Agent-Native Funnels and the Rewiring of Revenue Architecture

Julia Nimchinski:

And coming to the virtual stage, Seth Mars, Chief Strategy Officer at Stendler, who will lead the CRO Roundtable, Agent Native Funnels, and the Rewiring of Revenue Architecture. Couldn’t be more excited to feature you, Seth. Welcome back, how are you doing?

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, very good. These are always a lot of fun. Some familiar faces, too, which is great.

Julia Nimchinski:

Awesome. Well, take it away.

Seth Marrs:

Okay, alright, so just jumping in from… currently today, some context, Sandler’s a 60-year-old company, and working for this company, I’ve focused on helping Sellers be their best selves, engaging with buyers, so… That could be a little bit disconcerting when you start hearing something like an agent-to-agent framework in the buying process, and I’ve seen tons of catastrophizing that’s happened around this, disappearing of roles, sellers going away, all of this stuff, but I think some of that stuff is starting to settle.

and kind of as the AI narrative has evolved, it’s becoming clearer that the replacement piece isn’t the main story, it’s really around how do you make the most out of the people you have. And when you couple that with revenue growth being the most difficult thing for any company to achieve.

I think agents are going to revolutionize the revenue architecture, and it’s something we’ll talk about today, but sellers are really going to continue to be as important as ever. So, this group of panelists are a bunch of forward-thinking CROs, they have unique perspectives.

on how agents are impacting go-to-market, so I want to start by asking each of you, just to kind of talk through, like, one, like, share a little bit about yourself, but then also What’s your definition of an agent? Because one of the things that I’ve seen constantly is people have, say, agent, and agent is a very broad brush term.

So, starting out. James, you want to get us started? Great to see you again.

James Roth:

Sure. Hey, Seth, great to see you. So I’m James Roth, I’m the CRO at ZoomInfo. Zoominfo, I think most folks know. As just a company contact and signal data provider, and then we’ve got purpose-built apps, for very specific go-to-market motions, like prospecting, account research, etc.

and then really kind of in the shift towards just becoming the intelligence layer, whether that be for a built application on top of, you know, whatever LLM folks want, or any internal built.

Versus a kind of prepackaged application that we already have, but really the crux is the intelligence layer that hopefully builds out what is a robust context graph to power any sort of AI tool that you might have.

You know, I think… you know, the way we talk about agents internally, I agree with you, I think it’s a… widely misused term when you think about an agent versus a microapp versus an artifact versus a full-blown application.

I think the nuance is just the new world that we live in, but, you know, as I… as I think about agents in general, and I oftentimes will misrepresent an agent versus a microapp versus whatever I built in Cloud Code.

You know, I just think it’s something that can take a task or a motion and basically automate it in a way, shape, or form, whether that’s You know, something that’s running overnight, whether it’s something that’s on call that you can plug in before a call, whether it’s something that’s served to you.

I think of it as just an autonomous workflow that, frankly, you can either turn on, activate, or have running in the background at any given time, irrespective of if that’s via artifact, microapp, Agent, etc. I think some of the nuance there is… It is what it is. It’s the world we live in.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, very true. Great, great. Brian, how about you? You want to do a quick introduction and give us your take on that, on what an agent is?

Brian Birkett:

Yeah, of course, no problem. Good to see everybody, hello. I’m Brian Burkett, I’m the CRO of Lean Data, a CRM-native revenue orchestration platform. For those that aren’t familiar with us, we sit in the seams of the funnel, routing leads and accounts to the human rep or agentic, or agents.

We’re matching to the buying committee, and then scheduling the meeting. To complete that cycle. We’re really the agent-to-human foundation, that’s part of the infrastructure of some of the best GTM processes out there, so we’re working with companies like Meta, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google, and OpenAI, as well as hundreds of others.

When I think about agents, you know, for me, like, an agent isn’t a chatbot, right? It’s software that’s taking action towards a goal with judgment, so it’s not just answering a question. So for me, like.

A tool is something that responds, an agent is something that’s deciding and acting, so it’s observing a signal, you know, it reasons about context, and then it’s taking the next step without the human staging it. So… You know, if we put this in go-to-market terms, it’s not draft me an email, but it’s more like, hey.

Keep an eye on this account, recognize the buying committing forming, you know, route it, and book the meeting.

Seth Marrs:

Got it, okay. Philip, how about you? A little bit about you and your perspective.

Philip Lacor:

Yeah, hi Juan. Hey, Seth, great to be here. Philippe Lacorn, CRO of Prezonio. We are an HR and payroll platform. Late stage, focused on the EMEA market, and, very much AI-powered. For me, the definition of an agent is simply that it acts on itself. We have a bunch of systems, they’re all triggered by a human. But an agent really acts on its own.

And, we rolled out a whole bunch of them, we have one on the website, I’ll talk about it later, but, One of the things that we rolled out recently is, every morning. reps getting from an agent an update about that day. Here’s what’s going to happen in your day. Here are your customer meetings.

Here’s the background info for all these customers, and some of the things you can talk to them. They run autonomously. I also have, for example, a weekly churn agent that analyzes all our churns. Luke’s our trends, says to who we lose and why, and also reminds reps when they forgot to fill out fields. So, they run autonomously.

Seth Marrs:

Fantastic. And Sangeeta, great to see you again. How about you?

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

It’s great to see you, Seth, and great to see James and Philip have met in real life, meeting here, and Brian, great to meet you. So, Manu Sangeetra, I am the CRO at Amagi, and what we do is we are the industry platform for the media and entertainment industry.

And we, power everything that you’re watching on TV, Warner Brothers, NBC, the sports, big, big live events, and so on. And so we are all about autonomous workflows and always on, and where aging comes in a big way. I don’t think my definition is going to be very different from any one of you.

In summary, it’s a software that takes action on my behalf, versus maybe an assistant in the past that sort of gave me information. I think the thing that is interesting for me, and I mean, what a time to be in GTM, is why this is so important.

And the way I was thinking about it is, you know, I have agents working for me, the buyer has agents working for them. The age-old question of, should this meeting have be an email, is becoming, should this human meeting just have been one where my agent could have handled it?

So I think it’s up to us to make sure that we are resoundingly answering that in a positive manner as we, you know, rewire our GTM motions.

