How to Get the Most Out of Your Tech Stack

[00:01] Michael McNary: Welcome to Mimeo's Talk of the Trade. I'm Mike McNary. In addition to leading the sales organization here at Mimeo, I'm also interested in unlocking the secrets of sales and marketing. In each episode, I talk with creative leaders to find out how they approach problems like motivating sales teams, structuring the revenue cycle, and fitting product to market. At the end of the conversation, you and I have new takeaways to apply to our everyday life. Let's jump into today's episode.

[00:28] Michael McNary: Hey everyone, Mike McNary here welcoming you to another episode of Mimeo's Talk of the Trade podcast. I'm excited about our topic today, how to get the most out of your tech stack. For our conversation. We have Jake Dunlap. Jake is the CEO of Skaled Consulting. Jake, it's great to have you. Welcome to the pod.

[00:49] Jake Dunlap: Yeah, I'm looking forward to the conversation. It should be a fun one.

[00:52] Michael McNary: Yeah, I agree. For our listeners that might not know much about you, Jake, or Skaled, tell us a little bit about yourself and your organization.

[01:00] Jake Dunlap: Yeah. So I'm Jake Dunlap. I'm the CEO of Skaled Consulting. We are a revenue operations strategy and tactical execution firm, which really means we work with CEOs, senior sales leaders to operationalize everything from their top of funnel through the current customer work. And we do that via mix of best practices around processes and playbooks, but then also then the technology and tactical execution in your tech stack to pull all that through. So Rev Ops is a big buzzword now and we're really one of the only organizations that looks at it more holistically from both an enablement and technology vantage point.

[01:37] Michael McNary: Yeah, that's great. I can tell you that being lucky enough to have a Rev Ops team for our sales organization, I don't know what I would do without it now. So I think the value is really strong. If somebody's hearing this, Jake, and they're saying, wow, I need to get some of that, how can they reach out to you or to Skaled?

[01:57] Jake Dunlap: Yeah, LinkedIn is always good. Just check me out on LinkedIn. I do just a little bit of content on LinkedIn on sales and revenue operations. So just type in Jake Dunlap or you can just email me at jake at scaled with a k - Skaled - and yeah, definitely always down to talk best practices, strategy, and probably some of the things we're going to talk about today.

[02:18] Michael McNary: Yeah, rock and roll. We're going to talk today, as I mentioned, at the top, about making the most of a tech stack and wanted to kind of kick it off by asking you how has the sales tech landscape evolved over the last decade or so? Jake?

[02:33] Jake Dunlap: I mean, last decade there was only CRM and it was really like marketing tools went through their kind of evolution in the late 2000s, early 2010s and then sales tech kind of fast followed and call it early to mid 2010s with sales engagement platforms and various there's some already some data platforms. And so really, the last decade has been the birth of a lot of sales specific technologies. And now I think the difficulty we have is that many of the people that are in charge of these organizations didn't grow up with these tools and so they didn't build an organization that used $1000 to $2,000 a month per sales rep just for technology. They worked hard and emailed and called and did things and they didn't have the technology. And so I think that kind of like where we're at now is as some of these technologies people are now implementing their second time, their third time. I think you're seeing a maturation of use cases and people starting to either realize what's noise or how to actually get real value out of the tech stack. Because again, it's just like anything new. There's this rush to spend and buy and shiny new toy here and oh, this will solve all revenue challenges, or this will solve it happens all the time. Jake, we need an ABC tool and it's like, look from our like you actually just have a really poor part of your sales process right here. This technology is not going to solve a process problem. And that's kind of our ethos, is that everything is a process problem. So if you're looking at technology to solve a process for you, unless it's some manual behind the scenes piece, you probably have to solve part of the process too, where documentation SLAs different standardizations of way that you're doing things. So it's been an amazing evolution. We've been at the forefront for a long time. We were early adopters of some sales engagement technology back in 2015, 2014. And so it's really my job to stay on top of this and it's one of the parts of my job that I love every week, I'm probably taking a couple of different demos with different interesting technologies. So it's evolved a lot and it's a core part of how you have to build your team now that sales leaders again, just because they didn't grow up with it. You can't outsource your knowledge to an ops leader necessarily even. You need to make sure you kind of reimagine and rethink about what could be helpful or beneficial for your organization.

