#203 – GST XX: A 360° View of Sales Transformation in the AI Era

 

 

Full episode transcript: 

​Please note that transcription is done by AI and may contain errors.

 

George: Hi, everyone. George here, the editor of the Sales Transformation podcast. This week on the show, we finally have the final session from Global Sales Transformation XX. This was the panel session featuring Samantha Wessels, Samantha George, and Gareth Abel. Together, they explore sales transformation from three points of view, that of sales operations, sales leadership, and from buyers.

Like I said, this is the last of these sessions from GST XX, but the wheels are already in motion for GST XXI, which will be at a brand-new venue, as the London Stock Exchange is being refurbished. So, stay tuned for all the details on that, but in the meantime, please enjoy the episode.

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Phil: Uh, to welcome the three panel speakers, Samantha Wessels, if you'd like to come up. Who's the president of Box, so thank you.

Samantha W: Pleasure.

Phil: Um, we've got Sam, Sam, George, um, we said we've got two Samanthas. Sorry. Uh, so we've got Sam, uh, from, um, uh, Royal Mail Group and we've got Gareth Abel. Yep. As well. Um, uh, he was one of the people that I actually researched, uh, good practice in, in, in sales.

So I thought what we could do for this session is, is I prepared some questions, which I've, I've, um,

talked about

so much. Lemme just go to the right.

Place panel questions. So I've had some questions for each of, uh, the panel, uh, uh, panelists that we've actually got here. Um, but I'd just like, uh, if, if I could ask the panelists to introduce themselves.

So, so Samantha, can I start with you?

Samantha W: Yes, sure. Hi. Um, so I've spent 15, well, 20 years now. I'm getting old, um, in sales, all sorts of different sales roles. I've started my career at, um, dimension Data, which was acquired by NTT. Um, came over to London to build their cloud overlay project. So was with them for 15 years.

Everyone thought I was institutionalized and didn't wanna take a risk on me moving. Eventually I left. Um.

NTT and

joined a, um, a company called Elastic, which was pre IPO, which is subsequently listed. And I built the EMEA team there for four years. And then after that joined a small startup called sny.

And from there I moved to Box. And I'm in a general management role, um, which is wonderful because I get to experience just. Sales, marketing, customer success, the SE organization. Um, it all reports into me and I sit on the executive team, but they've actually managed Europe as is. It's not isolated obviously, but because we're so di different and complex, um, I manage it all.

So that was a great, um, move for me.

Phil: So,

uh, thank you. And I've asked, um, I've asked Samantha if she could, uh. Uh, respond to some questions about the leadership, um, sort of aspects of running a business and, and also talk about the impact of AI and how she sees that affecting, um, uh, her business in Box. So we'll come back to you, Samantha, later, Sam.

Samantha G: Um, oh, so I've been in sales for about 10 years now. Um, I joined Royal Mail about five years ago. Um, I started off as account manager and then I moved up to Sales Manager. I'll be own team of amazing account managers who, um, I speak to all the time. Um, but I have recently moved into a different role of, um, head of CRM.

It's just something that I've always been passionate about. Um, it's something that very much came across when I did my Masters with Consalia as well, which I really enjoyed. Um, and a lot of the time these kind of tools that salespeople use every single day, they have a love and hate relationship with.

So I want to make sure that Roma loves their CRM tools basically.

Phil: Okay. And last but not least, Gareth, I wonder if you can introduce yourself.

Gareth: Thank you. So my name's Gareth Abel. I'm a Chief marketing officer. It's always great to be in a room full of salespeople when you've got marketing in your job title. Um, so I, it's a pleasure to be here and I've, and I've come with my growth mindset, um, this afternoon, uh, to learn as, to learn as much as I possibly can. So I'm a marketer who focuses on sustainable profit growth. So not revenue. I'm here to make a profit.

So I knew what Ryan meant by the gross retention rate.

I was a little alarmed at how few salespeople knew what it meant. Um, I've been able to fortune. I've been very fortunate to live and work all over the world. Um, I've specialized working for, uh, predominantly technology businesses. So Telco, consumer Electronics and digital services. Um, last year I had the opportunity to live and work in Mexico City, which is a fantastic experience.

