What the Coming AI Wave Means for Your Sales Job With Jake Dunlap

As CEO of Skaled Consulting, Jake Dunlap is changing the future of sales, one organization at a time. Jake speaks with and consults hundreds of CEOs and VPs of Sales that are trying to figure out outbound, and helps them implement strategies grounded in data and geared for scale. A sales leader with decades of experience and two massive exits under his belt, he’s a sought-after thought leader whose ideas have been published in Forbes, HuffPost, and now, the OneShot podcast.

1. How to get ahead of the coming AI wave and future-proof your job as a salesperson and leader. Learn the exact skills you need to level-up, skills to skip that’ll be automated first, plus mistakes and practices to avoid

2. Why sales teams must treat outbound sales with the same dynamic optimization as performance marketing. Jake shares how to embrace a data-centric, scientific approach over gut feelings to maximize outbound strategies in a competitive market landscape.

3. How to start an effective outbound sales strategy from scratch right now—and how to optimize your current strategy to encompass best practices

4. Why the proliferation of sales engagement tools led to the demise of outbound sales and how to get off the volume-equals-success hamster wheel.

5. How to use AI in sales beyond just generating messaging. Learn prompts and ideas for doing deep customer research, role play objections, skill building, coaching your team based on their distinct personalities, and lots more.
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6. Why getting back to the fundamentals is the only way forward. Jake explains how to get inside the mind of your target customer to understand their priorities and challenges and how to translate that into high quality messaging and great buyer conversations.

Gautam Rishi 

Perfect. Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining. Super, super excited today to have Jake Dunlop with us from Scale Consultancy. So huge background in GTM sales, working with a bunch of scaleups. So we're going to talk about outbound SDRs, AI, all things sales. So, Jake, I'll pass over to you. Introduce yourself and we can get into it from there.

Jake Dunlap 

All right. Uh, what's going on everyone? I'm Jake Dunlap, as he mentioned, CEO of Scaled. Um, we are a, what, 30, 40 plus person consulting firm. We do a mix of revenue operation strategy and execution. Uh, we're the largest deployment partner for many of the sales engagement platforms that you all might use. Um, you know, we do hundreds and hundreds of deployments and overhauls. And, um, we also do quite a bit of, um, you know, other rev ops value chain work, you know, how, how do we unclog certain bottlenecks to drive more deals or increase our sales cycles, both on the enablement, playbook side, and then the tech, the technical side. So I get a chance to talk to hundreds and hundreds of CEOs and VPs of sales that are, you know, trying to figure out outbound our latest report said, uh, that we did think said, what was it? The only, I think 20, 15% of teams were hitting their numbers, 15 to 20% of teams were hitting outbound. So I definitely have some opinions and ideas on the, you know, the, the people that are doing it, what they're doing and, uh, to make it work in this kind of this climate.

Gautam Rishi 

Nice. No, I'd love to get into on that, like outbound, why people suck at it, why people are good at it, what's working, what's not, what's changing. I guess before we get into it, like just a bit about your background before starting Scaled. We were just chatting before this, right? I think I started my sales career in 2004. I've got the gray hairs. How did you get into it? It looked like you were like starting as an AE. You went into a kind of

Jake Dunlap 

Oh yeah, I've got it.

In sales. Yeah. I was in sports. Yeah, I was in sports. I wanted to work in sport in, uh, in sports coming out of college. Like a lot of people, I was very fortunate. I got a job in, uh, with a major league baseball team right out of college with the Tampa Bay Rays, um, was in sports for about two and a half years. And, um, it was in Phoenix then at the time. And, um, there's a company at the time was one of the largest job sites called career builder. They were building an office. And so that was kind of my foray into, you know, tech.

Um, I was a sales leader there for multiple years. Um, got my MBA. Um, not a lot of sales leaders get their MBA. I can talk a little bit about that in a sec. Um, and you know, I've made a lot of moves in my career and I'm not, I'll just tell, I've always been very intentional in my career about taking on more responsibility over more money at all times, the money will come. I, I trust I'm going to live a decently long life. Who knows? Maybe I won't. 

