The S Word: Is AI replacing salespeople? ft. Cien Solon of LaunchLemonade

20:59Cien Solon:It was just a habit. He wasn't really, you know, I don't think he was even too aware that he was doing it. But it used to really get on my tits, which was if he didn't remember something, we'd talk and be like, oh, what's his name or whatever, just immediately would whip out his phone and Google it. and I hated it I was like wait like at least give yourself a chance like give yourself a minute to get the neurons firing you know like give it a sec to try and remember and I feel like this is where we're at now with just like defaulting to chat GPT with anything that whether it's like fun silly low stakes or just like well indeed if it is a sales camp but it's like it's just this total outsourcing of our creativity our originality of coming it's exactly as you some really glad that you listened into the interview i did with daniel you can't it needs a prompt it needs an instruction you still need to exercise your brain in a different way to then put it in and find the right tool yeah because i've got a cheeky question actually seeing as i've got you in the run so every now and again i'll be like i want to make an incredibly niche list of people and there's only so much that some of the tools that we use, which I'm not going to mention because you're not sponsoring us yet.

22:15Cien Solon:I have found that on occasion you can go to like ChatGPT and say, okay, make me a list of all the top female founders that just raised blah, blah, blah based in the UK. But it's a bit hit and miss. I've heard people say that there are other AI chatbots that might be better at that. Which one would you recommend?

22:34Steph Melodia:um i would try building a uh workflow instead of just one like kind of like i would like everyone

22:44Cien Solon:noted what's about to happen is shen's about to sell her product and uh i think we can all just say that that's maybe maybe she had some really yeah i could create a workflow tell me how that

22:57Steph Melodia:would work no actually i was gonna say a proper you know like not you could use long cheminade

23:02Cien Solon:No, I would like to use Launch Lemonade. How would I do it with Launch Lemonade?

23:05Steph Melodia:So on Launch Lemonade, we're actually building a marketplace and we're using a product, a kind of like a scraping tool called Appify. And then in Appify, you can connect a language model on Launch Lemonade with either kind of like a LinkedIn database or a Apollo database or Google Maps or whatever type of database they have it. Like they have so much applications that you can connect your LLM with or your language model. And you can produce any type of deep research, whether it's deep research of leads, of locations, of a list of businesses, a list of TikTok accounts, anything. And it's still a little technical to do this by yourself, but that's why we're making it simple on Lashamed.

23:59Steph Melodia:You just tell us what you want and we'll give you that list.

24:03Cien Solon:Yeah. And then if I wanted to go beyond, I could even start, you know, putting together what maybe the general idea of those messages should be.

24:13Steph Melodia:Yeah, so I have a workflow where I used five different language models in what we call a flow. And you have Gemini, the model from Google would find marketing agencies in London. And then the next step would find information about those marketing agencies that will be relevant to my prospecting. And then the next step would be conduct a SWOT analysis of each of those companies based on what you find on the research. And then the last step would be put together a direct message based on the SWOT analysis that we found. What's a direct cold outreach message that we can send on LinkedIn?

24:54Cien Solon:Which tools doing the SWOT analysis? Sorry. Is that a different one to Gemini?

24:58Steph Melodia:Yeah. DeepSeek. I use DeepSeek for the SWOT analysis.

25:00Cien Solon:And then what do you use to copyright the email? Right answer, which I think I probably learned from you in the first place anyway. But having tried with you, I'm just like clawed for any copywriting. 100 % not ChatGPT.

25:14Steph Melodia:And you just connect them together and then they'll run. You don't need different tabs or windows. They just run on one page.

25:23Cien Solon:That's really interesting. Glad that you broke that down on kind of the whole sequence and different tools along the way. Something else I wanted to talk to you about is agentic AI. So what you've sort of described here, I don't know if this is exactly the same, but it sounds to me like it's a workflow automation process with all this mix of tools through Launch Lemonade that you can plug into the sequence. But then a Gentic AI, where you give it the same sort of command, it goes out, it carries out the task for you. We've encountered from a sales perspective is that more and more people are starting to use a Gentic tools in their inboxes.

25:58Cien Solon:so an assistant that sorts through what's spam what's cold outreach what do i need to follow up with what can wait etc etc this has changed the game as it relates to getting past the gatekeeper for sales people so one thing is overcoming like spam filters especially when just talking about emails a have you ever heard of this before and b what advice could you give to help salespeople overcome these AI agents. Tell me how I can do sales better despite AI. We are cavemen.