Seth Marrs:

Awesome, fantastic. So I think just universally across this group, basically, the ability to automate things, and for the agent to be able to do stuff for people, like, in an automated fashion where you don’t have to tell it, is kind of our base layer of how we’re talking about it when we’re talking about agents here.

So if we jump in, like, the first question I have, and James, I’ll point to you for this one, and then the rest of you guys chime in Based on, on your perspectives. What’s one way you’re re-architecting, that you’re re-architecting your organization with agents?

James Roth:

Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. I think there’s the actual org design piece of it, and I can hold that to the end. You know, I think our journey over the last 12, 14 months We, like so many others, deployed Claude across our entire company.

We built it, we called it Mesh, we built it on top of our entire context graph, Snowflake, Marketo, ZoomInfo data, all the first-party conversations, emails, conversational intelligence, and the tool was amazing.

And we launched that last… July, and everybody loved it, but I think we ran into it, a lot of folks ran into, is that we said, the litmus test is everybody use this thing all the time. And so we basically rolled it out, and at one point, I had close to 7,000 agents built across just the account management function.

And I had this moment of, like, oh crap, I don’t need account managers to be great agent builders, I need them to be great account managers that use agents. So, couple of the learning lessons and how we re-architected is we took some of the best minds that we had. Some were already go-to-market engineers. Some were just great folks.

We had a CSM who’s arguably one of our best, now, sort of agent builder, and we created a team, and we said, if somebody has a great idea, you take it, you build the agent, and then we put it into a library that says, at any given point, an account manager has 8 to 10 agents that they use.

I don’t want them wasting time building, I don’t want them… I want them ideating on, like, an annoyance of their day, and so we completely centralized the agents, and so that, okay, that’s That’s great.

The next iteration is that we still, even with those running in the background, we still saw about a 60% utilization, and I was talking to another CRO, and they… I think we’ve all probably felt this.

You still have your best people sometimes that just carry a notebook around, and they’re not gonna be AI-pilled, they still crush their number, they’re your best folks, they’re the ones that never updated Salesforce, they’re the ones that never leaned into whatever tool you bought, they’re just great salespeople, and so we had this moment of, okay, we’ve now got this agent library, we’ve got our best people, we’ve centralized it.

How do we ensure that these things are serving up, you know, basically a part of the workflow, so that even that guy that’s not gonna go log into Mesh or Cloud or whatever your internal system is.

How can we make sure that that agent is serving up those insights, whether it’s a, you know, churn and downsell, whether it’s a signal, whether it’s, you know, whatever action that we need the human to take, how do we make sure that we get that embedded into their workflow.

basically across every surface that they might be looking at in a given day. The only one we still haven’t been able to capture is the notebook. You know, working on that, but, you know, that was then the next iteration, and I think the final frontier That we’re on right now.

So we’ve gotten it to about a 90-95% utilization, where we’re making sure that those, call it 7 to 10 agents, whether you’re in new business, whether you’re prospecting, whether you’re an account manager, that they are actively being served up, really working on behalf of. And the last piece is then, how do you really unlock real-time?

And I think, for whatever tool out there that tells you they can do real-time, and when I say real time, I mean we have a deal desk agent, we have a point of view agent, those things are great. You do, you know, it hits you in your calendar before the call.

If I’m meeting with Brian at Lean Data, it gives me the point of view, it gives me white space, it gives me the deal desk agent that says, based on the last 10 calls, based on the last 3 renewals. this is what we should go pitch from a pricing standpoint.

What we have yet to unlock, which is, like, my last frontier, is the real-time, I’m 10 minutes into a call with Brian, and he completely throws us for a loop. How do I get the real-time agent working based on that particular conversation? That’s incredibly hard, and I think there’s a handful of tools that promise it.

we’ve POC’d all of them, but I think if I can get that to not only before the meeting, overnight, working on your behalf, built into workflow, great. That last mile is, I’m a mid-market account manager, I got 90 accounts, I got point of view, I got DealDesk, these are all pre-call, and all of a sudden, Brian’s hired a new VP of RevOps.

you know, find them, where are they from, what’s the quick debrief, and like, how do I serve that to them on that call, which may be the last time we ever talked to that new VP of RevOps. That’s really, like. the last mile, if you will, that we’re working on now. And then in terms of, like.

the organization itself, I think, like so many others, any of the tasks, any of the roles that were largely just doing the repetitive tasks that have been automated, how do we then either repurpose those folks into roles, or kind of reskill them to a role that, you know, they may or may not maybe more valuable in, but I think as I look at our overall org, you know, for us, SMB, we’ve got 25,000 small businesses, but we’ve got an upmarket business that’s over a billion in ARR.

How do we digitize and automate most of that SMB business so that we can then repurpose resources for the upmarket that requires a lot more of those skill sets. And then, I think, like so many others, things across support, you know, those areas even inbound SDR.

You know, we’ve really been shifting much more towards an outbound model, because we can automate just about everything on an inbound. You get the form fill, you get the signals, they come in. You get an avatar, you really don’t need a 22-year-old right out of college to go chase down that form fill, to then set up a meeting.

All of that can be done, so I think we’ve reorged like most. Which is the repetitive tasks, the large volume of humans doing very low-calorie activity. And I think the next phase of it is, you know, what is the balance of account loads in the enterprise now that you don’t have 70 hours a week to just set up the prep, to just set up the decks?

You know, we were on this mission to lower account loads as much as possible in the upmarket. I think, like so many else, we were like, oh, Salesforce and Enterprise Account Manager has one account, how do we get there? Now, you’re like, what is that balance?

Like, you can now manage 10 enterprise accounts, because so much of the hours that you were putting into your week were based on non-customer-facing activity, and so I think that’s… that’s really the last piece for us, is like, what is that balance of… The extra 60 hours you’re getting back, not doing the things you used to have to do, maximizing customer-facing time, maximizing new surface area, maximizing new relationships.

what is that balance? So I’ll stop there so I don’t take up too much time.

Seth Marrs:

It’s interesting, I think, in two ways. One, interesting to hear at the front, like, you guys went all out, everyone create agents. It created chaos to a certain degree, but it sounds like it surfaced people that were incredibly good, so it was almost like a recruiting.