But very early in my career, I was taking moves to get more responsibility, more responsibility, move up, be in leadership, et cetera, because I knew that over time it would max out my earnings. So I was the number one leader two years in a row at CareerBuilder. Because of the work that I put in there, Glassdoor came knocking. I was the VP of sales success and operations at Glassdoor. I built the sales organization, really the clock, you know, zero to 1 million in MRR in about a year. Hired 40 people in a year.

Um, scale that they ended up exiting for 1.2 billion in 2018. Um, was a left glass door after under two years went to another startup and then just realized, why am I doing this for other people? Why? Like the, the life expectancy of a VP of sales, it doesn't even matter how good you are, it's just like the stages you go through is I think it's down to like 16 months is the average or something. So I'm like, look, um,

I love building. I love sales. I love the art. I love the process and science of sales just as much as the art and technique side. And started scaled with the idea that I saw marketing had all this help marketing had, you know, marketing gets like PR agencies, web design, performance marketing agencies, uh, you know, like nothing like that existed for sales of like expert tactical support help. And every consultant I worked with in different roles is like great at giving me a bunch of reports.

And I'm like, what do I do with this? Like I need someone to help me to like get this shit done. And so I started Scaled really to kind of solve that problem, to be a tactical partner to these leaders as they're scaling, you know, bringing different like expertise, you know, similar to what, you know, marketing gets in, you know, the agency world. So that is a very, very quick.

Gautam Rishi 

is that? What is that? So like, coming in, so I agree, like, yeah, I've seen marketing, they get their content agencies, PR agencies, SEO agencies, ad agencies. Sales, we get training like sales training. That's about that's about it. You can go to like an annual, you know, like some sort of medic Sandler type training.

Jake Dunlap 

Sales training. And yeah, that solves everything. Don't get, don't get me started with this. Think, think about sales, right? Real quick. I just want to double click on that. What other part of the organization says, Hey, we have a problem. You know what we need? A four hour training to solve it. Hey, our accounting, our books are screwed up. You know what our, our CFO or you know, what, what they should do? Bring in a trainer for our accounts payable. No.

It's literally insane that sales continues to try to solve change management or foundational problems with a four hour training. Like it is beyond not logical. And again, we don't do one-off trainings. I mean, if it's a current client or part of a deployment, yeah, we'll do some workshops or, you know, an SKO or I'll do an SKO or something, but it is pretty mind blowing that sales, that training is the go-to answer for a lot of foundational issues. So I'll.

Gautam Rishi 

Why do you think that? Do you think it's because the business thinks salespeople are stupid, we're not good at our jobs? Or do you think that is? I'm thinking about it now.

Jake Dunlap 

I think there's a variety of reasons why we go there. One, it's cheap and it's easy. Change is not cheap or easy. And we would love it. It would be great if, look, training is fantastic if you're already at a 201 and you're trying to get to like a couple extra skills or tips, training is amazing for that, right? But if the issue is our team's not hitting outbound, just doing a training with them for a few hours on how to write better outbound emails, ain't going to solve the problem. Right? So it training has its place in the, this ecosystem, but I don't, I think sales leaders always want to move so fast and not invest the time it takes to actually make the change. And so they look for the shot in the arm option, and then they wonder why they're in the same spot, you know, six months later.

Gautam Rishi 

And that's it. And I've seen it, these enablement calls, they come in and they will do a bunch of cadence training and they'll make everyone sit there until they're like bored off their head by the end of the day. What do you do then? So like, give me an example. Like you go into a company, how do you help them? Is it just like just outbound? Is it rev ops? Is it deal management, qualification, helping poor performance?

Jake Dunlap 

Yeah, there's a lot. I mean, there's a lot that goes into it. Yeah, I mean, look, and I'll just give you all, whether you work with us or not, doesn't, you know, whatever, this framework you can apply to anything. You know, the first thing that I'll mention is we have to start to treat outbound the same way we treat performance marketing. And I'll just do a quick analogy and you can please try to poke holes in my analogy. If you have, let's say you have 10 SDRs or sales reps that are prospecting. Let's say you're spending on average eight grand a month. That's probably really low, right? Let's say 10 grand a month. That'll make it easier for me. So you got 10 people doing prospecting, 10 grand a month, that's $100,000 you are investing in generating a qualified opportunity. $100,000 a month. Marketing is spending $100,000 a month on Google AdWords. Marketing typically spends at least 10 to 20% of that budget.

