The Future of Sales Automation

0:00Welcome to the AI for Sales Podcast, hosted by best selling off their keynote speaker and sales innovator Chad Vermeister. This is where the future of selling comes alive. Exploring how AI transforms customer experiences, drives sales outcomes, and reshapes the way we connect, competes and close business. Whether you're from sales, marketing and technology leaders on the front lines of AI for sales, sharing strategies, successes, and the skills you'll need to thrive in an AI-powered world. As Dr. Joel Leban, marketing and sales professor at the Johns Hopkins University Carey School of Business said best in Chad's book, AI for Sales, how artificial intelligence is changing sales. In sales, time kills deals. In AI for Sales, AI kills time. Thanks to our sponsors bdr.ai, nooks.ai, and zoom info that go to market intelligence platform that accelerates revenue growth. Want an introduction to one of our sponsors? Go now to www.sdr.ai-forward-slash-intro,

1:05and Chad will personally connect you with the right person at any of these companies, the one who can make a difference for your business. And remember, in traditional sales, time kills deals. But in AI for Sales, AI kills time. Get ready to learn, level up, and lead the AI revolution in sales. This is the AI for Sales Podcast. Let's dive in. Welcome back to another AI for Sales Podcast. I'm Chad Burmese for your host, and I am with Eric Bauer, who's the head of sales at origami, an AI prospecting platform that you don't have to be a technical expert to yield or wield. Before origami, Eric sold stone fruit at the farmers market, and before that, he was scaling early-stage sales for novel microchip. No val microchip. Is that what it is? No val? No, novel microchips. Anything new? Yeah.

2:07Noval microchip. And then recycling robots. So he's kind of been from technical to non-technical and back and everything there in between. So I'm happy to have you on the show today, Eric. I can't wait to learn more about what origami is up to. Welcome. Thank you, Chad. Yeah, it's an awesome to have you. Well, I'll tell you, I used to work in the financial district as we talked about second mission. So I think we decided that my office was one block away from where you guys are, which is right in the heart of San Francisco where everything comes to life. So I'm excited to visit out there one of these days. Let me tell you, it is ridiculous. What is happening in this city? We just had a 17-year-old at the office who is a part-time founder consultant orchestrating go-to-market workflows for other founders here. One of our customers when he signed on was a 16-year-old venture backed founder. Now we celebrated his 17th birthday with him. So there's some pretty incredible people doing crazy things.

3:10There's also a lot of opportunity for those that have seen it before to tell us, you know, what we're missing out on. Wow, that's really interesting. I haven't thought of it from that perspective. My son's 24 graduated from mines here in Colorado. I thought that was young at 24, but it turns out 16 is the new 24. Wow, the power of AI. When you put it in the hands of the right people, they can build anything and create. Let's dig in, Eric. I love to ask the first question around AI transformation and from the customer experience. There's the 16-year-old 17-year-old building the power of the tools, but then there's the person who gets to experience it on the other side. If you wear the customer's hat for a minute, what value do you think they're experiencing as a result of your technology? So one, I'm glad you ask it like that. I think that's always to try to lens we have on our own prospecting is what does this feel like on the receiving end?

4:19And the number one thing is more noise because AI has made it so much easier to spin up different outreach campaigns. It started with just email automations to have dynamic first name and then even more complex emails and then texts and then linked in DMs even. And then now we got AISDRs calling you up on the phone asking you about things and then soon it will be videos and who knows maybe one day there'll be a hologram chat knocking door to door. So I think from the buyer's perspective or from anyone who's evaluating technology or product, there's just so much more noise to sift through that it's becomes much more challenging to evaluate what are the problems I need to be focused on and your brain kind of starts to filter out more and more calls messages things that you maybe would have considered five years ago, ten years ago when there was less outreach out there. That's right. My son who I mentioned graduated from mines, he can read a message like we were we were shopping cars.

