Where AI Is Actually Working in Revenue Teams with Alex Bilmes

0:10Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast hosted by John Kaplan and John McMahon. Today we're joined by Alex Bilmes, CEO of Endgame. Alex's team analyzed more than 30 ,000 real AI workflows across go-to-market teams to understand where AI is actually being used in production, not just where people think it might help. In this clip, Alex breaks down the areas where AI is gaining traction. Account intelligence, conversation readiness, deal acceleration, pipeline inspection, and team enablement. But the more important insight is that the strongest teams are not just using AI to generate outputs faster.

0:44For revenue leaders, that distinction matters. AI can help a rep build a deck or prep for a meeting, but the bigger opportunity is connecting the organization around the same account context, methodology, and customer truth. Let's dive in.

1:00So Alex, let's talk about in your survey, like really, you know, in a practical sense, how have you seen people implement AI where it's actually, let's say, working? Yeah. So survey, just to give a little color, we ran over a six month period, basically an analysis on 30 ,000 workflows. So it was 30 ,000 workflows. And we just looked at what people were actually doing. We took away any bias. We said, we're not going to have opinions on what people are doing. We're not going to come in and create any surveys because there's also some bias in those surveys, depending on how you frame the survey.

1:41we're purely going to look at usage data in production with customers that are actually using AI for real work and using it every day. And just to kind of break apart at a high level, what we saw the buckets to be, the buckets were number one account intelligence, which is just deeply understanding both internal and external data on the account. Very helpful because it usually take so long to do research on an account. Yep. Not just research. And maybe you can bucket this in research, but like, who are the people in the account? Who do we know? What are the stakeholders? What are power dynamics?

2:21What does the power map look like? How are decisions being made in the organization? So that was one. Two is conversation readiness. A lot of that is stuff that you'll be familiar with, meeting, prep, call debriefs, building decks for EBRs, QBRs. Three was deal acceleration. So how do you actually build things like business cases and other deliverables to accelerate the deal? There was pipeline inspection, which is what you think it is, and then team enablement. And it was interesting to see the usage and also how teams were using this in the different personas. So one of the things, and we talked about this a little bit that we found was most teams were using end game to better understand what was happening.

3:10And a lot more of the usage was really trying to figure out what was going on versus generating the outputs. You know, as I mentioned earlier, creating a deck, creating a document or an account plan is pretty easy. I can do that pretty well. Knowing what should be in those documents and and how well articulated they are to your value proposition, your methodology, your sales process. That was the really hard part. So we saw a ton of momentum across teams really trying to understand. The other thing that was interesting was the best teams would work an account from every different persona. So less silos, a lot less fragmentation.

3:54You would see SDR hand over to an AE. AE would bring in an SE. Sales manager, even CRO and CEO would be looking at that account. Some of my favorite examples were CEOs and executives that were trying to understand what was happening within some of their top accounts would come into Endgame and just ask a question. And all the context was there. And they can go talk to a customer without really having to go and talk to the rep as deeply. and so that continuity across different teams different functions was was a pretty interesting surprise I would say we had product marketers log in look at an account build a case study and get it approved in a day with the customers saying oh my god you've been listening to me for the last three years this is so incredibly thoughtful thank you so much for for sharing what it is that we did together in my language.

4:48And so a ton of compounding continuity when you have everyone working on the same information, that information is constantly updated. It's real time. It's grounded in your methodology, your frameworks. And so that compounding team and organizational interaction was what we thought was the most interesting and the most surprising. And who's choosing it the most? So the different personas that you outlined in the survey are the reps, some of the managers, and then also rev ops. So walk through what you saw from each one of those different stakeholders. Yeah, on the rep side, a lot of it is let me prep for the meeting.

5:30Let me come into endgame. Let me ask a question. What should I talk about in this call? What discovery question should I be asking? I need to build a deck. So we see a lot of deck generation. if you want endgame as an example to generate an our understanding slide for you it'll do it based on your methodology and frameworks again the deck generation part isn't that hard but doing it based on how that company sells and getting that right is pretty tricky so a lot of reps would use it to to sort of sharpen their kind of in-meeting interactions and have assets going into those A lot of follow-ups, kind of thoughtful, deeper follow-ups across every stakeholder within the meeting, as an example.

6:13A lot of prioritization questions. So we see reps coming in and saying, what should I be doing today? And again, when you have everything connected, you can get pretty clear responses based on your own data and information on where you can be most impactful as a rep. So on the rep, it was really mostly how do I make it much faster and easier to get better with customers? Kind of automate as much as possible of the mundane, repetitive stuff that reps don't really like to do and really customer focus. So we just saw a lot more, a lot more momentum on showing up to meetings, way better prepared, better messaging, better documents in a lot less time.

6:57Sorry, can we take a step back and, Alex, explain what Endgame is? Where does it sit? What does it do? Because I'm assuming that you've piqued the interest and there's going to be a lot of people listening that are going to be like, is this a platform? What is it? Endgame is a centralized intelligence platform. We basically connect to all of your internal data methodology. So we'll pull in data from Salesforce and Gong and Slack and email and all your enablement assets, methodology, messaging. we turn that into a synthesized knowledge and context graph that makes it very useful for LLMs to ask questions on top of.

7:44And then we have different interfaces. We have an endgame app that looks pretty similar to a Cloud or ChatGPT that's purpose-built for go-to-market teams. And a lot of our customers use our knowledge in Cloud and ChatGPT and interfaces they already use to get much more accurate, consistent, source-cited answers to their questions. And so it makes it such that you can connect all of your organizational knowledge to a single system that can look at every single part of your business. And that information is available across any surface that you work in. And reps use it a ton to answer questions and basically build artifacts.

8:28Do the other 15 AI tools that we have purchased, do those go away? What happens? What we're seeing is a pretty big change in what build versus buy means. And so you have a lot of go-to-market engineering teams, rev ops teams, technical teams that are building agents. What I think it looks like is you end up having a lot of your traditional systems of record, a Salesforce, a Zendesk, an enablement system, a Gong, what have you, that are not really built for interacting with agents. And so you're going to have a layer, whether it's endgame or someone else, that basically turns all the data you have into knowledge that agents can execute on and makes that available in whatever interface, whatever team is using.

9:19and we're seeing a pretty massive move towards Claude, Claude Cowork. Teams are building all kinds of crazy agents on top of that. Some still use ChatGPT. I don't know what the flavor of the month is going to be next month because the world is changing so quickly. But I don't believe you're going to be effective unless you can have that centralized intelligence across the entire organization available to every human and agent. And that centralization is what I think really matters most. And I think that will have a profound effect on what other tools and systems you need. Like we're seeing teams turn off of traditional enablement systems pretty frequently because you can now connect your methodology and kind of value frameworks enablement content to an LLM and make it useful for a particular situation in a particular moment in time.

10:17So I'm getting ready for this meeting. What discovery question should I ask for this prospect based on the last call we had, their industry, their vertical, what our messaging says we should be doing? It's a much more specific and personalized way of interacting with that information.

10:44Alex Bilmes: 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.