Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to B Two B, Revenue Acceleration, a podcast dedicated to helping software executives stay on the cutting edge of sales and marketing in their industry. Let's get into the show.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Hi. Welcome to B. Two B. Revenue acceleration. My name is Oraliamutier, and I'm here today with John Barrows, CEO at GB Sales. How you doing today, John?
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Good Orlean. How you doing, man?
[00:00:22] Speaker B: I'm good, I'm good. I've been listening your podcast to make my better. So you are kind of a superstar from our industry's perspective, and really delighted to have you on the phone. And I've had lots of conversation with you in the preparation. It's just incredible. And I'm so much looking forward to a conversation today. Today we'll be speaking about the future of sales. How does AI Are the good old days techniques still working today? Are we becoming more effective? Are we having fun? Are we driving people in the right way? But before we get going, I think for anyone that would not know you, they must have been living under a rock. But if you could just give a little bit of background as to who you are, John, that would be wonderful.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Yeah, man. I'm not that important, but I've been around for a while, so I think that's probably the biggest thing is staying power here. But yeah. So I'm John Barrows. So I grew up in Boston, went to school, kind of drank my way through four years of college, got my degree in marketing because I didn't know what the hell I wanted to be when I grew up and fell into sales just like everybody else. Right? So my first job was DeWalt Power Tools, where I was driving around giving away construction tools to construction workers, which was fun. Then I sold Xerox Copiers, and that's where I got my real sales education, is selling Copiers because talk about selling a commodity. And then I started a company with some friends called Thrive Networks. So it was an outsourced It services company for the SMB market. And I was 23, so I had no idea what I was doing. So I took every training I could possibly take. I took Sandler Miller, Hyman, Taz, Spin, all these different sales methodologies. And I came across this one group called Basho, and it was the first training that I took that I liked because it was super tactical. So I used Basho, and we ended up being the fastest growing company in Massachusetts for about three years in a row. Got us to about 85 employees and about 12 million in revenue. And then we sold to Staples. So Staples came and bought us. And I spent about a year going through that integration. And come to find out, apparently, I'm not a corporate guy, I don't have much of a filter, and I really don't like playing politics. So after a while, Staples offered me another position. They fired me, and I was looking for a job. And Bashio said, John, you know you want to be a trainer? And I was like, no, absolutely not. And they're like, Why not? I'm like, I don't like trainers. And the reason was is because most trainers I had come across at that point in my career were either failed sales professionals or professional presenters. And if you've ever been through a training where you can tell the trainers never actually done what they're telling you what to do, I didn't want to be that guy. And so they said, don't worry, you have to use these techniques to sell so you can train, so you can get paid. And I was like, all right. I like the whole practice what you preach thing. So I joined Basho, took on some bigger accounts, brought on some bigger ones, and then, make a very long story short, they screwed it up and I took it over. So about 15 years ago, I went off of my own with JB Sales and took all the clients and brought a bunch of new ones with me. And so now I work with companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Box, Dropbox, Okta, AWS, Google and a bunch of others, and I train their sales teams on tactics around prospecting, negotiations, closing and everything else, and trying to stay as relevant as possible, as long as possible, because I still sell every single day. So that's why I'm trying to bring the stuff that I learn every day to the masses and try to educate us all along the way so we can stay relevant here. Good.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: Wow, what a civil. I think one thing to add is that you do a ton for the community, so you've got Make It Happen Monday podcast. It's really good. You participate to lots of podcasts and you're also very approachable, I think. You and I spoke on Instagram, we spoke on different mediums, so it's very good to be able, with all the things that you are doing, running the business, to still be able to give to the community. Lots of people don't do that, they put themselves in an ivory tower. So I think you're quite different. I wanted to say that to you. Let's get going. AI is the big one. The last time you and I spoke about AI, you had a fantastic analogy about how sales people and AI would be like Iron Man. So maybe we start there. And I would like to get your opinion. How AI? Is AI the future of sales from your perspective?