26:33Steph Melodia:We just want to bang on door, get meat in, leave money. No, but it's an interesting question. And what we're actually building on Launchamonet, why we fundraised is we want a simple, easy-to-use marketplace where agents can collaborate together. So we think that the future is not just an agent that lives on your mailbox and sorts of your mail, but it's an agent that can work with another person's agent. So maybe your salesperson would have an agent that sends an email to your mailbox and your mailbox agent would look at the agent's email and then filter that email. I believe that by 2030, 50%, at least 50 % of all those tasks will be replaced by AI.

27:22Steph Melodia:They can't be doing, these agents can't be doing their work in silo. They will be collaborating together. They will be transacting. They will be working together on different things. Your business's agents will be working with my AI agents to book something or to buy something or to transact. So your sales AI, that could be an email AI or my sales efforts could be blocked by your AI agent. I think the technology will just figure out optimizations in a way to circumnavigate the filtering. Another AI will just say, oh, I'm going to create emails that don't get filtered.

28:11Cien Solon:And I wonder if almost it would get to a point where if that AI that's looking through the emails, if it's connected to like your strategy KPI page being like, actually, this cold, it could almost help salespeople in the future. This cold sales email is actually to do and is promising the numbers. So maybe you should look at it. I'd never thought about it in that it can it right now we're very much at that first step of, OK, cold email or whatever. But actually, it could be a good thing in the future that it then goes, OK, actually, yeah, you should read this cold email because it's linked to your priority list.

28:48Steph Melodia:Yeah. It's all going to get better. If whoever is selling is realising that none of the emails are getting opened and none of it's converting, you're going to come up with another way. And I think sales will look entirely different by the time that agents will be deciding what business to buy from. Give us your hot takes then.

29:10Cien Solon:You've given us your AI predictions for 2030. What does the sales landscape look like in 2030?

29:17Steph Melodia:We think it's going to be driven by some sort of matrix scoring. So and we're designing this. And that matrix scoring is something that is like Amazon reviews and transaction history. There are a lot of applications out there now, especially in finance, where once you enter your email address, they look at the age of that email address, transaction history of that email address, how many Airbnb's have you booked in the last five years, or do you have an Amazon account, do you have a GitHub account? And then with all that data, these banking and fintech applications now, they would ascertain how kind of like risky you are as an applicant.

30:04Steph Melodia:Are you high risk, low risk? Are you a bad actor, a good actor? And I think it's going to work this way as well, where agents would look at your credibility score, like how many tasks have you completed? Which companies have you worked for? What language model are you using? Is it a Grok model? Is it a ChatGPT model? Is it a Cloud model? So I think there's going to be some sort of matrix scoring that agents would look at and score other agents before collaborating together.

30:33Cien Solon:I guess then the good news is that there's different layers of salespeople that will lose their jobs first. I'm hearing SaaS, you guys are buggered. Pretty soon, you're out of there. They don't need it. They're just going to see the results. Does it work? What's the reviews? Easy. Public service provider, service provider, still got a little bit we've got. Don't worry, it's fine for all our service providers. We're going to be fine. But also, I think that so many more people are having to become salespeople that never had to be before as well. So it's one of those things. I think every time people talk about AI taking jobs, there's always this massive, and this is why I'm not scared and why I was never offended.

31:12Cien Solon:In fact, the only thing I didn't like about your little AI version of me is that you yassified her. She had eyelashes, little pink cheeks. She made straight AI tash. And that, I felt, was offensive. It wasn't like outwardly homophobic, but I guess it kind of just was like homo-nervous.

31:35Steph Melodia:I'm so nervous No, so we were in this like master class And I showed the people my TASH AI agents

31:46Cien Solon:Hilarious That's my ab workout for the day Sorrified But I think the big thing that And why I'm not scared And why I don't think that people should be scared Sort of to put a reassuring bow on the fact that 50 % of us Could have our tasks replaced easily by 2030 is AI does not take your job. It makes elements of your job easier. So if suddenly, the thing that all salespeople hate doing, which is outreach, is suddenly replaced. If 50 % of a salesperson's job is replaced and that 50 % is outreach and let's say follow-ups, they still need to pitch. They still need to close. They still need to create, well, and actually maybe they probably don't need to make contracts anymore.

32:28Cien Solon:But account management, looking after people, there are still going to be elements and it means that instead of spending all your time on minutia, I can use big words. OK, I don't like how hard you both laughed at that one. I did really well with my theatre and performance degree at university. Thank you very much. I scraped a tutu. Anyway, you can just be better at all the other stuff. Like, if I'm not worrying about that crap, I can be so much better at pitching.

