Transcript
What is up everyone, this is the Flow State podcast. I am Stuart P Turner and it’s Friday Awesome. And the sun is once again back out after some horrendous torrential rain that reappeared this week at least over my house. So hope you’re all having a great time and looking forward to a bit of weekend action.
Now today we’re going to talk about two worlds that they’re not often mentioned in the same sentence: the world of sales and the world of culture, and how AI is possibly ruining both or maybe maybe making both even better. Um, under the umbrella theme of those who can do those who can’t consult. Now if you haven’t heard that phrase before or you’re like why are you bastardizing a well-known idiom, it of course is a play on the “those who can do those who can’t teach” saying, which is typically used to disparage the noble art of teaching, which I’m actually a very big fan of. So let’s just get that out there right now. However, as you will well know if you’ve ever sat through a day or multiple days if you’re unlucky of training run by third-party consultants.
What I mean by that provocateur title is that when you are being trained by people who only have an understanding of the theory, you will often find the theory is somewhat lacking when you attempt to bring that theory into contact with the real world in your job. And there is no place that that happens in a more vitriolic and rapid fire fashion than in the world of sales. So what I want to talk about today is exactly that. And the reason that I’m talking about that is because a very core part of the reason that Flow State is here in our proposition is to address part of this challenge. We support a lot of very senior sales people across our programs and we know that they don’t like to fuck around and have their time wasted, to put it crudely. So we come in to take away a lot of the boring annoying leg work that the world of digital is shoving onto their desks to allow them to focus on the stuff that they’re good at, which is actually being a cool person and selling whatever they’re supposed to be selling.
The reason that I thought this would be a fun topic to bring up today is following on from the revelations about Spotify and military investment and how technology is impacting the world of creativity. There’s a link here which I’ll talk to you about in a bit. We’ll start with the importance of being human in sales. What I was reading last week that inspired this episode was on Reddit, which you may or may not read but I’ll include the link under the episode as usual. There’s a sub all about sales which is very interesting and amusing to read. This post just cracked me up and the discussion underneath is very interesting. If you’re just listening along, the post is about a salesperson who was forced to sit through six hours of consultative selling training, then use the exact script on a call and was hung up on immediately.
The post is quite amusing. They say that some incredibly expensive consultant was brought in to teach them modern selling techniques. It took an entire day. There was a lot of frameworks and theory, and then they put it into practice and it just didn’t work. Now obviously in very simplistic terms, you do need to bring a bit of your own game to these things, but obviously on paper these people are being brought in as the saviors of sales with these amazing frameworks and processes and whatever that are supposed to immediately improve your pipeline and generate deals faster and all that other stuff. So it’s just very amusing to hear that they don’t work at all. Another funny part of this post was that this person said: “Meanwhile my desk neighbor who skipped the training who was sick closed two deals this week just talking to people like a normal human being.”.
So that goes to show that if you are authentic and focused in your role then you can do a great job. The key point here I think, that the author of this post noted, is that the more they try to systematize it the more robotic you sound and look. If you only do the system then yes obviously that is the case. You can’t just robotically follow a process because yes you will sound like a robot and that’s not going to resonate with anyone.
However, what is frustrating here is companies are spending a fortune both in time and money bringing this stuff in. Sales training—not the stuff that’s run by actual people who’ve done sales, by the way, I just want to make that clear—like sales training from consultancy businesses who’ve never been anywhere near a phone in their life and never had to pitch anything to anyone. They just copy paste PowerPoints and bring them to you with your logo on. It seems amazing to me that you would dare bring people like that in, let alone pay them 15 grand to attempt to teach your sales team how to actually sell.
That fundamental kind of issue is again where we come in quite a lot in businesses from a totally different angle to help here. The key point that links all this together is exactly that. If you have experienced what it is like to be a salesperson—and I’m speaking specifically around B2B at present because it’s a complex and long process typically to sell stuff in the B2B world—you’ll know that it’s pretty hard work and no magic system exists to make it any easier. Because if that magic system did exist, whoever had come up with that system would be a billion mctrillionaire by this point. Everybody would be using it and every sales pipeline would be so full that is ready to burst dollars all over every company in the world. Now given that that is not the case, I would suggest that that system does not exist.
The challenging parts of sales are that it is an inherently human-oriented process and it’s quite messy and challenging and it requires you to have people who understand people in order to make it work really well. There is no system that can solve that essential human challenge.
The gist of a lot of this commentary on the Reddit post is that sales requires you to be authentic and talk to people like a normal person and understand their challenges and get to know them in a real way. You should not just try and robotically follow a process and like some sort of weird process Nazi just go through the steps exactly as they’re written down and not deviate at all because that comes through very quickly and very clearly. If you read through this after this episode, you’ll see like authenticity has always been reliable. You need to bring value to people. This is all the basics of sales that you just should be trained on straight away.
