Reshaping Business with AI: Insights from Sales Master Victor Antonio

0:00Welcome to the Big Success Podcast. Cutting-edge conversations on business and personal success, as well as how to level up. Here's your host, number one business coach in the world, Brad Sugars. Dang, we covered so much on sales success. See, on the Big Success Podcast, you know we talk about success, right? Well, Victor Antonio is my guest here today. He's a super salesman, built the whole sales thing. Then he went into training and teaching sales. A lot of it's from the buyer's side, the sales strategy. and with the way marketing is impacting sales today and how the salespeople have to take customers that are far more educated.

0:39He's got an engineering background, so that'll be the whole thing. He wrote one of the first ever books on AI and sales. In 2017, he wrote the book and it was released in 2018. I think he's getting more stuff on that today. But we look at how he's actually teaching you to scale up your sales, to do massive things in your sales. Not just that though, But how to be successful in all areas of business, I think you'll learn a bunch of it. So he's got international experience, worked all over the world, built with tech companies, sales and tech companies. He's the man. Let's welcome Victor Antonio to the Big Success Podcast.

1:14All right, Victor, we got to ask you the first question here on the Big Success Podcast. How do you define success? What is success in Victor's mind? I used to think it was money, Brad. I got to be honest. I used to think it was money. You know, I had a poor upbringing. I'm not going to give you the whole violin story, but when you don't have a lot growing up, you think money's the key. Over time, though, I've realized, I always call it quality of life now. QOL is what I give it. To me, it's quality of life, and that is the ability to have options to do what you want to do. I think that's the key.

1:43That's the key. Where did it change then? Where do you think, in your mind, that shifted from money to that? How did that shift? I made a jump. My background is I started out in engineering. right and so and i the reason i went into engineering was to make money right so i thought that was it went got my degree got into engineering didn't like it so then i moved into sales because i wanted the money and so i moved into sales became very successful in sales at the time i was president sales and market it was 420 million dollar company and i remember i i wasn't happy man i just wasn't happy and i'm like you know how is this possible and i remember talking to my mother and she's like, you know, you want to quit?

2:27I go, yeah, I don't want to do this anymore. I felt like Forrest Gump when he's running and he stops. He says, I just want to go home. I felt just like that. And that was the first time I realized that money will only make you happy up to a point. Now, I always say money won't buy you happiness, but it will buy you options. And it bought me the option to actually go on my own and launch my own business. I love it. I love it. So if you think back in your life, When do you think you chose success? Like, was success something that was just natural to you? Or was there a point in time where you said, I'm going to be successful?

3:01I think I just wanted to get ahead. And I'll define what that means. Is I've been motivated from, I think, from day one, so to speak, with fear. People always think, you know, I embrace fear because I think when I'm afraid, I run faster. And so when you don't have a lot, you're afraid to not have any. So you work hard for it, right? You put in the time. And so fear is my greatest motivator. There wasn't a time where I can say, because everything in life is transitory, right? You know, you can have one good day, then another bad day. Things can go well one year, then bad another year. And I think it's trying to find that balance zen, right?

3:34You know, there was, I think it was Lao Tzu who said the greatest disease is to be for or against. And I've always loved that because it talks about the middle way. And I think success is about finding that balance. You want to make money, but at the same time, you don't want to make so much money where you're burdened by other things. For example, I have a lot of friends who are killing it. I mean, Brad, just making big dinero. But they're working hard, man. You know what I mean? They're working hard in their sacrifice. And they're doing the 70, 80 hours. And I believe in family, right? I've been now married, I think, 37 years, right?

4:05And that, to me, is the biggest success I have because we have a great family life. And I bring it back to quality of life. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. The quality of life. You know, it's interesting. Progress. I mean, I was having a debate with a friend the other day about progress and success. And, you know, is a dollar burger progress and success when it actually kills the planet and kills the person later on sort of thing. I love your definition, quality of life. So over the years, then, you must have created some sort of a formula or some sort of a methodology that says this is how success happens.

4:41What's Victor Antonio's methodology that says this is how success happens? So there were two moments. So I quit that job, right? This present sales market is big dollars. I quit. I don't have a plan B, but I know I don't want to do that anymore. I have what is called that quiet discontent. I can't do that anymore. And years ago, I saw Zig Ziglar speaking, right? And I said, one day I want to be a speaker. So it's a dream I tucked in my back pocket for quite a while. And finally I said, all right, now it's time to pull the trigger. And I did the total unplug, right? Which I don't recommend, by the way.