You paid for it in a bunch of agents, but it showed you the people that you wanted to recruit to build them. But then also. the way you’re talking about this is, and I’d be interested with the rest of the group as well.

it’s not like you’re trying to redeploy this into gross, and I think that’s a commonly misunderstood thing, is I’m not trying to have less, I’m trying… I have a ability to engage in more sophisticated ways, so I want to redeploy the capacity to be able to go get that revenue that I couldn’t get before, rather than have a smaller team doing the same stuff.

How does everyone else think about that, in terms of how you’re architecting it in your groups versus… and then also, kind of, that churn and that movement of people into new growth?

Philip Lacor:

Yeah, I very much recognize what James says. We have… we started off with a number of, like, central agents, mostly bought. And then we rolled out Entropic to the entire company, 1,500 people. So people start solving their, own problems, own processes. And there’s good and bad to that.

The good is that people close to the customer, close to the process, know better than anybody else what the real problems are, and they can really get to efficiencies by applying some of these agents. At the same time, you also see there… you start to get, like, duplication of process. We’ve had, like, people building agents.

to do, reporting effectively, which you can also find in Tableau or some of the other tools. And there, this is where your carefully orchestrated processes that you build over time start to, like, diverge, and you’ve got to bring that back. But then other parts, you gotta, like, scale up.

So, we also built a central group with a number of go-to-market engineers. We have our data and systems team.

And then there’s always someone from the business, and they will take the best ideas, and then scale them up… scale them up and roll them out, and they then become the de facto standard, so… I always believe you need this combination of bottoms-up and top-down motion, and that’s what we’re doing.

Seth Marrs:

kind of landed you to where you are. Ryan, I see you came off mute.

Brian Birkett:

Yeah, I mean, I’ll just add on a little bit. We, like James, we opened up, sort of, AI and Anthropic to everyone, and all of a sudden, I had 15 different versions of, like, a demo prep agent created by each individual.

So there’s two things that I did that… I’ll make it quick, is… One is I created an AIOps function inside of RevOps, so that whole role is to sort of… scale, centralize, and make the agents repeatable.

And then the other thing that I did, so we didn’t starve off innovation, is I created, like, a go-to-market innovation lab by carving out a piece of my business with a goal of trying to run agentically. So. this group is not encumbered by RevOps. They basically have the keys to the Porsche, can build and try whatever they want.

They’re looking to, like, learn quickly, and then once they’re onto something, they’re passing to RevOps to, like I said, scale, sort of put in the governance behind it, and then roll it out to everyone.

So I think it’s, like, this balance between, like, how do you innovate and not hold your your frontline, smartest people back, but at the same time, at a certain point, you need to scale it and roll it out to everybody and make it repeatable, so it’s trying to find that balance, and I’ve done that by… You know, trying to create these two little groups.

Seth Marrs:

Okay, I gotta ask, encumbered by RevOps.

Brian Birkett:

I mean, we’re a much smaller organization than some of the other folks on this call, so, like, you know, my small team can basically run, buy, build, test. anything.

And then there are certain things where it’s like, oh, you don’t want… you know, to update all of Salesforce, or, you know, send all these emails, you know, so, Yeah, like, I would say there’s a small piece of my business that can run wild and test and learn quickly, and then when I think of RevOps, it’s like, okay, now we, you know, we need to put some parameters around how to do, you know, make it repeatable and sort of pull in the governance and stuff like that.

Seth Marrs:

Got it. Ain’t… Anything else on this, or I’m gonna go to the next question.

Philip Lacor:

No, no.

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

I did have one comment.

Philip Lacor:

Sorry, Subhita, you go.

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

Okay, I just wanted to say that I think what I… what we are all doing is focusing on the seller’s journey. But I also am looking at the buyer’s journey in mind, and just making sure that I’m ready for what the buyer’s agent is doing at every stage. Like, for example. awareness station.

They’re either coming intentionally educated by my AEO, or they’re coming intentionally educated in the wrong way by my competitor’s AEO, or they’re coming accidentally educated in the wrong way because of the AI hallucination, so… Knowing how we, while we’re building our, sort of, seller journey automation.

also knowing how to work with the, you know, expectations of the buyer’s agent is going to do is part of what we’re trying to build.

I think I had the, sort of, the advantage and the disadvantage of starting later than all of you, Philip, I read your article, I remember six months ago, that you had written about centralizing, and I think we are doing a bit more central approach and not letting everybody go haywire. So that’s been good, and then for us, it’s been, like.

To my earlier point, how do you know what the buyer’s doing?

Philip Lacor:

And I think building for the agents to be found through AEO, clearly is super, super important. The SEO traffic have come down. the AEO traffics are smaller, but the conversion of those is much, much higher, so really being very thoughtful about how these agents search and how you can be found is extremely important for double funnel.

The other thing I would add to organization is, more and more, when we think about scaling up teams, when I think about the BDR team, or the AE team, or the customer success team, the thought about, do I add my next customer success manager, or my next AE, or do I hire a go-to-market engineer for that function?

More and more, that goes towards the go-to-market engineer, who then can build the engine for that function, which is ultimately the better scalable way.

Seth Marrs:

Do more with less. Drive more volumes into that same team.

Philip Lacor:

Yeah, ultimately, you, you… James mentioned it, I think, or Brian, is the effective selling time, or the effective time in front of customer. That’s a great metric to look at. If you can take that from 25-30% to 70, 75%, then your people become… the output becomes much higher, and it’s probably also more enjoyable work.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah. So, I mean, you talked… so just building on that, the efficiency side, you guys made very clear, and you talked about how you’ve drawn down some of those Brian, I’ll start off with you. Just… some of the things… what are some of the things you’re doing to enhance effectiveness?

How do I make a seller better at their job once you’ve built in that capacity?

Brian Birkett:

Yeah, I mean, I think effectiveness is sort of where the unlock is, right? Like, efficiency is, like. you know, agents are drafting follow-up, and they’re essentially making the reps days shorter, and I think that was sort of step one. The next one is, like, how do I make the reps quarter bigger? That’s how I think about effectiveness.