There was one particular comment that I thought really encapsulated all of this which is from Moldy Money, a great username. The comment was: “I think and I tell this to anyone who will listen there are two things that if you master will set you up for life: Authenticity and focus”.
Authenticity in the age of fake stuff everywhere, AI, robotic process stuff all over, is more important and valuable than ever. That’s what you just cannot get from processes from only the theory if you’ve never done this stuff yourself. You don’t know how to create an authentic connection with somebody because you are just teaching someone a process that you yourself have never had to fire test or run on your own. That is why the best marketers that are obviously some of the people that we’re working with across Flow State in B2B will spend a lot of their time with their sales teams to understand how their work can support what they’re doing and get these insights from people who are actually doing the job.
The point I loved here was that—and this is a direct quoting—“People are craving regular fucking interactions these days and they’re eager to sniff out a fake because they are everywhere now”. Working on the internet a lot, I see this literally everywhere. I get so much automated crap outrage fired at me, it is unreal. I’ve just had to move to a “block report spam ignore forever” process now, because while it’s interesting to see the companies that this stuff’s coming from and sort of know what they’re doing, it’s just become a torrent now that’s impossible to turn off.
So weirdly the way to actually be mega successful in a sales role again is just to almost ignore all the process stuff and just be real and just have real chats with people and just be normal. That’s how we’re running our own outreach right now. It’s just no agenda conversations. We’re running some market research. We’re inviting people to come on the podcast. These are the ways that we can start a relationship that is mutually interesting if we get on and mutually valuable that doesn’t do a horrible bait and switch and you don’t get enrolled in an automated horrible process where you get 10 emails and they all say something slightly different. That’s what everyone hates right now. But weirdly, going back to the point at the start, that’s what everyone’s teaching and being taught and expected to be doing. Going back a few episodes, this was what we were highlighting is getting forced on everyone to use these processes: “use AI,” “just use all the automated whatever”. “Oh, your sales tools got an AI feature that’s been dropped into it. Brilliant. Just use that”. Like, no, don’t use any of that. Just be a normal person. Do normal person stuff.
I thought this was particularly interesting and I just wanted to share this because we’re all getting forced to sit through this stuff at the moment. And there are these promises being made everywhere of “automate everything,” “pipeline automation,” “deals coming in,” “10x deal values,” blah blah blah. I don’t believe for a second that any of those claims could be accurately validated or backed up by anyone pushing them out. There’s a real danger here if you’re a brand that is leaning in this direction that you’re going to alienate your team and annoy them, waste huge amounts of time and money on activities that are not going to materially impact the growth of your business, when instead you could be investing that time and money into something that more meaningfully engages your team, gives you better insights about what’s working and what isn’t working, and actually gets everybody kind of revved up about doing the job of sales. It just seems stupid that you would throw money away on external consultants when you could do something much more internally driven that would be much more valuable.
That was the key takeaway here that I just thought was quite amusing and quite interesting.
Now in relation to that—and this might seem like a bit of a leap—if you’re just listening I’m now looking at an article on the New Yorker magazine: “AI is coming for culture”. Linking directly to our episode last week on the horrible decisions of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, this is a really interesting article, a bit of a long read. There’s an audio version you can listen to as well about the impact of AI on culture. While obviously it is leaping into the world of creative, there are a few interesting links to the hardcore world of B2B sales that I was just discussing.
I won’t replay my rant from last week about how I think that AI is actually not welcome in most cultural spaces, and I think it is in fact doing quite a lot of damage at the moment. Not to say it couldn’t be useful at some point, but in this article there’s some very interesting stuff about the impact of AI on the world of human creativity. Where this relates to what is being discussed in that Reddit thread is the act of creation or creating things in creative spaces in the arts is what makes it great. It’s what makes it meaningful and makes us able to relate to it. Just like when you’re speaking to somebody, you get a great feeling immediately as to whether they’re being genuine in a conversation or not. In crude terms in the sales world, you can tell if someone’s trying to force a conversation or a relationship to go faster than it should or in a direction that it shouldn’t be going in at that time because of how you interact with other people. That cannot be replicated by a machine at present.
The same is true in the creative world. You can immediately tell whether something has value and has been genuinely created by somebody who has a bit of a vision and is trying to do something interesting and meaningful, versus just slop that is getting churned out because you can, and you can do it at scale now. I’ve seen some pretty amazing stuff done with AI, like there’s some really interesting video stuff being done which is cool. But this is by people who already have the expertise. Coming back to my previous point, and I’ve talked about this from a vibe coding perspective as well, if you don’t know film, you cannot use AI to immediately become an award-winning Steven Spielberg level director because you have no idea what you’re doing. You’re just like a monkey trying to write Shakespeare smashing the keys and hoping something useful comes out because you don’t understand the craft and you’ve never done the work.
