Transcript
Intro
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Today, we are in for a treat. Not only because we have a super intelligent guest on our show, but we have a super intelligent guest who is very, very good at a topic many of us are still trying to master, and that is artificial intelligence.
So, with that said, I'd like to introduce you to Erik van Eekelen. Erik and I have known each other for a little while now. We would be six to nine months. I've been following his journey at Icana.AI, which is the business he's the founder of and really loved watching how that business is growing, working through proof of concept, and now at a point where it's adding some really nice value to its customers.
So Erik himself, as the founder of Icana.AI, he brings over two decades of technological innovation, leadership, very much at the forefront of industry, but specifically to the AI industry. So he's got a really rich background, spanning energy. Same, same, but different as me. E-commerce, education. Erik's done some work in fintech and a whole lot of other areas, but for me, his expertise in applying AI to solve complex business challenges is the bit that puts him in high demand.
There aren't many of those people around, right? So I think we're very lucky to have a guest like Erik on the show today. In terms of qualifications, Eris's got a master of science in AI. I normally wouldn't talk about qualifications, but having one that is specifically targeted to AI is super, super powerful. So he's been at the cutting edge of this stuff of large language models of crafting solutions that drive those really significant advancements across the AI or the AI sectors, I should say. He's been in that for a very long time. And now his business, Icana.AI, has revolutionised. Well, I think it's going to revolutionise the beta C selling market with a product called AI Core Coach. Whole idea here is actionable insights and you plus 25% on your individual improvements.
So, Erik, I don't think I could have given you a bigger background of pump you up than that. But first of all, it's great to have you on board and thanks for giving us some of your time today.
Erik van Eekelen:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me here today. It is a great welcome. I need to hire you as my hype guy next time I do go on stage somewhere, so that's awesome. Thanks, Ben.
Ben Wright:
I am very good at networking and lead generation. It's one of my great strengths. And with that comes the ability to be able to introduce people. So I'm glad you liked that one. But before we get into it, you've heard from me or the audience, you've heard from me about Erik. Tell me about the Erik van Eekelen journey. What are you doing? Why are you successful?
Erik van Eekelen:
So I've been in the AI field, I guess, for more than 20 years, right? Like when I did my master's in AI at the time, it was still very much like more in scientific area and not so much in the applied AI area. And so one of the people that I work with, he often talks about, Erik, survived the AI wind time. And there's definitely some truth to that, because for a very long time, obviously, AI was there as a factor in some companies. We were successfully applying it, but most of us weren't able to use in our day to day lives. And that obviously has changed a few years ago. So in that interim period, as you were talking about, I've been in a number of technology roles, leadership technology roles. But now, as soon as generative AI basically kicked off, that was, for me, a real starting point to say, okay, I want to go back to that because I really, truly believe that this can make a massive impact on us as a humanity, as society. And that's what makes me really excited as well, is how can we apply AI to really kind of accelerate innovation, accelerate science, accelerate everything that we do and that we want to achieve. And with that in mind, I actually started a company, Icana.AI. I built some products, but I also do a lot of education, you know, work with companies to talk about their journey. And, like, what I notice is that a lot of executive leaders, they want to jump on a bandwagon, right? They want to embrace AI and to use it in the company, but they don't know where start. So I do lot of that work and, you know, I'm pretty passionate about that too.
Ben Wright:
That is a really good segue into what we're talking about today about the practical implications of using AI. And really for us, I think we're going to focus around how we can leverage where AI is at now and prepare for the future to help us build stronger sales teams and better business practices. So let's start at the start. What's happening in the world of AI today?
Erik van Eekelen:
Yeah, I think a lot of people see on LinkedIn and other social networks, X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it, they see some of the things that people are doing, but those are often experiments and they're not necessarily what businesses are using. Right. So if I talk about applied AI, I really talk about how businesses are using AI in their business processes. And so what's happening there is obviously in marketing, it's being used to generate content, generate images, generate text, generate videos. I know a few companies that are actually applying AI to basically look at the trending Google search words and then automatically rewriting their content on their website based on those trends. So instead of someone having to go through that on a daily basis, they now have basically AI doing that. So that's a really good example of how it's being applied. The other things that are now starting to happen, and which is a bit slower because it takes some time to really apply that in companies, is the logical reasoning. Right. The problem solving that AI offers and how it can help you to work through a problem.
So we are starting to see that more. I think that's also a very exciting bit of it.
