Bald Ambition
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Bald Ambition
Jack Siney Sprints Past Outdated Sales Management with AI-Powered FrontRace
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In this sharp, zero-hype episode of Bald Ambition, Mookie Spitz sits down with FrontRace co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer Jack Siney to break down one of the worst-kept secrets in business: after decades of CRMs, dashboards, KPIs, pipeline reviews, call analytics, and “sales methodology” consultants, most companies still can’t reliably forecast revenue or consistently turn average reps into top performers.
Jack argues modern sales management is digitally bloated and strategically broken. Companies are drowning in metrics yet starving for insight. Reps get judged on activity counts, managers obsess over rigid 22-step processes, and superstar sellers keep outperforming everyone else through instincts nobody can explain. Meanwhile, executives still miss numbers and wonder what happened.
FrontRace flips that model by plugging into existing systems, normalizing messy data across tools, and utilizing AI to identify what actually drives wins. Instead of more useless theory and consultant jargon. FrontRace reveals real world patterns hidden inside years of sales activity.
Jack and Mookie also go deep into why most sales stacks fail, why elite sellers often make terrible managers, why standardization can destroy performance, and how the future of revenue growth may be personalized coaching at scale. Jack’s blunt take: companies spent fortunes measuring the wrong things.
Here's what's been wrong:
- CRM systems full of stale or biased data
- Dashboard addiction with no causal insight
- Forecasting based on rep optimism instead of evidence
- Cookie-cutter sales processes that top performers ignore
- Promotions that turn great closers into bad managers
- Activity metrics that reward busyness over effectiveness
- Endless software layers that create friction, not growth
Here's how FrontRace fixes it:
- Connects and cleans fragmented data across platforms
- Detects the hidden behaviors separating 3X reps from average reps
- Measures sequencing, timing, pricing moves, follow-up quality, and deal momentum
- Gives managers evidence-based coaching instead of guesswork
- Gives reps specific next-best actions on live opportunities
- Personalizes development to the individual seller instead of forcing one script for all
- Turns historical wins and losses into a practical playbook
Their conversation is grounded on where AI can create immediate ROI right now: helping companies stop wasting talent, stop misreading data, and stop pretending the old way works. If you run a sales team, own a business, manage growth, or are tired of hearing inflated AI nonsense with zero substance, give Jack and Mookie a listen!
The Guest
Jack Siney is a serial entrepreneur and veteran sales leader with a proven track record of building high-performing teams and scaling companies. He began his career negotiating contracts for the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels program and has founded seven companies, led sales teams of 100+ reps, and closed over $500 million in sales. Jack has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and CNBC, and was named one of America’s Top 25 Inspirational Leaders.
The Company
At FrontRace, we bring together your team’s real activity data, connect it across systems, and apply powerful AI to reveal what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next.
Hello and welcome to the Bald Ambition Podcast. I'm your still very bald host, Wookiee Spitz, and the one with tons of ambition today is Mr. Jack Steady. Welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_02Thanks, thanks for having me. By the way, if you go to my LinkedIn profile, this is all new. This hair, I've my LinkedIn profile is a very, very short hairdo as well. So I this is all this this hair on top of my head is about seven, eight months old.
SPEAKER_00Nice, nice.
SPEAKER_02I'm in the bald ambition, yeah. Amen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you got that ambition too. You got a little crop top. So if you're just listening on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, uh, you know, I'll put a you'll you'll be in the little thumbnail with your crop top. And if you're on YouTube, wave, say hi.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, just enough that I have just enough hair to be dangerous.
SPEAKER_00So I'm still jelly though. You are the co-founder and chief revenue officer of Front Race. And you're using AI, plugging it into sales, and uh, I can't wait to hear about your value prop. Everyone's talking about AI, AI, AI. It's genuinely a revolution, whether we like it or not. A lot of changes. When I when I think sales, I think numbers. Show me the money. If you're a sales manager, if you're a selling person, it's all about the books. So data and sales have been entwined since the caveman. Tell me, tell our audience what's what's new now with AI and what are you doing with AI to help it out a little bit? Grease the wheels.
SPEAKER_02What a lead-in. What a lead in. I I guess as perspective, I'd I'd step back just a little bit and say, hey, if you in this, especially forget the tech side. I'm not I'm not a tech. So is AI revolutionizing the tech world unquestionably? What it's doing in tech world today is unprecedented, it's amazing. You know, my perspective is really on the business commercial side. And I would just say as perspective, we started or the the businesses started about 40 years ago to put this tech stack in place on the commercial side, right? CRMs and and then call intelligence and pipeline management and and uh RevOps and now AI and what's crazy, you don't have to take my opinion for it. If you put in Google or or ChatGPT or Club, whatever, and ask, are we any better today at forecasting and developing our sales teams than we were 40 years ago? The numbers, they're either the same or they're actually worse. And so that to me is such an interesting paradigm. And so that's what we try to lean into. It's like we spent all 40 years, CRM at all, all these systems, millions and millions of dollars, all these dashboards and KPIs, and we're no better today. Public companies miss today as much or more as they did 30, 40 years ago. It's shocking that we we have all this data now, but we're not much better at delivering what we say we're gonna deliver. And and and how that could that be? And so uh I would just one one real world thing is somebody's led big teams. We we've all had the moment where our dashboard, we had all the numbers, we had all everything on our we look great and we miss, we miss for the month of the quarter, and then we had the month where we miss everything and we're 30% over, right? And then inevitably the board or the CEO walks in your office, he's like, What happened? Or she walks, you know, what happened? And you're like, I don't know, you start juggling, you know, you're like I don't know. You know, you start making stuff up. And so to me, that's an amazing uh paradigm, amazing construct that we built so much money, so much time, so much in our tech stack, and are honestly no better today at forecasting.
SPEAKER_00So with that as a is that as a premise, uh whether you believe it or not, again, Google it's Wall Street believes it because the SaaS companies have getting their ass kicked by AI. So sales, all the way from Salesforce to Docu signed. Amen. Yeah. They're they're tanking because the agentic technology holds the promise of replacing the butts and chairs with autonomous agents. And to your point, a lot of these services suck, not to be disparaging about Oracle, but there's tons of tech, the stack is thick, and the practical application and impact to business, specifically sales team, has been uneven, has been kind of broken.
SPEAKER_02It's so true. Listen, listen, and and if anyone's sitting there listening, they're like, I don't believe that, or it's not true. Look, we've all had this. If you've run a sales team, you're VP of sales, CRO, treasure of sales, we've all had this experience, okay? You have two reps, okay? Their numbers look pretty similar. Uh their metrics, calls, uh, outreach, emails, pipeline look very similar. One is outselling the other 3x, right? Susan is selling 3x Bob, right? And so when that happens, on every sales team in America, again, the CEO or board comes in and goes, can't we just why can't we? What's Susan doing? And again, the head of sales makes something up. Well, Susan's just good at closing, she's a better demoer, she has a better network. We make something that's totally fake, but that happens today. We're we're no better today. Every sales team, 80-20, 20% of your people are crushing it. The other 80%, you're you're on some kind of pit plan or developmental plan or some kind of how can I get them to all be Susan? And we don't know. It is it's shocking. It's not that it happens, but the fact that we spent so much time and energies Salesforce and HubSpot have is look at all the metrics and monitor all their stuff. And if you just look at it enough, you'll and the sidebar to that is it's like the um in sports, it's the Michael Jordan complex. Like Michael Jordan's amazing, but you can't teach what he did, right? He's like, I was just the best player, or LeBron, whoever you know, and so they can't teach it. So Susan crushing it, you have her come into your sales team, do a training, and she can't explain it, right? She's like, I just do what's natural, I just it's who I am, right? And so the team doesn't get any better, and so that's ultimately the paradigm.
SPEAKER_00They pretend tend to promote Susan, so right.
SPEAKER_02She may not be a good manager, all right.
SPEAKER_00So she usually sucks as a manager because all the qualities that make Susan a great salesperson hyper competitiveness, relentless drive, those are exactly the opposite qualities you want from a manager. You want empathy, you want team building. They're not gonna do that, they're not gonna teach. That's because they're out there busy kicking ass.
SPEAKER_02I can't tell you how many times I've had the best person over 25 years try to do a training. And it's no offense to those people. They're amazing what they're doing. They're the worst trainers. You try, can you just share, share what you're doing on LinkedIn or share what you're doing to close? Or and then they they put together a little PowerPoint or you know, whatever they do on Google Slides. It's awful. And the team, the team actually leads worse, right? They're like, I just got dumber. I'm gonna try something that's out of the box that I'm not good at, that that person happens to be very good at. And so NetNet, that's really what uh we lean into at front rage, trying to shine a light on what's been this black hole of sales for 40, 40 plus years, which like, hey, what what makes Susan so great? And that's that's really what we're focused on.
SPEAKER_00But it's an employee development kind of HR angle on AI. And and I've talked to other folks who do who do similar kind of stuff, and the angle on that is there's tons of data. Yeah, you know, and another pundit called it data exhaust. I saw that.
SPEAKER_02I saw that in one of your other shows. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00We got a ton of data and it and it all gets vaporized. It's often to the ether. And if you have an opportunity to measure it, analyze it, and AI at its core is machine learning and deep learning.
