Where people still have the edge over AI in sales

Hello everyone, and welcome to The Play by Quotain, where we talk with sales leaders about scaling, coaching, and the future of selling. I'm your host, Alex Talamonti, CEO and co-founder of Quotain, and today I'm joined by Barry Toser. Barry has helped early-stage and growth-stage companies scale past $100 million in revenue with multiple successful exits. He tripled revenue for a division of a New York Stock Exchange-listed company, and he brings CEO, CRO, and CMO experience along with a background at multinational technology companies. Today he helps companies sharpen their go-to-market strategies through TNT Advisory Group, and on Fridays he turns his attention to another important pursuit: finding great pizza. Barry, thanks for coming on the show today.

Thank you, Alex. Really happy to be here with you.

Well, Barry, if anyone looks you up, they can see something really interesting. You've taken not one but two companies from under $10 million to over $100 million in revenue, both in less than two years. I think that's pretty remarkable. Can you take me through how that actually happened?

Sure. This was some time ago, but I have a heavy-duty background in the telecom industry, telecom and high-tech companies. Telecom has been up, down, and sideways, and it's not even really called telecom anymore. It's merged into the greater high-tech sector. But during some of the go-go years in telecom, I was the senior sales leader and a leading executive with a couple of international carriers. Through building successful teams and putting some strategies in place for growth, we were able to move very fast in the carrier segment by working with a lot of other telecom companies who were interested in the wholesale carrier services we were selling back in the day. We had some astronomical growth. I'm very proud of the successes we had at those companies, and in one of those instances I was able to successfully exit after having grown it to such a large revenue volume in a short period of time.

Yeah, that's very impressive. Going from $10 million to $100 million must have included a lot of growth in the sales team, and probably adding a bunch of new systems as you take a company from proven early success to a repeatable sales motion. Do you have any examples of things you did to help build those systems out?

I'll tell you, as successful as the systems and processes we put into place were, it's really about the people. I had a long stretch where I worked with a group of high-level sales professionals, sales directors, VPs of sales, people I had worked with and brought with me as I moved from one company to the next. With all the changes going on in today's sales environment, with so many more AI tools, it still comes down to the people. The tools are great, technology is great, systems are great, but it really revolves around the people. My success was a reflection of the success of the individuals on my team, who did a great job going out, finding new business relationships, and growing those relationships. We did have the right type of processes in place. The systems weren't as advanced back then as they are now. We didn't even really have a CRM system, so we were doing things in a more archaic fashion compared to today. But we had a lot of the basics: tracking pipelines, having meetings, going through account planning. I wish we'd had some of the tools available today, because I think we could have been even more successful.

Certainly. How do you, as a leader, take the people on your team and help magnify their abilities? Like you said, a lot of it's about the people, what they're able to do, and the relationships they're able to build.

You mentioned repeatable sales motions, and I think that has been tried and true. You want to find a successful formula, and what works for one person may not be what works for the next. The way you coach and motivate one person is not going to be the same as the next. But if you can hit upon a successful formula for each individual, figure out what their hot buttons are, how they operate best, and how you can motivate them, then coach them in that regard. Find some repeatable successes they have. I've always been really big on celebrating successes. In sales there's a lot more failure than success. You're failing 90% of the time; you have a very low batting average when you look at how often you're truly successful. So when you have a success, you should make a big deal out of it. People should be happy, people should be rewarded, people should be patted on the back. That creates a positive vibe and good energy, and it's repeatable. People are happy when they're applauded and recognized. If you can keep that kind of culture going with your sales teams, it will prove to be very successful in the end.

That makes a lot of sense. When, like you said, a lot of the job is spent failing, there's a psychological element to it. It's hard to keep having failure after failure, and that's just part of the job. So taking time to celebrate those big wins can really help the culture of the company.

And a lot of people aren't cut out for sales because of that: the fear of failure, and actually having failure. People in other departments sometimes look at salespeople as the ones who come and go, have all the flexibility, and aren't as tied down, and there's even some resentment at times over the life salespeople lead. But it is not easy. The failure, knocking your head against the wall, the rejection: it's difficult, and a lot of people aren't cut out for that. But some people are, and those people can have a lot of success, earn good compensation, and be vibrant contributors to the company.

