Rethink Sales Podcast: AI and What It Means for Sales

AI and What It Means for Sales

Arvind Malhotra
Being early in that in a prompt engineering, I always tell everybody learn to be a prompt engineer. It’s an and prompt. Engineering is about asking the right question. How long have you talked about that? In this case, Ask the right questions.

Michelle Seger
Right.

Arvind Malhotra
And that builds trust. And you get salaries yet still away. It’s I ask the questions the right way to get your answer. It’s a perfect time to learn how to use it. Yeah.

Mark Donnolo
Welcome to the Rethink Sales podcast I’m Mark Donnolo.

Michelle Seger
And I’m Michelle Seger.

Mark Donnolo
And Michelle, we’ve got a really exciting topic today, an informative talk topic on something that we’re all interested in, which is A.I. and what it means for sales.

Michelle Seger
Completely irrelevant. I mean, we are reading so much, it’s all over the news, whether you’re on. Well, wait, it’s not called Twitter anymore, is it? What is it called?

Mark Donnolo
I think it’s X.

Michelle Seger
Whether you’re on X or you’re on the reading. The Wall Street Journal. I mean, it seems like A.I. and tools like ChatGPT are just everywhere. And it’s really all over the place, isn’t it?

Mark Donnolo
Yep. Yep. But, you know, the question comes up for everybody. Like, what does it mean for my job?

Michelle Seger
That’s right. Yep.

Mark Donnolo
H. Allen Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship
And we don’t have all the answers, but we’re going to be talking to somebody today that has some really great answers. So I had the privilege a few months ago of going to a class at UNC Chapel Hill. It was an alumni class and it was with Arvind Malhotra and it was it was fantastic.

Mark Donnolo
H. Allen Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Kenan Flagler Business School at UNC Chapel Hill. And being a Tar Heel myself, I’m really excited to have Arvind and I was going to talk to us about AI and what it means for work and what it means for sales. So welcome Arvind glad to have you here.

Arvind Malhotra
It’s a pleasure being here. And Mark and Michelle.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, we’re super excited about today. Markets sent over some of your notes and some of the information from that class that you went to and I was wishing that I was a Tar Heel.

Mark Donnolo
Doesn’t everybody you know.

Arvind Malhotra
Everybody does.

Mark Donnolo
So so if I had the opportunity, I was at a reunion and they have these great classes at the business school where we go back. And the nice thing about the classes, that they’re not hard on us. So we get to actually go and enjoy class. Like I didn’t really enjoy class that much, I guess as much 30 years ago.

Mark Donnolo
But you did a class on On I in the future of work, which I thought was fantastic and you shared a lot of great ideas. And one of the big ideas I wanted to start with is looking at history to understand maybe what happens in the future. And I always talk about being a student of history and how that helps with innovation.

Mark Donnolo
But I thought your historic perspective was really helpful just to understand major innovations throughout time and what impact they had on on people and work. And maybe that’s a place we can start is just tell us a little bit about the past and and a basis for understanding what might be ahead.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, there’s two schools of time. History has nothing to show us about. And when I was young, I would probably say something like that, that it’s all transformative and disruptive words we love to use. But then there’s a history of great major technological shifts, especially computer technology. Of course, there’s a lot more shifts in farming and automation and farming, textile industry.

Arvind Malhotra
But closer to home, more digital quasi technology. You know, one of the earlier ones one can look on as the mechanical switching in telephone exchanges, which have completely been taken over. And so that’s one one can look at more recent and it’s not so recent anymore but nineties and eighties with the advent of spreadsheets. And then one could also look at manufacturing and you know, see and see machining and all of the computer controlled machining can be computer controlled jobs and automate automation in manufacturing industry.

Arvind Malhotra
What happened so these these are great historical precedents and economists have for us the great news is economists have looked very deeply. So if you looked at telephone switches and phone operators, that was one place where a it was a work where women were predominantly employed. And once the automated automated switching controls came in, there was a shift.

Arvind Malhotra
But it also meant that women either upskilled themselves into more advanced kind of jobs or downscale themselves into less skilled acquiring, but still jobs that were very important and formed a large part of the society. So that’s one. Then along came a few. Fast forward a tad bit and you know, I’ll date myself. But having used that physical excel, right?

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, the the first spreadsheets, as we now call them, and we’ve now just tend to call them Excel. But Excel had precedence, you know, more routine jobs like accountants, bookkeeping, those went away. But financial analysis, investment strategy creators, those jobs came roaring in numbers. And then it’s kind of funny in between if you really think I’ve got H which, you know, if you look at the earliest pictures of ATM being the first ATM came into operation lines outside the door waiting to use the ATM.

Arvind Malhotra
An economist have done studies where the number of bank branches actually increased post adoption of ATMs. So that was interesting. And then, you know, if you really look at, again, economists studying Census Bureau numbers and going as far back as 1950, the only true job that has been eliminated, I’m not sure if you’ve seen one of those recently, but it’s that’s how economists look at that and say only elevator operators.

Arvind Malhotra
Is it true job that’s been eliminated in any form or shape? Transformations occur. People have to move up and down the chain. So there are implications. But there there are implications because we tend to, you know, react to displacement, disruption, those kind of things. But there’s also partial automation and there’s augmentation. And those those tend to be there as well as what we would call job displacement or complete annihilation of jobs that existed.

Mark Donnolo
So people are people are moving up into different roles, but or into maybe adjacent roles, like you talked about the ATMs, but the jobs are maybe becoming a little bit different, but it’s not eliminating the need for those jobs except, like you said, the elevator operator, which I by the way, I did that as a work study job in college.

