Episode #295:
David T. Roberts, CEO at SugarAI, explains how AI is transforming CRM from a reporting tool into a platform that actively helps sellers prioritize, engage, and close opportunities. Grant Johnson, Chief Growth Officer at Chief Outsiders, shares why unified KPIs, organizational alignment, and relationship-focused execution are essential for sustainable revenue growth. Together, they reveal how AI, customer intelligence, and aligned go-to-market teams are reshaping the future of CRM-driven business success.
“AI’s going to allow us to harness everything that we know about a customer and we know about our business and be able to help sellers work in the way that they work.” – David T. Roberts
David and Grant explore how AI is transforming CRM from a passive reporting platform into an active revenue growth engine. The conversation highlights the importance of unified KPIs, sales and marketing alignment, customer intelligence, and workflow-driven automation. They also discuss why relationship data, intent signals, and AI-guided seller enablement are reshaping how modern B2B organizations improve execution, increase win rates, and drive long-term business growth.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host, and we have an incredible conversation here today. We’re going to talk about something that really is something that the entire industry has wanted to take advantage of, a promise in the CRM-led growth that we can, where we bring in all of the data, all the conversations that we’re having in our pipeline, and how do we take that?
[00:00:29] Steve MacDonald: How do we move that into actual pipeline opportunities, growth, revenue, close? And there’s been a kind of a promise that that’s what we do as CRMs, with our CRMs and as CRM companies. But Dave is going to talk today as the CEO of SugarAI, and a CRM company that has embraced AI dramatically in terms of the promise of what the CRM can do these days and what we haven’t been able to do versus the juxtaposition of what you’re enabling today, David.
[00:01:00] Steve MacDonald: I’d love to have you talk a bit more about that. Also, you’re a longtime Accenture partner. You were at a company for a long time, a startup, and grew quite dramatically in the customer voice, the voice of the customer space, and now you’ve been leading SugarAI as the CEO. Grant Johnson. Grant, you are, I think I mentioned this a few minutes ago before I hit the record button, you set a record for our podcast, and we’re almost up to 300 C-suite executive interviews.
[00:01:29] Steve MacDonald: But you’ve had the most C-suite roles of anyone that we’ve ever had on the podcast. You’re currently at Chief Outsiders as Chief Growth Officer. You’ve been five different times before that, CMOs in different positions, and one of the things that we’re going to talk about today is the number one challenge inside of every organization, this internal alignment, and how do we get the go-to-market teams to work together.
[00:01:58] Steve MacDonald: So your perspective on that, having kind of been war-torn, coming out of it, we’d love to have and have you talk about here. What I’d love to do though is kick us off, and that’s a big statement that we made in the title here, right? A promise, a 30-year promise finally delivered in CRM. And I’d love, David, if you wouldn’t mind, tell us a little bit about you and then start unpacking that, if you could.
[00:02:24] David T. Roberts: Yeah. Thanks, Steve. I started my career in CRM. As you mentioned, I was with Accenture for almost 17 years. I was part of the CRM practice. Back in the days, it was the strong partnership that Accenture had with Siebel Systems. I think I was on the first ever Siebel customer to go live at AMP Incorporated in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1994, and I’ve been in and around the space for a really long time.
[00:02:47] David T. Roberts: As a practitioner, obviously as a CEO, CRMs are a lot about how we run our whole go-to-market motions and understanding what’s happening in the field. So this promise that we can actually help sellers sell has been one that’s been a little bit elusive. I think CRM is certainly used by sales leaders to understand pipeline, to understand forecast, to be able to attribute opportunities to lead source, to understand competitive dynamics.
[00:03:12] David T. Roberts: It’s been a management tool, and I think largely sellers feel like they’re capturing data for other people, not using their CRM every day to help them do a better job engaging with customers. I’ll get in more into why I think that’s changing and how AI has a huge role in it when it’s time.
[00:03:29] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Grant, if you wouldn’t mind explaining a little bit more about your background.