Do you have any examples of failures at companies you've worked at or with that ended up teaching you something, and later helped bring that company back even better than it was before?

Yeah. I reflect on what was going on at a company that is still around and highly successful: Transaction Network Services, TNS. That's the New York Stock Exchange company where I tripled revenue. I came in to run one of the divisions some years ago, and at first we were just spinning our wheels. We were trying to figure out what it was going to take to turn this thing around, trying to be prescriptive and diagnostic about why the division hadn't been doing well. I think it hadn't been doing well because of a lack of meaningful activity. There weren't enough contacts being made, not enough prospecting, and not the right kind of prospecting. It's one thing to send tons of emails, make phone calls, and now do things on LinkedIn. It's one thing to have a lot of activity, but it has to be the right kind of messaging, the right kind of activity, something meaningful and actionable. When I took over the division at TNS, the right kind of activity was not occurring. So we had to change the dynamic and figure out our messaging. We were selling high-level telecom infrastructure products, and those were not easy. It was a long sales cycle, and it was hard to get to the right people, so we had to be diligent. As I mentioned earlier, it was about getting the right people into the organization, people who were going to be successful at breaking in and penetrating new accounts, building relationships, and doing a lot of needs assessment and probing. Over time we brought a couple of new people in on the sales side, they started to build relationships, and we were able to turn the ship around. It took some time, but we were successful enough that we tripled revenue in that division. It came from diagnosing what the problem was, coming up with solutions that were meaningful to the customer, figuring out and filling the customer's needs, spending a lot of time building relationships with prospects and end users, retaining those customers, growing the business, and putting a full-fledged strategy in place to get things turned around.

This actually segues into a question I wanted to ask you. At TNT Advisory, you offer both sales coaching and fractional services. Say you're brought into a company where the sales team has been underperforming, missing quota for the last six months. How do you measure where things are going wrong, and what's the first thing you would look at?

Yeah, I like to understand what's getting in the way. It's not a question of just telling people to sell more. You need to find out what is blocking them. Sometimes people in the consulting and fractional business will either assess something and then not be results-focused, or they'll jump right in and do something without doing the assessment. I try to do a little of both, in fairly quick fashion. It takes a lot of questioning and listening: asking people where the pebble in their shoe is, what's stopping them from being successful, and really listening to those responses so you can come up with the right strategies. A lot of times the issues are similar. Maybe the messaging isn't right, maybe the pipeline isn't full enough, or maybe people aren't as effective as they could be in meetings with prospects and customers. I assess issues like that with people and then start coaching them on those, a lot of similar things to what you're doing: role playing and working with people so they're more successful in each and every conversation they have with prospects and customers.

That makes a lot of sense. How many people within a sales org do you think you need to talk to in order to get an accurate picture of where the pebble in the shoe is?

Probably a good handful. And it's not just a question of talking to the sales reps or the sales managers. It's talking to both, some of the sales leaders and some of the reps. As you can imagine, there can be a disconnect there. You might hear something from sales management that doesn't align with what you're hearing from the reps, and vice versa. Leadership may be looking for the reps to do a different kind of prospecting, or more activity in one area that isn't working, and the reps have been doing that and know it hasn't been working. So either they're doing something wrong, or something new needs to be tried. I've always believed there's not just one successful way to bring revenue into a company. There's not just one successful sales method. It's usually a combination of varied approaches: trying different things and then mixing them together to come up with the right formula.

I certainly agree. You go to one organization and the way they sell is completely different from the next. There are so many different sales methodologies companies follow, and that alone is evidence there's not just one right way to sell. There certainly are wrong ways, I suppose.

