AI Selling Rewards Curiosity | Workflow Discovery with Seong Park

0:10Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast hosted by Jon Kaplan and Jon McMahon. This mini-sode features Seong Park, SVP of customer support and services at Cursor, on one of the biggest shifts happening in go-to-market right now. AI selling rewards curiosity more than certainty. Song breaks down why the real work starts after Signature, why workflow discovery matters more than a pilot, and what leaders need to understand about guiding customers from experimentation to real business impact. Let's dive in.

0:42What about that AI champion you're talking about as it relates to, I'm just going to play the other side of it, I'm a CFO. So I don't want an AI champion going out there and signing up 15 different AI companies because I got security issues. It's going to get sticky into workflow. So it sounds like it's going to, by the very nature of things, customers are going to try to push you into pilots. Always. Okay. So now even more, it sounds like to me that our ability to really qualify, not just getting them to sign up because it can stay in an AI lab for a while. because I would think that you guys got to get it sticky.

1:20You got to get it into something that impacts the business. It's got to be a critical workflow, blah, blah, blah, all the stuff you just said. Tell me about the challenges of that as it relates to the go-to-market experience, even pre-sales and post-sales. The former way of selling rewarded certainty. Yes. Right? Yeah. If you think about where we are in kind of the AI era, We're actually more rewarded on curiosity, on experimentation, workflow discovery. How do we like manage all these things in a way that, again, it's going to be kind of unique to each customer. And then and that's what I mean by the real sale starts after the signature, right?

2:06Because then you get exposure to all the inner workings of a customer. So it's kind of like our responsibility to, again, understand those things and help them drive the experimentation, help them drive their own kind of curiosity to figure out, hey, what does the shape of our engineering team look like? What does our workflow kind of materially change, right? Because instead of spending the majority of their time doing coding, guess what? That gets compressed because you've got tools that almost remove all that like work that developers have been doing, but it gets pushed out into other areas of that development lifecycle.

2:39It's change management, right? For decades, we've been talking about change management with digital transformation, application modernization. This is yet another flavor of it, but it happens at such a velocity and scale that I think it's kind of a free-for-all right now. Because if you think about customers trying to figure out their own strategies on how to be more AI native, you have on one extreme, right? We have a customer who's got tens of thousands of engineers. There's a mandate to go and basically uses many tokens, unlimited tokens, to go and build. And then you have customers who are doing this thing called token maxing, where it's like, hey, no budget, just go.

3:21And so finance steps in and says, hey, John, what are you guys doing over there? And then you've got other customers who are just kind of dipping their toes into water and looking around the room and seeing like, hey, what is that company doing? And should I just kind of follow suit? So it's a wide spectrum of, again, customers that just, again, are looking for help and guidance. And I think that's the moat that we build is how do we drive this like partnership that, again, we experiment together. We drive this, again, this very almost like a joint discovery session. You guys are guides, you're Sherpas.

3:53Exactly. And then we come out of this thing with like, hopefully something great that like moves the needle forward for that customer in terms of them shortening times for design to production for whatever app, right, that they're building. And I think that's the magic, right, because we have the ability to like have a front row seat to it, but also an ability to like materially impact and change almost fundamentally how a customer and a company does business. going back to value realization, it used to be that when you sold to an account, because you sold to that account first, you could lock that account down substantially and keep the competition out.

4:34But to your earlier point, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing in a lot of these bigger accounts. And they could have your competition in that account. And if you can't realize value for them pretty quickly, chances are the competition will find a way to get you out of there. Absolutely. Yeah. This is a nice thing. Go back to the profile though. Where are you finding these people? Because these people didn't exist before. So where are you finding them? You finding them like tech guys that have like a sales, some sales characteristics inside them? You probably certainly not finding sales guys that are technical experts at this, right?

5:08Yeah. I mean, there is a fair bit of technical depth and expertise you need, right? So you find them. I mean, we've had success with a few product managers that have kind of made the shift to go to go to market, right? Where they're working in the domain and learning, obviously they're coming from a very credible space and are open to learning and being coached up on account management and kind of the soft skills, you know, exception handling, competitive positioning, obviously, you know, we're putting a lot of investment and time into this transformation team that JP is running, which is going to, again, change fundamentally sales process and methodology, our qualification frameworks, but also how we differentiate, how we message in position.

5:49So I think that's going to come as a very good investment. Looking at pre-sales people, right? Because again, that is a very easy evolution. They just have to kind of grok the change that, hey, I'm no longer like core sales team. I'm like part of this, like other customer success function. So they have to kind of remove any bias or any like type of preconceived notion that, oh, CS is bad because we pay well here too, by the way. And then there's this like, oh, the real challenge is like the minute the customer signs, how do we do this long tail of all this work that is actually not that dissimilar from what you're already doing today, right?

6:28So I guess by the time this airs, I'll have one of the leaders here, which we both know, Frank Lampreya is coming over to run. Okay, great. One of the functions. Yeah, Frank's amazing, right? He's probably one of the best pre-sales leaders, but he's like, hey, this totally makes sense. I want to try this thing. But more importantly, I know he can do this thing because it was an easy kind of evolution. I have another pre-sales leader coming from, well, he was at MongoDB and was at Google, Tosin Ajayi. But he's also someone that's going to help run kind of the technical solution architect team that sits in customer success.

7:01But guess what? It's kind of like pre-sales in disguise in some ways. So find a lot of talent that way. Um, also, um, customer success, architects, professional delivery, again, consultants, management consultants who again, have this kind of AI native like mindset are also very, I think good fits for the role. And I'm going to put a, I'm going to put a little plug out there for people that are listening to this and going, I'm not any of those. What the fudge? So let's just settle down for a second because the more that things change, the more they stay the same. And let me just give some spirit.

7:39I believe, and I think Brian even said this, that the greatest sellers on the planet have always been the one that have had one foot in technical capabilities. and whether I have those technical capabilities or not, it's about the customer's technical capabilities and it's the customer, excuse me, it's the company cursor's responsibility to educate me on the technical problems and challenges and to give me dialogue so I can have one foot in this technical world and my job as a seller is to connect that technical world to business outcomes And before people are like, yeah, yeah, I do that. But I could stay in IT and sell a technical solution with some good post sales people.

8:27And we do a deal now with consumption and outcome-based pricing. Now it's going to be, not only do I have to attach it to the positive business outcomes, like you said, so I have to have my foot in the technical and the business world, but I also have to understand their specific workflow. And that is the skill. if I'm talking to people out there, if you don't understand workflow and you don't understand how these people are using your solutions or currently using their own, that's where I'd spend some time. Company owes you the knowledge about the technical. They owe you the knowledge about how to connect it to a business outcome.

9:07Your job is to understand what that workflow looks like. And I've just found a lot of, I'm giving sellers a lot of spirit because, you know, listen to this, they'll be like, well, I'm not a McKenzie person. I'm not, I didn't come from a technical, but if you really analyze it, it's, it's getting back to really good basis. And also the companies out there, you don't want to be hunting for unicorns. You want to take the real savages and you want to make sure that they have the right arrows in their quiver. And I think, you know, by the fact that you hired JP Boland, that's exactly what he's probably looking to do.

9:44Is that correct? That guy's okay. He kind of knows what he's doing. Yeah, he knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing.

9:52Seong Park: Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe, rate, and review the show to help us reach more people. This show is brought to you by Force Management, where we help companies improve sales performance, executing the growth strategy at the point of sale. Check out forcemanagement.com for more information.

10:15I beşet Vino.. RC 2020 & WERE PAć BELแ

10:35แ