[00:03:35] Grant Johnson: Yes. As you noted, Steve, I’ve been very fortunate in the companies that have selected me or I’ve selected, and have been acquired seven times, acquired 21 companies, public, private, VC, PE. And through just helping grow companies successfully, it’s not that surprising that if it’s attractive to a potential acquirer, it ends up in a merger acquisition.
[00:04:01] Grant Johnson: And so I think resilience has been one of my keys. Working through navigating with executive teams when you acquire a sizable company or become part of a larger company, how do you navigate that and keep momentum going? Because as we know, M&A can often equal disruption.
[00:04:17] Steve MacDonald: Here’s what I’d love to do. Take both of these backgrounds, and David, you mentioned something lightly there, which was a very big statement that I’d love you to continue on, which is CRMs in the past have been great for the C-suite, right?
[00:04:31] Steve MacDonald: We can take a look exactly where we are, every deal, closing rates, everything as a management tool, right, to oversee and manage the team. But has it been, to your point, the kind of tool that allows the actual sellers to make the decisions, to really work wisely with their time, give them direction, recommendations on how they could close more deals, what they should be doing?
[00:04:57] Steve MacDonald: So I know that’s a big part of what you wanted to talk to, and I’ll let you take it from there.
[00:05:02] David T. Roberts: Yeah. I think if you were to survey 1,000 sellers and ask them, “How much does your CRM help you prioritize your work, know where to focus, make your job easier?” I doubt you’d get many out of those 1,000 who said that was the case.
[00:05:18] David T. Roberts: It has been a management tool. It has been something that the companies have used to drive process adherence, to help drive quoting processes or discovery processes or close processes. And I think companies have also invested a lot in building dashboards, telling sellers, “All the data’s there. You can go find it.”
[00:05:35] David T. Roberts: Again, there’s so many demands on sellers, especially in the vertical we focus on. If you’re a mid-market manufacturing company and you’re an account manager, you get pulled in a million different directions. I think what’s changed is AI, and I’m not a big bandwagon hype guy. There’s certainly a lot of hype around AI right now and that it can solve all problems.
[00:05:59] David T. Roberts: Fundamentally, CRM has struggled because it’s been hard for sellers to get information into the system, and it’s hard to get direction or guidance out. And I think AI solves both of those problems really, really well. Not in this kind of ask me anything approach or co-pilot approach, but actually by wiring AI into the business workflow that helps understand all the data about a certain customer and tell the seller the signal or the focus that exists across all that information and noise that’s overwhelming them every single day.
[00:06:34] Steve MacDonald: You made a really interesting point about the data in, right? And it’s been one of the big issues in CRMs, the amount of manual data that we’re requiring primarily sellers to put in every single day and keep up with in order for, as we all know, garbage in, garbage out, right? So if the right data isn’t coming in, then the right decision-making isn’t happening on the back end.
[00:06:57] Steve MacDonald: And Grant, I would love to ask you a little bit about that in terms of how do you see this evolution? Because the tool and the way that it’s been used in the past can’t be the way that it’s used in the future, right? I mean, AI is not only helping us do things and make our processes more efficient, but the area where AI is really starting to emerge now is where it can help us make strategic decisions, work smarter, not just more efficient.
[00:07:29] Steve MacDonald: And so I’d love to get your thoughts on that.
[00:07:32] Grant Johnson: Yes, Steve, I would agree with David that largely CRMs have not delivered on the promise to enable sellers to optimize their success, quota crushing, revenue attainment. And it’s interesting, over the last several years as AI has been elevating its prominence across all software and AI platforms, there are certain marketing automation platforms, just to say it more broadly, not to call anyone out, but say, “We’ve solved it. We’ve got the promise.”
[00:08:05] Grant Johnson: But quite frankly, it’s better solved in the system of record in the CRM. And if the go-to-market team, sales, marketing, customer success, support, can all access and work together as a team looking at that data, you can optimize your workflows, your decision-making, and most importantly, the outcomes, because that’s where it really provides value to improve business success.