[00:04:21] Speaker A: I don't know if it's the future. I hope it's not in some ways, but it's without question going to have an impact. I personally think that AI is going to make really good sales reps, exceptional good sales reps, really good. But average sales reps are relevant. And unfortunately, I think the mass part of our population is average. And the reason is a lot of sales reps. It is the default profession, right? We all go to school for something else, and then we fall into sales and we get very limited education on it. And so a lot of us go through the motions, but the ones who are good, the ones who get it and want to evolve and are willing to adapt, there is so much opportunity for AI to make a difference because it can. Automate. I think one of the things that I'll say is, back in 2017, when I did this training, okay, it used to be based on this one very specific email called the Yuyu Now email, which was about going on someone's website, doing some research, being very personal, and sending an email up to the executive and saying, hey, I was on your website. I noticed that you just did this thing, opened up a new office, whatever it was. And the reason I wanted to reach out to you is because value Statement, let's talk. And back ten years ago, when I would train this stuff, that was like a magic trick. I mean, you'd get a 30% to 40% response rate if you did that, right? I have emails back from Mark, heard from Mark Benioff, from all sorts of crazy people, right? But then I started noticing a decline in the effectiveness back in about 2015, and it was because a lot of the Cadence tools were coming out, right? Sales, loft outreach and everything else. And then in 2017, I got a wake up call, and it was AI, effectively, because a couple of reps who had worked at Salesforce left Salesforce, and they created this artificial intelligence bot that created super, highly personalized emails. And they said, John, we created this thing based on your approach, and we want to show it to you, so can we send you a sample? I was like, all fine. Like, what? Sure, send over. I had zero belief that this thing was going to be good. What they sent me was like, Holy shit, this email was better than I could have written, right? And so I sent them back and I said, there was no human involvement in writing this thing. And he goes, no human involvement other than picking the article to use, right? So they pointed it at the article, and that freaked me out. I was like, oh, my God, where does that leave us if robots are writing better than I can? Oh, and by the way, it took, like, 60 seconds for them to do it, right? And so let's fast forward a little bit. I went to, you know, Gary Vaynerchuk, right? Gary Vee. So Gary Vee is a little crazy, but he's cool. And he has this thing called a 4D Session where you can go to his office in New York City and sit down with ten other entrepreneurs. And he brings all his executives come in, and they share with you what they're doing with some of the biggest brands in the world. And then Gary comes in at the end and does A-Q-A. And so at that time, I had seen that email and I had asked Gary, I was like, Gary, I just saw an email, a robot write an email better than I could ever write. Like, where does that leave us as sales professionals? And what he said still sticks with me to this day. He said, don't worry about the tech because you're not going to beat it, okay? You're not going to beat it. It's going to beat you if you keep trying to get better than the technology, but use it and be the last mile. And that stuck with me. Which is because he said, as long as there's a human on the other end of that phone, on the other end of that email, under that zoom session, then we have a chance, right? But let the AI or tech do all the heavy lifting. Let it do the research for you. Let it write the email, let it write the presentation of the proposal, but right before it goes out the door, make sure you humanize it. And so that's why I think it's a massive opportunity for those of us who figure out how to use AI to give us the time back so we can spend more time selling. Because there's that report that just came out with salesforce that said on average, the average sales rep only spends 28% of their time actually selling. The rest of it is admin and all this other stuff. And so if we can use AI to do all that stuff that takes us away from selling and give us more time back to engage with the client and have the relationship and the rapport, then it's like a superpower.
[00:08:33] Speaker B: I think technology is good, but also technology is kind of almost breaking the art of selling.
The question I'm asking myself is difference between technology and spamming, right? Taking the path of less resistance. The lazy sales guy, you know, the guy will tell you, you know what, it's about volume. It's a volume game. Let's send it to 1000 people. And I get one meeting or I get one call or one demo. And what they are doing basically is pissing on our turf and making people not pick up the phone, making people not look at emails because there is no personalization and I see that myself. I've got my competitors sending me emails. Do you need some services? It's kind of someone trying to sell yourself, training, john, I'm sure you have some people trying to sell yourself.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:09:16] Speaker B: But that's my concern. I think technology almost the way we could beat it is to avoid the spamming element of it. I don't know how we would do that. But giving those tools to people, it's like giving a tank to someone who doesn't know to operate a tank. It could be extremely dangerous.