Mark Donnolo
I was the elevator operator. Talk about a great way to meet people. Yeah, that was a good job. But anyway, that was the one job that went away.

Arvind Malhotra
Yes. Wow. And I wonder if, you know, I haven’t been to New York recently, but are you in doubt? You know, the doormen still may be pushing the buttons for the elevator, as I see in the movies. So I have an experience. Yes. But it definitely impacts there’s transformation. The nature of jobs always evolve, even if the job per se continue to exist, it’s processes change and new jobs emerge.

Arvind Malhotra
And and when automation takes place, new skills are required and those skills required new training, then over time that occurs. But in the meantime, there’s also investment in more automation, which increases, you know, the revenue for producers because it reduces costs and that creates new jobs. And that that happened in textile too. So there’s precedent going as far back as textile and looking at innovations coming in that changed one job, but then created a job requirement for three or other types of jobs.

Michelle Seger
So I know that we’re going to get into today, we’re going to talk about how I can be leveraged to actually make you more efficient, more productive, maybe augment a particular role. But I want to start with the big question that people are asking, which is and it’s just your opinion in jobs that you think like that, like that elevator operator, are there particular jobs that are out there that we think could be completely displaced or eliminated because of generative A.I. or or A.I. enablement?

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, And Mark had heard me say this. You know, if it’s super routine work with lots of information processing that looks like a domain of automation. Robotics are software AI that looks like a domain where it’s it’s the same thing repeated over time. And also a lot of information processing occurring at the same time. And those definitely are strengths of automation in software based.

Arvind Malhotra
You know, repetitious jobs are the demand for robotics. Information processing extends amount of information processing. You know, humans have cognitive boundaries. So if the information is increasing at the rate it is and it requires a lot of processing, that looks to be a domain of automation.

Michelle Seger
So I heard something really interesting today. I was talking to our director of marketing here at Sales Globe, and he plays a lot with an AI. He was part of that beta group for chat. GPT for example, but he was talking about how A.I. and chat up and intelligence like that, that it basically when you when you really put it in context, it ate it eats, if you will information is how he kind of described it to me.

Michelle Seger
So it’s already it’s hungry so it’s already eaten every piece of information that was ever created on the Internet. I mean, going all the way back in time, right, to the early nineties, we say, and then it needed more. So it started to eat, if you will, video, right? They started to engage in video and other things like that.

Michelle Seger
And I just go, Whoa, wow. Right? Because I can’t even imagine synthesizing that type of information. So I think that people can become a little fearful of that, you know? But but what’s your take on all of that?

Arvind Malhotra
Our healthy dose of fear is always good because it prompts you to you know, I wonder every day with the advent of air, how would teaching change the, you know, a healthy dose of respect for technology makes you consider what is it that you do that is truly a value added, skillful activity? Right? That’s the way I look at it.

Arvind Malhotra
Rather than waking up every morning and thinking, yeah, is going to be teaching, so I might as well retire. Right now. I know that there are certain road rules and, you know, repetitive and routine and packaged knowledge can always be taught, but knowledge also is emotive and and decision making, which is still previous humans for now. And I think any I think one can consider what’s the emotional slash decision making role are part of my process of my job and how can I get better at that is this is the way I look at it from thinking of and I know that I can help me quite a lot and I’m already starting to use

Arvind Malhotra
it every day. I’m wowed by it, but I also know that the information it’s eating, as you say, is not unbiased. I mean, it comes at a cost. So there’s that cost of teaching people how to filter information or or verify filtered information. Right. So I always tell my students, you know, because I heard Wikipedia is going to change the educational industry completely and then that came in wins.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah. And people said, oh, should we let them using Why should you not let people use any source of information but trust and verify to collect all that is our job. And then ultimately decision making is our job, our value added and emotional, You know, so I always look at what are these components of any job that humans can get better at because that’s our core strength.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. So that leads us to right the something that we talk to companies about and sales people all the time, which should be what is it right that the one thing or those two or three things that I will never be able to do that humans can? And how do we really think about and leverage who and what we are as we look at, you know, our job today and and the jobs tomorrow and even the advice that you’re probably giving to recent and upcoming graduates.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, And I miss as I get older all the time I would and I forgot to give you my own historical context, which is I immigrated to the United States as a research assistant for I.

Michelle Seger
Oh, interest.

Arvind Malhotra
Free three decades ago. So I look at A.I. as a race between humans and I When I came, humans were winning because of garbage in, garbage out. So you’re like, humans are not going to train you because people because, you know, the humans I was working with were very knowledgeable and they knew that they had the advantage. So using that context, Michel, I my panel, I’m standing just again, a little more centered because at that time we were meeting and I was like, Oh, it’s going to do a lot of repetitious information processing jobs, and it’s doing a lot of emotional and information processing.

Arvind Malhotra
So I just wanted to use my historical context and say my pendulum maybe swinging and saying this out, it’s a race. So we’ve got to win a race for our own value. And we also got to win a race according to some, to beat AI are to control AI and to not doing wrong things. But where do we have advantages, where we win the race?

Arvind Malhotra
And I think that’s what you’re asking me. And I think we win the race. An emotional processing, right? We definitely win the race and information processing. Right now, computers don’t have enough data, intuitive data to make are not intuitive data points to say, well, that would be the optimal decision for something like this. Humans are still needed for that decision making step, and I think those are the two.

