(40) How AI Is Finally Fixing the Sales Administrative Nightmare - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iatJNUzNkY8

Transcript: (00:00) And so this like human in the loop element I think is what is going to help people build trust around AI because a lot of the RevOps folks I've talked to here today, they say, "Yeah, we want to build cool things for sales reps. We want to adopt AI for sales reps, but there's almost like a tool overload. So how can we do something that like is very approachable? GTMAI podcast with Jonathan Lawson, Coach K, where you get the latest with AI and GTM today. (00:36) GTM broadcast with Jonathan Lawson, Coach K. Tune in now, don't delay. Catch the future on display. What's going on everybody? Welcome to the Go to Market AI podcast. Your go-to place for everything AI go to market. What we do here is we talk to founders, CEOs, and go to market leaders about how AI is transforming their business and their go to market. (00:59) Before we get started, I also want to thank everyone, our loyal listeners because ultimately because of you all, we were ranked in the top business podcast on Spotify. So again, thank you so much for tuning in. Excited to welcome Ken Babcock, who is the co-founder and CEO of Tango, which is a company revolutionizing process documentation and workflow automation with a background in operations, analytics, product management at Uber, by the way. (01:23) They have a lot of my money and I think their stock price is really high. So hopefully you kept some of that there. A lot better now. And a stand at Harvard Business School. He brings a wealth of experience to the table and under his leadership, Tango has over two million users and has secured partnerships with folks like Walmart, Nike, and Amazon. (01:39) So, welcome to the show, Ken. Dude, thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to jump in. So, let's get right in. The promise of AI in sales and business transformation is absolutely huge. So, when you think about ending the CRM headaches, streamlining change management, or guiding strategic pivots, I want you to help break down what's actually happening. (01:57) And so let's just start with the CRM because I think that's the favorite thing cuz everyone loves every morning to wake up, go grab their coffee, log into their CRM, and get to work. So tell us, is AI really going to be the answer to the CRM chaos that we experienced today? Yeah, I need to first off, I need to talk to the people that you're talking to because I don't know anybody that's waking up with their coffee in the CRM. (02:20) Look, I think there's I think there's a bunch of factors, some internally within companies, a lot of stuff externally that's putting a lot of pressure on go to market teams, but at the end of the day, like the question that I always pose to customers is no one ever hired a sales rep because of how good they were with the CRM. (02:36) You're hiring the sales rep because they're good at building trust, building relationships, understanding a customer's need, matching that need to a solution. You're not doing it for data entry. This is the best data entry rep I've ever seen. And when we talk to a lot of sales teams and a lot of sales reps, they it's almost like a time study. (02:55) They say, "Ah, I've got this bucket of time in my day where I've got to update the CRM." And you know, the things that are impacting my ability to do that are what was that day like? When was that call? Do I remember everything? Am I being objective? Which secrets out most reps aren't, right? get overly optimistic about a deal and you're like, "Huh, I'm gonna write all this fantastic med pick criteria that says we need to prioritize this deal and it should progress. (03:23) " And so you've got this system and I know a lot of people like to call the CRM like a database, but you've got this database with a user interface that you expect reps to engage with on a daily basis, but it's like the speed bump in their process. And what we set our minds to is how do we remove some of those speed bumps? How do we do a lot of that for reps and for sales teams? I I love that because ultimately I think we do have a lot of RevOps folks at this conference. (03:48) So, by the way, we are live at Go Nimble's Revf Fest at the house. You hear all the cheers? Yeah. You hear the cheers in the background? I think they they would probably prefer data entry be good. But, and if you look at it, over 70% of time is spent on admin, but you hired someone, you're quoting them to really drive revenue. So, anything that they can do to eliminate that drag is super critical. (04:09) Another thing, and we were actually just talking about this, so that AI has a promise of is really helping companies and products make strategic pivots when they need to, and you actually just released a new product not too long ago. And so tell us a little bit about that journey. (04:24) What kind of led to that? Was there an aha moment or a point that said, "Hey, we really need to go all in and do this." Yeah, Tango's been really a series of aha moments. I think I think the best startups, the best companies are what I call learning organizations where you are constantly learning from what the market is telling you. (04:42) And we set out in 2020, which is when we started the