[05:04] Michael McNary: I liked a lot of what you said there. I think speaking as one of those people you've described, a lot of this tech was not around as I was coming up or even when I started in leadership and getting to learn it. I honestly feel at times like I'm behind the learning curve of some of my reps because they've only known this world and can kind of see through the fog, I think, more quickly than I can when we get a new tool or we're piloting something different and I'm kind of envious at times. But the other point you made that I really like is the noise. You said understanding the real value of these things versus perceived value. Right. And it takes a little while to get to that point, and I think it's important for people to realize that. Right?

[05:48] Jake Dunlap: Yeah, exactly. Well, and I think what happens, too, is what happens is a lot of times people just implement. They hear about a shiny new tool, they think about it, but they haven't really mapped the real issue or the real bottleneck. I was just talking to someone about this maybe earlier this week, and I cannot tell you the amount of times people are like, look, we got to build a new playbook, or like, we've got to do ABC or this thing. And because they're not looking at the holistic piece or they're trying to solve it with this piece of tech, it's like the actual issue is the discovery process. It's not actually the proposal process or whatever. It's that your team's not doing this part correctly. And so I think that's a big issue right now with these siloed operations groups and sales ops, marketing ops, CS ops, and then Rev ops, just really in a lot of organizations, just being glorified, sales ops is that a lot of times people pick a technology to solve a problem, but that's not the actual problem. The problem actually exists in a different part of the value chain, and that's just the downhill effect of it. And so I think whenever we talk to companies, it's just so important to really map out all of these pieces and say, what's the bottleneck like? Yeah, this could maybe solve that, but is that going to really be the big unlock for you? And so I think too often, people, they jump to pick a point solution that doesn't solve the problem, and then two, and this is probably the most guilty, is we need to get this started yesterday. When are you guys ready to go live? Yesterday? And it's like, no. And then what happens is they rush the implementation of it, and then they blame the tool, and it's like, no, this is a change management exercise. It's going to take a few months to get there. Stop trying to oh, we trained everybody. We trained them. It's done. We train them, it's done. Right. So you've got both of those things. It's a selection process is flawed, and then probably the most consistent is the implementation process is rushed almost without fail in some of these tools.

[07:46] Michael McNary: Yeah, I agree. Starting out on the kind of selection side, Jake, there's a lot out there. As you mentioned earlier, you're taking calls really often to kind of stay on top of the market and what's happening on the tech side of things. But if I'm a sales leader or if I'm an organization with multiple decision makers, all involved in the vendor selection process, what are some things to consider when evaluating one solution against a competitive landscape, like how should be measuring what's best for your company?

[08:18] Jake Dunlap: That's such a good question. Step one is to map the process so you understand the bottleneck. Right. And what I mean by that is, and I say this a lot like one of my favorite facts I've heard is that the word priorities was invented in the 1920s. Before that, you can only have one priority, priority and bottleneck is another one of those words. There can only be one bottleneck. It's not by definition. And I think too often people are trying to solve a bunch of little point issues and so they never really get to the heart of what was the one bottleneck. And so their evaluation process is going to solve some small things, but then they don't end up picking the right person because it doesn't solve the underlying or big piece that I was mentioning before. And then when they get into the competitive evaluation phase, the most important part goes back to the second thing I mentioned, which was the onboarding. You should be picking a solution that is actively talking about how we're going to make you successful. I would be talking to customers who went through the onboarding process. I would be talking to slack groups I'm a member of. But all things being equal, if one tool is even 20% better at something, but that tool that doesn't have quite all the bells and whistles, make sure that you can use the product, you're going to get more of a lift. And so that would be my advice, is that pick the solution that's going to make sure and has that mindset of like, our job is for you to be here for years and the sales team is talking about that in the actual deal cycle, all that stuff. So that to me is probably one of the most important criteria is again, what is this organization going to do to make sure that I'm successful after I make this investment?