Ben Wright:
That first piece you spoke about is very powerful when we talk about businesses that are heavily reliant on paid search or organic traffic, and you're able to keep up with the latest or the most dynamic changes around what people are searching for in a somewhat real time basis. I mean, some of those data, there is a lag there, but to be able to do that in a real time basis, once you get that data, that's pretty cool.
So is there anything happening at the moment that's really surprising you with AI? I mean, you're a veteran in the industry. Is there stuff coming out that still makes you wonder, wow, I didn't see that one coming.
Erik van Eekelen:
Yeah, there's a lot of that. One of the interesting things, I think when I present on AI, a lot of people are surprised about the fact that the AI to a certain extent is a black box. Right? Like so that we don't actually know how it works, at least on the very detailed level. And that's because I often explain AI systems, or at least neural networks. They are trained, right? They're not programmed, they're trained. It means that a lot of data goes into it. And based on that, you get to an expected behaviour by lots of rounds of training. And that also means that similar to when you learn a new skill, you create new pathways basically in your brain, right? So's not exactly the same for AI, but there is enough of an analogy there that I think makes sense to think of it that way. So that also means that sometimes you don't know exactly what happens when you ask a specific question, right? You don't know exactly what's going to be the output when you give it a specific input. And even you might give the same input if number of times and get it slightly different outputs every time that you ask. And those are the things that a lot of people are surprised by. Those are less surprising for me. For me, what is really the part that I had not expected is the multi modality. So how well the learnings in the large language model, so the text models really transfer to being able to generate images, being able to generate videos. You know, I don't know how many of the people in your audience will have seen the Sora videos, but those are very impressive, fully generated videos just basically based on the prompt and that I had not seen coming. And that was also not something that I was taught like 20 years ago when I was at university. So I think that is only accelerating and that's very exciting. And at times also a bit scary.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, that was definitely running through my mind. Wow, it's getting really smart. If we can take text and put it into a whole lot of other modalities, because so far one of the fallbacks, or roadblocks, if you like, for AI has been its ability to mimic the human's adaptive nature or the agility of the human brain when you're in very complex situations. And it sounds like there might be some rapid closing of the gaps there, but we're actually going to get to, when we speak about closing of the gaps, you have certainly an AI opinion that I think is big, it's big news. And we're going to get to it in a minute. And all about closing the gaps between where we're at now as a B2C sales teams in particular, but also for some B2B, and where we think we're be twelve months but before we get to that, can you tell me how do you think AI is going to really impact the future? Let's look at a horizon of about twelve months down the track first.
Ben Wright:
So I think one way to look at it is look at the sales funnel, right? So if you think about the sales funnel and how AI is currently already being applied and what you can expect in the near future is what you can currently already see is like we talk about those search terms and how that you basically can use AI to generate content. So that's already there. Then the next layer is also almost like qualifying your leads, right? So someone finds out about your product, wants to know more about it. Currently you normally have your landing page or you've got your website, or maybe you've got some social media campaigns that try to kind of inform that lead that comes in, that person at prospect that's interested in your products, and then you try to get them to call you as quickly as possible or you call them, right. I can kind of get that lead capturing. But what AI currently allows you to do now is to have an intelligent chat conversation, and that's today, right? So that's already available. It's also one of the products that my company offers. But you can basically have a chat GPT like conversation, but about your products with a chat bot, even though I don't like that name, maybe an agent is a better word, a web agent. You can have an intelligent conversation with something that actually knows the pricing, that knows your current promotions, that knows you know the details about your product that chatGPT obviously wouldn't know. Right. So you can give it those details, you can train it on that, and then like your prospects can have a conversation with that, which really helps you to kind of qualify those leads. And I guess it's a different take than having your 24/7 offshore chat teams. So it's an alternative to that. And I would say a step up because it actually allows you to have those chatbots, they will have an intelligent conversation and people will actually get answers instead of just being asked to drop their details. So I think that's step two.