SPEAKER_02You got it. You you got it, 100%. That so so a little commercial front race. I totally agree. That you are uh a hundred bucks after the show. Like what we do for companies, which is the AI I think everyone wants today, like like AI sidebar, we're in the first days of AI, just like AOL. If you remember AOL, like AOL was great, but if you were still in AOL today, you were wildly You've got mail.
SPEAKER_00Now it's you've got a bot.
SPEAKER_02Right, totally, right? So we're in the earliest, earliest days. So committing to an AI anything is can be challenging, right? And so what we do for companies is we say, continue doing what you're doing, don't stop. We put a little layer on top of their tech stack, which connects all the data, normalizes, as you said. And then we take AI and non-AI analytics and start to tell the company, as you said, they already have a bunch of data, but the challenge is for years we haven't been able to measure. I believe the difference between the person selling 3x and the person selling 1x. It's 20 little things. It's not the big things. Everybody knows the big things, everybody knows their pricing, the demo, the FAQs, everyone already knows that. It's 20 little things that happen that historically we have not been able to measure. And so I'll give you some examples. Those things would be like everyone has a sales manual. Here's our 22 steps, like this is how we sell. The reality is your best people typically move that all around. They're they're doing it backwards, they're they're not doing it the way whatever's in your sales manual, they're not following the sales manual typically. So, what is the order that actually works? What's the order that actually creates deals? Then it's not only the order of things, but how much time between those activities? What it's not that you send an email, we've all had this experience. You connect with somebody on LinkedIn, and like six minutes later, they're pitching you, right? That makes you feel a certain way, it makes you it feels yucky. And so it's it's what's done, the timing between it as examples. There is the measuring the quality of how it's done, which can be subjective, but we tie that to did they win. There is uh when you bring up competition, how you bring up competition, when you brought when you first start talking about pricing, did you move pricing? All of those variables add up to the difference between why somebody is selling 3x over somebody else. And historically, as you mentioned, we've had a ton of data. We haven't had the ability before AI to measure those at a such a voluminous way that's needed. And so that's what Front Race does. We literally uh connect your data, start to provide uh uh standardization to an apple is an apple is an apple across all your systems, and then we use some analytics to give you new metrics that actually tie success and tell you what the best next step is for each one of the deals pending.
SPEAKER_00How do you deal with personalization? So oh, I love it, that's perfect. Norm Norm McDonald Norm McDonald made people laugh. Yeah, so does Bill Burr. And Norm McDonald had that deadpan humor, and Bill Burr is the Boston guy who's just going nuts on you. Amen. You mentioned sequencing, so you could you could find an optimal sequence, hypothetically, but it might not work for Norm McDonald because he's Bill Burr.
SPEAKER_02But that's the whole thing. Listen, that's the whole thing in sales. We hire a CRO or BP of sales, we say, figure it out, monitoring.
SPEAKER_00Get a system together.
SPEAKER_02Totally. Uh go to Sandler, go to Miller Hyman. Here's our 22 steps, here's our 28 steps, whatever it is.
SPEAKER_00An objection handler, X to Y.
SPEAKER_02Oh, you are preaching. Uh preaching. So we say, hey, let's here's our process. Meanwhile, as you just said, every sales rep has different strengths, no doubt. And every prospect is different. They're in different verticals, they're of different sizes, they have different money, they have different number of licenses or different problems. And then we're like, jam these 22 steps into every single thing. And if you don't, uh you're fired, or we're gonna put you on a pip. And it's like, oh, no. That's again for 40 years why we're struggling. And so, with that said, what's amazing about AI, it starts to enable you to do this personal, highly personal. Hey, Bob is great on the front end. Let's make sure he is that. But hey, when we get the demo, we might need some help. And when we close, definitely need help. Mary, horrible on the front end, great demo, can't you know? So it lets you give everybody uh the things they're great at, and then starting to develop where they're not, andor get them resources where they're not. So again, we can have the best next step for each opportunity instead of saying, everybody do these 22 steps, and if it doesn't work for you, you're fine. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00And and it also recognizes the individuality of the salesperson. And if you're in sales for a nanosecond, you realize that those stars, the three X people, are all kind of doing their own thing. They are some of them might be like, Hey, how you doing? They're instantly engaging and fun. You could have a beer with anybody, and it's one big party all the time. Amen. But you've got salespeople, three X salespeople are like, Hey, how you doing? Yep. Can you tell me a little bit about your business? I'm really I'm really curious about it. That they're they're both doing it their way.
SPEAKER_02I had listen, I had a team and I in our last company, I had a team of over 100 people, and then we'd work in teams, and then each team, so let's say we had 20 to 30 teams, they all had a miniature culture. And so we hired it was aligning new people on the right team because as you just said, I had cutthroat New Yorkers, I had sweet Mary Poppins, I had the analytical person, I had the dry person, I had the party person, I had the social media person, and so it success begets success if you align the right people. And so I, God bless, I that is what we are leaning into and be like, stop taking your standardized process and demanding that everyone on your team does it and it works for every client because nothing could be farther from the truth. And so now that we have some ability to figure out what really works and share that and measure it, that's that's uh in my mind, the future of how we'll do sales much more productively.
SPEAKER_00You know, I see where this is going. This is rapid-fire implementation, too. You don't you don't spend six months putting together a sales methodology necessarily because you're immersed in data and you're also analyzing each individual salesperson on a team.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you you know what happens is um we we think the a process should be a certain way. Everyone's biased, right? If you hire a new team lead or promote somebody, as you said, they come in with their biases of like, here's what we here's what I like. I like, I like gong, and I like to really analyze the calls, and uh, or somebody else loves pipeline management. And what's great about humbly what I what we do, what Front Race does, we we don't care about anyone's opinion or your systems. We give you the facts of what actually is happening, and you can do it that way you want. It's it's like um if you're a sports fan, the money ball, that movie money ball and baseball that analyzes all the stats. It's telling you factually, hey, here are the things that look like winning, here are the activities that drive winning, because it all looks a certain way typically within some bandwidth. And by the way, most people don't want to do this. Here's what losing, here's what we do when we lose, here's some consistent traits. Because most people lose a deal and they get irritated and they throw it away and they're like, whatever, I'm I don't want to talk about it. But if companies have, especially if they have some significant legacy data, we're able to analyze and go, hey, well, when you lose, here's what happens. But by the way, when you win, here's what happens. And inevitably, when we provide our first analytical report for a company, it's like they're shocked about two or three great things. They're like, oh my gosh, we need to share this with everybody. And then two or three things they inevitably are bad, and they inevitably go, that's not true.
SPEAKER_01And you're like, Yeah, that's true. That's that's what's happening, right?
SPEAKER_02And so it's it's amazing that a lot of people don't really understand their data. In fact, um, Larry Ellison, uh, just a couple weeks ago, if you saw, he said, pick pick whatever LLM you want. You they're all using the same open public data, right? What if they're all using the same public data? The magic is in your data. The magic is in your private data. If you have legacy data of wins and losses, what activities your team has done, that's where the magic is. You need to get that data, start to mine it, because that the answers are there. AI will help provide analytics and give you some accretive type stuff, but the magic is in your data, not in Cloud writing some generic marketing one pager for your company. It's that's just an aggregation of all your competitors.
SPEAKER_00This is where big SaaS companies like Salesforce are now getting their ass kicked, too. It's not just redundancy with the agentic technology, but it's an antiquated approach to sales optimization for all the reasons that you described.
SPEAKER_02I am shocked. By the way, I love Salesforce and HubSpot. They're they're we we work with all of them. They're they're yeah, they they do a lot of amazing things, but ultimately internally, you're like, again, where we started the show is is it helping us win more? Like, is it helping us the forecast is X? We it's shocking. Almost uh, you know, most big companies have one of those two, and you're like, we still don't get to the we still don't reliably get to the number, nor does your team. And no one asks no one asks why or how. It's like you, but if you say you have a CRM, you're almost derelict of duty, right? If you you're all like, you don't have a CRM, you're fine.
SPEAKER_00I love this. And there's a strong parallel with healthcare. So I've been a digital strategist on the healthcare side, the digital health side for quite some time. And the term that's been tossed around for decades is the quantified self. Okay. So we've got 37 trillion cells on average in a human body. This is good. And we don't we know nothing, right? We are they're gonna look back, Star Trek triquarter years ahead, they're gonna look back, and we're like cavemen wearing pelts at where we're at right now in terms of understanding the human body. And the big deficiency is data-driven too, because the human body is just so complicated, it's so personal. And if if only we could measure all of this and analyze it, we could not only manage but prevent disease, we could do all these amazing things, and you're doing something similar for a salesperson. Did you see?
SPEAKER_02Look, by the way, I comment to what you said. Did you see Elon said a couple weeks ago about aging? You know, when he was, I think he was overseas, and he was talking about, hey, saying we have 37 million cells, and like he's like, we're gonna solve aging because all those cells age at the same time. He goes, Your arm's not your arm's not 90 and your face is 22. He goes, There's a trigger, he's like, we're gonna figure it out and we're gonna address aging. And you're like, you know, like so it's so good.