5:15I think you should have a gradual entrance ramp into another career. But I just pulled the plug, which is the dumbest thing to do. And thinking back, I'm like, oh. So anyway, I'm thinking this is going to be easy, right? Write a book, publish it, successful, money, make it rain, that whole thing, right? Total delusion, right? And so I remember my wife was like, okay, if you're sure, go for it. Her fist was up in the air like, yeah, you go for it. Right. And then after the first six months, I made a whopping 17. That's one seven,$17 ,000 in the first six months. Right. And my wife's like, OK, so what are we doing here?

5:53I said, no, this is what I want to do. I know what I want to do. She's like, OK, but the fist wasn't that high, Brad. It's just like it was. Right. So I had to figure this out. So so I remember there's a speaker, is a great speaker by the name of randy gage i don't know if you know randy gage yeah so i went to one of randy gage's uh marketing seminars right because this is the man right this guy just knows how to market knows how to build business great speaking career and i remember at lunch i wanted to sit next to him brad because i wanted to like just dude i got to get the information direct from the source right so i sat next to him and i said randy and i start you know i i start doing the violin story i tried this wah wah wah that didn't work and i'm just i'm just crying all over his soup, so to speak, right?

6:36Finally, if you know Randy, right? Because he's pretty blunt. Randy goes, Victor, let me ask you a question. And I always tell people when someone says, let me ask you a question, I can assure you that it's not going to go your way, right? So I said, let me ask you a question. I said, what, Randy? He said, Victor, what business are you in? I said, speaking business. That's what we've been talking about. He goes, no, just like that. No. What business are you in? I don't know. I'm in the training business. No. What business are you in? And I like, you know, I, you know, I'm like consultant, you know, I was trying to come up with something funny.

7:11I got so frustrated. The Chicago side comes out of me. I said, all right, you tell me what business I'm in. Apparently I don't know anything. He says this to me without missing a beat. He said, Victor, you're in the marketing business first, everything else second. And you know, when you hear something, Brad, that you don't want to hear, it's like cognitive of dissonance. You're like, and my immediate reaction is like, screw you, Randy Gage. But the more, but you know, when you hear the truth, it like hits bottom after one. I go, he's right. Right. This is, he's right. And this was around 2007.

7:42Now here's, what's interesting around that time, Gary Vee publishes a book, right. Called, I think it was crushing it or crush it. Right. And Gary Vee was like all video, all video, right. Around that time, Google buys YouTube a signal to me, all video. So I'm hearing Randy marketing. I'm reading Gary V. He says, video is the way to market. And I pushed my chips all in on video. And that's when it all changed for me. I pushed it all in and all that happened. And I remember there's that, there's a Sun Tzu phrase that says, attack your enemy where they're weakest. And at that point you had all these great sales trainers out there.

8:17And I said, but what aren't they doing? Video. So I went all in on video. And that's actually how I got my speaking career, you know, in the air, so to speak. So let's break that down then. What is the formula behind that success then? What's the methodology? Is going all in a part of that formula? All in on, 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? 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?

8:55So I came up with the phrase sales influence, subtitle, finding the why in how people buy. And 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. And so that focus, 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.

9:28And 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? Why are you giving away for free? They didn't understand content marketing yet. Right? Yeah. And the way I explain it to people is, look, I got right now, I think I have about maybe 1700 videos on YouTube, right? 1700 videos. 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? He says, think about it that way.

9:59I said, I'm putting out there in 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. Yeah. Yeah. And that's how I view my marketing strategy. I love it. I love it. I always think of the fact that if giving it away for free didn't work, then no musician would ever have anyone at their concerts. Like it's all on the radio for free, dude, but they still want to come to the concert type thing. So let's flip it over then because there's times in life when we don't succeed, when we have failures. How do you learn to succeed from the failures?

10:33oh god that you know it's one of those things that you have to have something and i know it's gonna sound so cliches but you really have to have something that pulls you into the future something you really want badly enough i can't tell you that i could see myself as a speaker i saw the image of myself as a speaker i saw you know what i mean it just it was that the vision was so compelling that it's like i for me it was the moment when i saw zig ziglin i think this was like circa 93. And I go, that's it. But I wasn't brave enough to pull the trigger at that time. And so I knew what I wanted. And so, you know, that phrase, like, don't take your eyes off the goal, because all you'll see is obstacles, something to that nature, that nature.

