Transcript for "AI's Second Impression: How the Next Wave Changes the Game for GTM Teams": I'm here with Kyle Poyar, cofounder and operating partner of Growth Unhinged. Kyle, how are you today? Hey, Gerard. Doing great. Kyle, you mentioned that there's a lot of not so good AI tools on the market, and that's what's fueling a lot of skepticism from the market. From your perspective, what separates the first wave AI tools that under deliver from the next generation that'll create measurable value. Look. I think everyone had a chat CPT moment. Right? They logged on. They experienced what chat CPT could do, and it was like, mind blowing. This is so cool. And then they tried to use it to do their job, and they all of a sudden were like, oh, this thing doesn't work. I can't get any real value out of this. It's not customized to me. It sounds really generic. It's not in my voice. And so there's been a ton of skepticism around, the application for these tools. I think what's changed is the LMs have actually gotten a lot better, and the and people have gotten a lot better about how to use AI and when to use it. And so there's longer context windows. There's agenda capabilities, meaning folks can kinda capture data in real time or bring in multiple data sources. There's the ability to set up automations of workflows, which include an AI component and non AI component. There's secure access to different tools that you need, right, to to act on more proprietary data or customer data without being afraid that data is gonna be shared externally. And so I'd say for folks, if you gave AI a try a year ago and you were disappointed, come back, but also do the work to figure out how to use AI best for you. Come back. We we we miss you. You you've observed there isn't quite yet leading to reductions in go to market headcount, but it is changing roles. How do you feel about the responsibilities of sales folks, sales engineers, CSMs, enablement teams? How do you see that work shifting over the next two to three years? Well, yeah. First off, I would say, if I look at the different roles that exist, sales is somehow one of the, like, most insulated from I right? People still want someone on the other side of the table. They wanna build a relationship with the vendor. They wanna make sure they they trust the the counterpart before they make a big purchase decision. And so that relationship really matters. But where I think AI comes into play is that, we can do the things that we're aiming to do with our highest value, kind of our best prospects, and we can apply that across the board. And so if you think about for your best prospects, you probably had a mutual action plan. You navigated to the most senior decision maker. You made sure you covered all the different stakeholders, security, finance, legal, etcetera. You had business casing done. Right? You brought in your executives potentially to help you on that deal. There's so much work that can go into that, and I think that, because of it it it because that type of motion was so resource intensive in the past, we only did it for our best possible deals. Now we can create much more personalized content enablement assets, and action plans with the customer really move deals forward and use AI to create a better, more human buying experience for customers. I think that's the kind of the core to the sales motion to me is delivering a better experience through AI, not necessarily, having fewer people deliver that experience. And then I think in terms of other roles, like like like an enablement team or maybe a content team, instead of creating a generic one page white paper, they're actually looking at how do we customize assets to have the template or maybe a custom AI solution to then build personalized assets for each different buyer depending on their specific situation. And so we can go from this, like, idea of personalization, which is really just a a bunch of different versions and always feeling like you have versions not updated properly, but you're missing one, to true, you know, personalization for the specific situation. Yeah. Absolutely. Much of the AI conversation we've seen in the market, particularly on the sales side, has been on top of funnel prospecting, AISDRs. You you and I have talked about the work in the messy middle of the sales process where the bulk of the deals are are won or lost. What opportunities do you see for AI in transforming that critical stage? Yeah. And I think that we started to have a funnel because frankly, like, that was lower risk. And also for a lot of folks that was already fairly expensive relative to the results they saw. And so they they looked at AI and then I'm going to maybe improve what was already broken. Right? Now we're getting much more much more real about bringing AI into kind of core business processes. You see that in coding, but you also now see that in the sales motion itself. And I think the the biggest things for me are really trying to figure out the next best action to move deals further, and bringing AI in to deliver on those best actions. So to the extent that you know doing a, b, and c actually increases your likelihood of winning a deal or accelerates the deal cycle, you can actually, have AI guidance or an AI copilot reminding you to do those things or telling you, hey. Based on where this deal is in the funnel, we haven't had any interactions in the last two weeks. We should do x as the next step. We can be on top of every opportunity, not let anything slip through the cracks and really be thoughtful around ways to progress style deals and really move accounts to the to the finish line in a way that I think is, the best practices that we should have been following already. But just frankly, with all the, you know, all the things going on, all the busyness, you know, new deals coming through, it's just very hard to stay on that on your own. You've advocated for teams to have more space and more time to experiment, almost like Google's old 10%, time. In practical terms, how can leaders encourage bottoms up AI innovation without disrupting the core revenue engine? Oh, I really think that for a lot of the AI tools, the power comes from actually doing something yourself as opposed to just reading about it. And so you need to, you know, encourage folks to actually try things out, on their own, which probably means giving them access to tools that they can try out on their own. So, you know, whether that's a ChatGPT enterprise license or other kinda custom solutions that you feel comfortable are not gonna lead to, you know, sharing sensitive data or customer data out, with, with an LOM. Right? And so you need to give folks access to the tools. You need to kind of encourage them to use it. And then I would really try to do a regular show and tell. There's gonna be people that are forward thinking, love nerding out about AI. They've probably done some pretty cool things. Have them talk, you know, in a team meeting once a week or have them do a lunch and learn showing exactly how they built it, you know, what they did, and and actually giving some time for people to build something similar themselves in that exact meeting, context. And I think this this really starts to spread like wildfire as someone has that moment and realize these are not that hard to use. It just really takes some time and some kind of rewiring of the brain. I think people start to kinda get addicted and they start realizing, you know, what else they wanna do. Yeah. Totally. And then last question for you. You highlighted AI can create contextually relevant content. I know enablement's a topic near and dear to both of our hearts, for those in the moment kind of sales interactions. How do you think that capability changes and evolves and really shifts the balance between that centralized top down command and control enablement versus the seller created deal specific assets that we know moved the needle. Yeah. I think this idea of, like, deal specific assets probably scares every enablement person and every sales leader. Right? It's like, oh, wait. We're gonna trust the rep to say exactly what our product does for this specific customer? Like, we're about to sign up for a lot of things our product can't do. I think there's there's a ton of fear in this idea of sort of giving reps the tools to personalize the experience, but there's also an understanding that the rep has the context. They know what resonates with the customer. They know the different objections around the table. They know the competitive landscape. And also all of that increasingly lives in call transcripts, meeting notes, etcetera. And so I think that there's a role for enablement and product marketing to set the frameworks and set kind of core principles, core structures of how things should look, you know, absolute do's and don'ts, but then enable flexibility within those frameworks. And so instead of having, you know, 10 different versions of a one pager or a certain deck, having a a standard framework but then having customization built in is kinda part of that of that process. Absolutely. Kyle, thank you so much. I could talk to you all day, but I appreciate you joining us, spending a few minutes. And, folks, if folks are looking to engage with you, I know it's an obvious question to me, but where can they find you? I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so just connect with me or follow me there, and then check out my newsletter. It's called Growth Unhinged. Thank you, Kyle. Appreciate you.