[00:08:32] Steve MacDonald: And David, I’d love to, how have you further enabled automating getting data in? And then if you could, give us one example, kind of like a story about how this impacts the seller, right? How it changes their day-to-day lives.
[00:08:49] David T. Roberts: One of the things we spent a lot of time on is trying to capture all the information that enterprise has about a customer. And companies have invested so much in their back end, right?
[00:08:58] David T. Roberts: Being able to do order management, inventory management, shipping, distribution, all the things that have to run like clockwork for companies to operate well. And they know so much about the customer. Unfortunately, the seller isn’t getting access to that same information in a way that makes it really easy for them to know where to focus.
[00:09:16] David T. Roberts: So, as a really specific example, we at SugarAI inject a whole bunch of order data through an engine that helps interpret all that data to see patterns within it, and then make specific recommendations. Just like, Grant, in all your time as a CMO, just like a lead might come into a seller, in this case a recommendation comes into a seller and says, “This customer has been ordering these products at this rate and it’s starting to drop off. Go talk to the customer about why that’s the case.”
[00:09:42] David T. Roberts: Or, “This customer looks like these other 10 who tend to buy these products in combination, but this customer isn’t doing it. Go ask them why they aren’t.” So, don’t just give them reports and dashboards, but actually tell them, “Here’s the customer, here’s the product, here’s the conversation,” and help them cut through all the huge complexity that might exist in that back end to guide them towards the right conversation.
[00:10:07] Steve MacDonald: So, one of the big things that I think I heard you say there is you’re taking the intelligence from across the entire sales team and organization about how products are sold, typical patterns to expect, and you can turn that into intelligence on what should be happening where there’s no individual salesperson that could keep track of all of that intelligence themselves.
[00:10:31] Steve MacDonald: But huge, huge opportunity there. Did I read that correctly?
[00:10:35] David T. Roberts: That’s exactly it. I mean, you might have an account manager who’s managing 200 accounts, food distribution with a 10,000 product catalog. Like, how do they keep it all straight? It’s really, really hard.
[00:10:46] Steve MacDonald: You couldn’t, right? You just couldn’t. Grant, in terms of the data, and you mentioned all of the different places.
[00:10:53] Steve MacDonald: I mean, fragmented siloed data. How many years has it been since we first started talking about bringing data together? But still today, we’re still living in a lot of fragmented data silos across different tech stacks, across the go-to-market teams. What David is talking about and just the opportunity of bringing this intelligence together to lead to better strategic decision-making, what am I going to spend my time on that’s going to produce the most for me as a salesperson and as a company?
[00:11:30] Steve MacDonald: Like, put that into perspective for us in terms of how important that is to do.
[00:11:35] Grant Johnson: You know, I think it’s critical because the challenges of misalignment and lack of orchestration can be compounded the more data sources that one is using that are not unified across your enterprise. And so when you’ve got that single view, you can do things as David was talking about from the seller side, but even from the inside sales BDR, like, who’s searching first-party, third-party data, who’s doing something?
[00:12:02] Grant Johnson: Like, what was the fastest path to close in this vertical or that vertical? Let’s follow that path. And I’m going to throw something out controversial. Let’s just throw the MQL out. I mean, let’s just literally throw it out the window because the quantity means nothing. It’s really the intent, the urgency, the justification that your prospect customer has for this particular solution you’re offering.
[00:12:24] Grant Johnson: That’s where you have to seize on versus, “Well, I just, you know, somebody filled out a form.” Well, that’s great. And that’s why I think the promise that David was alluding to can really accelerate the coherence across go-to-market teams that are leveraging signals and things they do in sales marketing together to optimize every opportunity.
[00:12:45] David T. Roberts: Hey, Grant, it’s so funny you mention all that because we were just talking the other day about form fills and that marketers are so addicted to this concept of form fills. None of us buyers want to fill out a form, right? And we don’t want someone calling us up and chasing us down. We want to be able to go do our research, and when we’re ready to buy, we’re showing up pretty darn educated, right?
[00:13:04] David T. Roberts: It’s a very different world today. So I love the concept of killing the MQL and getting to a real sense of intent.
