1862 – Personality-Driven Sales & Marketing with Usman Sheikh of xiQ, Inc.

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0:58with us right now it's uzman sheikh uzman you are the founder and ceo of xiq you're found on the web at xiqinc.com uzman thank you so much for joining us nice to be here josh thank you for having me well i'm very intrigued i would love to learn what xiq is yeah so xiq is a next generation generative AI platform for B2B sales and marketers. And one of the cool things that we do is that we bring about psychology and infuse it into AI. And what that means is, Josh, that we can actually predict your personality type. And based on your personality, are you familiar with Myers-Briggs or DISC analysis?

1:40Absolutely. Yeah. So we use the DISC methodology and we have an AI algorithm that picks on publicly available information on about a billion individuals and can use that to predict what type of personality or dominant influencing steady conscientious or 128 different variants of that and we use that information we couple that with we're also one-stop shop for company intelligence so financials executive staff news sport analysis all of that is available in our platform and we couple the personality piece with all the information around your company, your competitors, to custom craft sales and marketing strategies for individuals.

2:25So we really prioritize personalization in B2B, and we have some state-of-the-art capabilities and some very innovative ways of being able to, whether we are crafting emails or writing proposals or business plans or simply doing stakeholder analysis, you can do it all in the XIQ platform. Well, I guess the inevitable question here is why is that important in sales? Yeah, because sales and especially B2B sales has become really stale. And whereas in our civilian life, and what I mean by that is that at the consumer level, we're getting a lot of personalization. When you turn on Netflix, there's recommendations in terms of what your personal preferences would like to see.

3:09when you order a pizza they already know what are your favorite toppings on it right and when you go online to shop they know what are the kind of clothes and sizes that you're going to be using so we experienced that and the table stakes for b2b have risen people expect to have a lot of personalization in b2b as well so for example you know i get emails today from marketeers and sellers that are saying, are you the right person within the company? Or would you be this? Or can you introduce me to that? And that's just a major turnoff. It's so impersonal, it's so mass produced at a time when the expectation of the buyer is that the seller should have done research and made it much more personalized.

3:52And given the fact that there is so much digital breadcrumbs out there that I leave that people, you know, you can go to my LinkedIn, you can go to my Twitter, You can go to my Instagram, my Facebook today. You can find out a lot of information about you. And I expect that a B2B seller should know that. And by doing so, those companies and those individuals that actually do personalize have an 84 % higher chance of moving to the next step within the sales discussion or progressing the deal further into the funnel. And that's why we need it. Yeah, yeah, that, well, okay, well, that's an important, that's an important figure.

4:36That's a metric to keep an eye on. Okay, so, Usman, I'm curious. So, I happen to know where I fit on the DISC assessment. I am what they would call a high I. So, if you are in the room with, and I don't know if you already knew that by now, but, you know, let's say that you're in a conversation with someone that is a high I. How might you want to approach the conversation a little bit differently than, say, someone with a completely different personality? Yeah, so eyes are people that need excitement in life. For me to engage with you, I need to come across very motivated. I need to use words that will excite you.

5:23You are somebody that would like to have a lot of information about the topics that you're talking about. essentially so that you can talk to others and say that, look, I'm in the know. That's why you are an influencer. You're a high I. And you'd like to be in the know about a lot of different things. And people have to deal with you in a very enthusiastic manner. Versus, say, for example, a C. A C would like to have a lot of data. They're skeptical in nature. And they will question you a lot. And I, on the other hand, will help you move a little bit further because if they get excited about what you have to talk about, they will promote you and they will talk you up.

6:05A C will ask a lot of questions. And in a group setting, when you start asking those extremely skeptical questions, you can start creating doubt. Right. And I will actually drive motivation. A C, on the other hand, will drive skepticism. Yeah. Yeah, in fact, I had. And so for, you know, if you're a sales professional and you're working with a C, I suppose that, you know, it's like if you know what to expect and, you know, if you're working with a very C-dominant personality, might they want to have three, four calls to understand something? It might show up like that. Yeah, absolutely. So it's very common for C people to really consume a lot of data.