So, for me, like, the stuff that we’re rolling around. Rolling out around effectiveness is… is really pulling together all the context to give them the deep understanding, so when the human interaction has to take place. they can operate at their best level.

So it’s connecting, you know, not only information about, sort of, the buying committee as, like, a signal pops in around one person, it’s connecting that back to our customer database to understand, like, okay, what are the stories, what are the proof points that resonate across this business?

Let me infer some of the challenges that this organization is having, and whether that’s, like, helping them prep for better discovery, and or actually, you know, further down the funnel, could be, like, laying out potential demo scripts or things based on discovery calls to go over, it’s actually making them win more and be more effective.

So that’s how I think about it. It’s like, hey, we have a lot of tools that make them you know, more efficient, they can do more now, but ultimately, how do I… how do they do the things I care about better?

And so that’s a lot of the agents that we’re trying to roll out, and standardize across, because, you know, like I said, there was a lot of, sort of, agent sprawl on effectiveness, and then it was like, oh, I see what you’re doing, centralizing that and rolling those out.

Seth Marrs:

So you have two levers you’re pulling. One is I’m giving you more at-bats, and then I’m… I’m winning more when I’m in those at-bats.

Brian Birkett:

Yes.

Seth Marrs:

Gotcha. Any other perspectives on how you guys are managing efficiency? then I’m gonna move on to the… to the, to the… to… Talking about, like. coaching. I mean, we talked a little bit about… we’ve been talking a lot about frontline sellers, so let’s talk a little bit about the manager side. How do you see these tools helping with coaching?

Making your sales managers a better coach for… for the sellers, and using that as a lever to be able to drive better performance.

Philip Lacor:

Yeah. Clearly, coaching is a very important part of the first-line manager role. I would argue one of the most important roles. But there are a couple of problems with the current way of doing it. First of all, Managers need to gather a lot of data. They need to listen to a lot of calls. It takes a lot of time.

Secondly, the question is also, how does a manager then score objectively? And you can listen to a call, but still, there’s got to be subjectivity on how well that call by a rep is being run. Thirdly. It’s not easy for a manager to really also track progress of a seller over time, or to compare one seller to another seller.

And this is where, agents, can, can really help. We record all our calls in Gong. And, you can then ultimately start, like, have an agent start scoring calls. You can say, hey, these are the criteria for a good call. You scored a 1 to 5. the agents record thousands of calls and can start, objectively start scoring.

And not only that, you can also easily compare them one rep versus another, so… You can see, hey, this rep is much better in discovery, this much is much better in articulating value proposition. And then, how does the rep track, over time? The other thing we are doing is we’ve built, like, we’re using Medic, we’ve built it into, Gong.

You can easily see, even on a deal level. Yeah, I was the economic buyer really engaged in this deal by this rep? And that also helps you, yeah, gather a lot of data and make coaching much more efficient than it used to be.

Seth Marrs:

So, less time listening. So, do you have your sellers listen to calls, or are you aggregating them and get… or do your managers listen, but… or do they get the aggregate now, and they basically get the… The summary of what they should do, and they coach off the summary, rather than having to go through all the calls.

Philip Lacor:

They do both, but they definitely use the summaries and the scoring, and when I do deal reviews, the sellers used to come with, like, a PowerPoint deck and multiple slides, now it’s like, okay, no slides, no nothing, let’s just look at the current brief, or the deal brief, that is AI-generated.

And also there, the data gathering is much more efficient, and you can really focus on the coaching, on the discussion itself, so much more value-add.

Seth Marrs:

Interesting. Interesting. What other approaches are there that you guys are taking around… around coaching?

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

I think the first thing is the… yeah, I think, the ability for the seller to coach themselves. is what I think is really a game changer for the right seller, right? It’s to listen and understand what they’re doing and improving over time.

Similar to Philip, we have incorporated Gong, and then through specific AI triggers, you can actually track to see if they’re better in certain parts of the selling message versus other parts, and seeing if that improves over time.

I think it’s giving managers more time back in their day, so they don’t actually have to listen physically to all of it. But to actually get the right things to coach, since you can’t quite coach everything all at the same time, even though we want to. It’s about cherry-picking the right thing that we want to do there.

And beyond that, I think it’s just-in-time learning on the pro… because our products are also constantly changing, so we’ve barely begun to teach the seller something, and our products have already changed. Bringing that real-time into this coaching journey, I think, has been a huge game changer.

Seth Marrs:

Right. So, yeah, seller-specific, let them do it. That often gets misunderstood, right? Give them all the tools, and then the manager can focus on the higher level stuff, and the seller’s coaching on the… Progressive stuff.

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

Yeah, I think most sellers are able to do a decent job coaching themselves if we give them the time and the tooling to do it.

James Roth:

I mean, I think if you look back 2 years ago, you’d have the output, whether it was pipeline generated, whether it was deals closed, whatever it may be, and it’s… I feel like most managers would just look at that output first, and then they might go grab a couple calls, and… but their mind had already been made up.

And I think one of the benefits today Is the ability to amalgamate information across not only their calls, how they’re showing up, what they’re pitching, how they’re pitching it, etc, but then you have every bit of data built into the model from, you know, what’s their conversion rate, what’s their… what did they do last quarter, what did they do the quarter before that?

I think from a frontline manager standpoint, you know, so much of that role is still jumping in on deals, and helping close, or, you know, getting a point of view across, or, you know, helping negotiate a deal.

And I think we kind of took those folks for a period of time out of that role, and made them more administrators, watching calls, you know, whether it was Gong, Chorus, whatever the CI tool they were using, watching calls, looking at those Tableau reports. they just became admins.

And then you had, like, a second layer of leader, and a third layer of leader, and, you know, if you think about the world, I remember when CI really first became a big thing, you know, we’ve got 1,200-ish sellers across the org.

There’s no way that you’re gonna have any sort of articulate point of view, you just don’t have time to watch enough calls to make sense of it, and so I think… very similar to Philip and Sangeeta, like, you know, now I have an agent that runs every morning, and especially for us, product-specific, we launched GoToMarket Studio in Q1, we launched an MCP server in Q1, And so just seeing, not only from a product-market fit, how those products are being sold, pricing and packaging is an amazing, you know, now with all of that data brought in, when you see not only what their competitors are at, those are all, like, amazing first-party data that’s served up live that you could have never… even if you had a team of 30 people, you still couldn’t get The amount of data ingested to then formulate a point of view.