to optimize it in real time. So marketing spending 10 to $20,000 to that 100,000 a month to optimize performance. Outbound teams are optimizing performance every six months. Like imagine if marketing hired an agency for Google Ads and they said, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna set up a bunch of your Google Ad words and keywords and campaigns, and then we're gonna check in six months. You'd be like fired immediately, never hired. So step one is that your organization has to have an optimization mindset that if you don't believe, if you, again, I, this is just basic math, which is if you are pumping thousands, hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of data points through a system, you have enough. It's called a law of large numbers. You have enough data to optimize it. And so, you know, for us, we try to get organizations in that mindset. Uh, um, you know, I need to, um, you know, go ahead and, uh, like.

And again, so step one is mindset. And then step two is just creating a team to do it. It really only takes a few hours, you know, every couple of weeks to do this. So, and you have to try to eliminate the opinions. Like I am very much, you know, for some reason I liked chemistry growing up. I don't really know why, but very much a scientific method fan, which in the scientific method is like, I have a hypothesis, I test the hypothesis, it works or it doesn't. There's no feeling behind it. I think this...

this, that we should send an email like this. I think we should do this. Cool. AB tested and then let the data wash it all out. So you have to, you have to make sure that you are looking at outbound, like an optimization exercise, the same way you would at Google AdWords. And that means changing content more, more frequently. And, you know, moving a step, like we've got, we've actually got a brand new data product for one of our partners, where I can tell you which step people are converting. It's like, oh.

Why are more people like what's happening at step four of this? You know, can we move that to step one? So that is the foundation of this. That if you want to be good at outbound, you have to have an optimization mindset. You cannot, this isn't a set it and forget it, you know, type of play to be successful. Uh, you know, today's climate.

Gautam Rishi 

Yeah, I like that. I like, I actually, I like, I was trying to poke holes in the ad analogy, but yeah. We are going through like ads at the moment. LinkedIn ads, we're a startup, we're spending like five grand a month. I had a growth comes up to me, it's like, hey, what do you think of these? What do you think of these like 10 ads? And I'm kind of like, I don't know, like this one's good, this one's bad, but like, I have no idea, right? And we have no idea what's gonna come out. We have no idea who's gonna click through. So the whole point was, we'll just test it.

as long as it looks half OK. And then in two weeks' time, we saw the data and it was clear what ad was working, what message was working. And we doubled down, tripled down on that. And this is interesting. I'd like to pick your brain on this. Outbound is a data. Outbound is a science.

It can be optimized. There's so many areas to optimize. ICP, seniority, subject line, length of cadence, channel, CTA, value prop, pain point, there's like 10, I don't think people understand this, right? I think there's so many, where do you start? Like, let's say we are a company, you're hiring your first couple of SDRs. You've been running, I just went to a company yesterday.

Jake Dunlap 

Yeah.

Gautam Rishi 

10 million in funding, they hired four SDRs, six months later, they fired all four SDRs. And they're saying outbound is not a channel for them.

Jake Dunlap 

Right. It was obviously their fault. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Gautam Rishi 

How do you start? What sort of data do you review? Where do you like, you know, there's a lot, and companies are doing outbound in a really bad way today as well.

Jake Dunlap 

Yeah. Okay. So let's, this, this is not that complex. Honestly, my friends. Um, it's the reason I'm smiling is, um, uh, myself, um, uh, Matt, who's been with me for eight years and Brad or have a rev-up strategy, we were actually, we ended up going down some rabbit holes. We were met for about an hour and a half, uh, yesterday. And we're literally kind of going through sequences that we had written for customers in 2015, eight years ago.

these sequences were so much better than what I get on a day-to-day basis. And let me tell you why they were better. Okay. That back in 2015, sales engagement tools as a whole hadn't really matured to where everyone is using them. So people's mindset was I've got to customize every email because I got to customize every email, there's no tool to automate this other than like a marketing automation platform. So people knew like, if I'm going to generate a meeting,

I'm gonna have to customize some things and personalize them. And somewhere in the last eight years, as these tools came to mainstream, we instead, we went the other way. We said, actually we can do more volume with them. And that's not what was meant to happen. It was meant to do more volume, like slightly more volume, but much higher quality, because you don't have to remember who to follow up with. But instead we moved to these sequences and cadences that were almost email only, very little personalization.