That's one thing. And I think the spamming, it happens everywhere. The other thing that concerns me is AGI, which is the next generation. So artificial general intelligence. Okay, so I was at Google is also one of our clients, and I met one of our clients quite high up at Google in San Bruno in the YouTube headquarter, and he was telling me about AGI. AGI basically would be able to reproduce your voice. So I don't know if there is a song from God, it's the Weekend and Drake, that is like a fake. You know, if they can reproduce those guys rapping, they can probably listen to all your podcasts. All my podcasts, and even reproduce my French accents and actually make me speak through a machine. And that's interesting because he was like, look, you could use people in the Philippines calling in Australia with an Australian accent. It'd be something that you would like to do. And I'm thinking it's something that I would like to do, but I don't know ethically if I would feel comfortable with that. But I think that's the risk of the next generation, because it's not just sending email. It's about being able to reproduce voice and potentially using translation technology to then translate that in lots of different languages and almost speak to you like your Satnav speak to you. You could just know, if you want to be Omer Simpson, you can be Omer Simpson.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: The reason we hate spam is because it's irrelevant, right? It's like, I have no interest in what this is, so whatever, I'm going to delete it out of my inbox. But let me ask you, why do I like Instagram? Well, the reason I like Instagram is because I've trained that algorithm. I thumb up, thumbs down the ads. I stay on certain things that I like. I move past things that I don't. So now every ad on Instagram is actually something I want, right? So it's like, oh shit, I definitely want that. So now let's take that to the macro. There's AI tools out there right now, and there's enough information about you out there and there's enough information about me out there that I think in the not so distant future, next six to twelve months, our inboxes are going to be filled with super relevant, super personalized emails. And if that's the case, do I care on whether or not it comes from a human being or a robot? I don't. Now, when I talk to somebody, I want to talk to a human, right? We've all had the frustrations of calling into these representative. Representative, right? That type of thing. So I want to talk to somebody. But the digital version, I could care less. And to your point of generative AI, if you go back on my LinkedIn post, about two weeks ago, my team with Free Tools created an AI avatar of me. All we did was take a couple of my blogs and a couple of my podcasts and fed it through the system. And it sounds exactly like me. It doesn't look exactly like me. It was the free version. But there are versions that you can use right now to sound exactly like me. You can eventually, I mean, that's what you'll see it on the budget, free stuff, right? Fast forward a month and say I decide to throw a few dollars at it. Well now you're going to have an avatar that looks exactly like me, sounds exactly like me. And then we're going to be able to take every piece of content I ever created, online blogs, podcasts, videos, everything, and ingest it into this thing. And so now you are going to have John Barrows. You're going to be able to say, hey John, what's up? And that thing is going to answer your question. Now let's take it to another level. You can also add every other sales guru out there and all of their content into that system. And so now you have Super AI Coach John over here that has every piece of information ever done known by sales in every way, shape or form. And I'm going to be available 24 hours a day in whatever language you want me to have it. And so you'll be able to say, hey John, I'm about to meet with a client here. And here's a scenario. What should I do? And I'm going to speak to you in French about what you should do based on my feedback. Now, if you look at that, who would you rather have? John Barrows, the guy who has 27 years of experience and my opinion of how you should do this, or Super John AI. John that has every piece of content ever made in the history of sales and can give you the exact answer when you need? I mean, I hope people want to engage with me in the future, but my reality tells me that they're going to want to engage with that. And especially as we move through this transition of generations. Because you and I, we grew up without technology for the most part. We were not AI native. And so you and I, I think, are always going to crave this, like this interaction or even going in person and meeting you because I just want to meet a person. But my daughter's twelve years old. Okay, I don't know how old your kid is, but my daughter's twelve. All of her interactions with her friends are on this device, okay? So she has FaceTime and all this stuff. So now whether people agree with this or not, it's true. This is a digital version of you. This is not you in person here. This is a digital version of you, even though it is you, okay? Very soon. So her relationship with her friends is on this screen in general. Now, she has Snapchat, for instance. Snapchat has an AI bot in Snapchat that actually is your friend. And thankfully you have to prompt it first and then it'll start the dialogue with you. But it is a really empathetic thoughtful friend. So now you have a kid who goes to school with their quote unquote, real friends who pick on them, say stuff like bully them, those type of things. And then that kid comes home and looks at their screen and types in hey friend, whatever AI friend thing, and it says, hey Charlote, how was your day today? And she goes, oh, it was a little rough, I got picked on today. And it says oh, really? Like, oh, this okay. And all of a sudden it's this really thoughtful conversation. You add an avatar to that that looks like a human. Fast forward a little bit. And will it actually matter that you and I are actually humans talking to each other? Or the avatar is going to get so good that it's not going to matter? And so that's why I think this generational shift to digital environments is so big and how it's going to genuinely shift the way that humans interact.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: You're perfectly right. I think it is three, four generation of version of Bolt or Chat GPD that are not being commercialized, but they are being used internally, they are being used by developers. So I was again in my same examples using Bart at Google. I was speaking to that same guy, said, do you want to develop an app? I'd love to develop an app. Do you know how to code? I've got an engineering degree, but I would not be able to code now. Well, you want to develop an app in Java, for example. Okay. He went to his, said, well, we were speaking about carb cycling, I think, which is like something you eat carb, you don't eat carb, you train at the same time or whatever. So I said, well, we're going to do something about carb, cycling, exercise and food. Put that into Bart. So give me a program, two programs. Okay. Put them together. Can you develop an app with that and start to develop some stuff? I say, well, detailed Java code and the code came out.
