The Seller’s Edge: What Stays Human in an Agentic GTM World

Julia Nimchinski:

Welcome to the show, Seth Morris, and welcome back, Mary Shea, co-founder and CGO of Meerkat. What a treat! I don’t think I ever saw you on one first orchot.

Seth Marrs:

Nope. This is it!

Mary Shea:

We’re… we’re making history.

Julia Nimchinski:

Awesome, let’s do it.

Seth Marrs:

So…

Julia Nimchinski:

Take it away.

Seth Marrs:

Thanks, too. You ready to go, Mary?

Mary Shea:

I am ready to roll, friends! Let’s do it!

Seth Marrs:

Alright, so, I think, So, should we start off with just introductions around, kind of, what you’ve got going on at… at Meerkat?

Mary Shea:

Yeah, I mean, happy to do that. I can jump right in if you’d like. So, for those who don’t know me, my name’s Mary Shea, and I’m the co-founder and chief growth officer at Meerkat.

I’m happy to tell you a little bit about the company and what we’re working on, but just in terms of my background, I’ve been around for a while and done a lot of different things, so I was a classical musician, an academic, a C-suite operator, a forester analyst, which was my favorite job in the world, and got a chance to meet Seth there and collaborate with him in that role.

And now I’m an entrepreneur, so that was, you know, kind of the one thing I’ve never been able to do before in my career.

And, I work at Meerkat, and Meerkat is a relationship intelligence company, and so… To keep it really simple, Seth, and I’m sure we can unpack a little bit more as we get into the conversation, but we’ve built, the most comprehensive map of who knows who, in the business world, and we’ve got over about, well, in the world, broadly.

We’ve got over about 500 million people, and we’re able to map the relationships between people by looking at career time, board seats, neighborhood relationships, and so on, so that we get And can bring together connections in a relationship graph that actually helps sellers and other folks get to a decision point in some of their business conversations.

So, I’m super passionate about the topic. One of the things that’s really irking me right now, Seth, is I’m getting, like. inundated with outreach. Just… it’s just because of the automation, and… the scale, and it kind of, like, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

And so, when you think about it, you know, AI agents can now fire off this infinite amount of outreach, and every channel… I think I’m mostly perturbed about the whole LinkedIn DM channel, because I really love LinkedIn from back in the day.

And it… you’re gonna convert, like, 1-2% of the time, and so our value proposition is that we’re kind of going back to the future in the sense that we’re using native AI tool to help people understand who on the human side is going to open up that door for them and provide the warmest entry path, and it’s going great.

So, that’s just a quick snippet about me and the company, and… I think everybody knows you, because you’re pretty much of an icon as well, but you should give… give a little bit of your background, too, and what you’re doing.

Seth Marrs:

Well, the cool part about this is, so you’re talking all about the buyer, and how do I understand what’s going on? How do I know who to target? What are they doing? How do I provide those insights for a company? And the perspective that I bring around this is, everything that I’m focusing on is about the seller. How do I make the seller better?

How do you have better conversations? How do you… Take that information and understand about a buyer, and turn it into something that you can progress a deal at a higher rate than you typically would if you didn’t have certain skills, expertise, and processes.

So it’s really cool that we get to talk about it from these two angles, and I think also with with you, you and I covered the same space over different overlapping times.

So, for those of you that don’t know, like, Mary was my mentor at Forrester, covering the sales technology space, and then when she moved on, I took over a portion of one of those things that were going, and also covering The sales technology space, so we get, like, the… hopefully what we can bring to this is… buyer side, the seller side, and then all the technology in the world around what’s going on with… with agents.

So I… I think that’s probably a cool place to start, is just… like, the agent-to-agent piece. I’ll kick it off, but, like.

Mary Shea:

Damn!

Seth Marrs:

when I listen to, like, the Asian to Asian side of things, it’s always really interesting, because I think… most companies aren’t there yet, right? It’s one agent talking to a person.