Arvind Malhotra
But I always human ingenuity is is our advantage and will that be replicated? I have heard convincing arguments on the other end. I think I’ve also heard convincing arguments that human ingenuity is always going to be there. So without the existential answer, you know, I think there’s the answer of how do we keep leveraging what we have that is so beautiful, Yet we need to trust and verify.

Arvind Malhotra
So it’s been eating all this information, but we are the also the information provider has been providing lots of great information and lots of better information. So that part still there, you’ve got to make the decision as to, well, does this make sense intuitively? What would be the emotional reaction of the person who consuming our service or slash and impact of this decision?

Arvind Malhotra
So I think that way, Michel, that that’s where we can win the race will enter place. I have I’ve been astounded at the ability of AI or as most people think, it’s getting more regenerative AI and doing things that 30 years ago I would have said, well, that’s not going to be possible because that’s right. So I think the creative work I’m starting to see come out of a pretty well generated AI, but I still think there’s a more at work, which is I was just talking to somebody in the hospital, right?

Arvind Malhotra
So I had gone for a checkup and I was talking to my doctor about nursing situation and he was like, What are you talking about? I can’t get enough nurses, you know? And I was reading an article about global war for talent for nursing, right? So you can also look at why because, A, it’s is super exceptional handling emotive work.

Arvind Malhotra
And so I always hold that as a standard of people to do want humans. They could have designed robots do for bedside manners and doing all of this. But, you know, if I’m in the hospital, what do I feel if a robot moves along or a systems put in place to ask me questions in a very robotic voice, and even if I made it, human nurses are quiet and nurses.

Arvind Malhotra
The shortfall of nurses is incredible. The other speech which I was reading, you know, we get carried away by the AI and knowledge work and we should because we do a lot of that work. But the shortfall of pilots in the United States, both in civil airlines as well as the United States Air Force, is astounding then the shortage.

Arvind Malhotra
So there’s all of that stuff that we forget. Yeah. You know, coding. Yes. I mean, I’ve only show you during Logo’s. Great, says Globe logo. Could be made better. Carolina, I love my world, so I hope it never changes. But I think, yes, the creative part still happening. But there’s enough examples of emotive exception handling work, right? So yeah, airplanes can fly themselves, but why do we have a pilot shortfall?

Arvind Malhotra
Because they’re required for that exception handling and making passengers feel safe. So there’s a tradition of, yeah, I do stuff that humans will accept. Yeah, maybe over long term, but that transition has to be managed.

Mark Donnolo
You know, the health care example I think is a good one with with the nursing and the doctors. And I was reading something the other day about the the more humane and motive work of the doctor being the more important thing. But then A.I. being able to take over a lot of the things that you see doctors doing during an appointment, like they’re on their computer, you know, just when you’re with a doctor now they’re on their computer taking notes as you’re talking and you’re wondering, are they listening to me?

Mark Donnolo
Well, they are. So they’re using recordings and AI to transcribe the recordings and then what they call pajama time now where the doctor goes home at night and they end up writing up all their notes. That’s being done by AI. So you take a lot of those data intensive routine processes away, right, and make those more efficient. But yeah, I mean, are we going to ever want to get into a star Trek situation where we’ve got like machines?

Mark Donnolo
I guess we do have machines operating on us, but but machines are actually talking to us, right, to understand us. Maybe not, but but your point on this whole and this has been kind of my bias for quite a while, that the ability to creatively solve problems is still innately human. And that’s one of the few assets that we have that can’t be tied or outsourced.

Mark Donnolo
And so that’s something to build upon in our view. Talk about this model where you get to things like more complex problem solving and higher level decision making that that’s kind of the realm or the domain of humans, which I think as far as we can see right now, that’s that’s the place, right? That’s the place that we can build upon.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. And I heard him mention also discussed like human judgment. Right. So trust and verify. I don’t know if you guys saw an article this a related, but the article this week in San Francisco they’ve got the self-driving cars and I don’t know if you read about that but they said they’re they’re being really rejected by the community and they’ve had a couple of dogs that were hit, apparently.

Michelle Seger
And it’s not using quite the judgment to be able to differentiate necessarily all the time. So self-driving cars am a little tricky. So I think I thought that was just kind of a little visceral and very tangible example, right? When you think about the human is there, the humans not, and what can go right and what can go wrong.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah. So if somebody if you ask somebody who loves Jack, not me, but like Luster Driver, Alfa Romeo, what do you want, a self-driving car or not? So there’s that Yeah creation AT Yeah in experience show activities are exponential activities Yeah right.

Mark Donnolo
Just because you can throw a frozen dinner in the microwave doesn’t mean you just still don’t want to cook, right? You know?

Arvind Malhotra
Well, that’s true. Yeah. Yeah.

Michelle Seger
Isn’t that great for frozen dinners.

Arvind Malhotra
And if you look at big time. So yeah, it’s like social media and tick tock. There’s more videos on how to cook and more amateur cooks. Right? Right.

Mark Donnolo
Ever before.

Arvind Malhotra
So we are still that mission of democratization, of being a chef. Right? So that’s not. That’s right.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. That’s important. Right. We’re still human until further notice, which hopefully we never get.

Michelle Seger
But so feel like I’m the only person who has not been on tech time anyway.

Mark Donnolo
I be the other one. So from one what my daughters send me. So if we swing this around to the world of sales and we look at kind of the evolution of sales and and I think back I think back on like some of those old black and white movies, I think back on It’s a Wonderful Life. And, you know, people would get on a train, the traveling salesperson or salesman in those days, and they would go somewhere.