SPEAKER_00It's uh what Elon is saying is I'm addressing aging because not only do I want to be the richest man on the planet, but the oldest one.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I want to be alive when we get out to Saturn or Saturn.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we get to Mars. I want to be the guy on Mars. So there you have it. But uh, love him or hate him, Elon's always leading the charge.
SPEAKER_02He's interesting to listen to, boy. That guy, he is there's a lot going on there.
SPEAKER_00So spectrum-y people who are changing the world for for better or for ill. It's uh he's he's in that Sam Altman, Zuckerberg.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, amen. They're uh we were talking about before the show.
SPEAKER_00There's a couple, yeah, there's a couple hashtag awkward, but hashtag genius. It's almost like you can't have one without the other.
SPEAKER_02It is. It's it's like in the entertainment field. The best singers we all know were all weirdos. You know, any a lot of people can sing, but if you want to become famous, you gotta do crazy tour around the world, live on nothing, you know, and so a lot of people can can sing or rap, but you gotta have the other kind of weirdo part of you to travel and do all the time.
SPEAKER_00You need an agent or a manager, you know, domesticating that stuff. Yeah, amen. That's so true. Going back to the quantified self, you you you are quantifying the sales force. Yeah. And analyzing it. Well, you know what's happening?
SPEAKER_02It before COVID, if you had if you had a sales team of 20 and you hired a good person, so just let's assume they're good. Forget you had a bad hire. They're good. You would say to them, hey, go follow my top three people, right? Go shadow Bob, Mike, and Susan. And and from each one of them, pick a couple things, right? You'd be like, get three things from John, or Mike, get three things from Susan, da, da, da. And they would develop and evolve and watching them. Well, we can't do that anymore, right? Every most people work from home. You can't say, go sit in Bob's house. You can't, you know, you can't. So we are really at a deficit of trying to how do you develop people? If you hire a good person today, what how do you share best of? You know, you hire a good person, like, how do I, how do I crush it? And and the best I've seen is fictional. Like, well, go listen to his like this. Go listen to their web call. Uh follow their. It's it's very, very challenging in today's day and age to become great. And so, as you just said, what we're trying to do for companies is when you hire a good person, you can now share with them hey, here's what greatness looks like inside this company. Here are the 22 things, here's the order of them, here's some examples of those. You will add your Flavor to it, so we will kind as as AI grows. We all know this. If you have Chat GBT or Claude at your house, you know it grows as it gets to know you, it starts to send you stuff.
SPEAKER_00It starts to blow smoke up your ass. Oh, it always does that.
SPEAKER_02No, it always does that. Chat, this is the best.
SPEAKER_00You are you are such a genius. You know what? This this is a funny side note. I tend to be cynical and sarcastic. Me too. Me too. So my my chatty bro, that's my name for him, Chatty Bro. I even had him as a guest on my podcast. You know, he's he did pretty well. So my chatty bro is now throwing it back and throwing it down because that's his way of kissing my ass. Because he knows that that's what I like. So he's throwing me shade and giving me attitude. Isn't that funny?
SPEAKER_02Two things, two things I'll say. These one one's one's my soapbox. One is it's so funny if you push back, it then always tells you you're right too. You're right, we should do that. You know, he kind of never says you're an idiot. And then and then I the little soapbox, it's quick side bars. We're we're gonna that's gonna be an issue. People are speaking into Chat GBT or Claude, whatever your system of choice is. That data's all being kept in mind. We think we're having a little private conversation, but it has everything about you. Like, no doubt that data is gonna get mined five years from now.
SPEAKER_00Oh, it already is. It already is. I mean, they they need the cap X on this industry, it is absolutely insane. Oh they're gonna need to generate some revenue here. Now, Claude, you know, Anthropic is doing the best right now. They went from a 1 billion estimate to 20. They did 20x this year of what they forecasted. They're doing pretty well. But even at that rate, they're uh they they say they might be profitable in 2027, 2028.
SPEAKER_02Well, that you see it's like it's like LinkedIn. You know, LinkedIn had us all put our resumes for years free. You're like, how's this gonna work? Everybody, you know, and and now it's the lead gen. They knew, you know, they knew years ago. I remember when LinkedIn came out, you're like, it's free to put my resume up there. What why is that?
SPEAKER_00And then they knew the endgame. Well, that's why Microsoft bought them because they needed a cohole in that. But but but LinkedIn, I'm gonna get on my soapbox. LinkedIn sucks for the same reason that Salesforce, but even worse, it's terrible. It's the worst, it's the worst social media platform. Not only is everyone all boasty, like I just I want to make an announcement that I just became senior vice president uh of the Dominican.
SPEAKER_02If you if you go into LinkedIn, if you look if you use LinkedIn as your social media feed, you'd swear AI is gonna end the world by this summer. You everybody, and I'm just gonna tell you, frontline deal with hundreds of companies uh every month. AI on the business side, we are so in our infancy. It is there are so few companies that are using AI at scale on the business side. Again, the tech side, it is crushing. It what it's doing on the tech side, but for business operations, sales, client service, retention, it is so minimal. They're like, fire your whole SDR team and hire agents. Not a chance, not a chance that works. Not a I don't care how much you train it. I don't care how much you think you not.
SPEAKER_00It's it's shambolic fraud for a glorified call it out.
SPEAKER_02It is, it's like I think one of your podcasts, it's like glorified spell check. You know what I mean? It'll create verbiage, document, it's amazing, but real world interact with somebody and and and do some strategic notion.
SPEAKER_00And provide immediate or near-term benefit in terms of optimizing a Salesforce or even optimizing remedial functions without that kind of human engagement oversight. It's just it's in its infancy. Totally. And people tend to gravitate from one extreme to another, which is I need to either install this little widget or I need to have Claude Methos run my company.
SPEAKER_02Well, look, I'll just say the thing right now is this Claude co-work, right? I'm gonna take everything, I'm just gonna put it in Claude, and it's just gonna connect all my stuff. And again, I'm living it every day. I'm not a technologist, living it every day. Claude, God bless what it's doing. It's amazing. It's the way you can connect data and run basic analysis, it is great. It's it's amazing stuff.
SPEAKER_00But if you try to do it's science fiction, it really is.
SPEAKER_02But if you try to do any complex analysis, it does not work. And it will get you will lose your job. I promise you. If you put your company data in Claude Cowork and think, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna analyze my reps over the last quarter, pipeline, and metrics. I promise you with 100% certainty that will break. It'll but it will tell you factually, because it makes stuff up, it will it will fill the screen, you will make a series of bad decisions that are based totally fake, and you'll get fired. Because it can't do the joins, it can't do the analysis. It picked one-to-one, who was my top rep last month? What you know, how many calls it's that's perfect. You get to the third or fourth level of multi-y want to do any strategic, it doesn't work. And it it's not meant to work. It's it's it's it's the data joins and how the code, it's very challenging. And that's what we try to deliver for people. We we built some technology that puts flags and hard flags in the sand. So you can do some, you can do real analysis, but without that, folks are always like, I'll just go put it in Claude and and co-work. You're like, all right, well, get your resume together because that's gonna not come out right. And no, no chance. By the way, I don't I don't forget if you get um front race or not, but no chance that comes out well, so please don't do that. It's not ready.
SPEAKER_00So we're we're halfway through this sales pod, and you've sold me on it, all right. We've got the value prop, we've got the pain points, we've got the implication. I got the contract.
SPEAKER_02I'm gonna send you the contract, Louie. I'm gonna sign on the contract.
SPEAKER_00Now, now, how does this work? So, all right, Jack, you've you've you've sold front race in. I've got, let's say, a Salesforce of a hundred salespeople, yep, and I'm using Salesforce or one of the other CRMs. You know my stack from being familiar with all the different ones. Now, you mentioned you're an application. So, how does this work? I'm assuming that there's a discovery process, so you learn about my people and my legacy processes, and then there's there's got to be a tech integration, and there needs to be some kind of UI or new dashboard, or what exactly the hell do I get?
SPEAKER_02Amen. So totally fair. So, last part first, it's a web interface. So you log on a web page, it's there. So ideally, you get up each day, you log into front race, it'll tell you what to do today. That's that's the net conclusion. But to your full question, no regarding all of the I don't I don't want to know anything about I don't there's no, you know, in the old consulting world, let me do a discovery phase, let me map your process, and let's have a let's have a team meeting, let's get all your hitters in the room. Uh, we're gonna spend six months deploying. None of that. That's again some of the beauty of today's technology. So when we onboard a client, we have it, uh we spent a couple years developing, and and a lot of AI companies have the kind of this APIs now, these how to connect the data, way easier than when you and I were younger. If somebody said it to you, you'd be like, that's a six-month effort. So the first thing we do is connect the data for companies. So a layer that goes on top, piece of technology, connects all the data. That's actually in today's world not that hard, to be honest. A lot of APIs out there. But the magic in the connecting the data, the next step is you have to normalize the data. An Apple in your Ford systems has to be an Apple. It has to be an Apple in your CRM, an Apple in your pricing. And shockingly, it's not.
SPEAKER_00For most companies, an Apple is in one system and aren't interoperability problem, data inconsistency.