33:00Steph Melodia:So this is a really good point. I think we're bogged down by the tasks AI replaces. Minutia, I think.

33:07Cien Solon:Yeah, the minutia.

33:09Steph Melodia:But we're not, you know, the objective that isn't the task itself. Like you can achieve the same outcome by doing other things. Right now, how we sell looks like this, but how we sell in the future will look different. So there are other things that you're going to have to learn to sell. But the selling doesn't change. We will always have to sell. Agents will have to sell. So I think that Tash should be able to sell services around training agents to sell. I think that's going to be... Yeah, you're going to help agents train. Train their eye models. Yeah, so that they know how to sell. So if I had a business and I have a sales agent so that I can sell to that business's thing, I'm like, hey, Tash, can you train this model for me?

34:00Steph Melodia:Can we get some information from you? Can you sell your data to us? And can you test the AI for this and that and this? I think that's going to be a future job, say, as people.

34:09Cien Solon:OK, yeah, I'll put that in my 2030 project plan then. I quite like that, actually. Yeah.

34:15Steph Melodia:It's just going to look different, but the role is there. The objective is the same, but the tasks to achieve that goal could look different.

34:25Cien Solon:You're so right, because what, like 20 years ago, a sales trainer would sit and say to someone, this is so funny because I was about to say, you need to hammer the phones, you need to go out and meet people in person. Knock the door. And then actually that is what I now say to people because all the online stuff has become too noisy. But then I think at a certain point, I think it comes and goes in trends. But yeah, 20 years ago, they wouldn't have even known what email automation was. Or maybe they would, but I had a really old school sales trainer 20 years ago. No, I was 10.

34:58Steph Melodia:It was my dad.

35:01Cien Solon:But, you know, like it wasn't even something that people really thought about. So I think we just need to learn and embed it into our lives.

35:11Steph Melodia:Yes. And it depends on what you're selling, right? Like I can see a world in 2030, not maybe 2030 is too soon, but like 2040, when people are hungry of kind of like the human connection that it might be a luxury for someone to knock on your door and we welcome the chat. And you're famous. Yeah, exactly. That could happen.

35:33Cien Solon:Yeah. And now, well, actually, there's nothing that I hate more than when people try and sell me things but knocking on my door. Except for there's one man, the fish man. He comes and knocks on my door maybe once a month. So you never know when he's coming and he just goes, I've got a van full of fish. What do you want? And you know what? Lovely, lovely fish. Yeah. Straight to your door. so it works yeah it's really good it is it's really good it's a really good fish a regular dose of microplastics delivered straight to your door xantador oh hilarious shen i always feel like whenever i spend any time with you i'm left feeling so much more optimistic about she shared all this good news and how it looks in the future any other kind of practical tools tips i really want to make sure you know listeners can like test something new execute like i think that always learning mindset is so important especially with ai like don't don't be afraid

36:35Steph Melodia:of it embrace it experiment try out different things you want to participate in this economy of ai agents this new economy we need to participate by having our own ai agents that can monetize for us that's one thing but how can we make that happen the first thing that you have to do is to transcribe your knowledge. You want to turn your expertise or what you're curious about, your experiences, into some sort of database. So you can transcribe it, open your voice note, just talk out loud or diarize, take a picture of your diary, and then put it into some sort of digital database and train a language model so that you can turn what you know into something that you can sell back to businesses.

37:22Steph Melodia:Are you a growth expert? Are you a Instagram expert? Are you an operations expert? Are you a sales expert? And what do you know?

37:32Cien Solon:You've definitely given me an idea. Could I? This is a question. If I wanted to do make some passive income and I did this, I created my own mini Tash. Is that something that I could like after I finished working with people saying, look, this is a thing you should buy, like plug in. I'm an idiot, by the way, when it comes to tag.

37:52Steph Melodia:I'm offended because we worked together for a while. But what I did... You need to know tech to be really good at sales. So what I did was I stored all our conversations and I stored the decks that you gave me. And then I fed it into an AI. And then every time I have a question, I ask, what would Tash do? Thank you. It's a 24-7 pocket that I have. I also have a Dan Kahneman one. So if you know Dan Kahneman, he's a behavioral scientist, is not the first Nobel Prize winner in, I think, behavioral economics. So I have pocket experts when I'm not sure what to email or when I'm not sure how to frame a message.

38:35Steph Melodia:I open my pocket sales coach and my Dan Kahneman and my experts. I'm like, what do I do?

38:42Cien Solon:Yeah. So it's literally, yeah. So I could recreate what you've already created.