That's true. The nature of the selling environment has changed dramatically, and I've seen many of those changes. Years ago we didn't have the tools available today, and you had to spend hours and hours researching your prospects, whether you were doing internet searches or something less sophisticated. It took a lot of time to do your research and a lot of time to do your planning. Now it's a different ballgame. With the great tools on the market today, and of course everything AI-related, you're able to move so much farther, so much faster, and preparation is so much greater. But in the end, people still have to do the work and make the connections. I do think buyers buy from people they like to deal with. It's not necessarily an AI bot they're going to like to deal with; they're going to like to deal with humans. So it's the combination: taking the capabilities AI can help with, like preparation, planning, efficiency, and research, and having a hybrid approach where the human turns that into a good connection with a prospect and builds a good relationship. I like seeing where things have evolved, but it sure is different from where the selling environment used to be.

I imagine so. I think everyone's probably wondering at this point how AI fits into all of this. It's what everyone's thinking about. It sounds like you think people are still going to be selling to people for a while. Would you say that's correct?

Sure, with AI there to complement what we humans are doing. AI will be a great complement, and if it's used properly it can dramatically change the game. But it's not just about activity. AI can help you produce thousands of emails and thousands of LinkedIn connections, and it can do things more quickly, but it's not just about that. It still gets back to the people making things happen in the end. I am using AI tools myself, and I believe that is how we ended up meeting in the first place.

That's correct.

There are really great tools out there that are dynamic and help people make new connections, possibly finding prospects they might never have found any other way. Even a great tool like Boardy, an AI super-connector, puts people together, like we're doing right now, and puts them into a conversation. AI is phenomenal at complementing efforts, but ultimately, and I hope it stays this way, it will be about people connecting with people and people selling to people. There's still a great benefit to networking, putting people together at events and meeting people that way, and then using tools like AI to augment and boost things up. I talk about that hybrid approach of having AI and having the person, and putting them together for the best of both worlds.

What specific activities do you think humans still do better than AI in sales?

That's where I've been a big proponent of networking. I ran a high-tech networking organization for 18 years that was extremely successful at bringing people together. At those events there was a lot of content from speakers and panels, but it was really about content and contacts, and I think it's pretty hard to replace that connection at a networking event with AI. AI could help you find information on the people who are at the event or who attended, follow up and send them an email, and do a lot of the pre- and post-work. But the actual event, AI can't replace. That's where the human connection ties in. People want to do business with people they like to do business with, and to be friends with people they like and have something in common with. That's the essence of the human connection, and it will continue to thrive and be at the center of everything, with technology around it.

I'm inclined to agree. You see throughout human history that the way things got done is people coming together. Maybe they form a business, maybe they're just working together, they align on some goal, and then something new gets created. That's kind of the magic of bringing people together, right?

That's right. And that's where a tool like your product meshes with what I'm talking about. Take sales role plays. Role plays have been done since the beginning of selling, but a lot of the time it's one person sitting with another person trying to do a role play. There's still great value in that, but having AI serve as that other person is a great advancement. It makes things go much quicker and more efficiently, and you're probably getting better responses. But again, it's planning and preparation, because you're trying to help a rep be better prepared for a conversation they're going to have with a prospect or a customer. That's the hybrid approach: a sensational AI tool that augments and accelerates a process that helps the individual be more successful. Here's the way I look at these tools. Typically 20% of your sales reps are high performers, 20% are low performers, and 60% are in the middle. If you can come up with some help, assistance, or guidance to move the needle a little with that 60%, and you move 10% of your reps into the top group, you still have 20% at the bottom and 50% in the middle, but now you have 30% at the top instead of 20%, because you've given them AI tools, coaching tools, and role-play tools that help them become more successful. Think about the revenue enhancement that will come from that. And you can probably do it more quickly with AI tools than the way people used to do these things. That's where there's such an efficient use of AI and technology. It's a game changer.

Yeah, it definitely makes everything a little bit faster, which is usually a good thing. And we're seeing that communication is only becoming more important, whether that's humans communicating what they want to AI or, as we've been talking about this entire time, communicating with each other. If you think about role play or coaching in general, that's the whole point: you want the people coming together toward a common goal to communicate properly. How many bad or strange things have happened in history because people miscommunicated?

That's right. Communication is the key.

Awesome. Well, this has been Barry Toser, everyone, and this is The Play by Quotain. Thank you very much.