company, to become the easiest way to create process documentation via Chrome extension. We are still a Chrome extension today, but we said, can we follow what somebody does and create a how-to guide? And that was the first version of our business. And that was a very acute painoint that we were solving. (05:02) A lot of people that were saying, "Oh my gosh, I use like a screenshotting tool in a word doc and then I'm like formatting it and it takes all day. Now it takes me 20 minutes." That was pretty amazing. But what we learned from that was like creation was one element of it. Adoption was the other side of it. So you could be creating process documentation about your sales tech stack, about your sales process, but it's no good if you can't measure like how people are using it. (05:27) Yep. And so in 2023, the next chapter of Tango, the first learning moment was we wanted to actually make that documentation interactive. So now what was a static how-to guide would be overlaid on your screen, actually walking you through step by step through that process and then giving people analytics and feedback back. (05:47) Hey, here's how your reps are doing. Here's how they are following it. And at that time, we were pretty horizontal, not just focused on sales teams. So it was teams across the board, tools across the board. The next learning which is where we landed today was really around sales teams. So we had all this data around how successful people were completing documentation or completing process executing it and we saw this like big ugly dark spot around sales teams and CRM. (06:14) No really where the process adoption was just really low. Y and there's a few ways you could explain that. You could say ah maybe they don't like the product or ah maybe the process like changed and the original workflow wasn't relevant. But the more time we spent marrying that quantitative insight with qualitative data, what we realized was just the complexity was really high. (06:36) The number of steps in those workflows were really high. The number of applications were really high. And so even just following along with our interactive walkthrough product was hard for people. And so we had this moment internally where we said,"What if we just automate it for people? What if we just do it for them? They can still define the process in the same way. (06:56) They can turn on a mode where they're actually guiding someone through it. If we see that there's difficulty in adoption, what if we just did it for them?" And so that really arrived at our latest product which is what we call hybrid automation. So the idea that you can define a process, you can designate uh what is automated, what is manual, you can bring the human back into the loop to validate some inputs, to validate some form entry. (07:20) And it's been really powerful for teams who are thinking about an AI strategy but just don't know where to get started. I I love that because one of the things that I see a lot is to what you just said, people don't know where to start, but then also they get stuck in the change management aspect. I love the fact that you mentioned, hey, we're having a little bit of a cumbersome process that wasn't getting adopted a lot. (07:41) If we could automate this, then maybe it would be more sticky. So, tell me a little bit about change management. Are you seeing AI and some of this automation help with change management for the users of your product or what are you seeing in that realm? Is it for people to adopt? Yeah, I mean I think AI is super powerful and you know what a lot of these tools can do is incredible, but for some reason a lot of these tools have taken what we call the blackbox approach where it's oh let me go off and do my magical mystery (08:07) tour and come back to you with an insight and it's okay that's cool. It feels a little like Wizard of Ozie and like you don't really know what's happening but it's hard to build trust that way. And our approach in getting people comfortable and getting them started was let's actually offer you real-time visibility into that process and how it's being automated and if something breaks because UIs change and tools change there's an opportunity for us to be like hey we think it's actually here can you confirm that or when we (08:35) extract a lot of info from a page it's later going to be filled into your CRM maybe we're extracting that from a call recording or an email you have a chance to validate it and so this like human in The loop element I think is what is going to help people build trust around AI because a lot of the RevOps folks I've talked to here today, they say, "Yeah, we want to build cool things for sales reps. (08:58) We want to adopt AI for sales reps, but there's almost like a tool overload. So, how can we do something that like is very approachable, is friendly to non-technical users, and offers that ability to build trust along the way?" I love that. So trust is so critical even more so now with AI and technology and then also the ability to be able to see what's going on. (09:17) I think that's why a lot of these kind of workflow tools have taken off is because you can see what's going on in the process and if there are certain break points how do I fix that or maybe I want to tweak something. So I think that's