[10:01] Michael McNary: Yeah, I think you're onto something there. When making that decision. You're talking about focusing on who's going to invest in a successful implementation. There's a lot of people that will be involved on the buying end, right. The people making the decision, the people that are going to be in administrative roles, people that will be kind of manager on that particular tool. The end users are the ones that have to adopt it, as we all know. Should they be involved in the decision making process at all? And if so, what's a good way to get them kind of the ability to give their two cent along the way?

[10:37] Jake Dunlap: Yeah, well, I mean, yes, like emphatic yes. And specifically the frontline managers have to be involved. We've come in on the back of many failed change management initiatives around the sales process itself or technology adoption. And I can tell you the most common is the lack of involvement of frontline leaders because at the end of the day, who is going to have to troubleshoot when a rep has a question? The leader. And so we use a framework. And all of you please, I encourage you to steal this. We use a framework is actually developed by Bain Consulting called Rapid. And basically it's a way to assign groups and roles to move through the evaluation process from a thoroughness standpoint and a speed standpoint. Because that's the other problem is whenever you don't come up with this kind of clear decision making framework, you just get every cook in the kitchen and then it's like we've got a client right now. This is a good example where our team did not do a good job of this. And so then it's like the person who brought us in product marketing, then you got marketing involved in sales and then everyone's got input. And it's like, stop, we're putting them in Rapid. And so Rapid is a real simple framework. I'll give you guys the definitions. P is for perform, who's actually going to rewrite the sequences, who's going to implement it, or do the run the evaluation, whatever. It ends up being input. So the I is input, okay? And that's where you form. You call them tiger teams, you might call them something else, where again, we might select a team of top performers from this group and a team of sales managers from here. These people are responsible for giving input into what the decision criteria should be or the final output, whatever that might be. Then you've got your agree team, that could be the frontline managers. Like, okay, so we've given some input. The frontline managers need to agree before we go to the recommendations phase that this is what we want to go. And then the recommendation is usually the second most senior person who's kind of like the sponsor, you could say, of the project. And then the D is the final decision maker. It could be the CRO, VP of Sales, just depending on it. And what we found is it is crazy by just setting up the teams up front, just the leap forward of the deployment of anything. Again, whether it's a sales playbook, whether it's technology, whether it's I mean, you can use the same framework for your interior design. Having an assigned decision making process, I can tell you cleans up most of what you see in dysfunction across cross functional teams. And so the Rapid framework is our go to. It's been our go to for about five or six years and it just flat works.

[13:15] Michael McNary: Yeah, it makes sense to me too. I think having that clearly defined roles and responsibilities is effective in so many cases, right. When everyone's trying to kind of do a little bit of everything or get their two cents into every conversation, it can lead to either stagnation or even reversal of momentum.

[13:37] Jake Dunlap: It always does, is what I would say. Because especially when you have two people that are at a peer level, if they don't get assigned a role. Right. It's not that you couldn't have two people at the recommendation. I'm not talking about that. But maybe it's cross functional. The buck has to stop somewhere. Someone has to say, we're going to move to the next phase. Again, we live in this world of kind of extreme consensus decision making, which just leads to more meetings and less decisions. This clears a lot of that up for you.

[14:08] Michael McNary: Yes. So having talked about the selection and the defined roles to make, it a process that you can kind of get behind, get some momentum with you're at the implementation phase. And I think you alluded to not expecting the tool to solve the problem on its own. Right. So what would you say makes some tech stack implementations more successful than others?

[14:34] Jake Dunlap: One is an unrealistic time frame. Whatever you think the time to implement is, double it. Like, good rule of thumb, just double it. You're like, we're going to be live six weeks. Plan on being done going live in twelve weeks. I think the more that you are realistic about that and you give yourself the leeway to make sure people are trained properly. And then the second piece I'll say is managers should go through everything first, put the managers through the process first. Then again, we do this with all of our playbook work. In particular, we do not never roll out the same change management to everybody at the same time. Because then again, the people that are the linchpin, the frontline managers, they're learning at the same time your reps are. I'd much rather deploy it to leaders, let them utilize it for two to four weeks, soft start to use it with their team, and then do a formal deployment to the reps on the front line. And again, we've just seen that be the kind of catalyst for success or the determining factor many times. So if you plan on slightly longer time frames in the grand scheme of things, right? Yes. Would it be great to have this thing go faster than six to eight weeks extra? Yes, of course. But hopefully this is a tool you're going to have for years. You're trying to select a tool that is going to solve a problem for many years. So take the extra time, get the right people again involved in the decision making. So when you roll it out, they're not asking, what is this thing? They were already involved. Make sure the frontline leaders, again, go through the process first before just deploying it to the reps. Candidly, if you do those two things, you're going to be in the top 5% of implementations that we see. Because those are the things that mess it up, is we condense it, we rush it, and then we don't get the people that are going to have to answer the day to day questions up to speed in a way that they can actually answer them and help the team.