And then we wonder why it's not working. There's like, I mean, I was talking to another leader, I get hundreds and hundreds of cold emails a month. And I can count on one hand, maybe half of a hand, how many actually personalized anything. And by the way, personalization is like, not I see you're the CEO scaled, or congratulations on your fake success or whatever it is. Right, that's not personalization. And the answer is chat GPT.

And that's kind of the rabbit hole that we went down for Teams, which is there is no excuse now with chat GPT. I can quickly say, and I can even pull up a thread. You know what I'll do for the show notes? I'm going to send you guys a thread that you can share. But I can literally say something like, hey, I'm looking. Here's what my company does. Insert link to your product page. I'm trying to book a meeting with this company. Insert link to their About Us page.

Jake Dunlap

Based on trends in the industry, and again, you have to use web enabled chat GBT. Based on trends in the industry, what are the top three ways we can probably help a VP of engineering? Immediately pulls it up. And it does it with such a degree of accuracy that it is amazing, the quality. So the answer is, you have to do some level of personalization. Just because something isn't automated doesn't mean it's not scalable.

That is the number one fallacy in a lot of these organizations. They think for something to be scalable, we need to automate it. My friends, Tesla has human beings in their production line. It's not 100% robots. Human beings belong in the production line because it will increase the quality of the output, just like a Tesla. And so to really simplify it, that is how teams are winning. Is they're saying, look, we're going to lower our minimums maybe a little bit.

But my expectation of the quality and the smartness and cleverness has to go up, right? Like we're not gonna let you just hit send all as a part of it. So those are just some, you know, I guess like quick tips for what we're seeing.

Gautam Rishi 

Yeah. And that is interesting, like 20, like you say, 2015, 16 outreach sales loft, they started coming about, then prior to that, you know, I think there was like, was it Yes, where was like one of the

Jake Dunlap 

That's right.

Yes, where, yes, where, and, um, tout app for going back in time. Those are yes, we're in tout app had the market and just, but that's a really interesting one. They, they actually, let me tell you what's interesting about those two. Those two tried to do product led growth. They went bottoms up. They gave it away for free. Let reps use it. Same thing with Mixmax. The people that won that category went top down. They didn't go bottoms up. It's really interesting case study in, um, sales strategy, which obviously I'm a kind of a sales strategy nerd.

Gautam Rishi 

Yeah, they um, yes, we're like the first will let you send six emails to see them. They were kind of like I use them. They were like, and they were like, yeah, 15 bucks a month or something. It was cheap, really cheap. And outreach was like 1000 2000 bucks a year sales led motion. They let you test it for a week. And it worked, right? It worked. There was this moment where you use those solutions and people responded on email three. And there was that stat like 36% of responses come after email three and not everyone was using it. And then everyone got addicted to the drug of, wow, auto, the sequencing is mind blowing.

Jake Dunlap 

That's what it was, man. Email only sequences were working. So to be very clear, here's what happened because email wasn't destroyed as a medium in 2016, 17, it actually was, it actually wasn't the end of the world. The problem is we stopped training. People had a cold call. We stopped training people how to personalize. And so then what happened is we created a whole generation of SDRs that don't know how to do this. And so fast forward to like, okay, we burned that channel. Now we need to go back to how we're doing it.

teams don't want to go back to that. But not realizing it's the only choice. It hasn't been working for multiple years. And again, we do this survey every quarter. Every single quarter, the numbers are either very similar of teams not hitting outbound or they go down. Every quarter for the last, we've been doing this for a year and a half, two years.

Gautam Rishi

Yeah. And I think it was, there was a once upon a time, 5% was considered a good response, right? Then it was kind of like 3% was considered a good response, right? Now, like 1% is probably a 1, 1.5 is probably a good response, right? For most teams. And then out of that, maybe 80% of those unsubscribe, leave me alone, take me off your list. There was, but you're right with some personalization, it works.