Mark Donnolo
So it was face to face. And then we learned that we could actually sell through over the phone. So we had insights sales telesales for a while, phone sales, and then it became Tesla web. Well, they actually can be on the phone and be on the on the chatter on the Web at the same time. And then with COVID, we moved more into online, certainly, and especially with COVID, we moved into omni channel, Right.

Mark Donnolo
So I can go to the store, but I can also go home and I can make the purchase on the phone or I can make it on the Internet. And so there have been these evolutionary points in sales. What I’m wondering about is what does all this mean for sales? So if we apply this thinking, we say simpler data intensive decision making analysis, that kind of thing.

Mark Donnolo
Where does that apply in sales and what do you see happening, I guess overall in sales in terms of maybe I augmenting what people are doing?

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah. And, you know, sales are still very emotive. So I think it’s it’s a very unusual activity because I’m biased towards sales because I still, you know, I find my mother still watching QVC and I was enamored like, wow, QVC is still gold. And it’s actually I read some statistics QVC has grown even more over the past decade.

Arvind Malhotra
So it’s each of these disruptive is the only makes QVC is in and I don’t see a robotic element selling stuff on QVC. So back to your question. All levity aside, I think it’s a unique job because it has such emotive decision making component to it, yet it has such information and processing component to it. Right? So it looks a perfect place for augmentation.

Arvind Malhotra
And to me, maybe I have biased glasses. Almost all these high end knowledge skill activities have both components and I always think, wow, if we could completely leverage lead generation, our lead validation or our pricing optimization, you know, these sound to be very these activities where there’s lots of upfront informational processing. But in the end it’s always about a decision, emotive decision making, right?

Arvind Malhotra
So that’s the humans in that process in a while. Why not let upselling, cross-selling? I always look at those as, wow, they got me that last element. And I’ll give you an example. I went to this restaurant and I work fast or somebody else was paying for it and they said, You want to eat this pasta and it’s expensive, but why don’t you take the tasting menu?

Arvind Malhotra
And then this person went on to give us five reasons why we should have the tasting menu, and I ended up eating the tasting menu. It was about four times more expensive for the person who’s paying. And yet we were like, While we’re over, we’re in this profession. You know, one was a consulting one, you being educated and we’re like, we fell for a sales.

Arvind Malhotra
So isn’t that amazing that, you know, when we let our guard down and we don’t trust this trust is this activity. It’s still amazing how QVC is successful and how upsell and cross-sell. So again, going back to upselling, cross-sell, rationality, all of this would says don’t get up salt for us. So right. It’s your consumer surplus but yet how many times we do that right so that human with a B2B right so people go B2B sales are different I’m like no humans are still human.

Arvind Malhotra
It’s still human. So educate your consumers. Get as educated by air or online tools or whatever they want to get educated. But that last impact of turning them into a revenue potential is a human proving to me, right? So that’s such a emotive even in the age of full information or transparency and pure purely true information, you still have that last step of emotive experience show process that is requires a lot of decision making because you want to love, help and decision making.

Arvind Malhotra
And so that’s that’s again in a sales person’s privy and you both are experts. So I only read my book, but in having watched so many movies on, you know, always be closing and you know, that always be closing also means, you know, that is where you are helping somebody make a very emotive decision and making them trust that they made the right decision.

Mark Donnolo
Now, you may you just pulled up a really interesting, I guess, mental model there. You said something like in the earlier stages of the sales process, I’m kind of, you know, paraphrasing, so like lead generation or maybe even backing further out to understanding who we should even be focusing on in the market to lead generation, etc., etc., that those things are more data intensive and maybe more suited for AI.

Mark Donnolo
Then you get further along in the sales process closer to the close, that becomes more emotive, more human. So maybe there’s some kind of rough correlation there.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah. All right, Mark. Very well. That’s exactly how stated. That’s very well put.

Mark Donnolo
I can I can think of one spot our where somewhere as we get closer to the human where I could be really helpful which would be when you’re looking at it you’re sitting in the classic sales meeting and everybody’s going through their, their CRM pipeline and they’re like, Oh yeah, this is going to close, you know, and this and I could probably tell you will, based on all of our data, this only has a 27% chance of closing in the next 30 days, whatever it is.

Mark Donnolo
And, you know, forget all the fluff and pomp and circumstance is not going to close. Jerry, you know, So I could see it being very helpful there to kind of flesh out pipelines so we get cleaner, leaner pipelines as well.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, this resource reallocation, you know, I see a I being biased and I see humans being biased. I see this power of us crossing out each other’s biases. Right. I could be super biased in processing all this information and the most rationalistic decision making form, but humans are very emotive, not rational decision makers. Right?

Arvind Malhotra
So that final checkpoint of, you know, while all the data might say this is an account you should pursue or should not pursue, my intuitive appeal, which I have not been able to yet quantified into data, says that that’s in account. Maybe in long run we should continue pursuing, even if it’s not profitable at this point, are that probability is low right now.

Arvind Malhotra
But I think that probability can turn in our favor. And this is again, your profession. But, you know, the complementary effects are immense, right? So it frees up humans to do what we’re really good, at least sales, which is that decision making, intuitive thinking in a creative thinking, all of those forms can then be layered on top of the rational decision model, right?

Mark Donnolo
So when we think about and we’re just working with a client over the past couple of months on a on a question like this about lead generation, and they said, you know, the people they get on the phones and we watch and they get on the phones, they make calls and they’re reaching out to prospects. And their their hit rate is really low.