5:24And so I would get a text and they would say, Hey, when can you and the misses come by? And my son was like, Dad, that's obviously an AI that you're talking to because they couldn't even take the time to mail merge the misses name because they didn't ask it to me during the sales process. But for someone like me, I didn't necessarily sniff that out from my all the way. So I think we we up level our ability to understand winner, we being duped so to speak. And the, you know, we have to get better and better as consumers. So yeah, very interesting. So so obviously to frame the conversation about your product and services, you do not provide the sequencing technology. As you said, you provide the data, the best data that's out there. Tell our audience a little bit more about origami. Yeah, so this came to be because there's a lot of companies out there trying to solve the automatic messaging, the AI FDR, the can you automate the entire stack of what an entry level fresh call a grad who's hungry who's just trying to get meetings on the calendar.

6:37There's a lot of interest in that, you know, P firm or a smart owner would think, wow, like, yeah, this should just be able to we check every box and have the messages sent. And for a few industries, it did work if you have a very, very wide tam and you're selling a higher turn service, like a lower cost, but for many industries, what ended up happening is poor messaging that didn't really resonate with the user and just led you to burning through your tam with people who don't really want to reply anymore. On the other end of that spectrum, there are folks out there developing very complex technical workflows to find niche targeted relevant people. So going on the flip side of there's so much noise out there. I want to make sure everyone I messes is very targeted. So that's things like not just someone announcing they have a funding round, but maybe it's a recent funder who was since, you know, check that they're recent. Last company they have actually got funded and then check their VCs of that last company and see if it's a match with you have and have all these extra details and the tools out there to do that require an engineer, at least one engineer to orchestrate these things.

7:47We built origami to be the bridge between those things, the ability to come up with the most technical workflows that can have very targeted messaging, but done by the layman as a salesperson really can just describe who they want and not understand all the technical data pipelines to it. So that's the niche we're building for that we fit into. Okay, that's excellent and it seems like there's it's not a crowded space right now because it does require some some great resources on the back end, but a customer viewpoint that makes it simple for the user. So it's exciting time to to be bringing that out any case studies that you can share with us, you know, even if you didn't have to share the company name, but can you talk about how you plug this kind of plumbing into an organization and what value did they see. Yeah, yeah, I can share a major financial services firm that sells terminals. Their sales team was hasn't been armed with new sales tech in a while, you can imagine there's lots of restrictions and their prospecting is mainly around the events and the media that they host and they have a high tier brand so they care very much about what they say in their research.

9:02They were doing these cold emails to executives at target accounts and they would deeply research, okay, where is this as this is exactly speaking, you know, what is going on in the earnings call, whereas this is a tentative events or talked about, you know, recent initiatives are they hiring someone one of their managers for a specific role. So we combined all of those different signals they were either researching or didn't have time to research package that for them. So now they get spent, you know, minutes sending out hundreds of emails instead of 10 to 20 hours a week on their entire thing and that email campaign got 50 to 20% positive reply rate for them, which is really high for a generally cold email campaign. I will say their red name is very high, but the the gist of the time saving and the return on that was an instant win for that and we sense expanded to multiple regional teams in that company. That's amazing. Yeah, we're seeing similar kinds of things and I know we're just cracking the tip of the iceberg on what's possible because we're not taking in all of the possible feeds.

10:05I mean, you could go to LinkedIn and read it and you could go to the internet and the 10 queue and the 10k and the in your report and and and and and and and. And there's no way that a company with some technical resources like ours is going to build all of the piping to all of those different signals and feeds. So that's exciting that you're able to deliver that to customers at scale. I mean, 0.5 to 1% for a cold email is pretty average these days. And if you can get into the 15% level, you know, that's a that's a significant return on investment for probably not a lot of costs. Yeah, yeah, and it's I think the the winner in this space, regardless of whether it's origami will be the most dynamic as the style of outreach changes are where to find the information changes, right. There's a lot out there with just the signals out the box, you know, someone just raised their CV say here's the list that you can reach out to and that starts to get noisy and then the next things like scraping the SEC for some form and maybe the next things we're looking at.