Put that into the system. Okay. The app was not pretty, it was not super functional, but I think you're probably 60% of the job done of the backbone built. Then you just need to move the button, maybe put some better pictures and things like that. And that took 50 minutes.
So then come the question, what do we do, right? Do we want to be jobless? And the conversation, Wendy too. Have you heard about UBI universal basic income?
So apparently that's what we'll be on. We will be on the same universal basic income and be replaced by machines. Scary. That meeting was a four hour meeting, by the way. It was supposed to be a 45 minutes catch up. He ended up into a 4 hours meeting because I spoke to someone who was passionate about it and someone was really open about showing me around as you realized that I was very interested. But I'm coming out of that meeting, I said, well, I need to do something about it. I need to do something about it now.
And what do we do? That's the problem.
Obviously you have to license your content and I think that that's something that you can do for you. For me, I have to think about it.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: So I think we're moving into a world where we're going to have very small companies be massively profitable. So for instance, I've talked to a lot of venture capitals and private equity, right? And from a VC standpoint, they're really wondering what to invest in these days because you used to have to put 50 million into a company to build an engineering team, to build a go to market sales team and go from there, right? Now you don't need those. To your point, you can be the developer, for crying out loud, with very limited knowledge. And so I think instead of giving 50 million to one company, they're going to give a million dollars to 50 companies and basically play Roulette and see which one pops. And so I think what we need to do is look just like anything. That's why I said the average people are going to get replaced in universal income and all that stuff, but for the people that are paying attention, we can evolve, at least for the midterm here. And the analogy I use on this is, have you ever seen the movie Hidden Figures about NASA, about how we got to the moon?
[00:18:49] Speaker B: The US.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: Got to the moon. So watch the movie. It's a really interesting movie. So it's back the first time that the US. Got into outer space and we won the space wars, right? At the time there was this group of black women who unfortunately were horribly prejudiced against, right? And they were in this back room and they were actually called the Computers. Like literally their name was the computers, right? And they did hand calculations and used all the metrics to figure out how we amazing to me, like using hand stuff to get to the moon, right? And then one day, the head of that group, right, she was walking in the main office and she walked by this huge open room that they had just implemented or dropped off a huge IBM mainframe computer, right?
And she looked at it, it's a subplot of the movie, right? But she looked at it and she was like, uhoh, they just invested millions of dollars into that. There is no way that's not going to replace us. So she had two choices. One was go back to her team and say, we got to get better because that machine's coming and we got to learn so that we can get better and beat that machine. The other approach which she took was let me pick open this manual and let me start to learn about this tool. Let me learn how to turn it on, let me learn how to maintenance it, let me learn what it does. And she dove into it. And after she dove into it, she then brought it back to her team and educated all of them on how to use it. So now when the IBM people came to turn this huge mainframe computer on, they didn't even know how to use it, right? They didn't even know because they were inexperienced or whatever it is. So guess what? That woman and her computer team who she had educated went from being replaceable to indispensable because they were the only ones that knew how to turn it on, maintenance it, run it, and everything else. And that's where I think we need to be as business professionals, as sales professionals, is I don't think there's an option right now. I think you have to dive in with both feet and learn as much as you can about how to operationalize and how to maintain this stuff.
Or the other option is unplug everything and go live on a beach in Bali and pretend like none of this shit's happening because there's no middle ground right now of, yeah, this AI, whatever, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. It used to be a slow path to irrelevance. Now it's going to be a faster path to irrelevance if you don't pay attention to this stuff.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: No, I agree with you. It's quite scary. I think it's about select everything and it's a story of life. If you look at Darwin, he's not the stronger or whoever is winning is the person who can adapt the most. So we'll have to adapt to it. Now, coming back to some of the conversation, the in the preparation of the conversation today, we spoke about maybe not AI, but kind of the new trick. And you mentioned with the email early on, like a new trick to get you a little bit more response. If you look at it, you've been sales for what, when did you sell Xerox?
[00:21:58] Speaker A: About 25 years.
[00:21:59] Speaker B: Yeah, 25 years ago. How much do you think has changed in the way people buy stuff, in the way we sell? Because there's all those tools about buyers and intent. I think they help, by the way. But do you think the actual interaction of a salesperson with a prospect has fundamentally changed?