Mark Donnolo
It’s laborious. They don’t like to do it. In fact, those are the those are the first people to schedule sales interviews with us because they would rather be doing anything than being on the phone making those call calls. But but the leaders of this sales organization, they’re kind of old school. They couldn’t understand why the cold calling wasn’t working and why they shouldn’t just be doing more of it.

Mark Donnolo
And we’re saying, well, really what’s happening now is it’s more about putting knowledge into the market and creating preference and becoming an authority in your particular space and supplementing those people, calling out if they’re going to still call out with with better information. And but, you know, if your point is right, which I think it is, a lot of that cold calling could go by the wayside because it’s just not going to be effective anymore.

Mark Donnolo
Customers are going to have information sooner. And it could be something our world where we say, well, actually what we’re going to do is we’re going to use AI to come up with better thought leadership on our particular space. If we’re a logistics company, is an example. Okay, how do we get the best thought leadership and logistics and what’s going to resonate with our customers in the beverage industry or whatever industry?

Mark Donnolo
Right. And that might be a a use of that that replaces largely cold calling.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah. And I’ve thought off my own profession that way too. Maybe it applies to sale, you know, rather than a cold push, a warm pull or contact service. So cold pushes like what you were talking about where it says one pull is let the consumer demand but then deliver the want along with it. The emotive part which makes them trust that they they pull the right service from you.

Arvind Malhotra
Mm hmm. Mm hmm. That that’s. I think that’s how I think about my own profession.

Mark Donnolo
Quite so. So we got the the lead gen, the data intensive stuff up there, and then we have this whole laborious thing in the middle of nurturing customers, nurturing prospects. So they, they responded to us, but it’s dragging out. And how do we keep that going and how do we figure out versus having salespeople periodically call and just check in or whatever it might be or send emails?

Mark Donnolo
Well, what’s the best nurturing process for the types of customers of the segments and the buyers that we’re talking to? What kind of information, what should what should we be saying? Not leaving that up to chance? And maybe as we’re seeing, even with LinkedIn right now, maybe AI is actually taking the place of the sales person and actually becoming the the personality of that salesperson to do that nurturing that becomes very labor intensive and data intensive.

Michelle Seger
Wow. That’s interesting.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah.

Michelle Seger
What do you think about that?

Arvind Malhotra
Are I like that. I think and that goes back to Michelle, that refrain from think that the emotive part cannot be done by the AI. Right there is there’s also base level emotive part, but then there’s higher level emotive but then base level creative work and then there’s a higher level creative work. And I think that’s where, you know, that’s the next phase for us to take each profession and distinguish the base and higher level in each one of our professions and then focusing on honing the higher level.

Michelle Seger
You know, particularly in an uncertain sales environment with our arguably, at least from our clients perspective, I can say that we are we are in an uncertain sales environment. And what we’re seeing are much longer sales cycles to just current current state, like Mark’s was discussing, as companies are trying to figure out like what to do next. And I see a lot of fatigue across sales organizations too, you know, because it’s like, oh, so if you could think through, right, if you could leverage high even for what’s the right information and how can they help with the nurturing of that sale?

Michelle Seger
And then your effort and energy is really is really focused on, you know, helping them make that final decision when they’re ready to make that decision? Mm hmm. I’m just hearing about a lot of burnout across different industries. So I’ll bring up one example. I’m I’m speaking at a a conference that’s aimed at as senior living industry, which is a huge growing industry.

Michelle Seger
Right. When you think about baby boomers, which will be the largest segment of society that will need on some type of everything from independent to full service care living. They are talking about how the sales cycle is really being drawn out because costs are higher right now. There’s still continued concerns about inflation, recession and lingering in the background a little bit is still about what happened during the pandemic within the senior living, within segments of senior living and people not really having access to their family, their loved ones.

Michelle Seger
So if if we could leverage, I would think, some technology to help on the upfront qualification, let’s say responding back. My understanding is people stay on waitlists for a couple of years and that means they’re not ready to go in yet, but they’re waiting until they are ready to go in. So someone needs to nurture those.

Mark Donnolo
Should we be getting on one of those waitlist now?

Michelle Seger
I’m not getting on.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah.

Michelle Seger
No. So I really live and I’m planning on being one of those centenarians that, you know, it’s going to be a high performer living at home.

Arvind Malhotra
That it’s perfect.

Michelle Seger
Anyway.

Arvind Malhotra
I don’t know. I love your analogy, but yeah, you know, not losing focus as long, you know, cycles, all this come and go and then when Yeah, when this cycle ends, there is going to be all of pent up demand. It always is out of pandemic, out of recessions. Economies always got stronger. So, you know, but nurturing as you’re you’re correct.

Arvind Malhotra
Word is nurturing. Right. Many times we have to nurture our students, too, because employment cycles also change pretty badly. But we got to nurture them by giving them skills, telling them if they’re waiting for a job. They’ve been asked to wait for their jobs, what to do in the meantime, what skills to do, you know. So those are I love you are nurturing.

Arvind Malhotra
So then we may maybe in a buyer’s have to be nurtured. They can be dropped. And how do you nurture them is a big aspect of why they should, you know, giving them alerts as to, hey, maybe this is the time you start to think of that thing you have held off on producing for a while.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. So I want to ask just a practical tactical question for sales leaders to the individual salesperson, front line salesperson, how can I begin to rethink? You know, we talk about rethinking the future of sales, how I can leverage, whether it’s, you know, part of a company initiative or not. So a lot of companies, they haven’t figured out how to leverage AI, Right.