11:12Parents that both would stand for their child's birth certificate right when you're born to prospect them, but I'm exaggerating a bit, but. Yeah, right, but what the next thing, there's a friend of mine who I just visited in Virginia and her campaign continues to be the number one connection rate for LinkedIn outreach. I'll share the secret sauce right here it's because she's a faith based person and if she connects to people who are in faith based groups on LinkedIn. Hey, we have a similar connection and it she gets a 87 to 89% connection rate not reply rate, but connection and if you can keep the funnel wide at the top. Then as it cascades down when the ask comes at some point in a cadence on a LinkedIn outreach, then you're going to get more if you have 87% compared to the typical 15 to 20% connection rate.

12:14So just those kinds of tweaks can give you 500% or in this case what we're talking here about 1500% greater reply rate. Yeah, those little bits of relevancy, I got a quick juice one, too. I mean, it's just the first name. So it came from friend Matt, fruit handler, he says he does for all the S he manages SDR teams. And just cross reference in our book of business SDR first name plus any lead like on this target account book of business, same first name. If match then just add in that extra dynamic like great name or some silly little comment. And just those little things can really move the needle, you'd be surprised. And so the territory based alignment of yesterday here could become a thing of the past for SDRs and BDRs as you can start to get more sophisticated in the name matching personality matching between a ease and their buyer, I think, becomes a thing at some point not too far from now.

13:15But what about misconceptions in AI because obviously if you're deploying AI for customers and presumably using it internally for your sales team, what misconceptions do you find out there? So AI is not ready to spin up a full lead list from a single prompt without any intervention. There is so much human context decision making reasoning that's useful to really get down to what a strong relevant and timely list is. And that requires at least some feedback loops of, okay, is this right? Why isn't that right? And that's why a lot of the single prompt to just spin up an email campaign from, hey, I'm looking to go after a series of founders that have problems with, I don't know, their sales force instance because we're like a connection to that. We're not quite there yet. And I would encourage anyone to think deeper about like, or be prepared to take those deeper steps on tuning and doing iterations.

14:18Yeah, yeah. Well, and it seems to me the guppie, you know, coming from an informatica lens, the governance, the master data management, the integration from all the different sources. It's just not in the public GPT's probably for a reason. And so that's where companies like yours that have incorporated all of those kinds of things eliminate hallucinations, right? If you said, build me a list of 5,000 founders of companies by number 50, it's going to be like, wait, why did you ask me for it? You wanted popsicle makers in Texas, right? The context. Yeah, that's excellent. I love it. I think you're right. And I think that's on purpose. I think if it was, if it was all, if all the power was put into the GPT to say, yep, we can solve everything. Then that could cause some mass disruption in the world. And I think that the delivery of some of these are probably being postponed so that there isn't mass disruptions, my guess.

15:27That's a whole different podcast. We can talk about that about the potential. But yeah, it's an interesting topic for sure. I think there's a little bit of spoon feeding going on. I'm trying to write my next book called AI for sales 2.0 upload all 250 podcasts that I've recorded over five years. And it does a great job of chaptering and all kinds of things quote, but when it comes to all right, let's go ahead, give me the book. Well, about 48 hours and we'll give you chapter one for 3000 words. And I'm like, oh, wow, okay, got it. It's good to take a little bit longer than I was used to a year ago with this technology. Yeah, we're in, it's an interesting time. But that's where companies like yours matter more and more because the clay that comes out of the box in a standard $20 a month, Gemini or GPT or Grock. I think that starts to become the magic secret sauce is in how you use the clay. And that's where companies like your organization matter more and more in today's environment.