Um, so I'm delighted to hopefully add a little bit of value and a slightly different perspective this afternoon.

Phil: Yeah. Great. Thank you. So those are our three panelists. So.

Audience, I want you to be involved in this next session and, uh, maybe channel, uh, challenge the, the panelists with, uh, some questions.

But I'm gonna start with, um, Samantha if I can. Yeah. So what shifts are, are you seeing, um, in how customers want to engage with, uh, sales teams? Uh, how do you see AI reshaping the dynamic at box? Have you seen a significant change.

Samantha W: Not really, to be honest. I, and because I think we're so early in, um, ai. Um, from a, from a, from a box perspective, you know, we, we sell an AI solution. We are all about unstructured data, um, and very secure unstructured data. 'cause 95% of an organization's content is unstructured Excel micro PowerPoint. It's sitting in all over the show in various, um, different applications.

Um, so we have our own AI. Uh, which we go to market with. I think for years, my whole sales career. It's about, um, selling with noble purpose, selling to the business value, identifying the pain, getting value engineering in to try and articulate what the return on investment can be. That's, it's been like that for years, if I'm honest.

What I think is changing, um, from, from. From, uh, so from our, my perspective in our business is AI is allowing us to be better at our jobs. So, for example, when I first came in, um, to box, I asked a couple of questions. What, what, what sort of emails are we writing out when we start prospecting? To our very important customers.

And what you find often is your SDR or your BDRs are the most junior people in the organization are writing some very strategic letters to your customers. And I looked at all of that, um, those emails, and I just. So I was, I was actually horrified because it's not their fault, but a lot of it isn't to the pain.

It's not personalized, it doesn't talk to the use case, and it doesn't talk to who the buyer is. So with agents and what we've built within Box, we've got, we've got. Probably 15 different go to market agents just in sales. Then for customer success, then for the SE organization. So, um, and each person can build their own agent and we send it to an AI team who can vet it and send it out to the whole organization.

But now our SDRs and our OBRs for example, can actually send personal. Emails at scale and build a magnificent sequence. So it's helping us do our job better. We, we, we show up, um, in a more professional way, and that's for, um, use case identification, for customer research, for, um, demo scripts for RFP responses.

So I think it is driving, um. Productivity to an extent but it's making us, um, more professional. So I think our customers are probably getting a better experience, um, from uh, organization like Box. But from a buyer's side, I would imagine, you know, and we've got so many different use cases we

could sell, but I

think it must be quite challenging at the moment 'cause they're doing their own research.

Um, they have access to all the AI tools. They've probably got the answers before you even arrive. 'cause they know what they're going to do. And therefore, I think, and everybody's selling AI to them, so I think. The sales person, as we know it, has to differentiate themself through their intelligence, through their knowledge, and all through the values.

In actual fact, um, that, um, you know, Consalia have put into a visa. In actual fact, I think alia's content coming through a visa is gonna be a key differentiator for them because we've all got forecasting tools, you know, um, and, and they.

All very similar, but the content from Consalia will definitely help make their AEs and sales and, and, and go to market people, um, a lot more, um,

yeah, a lot more intelligent, I would imagine. Because even with all the agents that we've got, and even with all the AI salespeople still arrive. Without doing the research, without doing an executive briefing, with no opportunity plan, medic's not up to date. You know, we've even, we've even built an agent that can take medic and the opportunity score it and tell them what to do.

So these, um, all these agents I think are gonna help. Um, must be more professional, but the world is changing and I think doing business in Europe is so complex with ai, with regulation, with the economy. Um, I do think it's, it's getting a little bit more difficult and therefore you have to differentiate yourself and sell more to the value than ever before.

Phil: Thank you. Um, any questions for Samantha around what she's just said? Anyone got any questions you'd like to, to pose? Yeah, Bianca.

Audience 1: Yeah, I have,

Phil: sorry. Um, do we need microphones? Where's my microphone team? I know we haven't had to work you too, too hard. Oh, they've gone to the pub already, are they? So, okay. So Bianca, would you mind just introducing yourself and then

Audience 2: My name is Bianca Portolan.