And then the third step is obviously, okay, so let's just say for the moment that you're going to be on the phone with them, right? So you want your sales team to be on the phone with your prospects. And a lot of my experiences in a, B2C, but maybe we can talk about B2B in a bit, but let's say B2C. We've got a call centre they're on the phone. But we also know that like in those call centres there is a lot of people, there's some really outliers, and I think this is true for, you know, a lot more about sales teams. But what I've seen from it in the past is that there's a few of very high performers, the Rainmakers, right. And there's people that are on different levels below that. Right. And it also takes a lot of time to kind of onboard new people, to kind of upskill them and get them to the same levels. And so what AI now allows you to do is actually analyse the recordings of those conversations with prospects and give immediate feedback and kind of say, okay, well, we should follow what our expectations of a quality call have been ticked off during that conversation. And we know that, I know a lot of sales leaders who would like it, who would love to listen to more of those recordings, but they never have the time to do it. And now AI actually allows them to do that. Right. Like it just analyses the calls and then it gives it the immediate feedback. I think that's really kind of like a next step up from where we are and which is already available today. And that you mentioned AI Core Coach, that's one of the products that we offer. There's obviously all those out there as well. And then if I look at, if I go one step further, if we go from there, I say, okay, well, what's going to happen in the next twelve months, right? And this is where my kind of bold statement comes in. I truly believe, and not everyone's going to be happy about this, but I truly believe that within the next twelve months we will have fully autonomous AI agents, sales agents, if you want to service agents on the phone, right, that you are able to have a voice to voice conversation with in real time. We're not there today yet. So even though some people have shown demos in the most optimal scenarios, if the people on the phone are very patient, they don't talk slowly, they don't interrupt you, then it's already possible. But obviously that's not reality, right? That's not how real life works, but we are now very close to that point where that is possible. So where we do have the possibility for both inbound and outbound calls, like real time. So an AI basically has a script like knows your products and has an understanding of your company. And the person on the phone will just be calling with their questions and the AI answering, as you would expect from a human sales or service agent. And I think the only thing that stops us right now is a kind of hardware which is currently being developed. So we're kind at a 1 second latency, as they call, kind of a 1 second delay in how quickly AI can respond to something someone on the phone has said. And I think from research, like, we need to get that down to third of a second. So, you know, and that gap is narrowing very quickly. So I do expect, you know, for example, if you call an airline, that you might get a choice. Instead of waiting for, you know for 60 minutes or half an hour before you get to talk to someone, you actually get a choice. Do you want to speak to an AI agent right now? I think that's how it's going to start and then we'll see that being rolled out very soon.
Ben Wright:
So that's the mic drop. Twelve months time, fully AI driven sales agents. Erik van Eekelen’s big, hairy, audacious statement made early 2024. May 2024. Okay. Wow. Well, that is an impact for sales leaders and salespeople. Do you think that salespeople and sales leaders alike should be concerned about that?
Ben Wright:
I think everyone right now with AI and the impact of AI on their jobs, almost every job, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, but I think people should have some concern. Right. You should definitely be very aware of what's happening and it's definitely going to change. So for the sales leaders, it's definitely going to change the way your teams are structured, the way that you operate, your operational model of your business, the cost pressure that you're going to get from your executives, all of that is definitely going to impact.
Now, there is obviously always a difference between the moments from when something is possible, technically or scientifically, to the moment is being rolled out in companies. And I'm sure that, like in twelve months time, not every company was switched to fully AI agents. Definitely not. But obviously the higher that impact is, the more costs will be saved by applying it, the higher the pressure will be to go down that path. Right. So, yes, so I think, yes, they should be concerned, but it also, it also creates a lot of opportunities, obviously. And so I think, I think you need to find that balance.
Ben Wright:
Couple of things in there really interest me. We talk about electric cars for a moment. It's been possible to drive an electric car for, for a decade, but we are still at least a decade, in my opinion, away from having electric cars as the mass market driver. So, fundamentally agree with you there. I also think there is a piece around, whilst the technology may be ready to run automated sales agents. There will be industries that it will work for, there will be industries that it won't work for. There will be industries that it is recognised as acceptable within, and there'll be industries that it's recognised that it's not acceptable in. And so I think there's a very long journey ahead here. But what you're saying is within twelve months be ready, you could be replaced by a far cheaper resource that could do close to as good a job at you in some instances. So if you're a salesperson now, what are you doing to, the instant word that came up from me was to compete against AI, but perhaps we can be a little bit softer here. And what can you be doing now to prepare to still be a very relevant and important resource in the business world in the future?
Erik van Eekelen:
Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think it first, it starts by being educated, being informed, having a good understanding of what is possible with using AI. So it's really make AI integrated in your workflow. So for example, if you're kind of working independently, you're doing B2B sales, and you've got your own pipeline that you work on, you might want to start using AI to analyse your own goals, right? Like how could you improve your meetings that you have, like record them and have an AI analyse them? I think that will get you a good understanding or use AI in other parts of your life or your work, right? Like, so just to get an understanding of what's possible. I think that at least will make sure that you're not as surprised by what is possible. I think that's what I noticed the most, is that people are really taken off guard or just basically by not knowing that what is coming. So that's one.