The chaining together of it, and how that’s going to work with buyers is really interesting, and it also kind of brings up I remember working, and it… I mean, a lot of companies have done this systematically through just, like, connections with your ERP, where you do ordering automatically, but now we’re talking about, like, having a buyer conversation and a seller conversation So, like, the first thing that comes to mind for me is I don’t… I wonder what that’s going to look like, because… When you think about… a seller.

There’s a lot of psychology involved in how you would approach a buyer. And I would think in an agent-to-agent world, all that goes away, it becomes very transactional. Your buying agent’s gonna set a goal for what it wants, and the selling agent’s gonna set a goal for what they want. I mean, the big question to me is, like.

Do companies actually want that? As a company, many companies differentiate on their ability to sell and market. I just haven’t seen a company be able to do that, like, or be willing to do that. Not able, but willing.

Mary Shea:

Yeah, well, I mean, there’s a lot to cover there, and, you know, the agent’s only as good as the agent boss, is what I like to say, and so, you know, you and I and all the people that are listening to this session, you know, we’re the bosses.

So, I mean, look, I am… I have no doubt we’ll probably get there, where there’s sort of this agent-to-agent, buying and selling process, and I think it will be likely more or less based on industry dynamics and selling motions, really, that will uncover what, types of situations, it makes sense, right?

So, if you think of a high velocity, somewhat of a commodity-type sale, I think that probably leads the trend, and we probably have companies that are out there, and buyers that are out there, and perfectly happy to do that, and it makes sense, and it’s efficient, and it’s a better experience.

But when I think about a high-impact, big B2B enterprise sale, you know, I always go back to what our friend Jill Raleigh sort of drummed into our heads at the time, was that people buy from people they know, like, and trust, and that’s probably not going to change for this type of situation.

I think the… you know, human accountability and the human in the process is going to continue for quite some time, Seth. And when you think about these purchases, they’re highly emotionally… they’re emotional-driven, right? And they’re, frankly, professionally risky, right?

So I see, in that type of motion, agents probably earlier on in the cycle, communicating and interacting with each other, but when the rubber starts to meet the road, when you’re actually going to start to ink a deal, get it done, figure out how to kick it off.

I think we’re… we, and I’m including us too, so I hope that’s okay, we’re gonna demand human interaction, human intervention, and human accountability, and… you know, I just want to look somebody in the eye and know that they have my back, for some of these purchases, but I’m perfectly happy to… you know, be enabled with a gentic process along the way.

So, I mean, I don’t know if I’m delusional or, you know, if this train is already way out of the station or not, but that’s what I think.

Seth Marrs:

And I think, like, that’s just a reality right now, so we can… pontificate around where things are, and I think what we should use, like, if we talk about that, like, let’s kind of center on what’s going on in the world today, and the fact is that you can make a very strong argument that the sales process and sellers in that process are more valuable than ever, because they’re the wild card versus all of the rote stuff that’s happening.

like, the idea of a seller, like, going off-script or trying to figure out new ways to win, versus the seller who just keeps running through their clawed script or their next best action seems to be, like, where the human fits in is in all of the stuff that’s happening. I think what you talk about 100% is valid.

Like, you want to buy from a human, you want to buy from a… a person that you can have a dialogue with, not a machine at this point in time. The interesting thing that came up, and I’d be interested in your perspective on this, is someone said yesterday, it was actually, Rachel Koser. Oh, yeah.

Mary Shea:

Good friend of mine, and yeah, I love their company, so yeah, tell me what she said.

Seth Marrs:

So she says there’s… the walls are gonna… the lines are gonna be driven… are gonna be built based on what we want, not necessarily what the technology can do. So, we are going to say we want an in-person interaction, and then we will build our agents around what we want.

Not necessarily what we have to have, but what we want in a conversation, what we want in an interaction. I thought that was really thought-provoking. What’s your take on that?

Mary Shea:

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I’m going back to our Forrester days back in 2017, I think I predicted that, the in-person sales meeting was gonna be askew, and we were gonna charge for it.