[00:22:17] Speaker A: No, look, I don't think sales well, yes and no. Not in the sense that I don't think the fundamentals of sales have changed, right? Like interacting with people, being able to ask good questions and guide them through. I don't think a lot has changed there, but how we interact with them absolutely has. And the main reason I think, is just because of access to information. So the Internet really did change the game from a sales perspective because it used to be we had all the information and so when I showed up at your office, it was appropriate for me to drone through my presentation because you had never seen this before. Right. And I was the curator of that content. I was the knowledge bearer. So you were looking to me as a client going, all right, tell me, yeah, that sounds awesome, I want one of those. But the Internet changed all of that because now it put the power in the client's hands. They have everything. Like, we've all heard the statistics, I think it's corporate executive board or whoever, that by the time someone comes to us, they're already 60% to 70% of the way through the sales process. Right. So with that, we do have to change because if we keep going through well, let me walk you through my process and let me first of all, let me make sure I ask you these questions and then Joan, through my presentation. The client has no tolerance for that anymore because they already know most of the stuff or they could find it in other ways. So I do think the way that we add value in the relationship has changed. And it has to, because it's no longer about creating messaging and drafting template, emails and all that other stuff. Like technology can do all that. It's no longer droning through bullshit questions so I can figure out what to sell you. Right? It's about being curious. It's about having empathy, having some business acumen, having some emotional intelligence, and really trying to get to the core of it. Now, if you ask me, those are things that sales reps have always had to have. I just think we're getting more and more acute to what the value of a sales rep needs to be, because all the other stuff can be taken care of through technology and through the clients process. I personally think this is the year that the no value interaction between sales and customer goes away because the tolerance is going to be zero for a sales rep to just drone through their presentation and not engage with me or not really understand my needs. Because guess what? I can go to Chat GPT and say, hey Chat GPT, could you summarize the value of this solution for me and how it relates to what I'm trying to accomplish here? And it'll do a better job than a sales rep going through their presentation.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: Yeah, trying that now, actually, for some of our clients, because we're starting to use the technology. In fact, working with Google, they ask us to use the technology. So we are using the technology. It's quite fascinating. In term of research, literally, you can type a couple of things, spend ten minutes and get so much information very quickly.
I used to go through this letter to the. Board or board reports or financial reports and literally understand 10% of them and trying to understand if they are trying to save money or invest money somehow and in which area they were doing it. You can ask GBT now, you get that literally at your fingertip in a minute, which is pretty cool. If you were to meet someone who wants to start their career in cell, like a young BDR, someone just pretty good, seems good, seems happy, wants to go in sales. They're just starting fresh out of college, 26 look like someone good, could be great. What would be the advice you give them? What would you say to them in term of future in sales?
[00:25:50] Speaker A: I would say have a bifocal vision and make sure that you learn the fundamentals as much as you can. Right. So break down the sales process and understand the why behind this stuff. So, for instance, these days you don't really have to know the details of an ideal customer profile or persona because the technology will do it for you, it'll find it for you. Right. But if you don't know the details of your ideal customer profile and the personas and the needs and the challenges that these people face, when you actually talk to that person, you're going to fall apart. You're not going to be able to have the conversation. And so I think it's an understanding of let's talk about the different pieces here. Right? So what is an ideal customer profile? Why is it important and what are the details of it as it relates to your solution? Okay, cool. Now that I understand the why and those details, now let me go find a technology that can optimize that for me or automate that for me. Okay. Personas. I go after CROs and healthcare. Right? Well, I want to use Chachi BT to understand what does CROs in healthcare care about right now? Like, what are their main challenges, what are their main priorities? Because I want to be able to have that. I don't want to just ask you what are your priorities?
The information is out there, so I want to learn those priorities. But then ask qualifying questions to say, hey, we're typically dealing with CROs and SaaS right now, and they're telling us that in 2023. Right now the biggest challenges are X, Y and Z. Are those yours? Right. So you can be curious. And I think that's what I want that I hope that people are using tools like Chat GPT for is to feed their curiosity, but not necessarily give them the answer. So my fear is right now that people are putting stuff into Chat GPT and they're taking whatever the response is and just basically cutting and pasting and going. They're not learning from it. Right. I use it as a curiosity prompt to send OOH, I haven't heard of that. Okay, tell me more about that. Tell me more about that. So I use it to learn not to produce the ultimate result of what I want to send. And I think that's the nuance there of how I would start to use tools and anybody, quite frankly, right now is just start using it. You know what I mean? Don't be afraid of it. Go in there and say, Write me a poem. You know what I mean? Put together a recipe for my favorite whatever. I'm going on vacation. What should I do in France? That type of stuff. Just so that you can start getting used to prompting. Because it's no longer about creating the message. It's about the prompt that you give the machine to create the message. And the better you are at creating those prompts, that's where creativity can really come into play, is that you get really cool and get nuanced with your prompts, and then you start to see the results that this thing spits out to you and you could learn a shitload. And then you take that and then you wrap it up into, say, okay, now how can I actually articulate this to somebody else? So I would learn fundamentals and I would use Chat GPT to learn fundamentals, right? Literally go into Chat GPT if you're a 26 year old kid right now and be like, what are the sales fundamentals? I need to know right now to be effective in the new world of sales and see what it says.