SPEAKER_02Right. So the two things we do for companies to start are uh uh connect the data, normalize it. And so that takes about three or four days. So we'll we'll get the data in. So again, this project sometimes years ago would be like that's a three-year project. So within a day or two, we have APIs, we'll start to normalize the data for companies. Then the second piece behind the scenes before they will log on, we apply some analytics. So there's two parts of our analytics that are really unique. There's a bunch, but two that are stand out. I mentioned one earlier. One is a metric engine. So we have a series of metrics that are non-traditional. We're not trying to give you your company more metric, but it starts to measure all the things I mentioned earlier. All these little nuances of what's the order of things, what's the space of things, when do you mention pricing, when do you mention competitor, how did we get the lead? Did you have a relationship with them prior? What's the professionalism score? Your tonality, was it a quality endeavor? By the way, all those things measured by did you win the deal? Because who cares what your opinion is or my opinion is, did we win the deal? And if we won the deal, in some way, shape, or form it work. So we start to measure on that. So we give folks this set of metrics. The metric engine starts to not only create these metrics, but measure them in time.
SPEAKER_00Okay, hold on, time out for a second. So I'm assuming that there's a delta that you're noticing right away between all the data that's on whatever platform they're using. You could API, do a plug-in, and and slorp it up into your application, but frankly, they're not even measuring some of the things that are important to measure.
SPEAKER_02Right. So great, that's a great question. So think about um, as an analogy, think about if you were going to go to your calendar. I think we all have a calendar and you see what your day is, right? You see, oh, here are my meetings every week, and there's empty spots in it, right? For when you're free or you're not, you don't have a meeting scheduled. That's how the data is on almost every company. No one has perfect data, right? But what we start to do when we do a baseline for a company, we say, here's the data on what you have. Here's the things we can speak into based upon all the data you have. Inevitably, as you just said, there's gonna be three or four things they have no data on. We don't have data on texting, we don't have data on social media, we don't have data on I don't know, uh, after hours stuff they do on their home, whatever. So then what's great, we could just say to a company, uh, we're unbiased. Do you want to dive into those things? Do you do you care about knowing what how somebody's generating leads on social media, or do you not care? Right? So if they care, if there's a yeah, we've got to see the text because that's part of the relationship thing. Bob sends 92 texts. Well, there's a myriad of texting programs, right? So then, okay, then let's start to monitor the text and we start to creatively fill in the open space on someone's calendar. Does that make sense? So then they can decide because they can say, you know what, I don't care. I don't, I don't, I don't want to track the the the the text, I don't care. Uh you're like, oh, okay, like that's on you. Do you want to track the proposal? They sent a proposal day one, it changed 47 times. Now we're down to half the original value. Do you care about that? Uh no. Okay, well, I okay.
SPEAKER_00I I would want to. I'd don't you push back though? Because more data is more knowledge, and more knowledge is more power.
SPEAKER_02We we do, but but what I also want to do to companies is start to give them a baseline and so they can see the holes they have, right? And let and then and then you decide. That that's what's humbly, I think that's one of the great things we do. We don't tell people to go get some, hey, what do you have today? Let's look at it. Does it answer the questions you care about? Let's strategically look at the holes you have in your data. Everybody has holes, and you you can decide as a corporate management team, do we want to invest in this thing? Instead of buying a new AI tool that's not going to tell you anything because it's analyzing stupid wrong data. Why don't we buy a texting engine? Or why don't we buy some people don't track any of their calls? Why don't we buy a call system that can digitally you can see your calls, or let's do a um transcription service of your web meetings? Like let's let's start to fill out the data, but if they don't want to, God bless, you know. So, but we we we get the data they have, normalize it, and then start to give them, hey, here is what we believe are the things really impacting your deals, good and bad, good and bad, right? And then the second part of that is you said, hey, are we gonna do this, figure out what our process is? Well, no, because that's what's great about the tech today. AI will when it has all the elements, it'll start to do that on its own. I don't have to ask, especially if they have legacy data, if they have data over the last two or three years, it'll tell you in a week, here's what your sales process is. I don't I don't need your process flow chart. You're measuring every touch point. Totally.
SPEAKER_00I don't I don't need you know, I don't need you to tell me. It implicitly determines what the process and structure is that underlies it.
SPEAKER_02Totally. And and what happens in that meeting, always the head of sales, their mind explodes because they have their process flow diagram of 22 boxes, a couple diamonds, yes or no, right? And inevitably, every single time, whatever number of boxes they have, it's twice as many. The real world is it's always twice as many boxes. It's steps, proposals, document sense, interactions, contacts, questions. It's twice every single company, it's twice. So to connect some dots, why the AI agents for the past year have really failed a lot of companies is that you you you have a process, you think you know, you put an agent in there, you tell the agent what to do. It's only doing half of what really results in success. So guess what? When it only does half of what drives success, it doesn't work, then you're pissed, right? Because you're like, we did an agent, it didn't work, our sales went down, and you're like, I know, because you only told it to do this, and your best people are doing twice that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and you don't know what you don't know. Totally.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, amen. Amen. So those those are that's how we go through the process. It's it's uh AI to me, is it gonna end the world? I don't know. But the one thing it will do is cause us to think differently. So that that thing of, hey, do I have to ask you what your process is or what you what are you really doing? I don't care. I don't tell us anything. That's it's like a magic show. Let it let us have your data, we'll tell you what's actually happening versus what you think's happening. And so that typically is a really fun process to go through with companies that are open-minded. Some companies get irritated, but it's like, hey, here's what's really happening factually. Regardless of what your opinion is or what Miller Hyman told you, or what Sandler, you know, you whatever. Here's what's here's what's actually happening.
SPEAKER_00Out of the box, and by out of the box, I mean you don't need any extra information. You're looking under the hood, and it's not from a process point of view. There's no PowerPoint slides here, it's just the raw touch point data. You get sales frequency, you get call duration, you get all the usual metrics. Yes. Okay. Is that sufficient as baseline to determine why Susan is 3x over Bob?
SPEAKER_02Oh my god. You know, I've been doing this a lot. No one's asking that question. That's amazing. Right. No, the the short answer is no. Uh, you know, uh, from a can we replicate Susan perfectly? But what does happen immediately, it's quite obvious Susan's process is so different from the norm. And then you start to go, what what are those empty holes? What like Susan's deals have there's holes here. What what's happening? And then when you talk to her, she's like oh yeah, I'm on social media, I'm LinkedIn, and that or hey, yeah, see my phone? Look, here's my 87 text, or hey, I don't, I have my own private little kind of proposal app and I analyze, you know, inevitably there's some tools there, and you're like, okay, well, she just told me we're gonna do that. So so typically day one, we get over 50% of like enlightenment. People are like, it it is totally different than what we think it is. And then for us, we really enjoy uh the back and forth of like helping companies work through is it worth uh tracking the social media piece? Is it worth seeing the video?
SPEAKER_00There's an implicit gap analysis that's taking place off baseline, and then the client, him or herself, comes the realization well, you know, we've just got our standard metrics. We see we see some differences with Susan, and duh, we know she's kicking ass. Right, but but wow, look, there's there's some gaps in her touch points, which we're clearly missing. And these front race guys are making recommendations on how we could boost measuring more touch points, measuring them better, adding dimensionality to Susan in ways we never thought about before.
SPEAKER_02She's typically doing the process different than the 22 steps, right? That the CRO swears this is our steps, and inevitably you know this. You mentioned the eclectic people, it's opposite.
SPEAKER_00Never I'm I'm in my experience, I'm sure in yours, there's no 22-step sales superstar, they don't exist.
SPEAKER_02Well, they she does it, she does it almost opposite. You know, it's like she'll sometimes she sends the pricing meeting too. And you know, the executive staff's like, what? What? Yeah, yeah. Second meeting before she even demos. Here's the price. And they're like, What? What that no, they don't get priced till after the demo. And she's like, no, no, no. Here are my initial email, you know, my my second introductory email. I tell them the range of pricing based on your sization is between 42 and$67,000. So she already has a flag in the sand that is instrumental to her clothes, where most of the reps don't mention clothes till after the demo or after they uh, you know, they uh did a proof of concept. And so uh those things are shocking. Again, the difference between, in my world, three X person and one X person, it's 20 little things. It's 20 little things. And starting to day one, we provide 10, and then you're like, can we get to 11 and 12 and 13 and start to fill that gap? What is it? But it's not the big things, it's 20 little things and starting to shine a light on those so we can replicate. So, so my my on my team, my C players are B players, my B players can be A players. We're never we're probably never replicating Susan in totality.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's just optimizing. If you could get it off just a few basis points, the ROI of implementing your service is already covered.
SPEAKER_02When you when you do the math, I'm not a math major, but when you increase the top, and we all know this, I don't funnel. When you increase the top 20%, the net in the bottom is 3x. I mean, it's it's because you have such a bigger thing, it's it's amazing. And so really trying to provide that statistically, not guesswork, not you hired a magic manager, we hired more superstars, we have more, it's starting to put some science to something that we've kicked, we've punted on for 40 years, for 40 years we've been punting on and be like, hey, let's start to look at this black hole of sales and put some numbers to it.