And then you can grab the best calls. You know, we have an agent that basically says, like, here are your best reps, not only just from a numbers standpoint, but also just on how they present the calls, how they build relationships. And then you’ve got the bottom end, and it’s like, okay, is this person coachable?

Is this just like a… maybe a lost cause, the ability to grab that across, now, literally tens of thousands of data points over a rep’s career. We’ve never had anything like it before, but I think the ability to use those, and then, I forget who made the comment, I think it was Philip, but then to allow the people to self-train.

Where it’s like, here are the 5 best people, like, watch their 5 best calls, watch how they position pricing, watch how they overcome objections, watch how they do discovery, etc. And I think some of these, like, the medic into conversational intelligence, the right back to CRM, like, a lot of those are becoming table stakes, which is awesome.

So that they can then focus on, okay, here’s what the agent’s telling me across my team of 8 reps.

I’m now in more conversation, same as, like, I don’t have as much administrative stuff, because the agents are doing it for me, so I can go back to being a real frontline manager, driving some of these deals forward, and actually coaching the people real time.

And then potentially shrinking down some of those additional layers that were just doing a lot more of the same admin stuff.

Seth Marrs:

And do you find that you can get the, like, what you talked about there on the product side is almost like you could do a switch-out, and you give every manager kind of a frame for what they’re doing, the models run through and fill those things out so they know what to coach on, and then they can go forward.

They don’t have to do all that work themselves.

James Roth:

I mean, I think really what it comes down to is a starting point. One of the hardest things of being a frontline manager is like, crap, I got my 45-minute one-on-one with Philip. what am I gonna talk about?

And so I think serving up, like anything, like a point of view in a deal, serving up the point of view for, like, what has Philip been up to for the last 3, 6, 9 months, it gives them a starting point with all of the data that would have taken them half a day to go chase down, to then have what is a thoughtful one-on-one.

And I think, for the most part, one-on-ones weren’t thoughtful. It was, Philip, how you doing? What’s going on with this deal? Like, you’re gonna hit your quarter? Alright, man, I gotta go see ya.

Now you have, like, a very thorough… we have a one-pager that goes out before, and it’s got the summary of their last quarter, quarter before that, pipeline, maybe they’re about to explode, but they had a bad quarter because they’ve got so much pipeline, like… Those things, like a frontline manager, was just balancing way too many things, and so, yeah, I think the biggest part of it is giving them that jumping-off point, informing them of what they probably didn’t know before, so that they can be a more effective frontline manager.

Seth Marrs:

Got it.

Philip Lacor:

Look forward to our next coaching conversation there, James.

Seth Marrs:

Right.

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

I wanted to add one more thing on that set. Oh, sorry.

Brian Birkett:

No, go ahead.

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

dumping your head again. I think the other thing that we used to spend a lot of time, usually at sales kickoff, everybody around the table and doing role play, AI can do that so much better now, and really scale it with tools like Hyperbound, so, you know, it’s really been helpful in sort of doing just-in-time coaching as well.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah.

Brian Birkett:

That was, that was…

Seth Marrs:

this.

Brian Birkett:

That was gonna be my comment. It’s not just the coaching, it’s the practice that goes on after, right? Like, you can coach all day long, but if you don’t put it into action, and so having those tools that allow the rep to practice the cold call, or we’ve built an email agent where it’s… You can practice your emails, especially for ramping new reps.

It allows them to get at-bats in that safe space so that they can learn and apply the coaching. Which I think, you know, it was hard enough to coach before, now you can do it, but if you don’t practice, it’s like in one ear, out the other.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, forget it and move on. So, we’ve talked about a bunch of stuff that AI is doing that’s adding value, both on the effectiveness and efficiency side.

What is your guys’ take in terms of just… if you could just consolidate in your mind, like, one thing that an agent… if you had to recommend one thing to the audience that they should use, one agent that you’ve built that has been the most valuable, what… what would it be? Sangeeta, why don’t you start us off?

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

So I have a couple. I think Seller Coaching is my second one. The first one is… Just being intelligently prepared in real time, to James’ point, very hard to do really real time.

But showing up prepared so that the time that you’re spending with the buyer is best used, and you’re building trust very fast, not going through the usual discovery process. In our industry, there’s a lot of, for example, M&A happening, so I’m talking to Paramount and Warner Brothers and Discovery at the same time.

This is constant… situational reshifting happening, it would take me forever to go and figure that out manually, but being able to come to the meeting and already saying, I know this is what’s happening, I hear this thing, what else am I not seeing that you, you know, you want to talk about?

I think that meeting intelligence use case is the most important one right now.

Seth Marrs:

Got it. that pre-call kind of prep coming in, and then I think, James, you were talking about trying to even extend that into, if you get a pivot on the call, that you could even start getting prepped in call for new things that happen.

James Roth:

Yeah, I mean, we call it internally the point of view agent, and I think it encompasses a handful of things that have been discussed. You know, as a sales leader, one of the things that always makes your skin crawl is when folks show up to a company that just laid off 50% of its staff, and they’re trying to jam an upsell.

And I think when you take all the benefits of first-party data, sentiment, calls, product utilization, competitive intelligence, like, all of the signal aggregation, and then all of the first-party data. The ability to give reps what they oftentimes lack most, which is a coherent point of view.

That, like, this should be a growth account, this is a churn risk account, and, like, the likelihood that they’re gonna go into Snowflake and pull the utilization, like, sure, they might have a dashboard.

I don’t know about anybody else, but you’ve got 30 different dashboards that an account manager’s living inside of, then they go ping the CSM, and the CSM’s going to grab from their dashboards. And I think if there’s one agent that we probably use the most, which we could not live without, it is that point of view agent.

And then taking that one step further, we’re still working on the in real time, like, the change of the point of view agent, but even off that point of view agent, we’ve now built AI talk tracks.

Where if you’ve got a thousand mid-market fintech customers, you know what won the deal, you know what opened the pipeline, you know what signals were happening prior to that deal closing, you have the entire journey.