I teach in the Master's for Consalia, but I'm also a change strategy for, so one of the things that we see every day from. Customer side is being bombarded about, it's quite overwhelming now in the, in the hype of ai, of multiple solutions, startups and all kinds of, uh, coding, emails, conferences, and et cetera.

On ai you just mentioned about improving the experience. So how, what's your experience at Box to improve this and make your solutions stand out from this? How

Samantha W: it's not easy, but it starts right from the top of

the funnel.

So you know, we, uh. What we've, what we've built now is a content engine to bring around, um, um,

so that when

they're doing search our customers, they are presented with good content from box. Because our M qls and our SQLs are all declining.

'cause nobody goes to Google anymore. They're all going to the, you know, they're using ai. So they're using chat GPT, for example. So what we wanna do is we wanna make sure that we are there with all our content. And then what we, what we are trying to do is we do, I, I believe our, our AEs, our SDRs, and everybody who engages with our, with the, with our customers, um, have to, we are, they are the differentiators because there's so many bits of technology, you know, whether it's from Microsoft or Google or this niche AI provider that it, it's.

It's terrible for our customers. So I do agree with you that, um, an existing relationship, if you can manage that existing relationship, if you can keep your existing customers, if you can land multiple use cases, you know, the good old saying, service equals sales. I think keep those existing customers and treasure them.

And then what we are trying to do is obviously new logos is always important for growth. And when you're going after new logos, just make sure it's very personalized. Very targeted and use case specific as opposed to this general platform conversation, which everybody's trying to do. So, um, personalized service, I would say makes a difference.

Phil: Okay, thank you. I'm just gonna move on to Sam now if I could. So, uh, Sam, um, I dunno where to start with, uh, this first question, but you moved from sales into now managing the, the CRM. Yeah. Kind of transformation that's taking place. So I perhaps we can keep it fairly high level. What's been, what's been some of the biggest learnings you've had about the experiences that you have had in this huge transformation at rollout group?

Um,

Samantha G: I think one of the key focuses that I did in my masters actually was, um, managing change, particularly within the sales team and. Royal mail is an ever changing company. It's 500 years old, we never sit still, basically.

Um, so

it's a constant stream of managing change anyway, but I think going through probably one of the biggest digital transformations, switching over to the new CRM that we're using currently was not only a massive digital change, but it was a cultural shift as well.

Um, I think people have become quite attached to the system. Um, so. I think what I was keen to establish, 'cause unfortunately I came on probably a little bit later than I would've liked to think of. I was there from the, from the day one. It would've been, I would've used my ad car model. I love my ad car model.

I was about to that in the change plans. Um, but I was probably at the stage where we were probably past the knowledge point. They'd had all the training and then I came on board. And I think it's, it's kind of doing a level of internal marketing. To rebrand it into not, we haven't just taken away this thing that you really, really loved using, which they never did when it was around, but suddenly now they love using it.

So I dunno what that was about. And then basically showing them that the new way, even though the cognitive load initially might seem quite a lot, it will be easier. It's just getting over that first hump. But the only way to get them to realize it will be easier, is by helping them see the value in what our new CRM brings, which has got all these bells and whistles that we didn't have previously in our old CRM, and it wouldn't have the capabilities either in our old CRM.

So historically, for example, the, um, like most CRMs, it's like a, it's a glorified filing cabinet basically. So you are putting lots of information in there and it's soaring it in there, and then it's giving your manager's reports and lagging indicators. But CRM nowadays, they do a lot of, um, automation, automatic logging, sentiment analysis that you might even pick for phone calls yourself.

Um, you might, um, get a leading indicators as well using predictive AI as well, which is fantastic. So you're seeing a lot of value come out of it for the sales person as opposed to historical CRMs. Mm-hmm. So leveraging that has been a huge thing. Along with the internal, internal marketing as well. Um, and I'm still pretty much, probably in the thick of it.