really critical. All right so let's switch gears just a little bit. (09:31) So you I think these you said these were your two favorite topics. I'm really excited to to get in. So one is called the speed 60 method that you implemented. And so just to explain it, you can probably do a better job than me, but tell me how I do a speed 60 method. It like structures rep schedules into 60 minute cycles, which I really love. (09:48) 45 minutes dedicated to the customer interaction followed by 10 minutes of rapid CRM updates, followed by a fivem minute preparation for the next call. And I think one of the things today, and I got I use this when I was I'm going to age myself a little bit if the gray beard didn't already. When I was in sales early on in my career, we went through months of extensive training and our leaders were really trained on leadership and coaching as sales and how to make you better. (10:13) It's almost like you're an athlete, right? And you went through this performance, you went through this training, you got your playbook, you're doing these things and your coach coached you all the time. Y and now we have a lot of younger sellers in the generation that got none of that and really get none of that. (10:27) And so I think this kind of approach to how is rigor, discipline, all those things is making people successful. So I would love to let me or for you to tell me kind of what what led to this approach and this method for you to create and implement. Yeah. And give me some of the reactions for the young folks that do they like it? Sometimes they may think of it as micromanagement potentially, but just tell us a little bit about how that goes. (10:48) Yeah. No, it's interesting. I'm glad you brought up the younger generation of sellers and I'll get to that in a second, but this method for us really comes from the fact that we we dog food our products internally. For those who are unfamiliar with dog fooding, it's just you're using your product. If you ever talk to someone at Salesforce, they have the craziest Salesforce instance internally that everyone uses. (11:10) And so we try to do that with Tango, too. And so our sales team is fully using Tango for everything from creating a deal, progressing an opportunity, close one, close loss, creating a quote, managing a renewal. We have automations for all of that. And so speed 60 kind of came from the fact that we saw in our own instance that we could do all those things. (11:32) I think when people first hear about the speed 60 method, they're like, there is no way I can act on next steps from the call, update the CRM, and prep for my next meeting in 15 minutes. That's ridiculous. And that's we tried to be a little provocative, but we saw internally that it was possible. And so we were like, oh my god, like we need to build something around this. (11:53) And the reaction that we've gotten from the team is twofold. One, it's pretty incredible what our product can do for them and how accurate it is. And it brings a level of objectivity for sellers where you don't fall into that trap of being overly optimistic just cuz maybe you jelled with the champion, but you don't really have an economic buyer. (12:12) You just really that person. You mean vibes is not a forecaster. Vibes is not a forecast. Got it. Okay. Got it. All right. And so that objectivity what we've heard is people are like, "Okay, when Tango is doing this on my behalf, I'm much more objective about my pipeline and how I'm managing it. (12:26) " So that makes them feel good. The second thing that we're seeing is that this speed, the reason we call it speed 60 is speed is a competitive advantage. And we were talking with a customer CRO who who who basically was like, I saw a bunch of vendors yesterday. I forgot all those conversations. And you know what? One of them emailed me. (12:47) And so now it's like I'm going to go with the one that emailed me because like I I'm more aware. And that was also like an aha moment for us where it's okay. Speed 60 is not just the ability to be objective, the ability to condense busy work into small blocks of time. It's also a way to act quickly on what you just heard. You have their attention. (13:07) You have if it was a great call, like you have this commitment from them or the ability to say, "Okay, hey, we talked about this. Can you get that happening?" And they're still in it with you. Yeah. Our sellers feel faster. They feel more competitive. In a very crowded sales tech space, you need to stay competitive. (13:23) So, those are big ones. And then I would say the last one, this is to your point around the junior sellers is saying that these things should take 15 minutes is actually pretty liberating for them. So a younger seller might say, "Oh, I got to prep two hours for my call." No, you could and it'll probably be better, but at some point it's diminishing returns. (13:42) And so giving them the license to be like, "You prep for 5 minutes, you follow up for 5 minutes, you update the CRM in 5 minutes is actually something where they could say, "Oh, okay. Yeah, that that seems achievable. I can do that. And so the momentum is there, too. I love that because being able to have, to your point, that speed, it takes a little bit off of thinking, oh, this is going to be something that takes forever. (14:04) Oh