[00:28:59] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty cool. I was smiling because as you are saying that, regarding the poem, one of my friend was telling me that he wanted to use Chad GBD to write his wife Valentine's card. And I just like, God, that's smart. That's smart, because you never know. And he was like, look, it was great. Literally tear to her eyes. I put a few things. So I prompted a little bit. We speak about that. Make sure you speak about our wedding. Just speak about this. Just say about oxygen. So he had a little bit of personalization and he just came out. I had to change it a little bit. But he was like 95% done. And he was beautiful.
I said to him, Imagine, she just take a picture of that and put it on Instagram in our stories. Like, oh, look at my hobby. So nice, so beautiful, so much in love. And our friends like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, John.
But apparently it doesn't generate the same response all the time. So I was then speaking I used that, speaking to some people who are really, again, the Google guys and some other people are very much in the AI world. And people are telling me that now you can get a Chrome or depending what you use to read your email, like in Outlook and stuff like that, we'll be able to have an add on that tells you if the email you received has been AI generated. Or generated. And that's one thing that I would like to spend a minute to speak about, because I know what you said about the email is beautiful and stuff. I think my rule of thumb is that pretty much delete, delete, delete, delete at the moment. For all the things I think are spam, I kind of like the fact that someone has been spending time researching. Maybe I'm nostalgic, maybe of the good old days, but I would love the fact that someone's made an effort to actually put the email together. Maybe in five years, maybe your daughter's generation will be different from me. But I'm only 40. I've got another, hopefully 1520 years in the industry before I decide to retire in Bali and go to Gilly Island and chill. But before that, I think there is a lot of people like us that probably would want to have a human interaction and would not want to just have the robot. So I find that concept of is it a genuine content, quite interesting. And what's your feeling about that? Would you still not care as far as it's really super personalized and you think they curate the data and they've done a great job?
Would you interact with the robots 100%?
[00:31:20] Speaker A: Yes. And I think you and I the reason that I think you have that view is because you are so deep into what we do SDR outbound. You know what I mean? So you have a different lens than 99% of the world does, right? The lens that most people have is I have 100 emails in my inbox. These are dog shit. What's that? Oh, that's kind of interesting. Like, oh, look at that's. Personalized, right? All right, good. I kind of want that response. Human then talks to me. So I do agree with you as far as like I said, when I want to talk to somebody, I want to talk to somebody. I don't think I'm ever going to get to the point where I'm comfortable talking to an AI bot for anything that well, I'll take that back. Probably in the next two to three years, AI bots are going to be so fucking good that you will be able to have a full blown dialogue, solve your problem, go from there. And we won't need customer service people for the most part. Right? So I do think that's coming. But for me personally, if I want a solution, that's when but what's in my inbox, man? I don't know. Like, look at I look at Instagram. Do I care that that super personalized, really cool thing that I want came from a human and thought of me personally be like, oh, John Barrows wants this thing, so let me send him that be I'd be disappointed if a person was doing that. I'd be like, what the hell are you doing that for? There's technology that can do that for you. So I look at the same thing in my inbox, the amount of dog shit that's in my inbox right now because of sales reps just pushing play, it's laughable. So if I get an AI bot that comes and writes a hyper personalized one, that's super relevant to me compared to a sales rep who farted around on my website and found it out that I went to university, of Maryland and sends a dumb ass email that says, hey, John, I see you went to you Maryland go terps personalized, but then cuts to some piece of shit value proposition that I'd have no interest in. Okay, that's a person. They've done research, they've showed that they put some effort in, but the email is terrible and basically irrelevant to me versus super AI. John goes analyzes every aspect of my digital profile, finds out something that's really fucking on the top of my mind of something I need, and writes a hyper personalized shit I could care less if that is a human, if it's relevant and personalized to me.
[00:33:44] Speaker B: And you know what? John never gets tired. He can walk overnight, doesn't need coffee, doesn't need to take a toilet break. He's always on it, always smiling, which is also very concerning. So what do you think will change in your business? Because I still think that for the time being, maybe three years, five years, ten years, people will still probably want to come and it'd be nice to gather around and see John Barron's stage versus being in my room and looking at him on my phone. Do you think about fundamentally, I mean, you don't need to go into your strategy because I appreciate you good competition stuff, but how are you going to adapt what you are doing to cope with that future as we're describing just now?