SPEAKER_00Do some of those magical personal soft skills come through in the raw matrix? Yes, but and by that I mean I was on I was on a double date recently, and the other partner's partner, she's a top, she's a 5x Susan. Okay, she sells for pharma and and the doctors love her, right? She's got the ADHD. She's like, she's got her phone, she's texting, she's doing all this, and when you look at her, she's like the Tasmanian devil's wife, you know. She's involved, but she pours it on the doctors. They love her, they know her. She goes to ad boards, she does the clinical stuff. And when you ask her about the drug, she's very knowledgeable, but she'll talk about it for about 20 seconds, and then she's off on something else. And I guarantee you, she's the same way with the doctors. But the doctors feel that they're covered, they feel that she's there for them, and they they adore her, they adore her attention and all that stuff. So these are all soft skills, it's got nothing to do with her knowing progression-free survival of the cancer drug.
SPEAKER_02See what I'm getting at? I am. We have a whole in our metric engine, hundreds of these qualitative, so kind of subjective measurements. And so I'll give you one one example, real world example. One of the CROs was adamant, he felt like his sales reps would talk over the clients. He was in the in the he'd watch the replay of the video conference, he'd be like, You gotta let them talk and blah blah blah. And so we had this patient score. So when at the time the prospect stopped talking, when did you interact again? So it was his it was his thing. Eight months of data, completely inconsequential. He he he was so adamant, it was totally inconsequential for all. It did not that did not matter, but we have a litany of those, and what you're talking about, I just I want I want to be I want to be really clear with your audience because there's two things here that are I I think really, really important. I'm not we're not selling some pithy mixy duck pixie dust of measure quality or measure professionalism or measure tonality. What what we're talking about is AI can start to put scores to those things, okay? But the magic, it's like NPS. If you have you done an NPS. Survey, it's not what the score is of your company because it's the score, how does it move over time? Right? That magic of NPS is not when you do your NPS and national promoters or uh uh is it national promoter score? Net promoter score like whatever it is, it they tell you who cares what your first one is, you just want to keep getting better, right? And because it's people that love you versus attractors and blah blah blah. Same thing. The the software starts to measure the tonality, which is different for everybody, and then it starts to measure did you win the deal? Right. And so we have a myriad of those where it starts to give you a score, and then I haven't talked anything about it yet, but the second part, the metric engine is what we do, but then we have this thing called time machine that can track it over time because believe it or not, shocking. Salesforce today, love Salesforce, God bless you.
SPEAKER_00We keep playing that so we don't build up bad Salesforce karma, but it's it doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_02So Salesforce today, if you had a proposal and it changed over six months, you can't go back and see how it changed, when it changed, and what variables change. You can't. It does not exist. If you have a proposal, they create it, and what we rely on today, we tell the sales direct to change it. We're like, hey, you tell us when it's gonna close, what's the probability it's gonna close, change the value of it, and then we're pissed when the pipeline sucks. And you're like, that's done, what they're so biased. And so we have this time machine that not only starts to measure these metrics, but then tracks them over time, and you can start to see is it not not is is Mookie's better than Jack, it's Mookie versus Mookie. Hey, here's how you did it last time.
SPEAKER_00It gets rid of this standardization, right? And it gets rid of erroneous variable analysis, such as talking over someone. That woman I just described, the 5x pharma sales dynamo, she's literally yelling at everybody. Yeah, sometimes can't even get a word in, and I guarantee you she's the same way with her doctors, like hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, but but it works. Get to what works, don't obsess over something that's otherwise irrelevant because you think it's gonna impact the sales negatively, right?
SPEAKER_02And we mess people up all the time. Listen, we we see it in companies where they put a new system in place, right? We we just bought Clarity or we bought Gong, and we gotta follow the the or we have a new processing, like you're like we see it in the data. We're like, hey, what happened February of 2025? Oh, that's when we bought blah blah blah. And you're like, Yeah, since then everything sucks. You know what I mean? Like you either and you added that system, you forced everyone to use it, and everything went down 32%. Like, why are you doing that? What like well Bob really liked that system, and he thought we really needed to, and you're like, I know, but every time someone uses a system, your close rate goes down. So again, no opinion, no personal opinion, it's all the stats. It's it's what are the you started the show with it. What do the numbers say? And the more data you have, especially legacy data, and going forward, it'll get smarter and smarter and smarter. Your LLM and what we do gets smarter each time as we start to measure it, measure metrics, and then track it over time. It's amazing the impact that has on companies.
SPEAKER_00How does it impact the salesperson? Because I want to dovetail off of what you just said, which is really great for employee empowerment, salesperson empowerment. Because the old school is we got the 22 steps, buddy, and you're talking over people, so shut the hell up and listen more. And when you're from 18 to 19, we notice that you drop the ball. And they're like, what the actual F does that have anything to do with what I'm trying to do here? Amen. So you're you're reading between the lines, you're also passive, not active. You're you're what you're watching with data and you're taking it in, and then you're able to provide recommendations that make sense for the individual seller.
SPEAKER_02That's that's it. Each in our app for every opportunity, you bring up an opportunity, it ranks the probability it's gonna close statistically, not somebody's opinion, the date we think it's gonna close. What is it in critical or non-critical stage? Like, is it we need to get something needs to happen right now? And then starts to tell you what should be done, and then it does a myriad of other really cool things. It'll tell you exact message to send, what you should say, why it's important, how to move the price, a lot of things. But for for a rep, for each thing you're working on it, it'll literally be like, you might think this, but here's statistically where it is, what it's worth.
SPEAKER_00Tell me more about your UI. As you've been describing more or less the user interface for the sales manager, which has this other stuff. I'm curious also about the UI for the sales person.
SPEAKER_02It's the same, it's the same web interface. Everybody loves it's you log into front race, you have a login, and it it literally discriminates between typically a management personnel. If you're a CRO, here are what exactly what you think management level, hey, your your delay uh in closing, there's a big gap. Um deals have been it used to be 67 days, it's now 92. Hey, two deals are scheduled to close today, but both the people closing are not good at closing, right? At executive level, it tells you hottest action items constantly, but the same interface when you log in if you're a sales rep, it'll give you your deals and your stuff and start to share it with you. Be like, hey, today, here are the signals for what you should do today to have the biggest impact on your day. And if you want to go look at all your deals that are pending, here per deal is what you should do with each deal, if anything, per today. And so it's it is humbly, it is I again, I it's the thing that people want from AI. Can you make me smarter? I'm not purposely screwing up my deals, but that's what people do. They send the wrong thing, they give the wrong pricing point, they send another text, and they shouldn't. They should literally do another action item. And so we've really helped people maximize how granular is that experience.
SPEAKER_00So if you've if you're a sales rep and you've got the rep plugin for Salesforce, you've got your own dash, and it gets really nitty-gritty. It's like number of calls. It's got a CRM built in too, right? So it's like I sent the email on April 20th at 8 20, and I did or didn't get a response within two days. And then you got the little yellow and red going, you need to follow up, and it's basically you're a spreadsheet jockey.
SPEAKER_02Right. I but but you know what's funny? As you asked that question, which is a very fair question, lovingly. It's so funny. When we when I'm dealing with the CRO who said something like that, I got all this in Tailsports. You're like, okay, well then, well then do you hit your goal every quarter? Or how how yeah, how is it how is this and inevitably the result's not good, but the but because here's the issue. One, you're missing some metrics, but two, we you and I could look at the exact same data on a dashboard and take totally different actions, right? You you would look at a set of numbers and go, oh, you know, from that, I would then call them and reduce the price. And I might say, oh no, don't call them at all.
SPEAKER_00That's what I'm getting at. So you're does does front race replace, in a sense, their CRM experience that they've had before you? Does it augment it? Right. We we don't we're not a CRM. What is what is the actual experience of you coming on board like?
SPEAKER_02Yep, no, totally fair. We do not, again, we do not have a kept replacing any of your stuff as we sit here today. What is that? You know, like Salesforce just, I think this uh oh the sun just came out my asking.
SPEAKER_00I know, you're getting a you're getting a tan there. My lord. For listeners on Spotify and Apple, Jack, Jack in the last few minutes started glowing. And you know what that is? It's like the movies. He's he's nearing the close.
SPEAKER_02No, no, God, God, God, I must say something. I must say something good. Like God's like, all right, now's the time. Spotlight on. Yeah, so that's so funny. But what we wanna we want to help them get through the deal and provide them that data. But if you saw Salesforce this week announced, hey, they're have no UI, they're just gonna have an API, right? They're gonna they're gonna lose their front end and start to just let agents plug into it, right? So that would have been shocking.
SPEAKER_00That's because they shit the bed uh on the stock market, right?
SPEAKER_02That that would have been shocking, though, two years ago. If you said no UI, so could are we moving to a time, I believe, where the traditional CRM and these these sales enablement tools are not the answer. I I think we are. I I think it's evident 40 years in.
SPEAKER_00It's been a clunky disaster.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't want to say failure, but it's we have more data. It's a pain in the ass to use, and it's kind of we're no better, but but if it was but if it was better, if we hit the number, if we delivered on goal, if 100% of the people on your team or 90% were getting to goal, you'd be like, it's so worth it. Let's record all the calls, let's let's analyze all the stuff, let's have metric, let's have a dashboard of every single person in terms of both worlds now.