And of course, that was just being purposely provocative, like we did in the day, but the idea is, like, if the buyer wants to meet in person, you’re gonna meet in person. If the buyer wants to… meet with an agent, you’re gonna meet with an agent.

If a buyer wants half of the cycle to go with an agent, and then the rest of the cycle human, you’re gonna do it. So, I do think, again, it takes me back, and I don’t want to, you know, beat a dead horse, although I certainly have been known to do it before. You know, like, just because the technology can, doesn’t mean you should.

And again, we’re seeing that again in all the outbound, which is, you know, unlimited automation, which is just absolutely ridiculous. So, you know… I think it’s gonna be interesting, but the way I see it, Seth, is… The human’s the expert, the human’s the AI boss, and the human’s the decider.

At least today, the AI does the heavy lifting, so… The AI does everything that lets the human take on more scale, because let’s be frank, we’re gonna have to take on more accounts, we’re gonna have more responsibility, we’re gonna have multiple agents that we’re, managing and overseeing.

But, when you think about… how I’m going about it, and I’m selling as a founder, which is what we do all the time. You know, I offload all the research, the sequencing, the content, the email writing. Email writing, I’m very persnickety about, because I just hate, like, the AI wonk voice and the tone, and that just really irks me.

the deck creation with Claude, and what you can do by embedding your different tools in Claude, it’s… It’s amazing, but, to be really honest, I always jump in, I tailor everything, and being really direct, I beat the crap out of my agents before I ship anything.

So, again, the humans, the brains, the AIs, the brawn, and I see that… Being the situation for quite some time, actually.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, so I’m going to pivot into… into the… because obviously, a year ago, I moved into Sandler sales training space, really about trying to figure out how do you improve that seller experience for… for our… for our customers.

One of the things that I’ve seen today that… that there’s… three problems that have come up over and over and over, and I don’t think have ever really been solved in sales training. One is, how do I actually understand adoption and make sure that what you bought is actually being used in real life?

The other is when you do that, how do you tie it together with ROI? And then another cool piece is, how do I give you an insight that’s beyond just the basic methodology that says what’s the best practice in general for everybody? And, like. as we’ve gone through that, like, AI unlocks all of that.

Like, I can track adoption now because I can see what’s going on on calls, and I can look at skills. I can tie it to ROI because now, because I’ve codified those into actual scores on performance, I can see good performance equals.

Mary Shea:

Yeah.

Seth Marrs:

good revenue, and then by putting all of those insights into an LLM in a structured way, you’ve got it harnessed up with all the information set up to look for certain things, I could find insights that take a methodology and make it Very much unique to a customer.

when you hear those things happening, I mean, you covered the sales training space years ago. Were those problems the same problems? And, like, how does this world that’s being created now sound in comparison to what you were dealing with when you worked with people around sales training?

Mary Shea:

Well, I mean, it’s a completely different world, and those are the same damn problems, right?

Seth Marrs:

Yeah.

Mary Shea:

The problems just… follow us along in our careers, and they follow us along even as the technology becomes more advanced, but I think there’s some nuance there, that we could, you know, dig into, Seth. So, you said it really well, the core challenge, you know, when implementing training is making sure it sticks, right? The reinforcement part.

Rolling out, great, we… rah-rah, sisboom-bah, we can all do it. But getting reps to adopt it and keep using it as, you know, long after that session ends. That’s the tricky part. And so, obviously I’m not as close to it as I was when I wrote that first inaugural wave, and as close to it as you are, given your role.

But, you know, naturally I do have a point of view, and, I think that, look, the… the… I think the adoption and the tracking thing is largely solved, and maybe you’ll tell me it isn’t, but… we’ve got so much to… so many tools.

The ability to really transparently see who’s showing up, who’s doing role plays, who’s, you know, moving and advancing deals, based on, aspects of the methodology and approach and process that we’ve committed to as an organization. I feel like that’s sort of less of a sticky wicket today. But… you know, maybe you can tell me differently.