[00:13:13] Steve MacDonald: I was reading a Chief Outsiders article earlier today that I got to off of your LinkedIn feed, Grant, and it was basically what you just said there, right? And you talked about lack of definition between the different levels, what those levels are, what the handoffs are.
[00:13:30] Steve MacDonald: And there’s always been a massive gap between what marketing thinks is a great lead and what sales wants to act on, and there’s this big chasm or gap in the middle, right? So David, how does it help solve that gap? How does the data and the intelligence that’s coming in help marketers determine what is a good qualified lead to turn over to sales?
[00:13:57] Steve MacDonald: And how does it help sales accept those leads and understand the value of what’s coming in?
[00:14:03] David T. Roberts: I’ll say AI and CRM I don’t think is actually a problem in this case. I think Grant talked about this idea of growth as the goal. I just hired a new CMO who’s been here for two or three months. She’s absolutely a full funnel marketer.
[00:14:18] David T. Roberts: She thinks about how it all hangs together from intent all the way through to close one deal and following that as the customer adopts whatever technology you’re selling to them. And that the sales and marketing engine needs to be way more connected. This idea that a CMO creates a lead and hands it off and sales picks it up, and there’s always going to be a gap as to what people think the quality of a lead looks like.
[00:14:40] David T. Roberts: If you convince sellers they play a role in nurturing as part of full funnel marketing, and you convince marketers that they play a role in negotiating at the tail end of a sales cycle. They all have roles throughout that cycle, and you’re building collaboration from sales and marketing. They show up with different skill sets, but the whole funnel needs to be something that both sides are engaged in.
[00:15:01] Steve MacDonald: So Grant, I know you’ve got a ton of ideas on this, right? Forever, there’s been so many CMOs that have felt, and I talk to them on a daily basis, they feel like they have imposter syndrome. They’re only as good as their last MQL. They’re looked upon as one of the biggest cost centers in the company. And what David just described is a way that CMOs have an opportunity to really step up and become full funnel marketers and nurture leads all the way through.
[00:15:33] Steve MacDonald: And in the world of ABM, by very definition, we want relationships early. Early relationships are not BANT qualified, right? So they’re typically not picked up by the sales department. So David, you were saying, sales have got to nurture earlier and marketers have got to stay connected much, much longer all the way through to close that gap.
[00:15:59] Steve MacDonald: How do we do that? How do we take the step forward to make that happen? Because it’s not happening in a lot of companies right now.
[00:16:06] Grant Johnson: Well, to me, it starts with the mindset, as David described, in selecting the CMO that’s a revenue marketer. We are in it together. If it doesn’t lead from opportunity to close one revenue, it doesn’t matter.
[00:16:20] Grant Johnson: And that’s an educational process. It’s a mindset process. It’s also an empowerment that the CMO is part, the C should not only be chief, but customer-minded. That’s what this all should be thinking about. I know David’s great background in voice of the customer. It’s the whole journey you’ve got to think about from their first trying to think, “Do I want to deal with your company?”
[00:16:42] Grant Johnson: So you’ve got to show up. Marketing has a lot to do with that, with AEO, GEO. And then you have to engage and you have to be responsive. You have to have handoffs from marketing to sales and sales to implementation and have SLAs across the board. And you have to measure everything, see what works, and continue to iterate.
[00:17:00] Grant Johnson: So it’s kind of an all-in mindset I like to describe where maybe early in my career, somebody was celebrating a volume. I would rather celebrate velocity and value. Volume’s good, but getting closed won deals and making the bookings and revenue, if you’re a public company, targets that you have to report, even more pressure.
[00:17:19] Grant Johnson: That’s the key. And if you have that mindset, you’re a business person first, you just happen to wear the marketing hat. That’s why a lot of us that help mid-market companies at Chief Outsiders, we call ourselves chief growth officers or growth orchestrators because that’s what the company needs most, profitable growth.