She has to let, let me know, like 12 months online. I'll let you know if it's gone very well or not. 'cause so far I'm still just in the, in the complete thick of it at the moment, so.

Phil: Okay. So I'm sure quite a few in the room have gone through some sort of CRM transformation. Any questions that anyone would like to pose?

Yes.

Audience 2: Hi, uh, Jay. I'm a sales manager at.

We're just about to embark on this journey as well, and I'm quite removed from the project and then the change that's coming because I think, yeah, we've got a journey to to go on, but I wanted to ask around like productivity loss in that when you move from one to the other, is that, I hear what you're saying, that people love the audio.

That's terrible.

Samantha G: Yeah,

Audience 2: because we've known it 20 years, so I think it's quite a lot of concerns internally around what does that mean for that productivity, for output during that. Switch over. So what was, what was that like at, did you see a real tangible drop?

Samantha G: Um, I think with any kind of change, some people took switch from I conduct was from day one.

Other people took a little bit longer. And where other people took a little bit longer, there was definitely a productivity loss there. Um, but more so in the sense that. They were still contacts of customers. Like customers have always been their priority. It's more just the bit that we needed on CRM basically that we were lacking.

Um, so it was about, 'cause at that time, right from day one, I was still a sales manager at that point. Even though I had input into the project, I wasn't directly involved at that stage. So basically would sit down with my account managers at the time and basically try to understand their barriers. How are they feeling about it?

What could we maybe do differently? Can we maybe get caught with some tips, things like that, to kind of really just get past that phase and then try to pair them up with somebody who's really comfortable with it. Um, the pairing up really, really helps. I noticed this was a massive difference at that stage, um, because they, they sit next to each other in the office well, which really helps.

And then just they kind of push each other. Which really was definitely beneficial for sure. But yeah, do expect some level in very, very early days. I'm thinking not once, I'm thinking weeks potentially. Um, but yeah, all you can do is try to prepare for every eventuality and just, you know, your team best.

So you'll probably already have an idea as how they're gonna react to it. So it's just making plans for that basically. That's all I can suggest.

Phil: Okay. Any other questions? Yes. Sorry, there's a few hands going up here.

Audience 3: Uh, hi. Uh, Simon Weer from Salesforce. I couldn't help obviously asking a question about CRM. I won't ask which one, it's, but obviously you've got a lot of now modern CRM capabilities. What would you say the one thing about the new system, like if you had to choose one thing that's really gonna turn the dial on something, whether that's performance, productivity, efficiency, what's the one thing do you see that's really gonna

be transformative?

Samantha G: Um,

Predictive AI for sure. So data modeling, which I know Data Cloud can do as well. I'm aware of that one. Um, and then how that then services in terms of like, things like Salesforce have Einstein next Best action. So it surfaces a prediction in a suggestion to the salesperson. I think I'm very much about making sure that sales still have autonomy.

They're not being controlled as to what they need to do next. They have suggestions, servicing for them. If we know that basically that that level of churn that we saw on the screen, it's.

it's

Ridiculous and it's getting worse. Basically, if we can use things like predictive AI to basically build those models to help us determine, okay, what's gonna happen with this customer next month?

Are there any kind of leading indicators we could maybe have a look at? Have their recent cases gone up? Um, are we seeing, um, a drop in their invoice payments? Anything like that, that would mean that okay, the account manager's gonna jump on that way ahead of the time that the revenue drops. Basically.

That's where I see the most value for sure.

Audience 1: I love that.

Phil: I think there was another hand up.

Audience 1: Yeah,

Phil: yeah. Sorry. Alex,

Audience 1: Alex s from Context Market Research Organization. Um, I suppose you have a very different generation inside world now. Yeah. Did you see

Phil: Yeah.

Audience 1: Uh, um, differentiation in terms of adoption of the new bells and whistles, CRM, new tools, uh, related to AI

According to those generations,

Samantha G: um, not so much. It was very much about mindset, really. The, the people who had growth mindsets, regardless what generation they were in, they, they took through it straight away. People who had the fixed mindset, who really wanted the old CRM back, it was, it, they were all a lot harder to basically bring along the journey with us.