And the other thing that you mentioned, I think, was the ROI, and I… I think that continues to be problematic for me, and again, I hope maybe you can shed some light being closer… closer to things, but… Back in the day, when I was looking at sales training and methodologies and trying to link the ROI, I sort of went back to the early days of social selling, when… because I think it’s a good analog.

there were certain CROs that just knew it was the right thing to do. You get out there, you engage, you get reps who can actually interact with contacts, they’re not just driving, you know, marketing content through the channel like it’s another channel, but folks who really know how to use it.

The benefit came back to the organization, but it was a little bit of, like, you just have to kind of be a believer.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah.

Mary Shea:

I still feel… Like, this ROI piece is really tough. And in some ways, if I were selling your solutions, it’s like, you’ve got to get to the CROs and the CEOs who truly understand and respect what a solid methodology and approach that everyone in your organization is operating off.

They’re using the same language, everyone understands what certain words and phrases mean, that that just intrinsically gives really good lift, but… You know, I would defer to you on the quantitative piece. I think it’s still shaky, but I’m hoping you’re gonna tell me it’s not.

Seth Marrs:

It still is. Yeah, it’s still very much shaky. And I mean, the adoption problems that you… that… the way that I put, like, the way adoption’s being solved in… Training is there’s lots of claims of solving it, but not.

Mary Shea:

Right.

Seth Marrs:

of structure around it, so can you dump a transcript into an LLM or into even a custom LLM based on a training provider and get an answer back? Yeah, that’s pretty straightforward and easy, so I could… I could go take your call, look at it. Yeah.

The part that I think’s missing in that I’ve been working hard to solve with… with Sandler is, how do I build an infrastructure that allows you to take all your calls, score them, structurally put them in a place so I could see How you’re doing over time, and, like.

Mary Shea:

Right.

Seth Marrs:

on the ROI side of things. the only way to get ROI, truly, truly understand ROI, and I’m… one of the big things, goals in my pursuits here is… how do I do that? And to me, in my mind, the only way to make it work is I need to… when you buy, like, say, Sandler Essentials. it’s 17 skills.

17 skills that make up that essentials, that when a company buys from us. they… they want their sellers to be imparted with those. They’ve bought into it, they’ve…

Mary Shea:

Right.

Seth Marrs:

They realize that they believe in it, they want all their sellers to do all of those skills. The way that that turns into ROI is if you could take that skill and score it, and score it as it happens in real deals, live fire…

Mary Shea:

Yep.

Seth Marrs:

Working on a deal, real deals. then, and only then, can you start tying it to win rates. So the way that we’ve looked at it, I’d be really interested in your perspective on this. is we want to look at revenue per rep, it’s the purest number.

There are no perfect numbers for what revenue for selling performance is, but revenue per rep is pretty pure. Our goal with it is, by us tying a seller and seeing how they use the skills. And then correlating it and running it through to be able to see when you use these skills, does it give you the lift? That’s where we’ve really started to.

Mary Shea:

Right.

Seth Marrs:

is I want our customers to hold us accountable to ROI. I want our customers… I want to be a growth partner with our customers. I don’t want to be a training provider. And I think training’s critically important.

But the conversations that we need to have, and we are having with this is around, let’s make it visible, and let’s turn your revenue per rep number up. Rather than focusing on, did, you know, your 18 sellers complete the 4 modules of training?

yeah, you kind of have to do that, but I want… when you’ve done that, I want to see in live calls, are you applying it? And then I want to level that up and get you the adoption needed, and then once you get the adoption, we’re going to look to see if you get the RRA. That’s the path that I see, and believe it or not, Mary, not much has changed.

Mary Shea:

No, no.

Seth Marrs:

broke the first wave on sales training. Not much has changed in that regard. Most ROI stories are… more around, hey, you know, I had a good year, or a com- like, a case study, or, like, but there’s very little infrastructure to say. I bought this investment to drive growth. That is kind of where we’re at with it and what we’re trying to do.