It’s the same with sales. If you only understand the theory and you’ve never done it, you will not be successful straight away because there’s a lot of things that can happen that you will not expect that won’t be in the theory. I talked about this with the appalling AI wallpaper music band that’s been making headlines on Spotify, where they’ve ripped off the better emotion-filled work of other people and are spewing it back out in a more generic boring way and Spotify is making money off it. That is just the worst side of this at the moment. You can hear when someone’s put some feeling into something.
The takeaway from this is that authenticity in the creative arts is paramount to them being valuable. Whether you love or hate it, that’s the way it creates a reaction. And it’s the same when you’re at work. The worlds of work and life are not as far apart as we would like to make believe. When you’re in a job like sales and selling stuff, it’s a very personal job. You have to be personable. There isn’t that division there. You have to bring yourself to work, that was very popular a few years ago.
I wanted to call that out because this is where the worlds of work and life collide for me. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff in this article about the use of AI where it fits in within the creative space and how it can be used to augment or accelerate that. But it all hinges on the fact that you still need to have done the thing. You have to be coming from a place of experience. The author of this article is saying all the way through like, “I use it to assist in writing,” which is great, but they are a writer. Joshua knows how to write, he’s an author, he gets that.
Coming back to the sales point and the consultative selling, I think that’s the issue. There’s a real danger at the moment that we’re moving into a world of the blind leading the blind where algorithmically driven training will probably replace consultants. I’ve seen a lot of amusing people particularly on LinkedIn trying to pitch these weird PNGs of a big process. “Oh look, I’ve made the same as a 25 grand consultant could do in this little image or process or whatever”. To be perfectly honest they probably have, because that’s all consultants bring: they bring their big PowerPoints and reports and a day of training, and that’s what you get.
The new people pitching these images are not consultants. They haven’t had the years of looking at all these businesses and seeing the same patterns and trends across all these businesses that a consultant would have that they’re supposed to bring to the table for you. The danger there is if nobody’s actually done the things that they are saying that you should be doing or that they’re trying to sell, where does that leave us? It leaves us in a very dangerous area where we don’t know if any of this stuff’s going to work effectively because it’s never actually been done by the people who are doing it.
If AI is then just hoovering all this crap in and regurgitating it back out, we’re just back to that point I’ve been making all the way through this series of a very reductive race to the bottom, distilling of stuff. If you’ve ever tried to keep like refining an image for example in Photoshop in certain ways, you just keep doing it and keep doing it until you eventually just end up with like brown sludge or like “monkey Jesus”. You keep trying to fix something so much that you just ruin it. That’s the direction this could go in and that’s the gist of the article in AI coming for culture. Is that where we’re going? Maybe.
That’s the point I wanted to make. It’s a bit of a short and sweet one today, but I just wanted to call this out because these live conversations—yes, I know Reddit’s anonymous and yes, a lot of people go on there and winge—but I think the anonymity of Reddit is what makes it much more credible and honest. Reddit’s like one of the last bastions of social media that is resisting being ruined by bots and spamming and marketing people like me who just want to go on there from a digital perspective and rinse the data and leverage it. But there’s still a lot of real discussion on here.
The sales sub is particularly interesting because you get great insights into the ground level of sales and what people are experiencing. I’ll leave you with this comment which was the again slightly crude takeaway from this week:
- No needle worker 6585 (Obviously auto generated name).
- Yes, fuck your VP.
- He sends spreadsheets to the CEO.
- He doesn’t know sales.
- Talk to people like they are human.
- Authenticity is the only way.
I could not agree more. Authenticity has become a cliché but I think it is genuinely what people want now. We are being driven off the environments that were connecting us before because of all the fake crap that’s everywhere. We’ve been spammed out of the channels that we used to connect in. The job of sales is actually getting much harder because you’ve got to break through much more of this noise now.
Speaking from experience leads to being able to be more authentic. It gives you a foundation of authenticity because people know that you’ve done the doing. If you can’t speak from experience you can still be open and honest about that and just be authentic, but that is the key thing. We live and breathe this every day at Flow State where we’re leveraging digital channels to start relationships, but that’s only what they can do. They can start them and they can enable them, but we are fighting all of this ourselves. We don’t want to be in the same spaces as all these spammy idiots just pushing out this garbage. We’re trying to forge real relationships for ourselves and our clients.
The link to the arts made a little neat tieback call back clapback whatever to last week’s episode. That’s it from me today. Short and sweet, which may be a bit of a relief for you, or maybe you’re desperate for more. I’ll leave you on that note: Go and, if you’re a B2B person in a growth role and you’re not in sales, go and talk to your sales. Go buy them a few beers this afternoon and have a chat with them and see what they’ve got to say and what they think about the last training you did, the tools you’re trying to force on them, what a customer is saying to them. They will thank you for it and you will thank me for it because I guarantee you will learn some stuff that you did not know before you had that conversation. You go and enjoy the rest of Friday. Thank you once again for joining me and listening to my varied opinions and ramblings on what is happening. And I hope you will rejoin me again next week.