And Sangeeta brought up that point, and so it’s like, if I’ve got a thousand of those customers, I know who signed the DocuSigns, those are all plugged into the context graph, I know the buying committee, give or take, like, why would there ever be guesswork in terms of, like, who’s in the buying committee?

We’ve got this vertical, we know this vertical. We also know what was said on the opening call, we know what was said to close the deal, we know the aha moments. And so, why would you ever let a 28-year-old mid-market sales rep who’s been in business for 5 years, let alone in sales, but in business for 5 years, choose who should I be talking to?

What message, who’s in the buying committee, in this particular sub-vertical, within this particular segment?

And so I think taking it from point of view to, like, a, you know, very coherent talk track, and this isn’t probably gonna be a great soundbite, but, like, one of the missions that we have from an agent standpoint in general, is like, how can I take more of that, what should I do today, what should I say today, out of a seller’s mindset.

Because it’s like, we have this data, we’ve got 40,000 customers, we know what works, we know what doesn’t work, and we’ve got years of this data in a context graph, like.

the AI’s gonna get it right 99.9% of the time, and I would take that over a, you know, 23-year-old BDR who’s talking about SDRs in the commercial real estate vertical, which don’t exist. So, I’ll stop there. Those are the two biggest that we’ve implemented.

Seth Marrs:

Gotcha.

Philip Lacor:

I was speaking to one of the vendors, one of the AI vendors, and One of the trends they are seeing is that a lot of people figured out… start to figure out the new business part, like account research and so on.

So there’s more… now more interest for existing business coming, and there, I think agents can help, in one way with, to simplify prioritization. If you have a large book of business, and you are an account manager that does upsell, cross-sell, renewal, pricing changes. you have a couple of issues.

Number one, which accounts in my book should I reach out to first? Which ones are coming up for renewal? Which ones have the biggest cross-sell, upsell opportunity? Problem number one. Problem number two is, for every account that is being prioritized, I call it, like, the Rubik’s Cube. Do you cross-sell this app?

Do you reduce the price from that one? Is it just a defensive renewal? We have, like, 5-6 products that we can cross-sell? So, it’s pretty complex for an account manager or a customer success manager to determine the next best action.

And this multi-level prioritization, and helping people to understand, hey, these are the accounts to prioritize, and then per account, this is the next best action that you need to take.

That is one thing that, where we see a lot of possibilities, and… As I hear more and more… companies are starting to go not only looking at the new business part, but also, okay, how do I build out my existing business? I don’t know if someone would be able to see that.

Seth Marrs:

It’s the biggest book you have, right? Right. Interesting. Very interesting. Brian, how about you?

Brian Birkett:

Yeah, I mean, I think, very similar to James, I think we’ve built some agents around, sort of, buying committee assembly, and it’s pulling those signals together to take the right, sort of, action in the account with recommendations for the rep.

I think the other thing that I mentioned earlier, which I think is you know, we always struggle to tell our own story with so many different use cases. The ability to unlock our customer stories and match them up with specific use cases when we’re going in, you know, going back to, you know, Sales 101, like.

you tell… if you tell a good story that resonates with a prospect or a customer, that’s what they’re gonna remember. So our ability to impact better storytelling, I think, has been a big… mover. So I think those two things, whether it’s, like.

account-based research, next best action, especially when you’re selling across a 10-member buying group, gets complex. The more we can do to make our reps effective there, but then tying them to the right customer validation point, has gone a long way and done magic for us, so I would recommend those two.

Seth Marrs:

I mean… it feels like the agent piece is pushing further and further into, like, kind of, like, listening to this, is there any… do any of you have a perspective around, like, what does… what do you… like, James, you talk pretty far down the path of what a seller would do in a sale and what would be automated.

What makes a seller uniquely a seller in that world?

James Roth:

Yeah, it’s a great question, and I think, you know, as you think about the job description of a seller, and just one final piece on the last one, I think The agent use cases are basically endless, but I think the number one thing, if there’s any takeaway, is, like, the… what each person has touched on is, like, that context.

Each of these use cases gets stronger, the agent gets stronger, if that context graph gets wider and bigger. And you think about each of the respective agents that we’ve talked about, you’ve got some pulling from CRM, some pulling from third-party signals, some pulling from their websites, Brian brought up.

you know, matching the company’s website, what they do, what their secret sauce is, with what your product does, and then grabbing 10 customers that look just like it, so that you can really, truly marry the, you know, your use case to their secret sauce.

Those things only get stronger as that context graph that you built your AI on top of get bigger. Across just, like, again, product utilization. What are they interacting with with marketing? What are they using in terms of your platform? Did they just raise funding? What’d they say on an earnings call? Who just joined the buying committee?

Where’d they come from? Did they sign your deal before? Did they kill your deal before? Like… That used to live inside a sales rep’s head, and I think, to answer your question, what is challenging is that so much of what made our best sales reps the best sales reps is, like, maybe you had somebody who was just amazing at champion tracking.

Sangeeta leaves Miro, she goes to Amogee, like. that rep, who’s a great rep, knows her, follows her, remembers what she liked, and that used to live in a sales rep’s head. I think what’s challenging is that now, if you have the right tooling in the right context, it does take that away, because the agent would say, okay, new CRO, huge fan.

this is what their company’s going through, they’re focused on M&A because, you know, who they’re selling to is focus… like… It kind of gets that rep to a… to the 10-yard line a heck of a lot faster, and so as I think about what is most important, we all used to have to make that trade-off of, like, what is always a high-activity sales role, even if you’re up in the enterprise, it’s still high activity, it’s just different activity.

But I think you used to have to make that trade-off where, okay, I met with Seth. Guy’s a grinder, works his tail off, he’s probably gonna make a thousand calls in a week. But he’s just not that good. And you used to say, okay, well, I would take that, because he’s gonna take… he’s gonna make all these calls.

I think now, you can really optimize for some of those intangibles, like the ability to build a relationship, like the business acumen, like the ability to, you know, charismatically tell a story.

I think you can optimize for, we talked about it earlier, where you don’t have 60 hours of prep work in a given week, you’re optimizing for customer-facing time. And so I think what the sales rep of the future looks like is, you know, everybody’s had those sales reps in their… You know, hey, I wish Terry worked a little bit harder.