Michelle Seger
But yet it’s all out there. How could I begin to leverage it to help me do my job, to be more efficient, more effective, and have a better relationship start to better relationships with my clients? I’d love to hear your take on that, both of you. I’d like to hear your take on that.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, I think one of those is just like I do, and I won’t tell you my age, but yeah, how could I use my all these tools now there are gazillion tools, right? So which tools could I use to automate the most boring parts of my job, or at least value add and playing with that, right? So instead of being fearful of what’s coming sometimes, then you play with technology.

Arvind Malhotra
Yesterday I was trying to generate a logo and with my son and I told him to teach me. We looked at four or five different tools to generate logos or graphics for my PowerPoint, and I was like, Well, this is good. This is terrible. Yeah, Just learning how to work with this is the right period to instead of being fearful, to learn how to work with AI to do things that would make your life very personal or professional easier.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, right. So being early in that in a prompt engineering, I always tell everybody, learn to be a prompt engineer. And prompt engineering is about asking the right question. How, how long have you talked about that and the skills to ask your client the right questions? You’re right. And that builds trust and you get it easier. Stay away.

Arvind Malhotra
It’s I ask the question the right way to get your answers. It’s a perfect time to learn how to use a Yeah, just asking great questions. I think I’m saying IQ right your your emotional quotient. How do you increase your emotional quotient? How do you get better at We all have severe weaknesses and if we think is coming for us, what are the things we can distinguish ourselves?

Arvind Malhotra
There’s enough research. You know, people say, Oh, I’m an extrovert, so I’ll be a good salesperson and I’m an introvert. I’ll never be good sales. But those have been falsified, right? So especially our kids and their generations, Yeah, they all have unique skills. That’s one of the most promising things. And so each one of them tries to not hide their uniqueness.

Arvind Malhotra
They try to highlight their uniqueness. And I think that’s something I’m learning. I mean, my my students ask me, what can they learn to increase your emotional quotient of how you interact with people using what you’re really good at? I mean, this internal extrovert type type B, these are very old school boxes and the next generation doesn’t have these boxes at all.

Arvind Malhotra
They’re just they embrace this, their uniqueness, and then they sell their uniqueness and they leverage their uniqueness. And I think and I’m learning that myself at this age, it’s the what’s what makes me unique in a classroom, Right? What’s what can I embrace? Are, are fun and, and what can I do with a I take away all the stuff I don’t like.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah yeah. I mean that’s a great point. On the uniqueness are of a I’m thinking back to business school and how we all thought we had to develop all these specific skill sets to be ready for the job market, which we did in a lot of ways. But the reality was, you know, I came from art school, undergrad into business school.

Mark Donnolo
I wasn’t going to be nearly as good at some of those things as the engineers were, Right? I mean, just wasn’t my strong point. But and I think we’ve evolved a lot over the past, I’ll say three decades since I graduated, where recognizing our uniqueness actually a strength. Right. And so I love that idea of of of play that up and understand what it is.

Mark Donnolo
And that becomes something that’s really, really important. We’re not we’re not all trying to be, you know, drones and fit a certain mold. Yeah, yeah.

Arvind Malhotra
And next generations really, you know, my students have taught me that they embrace their uniqueness, right? They’re not embarrassed by it. It’s not that something. You know how introverts always we felt had to hide that they’re introverts, right? Yeah. I am an introvert, but I have. I have analytical skills. You will never have decision making power. You know, I love that part is to take a step back and, you know, always look at what’s unique about me.

Arvind Malhotra
That would be the perfect fit for this job. And if there’s nothing that I need a new job.

Mark Donnolo
Yep, Yep. I want to ask you a question. Or based on something you said earlier about having bias like humans have bias. And then an observation Michelle and I made the other day with one of our teammates that had had a I write an article and then he was testing the information in that article. And I then said, Well, a lot of this was not true, and it basically filled in a lot of blanks to create this article.

Michelle Seger
It did? Yeah. Said I made this up.

Mark Donnolo
So there’s some of this I made up, but it didn’t. It’s like a bad kid, right? He didn’t tell. It didn’t tell him until he actually forced the question. So. So my question for you are, is how is AI becoming smarter or how is it going to become smarter? Because, you know, now it can pass an exam for some colleges, but, you know, just barely some it fails, but it’s got to become becoming smarter.

Mark Donnolo
When does it how does that happen over time?

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah. We talk about this is so funny, Mark, because we you know, when we talk about chatbots, we talk to cats as if they’re humans. And then we’re talking about A.I. being biased and humans being biased. And we forget that is biased because it was made by humans and trained AI. Inherently, it’s our own bias that is replicating and amplifying itself.

Arvind Malhotra
Right? So I think the answer is in there that verification of information to me is super important right? To get carried away on wrong information can really, really wreck a lot of good stuff. So this verification of information is is going to be very super critical. Right. And and I think that’s where, again, one of our strengths is to use AI to verify our information.

Arvind Malhotra
Right. To fill our holes and and to ask for sources and just our to make it look at sources. I just saw how to write prompts, which is you make it look at things you think are trusted rather than, you know, you can constrict its brain eyes brain by telling it to look at reputable and and restrictive sources for that information and writing a prompt to get do your job by looking at trusted and verified information right is a good way of removing our own biases.

