Will AI Replace Your Sales Team? with Ellza Malok

0:00 Is artificial intelligence about to replace your sales team? Let's find out with today's amazing special guest, Ellza Malok. Now, Ellza, I'm so excited to have you here because this is a really big issue that I talk with people a l about a lot. And I have very strong opinions about this and The people at the tech end are so excited. Like we could place our entire team with sales staff. We can have AI doing phone calls and eighty-four percent of people hang

1:20 up as soon as you realize it's an AI, but the other sixteen percent don't realize, and then we have a chance to make a sale. And I come from the other end where I think we're gonna see a shift towards which is referral marketing or friendship marketing, or the handshake is actually gonna increase in value. But a lot of salespeople right now are worried. And should they be worried that they're about to get fired and replaced by AI? ~ thanks for having me, Jonathan.

1:42 This is such a really good question. And as someone who digs deep into behavioral mechanisms, both within an organization and the instruments that they use to produce a particular behavior, as well as on the buyer side, what their experience is like, the biggest element that I can kind of say is potentially. And and I would say potentially because it's a what happens in many organizations is we want to reduce our cost and therefore AI is a great cost reduction

2:08 But AI so far to date is not a great trust building mechanism. So you may have a really good trajectory for the early stage because you're perhaps relying on the brand trust that you've spent years and years building. And then as that continues to erode, you're gonna start to see your sales cycle and your conversion rates plummet. In fact, I have a couple of those instances. It's what's pretty much occupied most of this summer, ~ transparently, is organizations that have done away with their trust building

2:39 mechanisms and replaced it with AI. But in that instance, what's the difference between your you and your competitor that are doing the exact same thing and potentially even offering the same exact product? in the same exact deliverable because both of you are, you know, basically it's a race to the bottom kind of model. So it is, it is interesting because I think most organizations are thinking either on a strategic lens of how can I use this to build further trust

3:02 and augment my team and and have them focus on the highest human payoff versus the ones that are kind of like, I just want this to this efficiency model for efficiency purposes. And I'll take the three percent conversion rate because at scale over a thousand bots, that's better. It hurts you in the long run. And and by the long run I mean within six months. I think that A lot of people when they're selling, they switch into the seller's mindset.

3:28 And I've seen this a lot with authors. The biggest example with authors is someone's writing their first book, they go, longer is better. They go, I want to make it a thousand pages. And then when I go, Well, when's last time you write a thousand page book? And they go, never. And I go, Okay, keep that in mind. That there's a ~ as a creator, we always think length is the ultimate value. And it's just when I look at a movie.

3:47 ~ and they say it's a four hour movie. I Well, I'm never gonna see that. Like I four I have five kids. It has to have a high attribute level of desire. Like keep in ~ like I'll use Avengers as an example. That movie was long, but the first Iron Man movie was not. It it worked its way up to earn that time. Now, like my me and my kids, we've been watching Masters of the Universe for like the last six days. We watch about

4:08 10 to 20 minutes blocks, well. like small pieces, because I just cannot and I like it. Like I grew up watching Human. It's a movie I like, and it's still like such a long journey. And I think that's The same thing that's happening here with a lot of people that do AI sales, the same thing I say when people say, we want to do an AI chatbot for customer service. I go, Have you ever had a good experience with someone else's customer service chat

4:30 bot? And they No, they enrage me. And I'm like, okay. So I think there's this thing where we forget the other side of the experience. And so you do have to go in eyes open to think you can get away with it for a And it's like if you're self-selecting at everyone who realizes it's an AI, is your ideal customer someone who is easily deceived? Like that's your target demo. Like that's worrying for me. So I think that you're very right.

4:52 And I think about ~ like my parents' generation, where like they ever they had a guy for everything. Like we have a air conditioning guy and we have a guy, a car guy, and we have a mechanic guy. And everything was a guy, even it was a lady, right? You have like that per like that person that you would trust to do it. Like, I've had the same person fix my car for 20 years. What I I wonder about is are we going to

5:08 shift back to that culture? Because now it's like we're trying to remove human from the loop completely. But do you think we'll shift back to a culture where relationship becomes really important again? I think we're gonna shift further into the things that come just naturally to us as humans in terms of community, in terms of that peer-to-peer trust. And we already see some of that happening, right? Like we see places like, and and I'm part of actually this community, places like Vistage, which is a

5:35 peer-to-peer community, and they have hubs that are both local and global that they can go to. We have To your to your point, like I go to this particular mechanic, and that that mechanic is the person that I trust with my car, whichever car I have, et cetera. We are gonna start to see that, and I think that's gonna make not only the sales process much harder, but it's gonna create this cognitive load where everything else is like a fade.