[16:29] Michael McNary: Right?

[16:30] Jake Dunlap: Yeah.

[16:30] Michael McNary: Which makes sense. And I think what you can do a lot of times is if those frontline managers don't understand it, you can lose some faith from the end users.

[16:40] Jake Dunlap: Right.

[16:40] Michael McNary: If they're seeing that somebody else isn't taking it seriously or hasn't become expert, they might not themselves have the desire to take it seriously or become expert.

[16:48] Jake Dunlap: That's right. And if they weren't involved in the decision making process, that's the other thing. Right. And then you're like, hey, here's this tool. And every single manager is like, why did we buy this thing? Nobody on our team. We would love it if we as humans could just change on a dime. But that's just not how life works, right. Change management is a very real thing. So just having an appreciation for that that changes is not automatic. And therefore, what can we do to help to sell this internally and get people on board and making sure you're spending just as much time thinking about that even as you are about the technology you pick? Because if you don't think about how you're going to actually get this live and get people excited, then again, you could pick the best tech, but it.

[17:34] Michael McNary: Still won't get yeah, I totally know. Even if you do all those things right. What I've seen sometimes, Jake, is that the end users will there'll be an incongruous adoption, right? Some will really take to the solution and some might not kind of jump towards or buy into the ROI as quickly. Is there a way to effectively incent adoption or to drive it in a way that will make the end users successful, the tool more quickly?

[18:07] Jake Dunlap: Yeah, I think there's a couple of different ways that you can think about that. One is just establish what success looks like. The amount of people that I see who don't establish success metrics for a new technology to put. And that could be a mix of usage metrics and it should be business metrics. If you're going to invest in Abct.com, IO, AI, whatever the name of the tool is, okay, you should be able to say, this is going to impact rep productivity, this is going to impact sales cycle. Like, whatever it is, it is mind blowing how few technology deployments or rev ops like, for us, as a Rev Ops consulting firm, my team is maniacal. You're not tracking our performance based on number of tickets. Did we build a process that got a bunch of projects done? It's like no. For this project, the metric, we're trying to impact a sales cycle and we're going to try to decrease by 25%. Right. So you should be tacking any type of technology, and you could have some leading indicators around usage. Like, okay, within 60 days, we hope that X percent of people are using it x percent of time by 120 days. We're hoping for this, but at the end of the day, what's the metric? A business metric, not a they like the tool, like you bought it for a reason, and it's probably to drive sales, whether that's via productivity gains or actual revenue gains or more at bats. You should establish a business metric for your purchases.

[19:40] Michael McNary: For sure. Yeah. We kind of started the conversation, Jake, talking about how… okay, this last decade we came from the Dark Ages to a place now where sales tech stack solutions are ubiquitous, right. They're everywhere. And if you're a sales leader or an Ops, you get outreach from SDRs of every new tech solution you can think of every other week. Right. What advice would you give a sales leadership team or even a rev ops team to stay on top of this ever changing tech stack and all the options available? How do you stay current?

[20:19] Jake Dunlap: That's a really good question. I'll try to give you a couple of different ways to think about this.

[20:25] Michael McNary: Sure.