SPEAKER_00It is.
SPEAKER_02Amen. We are data crushing our people, and none of it, humbly, none of it, is having a difference on the bottom line. Not not, there's not a I've met a CRO yet. Like some companies are hitting goal, God bless. But it's not because of their data elements. It's uh when they miss goal, they have no idea why. And it's I believe it's for these things. It's it's the difference between good and great, or 20 or 30 little things we've historically not been able to measure. You mentioned some of them being qualitative, definitely, some of them being in the weeds type of timing and logistics items. We again we haven't been able to measure at a uh a macro and a it's with so overwhelming the amount of data which AI makes.
SPEAKER_00Like level of grit. Like how determined are they? And that might seem kind of obvious, but but how do we measure grit?
SPEAKER_02That's that that is I've never had that question. That's a really interesting thing. I mean, that can lose the foundation. I'm going back, look, I'm going back to the tech team and be like, oh, add add grit.
SPEAKER_00Relentless determination. Are you zero to ten? And and it's of a virtual certainty that your three X people are all eight and above in terms of the grit, right? Sonacity, that's it.
SPEAKER_02You know what I was thinking of too? This will get me in trouble. But I think too, there's something about, especially in the face-to-face sales world, appearance, look and feel, uh, your your you know, how do you how you right? So being able to take some of those things and and start to quantify them. But that, but that those are real things. We we can keep trying to sidestep those, but those have those you can send two people in, forget they're whether they're pretty or not, or whatever, but one looks slightly disheveled, one looks together, you know, but based upon whatever you require that they wear it. And those are all real things that affect the outcome. That we've never measured that. Have you ever seen a Salesforce dashboard on on their appearance or look and feel or even like attention getting magnetism?
SPEAKER_00Right? Going back to Noam McDonald versus Bill Burr, all right? They're the opposites. You know, Noam McDonald's like, you know, I was taking a walk and the dog took a dump, you know, and then Bill Burr is literally screaming at you at the top of his lungs. They both have magnetic personalities, but in their own way. Yep. So how do you reduce that to a single key variable, which is I can't take my eyes off this person and I want to keep talking to them, I want to keep listening to them, right? Amen. That's the kind of essential metric that makes the difference.
SPEAKER_02Amen. I and I and and just in all honesty, when you talk about 20 different things making a difference, will we ever have all 20? Will you be able to maybe with robots? If Elon gets us to robots with AI, maybe we're you know, match all 20. But in in the world of humans, our the goal is to let can we get to 15 out of 20? You know what I mean? And and there'll still be five. You'd be like, it is magnetism, it's their appearance. There could be some things.
SPEAKER_00There's one other element I want to toss at you, which I think is very significant, and salespeople make this mistake, especially sales managers. There's this idea that you need to be awesome for everyone all the time. And if you're not, you suck. So, for example, my 5x pharma gal, okay? She's ADHD and she's running around. They love her, but by they, I'm talking about 80, 85% of those doctors. And I'll put equal money, the 10 to 15 percent cringe when she walks. Every time I see her face, they're like, no! Oh, not her again, not again, right? And she's a 5Xer. So that's a critical decision that has to be made. And it goes all the way to the essence of branding, which is pick your lane, find your positioning, pick your identity that works best and is reflective of who you are, and understand that it's not gonna work for everybody. Right, you're you're so right.
SPEAKER_02Listen, we and you know what's interesting? We do that, and any good manager does that. When I have my sales team, I couldn't take Mary Poppins and send her into New York, just like I couldn't take the New Yorker and send him out to Ireland, right? It doesn't work that way. And so we put measures to people's personalities and how they sell professionalism, uh, the extrovert, are the introvert, are the relationship builder.
SPEAKER_00You gotta align with the prospect. The prospect is a key variable in totally, and but but think about just reality check.
SPEAKER_02How many times have you ever seen a dashboard that says that? Hey, client profile, and whatever range you want to put in it, one to ten, just just as a just as a range. New Yorker to country quiet.
SPEAKER_00Never, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02Right, none, none, none. I mean it's so important. It's um it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. McDonald Bill Burr. Right. Or or one that we measure today is is how did we get the lead? Not all leads are the same. Like, did we get it as a referral? Did we get it off social media? Did we get it as a cold lead from a marketing campaign? Did we get it because uh somebody drove by a truck and the truck had a big average? You know what I mean? That affects the outcome so much. There, you ever seen a score for that? You ever you ever seen Salesforce be like lead, not lead quality of lead, but like where it came from and how that much that impacts the end result? And I'll give you another one, I'll give you another one measure. This is a real one. This this uh this just changed me. This is a real one that no one talks about. Hey, are we discounting this month? Well, what's the biggest variable are we gonna discount this month? What is it? How are we doing? How how are we doing? How how are we doing this quarter? If we are crushing it, we're not discounting. But back, you you need an arm and leg. Oh, we're 30% under. Oh, listen, we're running a two for one sale.
SPEAKER_00Do it so does it blow up your freaking brand? Remember the iPhone, uh, I don't even remember, iPhone 6 back in the day. It was it was a huge mistake, Tim Cook's biggest mistake. He did a like the$300 plastic iPhone, okay, with like a shitty non-glass cover. It almost destroyed the brand because they were competing with the cheaper Androids. So if you're discounting, are you underselling and destroying your brand because you're not selling based on value, or are you taking a great opportunity to get in a wedge and build a new client? Right?
SPEAKER_02Well, listen, I I I I yes, but I would just say very few brands, very few, have the luxury of being like we never move all price. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00Like, I'm not saying it's monolithic, but to your exact point, when to do it and how much.
SPEAKER_02Right, right. Because people, when I deal with companies, they're like, well, Google does that or Apple does that. And you're like, you're not Google or Apple. You're what are you talking about? You're barely in business. What don't compare yourself to Google. Like, so so in that pricing world, it's like, how much you're gonna move on price, it's so affected by how you're doing as a company. That's that's the point. It's like you I don't care who you are, because we've seen we've all seen Louis Vuitton went down as far as we go came back, God bless. But when they were down, they would very different to what they would do today. So, right, when you're riding high and everything's great, you're like, listen, the price is the price. You don't want it.
SPEAKER_00Don't thin it out. And then if you really want to stay competitive in a commoditized atmosphere, whether to your point, whether it's five, ten, fifteen percent, that could make you or break you for some of these similar reasons, because you don't want to undercut value.
SPEAKER_02But how have when have you ever seen a CRM dashboard that said, oh, here's our pricing based on where we are in the month or the quarter toward our goal? There, the correlation between those two is so high. It is, especially if you're a company that does a lot of stuff at the end of the quarter or the end of the month, the correlation between where you are uh to goal and where you are at uh time of the year is enormous. Your ability to discount or change price or move on price. Highly correlated, highly correlated, unbelievable.
SPEAKER_00Exciting stuff. So, all right, I am uh bald ambition l t and I've got uh source of a hundred guests and they're they're ready to rock. Amen. How does this process work? Because you describe a very, very aggressive onboarding process, and there's there's minimal due diligence when it comes to process and conversation. You guys aren't a McKinsey, it's the opposite, and it sounds like there's a technical aspect. So there's a couple things there beyond just the immediacy of the timing, and the thing that pops up immediately into my bald head is privacy and security. You're APIing my ass all over the place. Uh, where's my data going? Uh give me some assurances.
SPEAKER_02Sure. API, we're we're uh uh AWS or or Google Web, right? So all super secure, stock two, all those necessary things. But you bring up a really, really good business point, which is uh, I don't know, I'll get myself in trouble here, but I would just say that executives that we're like where you and I are in life, when we start talking about what we do, they start fibrillating because we have the old construct of what data project and connecting data and normalizing it. Like we we're in our, you know, we we just tried to connect our CRM to something five years ago. You'd be like, oh my gosh, I'll see it next year. And so it's amazing the uh what's happened and and how uh more fluid that process is. And so I our biggest thing is we make sure that we're more diligent. Sounds weird, but the more mature an executive is, we want to make sure that we go through it because uh sometimes it gets killed when they take it somewhere else because, like, how are they gonna do that?
SPEAKER_00I I gotta relate some of my own experiences too with my own clients on not the podcasting side of the house, but on the consultancy side of the house. And and it's amazing the extent to which sometimes very senior people in organizations across multiple verticals don't get it. And that's no insult to their intelligence or their experience, but to your exact point, there's an old school mentality about what technology is and does, and the flexibility, fluidity, the plug-in nature of AI, which is really one of its key strengths, isn't really made aware to a lot of people who are used to this Jurassic Park. I need, I need a team, I need six months, I need half a million dollars before anything happens, and I need to shut everything down while I might remember data migration. I need to migrate, I need to migrate the server, right?