5:59 Everything else is just white noise in the background that people ignore and and or at least try to. ~ and that what does that mean from a from a bottom line perspective? That means your cost per customer acquisition is going to increase, that means your ad spend has to increase. potentially you may decide to re- completely restrategize how that is. And I really liked what you said around your ICP re in relation to the mechanisms that you're using when it comes to AI.

6:25 If your ICP doesn't care about the experience, it probably are looking for the cheapest thing on the market. And that may not be the most ideal for every type of organization that is trying to sell a good or service. So it is matching those two in in terms of what experience they're going to go. And I kind of say I'm like a little empathy goes a long way. Cause if you sit in the buyer's experience and you you make yourself live through

6:50 their your buying process in their shoes, it reveals a lot about how much you really care about your clients. And how easy it is to buy from you. And I say that specifically because I think the buying I think whenever someone ~ a team creates a selling process, they think of it from their efficiency standpoint. But if you sit from a buyer experience process and then you work through, okay, what are the elements that I can mimic to build that trust, to build that relationship.

7:18 it automatically becomes way more efficient than whatever you were coming up with because we're taught that it looks it has to look like this process and it has to look like a funnel, et cetera. Especially when more and more research is saying that over eighty five percent of buyers already have a preferred partner before they even reach out to a salesperson or any type of website ecosystem. So what does a buyer actually experience when they're on the other end,

7:42 when they're on the buying end of an automated sales process? How much has that changed with AI, whether it's chatbots or AI phone calls or what other components? How much does it change the buyer experience? I think it makes the assumption that information is cheap. if I have a chatbot, I can ask the chatbot pretty much anything. But if I have more complex situations, the chatbot may or may not have that answer. but it cheapens the sales process and therefore potentially cheapens

8:09 the product that you're selling as well. ~ in many instances, because you're saying this information may or may not be privileged, but to customize it to your world, like if I'm sitting in a chat bot and I I have a an amazing colleague that actually does a ton of research on chat bots specifically, and the it does provide the speed that you need, but doesn't provide the emotional building because you've cheapened the knowledge. that you are going into. It's not like a

8:33 knowledge base that you are able to look for and kind of put some effort into. and we know that effort is a mechanism to drive trust it in many instances. There is kind of a rage quit model that you have to you have to make sure you're safe around. Like it can't be so hard to find that it's basically impossible and I'm off this website. But it's gotta be to a point where like I'm looking for something specific and and

8:55 enough in a way rather than getting a lot of technical talk That may I may or may not understand if I'm if I'm initially looking at this. So you've got to really kind of work through the balance of where does your IPC ~ ICP sit? How do they behave? What do they value that they want easy access to that doesn't cheapen the particular sales process? And what would they want to actually have a conversation around? And contrary to basically every report out there to say,

9:26 like, well, the younger generation doesn't even want to talk to anybody. The younger generation is literally bringing malls back into a thing because want human-to-human experiences. So I I think there's there's a kind of a dissonance between valuable interactions and invaluable interactions, and we have to like balance the two. And personally, if I have a chat bot and I'm looking for something specific, great, okay, you've answered my question, but you haven't really moved, you haven't sold me on anything. You haven't given me an experience of

9:52 like, you're solving the thing that's in my head right now. And that that requires conversation. because I'm not gonna I'm not gonna tell a chat bot my private information about what I'm trying to solve for. Can a buyer tell when they're being sold to by a machine? Does it change how they behave? Yes. ~ just like we can tell when you're when you're kind of like the traditional used car salesmany language, ~ a chat can do the same. we have I had

10:15 written this a number of years ago around the concept of like the uncanny valley having having a comeback in our in our biological response around it. And we can tell, and not only then do we specify as humans. We then go down to like, can you do this yes or no? And then it becomes almost like a mental filtering process because keep in mind, chances are before any type of engagement occurs, someone has already formed a perception of you. Whether I've seen you on social media,

10:48 whether I've potentially asked my personal chatbot questions about a problem I'm trying to solve, and it's linked specific information about it or I've read reviews. There's there's again, there's a ton of information out there that's really ~ accessible. However, the the way humans process information is highly emotional, even today. So the questions are going to be curated in a way that gets somebody validated, basically a confirmation bias over the things that they already have in mind. And if they know you that you're