my gosh, I might have to because the other thing is they'll just put it off and then it will take forever and they'll have to spend an hour updating this to bed. You're doing it after dinner. You're doing it after you put the kids to bed. Like I it's just it's crazy how when you look at sellers calendars and how they manage their personal workflow. (14:22) Speed 60 is our answer to there's got to be a better way. Yeah. And make sure you get to those points because you just made I can't tell you how many times that's happened to me too where you're talking to someone, you don't get a followup or even worse B2B buying is so awful these days sometimes because I'll go do a form fill or talk to someone, you never hear back from them, you never get the next step. (14:43) And so being able to make sure that all of that stuff happens is super critical for them because that's their that's how they make their money. That's how they feed their families and everything else. So can I give you an example of where where I failed? Yeah, for sure. Love that. Before we had launched this product and before even the speed 60 was like a concept in our minds. (14:58) I was working with a large residential home builder, one of the largest in the US and had befriended their CTO who was in charge of all their internal applications had befriended him at a conference and we had a strong relationship and he was introing me to the right people albeit a little bit slowly and we were having meetings. (15:16) It was great, but I felt, you know what, I've got this guy like the momentum that I need to drive here is actually going to be driven by him, so I'm going to feel pretty good. And so there would be time lapses and I when I email this person, he always gets back and we like reacelerate. And it had been a minute since we last chatted and I saw he had posted on LinkedIn announcing his retirement and it was the truest definition of time kills all deals because I just thought I got this one in a back pocket. (15:46) We've developed a strong relationship here and I wasn't creating the momentum. I wasn't following speed 60 in a way where it's like, okay, new contact. Let's talk to that person. Let's get that person involved. Let's make them feel like they're part of this decision. just thought I had this CTO who could drive a lot of it and then he retired and I emailed him and I was like so and so is going to own this and you met them and hopefully you've been following up with them and I'm like oh my gosh I'm caught flatfooted here. (16:12) Wow. And so keeping that momentum is just so critical. That was for me like a tough pill to swallow. It is I bet. So there's a lot of learnings there to your point. I love the fact that you've created something and instilled that because hopefully that helps others from not having to have that type of same failure potential. (16:29) They'll go other failures for sure, but at least taking that and helping other people learn because you never know. Like you just said, vibes aren't a thing. You have momentum. You got to make sure that there is a lot of the followup, a lot of the speed because time kills all deals. And he retired or looking for another job. Yeah. (16:43) So that's for sure. Okay. And and next up, so think about the young sellers and we think about startup culture and it's very easy to be able to just try to create a product to move fast to break things. But something that you've done a little bit differently is really nurturing and enduring kind of a company culture where most people say they have a culture. (17:04) They may have some words on a wall but it's not really something that they instill. How are how what are some of the ways that you make a culture a good culture happen as you're scaling a product as you're scaling a company? Yeah. I this is a topic I love talking about. I spent most of my formative years of my career at Uber which is known for its culture in a certain type of way. (17:25) Y, but it no, it gave me the blueprint for, hey, if I ever start a company, which I always knew I wanted to do, we're going to do it the opposite way. It was funny, like some of the people at Uber drank the Kool-Aid and they were like, no, this is why we were successful. I'm like, no, we had the greatest product market fit product of all time. (17:41) We were successful in spite of ourselves. Let's not lose sight of that. And and so that is why I care so much about building the right culture. Like you said though, culture is not just posters on a wall. It's not just words on a page. It's not just like values that you point to and you say those are our values. A lot of people confuse it with just being like a nice person. (18:01) You can be a nice person that's a good culture. Culture is very much how do we work? And so values being tied to behaviors. Those behaviors being reinforced in performance management reviews being reinforced in all hands meetings being reinforced in the hiring process. It sounds a little cultish when I say it like that, but it is right. (18:23) Yeah, you're like, "Okay, here's here are the expectations. Here's how we work as a team." And so whether it's junior sellers or any employee, they have that roadmap for okay, in order to be successful, here are the behaviors that I need to show. And as it relates to sales, it's