[00:17:38] Grant Johnson: And so you’ve got to make sure that everything you invest in has a good ROI. But the alignment, that’s what you’re alluding to, Steve, and I know David’s experience. You’ve got to continually work on the alignment and managing good collaborative communications so that you can drive together and go farther.
[00:17:56] Steve MacDonald: So put it, Grant, if you could, into perspective for us, because we can say things like internal alignment is important, right? We can say all kinds of statements about it. The voice of the customer is important. Product development iteration is important. Put into perspective to have the go-to-market teams work together, that internal alignment, how important is that to the success?
[00:18:22] Steve MacDonald: If you’re playing the chief growth role, and then I want to ask this question to you, too, David, as the CEO, right? Ultimately, the buck stops somewhere, right? But how important is internal alignment to that growth motion?
[00:18:38] Grant Johnson: It’s instrumental. I think you have to be aligned 100% on the KPIs. Every firm has OKRs, KPIs, metrics, the numbers that mean the most to your business momentum and success.
[00:18:52] Grant Johnson: And if you fall short of that, what are we all going to do to make up the gap? And then you say, Dave and I are aligned, the CEO, CMO, CRO. But it’s got to be up and down the chain, because if it gets disconnected at the regional level, at the product level, at the field level, then it’s not going to work as effectively if it’s all harnessed.
[00:19:11] Grant Johnson: I like to call it a flying formation. It will move through the air much faster together and on the ground as well.
[00:19:18] David T. Roberts: Yeah, and I love the KPI concept. I was just sitting here thinking about the four measures you give to your CMO and your CRO. You say we’re going to generate pipeline, and salespeople have a responsibility to generate pipeline.
[00:19:31] David T. Roberts: In fact, things close at a much higher rate if they’re sales generated. So pipeline creation, average deal size, how do we make sure we’re pitching the company from the right starting point? Sales velocity, are we taking deals through the sales cycle? And maybe most importantly, what’s the win rate?
[00:19:51] David T. Roberts: So my CMO is being asked right now to focus pretty heavily on win rate. And you might argue, why isn’t that a sales metric? Isn’t win rate sales? Well, maybe, unless you think that the CMO owns enablement and owns helping the sellers be able to position us correctly, being able to package and articulate the product correctly. Like, win rate is just as important from a CMO perspective as it is from a sales leader perspective.
[00:20:10] Grant Johnson: I have to say, I love that as a former CMO and now a fractional, is marketing should be held accountable all the way to the close, and that way they think even more carefully from the beginning. Everything’s going to add up to a better win rate if each of these interactions, moments that matter, are made better.
[00:20:30] Steve MacDonald: I want to bring this portion of the conversation around to something, David, that you talked about earlier, which is, I mean, the fact is all of this, we’re all in a relationship-based business, right? So like if your CMO’s focused on win rates, your CMO is focused on relationships, right? And that’s true at every point in the funnel.
[00:20:49] Steve MacDonald: You talked about bringing in structured data with unstructured data, and that unstructured data was literally the language of relationships. How is SugarAI enabling that, and how does structured and unstructured data come together in order to increase those win rates?
[00:21:09] David T. Roberts: Well, I’ll first admit I stole that expression, the structured and unstructured data line from one of our chief engineers and architects.
[00:21:16] David T. Roberts: What he said is that structured data is the language of business and unstructured data is the language of relationships. Now, in all those cases, I think a lot of us, and I grew up at Accenture thinking systematically about things, sellers aren’t going to go do a bunch of, most of them aren’t going to go do a bunch of spreadsheet work and analysis and correlation, right?
[00:21:35] David T. Roberts: They’re also out interacting over WhatsApp, over text, over Zoom, over phone calls, face-to-face. The conversations they’re having to build those relationships, it’s all unstructured. But in that unstructured data is the key to who the decision maker is, what the buyer values are. It’s all there. It’s just not broken down into fields and rows and columns.
[00:21:56] David T. Roberts: So what we do at SugarAI is ingest unstructured data, make sense of it, as well as combine it with structured data from ERP to help guide the seller to the right conversation to have with the customer about the right products.