38:48Steph Melodia:But with you.

38:50Cien Solon:but me and i could sell that on as like a little passive mini tash that's that is what the future is gonna be like i like it's still you yeah i'm happy to do that but it's just productized yeah well because i don't want i mean i love when my clients are like hey tasha got a question can i just whatever but there will come a certain point where it's not possible for me to be that for

39:15Steph Melodia:everyone exactly imagine if it was a chat bot that they can just whip out their phone like hey tash instead of actually calling you hey tash i got this message how can i respond to this i like it yeah all right i'll make a little ai tash you need to build your templates build your templates make sure that they're accessible okay and i am definitely building a mini scott galloway

39:38Cien Solon:I definitely want Prof G in my pocket, 100%. One thing that came up was the reluctance to upload our data, especially with that example you gave with like taking photos of like diary. So I totally see that it's a cost benefit analysis. Like I can see the upside. But what would you what advice would you give to people who are feeling a lot more precious about their privacy, their data, uploading all of this? Like is the juice worth the squeeze here?

40:10Steph Melodia:I get asked this all the time. I bet you do. Yeah. My first answer is, as a Filipino woman, and because I know that my data isn't well represented in these data sets, I actively, personally, personal choice, I'm not saying that you guys should do it, I actively opt in getting my data trained.

40:31Cien Solon:I never, and this is why it is so important to hear, like, different people, because I would have never thought or recognize that in a million years. I mean, I know that AI is racist. Often it can be. So, yeah, really interesting. It's a lack of data sets, right?

40:47Steph Melodia:So AI doesn't, these language models don't have enough data on certain demographics. A lot of kind of like the products that are building in health right now are trained in, you know, a lot of health data, but women are not often well represented in these data sets or Asian women or whatever, you know, like, so I, Actively. Interesting. I actively allow models to train on my data. Now, how we built LaunchLaminade is we don't allow the models to train our data because we have that. We know that small to medium-sized businesses aren't well-informed in terms of what data to process out to secure the data.

41:28Steph Melodia:So we've made it secure. But when I'm using Chai GPT-Claw Gemini, I opt in for train on me. Here's my data. So that's one thing. Now, if you've got apprehensions or concerns about your data, there are many things that you can do. One, don't upload any personal PII data. So personal identifiable information that includes email addresses and home addresses. So if you have someone's email address and their home address, you know it's them. Doesn't your VPN identify your location, though, or it's just not specific enough? The VPN doesn't get sent to the actual chat interface. Your IP address doesn't get sent.

42:11Steph Melodia:It's just what you input.

42:13Cien Solon:Yeah.

42:15Steph Melodia:So you can do that. So I come from finance, so I know the difference between what data I should remove in the input. Again, any identifiable data, any sensitive data for your business, you can remove that. And you have the choice. You don't have to feed everything. Think about the product that you want to build and then choose the knowledge related to that product and go from there.

42:39Cien Solon:I guess like your knowledge, your expertise isn't going to cause like that much of a threat. But I can imagine for a lot of people, that's still something to overcome, especially if they charge for it, if that's how they make a living. They're like, well, I'm going to like upload this all to the cloud and give it away for free. What does come to mind? And we don't have time to talk about this. And I know I'm like, I'll be bringing the tone down a bit, but it's the people who are in charge of this as well, which is like one of the very many reasons why it's so wonderful to have like a filipina woman running an ai startup at the moment because again like in such a tiny minority but it's like the male pale and stale like corrupt billionaires that are running the show with this like especially on the subject of like trust and what's going on is like that we've seen how that's been abused and manipulated in the past and the political connections and everything else.

43:30Cien Solon:Now we know that women of all race and sexuality can also be corrupt billionaires too. And it's important that we all try to achieve this. Women in male-dominated fields. Shen, go and be a corrupt billionaire. I love it. I love whenever I see a woman on the most wanted FBI list, I'm like, yeah, women in male domination. I love it. This is why Tash and I are the perfect doers. I go deep and heavy and dark and Tash brings it right the way back up again. I love it. I'm going to be very uncomfortable. Let's be silly. Tash, I know you wanted to ask about, we've talked a lot about AI in sales, but what about sales in AI?

44:19Cien Solon:Oh, yes. Okay, I'll hit you with one last question, which is, everyone always has different objections when it comes to sales. I have found that especially when it comes to AI companies selling, they have to spend unbelievable amounts of time building trust for people. And I guess it kind of ties into the data question. But what is your, for anyone who's watching that's like a head of an AI company, when someone says to you, I don't know if I can trust, especially with your consultant help. I don't know if I can trust putting AI into my business. How do you overcome that objection? What's the reassurance that you give people?