16:34What about balancing the AI automation and maintaining a personal patch? How do you do that? So Chad, I got a good story for this one. Over the summer, we were drowning in and linked in DMs and bound content. We had an intern come on and he's pretty smart, yet very smart. And he's like, I can automate this. Like, okay, you know, your first project, just whatever you figure out is awesome. And it worked, but it worked too well. It was able to look at the context of someone's profile, send them the very relevant first message that reference something personal about them and keep the conversation going. And so I got an sales call with a VP of sales and he's from Chicago and the first thing I call, he mentioned some sandwich shop I have never heard of and he's like, oh my gosh, I can't believe you love porteos or whatever it is. And I was like, oh, and I got off the call and I said, we need to turn this off as soon as possible. And it's not like that wasn't solvable. But I have a pretty strong opinion that we should be thinking about relationships from a much longer time horizon than just getting the deal done. And it would have just been keeping fighting band aids on making sure we have all the context of these these conversations that are going on in the background.

17:48So in short, the person that's talking to the prospect should have all of the context of what is being sent and shared with them and be the final like orchestrator and understanding of that. Once you go on the second and third layer of like conversations or extra tidbits that you wouldn't even know or talk about in real life, that's when you risk just losing trust with someone and it being poor outreach. Every quarter, your pipeline goals go up. But when SDR teams are bogged down by prospecting, dialing and coaching busy work, they struggle to hit their goals. That's where nooks comes in. Nooks helps you double and even triple the pipeline you generate. Nooks is the AI sales assistant platform that automates account research, list building and getting more great prospect conversations. So you can focus on the human side of seller companies like seismic modern health and greenhouse use nooks to radically increase outbound pipeline. See how you can build more pipeline today by visiting nooks.ai.

18:53Wow, it can take a long time to build trust and it can take a second to lose it. I couldn't agree more. I know of a outreach campaign will just keep it at that without pointing any fingers at anyone and they said in message one or two, hey, I'd like to take you out for a cup of coffee. If you happen to be at this event next month and then three emails later, hey, did I tell you I'm a robot. Why are you asking the person for a cup of coffee and then admitting three emails later four days later that you're a robot. The math didn't add up. I was like, yeah, you're going to cut the trust cord so quickly with that. So I love that you figured that out. If you if you followed our podcast, we originally called it artificial intelligence for sales. After two years and probably 50 guests, we crossed out the word artificial and said augmented intelligence for sales.

19:55And I think that's a lot of people are going to have to learn the hard way, but thank goodness that your company had Eric Bauer because you learned. I wish I was following when you made that name change and I think that's a great position to take on what should the AI stand for. And augmented artificial is like an artificial Christmas tree. We have one, but man, augmented is where it's at. Okay, what about emerging AI technologies? Obviously yours is amazing. I'm assuming you're looking at buying, recommending what what's hot on the horizon. We switched from for presentations. I've been a Google slides guy my whole life or PowerPoint to think of Chronicle. And it's just more beautiful quicker prompt to slide generation can add, you know, it's just more scalable to go from demo to or from after the call to actually setting up the demo.

20:58It was a pain point for our team of so many demos on the calendar and you're in there. You want to go eat dinner instead of designing the next slide deck. So to take details from the transcript and then put that into something that can get populated in a demo in a really beautiful way. Not just getting the slides done, but making it just add that extra layer. That's a sales tech that's cost effective and pretty high value that we like. But a lot of what we do just comes from the, you know, quad projects plus a whole lot of other orchestration layers internally. I think the so much easier to build things now. And I'm always impressed with what my team can do. Wow. I just literally the podcast before this one is with Aiden, who's the CEO of a company that's out of Ottawa, called fellow.ai. And they capture all the recordings for sales people for CS for every single type of person in a company. They take it. They integrate to sales force and other CRMs and they build your presentation automatic. They build your follow up email to the customer or to the internal person you just met with.