SPEAKER_02You see what um Claude actually put out co-work. I think today um uh uh uh OpenAI released their connector. There is so much happening in, and I don't have this, like we all gonna be out of a job, but it's gonna be different. We you have to we have to start thinking about our issues differently. Like if somebody would have said to you the day the internet started, oh, we're gonna watch movies on our phone, or they're gonna be, they're gonna be, we're gonna stream TV, you're gonna get rid of cable and you're gonna stream. You'd be like, there is not a chance. I can't even download a picture, you know. And so again, we're in our infancy of this AI thing. And I just I just want to encourage your listeners or folks that are watching. What we try to do for companies is give them a foundation of analytics so that again, this last mile, it's gonna keep changing. The solutions that work, AI is cannibalizing itself every single month. And so we want to give you a set of analytics so that as you plug different AI tools in, you can measure is this helping us? Is this hurting us? Is this good? Is this bad? You've got to have a way to measure what's happening. That's what we're trying to do for companies. I don't want to be out here on this last mile. This this is so, God bless Elon and and whoever Sam, whatever they want to do. But your company needs to normalize the data, be able to know what the process flow is, test different things, test AI. And what works today, I promise you, will not be the thing you're gonna want 18 months from now. There's no way the way technology is advancing. So you want to have something to be able to measure and constantly track hey, is this good? Is this bad? When do we start declining? It's time to replace that. Do you You know that uh that we're paying for this, now this part's free. And so that's what we're trying to do for companies is give them a baseline that they can make good decisions over the next couple years because it's changing constantly.
SPEAKER_00The point that I think I'm hearing, and I just want to bring it back to you, is is is is limited barrier of entry. So so so it's not as easy as snapping your fingers, but as you mentioned, within a few days you can plug in. And by plugging in, it's unobtrusive. Your systems remain your systems, you're doing your thing, nothing changes, and you're an add-on application.
SPEAKER_02It's a layer, right? A little layer on top.
SPEAKER_00It's a little layer on top, and then you're given a scalable option. Dig in a little, dig in a lot. Have your salespeople focus a lot on this information, have them do whatever they need to do, but it's crawl, walk, run.
SPEAKER_02Oh, that's great. We always say that. We always say that internally. We say that all the time. Yep. Crawl, walk, run. Do not go out and spend$250,000 on some AI solution. You don't, you're not gonna want it a year from now. And I say this all the time. There's no AI expert. If somebody shows up your door, gets on a uh one of these boxes, you're on a web conference, we're the AI experts. No one, there's no one has any idea what 2030 looks like, and you're trying to do 2030, they have no idea about 2027.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. My my favorite, my favorite, talking about you know, my most and shitified platform, which is LinkedIn, I hate it, is like you got you got people who are giving these deep seminars on AI and certain stuff, right? They're laying it out, this is AI. When like by the time you get to module number six, change out from under you. I mean, if you're not talking about immediate pragmatic application through the lens of business rules and business application, what are you talking about?
SPEAKER_02Listen, for you for for people listening, get everybody wants to jump into AI. Listen, my best advice, best humble advice. Yeah, work on your data, standardize your data, get it cleaned up, and get your process flow, understand what they are. Before you invest in any AI.
SPEAKER_00That's 95% right there. And then that's never gonna change because you got data from multiple sources. You need it to all be interoperable and normalized, and then most significantly understand your own workflow, your own word stream.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, garbage in, garbage out is so applicable. AI is going to expedite that, like you said. In the years past, you'd migrate your server six months, you didn't know you got burned immediately. You go buy some of AR, AI, apply it to your in in incorrect data elements. You will make seven more hard decisions, wrong decisions, and you'll be out of a job or your sales will be down 30%.
SPEAKER_00Your vendor who you brought in to fix stuff all of a sudden breaks even more, they own your ass, and then you're actually one step forward, 10 steps back, and in a Salesforce kind of view or a salesperson kind of view, sales management, your people are still not benefiting at all because they're running around not listening to anything you're saying anyway.
SPEAKER_02Listen, and every everybody today, you uh you talk that AI is making more work for the people that I mean it's just you you feel like, oh, I gotta check, I can look at AI, I gotta create it's like so many more cycles of everything. Because you're like, did you did you check that? Did you did you put that in chat GPT? Did you check that in Claude? Do we yeah, do we? You know, it's it's it's creating a thousand cycles now on everything. I'm really gonna miss you on LinkedIn when they when they what do you what was the old liberal thing? When they cancel you, when LinkedIn cancels you, like I think uh they're gonna bot me.
SPEAKER_00They're gonna stand it. I'm gonna get kicked off LinkedIn, and then Salesforce is gonna, you know. That's it.
SPEAKER_02They're gonna be like, they're gonna be like, remember him? He where is he now?
SPEAKER_00No, we love you, LinkedIn. It's not I've been on other podcasts saying Satya Nadella has been one of the best CEOs in all of history. So he'll forgive me for shitting on LinkedIn. I do want to ask you one important thing though, before before we go, and that is, and I've seen this personally from my consulting work in AI. Employees, whether they're salespeople, whether they're part of teams in whatever vertical, are freaked out. If you bring in, if like an AI company comes in with a new application layer and you're asking anything of these people, and it's especially true, I'm curious your opinion of salespeople, because they're really competitive and to the point of paranoia. Don't take my stuff, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01Totally true.
SPEAKER_00A lot of people think that you're coming after their job. Totally agree. Yeah, so how do you deal with that onboarding for front race coming across as a friend instead of an enemy that's ready to break them?
SPEAKER_02Great question. You know, it's and then it's an old old school like change management, right? It's it's not the facts, it's how you speak about it. And um, I I would I would share the following, uh just being super direct. It's what's happening today, this is a long answer to your question, which is what's happening today in the old school. If you were a public company and you fired people, right? You did a mass layoff, the market would crush you. They'd say, You're a bunch of idiots, you overhired, you just did a riff. You in fact, we want to fire all of you, and we'd start over. Now, we've seen the last six months, companies are rewarded for doing a massive riff, their evaluations go up. All these public CEOs, I guarantee you are all having meetings. Right, that's what they say. It's never been done. Right, it's never been done. It's it's when you, a public company did a mass riff, the market penalized them because they said you managed the business poorly.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_02Only in the last six months now we have this dynamic where, oh my gosh, you guys did a mass riff and say it's going to AI. We love you guys.
SPEAKER_00You're staffing goes down and then market cap goes up, they're inversely proportional.
SPEAKER_02Correct. So that is a wild card in what's happening. And I just want to say to people one, you you AI's coming, right? And so what we try to do for companies, they're like, oh, you're gonna share my stuff? Think about what I said earlier. You go work for a new company or you work for a company, and you want to know what what's the best people doing. How would you find that out today? Like, forget uh like how who you're gonna learn, you're gonna get trained by the CEO or they're gonna hire a sales training company. How would you smart, goodwilled, 32-year-old, starting with pick a company you love? Apple, Google, whoever, do it, whatever, and you want to be great. You want to be in the top 20, you want to be how what how would you possibly get trained up to be great at that company on this in the sales world? What what does that look like today? It's a mess. It you you go to corporate training, those people don't sell. We know that you don't pay attention, you get drunk at the hotel bar. People training you don't sell. The people that do the training don't sell.
SPEAKER_00Either they don't sell or they're a sales star to our point earlier. Oh, they don't know what to sell, right? They don't know what they're talking about.
SPEAKER_02No, but you maybe get the sales star for two hours, you don't get them for two weeks of training.
SPEAKER_00Not for the whole seminar. You get a teacher, you get a shower not a doer.
SPEAKER_02Right, and they'll teach you some model, and you have no way of doing it. And so that's a long-winded answer to your question of what we're trying to do for people is share. Since COVID, particularly, no one really knows what success looks like. I believe that's one of the reasons we're still fibrillating from COVID. We no one knows what what is Tom and Susan and Mike doing at their home office in their living room, blah, blah, blah. We're gonna track what's great about you because, as we said, everybody's created a part of it. And so for the AI to be able to like say, you know what Mookie's really great at? I don't know about the, you're not great at cold calling or building a pipeline, but once they're in from demo to close, superstar. And you've been able to talk about that, see it, quantitatively look at it, because when people know your skill set and you're getting coached and management sees it, you then have more value. If not, you better be great at the whole thing, right?
SPEAKER_00That that is such a terrific point because nobody does everything well. And the problem that you really suck at certain things is exponentially increased with how good you are at doing other things.
SPEAKER_02And and about and think about the clients. Uh like a lot of people separate enterprise from maybe SMB, but some companies don't say them, maybe you're great at big company deals, maybe you're great at small company deals. Like we are gonna help share what's great about you. You may suck, by the way. Like, like, let's just discount people that suck. Discount people that are aren't really working, they are not really back to grant and determination, right? Right, they they're they shouldn't be in sales. Forget those people that are, but people that are in the bell curve, good, solid people. We start to be able to measure what they're good at, how to make them better in other areas, share that with the company, know that hey, you you're entering an area of weakness, so let's get another resource to help you because that's not what you're good at, right? So those are all things that we deliver for I believe we're an enabler to those people so they're better, measure, share what they're great at, because no one's great at everything, but we have to pretend like we are, and so I believe we've really helped that person stand in the world.
SPEAKER_00I love that on a deeply personal level because I know I suck at things, and I'm I'm awesome. Me too. Me too. Me too. If I could do more almost entirely of the shit that I'm great at, I will be happier and the world will be happier if we could if we could shake it up. How many times have you seen an employee doing whatever role, and with one group doing certain things for certain clients, they're a rock star. Yep, and then there's a company reorg, or something goes on, and this same person doing more or less the same stuff goes to a different group, is assigned a different kind of client, and they tank. Yeah, nothing has changed, they're the same person, rock star to bum. Yep, and and the fault is not their own, the fault is alignment issue, and and that can be circumvented with data, with knowledge.