44:57Businesses never come to me to solve just the AI.

45:03Steph Melodia:Like, you know, I have an AI problem. It's not that I have a efficiency problem. I have a conversion problem. And then you say, well, we can solve that with AI. So business come to me to say, these are the problems that I have. How do we solve it with AI? And you can start your conversations with that. You don't just offer an AI solution. You offer a solution to the business problems. It just happens to be AI powered. Yeah.

45:30Cien Solon:But I guess like especially we're sat here recording this like at the end of 25. This is out in 2026. But it is AI, AI, AI, every bloody where you look, everywhere you turn. And what that has meant is with such an oversaturation, there's all the rumors of this being an AI bubble, is that it's like another AI. So I think there's that kind of cynicism that comes in with like if you've got an AI, it's like, OK, well, what is this just like a chat GPT rapper? like so i think there's that like taking it seriously if you're building an ai startup

46:04Steph Melodia:lovable is a billion dollar company and that is a rapper great response cursor base 44 there's so many ai rappers that are like unicorn startups in eight months in a year of being um uh conceptualized Another big word. I can't wait to go home and play Wordle.

46:28Cien Solon:I'm going to smash it. Game of Scrabble with Sophia. Oh, I'm going to win. What is it? We've had minutia. What was my P1 again? I don't know. You remember them now, hilarious. But that's such a good answer. Like, you know, there's no... Sometimes you need the big fancy sales answer. So sometimes you need the longest explanation and all of that. And sometimes you just need to go, OK, but what about lovable? Point at the facts. Exactly. Shen, thank you so much for being our first official guest on The S Word. I'm going to suggest a closing traditional challenge. I'm going to start potentially a new tradition, given that this is a sales show.

47:12Cien Solon:I have no idea what she's missed on. Tash has no idea. Shen definitely has no idea, given that this is all about the dirty word in business. sales. No, I know exactly what you're about to do. If you're not watching this on video, I'm handing Shen a pen. Oh, that's fun. Shen, sell us this pen. Let me just ask ChatGBT. No, do it. Do it. Ask ChatGBT. How would you sell this pen? Go on. That's how you do it. Hello. Hello. Hello. You've reached Launch Lemonade. I'm your virtual sales assistant. Which language would you like to continue in? I can assist you in.

47:52Steph Melodia:So we're going to use English, but I need your help right now. So I'm being challenged to sell a pen. How would you go on about selling a pen?

48:03Cien Solon:Selling a pen effectively involves focusing on its features and the benefits it provides to the user. Here's how I would approach it. One, understand the customer's needs. Ask questions like, what do you primarily use pens for? Or what qualities do you look for in a pen? This helps tailor the pitch to their specific needs. Two, highlight the pen.

48:27Steph Melodia:Can you pretend like you're selling the pen? Just give me a couple of lines to win the deal or to seal the deal.

48:35Cien Solon:Imagine you're at a crucial meeting and need to jot down a brilliant idea. With this pen, you're not just writing words. You're making a mark. Sleek, reliable and smooth. It's the perfect companion for your thoughts. Shall we make it yours today? Do you know what really annoys me? I'm sure everyone listening to this obviously listened to my episode with Steph before. But Steph asked me to sell the pen and I literally did the exact thing. I was like, you know how you've got that match. We were talking about a big contract. You've got that massive contract you want to sign. Imagine if you're about to get it sent to you and you didn't have a pen available.

49:11Cien Solon:right now I've got the pen that you need. It's full of ink. It's perfect. It's from a unicorn. So it's literally exactly what she just did.

49:19Steph Melodia:What I would do is ask Tash. Tash, can you look at my instructions and train my AI for me so that it improves better? So that could be.

49:31Cien Solon:Next job. It's a deal. Well done. Shen, thank you for coming on. Of course, classic. You'd have to pull out your AI to try and sell us this pen. That was very effective. thank you so much thank you so much for tuning in if you've enjoyed it why have you not already hit that like and follow button they were distracted by how funny and attractive if you haven't already please hit that like and subscribe button it really helps us out big support really hope you've enjoyed this if you have then we look forward to seeing you next time thanks a lot take care bye we have broken bread she's my friend i don't know if i'm her friend Simon was just looking for his phone Whose phone is that?

50:13Cien Solon:Is it your mum? I'm getting a call from Keeley It's not my mum Simon was looking for his phone Oh my gosh, wow This is hilarious He was looking for his phone