22:04So it just it continues to get more and more amazing. So I can't wait to check out both fellow.ai and now Chronicle. I'm not through that one yet. Wow. That's why I like to have these shows because there's so many things that we all don't know about. And if we continue to share what's what's available. What about the ethical side? Because you you stop the production line, Eric, on an AI that you said was delivering too well because it referred to the sandwich shop example. So it, you know, you've demonstrated that the ethics also are incumbent upon us as human and blue right at the user level at the head of sales level. What's your view on how does ethics and AI evolve over the course of the next five to 10 years? So growing up in the Bay Area and been here most of my life. I've seen a lot of crazy things related to tech growth AI and the implications of it.

23:09And I see also a lot of the pain of really the wealth gap it's creating like most of the value of AI is getting collected by a very small few people. So my call to anyone that's listed in this that is in a position of power in this state is extend your time horizon. Like we can get so caught up with short term KPIs like my quarterly sales quota, which I do have, which is important to my well being. But try to make decisions from prospecting from what we should build to how we talk about a relationship. What would this matter a decade from now? Five decades from now? And that's why sure turning on a fully automated LinkedIn bot that can have conversations may make me a net new number of meetings this quarter that make it more likely to meet the team sales target. But how many of those people would when they learned about the truth just feel disrespected and end up churning or just be someone that when they think Eric Bauer they think just a little bit sleazy and they're less likely to make that recommendation. Extend the time horizon as long as possible for like all relationships and I think everything else sure goes down from there when you have that rule of thumb.

24:11Yeah love it. I've heard from a few guests that they're starting to have AI standards committees where just like ISO 9001 you know you got to comply with this. I like that it's it's done between different businesses. It's not just a government coming in and saying here let's slow the course of progress down. No, it's more of a collaboration between multiple companies and this third party entity and there's I guess two that are really taking the lead. I can't recall at the moment but I'm happy to hear that that's at least being talked about because you can fast forward the tape five years from now. So yeah are you AI blank blank blank compliant and hopefully it doesn't slow down the pace of progress because and keep it available to the masses because I believe AI can be the great equalizer when it comes to getting your product to market and taking your ideas faster and better than ever before. Yeah and I'm sure it will slow it down in certain ways but for the best of the long long term like that the temporary slow down will be worthy of the sacrifice and who knows if it's Vanta or Del over some sort of third party compliance body that's the one doing it but just like we have GDPR and talk to and ISO 9001 that I just refer people to our trust center when we get in that stage.

25:33I would love to be like include startups as well as large organizations to help define the definition of like what should this be what the council is because I don't know who has a seat at the table but it's worth deciding. Derek one thing I've heard is happening in AI deployments and you can confirm or deny if you're seeing this is that mid-level managers tend to put the roadblock in place unconsciously or consciously and say oh no this is not going to work in my yard and they tend to try to stop it where the top wants it the reps want it but then the middle level manager put in the kabash. Are you seeing that and what recommendations might you have for companies in this area. I think it depends on the persona I actually have seen the opposite which is one of my perfect personas is a tech forward millennial reports to a gen X who is a little bit behind the curve and this is like director manager level.

26:41You know our champion at that that first company I mentioned he was the one that brought in LinkedIn sales navigator back in 2014 when that was the shiny new thing. And now he's championing origami across his organization and that type of person who is used to trying to champion tools and want to be ahead of the curve and want to make their regional team expand and grow and build an empire within their organization is an amazing fit to test out and try AI. It probably depends how the organization is structured we mainly focus on like those mid market company so not quite enterprise level so maybe it's different once you get up to having many many layers of managers but yeah I guess I can say I can't really confirm that my request to find the person that I'm saying find the influencer in mid level management who can actually champion it and then you don't run into that problem. Yeah this is probably table stakes for most says people but like what's the last thing you bought or what's the last tool you really championed and if someone can answer that well and you know you're dealing with a complex sales cycle your efforts are probably better spent in different rabbit holes.