Jake Dunlap

It does work. Like that's the crazy part. And there's just no, I just don't, I think what people need to realize too, if you're listening to this and you are a frontline rep, um, or even a manager, if you're doing what I just described, AI will replace you. Like if you're, if your skillset is logging into a system and hitting send and uploading contacts, it's over. Like that, that job will be gone in a few years. So.

Like if you don't know how to be clever and care about your buyer, and by the way, it's like these are the old school things. I need to understand my buyer and what they care about and be able to customize their message to them. This is what we, the same thing we did 12 years ago or 15 or 20 years ago. Um, if you can't do that, you will be replaced by AI. And same thing as a leader. If as a leader, I don't add value qualitatively, I I'll be replaced because chat GPT is really good.

Really good. I told this story earlier this week. I had ChatGPT help me to build a family operating plan for my family. I've got a nine and a five-year-old. And they're just bickering and always disrespectful communication. It built the most amazing operating system. We've already implemented it. And we made some tweaks to it, obviously. But my wife is happier. I'm happier. It is so transformational in its applications across sales and other places that.

The people that are going to be successful are the people that understand how to use these tools and are clever. And, um, sales in particular, I think is going to be dramatically affected by this if, if people don't start to do what I'm talking about and learn how to do personalization and get inside the mind of a buyer, which again, you can role play with chat GPT and it can help you with that. Um, you know, you're going to be in for a rude awakening in two to three years.

Gautam Rishi 

And it is really phenomenal. And I think you see a lot of noise on social where people will be like, I received this AI email. It sucks. I think my job is safe. And they'll just take a really bad example. I'm like, if everyone uploaded the manual written emails they're receiving today, I guarantee that AI email is better than 99.99% of the stuff without that.

And I think you may actually it's funny you mentioned that family OS we've got like a two and a half year old who's I mean, I'm in the UK I know how big Peppa Pig is as a show as a kid show. Yeah. And then I just went to track GPT and like my daughter's called Sienna like right Sienna bedtime story that she's a character in Peppa Pig and the story it wrote was unbelievable. And now I read her a track GPT bedtime story every night. It's brilliant.

Jake Dunlap 

Yeah, exactly. That's a really fun use case for it.

Gautam Rishi 

Yeah, and now in terms of how you're going in, you're advising scale-ups, enterprise companies on outbound, how active are you with ChatGPT? What use cases are you working on with ChatGPT? Is it just messaging or are you looking at other use cases? What are you thinking in the next kind of 12-18?

Jake Dunlap 

Well, this, now you're, now you're really opening up the can of worms here. So we'll, we'll put some links in the show notes to some of the things that we're doing. Um, we've built out a whole, um, sales AI prompt library and notion. It's 50 bucks to do it. It just covers costs for us. Um, so we've built out, um, the entire prompt catalog of everything you need to know about how to use it to generate more meetings, um, close more deals, work with your current customers, be a better sales leader, um, all that's in there. Uh, in December.

I was just in California. I recorded for LinkedIn learning the chat GPT for sales course as well. So I'm, I'm all over this and I'm just going to tease out a couple of use cases. I'm not going to talk about better messaging. We've already talked about that. Um, but think about the quality of research and maybe again, just like next, next level, like if you use the web enabled version of chat GPT, which all of you should be, um, I can drop in a link. I don't actually, I don't even need to drop in a link. It'll go find it, but I can say.

I'm trying, you know, let's say if you're working with like a mid-market company, I'm trying to book a meeting with this company, insert link to their investor relations page and the press release based on what they're talking about consistently as their top priorities for the company and insert link to my solutions page and you could drop three or four links. What are probably the top two or three themes that they're talking about where we can potentially help and I'm trying to book a meeting specifically with Jake Dunlap.

Here is a PDF of Jake's LinkedIn profile. Here's a link to three YouTube videos he did. Now help me to book a meeting with Jake with these trends, knowing his communication style and what's top of mind for him to enter. My friends, that would take you two hours to craft. I can do it in 25 seconds. So there is no excuse.

Gautam Rishi 

Yeah, yeah. And the quality, I mean, you cannot beat that quality of output. It's based on...