Mary Shea:

Yeah, thank you so much for your perspective, and I’m not surprised that not a lot has changed. I mean, it’s tough, right?

So, these are the tough problems that you’re tackling, and I think when you conquer this, it’s gonna be nirvana for business leaders, because You know, we run all our businesses on metrics, and milestones, and growth, and we’re tracking, and, you know.

This is one area that you want to track, like, every other investment that you make into the business, and it’s just been… to date, it’s been… very soft. So I… I love… I love what you’re doing, and I’m, you know, sort of thinking about it… The same way, which is, and this is sort of old-school comment, but the proof is in the pudding, right?

The proof is deals, legitimate deals added to the pipeline that progress at a normal or faster than normal pace in closed deals. And, you know, you can get all the meetings in the world and, you know, do all the role plays in the world, but ultimately, that’s… what’s gonna decide whether or not it’s working.

So, if you can get under the covers, and I think you can for a number of reasons. One, even large sales organizations are starting to become a bit smaller and tighter and a bit more manageable, and then there are technologies and tools that can actually provide you with the insights. In the first example that you said.

you said you could drop a call report into an LLM and figure out who’s using the training principles and so on. Well, that’s still a manual-based process for your enablement lead, and so it’s not sustainable, it’s not scalable, and you know, it… you can do it if you have a 5-person sales team, right?

Or you’ll do it for a couple weeks, you get your insights, and then you never go back to it. But if you can create some automation around that, where every week, all of the calls across your global sales team are loaded into an LLM, and you get rich analytics for your, you know, head of sales and CEO and whoever else wants to see it.

you know, that starts to really be meaningful, impactful. And then, you know, in addition to policing adoption, because I think growth is so much far beyond that, then it can impact more training that needs to be done, right? Or different types of training, or pricing issues, or marketing, friction in the process.

So, I think it’s… Hugely valuable, not just to, you know, the sales leader, but to everyone in the organization, from product to go-to-market.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, I mean, that’s the focal point, right? Like, how do you solve that problem for customers? Because the thing that… I kind of… to widen back out a little bit, isn’t it… are you seeing the same thing?

Like, what I’m starting to see is a retreat a little bit from some of the apoplectic stuff that’s been happening around AI agents take over the world.

Mary Shea:

Yeah.

Seth Marrs:

the agent-to-agent stuff is happening, like, there are things where it’s really, really important, and I think we’ll see phasing around where they’ll work together, but I think the… the value… the true value stories that I see are starting to aggregate and pile up in making you better rather than replacing you.

Mary Shea:

Right.

Seth Marrs:

You’re interacting with customers and with people on a different level. Are you seeing that similar things start to happen from your standpoint?

Mary Shea:

Well, I’m certainly… I can speak to me as… almost as a salesperson, because I’ve kind of gone back to the future, you know, as a founder. Like I said, you’re either building or you’re selling, right?

Seth Marrs:

Yeah.

Mary Shea:

Or… or raising, right? But, you know, I’m focused more on… more on the first two, because I think they… If you get those right, the third piece is gonna come naturally. But… I’ve always believed and written about this and talked about it, and you and I have talked about it, that the real magic happens when The machine and humans connect.

and work together in concert versus an either-or, and certainly, we have our swim lanes, right?

The agent has its swim lanes, which we program it to have, and we have ours, and the more focused you are on what you need to do, the better results you’re gonna get, but for me, that’s really… where the magic happens versus this either-or conversation, which I think is just really dull, and it’s boring me right now. I’m kind of tired of it.

Seth Marrs:

So… That’s true.

Mary Shea:

And I’m very empathetic to, you know, people who have lost their job, but often… I think, you know, the wraparound and positioning around those layoffs is… we need to dig in a little bit deeper and really identify what’s going on there.