27:48I mean you and I knew when I met you that that we think alike because I often ask that even of a rep who wants to come and work in my organization when did you champion a product or service in your work and you know if I asked you that in an interview cycle you'd be like we want to know the one last week you want to know 15 in the last five years like which one do you want to know about. If you can champion that as a buyer you know as a user you're selling internally that just shows me that you're going to be able to sell anything to the customer as well in the prospect so yeah. Yeah I can say on that these amazing to have sales person as one of our key personas because the level of empathy I can have and just the feedback loops I get in everyday life. One I have to have such high standards on how our team does each part of the sales process and we get great specific feedback.

28:48If you're selling the sales people you have to have run an amazing sales process and then myself I read most cold emails I get I pick up the phone on cold calls if you want to enrich my number and thank you have something you can sell me I will pick up because I want to see how it's doing I want to learn what others are doing and empathize with what it's like to be sold to and run my own deals and champion to my my CEO. Why we should or shouldn't invest in a technology and getting the empathy just makes you better seller so it's an awesome feedback loop to have love it. Well just closing out origami was one of the sponsors at the SDR leader conference in Dallas recently and I was sitting at the table when Eric was sitting across from a former tester of origami from one to two years prior. And what was interesting is that originally if I recall this correctly Eric origami was using some platform stuff on the back end but you completely re architected the architecture underneath the hood to deploy new and innovative strategy so this is not like anything else that's out there on the market.

30:01It's not hard coded some of the limitations of those other platforms that are out there you guys have built around to solve for can you talk just for a minute on am I am I close to what we talked about table that morning. Yeah it's the classic fighting the innovators dilemma of we were selling spreadsheets with existing tools scraped together and you know we take a description of what your perfect lead list is and then reality was engineers up till you know 11 p.m. on a Sunday trying to scrape together different automations and get that workflow built. And there's there's some major tools out there that we would use for that and including one of them is clay and learned from that okay what is our pains with this why doesn't this scale well why are we having so much struggle with it and in parallel to using that to deliver to paying customers we've been funding that operation to use engineering to build our own killer of that the next generation product so.

31:01So it's transitioning from a full service model of you just describe what we want to build everything to slowly letting the customer experience more and more of it we have an extremely high bar for how easy an intuitive a product should be before a customer can experience it and I look forward to. Like being able to deliver more and more of that but that is our thesis that we've been able to come for the innovative dilemma of those that are out there and run a lab using their tools and build a better version of it and launching that very exciting well Eric really enjoyed having you on the show today thanks for sharing about the different tools that you that you're testing and using and the success you've had with origami and your customers. If you need list building and you want to start to take it into your own hands and put it in the hands of a business user but give that user the power is if they had a development team at their fingertips man I can't see anything more powerful because you're right the list providers have not solved that problem yet and so and I don't see it on their short term architecture i've seen a couple tried

32:19to do something but nowhere near what I understand origami to be so if people want to get a hold of the Eric what would be the best way to reach it. Just go to origamiagents.com click book a demo and we'll see you on there and we'll see you online Eric thanks so much for being here everyone thanks for being on another AI for sales podcast we'll catch you in the financial district at some point in the not too distant future. Thanks everybody. Thanks for listening to the AI for sales podcast with host Chad Burmeister this episode was brought to you by bdr.ai nookstudai and zoom info the go to market intelligence platform bdr.ai helps sales teams accelerate outreach and book more meetings automatically using AI to personalize messaging across LinkedIn email and beyond. Nookstudai is the AI power sales assistant platform that automates account research list building and connects reps to more high quality conversations helping teams double or even triple their outbound pipeline.

33:24And zoom info gives your revenue teams the data and insights they need to find and gauge and win their best customers helping you move faster work smarter and grow revenue at scale. If your company is serious about driving better outcomes with AI for sales here is the fast track. Forget the endless website clicks and forms go straight to the decision makers of these companies the ones who can move the needle for your business. Chad will personally connect you with the right leaders at our sponsors the people who can actually make a difference in your business. Head to www.sdr.ai forward slash intro and unlock your direct line to a more closeable pipeline powered by AI. Until next time keep leading the AI for sales revolution and remember in sales time kills deals but in AI for sales AI kills time.