Mark Donnolo
It’s almost like a just a person. It’s basically saying, well, if you if you look at this verified information, you’re going to have a certain point of view versus, you know, your what you’re seeing or watching other things that maybe are on the fringe or whatever. And so, yeah, your your point of view is going to be based on the information that you’re you’re taking in.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah. Its greatest strength is human weakness and its greatest or its greatest weakness is human weakness and its greatest strength is human trends. So, you know, at the end of the day, I think the way I look at it, it’s reflecting us. So hopefully societies will transform into better societies just by being reflective.

Mark Donnolo
So if you look at this from a CEO, we talking about salespeople. If you look at this from a sales leadership standpoint and say, I’m a chief sales officer or chief revenue officer and I’m hearing all about AI, what should I be thinking about? Unless I’m planning on retiring in a year or two? What should I be thinking about for my organization ahead rather than kind of shying away from AI or just kind of pushing it on to somebody else?

Mark Donnolo
What should I be thinking about strategically, about how to take my sales process or how we work with customers, or how our coverage model works and thinking, you know, where we’re might I play in there? Not not necessarily knowing the answers, but like you said, what questions should they be asking to improve their go to market models and their sales organization?

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, I I’m going to try Mark in the show. I think it goes back to the same framework I use all the time. Is what’s repeatable in my job and what requires a lot of information processing. And I’m my job are those who I manage right and how can I leverage AI for those things and then how do I tell who I manage or myself as to what distinguishes me or what distinguishes the process by me being part of the process, Right?

Arvind Malhotra
And if it doesn’t distinguish itself by being me being part of the process, then it is where I have to leverage it. The most. I also, you know, this is very stupid, but it’s simple and effectively stupid is take some time to play with it. Some of are very overhyped tools. The reality of the tools is very distinctly different from the the hype of the tools.

Arvind Malhotra
So, you know, sometimes you just have to look at the tool because if somebody tells you they, I’m going to be able to use this tool to do this and this and this. Having that ability to say no, I don’t really think so. But if it’s price optimization, I’d look at a tool. I mean, yeah, to be more concrete in your world just to see what can help me make decisions better for my clients and play with those tools.

Arvind Malhotra
I mean, it’s always such a great idea, any tool for that matter, to create a new logo because it tests, it shows you how is thinking in different fields.

Mark Donnolo
Right? Right. You know, take your logo example. I’ll just take my old art school background. When I look at AI creating logos, what scares me about that is it’s kind of like back in the days I did myself back in the eighties when we’ve had our first Mac pluses, the little boxes sat on the on the desk, the little black and white screen.

Mark Donnolo
Everybody’s like, well, desktop automation, you know, everybody’s going to be able to do newsletters, everybody’s going to be all do their own advertisements and all this stuff now. So the need for design firms is going to go away, right? And it’s sort of like that saying, Well, hey, I can develop logos. But what we found with all of that is just because you give somebody, you know, a hammer or give somebody a loaded gun in terms of desktop automation doesn’t mean they know what to do with it.

Mark Donnolo
Right. So what happened was a whole generation of the most horrendous design that you’d ever seen because people just started. People now have the ability to do their own design work. Right? It was it was horrific. Right. And so I see I see air generated logos now, and I’m like, okay, what’s the concern behind that logo? Yeah, I can I can mix and match and throw stuff into a blender and come up with different images.

Mark Donnolo
But what problem is it trying to solve in terms of what we’re communicating in the corporate voice? Whatever those things might be? So I think that’s just an observation on logos itself. But, but it also talks to your point about the emotional intelligence and the humanity of understanding what’s really going to communicate or what’s going to really get across to people.

Mark Donnolo
So I think to play on top of your answer to are what I would do if I were a sales leader as well. I would take your criteria and I’d probably break apart the different components of our go to market strategy. So I’d probably take the sales process all the way from segmentation and targeting and what customers are looking at to lead generation to, you know, nurturing, to closing the sale to implementation, whatever it might be.

Mark Donnolo
And I would ask those questions about what’s data intensive, what could I actually supplement in an unbiased way? Where do we still need to have the human element? And I’d probably look at that across the coverage model as well in terms of the roles that we’re using, because some of those roles it might be and companies are already doing this right, maybe certain customer care roles to face to face roles to, to certainly online, you know, Internet purchasing, Internet information acquisition, a lot of that can be automated, some of it can’t.

Mark Donnolo
But I start to break apart kind of those different components and ask those go through with your questions and ask those. And then I certainly wouldn’t know the answers, but I would know the answers I was trying to find. Right. And then put the right people on that. But but I think your point about playing with the tools is a big one because I think just the fear of it and shunning away from it is is worse.

Mark Donnolo
Actually understanding what it really is at this point in its development.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, it is it is a you know because the tools also help you map what you said Right so you find the reality is not where you think it is then you certainly find we as humans are really good at this and so you start to separate that in the map. It says this is the it still is part of emotional intelligence and it’s not.

Arvind Malhotra
And over time, things will shift, too. I like that. The Michelle response to Michelle, rather they’ll take over or not. That’s we perhaps won’t be here but not to answer existential questions, but to say, well, there’s a way to analyze what’s the privacy of humans and our strengths and what’s good with AI and how do you figure it out unless you play with it?

Arvind Malhotra
Because again, back to your local thing. I played with the logo six different. All I wanted them to do was to make a graphic image which shows business disruption and I couldn’t get it to do it right. So I got my son to come help me. I was like, He’s like, Why don’t you put fire? I’m like, No sign.

Arvind Malhotra
You can’t put fire for disruption. What about explosion? I was like, No, that’s not disruption. And so at the end of the day, I gave up like, I’ll just put the word disruption and resonate better with people than trying to find a graphic for a PowerPoint slide.