Jake Dunlap 

You cannot like I can get a 22 year old with no experience to sound like me who's been doing this for 20 something years. Like that is the promise of this stuff. And it's and it's delivering to be very clear. This is not it reminds me a lot. I talked to, you know, again, more senior leaders, even at bigger companies. And and the way that they talk about chat, GPT and generative AI in particular, it seriously reminds me of the Internet. Like it's like, yeah, you know, we're concerned about data quality and data privacy.

You know, if we give people access to it, it's like, it's the same thing people said about the internet. That's exactly like, I could literally copy and paste that conversation to 1996, you know, at a big company, like, well, if we give people the internet, they're gonna search. Yeah, they're gonna go to Pornhub. Who cares? It's much better to have the internet than not have the internet. It is much better to use these tools than not use these tools. Just so you guys know, chat GPT does not steal your information. It does not pull your information into this hive mind.

and your company data. That's not how it works. And all the things we're talking about right now aren't really proprietary anyway. These are all publicly available things to do. So that is just one example. Another one is think about role playing. Hey, and you can give it in custom instructions. You can say, hey, this is the persona. This is what we sell to, you know, blah, I want you to role play with me objections. And I want you to be a very difficult person to book a meeting with, go role play, bop, right? So skill building.

I can get 40 new meeting at BATS in a week. Used to take me my first three months to get that. And granted, it's not the same quality as a live meeting. But just the speed of quality work that is available for salespeople now to get better at their job is like nothing that's ever existed. So there's just so much opportunity there. And it's why for me, it's so exciting. And I'll drop some links in here too that you can share.

do a weekly webinar talking about this with my friend Kevin Dorsey. And it's that important for everyone listening to learn about these tools.

Gautam Rishi 

Yeah, yeah. And experiment, play with it for a week, take a use case that you're dealing with. I was thinking back to like, I went into my first leadership role, I think I was like 29. I didn't know what I was doing. And I remember I had to hire 16 direct reports, like eight SDRs, 10 AEs. And I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know how to be a leader. I didn't know. And every single one of the 16 people is a different personality. They learn in a different way. They take feedback in a different way. And I keep thinking, wow, imagine some of the chat GPT use cases I could have for my, like, speak to Jake in this way, or he's underperforming in here. And I was like, that could have made me become such a better, more efficient leader with way less stress.

Jake Dunlap 

That is a phenomenal use case. Phenomenal. And now let's take it a step further. Jake is, uh, Jake sucks at, uh, account planning. Right. And I got, I mean, I want to have a conversation. I'm worried he's going to be combative. Help me write a script to have this conversation with Jake and make sure he's combative in the script. Now let's take it a step further. Chat GPT helped me, uh, write a six week training program with 30 minute agendas focused on helping Jake get better at account planning, specifically at getting warm introductions and having executive conversations.

Add it will write a six week training program for Jake to get better at that. It would have taken me an hour or plus to put that together. And I probably would have missed one or two things. So instead I can do it in 25 seconds and then I can spend 10 minutes customizing it and it's a better quality than anything I could have came up with on my own. So the, the people development side, the leadership applications are very real. Very, very real.

Gautam Rishi 

Yeah. And that one of the hardest things about being a leader is obviously the people management side of things and you know, then different personalities. And it becomes stressful. You start getting like, for me, I would get like extra stress with specific employees or, and this would have just been a way for me to help me like, Hey, I'm trying to, I'm learning that this guy is pissing me off because he does these same three things every week. But they could recommend it like, hey, maybe try this, maybe do that. And I didn't have that voicing mentor leader I could go to for that. Final few kind of questions here now. You touched on outbound. Where do you see this heading? Like the next, there's like at last count, maybe like three months ago, I think there was 1 million SDRs in the US alone.

VC money is becoming harder to get round sizes are getting smaller, but there's still action. Where do you see the future sales team? Like is there are there going to be SDRs? Are we going to move to full cycle AEs? AEs going to work. Yeah.

Jake Dunlap 

Yeah, I've been talking about this. Um, uh, you know, it's tough to give like blanket advice. Here's what I would say that we're going to have to go back to doing, to focusing on quality and teaching people how to interact with other people because the bots are going to get really good at just interacting with themselves, right. And getting down the funnel further and further and further. Um, so I think.