[00:22:09] Steve MacDonald: And Grant, what do you think about just the fact that if relationships are the way that we’re going to win, right?
[00:22:19] Steve MacDonald: And I think it was last November, Forrester came out and they said their biggest prediction for this year was trust, and trust is the foundation to relationships. I mean, if you go back to marketing 101, our brand is a trust mark, right? So trust, they said, is how you’re going to get into deals, how you’re going to close deals, and how you’re going to keep those deals, the loyalty factor, right?
[00:22:46] Steve MacDonald: So if you could put this relationship focus into a better focus for us in terms of just how important it is and how it relates to a growth-minded, revenue-minded go-to-market strategy, because it’s never been a dotted line even. It’s been a very kind of circular line, right? But what David, I think, is saying and I’m taking away is, no, this is one of the most important aspects of a revenue-minded go-to-marketer, right?
[00:23:20] Steve MacDonald: How do you think about that?
[00:23:22] Grant Johnson: Well, I think it’s fundamental in just the definitional terms of relationship or relational versus transactional. And if you approach and just let’s do more of something versus do it better, do it more sustainably, make it more lasting. And then you just realize that you have to grow a relationship, whether it’s personal or business or anything, you have to invest in it.
[00:23:48] Grant Johnson: So you need to be listening to what is the customer problem, what is the critical business need that’s unmet, how could you help them achieve their business objectives and realize business value from your solution, get a great return, a great ROI. And the relationship is the whole journey of the customer.
[00:24:05] Grant Johnson: And if you think about it, if you close won and then you don’t kind of get the go live right or the first implementation right and then sort of lose focus on the customer, you’ve sort of diminished the trust, right? Because then they’re not going to be an advocate if you didn’t deliver. So like it’s something you just invest in for the long term.
[00:24:22] Grant Johnson: If you think about it, customers go to a new company and now they’re prospects, but they trusted you from the last company, so that relationship has future value if you took care of it, right? So I just think relationships are what it’s all about, and we could go into a lot of dimensions, but that is the fundamental start.
[00:24:40] Steve MacDonald: There’s a topic that we’ve just started to explore on the podcast here, and that’s think of like the last time we went into a CAB meeting, like a customer advisory board meeting, right? We come out and we’re all doing high fives and belly bumps because we’re like, “Oh, we got to do that so much more often,” or, “We learned so much.”
[00:24:57] Steve MacDonald: That’s a perfect example of unstructured data, right? A Gong recording of a sales call, unstructured data, right? What you’re talking about, David, is the back and forth, right? The conversation that happens and what we learn inside of that. How are you allowing through SugarAI, how are you allowing that unstructured data to be something that is not only captured, not going to decay, but become part of that decision-making process?
[00:25:29] David T. Roberts: Yeah. First of all, it’s just as simple as capturing it. I think most salespeople would say, “Look, I’ve got to update my CRM on Friday because I got my manager calls on Monday. We got to submit our forecast on Tuesday.” There’s this rhythm of most companies, and they don’t want to sit for two hours and update their CRM.
[00:25:47] David T. Roberts: It’d be great if they could get in their car after a customer meeting and record a quick five-minute audio recording and have that be ingested, and that’s exactly what we’ve done and we’re doing, is being able to pull all that information in. And then that’s using AI, of course. And then on the other side of it, it’s how do you use AI to recognize the patterns within the data and to actually take action, right?
[00:26:09] David T. Roberts: So if an opportunity’s going from sales stage two to sales stage three, and that’s the stage you put a proposal together, a whole bunch of that information you captured in that audio recording is helping shape what that PowerPoint presentation looks like. And AI can create a first draft that leverages all that to help the seller get, I don’t know, 75, 80% of the way there before they go out to the customer meeting and make the proposal.
[00:26:33] David T. Roberts: So I just think there’s so much using this technology that if put into the right business workflow, if leveraging all this unstructured and structured data can just make the seller feel like they’re able to get five times as much done because they’ve got a, I probably said this on your last podcast, they’ve got an Iron Man suit that helps them just be faster and stronger than they otherwise would be.
