Mastering Sales in the Era of AI from Victor Antonio

0:00The search engine results page is dead. Brad sugars is going to create a Brad dot AI. Victor Antonio is my guest here today. He's super salesman, built the whole sales thing, then he went into training and teaching sales. Sales, marketing, and one could argue customer service have to merge. Wrote one of the first ever books on AI and sales. I can't train somebody on 100 ,000 SKUs, but I can train my AI to know every product, every specification, and how could you compete against that? Let's welcome Victor Antonio to the Big Success Podcast. How do you define success? What is success in Victor's mind?

0:34To me, it's quality of life. And that is the ability to have options to do what you want to do. What's Victor Antonio's methodology that says, this is how success happens. I believe you have to have a banner. I'm very specific in a niche, right? So I picked a niche sales training. It was too broad. And then I read a book by Dr. Robert Cialdini called Influence, right? Yeah. Which talks about behavioral economics, which I'm sure you know. And so at that point it hit me, you know, why don't I talk about instead of how to sell, why don't I talk about how to buy? So I came up with the phrase sales influence subtitle, finding the why in how people buy.

1:05And I told myself, I'll look at it from a neuroscience standpoint, and that would be my differentiator. But then I said, I'm all in. So if somebody says, Victor, do you do teamwork? No, I'm not doing that. Do you talk about leadership? No, that's not what I do. I do sales influence, that focus right there. I kind of staked out a claim in the sales world. And then I started just creating content on a cadence after that. I think I was doing like three or five videos a week on different snippets. The best way I can describe this, Brad, is that because I was putting content out, right? And people are like, why are you giving away for free?

1:35Why are you giving away free? They didn't understand content marketing yet. The way I explain it to people is, look, I got right now, I think I have about maybe 1700 videos on YouTube, right? People say, well, Victor, if you give it away, why would they hire you? Or why would they buy into your sales velocity academy? I said, it's like a box of a puzzle box. You ever do a thousand piece puzzle box? I'm putting out there a thousand pieces, but I give people the puzzle box without the picture. In other words, they got to come me to put it all together. And that's how I view my marketing strategies.

2:01How do we succeed at having influence in sales? When I decided to do sales influence, again, I give Robert Cialdini the trigger point for me getting going in that direction. I started studying that people are now more informed than ever, even more today. In 2011, there's a book called The Challenger Sale that came out by the group called CEB, which is now part of Gartner. And they said that the buyer is 57 % into the buying process. And I remember that was interesting. 57 % of the buying process, which means they're more than halfway to making a buying decision. I would argue that today, that number is probably 70, 80%.

2:32And when we get on the subject of AI, that's probably going to get to 80, 90, maybe a hundred percent, and they'll just make decisions. So I realized that buyers are smarter than I do. You can't really sell them because they have the information. So fast forward, if I were to divide the world of selling, it'd be pre-internet and post-internet. Pre-internet, you can sell to them. That's when you get value proposition, and willing to spend time, blah, blah, blah. Now, because they have the information, we have to figure out how they buy and then align our sales process with how they buy. And that's where that came from.

2:59If I understand how you make buying decisions or what holds you back from making a buying decision, and I can figure that out, then I can sell to you more effectively without pressuring you. So I use the word pressure for pushing and selling. Nudging is guiding you to a decision that I know you're going to make if I present things in the right way. How do we succeed to creating the right sales strategy? That's a big question because that's either a B2C or B2B question, right? And today it gets a little more complicated because again, you can create a sales strategy. In fact, let me back up. This is really interesting.

3:28I was doing some research for a presentation, again, on AI, and I found something really fascinating. In 2018, the average salesperson was spending about 35 % of their time in actual sales activity. Fast forward to this year, that number has gone down to 33%. Well, how can that be? How can they spend less time on sales process when they're getting more sales enablement tools? Companies are investing in all these tools. Every salesperson has a tech stack of seven to 11 different product stacks, right? So that was interesting. What's happening is we're giving salespeople more tools, but I think we're focusing on the wrong side of the equation.

4:02What we want to do is go to the other side of the buying place. Again, the buying side, because what we have to do is make it easier for customers to buy. And so when people say, what's a sales strategy, we have to understand that sales, marketing, and one could argue customer service have to merge. We can't treat them as silos anymore. And for the first time, I can't believe I'm saying this because I used to ridicule marketing. Remember that, John, want to make it a line? 50 % of my marketing works. I just don't know where it's 50%, that whole thing, right? And so now marketing is the driver of sales, of qualified leads.

4:32And so we need to shift more money over to the marketing side because they're the ones that are conditioning the buyer along the buyer journey. It is that last mile. That's where the salesperson comes into play. It's that last mile to get them over the hump. And so there's different books out there about sensemaking, helping them curate the information, guiding them towards that final decision, being a Sherpa in sales. And it is that last mile where you won't get rid of the salesperson. How do you see we're going to change sales in the coming years, two years, five years, using AI? So the two big things I talk about in my predictions is first one, the search engine results page is dead.

5:09It's on an asymptotic curve, approaching zero, but never getting there. In other words, how we do searches, we're not going to see those pages anymore. What's going to happen is Brad Sugars is going to create a Brad.ai. That's his digital twin. And Brad's going to say, okay, look, I'm looking for a camera. I'm wanting in this price range, these specifications, find me the best three, and then suggest the best one. And then if you're bold enough and you trust your digital twin, Brad, you're going to say, and buy it while you're at it. You know, that's what's going to happen. So no more going in there and doing Google searches.

5:39That's one big change. And then the other one is, is the cloning that's going to happen. Because if you were to hire a person with a bachelor's degree, well, okay, that means they went to four years of college. If I need somebody with a master's degree at two more years, if it's doctors, probably at three to four on top of that, right? Now, I don't need to do that. I can program within code, a graduate, right? And then I can what? Load this graduate with all the content. I could train it with machine learning. I can use test set data, train it on all my products. So if I'm a company like Wayfair, I think Wayfair is an interesting study.

6:13Wayfair has, I don't know, 100 ,000 SKUs, right? And so I can't train somebody on 100 ,000 SKUs, but I can train my AI to know every product, every specification. and how could you compete against that? Now imagine you're a company, you have only, let's say, 100 SKUs, doesn't matter. You can train them. And every time I have a new product, guess what? I just train the machine on the new product. So I then take that chunk of code and I copy it again and I duplicate it again and I create as many virtual employees as I want. And guess what? Almost near perfect recall. That's how it's changing. So I don't, the call centers, I think you're going to see this massive devastation in the call centers.

6:52We're going to see call centers It's almost like the dial phone or those phone booths. That's what I'm going to say. You used to what? You used to put people in a bullpen with a phone? Yeah, call centers. Why would you do that? That's what's going to change. So I think countries that have depended on call center business, I think that stuff is going to be impacted over the next three to five years greatly. And that's a big success podcast for today. Hopefully you took a lot of notes, learned a whole bunch. And if you need to go re-listen to it, we dropped a lot of information right there today.

7:21Big success is what it's all about. And by the way, if you haven't subscribed, hit that subscribe button so you're here with us every single week on the Big Success Podcast. I'm Brad Sugars. That's BS. Big success is what we're shooting for. Check the show notes for all the links. Make sure you follow through. Keep learning. Keep coming back. Oh, and by the way, share this with any of your friends who you know are up for success. I'll see you next week on the Big Success Podcast. You've been listening to the Big Success Podcast with the number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. To learn more about how to achieve business and personal success, as well as how to level up or listen to past episodes, visit www.bradsugars.com.