11:13And I said, I got to be a speaker. And so I think of I think of going after something like a Rubik's cube. I just got to figure it out. There's always a way to figure it out. Right. Well, I tried this. That didn't work. I know that it works because I've seen other people do it. So I'm very attuned to social proof. If Brad Sugars is doing something and it's working, so that tells me it works. I just got to figure out the formula that works for me. So I think that's what gets me over the hump of failure. And by the way, it's almost like that burn the ship thing also, right? You don't want to go back.

11:43I don't want to do that. So I got to figure this out. Yeah. It's an interesting challenge. So if you think about the relationship that, how do you describe the relationship between failure and success then? How do you teach that? Yeah. It's a tough one because I mean, the easy answer is, you know, we learn from our failures, that's how we become successful, right? That whole routine. But there's something about failure that creates this resilience. Like, you know, when you first encounter failure or rejection, I think that's a more broader aspect of life. You're like, you take it personal, right?

12:19And then somewhere along the road, I don't know if your skin just tempers, but you learn to kind of not take it personal. You almost depersonalize rejection or failure because you didn't fail. You just didn't figure out a way to solve it yet with the word yet being key here. Right. I just got to figure this out. I've just figured out yet. And so you I'm sure if I would have turned this interview around and I've asked you about your successes and your rejections early on, you'll give me a litany of times it didn't go your way. But then after a while, it's almost like because you've been there and you've done that, you go, yeah, I know how this works.

12:50and I think as you get older, it really becomes like water off a duck's back. It doesn't hurt you as much. It doesn't impact you as much. Yeah. You're on the Big Success Podcast. We're going to take a break. We will be back. Victor will teach us all about sales, including the guy who wrote the first book on AI in sales way back when. In 30 minutes a day for 30 days, 30X Business will take you through the exact hard-won business principles that Brad Sugars has personally developed over the past 30 years as an entrepreneur, investor, and business advisor. Join Brad and his team and 100 other entrepreneurs who want to start building a successful business today.

13:26And we're back. Big success podcast. Victor Antonio. Now, we'll get to that whole AI thing in just a moment. But sales influence, how do we succeed at having influence in sales? So what's happened in the market is when I decided to do sales influence, again, I'll 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.

14:01And 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%. And when we get on the subject of AI, that's probably going to get to 80, 90, maybe 100%, and they'll just make decisions. So I realized that buyers are smarter now. You know this, Brad. I'm preaching to the choir. Buyers are smarter now. You can't really sell them because they have the information. So fast forward, if I were to divide the world of selling, it would be pre-internet and post-internet. Pre-internet, you can sell to them.

14:30That's when you get value proposition, want 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. If 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. Yeah, I love that nudging, the nudging.

15:01So that brings us to sales strategy then. How do we succeed at 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. I was doing some research for a presentation, again, on AI, and I found something really fascinating. In 2018, so let's go back pre-pandemic 2018, Brad, the average salesperson was spending about 35 % of their time in actual sales activity, 35%, right? Fast forward to this year, that number has gone down to 33%.

15:40Well, 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. What we want to do is go to the other side of the buying plate. 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.

16:14We 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. I used to make fun of them, right? Because I have, remember that John, want to make it a line? 50 % of my marketing works. I just don't know which 50%, that whole thing, right? And so now marketing is the driver of sales, of qualified leads. And 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. Yeah, I'm in 100 % agreement with that. I sit down and I look at how can we sell the person without a salesperson is almost the question.

16:50And the salesperson is really that last point of contact to just say, yeah, we're a great company. Have the relationship with us. So that brings us to then. Can I add something to that, Brad? I don't mean to interrupt, but you said something interesting. It tricked me. 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.

17:24Yeah, 100%. So reducing bioresistance is on that last mile. How do we do that? Well, several ways you could do it. There's a wonderful book out there. As you can tell, I love reading stuff. There was a book called The Jolt Effect, J-O-L-T Effect, written by Dixon and McKenna. What they did is they took pre-pandemic. By the way, here's an interesting question. What percentage, and I'm not trying to trick you, Brad, what percentage of information, let's say pre-pandemic of conversations with clients, salesperson and clients actually made it into the CRM? What would you guess, Brad? I'm guessing almost none.