[20:26] Jake Dunlap: One is take demos. Meaning when you go to these conferences, I would just encourage you to just always be dedicated. I use this framework I call 80-15-5, which adds up to 100%. 80% of my time is spent in things that are going to impact the business and my day to day in a very relatively dune time horizon 30 days or so. 15% of my time is dedicated to things that might help me in three to six months and 5% of my time should be dedicated to things that might help me in a year or multiple years. And I think if you're a revenue leader today, whatever your moniker is, you have to adopt a version of that that if you are not, it goes back to what you said, right, where your reps are on top of it. If you think about where you want to be in five years or ten years or 15 or 20 years as a leader, if you still want to be a leader and you still want to make that big salary or whatever again and same thing at the rep level, you need to invest the same amount in your time to master these tools. You have to dedicate the time to do it. And you can't outsource there's certain knowledge that you just cannot outsource. You cannot outsource your knowledge about what's going to be next. How are people building teams in a modern way? So step one is you've got to carve out time for it. And I would just really encourage everyone, no matter what stage of career you're at, to have that mindset. I think it's one of the things that made me very successful throughout my career, is always doing a little bit of my time, very little bit of time, always planning and preparing and learning. So when opportunities came up, I was there. So that would be probably one of the most important kind of bigger picture pieces of advice, I think. Look...candidly at Skaled, I think we're putting out some of the best content around this right now, around kind of technology and what's working and what's not. So definitely humble brag on the work I think our marketing team is doing, but I do feel like we are putting out some pretty remarkable content on sales technology, what matters and what doesn't. But take a few extra demos that you might not have planned. Build the time into, okay, what is this thing? Okay, this is interesting. And then over time, you can kind of right size some of that. But yeah, that's maybe the easiest answer I have, is there's a lot of different resources. G2 is another one as well, too, that I think has a lot of good difference, especially for software. But yeah, I think even if you just carve out the time, you're going to be in a much better spot no matter who you listen to, me or anybody else.

[23:01] Michael McNary: Yeah, no, I think there's some good points. Right. If you don't take a gander, so to speak, you won't have an idea of what's on the horizon. Right. And if you're not carving out the time or going out to find third party expertise, you're going to be behind the curve. Right. And as things are changing so quickly, getting behind the curve can happen very quickly. Right.

[23:28] Jake Dunlap: Whenever we talk about generative, AI can go on a whole other rant about just how important that is as that next trend.

[23:39] Michael McNary: Yeah, let's talk about that for a minute. Right. As you said, we could probably do hours on it, but going to the point that we've kind of been building up to is that having a proficiency with whatever tech stacks in place and an idea of what's around the corner, that's kind of table stakes these days. As top performing salespeople, you need to know how to leverage these tools. And as organizational leaders, you need to understand what's going to deliver ROI and help your team sell. AI is the prominent kind of, I want to say sexy, but also high potential active player in the marketplace right now. What do you see being the immediate value of AI for salespeople? And then maybe where do you think it's going? Just some guess because it could go a lot of different directions and maybe the next couple of years, Jake.

[24:38] Jake Dunlap: Yeah, there's a couple of different things in there. There's one thing you actually mentioned, just briefly before I jump into generative AI in particular is you as sales, if you're a rep and you're listening to this, you have to take your own professional development into your own hands. Meaning you need to go out and get certified or to go out and do if there's a tool that you are supposed to be using every day, you should get certified in that tool because chances are you're only using 20% to 30% of it. I think you cannot sit around and wait for your company to train you on it again. This is about your skill set and the job that you want to have 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now. So just like I'm sitting here talking about leaders carving out time, if you're a rep, you cannot just sit there and hope that my company is going to give me all this training because you're going to be sadly disappointed, most likely. I love that. Since I talked about in terms of what it is generative AI, why it's so I guess transformational is for me as a CEO now. And if I put myself in a CRO or VP of Sales and all the way down to frontline manager and rep. This is a first tool where it's like I have to rethink the way that I work. And what I mean by that is like, if I have a new problem, the usual thing like, okay, I'm going to go open up a Google Doc or an Excel or I'm going to go to Google and kind of YouTube look at some options. Now, the answer to all of this is go to Chat GPT. Chat GPT literally can get you started so much faster on any problem that you're having, right? And if you think about some of the prompts and we'll drop some links here in the show notes, we've got kind of our AI sales prompt pro. We have a weekly webinar series, me and Kevin Dorsey on AI Unleashed where we talk about all the applications of Chat GPT. So I won't get into all the details here, but imagine with Chat GPT and when you can web enable it now, Bing or you can use they've got some other plugins like Webpilot. I can literally do a prompt like, I'm trying to get a meeting with Shell's division of ABC. This is the group. Here's a link to their investor relations page for that group. Here's a link to their press release page for that group. Here's a copy of a blog post of the person I'm trying to get a meeting with. And here's a link to our product page for the product that I sell. Help me to understand, based on their current initiatives in the last 40 press release or things they're talking about, what are the top two reasons that they'd probably want to partner with me and then help me to craft a five sentence message to this individual based on their preferred communication style? To help me to book a meeting with them.