He’s so good in front of the customer. But he’s just, like, his work-life balance is what it is, you know, he’s got a couple kids, and, like, he just doesn’t work that hard, but he still crushes his number because he is so good in front of customers.

I think you can now optimize for, like, more tarries and less of the grinders that were gonna make the thousand calls, because so much of that sort of context is now in the machine.

And, you know, it’s not to say the activity goes down, it’s just different activity And it’s optimizing for that, you know, customer-facing time, the ability to build a relationship, the ability to tell a story. I also think just one last piece is, like, the A-B testing and the curiosity, almost like the GTM engineer.

I feel like sales reps should all kind of start erring on the side of engineering, because none of these things are that difficult to engineer as coming from an old guy that has built stuff in Cloud Code. It’s all pretty easy.

You just have to sit down and do it, and want to do it, and so I think, like, those are the things that we look for today, that frankly, we couldn’t really optimize for 2 years ago.

Seth Marrs:

Yes. Relationship-based. Basically, I mean, Brian, is that the same for you?

Brian Birkett:

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I was gonna touch on relationship, but the way I see it is kind of with… with agents, like, everyone’s job moves up a level, right? Like, before, you just had… you know, James talked about the rep that would… the grinder that would do all the activities.

Now, like, when you move up a level, you’re valuing judgment, you’re valuing the relationship, it’s more about that than the throughput. And then I think the other thing that, like, will just be is, like, you’re gonna have to manage your agents.

So, like, that skill itself, like, like he talked about, like, it’s kind of table stakes for the new way of selling. Like, manage your agents, understand how to make really good judgments calls, and be damn good at building relationships.

Seth Marrs:

Do you think tuning an agent will become an advantage? Like, if you’re a salesperson that has your kind of virtual twin doing all the admin work for you, that your ability to tune that thing better than an additional sales rep would become an advantage? Or do you think that’s going to be democratized?

Brian Birkett:

Absolutely. I think good reps know how to take advantage of every resource. They’re the ones that pull in the extra SC, or they’re the ones that get the extra marketing support. It’s no different than in the old days, right? Like, now they’re just gonna take advantage of their agents.

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

I think the best reps are gonna figure out how to influence the buyer. very differently. Remember the days we would say, if you didn’t write the RFP, don’t even try, right? Now, you’re not going to just write the RFP, you’re going to give the buyer the prompt that does the research for them, that influences their RFP.

You just have to think one level beyond, because their world is transforming, too.

Seth Marrs:

Do you think that moves the seller more upmarket, or up to higher in the funnel in terms of how they engage, where they’re engaging much earlier in places where they wouldn’t normally, or a BDR or marketing would?

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

I think it gives the seller an opportunity to add value like never before. Like, the buyer also doesn’t know how to write these agents, right? They’re also trying to figure out AI. If you’re making that part of it easier. then I think that’s a huge advantage.

Like, that’s where I want my sellers to be, that you’re actually thinking, how can I make that buying process easier in the way, the way that the, you know, the AI is changing their evaluation? And in terms of job description, I think one would be it designs and orchestrates buyer experiences across both human and agent touchpoints.

This is… Just making sure that the human interaction, when it happens, it totally stands out and is counted for more, right? That’s… that’s what I would expect these sellers to be thinking about. I don’t think they’ll be tinkering, sorry, I’m differing with Brian. I think they would… I would expect that to be a bit more central.

I want my sellers to think more from the outside in.

Seth Marrs:

It’s… yeah, it’s interesting, because I think that’s going to be a constant challenge that we all… we all deal with today, I mean, if you just go into most teams, do I centralize and give you everything, or do I democratize it and let you do it? It’s always a constant challenge in businesses.

I don’t even know if there’s ever a winner or a loser, because businesses kind of get stuck on one or the other. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

Right.

Seth Marrs:

So… Brian, did you… Okay, So, one of the things I… one of the things I want to jump on and talk through, kind of in the final minutes we have, like. We talked a lot about the unified approach. We talked a lot about the unified approach to the seller, like. how do we do that?

So, like, we talked here around… So, Singhita, you’re saying one person going through, Ryan, you’re saying, I’m gonna have someone that’s gonna work… or not saying, like, I asked you the question, and it’s like, I’m gonna have this person tuning it.

whichever way you go about it, like, how do you get to a consistent… like, where you’re doing… you have a consistent, unified approach to selling? Like, where your sellers are delivering in a way that is… that you trust, and that they… that you want them to deliver. Philip, how do you think about that?

Because there’s value in that, a huge value in that, right?

Philip Lacor:

Yeah, look, I think the shift is that I think consistency, or the lack of it in a go-to-market organization was seen as a training or enablement problem. So you would train in a certain way, this is how we’re going to work, and then The sellers go back, and over time, they start doing it more and more in their own way.

And the question is, are there certain motions where you can get that consistency by fully automating? And… A great example, I find, like, the inbound motion, where we have now, as I said, an agent working on our website. The agent does discovery, books a follow-up call.

We’ve now also said, okay, the problem that we had is that the time for the follow-up of a call request or a demo request would vary. We are compressing that time by having an agent there.

Now, the next thing that we have done is that There can be inconsistency in how we show the product, so… a prospect can also get an AI-powered demo, so you start to re-architect parts of your motions to get to, like, much higher… much higher consistency. So.

the thinking goes from, okay, inconsistency is a training problem, to how can I build an architecture or a go-to-market system that in itself produces much more consistency. I’ll give you one other example.

A common problem is, like, you win a deal, and how is the deal or that information being transferred to the implementation, to the professional services teams? Some reps do this in a great way, they write a book. Another rep might just throw it over the fence.

again, we have an agent now deriving from all the thousands of calls, like, okay, this is how the… this is the information that the implementation team needs to do a consistent handover, and to get to a consistent implementation. So.

There are these points where agents can help you become much more consistent, and then, yeah, the engine as a whole becomes more consistent.

Seth Marrs:

As this stuff happens, Thank you, E. We’ve talked a lot around this. It seems like there’s a lot that the agent’s gonna do, and it’s also making the seller more valuable in certain areas when it comes to relationships. is this going to play right into the hands of a typical seller who just wants to do whatever they want anyway?