[00:26:54] Steve MacDonald: So Grant, with all of this data, right, the structured and unstructured, and making use out of it, does it put more onus on the C-suite to make sure that all of the KPIs that you talked about earlier are very well documented so that the AI tool knows from all these conversations that it’s bringing in what’s even the most important?
[00:27:20] Steve MacDonald: What are the most important, like if you said, “Here’s the five most important bullet points of our go-to-market strategy, our unique point of view that makes us different and unique, that raises eyebrows,” right? If we don’t, as a C-suite team, really make sure that’s a framework that the sales team, the marketing team, the AI tool, the CRM, everything has all the way through, like, why do we lose deals, right?
[00:27:47] Steve MacDonald: And how are we pulling out really good insights so we can see objections coming before they come, we know how to answer them when they do. Doesn’t this entire conversation put more onus on the C-suite to make sure that has been clearly articulated, and that it’s not just a bunch of data coming in that AI on its own, based on general market information, is making decisions based on?
[00:28:14] Grant Johnson: 100%. We have to have a unified view on the metrics that matter and the most important ones. Otherwise, if everybody’s bringing their own view, sets of numbers, interpretations, we’ll never be aligned. It’s like we’re all speaking different languages that each other doesn’t understand, right? And so that’s the common language of numbers from all the C-suite to the board to investors.
[00:28:38] Grant Johnson: And, you know, I’ve been fortunate enough to be at both PE and public companies and a maniacal focus on instrumenting the business and knowing the numbers that matter and getting both leading indicators and lagging indicators. They’re not all leading indicators. You know, when people start defecting en masse, and so Dave knows this quite well, it’s like there were some signs along the way that they were going to soft or hard churn, but you weren’t looking at the numbers in time.
[00:29:06] Grant Johnson: They’re using your software, like it went down by 50%, wasn’t that a sign they’re not getting as much value added? Et cetera. But yes, 100% focus aligned on the most important numbers.
[00:29:17] David T. Roberts: And Steve, maybe I’ll build on that a little bit if I could. You talked about the C-suite being really aligned on what the message is, what the competitive advantage is, what the objection handling is.
[00:29:28] David T. Roberts: If you go back to the early days of implementing CRM, it was all about setting up your fields and setting up your integrations, right? It was a very structured mindset. The implementation of today looks very different. You’re actually loading in content and video into your CRM system. Things like what’s the sales cycle, what’s the entrance and exit criteria, how do you handle certain objections, who are your competitors, where do you win and you not win?
[00:29:51] David T. Roberts: You don’t need to put that into structured fields. Load in your best competitive PowerPoint decks and allow AI access to that, and use that as a way of helping inform and guide the sellers to be able to respond to whatever situation they’re dealing with. So, a historic CRM implementation looks nothing like today’s CRM implementation, which is content and video on top of fields and mapping and integration.
[00:30:16] Steve MacDonald: So tell me if I’m taking this away correctly or not, because we’ve had PowerPoint decks before. We’ve had sales training before, right? But that has a lot of the time been disconnected from the tool that now AI is enabling that can make sense out of that and bring it in at the moment that it makes the most sense to make the right recommendations, right?
[00:30:42] Steve MacDonald: So it can’t just be sales training anymore, right? It has to be more integrated. Is that?
[00:30:47] David T. Roberts: Well, maybe enablement starts to be a little different, right? So let’s pretend we’ve got a PowerPoint deck with 20 competitive battle cards or 10 competitive battle cards. And we’ve all seen battle cards before, right?
[00:30:58] David T. Roberts: In the old days, you train the seller on it. You hope they consume what you’ve said about why we compete with our biggest competitor. You hope they remember what questions to ask to help frame the competitive positioning. Now, in the new world, AI has access to all that, and it’s actually telling the seller, “Go talk about this topic in this context because this is the competitor.”
[00:31:20] David T. Roberts: And they know it’s a competitor because they heard, I’ll say heard, the conversation you had with the customer about who else they’re considering. So it just starts looking entirely different than the way we used to do this.