11:16 a bot or you're kind of an automated system. It's really easy to kind of play that game because they know how systems operate. Whereas a person may push a handful of times and would get the grace to push a handful of times. But if a bot asks me that question, I'm not gonna get that grace. I'm gonna close it and say, peace out. just answer the question and move on. And we see that, right? Like we see that even in ~ instances where Chat

11:40 GPT is being non-compliant with the particular question that maybe we're and we're going back and reengineering the question and if it's not working we just close it out and start all over again. A lot of companies from the top down think we'll bring in an AI tool and it will solve all of our problems. I've been told the CEA g CEO gets told this tool increase your company's by 10% or lower your overall cost by 20% and they low roll out the AI tool

12:05 to the sales team and nobody uses it. And from my work, I always try to minimize the amount of behavior change. So if someone only checks your email, then I want to connect with your email, then that's how we'll do it. If someone only texts, fine. I would rather kind of meet someone where they are than try to change human behavior. I know changing my behaviors really hard. but what's actually going on when nobody uses these tools? Am I on the right wavelength here?

12:29 Is that why people aren't using the AI tools? It definitely is part of it. I think there's also, you know, a sense of security. Like if the if the if I make the bot not work or non-efficient, then it goes away. So there is there is a little bit of that. But again, it comes back down to is this going to make me a better salesperson or is just this one other thing that I have to do and use in addition to my CRM,

12:51 in addition to the marketing automation tool? Like it just becomes another thing. And unless The sales team has also been sold on the efficiency of a product, then it's really unuseful. Like in my instance, I do a lot of sales fitness labs where we're measuring the effectiveness of sales teams on an individual level and as a as a whole. And we did this because this research sits on how the top athletes perform and how they get to their numbers and how

13:15 they get to the levels of a performance. ~ sales teams have very similar athletic behavioral conditions as we call it around it. So when we do that, they are highly compliant because they realize, hey, if I can fix this thing, I make my quota and then some and I get a much bigger bonus off of it. so it we have to then educate the sales team on what makes it because you can very easily change behavior. within 90 days in a sales team,

13:45 if you really wanted to. You just gotta pull the right behavioral mechanisms to get that. And it's all around conviction. And I'll I'll give you a personal example. I went through a a a health transformation last year because mentally for two years I sat knowing that I had to do these things. I had to my family has a a genetic condition, a heart disease. So I knew I had to like be proactive about that, etc. Mentally I knew that, but emotionally it hadn't hit me yet.

14:10 And then I had a catalyst ~ catalytic event in our family and and I was like, ~ I gotta do something. I really gotta do something about that. around it. So it's gotta hit emotionally and with sales team ~ sales teams transparently, the emotion is easy. The comp plan is what the what drives the emotion. That's why we spend so much time researching a good comp plan and but it comes back down to you can you can if teams really wanted to,

14:34 if leadership really wanted to make it a a change in behavior. There aren't many mechanisms that they can use, but the ones that they do have available to them make waves in in in massive methodologies. They just also personally have to be convicted to that change. And often that is also the part that I see. I buy this tool and I've abdicated responsibility of the effectiveness of And if it doesn't work, it's not really my fault. There's no adoption. You know, we've kind of

15:03 remove the accountability from it as well. And that's one thing that AI also does. It removes the accountability factor because if an AI deletes your entire CRM, whose fault is it? Is it the CEO who bought it? Is it the CTO who implemented it? Is it the person who accidentally put something in their system that triggered an event that triggered another event, etc. We've abdicated all responsibility. when we use AI. And that's one of the things that I think makes AI so dangerous,

15:30 but it also makes it so easy to buy because it creates that ecosystem of nobody's technically at fault. Technically. Yeah, I think that the it's like a double edged sword because it's so easy to use, which means that you start to zone out and that's when you start Mm-hmm. to make those little mistakes. And That's something I think it's really important in all the systems I build, I always force a man in the middle step, even if I don't want to. So I built like a

15:55 custom tool. My biggest problem is memory. I talk to so many people. I probably have two hundred messages go in and out on LinkedIn a week at a minimum. And my problem is remembering who's who. Mm-hmm. And it would be so easy to have the AI write and send the message for me, but so often the message it recommends is not what I would say. It doesn't sound like me. It's not natural. It adds in something weird or cheesy or disingenuous.