[27:19] Michael McNary: Right. Which is insane.

[27:21] Jake Dunlap: It is insane. That would take me, it's insane, one, to get to that level of skill, to know how to insert information and to even think of that. It would take me ten years of sales. Now, I could have zero years of sales. And just know the right prompts to ask. And I could put together a message just as good, if not better, than someone who has 20 more years of experience than me with some of the PDF readers. Or if you turn on code interpreter, you can just drop an entire PDF into that. You can drop your entire call transcription in there. I mean, there's just the application to just move so quick. At personalization and customization, there's no excuse. Now, everyone's been looking for this magic bullet of personalization or customization at scale. This is it. Again, as a leader, you have got to change the way that you work. You have to. I just did this and this would be a great share. I was thinking about my I've got a nine year old and a five year old, and they're at that age where my son's playing sports, and I'm on all the time about it. And I said, man, you know what? We need to create a family like operating system. Chat GPT created… We just literally had our family meeting, our family operating system meeting last night. What it was able to put together was phenomenal. It would have taken me, know, 2 hours worth of YouTube videos and whatever to put together this beautiful thing that is like this really structured. And then I said, Give me the script for it. Give me the script for how I should say this. I'm the dad and my wife is and it could not have went better. And so you're kidding back to like, oh my gosh, you know what I'll do? I will copy and paste this thing. I will copy and paste and I'll create a link that we can put in the show notes or people can I love it. That's a snippet of again, it goes back. The way that we process information today has changed forever. It really reminds the conversation I'm having I won't mention the company, but it's a Fortune 100 company, a sales development leader I was talking to a couple of weeks ago. And just the fear of what Chat GPT and we're going to feed our information. It reminds me of people talking about the Internet when they're like, well, if we give everyone access to the Internet, then they could share company information. It's like, Dude, do you know the websites they're already going to I don't think you want to. Again, just very reminiscent of someone who was around when the Internet at 43, when the Internet came to prominence. It reminds me of something very similar where it was before you needed a book to go find a book or something on a topic and go to your library. And then the Internet came. And now instead of using Google or just purely your own deductive brain power, you can leverage a tool like Chat GPT to help you to find outcomes and a quality of outcome that would have been impossible on your own, even if you did 50 hours of resource research.

[30:27] Michael McNary: Yes. And I think you said at the top is basically, if you're leveraging the tool properly or strategically, you can overcome what would have been 20 years of institutional knowledge that you didn't have in a matter of a few key prompts. Right. And you can get yourself to a place where you sound expert in a way that there's no way you could have been by just doing and using the tool in the proper way and in a forward thinking way. Right. And then, of course, later on and leaders, too.

[31:04] Jake Dunlap: Yeah, leaders too. Especially if you're a new leader. Hey, I've got a rep who's struggling with account planning. Here's a link to what my sales process is. Here's a link to our customer pages. Help me to build a six week, 30 minutes per week training program with agendas to help my rep to get better at account planning. I've done that prompt before. It would have taken me an hour or so to put that together, at least. And there were a couple of ideas in there I'm like, I wouldn't have thought of that. And that's really freaking good. The quality of conversations. And this is the scary part, I think, for AI is like, look again, I'm 43. I've been in sales for 20 plus years. I now realize the knowledge that I accumulated is not that proprietary. And for a lot of people, it's terrifying. You're like, but of course I know this and I'm like it's not. And so you can either choose to accept that that the knowledge that you thought that you gained was some proprietary data set, and then you will quickly find out that it was not. And I think that is the big learning, is like, your brain should not be responsible for coming up with all of the answer. And that, I think, is what scares people the most necessarily about it.