Um, but yeah, that was definitely cross generations. There wasn't any particular right. Type of generation. Yeah. And we do have all generations in role now. We have multiple family generations as well as mine.

Gareth: Yeah.

Phil: Okay. So let's move on to, um, Gareth. Gareth, can I throw a question at you that you're not prepared for?

Okay. And that is being a marketing person, and I'm just interested in your. Reflections on what you've heard today. Um, I know that's not a question that I have asked you to prepare for.

Gareth: No, it's fine. It's fine.

Phil: But, uh, you did say that, you know, it's nice being a marketeer, uh, with a bunch of salespeople, and I'd just like to hear, you know, what, what you've made of this afternoon.

Gareth: So first I think is fascinating, right? So sales is probably the most.

Phil: careful

what you say. Careful what you say. No, sorry, we lost. That is the most,

Gareth: I'm a father of three daughters. I have no filter. So, um, I think it's fascinating. So sales is often regarded as, you know, the most important job in any given business.

Right. And

I think it's fair to say that it's very rarely underrepresented in terms of the amount of, uh, bandwidth that it gets in the C-suite.

But I think listening and, um, participating this afternoon, it's just about the care and attention that goes into the professionalism that really high quality salespeople.

Put into their work, their process and their responsibility. I've had the opportunity to work with some amazing salespeople that delivered results. I have had the opportunity to work with some dreadful salespeople who also

also delivered results. So being able to be, you know, to, to kind of go behind the scenes in terms of what it takes to become.

And to sustain as a great salesperson, I think is a, is, you know, is a fantastic learning for anybody. So, you know, I've really appreciated the opportunity to be part of it this afternoon.

Phil: Okay. Well thank you for that. Um, but the question I asked you to prepare for was, uh, that, that decar one, the people that we had no relationship.

With, uh, responded to a LinkedIn request for people to take part in the research, and I think it came through perhaps Eddie.

Gareth: Yeah.

Phil: On the marketing side. Um, and, uh, we had a very interesting conversation and you shared some stories about what you saw as being great practice, and I just wonder if you could share, uh, one of the stories you had, maybe you need to set some context for it.

Sure. And, and, you know, let's, uh. Let's hear your story. Okay. About what you would consider is great practice.

Gareth: Yeah, it's a great practice. So, um, as you'll see from, from my experience, I've done quite a lot of work in the, in the telco space. So, um, I've spent quite a lot of time working in what is called the mobile devices part of the telco space.

So many of you probably get the phone in your pocket or in your hand from your mobile network operator. You buy it on a contract and you pay for it over a certain number of years.

So what this means is, is that the mobile network operators buy the phones. From different handset manufacturers and then they provide finance to you.

So there is a huge, absolutely huge financial program that goes in to spend spending literally billions of pounds, dollars, euros every year with different device manufacturers in order to provide you with the, the phones that are in your pockets. So one of the best, um, salespeople that I've ever come across.

Was working for a handset manufacturer, you can, by me calling it a handset, you can tell it wasn't a smartphone. Right. Um, so I was working for a handset manufacturer that had a huge relationship with the company I was working for. And I was working for Orange at that time. And they were probably, we were probably spending 500 million euros plus per year.

So we're a very significant relationship, but not the biggest. Um, relationship that we had, and what was quite incredible was that this guy orchestrated a incredible transformation in the relationship between their business and ours. And he really identified the things that we were all about and then was able to present what his own business could do for us, but also.

Was able to take what we needed and take it back to his organization to change what they did. He was able to do this operating across 18 different markets simultaneously with all sorts of different, uh, positions. So here in the uk this brand was, you know, probably number two in the market, but I can remember in Spain they had a really low performance and he had to convince his own business.

Us to overinvest in that market in order to ensure that their brand awareness and their, the confidence that our team in Spain would have would be there in order for them to participate more actively in this relationship. This guy was delivering 500 million euros of business per year, but he was not interested in it being 510 million euros.

He was not chasing the final Euro. He was looking to make sure that he could authentically build that synergy between the two businesses, and he was there to learn, take it back, present it, and then to manage the challenges

that came along.