16:19 And like, no, that's not what happened or not how I would say it. So by forcing myself to have to copy and paste and edit the message, it stops me from just clicking that button and saying send. So you having that step in the middle, the same with my social media posting, even once I send it to my schedule or I have to click approve one more time, I could easily remove that step. Mm-hmm. But once you do that, it that's when you

16:36 start to introduce a lot of fault because you go, well, it worked fine the last nine times, and that's when you have something bad happen. But in a sales process, what what part should stay human and what part Yeah. is okay to hand to machines? I think it depending on the ICP, you also have to measure like the level of cognitive load they're okay with. 'Cause there are certain things like a reminder email or a summary of the the SOW that they that you've discussed.

17:04 Those things can be automated to an extent. You know, that SOW for example. You can get the notes, you can organize it, you can train AI to say, Hey, these are this is how we like to do it. These are the questions we like to kind of ask ourselves internally and then spit out a summary. But to your point, someone needs to validate that information because there's a high level of decision making that occurs in some of those elements.

17:28 So my trigger point is what decision has to be made? Who is making it? AI or human? And what is the result better between the two? Because if I'm writing an SOW, and I do this a lot, right? Like I use AI in my note-taking system when I'm when I'm jotting things down and I'm having a conversation with a business owner or a key leader in that organization, they're like, I have this problem. AI will summarize that information for me,

17:51 but I have the behavioral intelligence to be like, ~ that's probably not the problem you have. But it's the symptom that you're currently experiencing. So in my SOW, I'm gonna add two other pieces of inquiry that we need to add just to make sure that we get to the root cause instead of just putting a band-aid on something. And unfortunately, an AI is not gonna know that. An AI is not gonna know discernment because it doesn't have the, to your point,

18:17 the memory to kind of create all these moments of like, this is this is. This comes from experience. This comes from a level of intuition that when you've been in the business for X number of years, you start to kind of create, you start to see the patterns before they occur. ~ and and in a way that like offers the level of consultative support that the client is actually paying for, right? They don't want you to just put a band-aid on the symptom because they're

18:42 gonna come back to you three to six months later and be like, I have another problem. Or the problem, the band-aid bursted through because now I have a carotid artery and and you didn't tell me I had a carotid artery. so now you're also kind of liable for that potentially in certain scenarios. So I I think it kind of goes back down to like what is the decision? How risky is that decision? Is it something that AI can kind of

19:02 automate like yeah schedule the next call Y, and Z? Or is it and and content's a really good way to discern that like is this content good? Would it Would it be something that I as a buyer would appreciate? Or is this just mumbo jumbo that I'm putting on my website so I can so I can just have this beautiful LinkedIn post calendar of of nice images that mean nothing? I think one of the driving forces behind implementing AI for a lot

19:28 of companies is they don't want to get left behind. They don't want to do it yet. They're not sure what they're doing, but everyone else is doing it. So we have to because we don't want to get left behind. There's that fear of missing out. And so I see so many companies pouring money into these AI embedded sales Are they actually beating the ones that are betting on human behavior? What does the data say? Are these AI-embeddales sales programs actually outperforming humans yet?

19:50 So it's funny because there's this concept around pluralistic ignorance, meaning most people probably disagree with it, but because the loudest voices are saying we gotta go with it, you've kind of got like this unintended compliance along with it. but I will say almost every single research out there has shown that AI has produced a whopping total of zero. percent in ROI. Regardless if you've become a high fidelity organization, non-fidelity, etc., the implementation process on average is very, very low when it comes to a monetary value.

20:23 Now there are some some some instances where they can prove that to be different, but then you have to look at how they're doing it. IKEA is a wonderful example. They automated a huge chunk of things that were considered not heavily in the decision-making process, freeing up 8,500 customer support team members to do that. And then said, Well, what do we do? Do we keep things status quo and just because we've automated this? Or do we elevate the entire experience and become far more unique

20:51 in the marketplace and far more valuable in the marketplace? And they converted those 8,500 employees as advisors. So now they have far more salespeople in their organization than they've ever had. And all the things that kind of were taking up their time in terms of low payoff activities, they've converted into revenue generating And that strategic value is to the tune of $1.4 billion. That is the difference between and it's funny because we talk about AI as like this next innovative thing,

21:22 but the mechanisms in which they're used is a very antiquated process, like slash the the cost and then absorb that rather than reduce reduce the the lowest payoff activities and then send all that money back to like the revenue generating and high payoff activities. ~ it tends to be kind of only the former, very rarely the latter. And that that is the difference between those organizations that that kind of only look at like, I just want to reduce cost. Now there are some instances obviously are