Yes, you're going to see more teams go to full cycle AEs. We can't only, we went too far, you know, um, they, the SDR role is meant to be a training ground for AEs and it became a email content copywriting job. Um, so I think you're going to see, like, if we're going to have, you know, for the steps, we're going to need humans in the loop, we are going to have to make sure that we're investing in our people. And again, not doing a one hour training, but really it starts with onboarding.

Um, again, getting people up to like the most important thing you can do. And again, we've built a whole onboarding curriculum with chat. GPT with this, um, is get people up to speed on your buyers, the trends, what's happening in the space. I remember when I started at, you know, go back to career builder, I got a binder paper that was this thick. That was only industry trends. And then when I went into leadership that I would drill my teams on like, what is like the very first question when they asked me to count, what does the company do and how do they make money?

Right. That's my very first question. If you don't know what an industry does, a company does, what a buyer persona goes through, you can't customize anything. And so I think we've got to go back to where, whether it's an SDR or full cycle rep, we have to train them on the industry that we sell to the buyer personas and what they're going through and go from there, you know, so that, that I don't know which way to go. It's whatever your cost of sale can handle. Um, but I do always believe AE should own.

part of their own prospecting 20% at least. And I think you're gonna see more teams do go full cycle because it just creates a better customer experience too. The same person that's been trying to get a meeting with me is also on the call and can add value. So I think there's some customer trends that are pushing that way too.

Gautam Rishi

I’ve seen just and I don't have any data this is just my first hand experience I've seen that every company I've worked with the top performing AEs are always also the best performing like outbound they like they have that cadence daily cadence an hour two hours a day they're always top they're always top every time

Jake Dunlap

And because they know the buyer, right? It's not shocking to hear that, right? Because they interact with the buyer later. So they know what they hear and then can translate that into quality messaging. You know, even if you're not going to do call it personalization, it's about being relevant that I know what this industry is going through. Um, you know, one of my favorite chat GPT is I was like, okay, help me to write this, but use a lot of like this industry's jargon.

And like, and it can like teach you the jargon of the industry. And then like, you can add that to your outreach and that really separates you. They're like, Oh, this person gets it. Like, Oh, they know what Revpar is or whatever, if you're selling to hospitality. So. Yeah, there's a, again, there's a lot of opportunity for the people that are going to invest in knowing their buyer being relevant, et cetera.

Gautam Rishi

Yeah. I'll have a look at your prompt. I'll pay the $50 to have a look at your prompt list, because that sounds super cool. Because people have got so creative. I remember I came up, this was when I came up, where I probably subconsciously stole it off someone else, though. But it was, in the first line of the email, create a joke based on their persona or their previous experience. And it will come up with some absolutely brilliant. And we've seen some really good responses. People think like that's a, it just makes them laugh. They'll mention something about their previous company experience, where they're from. They tie it back to the value prop. You can get really, ChatGPT is funny. It has a good sense of humor if you can train it in the right way. So I recommend if you haven't tried the joke one, try that for sure.

Jake Dunlap

Yeah, there's a lot of things you can do there about raps and poems too.

Gautam Rishi

And just, yeah, I think that's how they get everyone hooked. They start off with the poems and then they get you to the jokes and then they, then they go from there. And final, final question for me in terms of like what trends you're seeing with your customers today around adoption of ChatGPT, AI, tool consolidation.

What are you seeing like market trend rise? What companies are doing?

Jake Dunlap

Yeah. Well, chat dbt, it's at, look, your reps are all using it. So just so you know, again, we've done some surveys. Um, 70% of, of sales reps said they're using it at least once a month. And I think it was 20, I can't remember the exact stat. Maybe it was 20, 20 to 25% are using it at least weekly, um, or daily. So your tools are, you're already using it.

Companies need to get a strategy for how to harness it at each step. And that's obviously what we do. Right. So we've got a series of workshops and some other things. And, and look, you know, we're a rev ops consulting firm. The reason I'm jumping all over this and I've been so, you know, public about a lot of this is just because of the impact. Like I, you will very quickly see like, wow, Jake, usually what happens to people like I never thought of that. And it's like, I'm just getting started. You know, like if you haven't thought of that, let me give you like 18 other ways that you can use it.