What I can tell you as a person who has sold in one capacity or another for close to 30 years now is that I have never been a better seller than I am today, after all the different things that I’ve done.

And I’ve, you know, obviously, I’ve got a lot of subject matter expertise, I’ve done it, I’ve been there, I’ve done that, I’ve gone through Sandler, I’ve gone through all your competitors’ training, I’ve hired you guys, I, you know, I know all that.

But because all the minutiae is completely lifted off my plate, because I can provide Forrester and McKinsey-level decks on a first call, or even a first reach out to someone, I am going CC on every conversation. So, we all know on these sales, if you can get to the C-suite, it’s easier and faster, and it’s more rewarding.

So, that’s one thing that’s happening. The other thing is, the response I’m getting from the marketplace is like nothing I’ve ever had before, because I can build my decks. with all of my contextual information that I have in my head that’s never, ever gonna go in a CRM, because that’s just not how we’re wired.

Like, I have… years and years of things in my head, and, relationships that have gone on 20 years that I’m… people I’m pitching. But I can build decks that are so on point, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen, and then I can practice that conversation in roleplay before I even have it, so that when we get to that first meeting.

It’s literally like nothing I’ve ever… delivered before, and so it’s so rewarding for the salesperson. Now, I think what’s really interesting is when you think about your clients and Sandler and users, it’s like, how do you… Work with… in concert with all those other tools, and kind of pick up the handoff, right?

Because at the end of the day, it’s the human skill set, the human… intuition, the human psychology, I think you used that word at the beginning of this, that is going to drive this deal over the finish line. And so, I think that’s the… Interesting thing to kind of talk about. Oh, Lucas. Yeah. Hey.

Seth Marrs:

Amanda?

Mary Shea:

Amanda, yeah.

Amanda Kahlow:

I…

Mary Shea:

He’s gonna have an interesting perspective, too, but yeah. But it’s our show right now, Amanda, so you.

Amanda Kahlow:

I’m gone.

Seth Marrs:

So, I have one thing on that, on that, Mary. So, what you just described there is kind of… where I think things have to go.

in that, in order for us, like, for Sandler to be successful, we need to be able to bring out not just what a best practice is in general, but we need to be able to support all the technology and tools and the individual person to make them their best selves.

Mary Shea:

Right.

Seth Marrs:

I mean, that’s kind of where it’s at in this world today. You can’t just create a… machine… like a… a… a… manufacturing for a line of sellers, you’ve got to find unique ways, but the cool part about it is it feels like the tools are there, that we can make individual Individuals into their best unique self, rather than the best average self.

Mary Shea:

Right. I… I mean, I completely agree, and so I’m glad that you’re focused on that, because, that is a sensitive sort of handoff point, and the tools are there. I mean… Everyone that’s been on you know, these sessions over the last two days, I mean, it’s amazing, it just blows you away. So the tools are there.

What you have to do is figure out how do we… how do you help the seller and the sales leader provide that, you know, that form-fit, right, at the critical juncture, and take it away from there. And, I’m glad you have the hard job, because I’m not exactly sure how to figure that out, but…

Seth Marrs:

We’re on it.

Mary Shea:

It also leads me to… to… surface another salient point, which is we were talking about at the beginning of this call, you know, how, like, same shit, different day, like, not a lot of changes. I’m still wearing my Fanta pack from the 80s, and…

Seth Marrs:

You know?

Mary Shea:

It has a different logo, maybe, but, you know, that your industry really hasn’t changed. Well, one thing that really has changed is the proliferation of tools and the powerfulness of those tools.

And so, I think… You know, the sales training and methodology company that is able to harness those tools and provide sellers and sales leaders with that roadmap around how to leverage them, and then still be authentic, and then still, in a scalable, repeatable, consistent-to-the-brand way, sell that final piece of the process.

That’s the company that’s gonna win, and the others that are doing it the same way will, very much fall by the wayside.

Seth Marrs:

Yep, totally agree. Hey, Julia?