21:50 that are super inefficient. Insurance is a good example. right? It's a very high cost industry in terms of the administrative process. What have what have we kind of seen that's been implemented, but not at the benefit of the in the end user, which is the person that is paying the insurance, because now it's got a 90% decline rate and very little customer experience to help figure out where the source of those issues are. So you kind of have to like measure those and and say,

22:20 are you actually providing efficiency or are just, you know, reducing for the sake of reduction and and racing yourself down to the bottom. Yeah, one of the things that I say to everyone I work with, when they go, we've increased so much efficiency, we can let go of some of our employees that come into the office. I'm like, just be a rare. If you want to change your mind, you can't. It's so hard to get people to come into the office now.

22:40 Though that's actually become a rare skill. Like which in the like 10 years ago was like, no, everyone comes into the office now. It's like, you come into the office, you're sp like it's almost like you want to reward them because it's so special. And Mm-hmm. the desire, like you said, this desire to achieve efficiency, they let everyone go and then they realize, wait, that person was doing other things. And so we free up all this time and we go,

23:02 well, we can either the only way you actually and this is because of some of the language I think of AI, which is the only way to save money is if you lower your cost. So even the increased efficiency doesn't change the paychecks. You to fire someone. And that's why I don't really like that consulting language because you all You it's better to reskill someone who's already amazing and is going in the same direction as you and on that wavelength with your team.

23:21 So I love that IKEA story. That's really amazing. And that kind of leads me to the final question I have, which is like, what do the top performing sales teams have in common? And how much of that can AI actually replicate? ~ this is such a good question. ~ in in our research when it comes to how top performers generate year over year, quarter over quarter, things like emotional tempo, team rhythm, the ability to recover from a loss, a deal loss, those are all incredibly human.

23:51 could AI help automate some of those? pieces to get you there to an extent, like especially like recovery, like getting back and finding a new deal or or working your other ones a little bit more efficiently. The problem is the how. The how is the part that is the most critical and AI in theory can do it, but not as effective as a human. ~ to be able to generate enough emotional tempo across a team that has to work

24:17 on a 50-page RFP, that that and and then dissect a ton of technical information and then apply it into why this person is potentially giving you this RFP. Why do they potentially want to buy your product? Yeah, they can give you the technical spec, but it's not gonna get you the human why. It's not gonna deep dig deep into like a sales engineer that would sit and say, Let me understand. why your life is so difficult right now and how our because that's really good,

24:44 right? Like that's what that's what gets the sale. And then I'm gonna embed that in language that you can understand, that your team would appreciate and and resonate with in a format that you've for. That part's really hard for AI because it has to ask the right questions, it has to know and ask the right questions. And has to then apply it in a mechanism that is beyond the technical briefs and and beyond the more solid structures. It is very much in the human side.

25:13 ~ and I always kind of say I'm like, we call it sales engineering as as these technical sales, especially. ~ but it's very much an art more than a than a science. And as I think about all six levers of of the behavioral conditioning, they are all incredibly human and require a level of conviction to perform at that level every single day. And I think that if you replace those pieces with an AI bot, you're still not going to get the trust

25:39 that that system builds to the audience that it's going to to be effective and and and frankly efficient in a way that you know, doesn't require burning your through your entire list of contacts and your entire TAM just to get a percentage of sales. I think that no one's ever gonna trust your chatbot more than their own. Everyone already has a GROK or chat GPT or something in their phone, something they're using. So when they talk to your chatbot,

26:09 they'll never trust as much as their own advisor. So I think you're onto something really important there. And I think this has been really, really useful. I think a lot of people are very fascinated by your scientific approach to artificial intelligence implementation. Ellza, for people who just fascinated by what you do and your amazing research, where can they find you and more of your research and see what you're doing online and maybe learn a little bit more about Blue Monarch?

26:30 Yeah, so if you have like specific questions, I'm on LinkedIn and I I am pretty efficient in it ~ personally because I do personally answer those. if you have specific questions on these studies that we talked about, ~ our website, Blue Monarch Group, has a ton of it and you can request information around the labs that we do, both the buyer experience and the sales process, in addition to even like organizational change and and adoption in terms of new technologies and tools that that your

26:57 strategic initi initiatives have and and kind of access some of that data or you know, we've got a lot of perception studies that you can read deep dig deep into that that might be helpful. but all of that is probably easiest to find on our website. Amazing. I'll link to everything in the show notes and below the video. Thank you so much for being here for another amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thanks for having me, Jonathan.