So I think on the chat GPT, it's about having a strategy. And obviously, hit me up and I can give you some best practices or just follow along. I post a lot of this stuff too and do webinars and things that are all free. Tech stack consolidation is very real. If you cannot, if you aren't doing a good enough job of tying what your product does to some type of ROI, you're going to be in trouble. And so it's going to be absolutely critical that, if you've got a renewal coming up three or four months out, do you have a way to track return?

You know, and do, you know, if you, if you think that you're, you know, your return is, you know, call it a productivity gains. Can you prove it? Can you prove that you can make people more productive? So I would just say, you know, on the customer success side, you're, you guys got to get to work that you are going to lose out because these other tools are like, well, you don't need all these other point solutions. Our tool can do most of this at like 70%. Um, and it'll save you $200 per month per rep. So if you don't want to be in that fat that gets cut,

You know, you need to have a plan there as a part of it. So I think it's, those are the two big ones is like, you're going to have to prove ROI consolidation is very real. All these people are coming into each other's space outreach sales, loft, Gong, uh, zoom info. Uh, there's pro Apollo, like those five right now are literally doing like. 75 to 80% of what all the other ones are doing. You know what I mean? So some of them do data, some don't whatever. Um, yeah.

Yeah. So anyway, that's, that's what I'm seeing. And, um, it's very doable to show ROI. You just, you can't be lazy. You can't just be reactive and look at, Oh, they're logging into the tool. Usage is, is an indicator. It's not the indicator. Right. So it's the real indicators. Are they, you know, are they driving the outcomes that they originally bought your product for not did people log in? And I think I'm not a lot of people do a good job of tracking that.

Gautam Rishi

Amazing. I think you've kind of covered quite a bit here. I think I'm kind of taking away from this, like, getting back to the fundamental. There's like getting back to the, there's AI, but there's getting back to the fundamentals. Like know your customer, know your industry, have your daily cadence, don't be lazy. We kind of went through this like predictable revenue, robot mode, loads of money flying about. And now AI is going to make up the people who want to get like a leg up on everyone else, this is the time to do it. But if you're not doing the fundamentals, if you're not looking at this at your business, you will fall behind, you'll get replaced. But if you use it, you will get ahead. It really is as simple as that.

Jake Dunlap 

It's so, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's, you're, the good part is you might hear what I'm saying. Um, and get nervous. It's like, we are still there. We are at step zero of this. You know, if you think the use cases I'm telling you now are bonkers, I mean, buckle up because it's just going to get more and more and, you know, I, that's what I did. I fired myself as CEO for about a week or so, and I just started getting deep into this and started playing with it. Well, if it can do that, can it do this? If it can do that, can it do this? And.

You know, even if you've been in the game for 20 plus years, you need to, you need to treat this like you just started, you know, you need to treat this like, you know, you just opened up Salesforce for the first time and had to figure it out. So, you know, don't be scared. It is what it is. Learn how to harness it and you're going to be in a great spot.

Gautam Rishi

Amazing Jay, I've absolutely loved it. It's great speaking to you. If anyone wants to follow you, find you, LinkedIn, where do we go?

Jake Dunlap 

Yeah, definitely check out. Yeah. I would say we'll drop some links, um, uh, for you all to check out some of the AI stuff and some of the things we're up to LinkedIn, I post every day on LinkedIn about different sales and technology related topics. So follow me on LinkedIn. This is Jake Dunlap. Um, check out YouTube as well. I'm putting out quite a bit of sales content on YouTube if you like videos and things like that. So, um, yeah, DM me on LinkedIn. Um, check out what we're doing with AI on the scaled side and in general.

And check out the YouTube. Let me know what you think.

Gautam Rishi 

Amazing, amazing. Jake, thank you so much for your time today. Make sure everyone follows Jake, and then we'll be in touch. We'll add those notes as well, and I for one will be getting that prompt list straight after this. Cheers, Jake, thank you so much. Cheers.

Jake Dunlap 

Let's do it, man.

Jake Dunlap

All right, thank you. I enjoyed it.

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