Mark Donnolo
Right? Because what you brought up there was a complex kind of emotional problem. And when you say business disruption, well, yeah, you have kind of the immediate things of what things are disruption or destructive. But then you have the you have metaphors like what is destruction, what is disruption, and what are metaphors for that that are positive metaphors.

Mark Donnolo
And so, yeah, I suppose I could do that at some point. But those those are very human questions.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, I yeah.

Michelle Seger
When I think about how salespeople can start to play in this space, a couple of things come to mind, right? Well, when I think about, oh gosh, I’m going out there looking at new customers, right? I’m out there looking at what the opportunities are, and I’ve got this lead list. But having it help you do that research and gathering the information for you across, you know, because if you think about what that I ate right we talked about everything that at eight anything from who knows a CEO’s YouTube video channel that you may not know exists to their LinkedIn profiles and any other articles that are out there about the company, recent M&A, whatever that

Michelle Seger
might look like. But to be able to synthesize that and help you understand the story of the company can help you understand what your buyer may be solving for again, so you’re not asking to solve the problem, but what you’re doing is leveraging it to gather you information, save you some time. I can see that being really helpful.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. And in what you’re talking about within that, you said the story. Your story is something that’s human too. It’s like, right then all this information, how do I find the story of if we’re going to be with the CEO, the story of the CEO, not just in terms of her resume or his resume, but what have been the challenges, the drivers, the things that are going to be meaningful as that person looks ahead?

Mark Donnolo
Right. So we can do a better job helping them. So that’s that’s a human thing.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, you nailed it. I mean, I asked somebody.

Michelle Seger
Oh, go ahead.

Arvind Malhotra
Sorry. Michelle Guthrie. Michelle, sorry.

Michelle Seger
I was just going to say, I think what I’m hearing is that sales are people aren’t aren’t dead. We’re not out of the equation. And yet anyway, we’re not out of the park.

Arvind Malhotra
Not that. Yeah.

Michelle Seger
Well, you know what I mean. I think that sales you know, I was recently talking to a sales leader of a global manufacturing technology firm, and they were one of the first companies that made a decision to get out and see their clients as the pandemic as as some of those restrictions were lifting. And they came back and said, boy, what we’re hearing is the person who shows up, the one that looks them in the eye, that they’re building the trust with and can tell them, you know, why their product and service is going to help them solve their problem are the ones that are winning the deals.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, Yeah. So I still think the human element is very important.

Mark Donnolo
In the showing up piece. Yes, it’s important to build the human connection. I’m also thinking, Michelle, based on what you’re saying about this idea of understanding what’s going on within the customer, if we’re talking about kind of a two dimensional flat world and we’re in we’re we’re doing this right, We’re on Zoom calls and we’re we’re connecting on email and that type of thing.

Mark Donnolo
That’s one way of gathering data that I assume I could handle. But if you picture art as an example, you go in and you’re a consultant and you’re walking into the client’s office and you’re observing what’s going on in the hallways and you’re seeing how people are working and you’re going on a customer call and you’re watching how the customer interacts with the salesperson.

Mark Donnolo
Unless you have like some kind of eye on your shoulder, I don’t know how it gathers that kind of information, that kind of knowledge, at least in this generation that we’re talking about, that would be very hard to do in a three dimensional world.

Arvind Malhotra
Yeah, And that isn’t that what everybody is realizing? Because I had students that took me virtually, and then they took me in class and they said, You’re so much better in class. It’s like, Oh, find my friend. And I think that was the power of being part of their emotional decision making about, yeah, I am part of their emotional requirement from education.

Arvind Malhotra
I am not critical that I realized, but I am part of their emotional journey and and, and so is and this is interesting. I didn’t want to let this go because I asked somebody who’s my mentor and he’s he says things that are so brilliantly simple. I said, What’s our job? He said, Selling our selling knowledge through storytelling.

Arvind Malhotra
That’s like, wow, it’s storytelling and selling. That’s that. That’s right. I think that’s I mean, he’s such a good storyteller. I’ll always be terrible. But then I was like, Oh, maybe I’m a standup, so I’ll tell jokes.

Mark Donnolo
I think you’re a great storyteller, and I think that’s one of the reasons we’re talking today, because I sat in your class are of and I’m like, Man, this is this is great. It’s a fantastic story. Plus, plus, you’re funny. So that’s even better.

Arvind Malhotra
Than might be. You could tell that to my kids. So.

Mark Donnolo
Zarb, as we’re finishing up here, what one piece of advice would you give to a sales leader on a I and what they should be thinking about?

Arvind Malhotra
Verify one word, use then verify and wow. And get comfortable. I think get comfortable. Change is very uncomfortable. Winners and losers are governed by who gets comfortable with change.

Mark Donnolo
Right? Right. Excellent. Well, thank you. This has been a great conversation. How can people get in touch with you? Are of I. You’re at Keenan Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill. Is there a way they can connect with what you’re doing or ask you questions?

Arvind Malhotra
Absolutely. I think being an educator at public University, I’m the most accessible person. You just have to type my name in the Google. You’ll get my phone, my email, and also access to my research articles and research topics. So it’s all there in the Google bar.

Michelle Seger
Okay, All.

Mark Donnolo
Great. Arvind Malhotra, thanks for joining us and we really appreciate you being on the Rethinks Deals podcast and look forward to talking to you some more.

Arvind Malhotra
Absolutely. Thank you, Mark and Michelle. Thank you.

Mark Donnolo
Thank you.