It was fascinating to watch how this guy did this.

Phil: Yeah. I think you talked about his ability to work at a macro level, uh, looking at the strategy as well as the micro level, correct?

Yeah. Which is the, the detail. That was required in order to pull that in a quite complex, uh, relationship, um, to actually, uh, together. So any, any questions of Gareth from anyone in the, the audience? Uh,

Gareth: don't be shy. Ask a marketer, whatever. Whatever you really want to know.

Phil: Yeah. What do we think of marketers, guys?

Yes. Donald.

Audience 4: Donald to from s. Um, and I'm really intrigued to, to get your opinion on what you saw on Aviso

and how you feel that that could be a marketer's tool as well as a sales tool.

Gareth: I think there's, there's probably a few reactions that, that I had to it. So firstly, I think as a, as a tool, which works to be honest, like any other AI tool which is there to help us to structure.

And to do a better, but not a perfect job. Um, and to do it more quickly, I think it's really useful. So I think that kind of, um, generic AI capability is quite useful, um, in, uh, any of the macro business functions. Um, where we use, um, marketing in ai, uh, sorry, where we use AI in marketing. Um, there are, there's a, there's a couple of sort of macro areas.

So what do you hear a lot of right now is around the rapid execution of automated campaigns or creative development. And that is okay. Uh, but there are, you know, that there are, uh, there are lots of different use cases, but you are, you're probably seeing it being not particularly effective. It is quite interesting.

That probably the most famous AI execution in marketing over the last few years has been Coca-Cola. So one of the interesting things about Coca-Cola is it's run the same ad at Christmas for more than the last 40 years. Uh, they last year they recreated it for some reason and made it worse, um, with, uh, with ai.

And they have done an AI plus version of it again this year. So they're running the same execution, um, but just gently improving it, I think. That's probably a easy way to use, um, AI and marketing, but where the real intelligence is in marketing is at the diagnosis and strategy stage. So one of the things that I do is the fir my first task.

Is about building the segment map of the market. So I mentioned before that I, I position myself around delivering sustainable profit growth. So I'm identifying where are the segments in the market where there's actually profit to be made, not whether it's volume, whether it's profit to be made. Now, in order to do that kind of manually, that can take months and cost you a lot of money.

But now with the use of synthetic data, um, you know, from companies like, um, EV as an example. You can do this at a fraction of the cost overnight, and with 90% plus of the accuracy, those types of, um, those types of use cases are absolutely fascinating and I believe we really will transform,

um,

how the, how the technology could be used in business today.

Phil: That

answered your question, Donald. I

Audience 4: certainly given

Audience 5: an insight.

Phil: Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Okay. I'm, again, very conscious of time. I'm really sorry, but any questions of anyone of the panel?

Yes,

Audience 5: Kevin Kelly. I, I just have a, a business development agency outbound team. I'm curious what you guys think of, um, if I was

to say,

AI emails are automation on steroids basically, and. We are seeing a record amount of email be just deleted. And that's the feedback we're getting. Um, and I'm just wondering, you know, we, we talk about personalization and a lot of the personalization we see, and this is from feedback from our clients, get names wrong using old company names and everybody thinks that yeah, we're, we're super personalized when actually it's not even close.

And the other part of it is maybe we send six or seven of these in sequence. Nobody opens them, nobody looks at 'em. And we think it's great to send an eighth and ninth one. You know? I'm just wondering your opinion on

Samantha W: that. I mean, I'm, I'm battling with the same, and I think most software companies are.

Audience 5: Yeah.

Samantha W: So I'm, I think it's not about personalized campaigns, it's personal campaigns, so it's to to, to the CMO at Coca-Cola on their last advertising campaign, referencing a comment. In LinkedIn and then not asking for, would you like to meet here as a calendar invite? I can't stand that. 'cause you just delete.

'cause that's not authentic. You don't sell like that. You don't build relationships like that. So it's about helping the, the SDRs or the BDRs to actually think about. The relationship they're trying to build, rather than say, can I have a meeting tomorrow? Rather say, oh, and by the way, here's a white paper.