[00:31:31] Steve MacDonald: I love how you’ve taken this from so important how our product suite can be sold, but you’ve taken it to a whole strategic level, too, in terms of what are the challenges, what are the pain points, right?
[00:31:47] Steve MacDonald: What are the objections? What are the core selling statements? What are the things that will help the seller sell better? And if we organize better, then the whole thing works better.
[00:31:58] David T. Roberts: Yeah, and Grant could probably expand on this, but he’s probably spent a lifetime trying to create battle cards and objection handling and product positioning and trying to get the sellers to get it into the way they work and think, and maybe now AI guides them towards that.
[00:32:13] David T. Roberts: You’ve probably spent a lifetime at that, Grant.
[00:32:15] Grant Johnson: I’ve probably wasted a lot of time, say, but I remember sitting with the head of Sales Enablement said, “All the stuff we created, what are you using?” Well, not so much of it. If it’s used, it can be helpful.
[00:32:27] David T. Roberts: Totally.
[00:32:27] Steve MacDonald: So I want to ask one last question to each of you.
[00:32:30] Steve MacDonald: It’s the same exact question, because we’ve covered a ton of territory here. But if there was one thing that you wanted the audience to take away from our conversation, C-suite executives, CEOs, CMOs, CROs, CGOs. Grant, I’m going to ask you first, but you have the hot seat. If there was one thing that you wanted that audience to take away that will be consuming this podcast, what would that one thing be?
[00:32:56] Grant Johnson: Insist on alignment over a consistent set of agreed upon numbers to measure your business success.
[00:33:05] Steve MacDonald: I love that. You set a record. Nobody’s ever answered that so shortly. I love it. That’s just concise. Now I’ve got the challenge. Yeah, you’ve got the challenge. You can go a little bit longer. I’ve had like five-minute answers for that.
[00:33:17] Steve MacDonald: But I love that because internal alignment is the number one challenge, and I love that you focused back on that. David?
[00:33:27] David T. Roberts: I think it’s a recognition that the way sellers approach things is very different than many of us who are rev ops people or ERP people or back office people or finance people look at the world, and that AI’s going to allow us to harness everything that we know about a customer and we know about our business and be able to help sellers work in the way that they work.
[00:33:47] David T. Roberts: So our mission is all about helping sellers sell and giving them the tools and power to be able to do that, and I think it’s a recognition that that’s possible in the world we now live in.
[00:33:57] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, my takeaway from everything you guys have said here is I never thought about the opportunity with AI quite the way that you’ve articulated it here today, which is sales training should never stop, we all know that, but it should happen at the moment it’s needed the most, and the AI can enable that.
[00:34:19] Steve MacDonald: Mid-conversation, right after the call ended and you’re thinking about what follow-up you’re going to send out, you know, when you’re planning the next touch point, it should have the entire world of all of that structured, unstructured data, and then the core mission of the company from your go-to-market strategy to those objections, right, in mind.
[00:34:42] Steve MacDonald: And we can’t ask any one person to do that. I couldn’t do that. It’s impossible to do that, right? But the possible is possible today, which is my takeaway for why CRM is now the 30-year promise, is probably coming to fruition. That’s where I’m bringing it back. I have to tell you guys, I think there’s a whole series we could explore here, but what a tremendous conversation because the mission here of this podcast is to bring different perspectives from different C-suite executives, different roles all across the world, B2B companies, and what have we learned, what are we thinking, what are we trying to do different?
[00:35:19] Steve MacDonald: Because we know the old playbooks just don’t apply anymore, right? So I just wanted to say thank you both for coming on and sharing all of these insights. Absolutely incredible.
[00:35:28] David T. Roberts: Thanks, Steve. It’s been awesome to be here.
[00:35:30] Grant Johnson: Yeah, thanks Steve, and great sharing the podium virtually here with David. We’re certainly like-minded, although we’ve come across along different pathways, that where the future promises can be realized.
[00:35:43] David T. Roberts: That’s right, Grant. Thank you too.