[32:22] Michael McNary: Yeah, I think you can't fight fate. Right. And a lot of people, what they consider to be their own IP, so to speak, has become obsolete. Quite what it is. I think the interesting part about it is almost how you can continue to push this tool to see where the bounds are. Right. Like, you've just given a few examples where if you had said to me that, do you think that this generative AI tool could accomplish this task? I would have said maybe a little bit. Right. You might get a little bit of what you're trying to get here by way of end result. And you're telling me that in a couple of those cases, you were pretty blown away by the final output. And every case, I am, yes, every case.

[33:11] Jake Dunlap: And the key is, when I talk to a lot of people again, it's just like the Internet and search queries, right. Remember how people don't realize how bad search used to be back in the late 90s, early 2000s, Alta Vista web crawler and some of these other ones. And that's kind of what it again, it's the same thing. It's like, well, the answer is okay. It's like, no, your prompt sucked. You weren't searching correctly. It's very similar. And that's why, again, we started this huge kind of sales prompt library where we even aggregated a bunch of this stuff for people because obviously, if you can't tell, I spent a lot of time thinking about this and talking about it. But from a productivity standpoint, it is the most important. It's not a sales technology per se, but it is the most important kind of sales technology that every leader should be at least becoming familiar with and thinking about at least one or two ways to adopt it in their team. Because the teams are already using it. We've done surveying. We had a survey we did. I think we had almost 500 respondents and 70% of sales reps said they're using it at least monthly, if not weekly. And I think it's like 20 or 25% or something said they're using it at least once a week. So your teams are already using it. That's why again, it is like the Internet. There's no change management lift to learn how to use chat. We already know how to use chat and that's a big and I think.

[34:32] Michael McNary: That's one of my big takeaways, what I'll get to in a moment. But owning that development yourself I think is key. Right? But one of the takeaways I have jake, is anybody listening? You want to hear more about Generative AI and chat GPT, check out Jake's content because I think you are thinking of some creative ways to apply this that personally I wouldn't have thought of, but I think many folks wouldn't have. And I think a lot of us are looking for some guidance on hey, Notionally, this is a direction you can take it. And notionally, here's another and honestly try anything that comes to mind and see if you can find the balance of what this tool can add by way of value.

[35:17] Jake Dunlap: And I think most of us, especially once you get to a certain point in your career, you just used to doing things. I'll do it. And again, I've told this before when I first kind of started to go down the rabbit hole and had another sales leader who really kind of opened my eyes, I'm like, I fired myself for almost a week or so and just started just doing, just trying, experimenting because I knew it was that important. It just became very clear to me, like, Jake, you need to put on big time beginner mind here and go back and act like you know nothing. And it was wildly transformational.

[35:52] Michael McNary: Yeah, I think that's the ticket too. Just going, understanding you know nothing and just have big open eyes as to what this new world is going to be able to do for you now? Who knows where it's going to go in the years ahead? Big picture, but also in the sales tech landscape. Absolutely. Yeah. Jake, I really have enjoyed this conversation and I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming on the pod and talking through some of these things. A couple of takeaways I have from our conversation is going back to the top. Know the bottleneck, right? When you're thinking about tech stack options and decision making, make sure you're addressing the root cause or the actual problem, obstacle or need that you have, right? You can't just have something you're trying to achieve and you can't slap technology on it and hope for it to just magically work out. You need to understand where the problem exists to begin with. Secondly, change is hard, right? If you have an appreciation for change being hard, you'll probably implement it in a more thoughtful way and manage it in a way that is reasonable, achievable and will lead to greater successes in the short and long terms. And then finally, listen, with everything out there right now, from the first tech you mentioned, CRMs, to the generative AI and everything in between, you have to own your own development and education around these tools. If you're relying on someone else to show you all the things that these things can accomplish on your behalf and the ways that they can bolster your output and productivity, it's not going to happen. So you need to own it. So take the time, right? Become expert and it's table stakes these days, right? These tools are available to everyone and those that are using them and using them effectively will probably prevail and the sales performance game as we move forward. So I think a lot of great stuff there, Jake. So thank you so much for joining us today.

[38:01] Jake Dunlap: Awesome, thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation.

[38:04] Michael McNary: Talk of the trade is hosted by Mimeo, the better way to print Find out more at www.mimeo.com.