[00:34:23] Speaker A: So, again, I'm actively working to replace myself. There will be an AI version of me that will be your coach 24 hours a day, whenever you need it, and there'll be some type of subscription service to that.
But to your point, I think right now for the next one to three to five years, maybe that personal brand is going to matter, which is why I'm coming back out front. So for years for me, I started as Jay Barrows and then I went to JB Sales. And then I went to Sell Better by JB Sales. And the point of that was to try to put the company out front and make it less about me personally, right? Because the whole plan there originally was to create an annuity for me. So I never had to be doing this. Right now with so much confusion in the marketplace and nobody knows who to trust, I've been working on building my personal brand here for the past 15 years in this industry and I've been really thoughtful about being authentic and being real and integrity and all those pieces to it. And so now I think for me, personally, there's an opportunity to come back out front and say to people, look, I'm a human, I'm trying to play around with this stuff, but I am learning out loud like the rest of you. So let me be the human connection here for you of that bridge, of all this technology, but also the sales skills, the fundamentals that you need. So instead of having ten trainers and building out my whole organization, I'm just going back to being me. And it's going to be me with one or two other people, but massively leveraged so that I can help support as many people as I can with my live sessions remote and then be very exclusive for the on site stuff, right? It's kind of like musicians, right? Musicians these days, they make no money on Spotify, like when they release a new album, right. They make no money on that because they get paid 0.5% of the downloads or whatever it is, so they have to go on tour to make money. And so I think, to your point, hopefully people will still want to come to an event or see me live in some way, shape or form, but that'll get more and more elevated from a pricing standpoint. Whereas I'll give the masses the AI version of John, the online content and everything else to create the annuities. So I'm kind of trying to take it from both angles, is that let me create this recurring revenue stream that is 24 hours a day. You can have it whenever you want, as long as you're behind the paywall, but then pushes me upstream to be the kind of tip of the spear, if you will, and if you want to talk to me, if you want me to engage. It's kind of like if you think of Tony Robbins, right? Tony Robbins has the workshops that people can come to, but he also has the CDs and the DVDs and all that other stuff. But then if you want Tony, you know what you're like. I think Tony charges like a million dollars for four phone calls. A like if you want four phone calls with Tony as the coach, it's a million dollars. I don't even know if he does that anymore because he's made so much money, but I'm not obviously going to get to that level. But that's my strategy moving forward, is to give everybody what they need, but.
[00:37:22] Speaker B: Also to get the most out of that call. Bloody hell. For 250K. Good. To get the most out of it. Yeah. That's interesting. And as you are speaking, I was thinking about all the things we can do because basically, think about it, AI are nothing without data, right? And I believe that the key. The actual dollars will be in the data with getting all that data, and then when the AI start to deliver it and obviously feed itself with its own data. But to start with, they will in your content. So I think what I was thinking in my head is literally we should record ourselves all the time. You record yourself speaking all the time, so the things can replicate your personality in a way which is quite strange. It's quite scary. There's another movie? I would not remember that. I was thinking about it as well as you were speaking Is with Johnny Depp. And I remember in the desert with lots of solar panel and he create an AI. Because he dies. And then the AI gets a little bit crazy and then he goes to go and unplug the stuff. But let's not go there because I think we've been scaring already. Far too many.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:38:18] Speaker B: So people are probably going on to India and trying to find another job. To be a plumber, we will need plumber. An AI cannot replace a plumber.
[00:38:27] Speaker A: That's so actually, it's funny you say that for kids who are going into college here in the States. I'm actually actively telling them, don't go get a major in something, go into a trade, be a plumber, be an electrician, because those are going to be really hard to replace. There's always going to be a need for a plumber. There's always going to be a need for an electrician, and especially an electrician, quite frankly, because power is going to be really important in the future. And so you will never not have a job if you become a plumber or an electrician, in my opinion. I don't think AI is going to I mean, it'll make that more efficient and everything else, but it's not going to replace the actual act of having to be a plumber.
[00:39:05] Speaker B: Someone needs to unscrew your stuff and what you want, you just want hot water to come out of your tap, right? You don't want to know what's going on behind. Last question for you, Jen. I know that you speak about your daughter quite a lot. She's coming up a few times. I was listening to one of your conversations with someone about her playing basketball and figuring Know scores three pointers and I'm good at basketball, I can beat Steph Curry.
