team is doing coach with.
data not with intuition typically when you go into a meeting with your sales team you spend an hour figuring out what are the problems and you dont have the time to go fix those problems what do you see the behavioral patterns when you see whats going on you come in with identify promise you can go and solve correct by the way you know expand on that or like you just said something and I know youre used to saying this and big but I find it powerful this coat the.
coach with data not intuition and I want people to hear that from you because its one of those things where again thats where we fall apart sometimes now youre bringing data to the table heres specifically your problem and I also think tell me if Im wrong is that when people know specifically what youre telling them say hey heres the data itll not only help them more but I think you as a manager get more.
credibility everybodys data is visible to everybody and so what you do is what you get and so theres no kind of like a Im not doing well because leads are bad or I have bad territory we have bad accounts man youre not doing my enough like look if you can do two hundred twenty activities a day and youre doing.
forty Im sorry and we got started on the same day like very different thing and yet no wonder hes holding three million doors the score here causing that yeah if youre a if youre a small by the way you answered the second question I was gonna ask you about executives managers which youve answered and then salespeople those three levels so well done man you covered it the perhaps also actually you know the best reps really liked it like to be honest we can tell not look at it there we dont need to.
see the attainment numbers to tell it what the best reps are when we deploy people yeah and we dont even need to see activity what do we see is who is checking out others more what do you mean by that so in people I can see how like you you can see how much activity the guy next we did okay if you open up those permissions obviously some organizations do not you know what best salespeople before they leave it before they leave work because theyre competitive so real sales people are competitive its like a.
game to them right so you basically inherently youve gamified this thing yeah inherently just doing that just opening it up and dance everybody gets time back and get that makes more money mmm love it and I think theres always interesting our brain always compares ourselves right were always comparing things so I think comparing yourself to somebody else is powerful if you know what companies can use your product and what companies.
cant use your product I know its a very general statement but for those listening in to this podcast it might be a small business owner saying I dont know I got only three people I dont know if I should use this I mean work give me some parameters in terms of who should be using people AI we need a ton.
of data to process for this to work so companies with at least 500 employees are typically a good fit for us okay typically have 20% of your employees are sales people and so with those 20% its a hundred reps thats where the amount of data becomes enough for us for our a I to begin okay and how much data do they have to have you know do you have.
we have that X torkoal data or they start tracking immediately so I can immediately moving forward but what we care about is polymorphic activity per day kind of only become substantial enough for statistically correct answers at the hundred reps thats amazing you know so by the way congratulations I wanted to congratulate you on your 30 million Series B funding well done well.
done Im sure that would our partner at the front is actually teaching an enterprise sales class at Stanford from stanford wedeck irregardless school in business and so when I came in to pitch him last February turns out not only we went to the same university in in Boston University but also his students dreamt up people AI as the sales platform of the future in his.
classes this is before before you asked yeah he literally pulled out homeworks where students collaborated on heres how the future of stairs is gonna look like which the only thing was missing is the name he play at interesting interesting well well I would think thatd be a great note to wrap up on lets do I want you to tell me what is.
the future of AI but more specifically people a tie give me give us a vision of where this is all going because you know we keep hearing the buzzword AI machine learning all this stuff so but where is it going whats whats your vision wheres this thing going yeah of course so we service sales people already span it across the whole revenue team so anybody who touches a customer but you know what we find we found out that roughly 40% of every knowledge workers time is spent on data entry and non-value add tasks and so the people.
here does we are automating and freeing out the time that actually yesterday I was at a conference we had our own custom advisory board yesterday I had Frank Chen from a recent Horowitz their in-house ear specialist do a career keynote speech and he its another statistic he provided or 40 percent of every white-collar workers die knowledge workers time is spent on stuff that they shouldnt be spending time so Canada mission of people AI is to automate all the stupid boring work right the redundant tasks its not.
creating its its taking information like workers 100 years ago on an assembly line were taking a piece from here and putting it here and robots do that right we are taking we dont have information workers knowledge workers taking a piece of information from here and putting it here and so its this exactly same revolution happening as what Henry Ford started in 1900 s and so having measured the time we are seeing that we can we already have disability.into the 40% of every dollar to workers time and 40% is two days extra week what if you had a four-day weekend Israel would be jealous yes that would be great that would be good Oleg I could go on with you for a long time here thank you for your time I really appreciate it thank you thank you.
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