The other thing is what is probably the hardest part for, I mean, you mentioned this before, you said, you know, not in every industry AI agents will be acceptable. And I think that's a really good point. So if you think about your career as a salesperson, then I think the logical path would be to go down the road where you really have to focus on the quality of your conversations, really have a good empathetic understanding of your clients. So both in your skills and maybe the type of work that you do, really focus on those areas. Because even though AI might be able to do it, it would not necessarily be acceptable for humans in the next few decades to have that conversation with an AI, right? Like they are emotional or have a specific drive to go for a specific purchase and they might not want to talk to an AI about it because they want a human to understand how important it is to them. Right. So I think if you can ensure that you develop those skills or further develop those skills and to work in industries where that is really important, I think that makes a little sense.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, good one. So what we're saying here is be really, really focused on where you add value. Be really focused on learning the technological changes that are coming. This is not the first period of mass disruption to people as sales leaders or sales individuals. In fact, we've just gone through a pretty significant one, that little pandemic, absolutely unheard of changes to how we had to operate during that period. And I led a team of 80 people over that really heavy six month period at the start there, and everyone had to make significant changes. So we're all capable. It's whether or not we put our focus onto it. Ok, so let's go one level higher before we let you go. If you're a sales leader, what are you doing today to prepare for the upcoming or the continued disruption? No, I'm going to stand at the upcoming disruption. I don't think AI is truly disrupting sales teams yet. Not truly, but I think it's not far away. So what are you doing as a sales leader to prepare for the upcoming disruption?
Erik van Eekelen:
Yeah, I think there's a few things there. One is to really get that basic understanding of AI. And I know this is tough because everyone has got their own personal development agendas. There's so many things already on your list's so many things that you want to learn and study. And obviously it's easy for me to say, okay, you need to get a better understanding of AI. But I think once you start actually using, like even if you just get ChatGPT, I would suggest getting a paid account or anthropic, just the competitor or anthropic AI. They have another, another AI product called Claude, which is just about the same level as GPT four. And so if you aren't using that already in your life and even just for your personal things, then start doing that because that really will give you a better understanding of what is possible and the level of AI. Because if you used it two years ago or a year and a half ago when the GPT just came out and you're currently basing your opinion on those first experiences, you're completely off the market at the moment.
So you need to make sure that you get better in form. So I definitely start there and then build up from there might get a better understanding of what tools are available for salespeople that use AI. And you have to be a bit selective there because there's many in the market that you might not be interesting for you, but in your use case in your funnel, as we, we're talking about before, what would make sense as a sales leader to kind optimise your cost, to optimise your conversion rates. Right. Like which tools would be interesting to try out? And I think that would be my third point. Experiment, experiment, experiment, right. Start experimenting with some of those tools. What makes a difference for your teams? And I think that one of the key points there, one of the things that I have noticed when people start using AI products and sales is that there is some people, they are really excited about it and I'm talking about the people on the phone now, right? So some people are really excited about it and others are really cautious. And then there's people obviously who are very much against it because they don't necessarily want AI to analyse their goals or tell them what to do. And I get that. It’s just a very human emotion to feel that, to go through that.
So by introducing it slowly, by starting with small experiments and then start building on top of that, I think that's the way to go, to not just for yourself to discover what is possible, but also to kind of get your teams used to it, right. To get an understanding of what it means to work with AI, right. And not against AI. Does that make sense?
Ben Wright:
Yeah, I like it. Learn it, embrace it, experiment with it. I think that is very much paraphrasing what you said, but very much, very much should be on the front of sales leaders' minds right now. Excellent. Couple of challenging topics in there today, Erik, and one big, hairy, audacious, kind of bold prediction, which no doubt is going to go headline of when we put this one out on social media. But thank you very much for your time today. So, Erik van Eekelen, he's the founder of Icana.AI. Erik, where else can people find you if they'd like to get in touch
Erik Van Eekelen:
EitherLinkedIn. Right. So feel free to drop me a line, just mention this podcast and I'll definitely respond. And alternatively, my website, www.Icana.AI
Ben Wright:
Excellent. Fantastic. Well, thank you very much again, Erik. Lovely having you here. For those listening, keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
When Will AI Replace Sales Teams with Erik van Eekelen