I thought you might be interested. Um, and the next one, here's a, here's a Gartner report. I thought you, you, you might be interested in. And then build up some rapport and then ask for the meeting. So I think it's about personal, um, outreach. The problem is, um, AI agents can help them do a great personal outreach.

The problem is now when they're. Email comes back in and starts asking questions, and then they've actually gotta start thinking for themselves and have the second and the third, um, sort of email back to that customer

organized and,

and, um, relevant and, uh, spot on. Otherwise, you're gonna blow it on the second email when they actually come back to you.

So I think that's as important as the first email, but AI will allow you to do more personal, personal outreach at scale.

It makes a difference.

Phil: Thank you. Thank you Samantha.

Samantha G: Of

Panel: Samantha.

Samantha G: I would agree with that to be honest.

Phil: Yeah. Um,

Samantha G: I was huge on insight selling particularly, um, was probably one of my key focuses when I was doing my masters as well.

I think providing value and differentiating yourself, I think we probably say it so much and maybe loses a little bit of meaning, but it is genuinely you are, you are sat in front of somebody. They're dealing with lots of different things in their head. Um, if you ask questions, you find out what that customer wants.

The last thing you should then be doing afterwards is basically just giving a, probably a poor prompt to a language model to spout out some really poor email with, with no context, with no emotion, with no meaning, um, and then basically lose that connection. You tried to initially build. Um, I think. It's always gotta be contextual, it's gotta be applicable.

Um, it's gotta be relevant for the person you're speaking to as well. So, but yeah, I'm probably one of those, the people that, I get a lot of those emails now and I do delete them all unless it's got some actual value in there.

Gareth: So can I ask you a question back, because this is the, this is, the marketer doesn't quite get it.

Sorry. Um, what's your objective with sending the emails?

Audience 5: Well, to be honest, that we don't, um, we, we look to go outbound on a call first. So that the email comes second. And that's, that's personal. So for us, that's, that's the approach we take. Um, and I delete all the emails, by the way. It just seems to have increased.

Uh, and all AI companies are selling AI and all of these volumes are coming through, but our, our clients are saying the same thing. But, but for me, the personalization starts with potentially going outbound. Now we have the tools. Nowadays, there's never been a better time to go outbound with all the tools you can get from.

Direct access, you know, depending on which country you go out into. But you have a huge opportunity, uh, to engage with people. I think the email must come second. Not first.

Gareth: Okay. Because

Audience 5: then it becomes personal. Hopefully that makes sense.

Gareth: Yeah. I hear. So just so I'm, I'm getting it and I, I,

Audience 5: yeah.

Gareth: Forgive me for being so simple, but your goal here, in terms of going outbound Yeah.

Is that you are trying to get somebody to be interested in having a conversation about future business with you?

Audience 5: No. with our, with our clients.

Gareth: Okay.

Audience 5: Yeah. So, so we're, we're going outbound to find people and try and bring 'em to the table. Uhhuh. That's pretty much it.

Gareth: Yeah. Okay. So my, my advice as a, as a, as a marketer here

Audience 5: Yeah.

Gareth: Is Jesus, that's incredibly inefficient. Agree in terms of what you're doing. Agreed. But actually inefficiency is irrelevant. Yeah. You wanna be effective before you can be efficient, and so an outbound approach in that way is totally ineffective. Your clients would be much, much better off, um, building their brand around what are the category entry points for their sector so that they build organic traffic and organic interest in them.

And only then when you have someone who is already warm and interested in what solution you provide, whatever that problem is, only then will you find that any kind of, uh, communication is actually going to yield. Effective and efficient business outcomes at the end.

Audience 1: Interesting.

Samantha W: That's

why we are building that content engine so that we can build that organic awareness.

Yeah. So that when you do reach out or you do call, there's an awareness of the brand and, and your, your value proposition.

Phil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I'm just conscious of time and we, we very shortly need to go to the pub. I'm desperate for a drink, so I'm just going to thank the panelists for taking my, can we get my thank much?

Thank you.

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