18:01You're close to be right. 5%, right? Yeah. So a lot of that information was lost. Fast forward, we have the pandemic. Everybody goes online. So what happens is everybody goes online, like on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, whatever it may be. Now there's a lot of conversations recorded. So a company called Tether took 2.5 million calls that were recorded, ran them through AI, so to speak, right? They analyzed them and they came up with different reasons why people buy and why some people are top performers. One of the biggest ones, big takeaways from the book was you got it. You have to learn how to de-risk the buy.

18:40So whatever you can do to reduce the risk or at least the perception of risk was one way to push the sale over. The second one that I thought was really interesting as far as what they found is that salespeople who moved into what they call advocacy mode recommend actually sold more and higher customer satisfaction, which goes against us sometimes what we think. Well, we don't want to pressure people. No, but you're the domain expert. You're the subject matter expert. You're the person that's supposed to guide them to make a buying decision. Tell them. Give them options and indication. Here are three options.

19:14And if it were mine to do based on what you've told me, I would go ahead and do this one. Boom. Thank you very much. That's what they found in that book. Yeah, I love it. I compare that to a doctor. Doctor doesn't say to you, hey, I think you should take this prescription. Would you like to buy that or not? This is the prescription. Take this. You'll get better. Everything will be fine. So let's dive in then to actually before we get in the AI, velocity. It's the big word. It's the big thing behind you there. Talk to me about velocity and why that's important. I came across this equation. I like to say I invented the equation, but I didn't.

19:49I came across the sales velocity equation a few years back, and I'm like, I love this because it simplifies everything. So there's only four levers to grow your sales. That's it. Four levers, if you really think about it. The first component, if you think of a fraction, think of the numerator or denominator. In the numerator, you have numbers of deals in the pipeline multiplied by your conversion rate multiplied by your average deal size, then divided by in the denominator, your sales cycle. If I can increase the number of deals in the pipeline, increase my conversion, increase my average deal size and reduce my sales velocity, my sales cycle, I can increase velocity.

20:25Here's the interesting thing. So those are four things everybody can focus on as a team. Did you know that if I can increase the number of folks in my pipeline, let's say I have 100, Now, again, just 10%. Now I have 110. My close rate, I improve that from, let's say, 40 % to 0.44%. Average deal size, 10%. And reduce my sales cycle by 10%. I'll increase my velocity by 47%. That's almost 50%. So no one seems to measure that, though. No one measures their sales cycle. I go and ask companies all the time, how many days for a deal? How many hours for a deal? No one seems to measure it. How do you get them doing that, though, buddy?

21:03How do you make that happen? By the way, that's almost like a religious or a political discussion with some companies because it depends on where you start measuring, right? So in other words, is it first contact when they first sent you something on the website, right? Requesting more information or because that's not, you know, you had some, that's a market qualified lead, or is it until a salesperson like an SDR or BDR talks to them and then now that becomes a sales qualified lead? Or is it when the AE who's been handed off this new lead actually sets the first meeting? That's where everything gets a little fuzzy with people.

21:38But I think, by the way, if you want to measure sales cycle to your benefit, obviously, you're going to pick the shorter timeframe. But I think we should start from the time the person came in, in the funnel, which is the actual website, all the way to the first order contract sign. Yeah. Yeah. And you can measure all of them. It doesn't matter which one you measure. I would say measure all of them because it's going to help either way. So AI, let's go back. Hang on. How many years ago was it when you wrote that book? I wrote it in 2017 and then published in 2018. Yeah. Six years ago, you wrote a book on AI in sales.

22:13Today, almost every speakers bureau is going, can you speak on AI? Donnie took six years for your book to hit the mark, buddy. So let's talk about AI and its impact on sales. Yeah. What happened? Well, I'll go back. I was an intern working for Honeywell. I worked for their undersea systems division. If you saw the movie, The Hunt for Red October, Russian sub, U.S. sub, the torpedo on that U.S. sub was a Mach 46. I worked on the Mach 50 torpedo as an intern, and that one had the first level of rule-based expert system slash premature AI. That was my first introduction to AI. And this was like circa 85.

22:55And so then we went through this nuclear winter where nobody talked about, you know, rule based AI because it was too hard to actually program everything in there. Every single rule for every different scenario. It was too expensive. Storage wasn't there. Processing speeds weren't there. Fast forward. I pretty much forgot about it. I got to be honest, forgot about it. And then in 2016, this is why the book was in 2017. In 2016, I go to Korea, to Seoul, and I'm speaking for Cigna, the healthcare company. And after that, I remember the gentleman's name is Ben, the VP of the region says, hey, Victor, would you like to see our call center and what we're doing down there?