SPEAKER_02Real world, only only people that run teams and live this for a world are gonna agree with the following. But it's like you can't have all eight players. We're there's not everyone's wired that way. You be you need B players to be with B players. Like, like you need a lot of B players, like you need stereotype. If if we have a single parent that needs to pick up their kid at three o'clock, and they're they're uh 70%. You need those people. Like to expect them to do what what the uh the super energetic, young go-getter, not young, but whoever the go-getter is, like who's working 12, you know, 15 hours a day, they're different, but they're not all the same. And a company, you do do you need those crazy 15-hour people? You do, right? But you also need a lot of super solid, very good quality people, and matching what they want, their earning potential with the opportunities is so important. Like expecting everyone to be the it's not doesn't work, it doesn't work. And so matching what they want to do with their skill set and the company being happy with that performance is all part when B people do B work and are paid B money, everybody's fine. They really are. When A people do A business, paid A money, everyone's fine. It's when a it's when a B player wants A money for B effort. That's when you get sideways in the HR world. So again, we help kind of put people in buckets and let them self-choose. Like, hey, here's why your earning is here, or here's what it is. It's cool. Are you good with it? We're good with it. We we love that you're what you're doing. We need it. We need we can't we can't exist with the bell curve moving all the way to the right.
SPEAKER_00It's like the nightmare before Christmas. Jack Skellington wants to be Santa Claus. Part of this problem is the B player is a B player. They need to acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses, know which swim lane they're great at, put them with the other B players, and there's no shame in the hierarchy. And most of them are, but most of them are happy there. And stop being aspirational to A when really it's B is fine. Be the best B player you can be. Right.
SPEAKER_02Most people I know in that world are fine. They're like, good, I don't I don't want to, I don't, the extra hours to me in my personal life, or to be able to go work out, or to take care of my kids, or whatever it is, to be a uh little league coach is way more important than the other things, and it's fine. That's totally fine. But if you don't have the data and you try to treat everyone the same and every opportunity the same and the same sales process, that's why we are 40 years in with no true answer to why is a public company with an incredibly complex tech stack with every metric under the sun, how can they possibly miss quota or or sales team only 30% get to goal? How can that possibly be with no answer?
SPEAKER_00Sales team turnover. You've got frustrated people, right? And then and then and then you got the A-list people who who are just you know freaking out in their own way without proper guidance and reinforcement. I do want to end on a on a Pollyanna note. The the the thing that I love most about this conversation and what you're bringing to the world is the opposite of the doomsday AI scenario. And by that I mean everything that you've been talking about shows the benefit of using this technology to better understand ourselves, our jobs, yeah, and to bring benefit that way. And to do it in a way that's expeditious, unobtrusive, and cost effective. Everyone's like, oh my God, AI is stealing our jobs. Oh my god, AI is gonna end the world, it's the Terminator, it's Skynet, we're doomed. The flip side of this is all of our lives could be so much better if we're better aligned to our own skills and the stuff that we do in the world.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And and I think we're we're we're at this golden age if we can go through this disruption, exemplified by a lot of what you're proposing for sales teams, which is I want to do the job best suited to who I am as a person. And the best way to do that is for you to know as much as you can about me and aligning me in situations where I can be a star.
SPEAKER_02Amen. Listen, here's the sales, here's the sales dirty secret. This is so true. I think I've never had a person disagree with this. Here it is, here's sales, the entire history of sales. Hey, I reach out to 100 people, I connect with 30 of them, 15 of them will talk to me. I demo seven, I sell three, right? I mean, everybody's numbers are a little different, but isn't that true? Like I reach out to 100, I only connect with conversion funnel. It's never contained. Right, but but imagine if we're able to use AI and do some of the amazing things so that we we no longer have to talk to 100 people. Imagine if we only talk to 20. And of the 20, 17 are dialed in. It changes the entire world. You know how much time we spend in sales, for lack of a better word, wasted just calls that are unreturned, emails that aren't the like it's imagine if we're able to self-actualize AI and be like, imagine. I'll use this. I'm a huge sports fan. I use this analogy all the time. Jordan Belfer, the Wolf of Wall Street guy, said this. It's so true. If you came to me and said, I have a Tom Brady trophy or Tom Brady helmet signed Patriots, hey, it's$500. I couldn't sell it to me unless I resell it, right? If I was gonna be, but it's not going to my house. I don't care, Tom Brady. Not if there's not a chance. I don't, it doesn't matter. You could have Tom Brady made it out to Jack Sonny, love you, you're the best guy. I'd still be like, I don't want it. And I'm not paying for it. Like, I don't want it. And so, but if you had a I don't know, Baltimore Ravens helmet who I grew up in Maryland, signed by Ray Lewis. I what is it? It's 900. I'll pay you a thousand. I'll tell you like we're we're all that way. So imagine everyone typically hates salespeople or hates the sales people. Imagine though, as you go through your day, you go through your life, if the calls you got, we all get too many spam calls. While we're on this podcast, I've gotten three calls. Spam, spam. You know, it's like imagine the people that reached out to you were things you really cared about. Like, hey, you just whatever got a flat tire this morning, and it knows you have a flat tire, and like, hey, here's three tire vendors in the area that'll come to your house and replace the tire on driveway. I definitely want that, right? So imagine our business world, if they knew from the signals that we're giving, we either hired people or we fired people or we moved over to the new market or we just got a new office. If you had people that were in line with how you're living interact with you, think about how amazing that would be. And that's to me where we're going to. Well, we don't have to do 100 anymore. We reached out to 100. Again, 80 of them, 70 of them want to tell you to hang up on you. Please stop calling me. You're annoying. I hate your guts. But that's how we waste our time. Let's just get down to 20. And of the 20 you call, they're all like, Oh, yeah, I'm definitely looking. Uh, yes, thank you for calling.
SPEAKER_00Same transparency and alignment that I was talking about. Your sales team is towards the prospects, they're exuding all this data too. So connect the dots. That's the math. That is the marketing challenge, right? And and even the best platforms do a half-assed job, you know. Like if you watch this on Netflix, you might like that. It's variations of these recommendations because they get to know what you're watching.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00If we can get that right, then to your point, salesperson, prospect, and the salesperson is getting better at doing what they naturally do. And the prospect is becoming more and more transparent in terms of their pain points and needs and opportunities. And AI with machine learning, deep learning, is perfectly positioned to munch all this data, connect the dots, and share best practices to do it.
SPEAKER_02People are listening people are not, and especially in the sales process, the higher dollar value you're buying are not going away in the sales process because there's not a person in the world that wants to spend six figures plus and be like, who'd you buy that from? Oh, I bought it from an automated agent and uh they're gone. Yeah, I mean, like, have you ever have you ever had a problem with your company and you try to call Google, like they either took down your page or the search results don't work, or somebody said, There's no one to call somebody on the other line.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02You can't so imagine you do that with something that's critical to your operations or really important. So the the more for for the audience, the higher dollar value what you're selling, the chance you go away is very small because people want to be able to call back and be like, hey, Bill, Mike, Susan, you know, hey, this is going good. This is not going good.
SPEAKER_00Remember the qualitative attributes about what makes the salesperson good is human qualities. We're making human connections. And it's particularly important for a consultative approach for higher value services.
SPEAKER_02You need help. You want help, you want support, you want nothing's perfect, and so you you're not again try to call Google or Facebook when you have a problem. Zip. You get nothing, and you're like, this is unbelievable.
SPEAKER_00You're gonna get a bot, right? Your value prop sounds uh intriguing. I'm gonna put links in the description for the podcast and the YouTube video. How does it work reaching out to you? Is it a is it a consulting call?
SPEAKER_02Sure. My little uh a 15-second commercial, you can find Jack Signy, S-I-N-E-Y on LinkedIn. You can ping me. Or but if you go to frontrace.com, frontrace.com, one word, frontrace.com. In the upper right hand corner, it says join the race. Um just fill out the form. We'll let you have the software. We'll put our money where our mouth is, we'll set it up, customize it for you. Can have it for a month for free. So you don't have to take my word that it works. Like, literally, not some uh what is it, proof of concept where it's vanilla. It'll be customized to your stuff. You will literally I we tried to create uh a company that is so sought after. It's like you even if you never buy it, you're gonna be so much smarter a month from now, totally for free. That's how much we believe in what we're doing. You can just go hit join the race, fill out your name, uh, I think it's email, phone number, put it in there. We'll we'll set up the software. You can use it for a month plus, make sure it works great before you ever have to pay for it.
SPEAKER_00So awesome. And then my IT guys are not gonna flip out. You can just the plug in. API key.
SPEAKER_02Just quick sidebar. You mentioned the call that make sure your IC security, they all want to make sure, you know, do you have the right security? But that's that's always the question. Who who has it? But it's all super secure. You're you're good. But there is that question. But once it is API key data set up in about 10 minutes, you're good to go.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Jack. Like. Comment, subscribe, share.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, thank you. Yes. Thank you very much.