Biggest lesson of leadership that you think you taught your daughter? I think that you're the most proud of in terms Know leadership and the impact you had on her.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, leadership is an interesting one, right. Because a lot of people think you have to lead from the front. But I think a lot of people don't realize how important it is to do bottom up leadership. Right. I tell my daughter all the time, I have twelve personal guidelines to success, and one of them is, don't ever think you're better than anybody else, but know that nobody is better than you. And to me, that's the confidence versus ego, right? Like, you never want to put yourself above anybody else. But I also don't want people to think that they're better than me. So I think that understanding that you can learn something from anybody and you don't have to be out front to always lead. You can let others take the lead while you support them. And also, I think mainly we have this little saying that we do every day, which is to really just focus on what you can control. So back when she was about six or seven years, know, the elections here in the United States were getting pretty heated. Obviously, I don't want to bring up politics, but Trump, right? And my wife and I were very adamant about our disdain for what was happening, right? And so we had the news on and we were not arguing, but we were, like, know, yelling at the TV a lot. And my daughter started picking up on that, and so I noticed a distinct shift in her attitude. Like she was angry. She was always arguing and she didn't even really know what she was arguing about or what she was angry about, but she was picking it up from us, and I noticed it and I was like, Shit, right? And I remember shutting off the television and I said, sweetheart, Daddy, Mummy are doing a bad job here, but we can't control any of that that's up on the screen, okay? There's nothing we can do to change any of what you just saw there. I mean, we can vote, whatever, so we have to focus on what we can control. And so we brainstorm and say, all right, well, what can we control? And we came up with this little acronym that we have which is Eat, which is Effort, how hard you work, right? How hard or little you work. You can control that absolutely your attitude, how positive or negative it is, and then how you treat other people. You can't control how other people treat you, but you can absolutely control how you treat other people. So with that acronym, we have a little coin here that I made that says Eat. And every morning we do this little handshake and I say, all right, before I drop her off to school, I say, all right, sweetheart, what can we control today? And we eat. Effort, Attitude, how we treat people. Right? And that to me, is, I think, really important because we get so caught up with all this AI conversation, we've probably freaked a bunch of people out, right? People are, Holy shit, I'm going to lose my you can't control what AI is going to do. You can control how you're going to react to AI if somebody's going to yell at you or berate you. You can't control what they but you can control how you react to how they respond to you. So I think that is probably one of the best lessons that I've taught her and myself, which is, let's calm down here for a second. All this external stuff that's happening out there in the world. You need to be conscious of it so you know what's happening, but you have to really understand what you can control. So from a leader standpoint, I really recommend leaders talk to themselves and their employees about, let's stay focused on what we can control. Let's talk about prospecting. You can control how hard you work, right? Like, you can control how many calls you make, how many emails you send, that type of stuff. You can control how educated you are and your effort around learning and building your skills. That's all stuff. And you can control whether you're going to take this conversation that you and I just had and say, holy shit, fuck it, this is the worst thing ever, or, wow, that was really interesting.
Let me see the positive side of this and learn from it, right? You can control that stuff. And so I think we all need to kind of recenter every once in a while and reset and focus on what we can control. And the world be a lot better place if we didn't. I think there'd be a lot less stress if people did as well.
[00:43:25] Speaker B: It's about being stoic, isn't it? Coming from Marcus Aurelius? Beautiful name. Aurelius, particularly second part. Yeah, it's about being stoic. You should not waste time on things. You can't absolutely love it. I love to eat stuff. I'm going to use that with my kids. The reason why I'm asking that question, it's a new thing that I'm doing. I've got two boys, six and three. I've got another one, which is minus six months, coming in September, actually sooner than that now. Good. And yeah, I'm just trying to make sure I don't mess them up too much stuff. Because sometimes with so much working on the phones and everything, I just want to make sure I don't mess them up. But I really like that. I really like the efforts you went through. Love the Acrylic, because you've got to eat every day. So I think it makes so much sense. I'm a bit jealous I didn't come up with it.
[00:44:09] Speaker A: In fact, I'll send you here, send me your address because I'll send you two things. I'll send you the book that I wrote with my daughter called I Want to Be in Sales When I Grow Up, and it's great for five, six years old. So it's try to teach kids the essence of sales and how it is an actual profession that they could be proud of. So I'll send you that and I'll send you one of these coins so you can have it as something you can kind of as a nice reminder.
[00:44:32] Speaker B: I love it, man. Well, thank you so much for attention, John, and thank you again for everything you do for the community and the rest of the stuff. Great chat. And yeah, today we just thought that we need to do something about it. So don't sit there. We're not victims. We're going to write our own future, so we need to go about it. Thank you so much.
[00:44:47] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me on that. I appreciate it. You've been listening to B two B revenue acceleration. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.