Do you think companies are going to want sellers to kind of ex… like, we talked a little bit about experiment, but you kind of need the seller that’s going against what the agent would do, and trying to find those other things that are… unique, or would allow you to win that others wouldn’t do, because if you assume that all of these things are going to be done by an agent, all that stuff is rote, you’re going to be looking for new ways to win.

Does this kind of create a new frontier around how sellers find ways to differentiate in deals?

Brian Birkett:

I don’t think so. I think the agents make the methodology sort of live in the workflow, right? But you’re not… you’re not scripting the behavior, so the seller can still be themselves. It’s just like, hey, at a certain point, you’re gonna have to take a demo, right?

Like, let’s be consistent about how we deliver, but how you… how you talk on that demo, you know, things like that, that’s… there’s still room for human seller magic to happen.

But it’s the consistency in the process that, like, basically used to live in enablement decks that nobody read, now can live in your workflow and happen every… So the… there’s consistency in the process, and there’s still room for creativity and, like, human behavior to, like, let your reps shine. You know, in those moments.

Seth Marrs:

So use the tools consistently, but be yourself and find a way to unique… to find that unique value with you.

Brian Birkett:

Yeah, have the tools and the agents keep your process consistent, and free your reps up to do, you know, sort of the human aspects of it, and make the, you know, make the judgment calls, do the human things, you know, not just follow the script, or we would have an agent do everything.

Philip Lacor:

I think it’s very hard for an agent to really have, like, a greater judgment. There are moments in a buying cycle where you need to read the dynamics of the buying committee. You need to understand what the motives are of the different players. You need to have… get a feel of, like.

Are they really going to make a decision this quarter, or is there really lack of urgency? And this is where the judgment of the seller really comes into play. I think it’s still one huge factor. I think another factor is still, like, trust.

Customers still want to buy from people to a very large extent, and having a go-to person, people buy still from people, and it might change over time, but right now it still happens a lot. Unless it’s a very transactional sale, but, yeah.

James Roth:

Yeah, I think… I think somebody made the mention of, like, it just raises the expectation up a level, and I think if you think about those reps that I mentioned earlier that had all the contacts, they were following all the champions, all that kind of stuff. I think now, a buyer today expects the seller to have a pretty strong point of view.

And so I think that same crop of your 10-15% best people If you think about the onboarding use case that Philip brought up, and, you know, you now can go ping, say, okay, what did the new business rep close? How did the OIT team do in the onboarding?

you know, that account manager that gets that and says, okay, I read the single pager, now I feel prepared. the good reps will then go look at 5 other recently onboarded in the same sub-vertical, get a point of view around what they’re doing, and then go do a bunch of industry research. What did the public ones say on their earnings calls?

Like, there’s always gonna be those top 10% reps, and I think at least what we’re focused on is, like, what they’re doing with not only the agent that we’ve built into the workflow, or the agent that we’ve given them, then what is that additional work that they’re doing that we can also now pump into the agent to say, okay, if you just have this one customer journey, the account manager is unequivocally better prepared than they were a year ago, but, like, what is that best rep doing?

Well, they’re going to the 5 other ones, they’re going to an industry point of view, they’re seeing, like, okay, there’s public companies here, here’s what they said on their most recent earnings calls, just, like, ratcheting up, like, because I just feel like the one thing that’s scary is now, if you are that rep with a notebook, and you don’t use one of these agents ahead of time, and I did this thing with this guy, and he was talking about, like, the days of discovery are dead.

If you go into a meeting now. doing discovery, you get thrown out of the room, because the expectation is that you know most of the things, so he’s… and I like this, he flipped discovery to editing. He’s like, now, it’s no longer discovery, you’re in editing.

You come with a point of view, you know all of this about the business, but rather than $1 billion in revenue, it’s $1.1 billion in revenue. Like, you’re editing. And I think that is, like, what we’re focused on in that next one, is, like, how are these folks using it to their best ability, and then what do they do in addition to that?

And then how do we democratize that addition into that other 80% of the reps that are now just using the agent that we built?

Seth Marrs:

Gotcha.

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

Yeah, I think I absolutely agree on the bar being raised. I think the only possible way, I think, of the frontier shifting a little bit is that we always knew that you have to help the buyer buy. In many cases, the buyers don’t even know how to go through this process.

And that buying journey is changing for them, so you also have to have the seller know how to let the buyer buy in this new world. That’s sort of a new frontier, I think, that we’d have to work on.

the thing that’s on my mind as I’m thinking about James, your POV agent, is if it’s substituting sort of years of experience, are we going to see young, newcoming sellers, sort of, really accelerate their career track?

That’d be amazing to see, because they don’t have to go through that long process and scars on our backs that we had to go over years.

Seth Marrs:

Just allows you to have a step up and find new, different types of scarves that you’re gonna get as a seller in this new world.

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

True.

Seth Marrs:

Awesome. Well, I know we’re coming up on time, so I want to make sure… I don’t want to squeeze in another question with 2 minutes left, so I just want to thank you guys very much for We’re joining for the time, for the great responses. Really appreciate it.

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

Thanks for having us.

Julia Nimchinski:

What a phenomenal panel. Thank you so much, Seth, and thank you all, and let’s do just one minute of, you know, shameless plugs. What’s the best way to support you? Let’s start with you, James.

James Roth:

Yeah, so thank you, Seth, thank you, Julia. If you’ve got any questions on all things, anything Zoom info, shoot me a note on LinkedIn. I would be happy to connect, and that’s all I got.

Julia Nimchinski:

Sangeeta?

Sangeeta Chakraborty:

I’m always happy to discuss customer journey and constant evolutions. Find me on LinkedIn.

Julia Nimchinski:

as in Phillip?

Philip Lacor:

Yeah, Julia said, thanks for having us. We are hiring, so hit me up on LinkedIn. We’re looking for great people.

Julia Nimchinski:

Right.

Brian Birkett:

Yeah, same thing. You can find me on LinkedIn and reach out with anything, Lean Data. Thanks for having me.

Julia Nimchinski:

Awesome, and last but not least, Seth.

Seth Marrs:

Yeah, same thing, find on LinkedIn, and if you’re looking to help make your sellers better at selling, go to Sandler.com.