really about we have to stay constantly in search of product market fit because our first product market fit out the gate, right? People were creating documentation horrific ways. (18:49) We're going to automate that for you. Oh yeah. And it came back to us in spades like the feedback. But the reality is like so much has changed that product market fit has a time window. And so we always have to stay agile. We always have to stay learning. We have to win as a team. Like those types of things are so critical. (19:08) Like I get super uncomfortable when people on the team think, "Ah, we got it in the bag. We just run our process and we just do our thing and like these will be repeatable results." I always I'm like nothing's really repeatable. like we iterate but like that moment in time has passed might have to do something differently. So I try to try to reinforce that in a lot of our culture building. (19:28) I I love that and so I think what would be good have if you have some best practices or tips or things that you use because ultimately I have been in many startups. So we were talking about this I started at a very large company. They spent a lot of time developing leaders. They spent a lot of time developing their people and it was a big investment and I don't see that anymore. (19:49) And one of the things that you know you do is you have these you've even mentioned it is culture should go through your performance review. It should go through the hiring process. You're having one-on-one. So are there some things that you know you've learned over time that's hey this these are the ways to have these things effectively and is there anything that you use like AI for data or insights or anything like that can help you have qu just as a seller I can have a quality conversation with a prospect using research. you should be (20:13) able as a leader to come prepared to have a quality conversation with your team. So, there's anything any tips, tricks that you can give. Yeah, there's really two forums for me. You mentioned one-on- ones. Those are super critical. I set expectations out the gate that like my direct reports set the agenda. (20:29) We have a history of agendas. That those agendas can be revisited. You can run those through AI and understand, okay, here's what we talked about. Here's what we need to follow up on. Here's what we're thinking through within that one-on-one structure. I also dedicate time for what we call like career development conversations. (20:46) And so that happens probably like once every other month with all my direct reports, everyone on my leadership team where we just talk about, hey, are we getting closer to what you want to achieve? Are are we getting closer to your goals? And even if it's not that, it's are you enjoying the work? Are you energized by the work? I love that. (21:01) And and it's been fascinating because there are so many people even at the leadership level that are afraid to say when like they feel like something's broken or they're not enjoying it and they don't realize they have the license to the agency to actually go ahead and change it. And that is like one of those very little things that I'm always reminding the team and some of it is like telling them explicitly something that some of it is showing it doing these career development conversations but like anything we can change. we're a startup (21:28) the stuff to like we can change the way we do XYZ and that's okay like we are not wedded to anything and that also comes back to the learning organization too. So I think my advice would be like be mindful of these like little reinforcing moments you have if you're giving your leadership team license to like change exactly how they do their job every day or their how their team does their job that means you can constantly do that at the company level too because everyone's steering that ship together. (21:55) That's great. And I we talk a lot about this even with AI and utilization of it is really just continuously learning continuous to try to experiment and figure things out. And I think that's important for people in a culture is like how do you create that kind of curiosity and that learning overall? All right, Ken, tell us a little bit about tell us what where to find you. (22:13) Anything you want to talk about Tango before we before we wrap up? Yeah, people can feel free to connect me on LinkedIn. I'm posting a lot of stuff everything from, you know, what we do at Tango, but also just my journey as a founder. I love that. in calibrating my own leadership style which is a forever journey not a destination. (22:30) So I share a lot of stuff on that. So find me, connect with me on LinkedIn and if you want to learn more about Tango obviously happy to do that too. Easiest way to find us is tango.ai. Yeah, check them out. They just released a new product being your kind of AI CRM agent I believe. So really good stuff. We're checking them out as well. (22:46) But for everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. This is another episode of the GTM AI podcast. Until next time, stay curious, stay learning, and experiment. It's the only way to stay ahead. Cheers y'all. Thanks again. Thanks for listening to the GTM AI podcast. Please follow, subscribe, like, comment, and come back for more.