6:51So one of the examples I like to share with people is, do you remember Star Trek? Do you remember Kirk and Spock? I don't know. I sure do. Right? So Kirk was a clear D, right? So he had to make decisions with information that was given to him in three bullet points to probably build one page, three paragraph CEOs. Spock, on the other hand, was a C. Right. And Spock needed to get a lot of information, ingest a lot of information. Now, if you imagine if you went to Kirk and dumped a lot of data on him and, you know, you shut Kirk down, he'll never open your emails. He'll never talk to you again because you've just kind of clogged up his thinking process.

7:35On the other hand, if you did the Kirk formula, three bullet points and three paragraphs, one page to Spock, he'd laugh you out of the room and also not have a voice. And that happens a lot in B2B selling. So yes, to answer your questions for C people, it doesn't mean that they're an automatic no or they're naysayers, but they are skeptical and they want to have a lot of information, proof points, case studies. I would feed them a lot of case studies. Whereas in the case of an I, I would give them some quotes, some references. Hey, this is what one of my clients said, who lines, right? And that's good enough.

8:14You see, this is a customer of the company XIQ. They said that, whereas a C would want to see the full case study, would jump into how the ROI was, what were the semantics and the technology that was running our platform, et cetera. So there's two different approaches to those innovations. How is XIQ incorporating AIC that, you know, in your content, you're talking about, you know, kind of some newer aspects of your software? And it's potentially very exciting. I think, you know, for the sales world, you know, if you're not very actively looking for AI-enabled solutions, you know, you're going to get lapped.

8:51So how is XIQ incorporating AI? Yeah, so first of all, we are one of the pioneers of using what is now known commonly as generative AI. And what generative AI is, being able to pick up public information, analyze it, and being able to talk to the AI in a very conversational mode. So the first thing we did was the ability to predict the disk insights on a person. And we can do that, as I said, for about a billion people. The second thing was we coupled it up with company information. Now we have two great data pools of information that we can leverage. And that comes in extremely handy. For example, use cases coming out of XIQ.

9:32To be able to write custom cropped email. So in a mass situation, when we're writing emails to tens of thousands of people a list, you load that list up into XIQ. XIQ breaks it into the personality types. You write one copy. It frames that copy for the different personality types. and then you can send those emails or your marketing campaigns based on the personal and communication preferences of the individual that is receiving that email. And here's a very interesting fact. Today, we have improved the open rates and click-through rates by using this method by 6x. So, for example, in our particular case, we were doing about 9 % open rates on a traditional one-size-fit-all email and that number jumped up to 52 percent when we started introducing this personality-driven flavors of how you write a mass email another thing we do is we can use generative ai to help you write out an account plan so in b2b selling account plans are very important you know these are long sales cycle multiple decision makers and a lot of competition going on a lot of things can change in that long sales cycle so account plans is the north star for sales teams to be able to continually monitor the direction they're taking and execu helps you do that we also help you write social media posts so you can be good at social selling because in today's world it's not just the seller doing research on the buyer the buyer is also doing research on the on the seller and the tables are turning as a matter of fact today buyers are showing up when they do show up, much more prepared than the sellers are.

11:21They know the competitive landscape. And lastly, probably the most important thing about XIQ is that today, given the nature of digital media and social media, we have a lot of information on our prospects, prospects at an individual level and prospects at a company level. However, we don't have enough time or the resources or the whereabouts to go and collect that information. So XIQ aggregates that information so that the seller can get up to speed on their prospective buyers, both at an individual and at a corporate and at an industry level, much faster so that that buyer that's coming and doing research on you is very well researched, you can actually provide an equivalent set of responses to that.

12:10So net-net, what we do is we help the seller improve their business acumen and their communication capabilities in a much more empathetic manner, targeting prospective buyers. And that culminates into the buyer having more trust in the capabilities of the seller, because it appears you've done a lot of research, you know who I am, you understand my business, And you know that when your buyer says, hey, you know, I think you understand my business. That's more than half the deal being done right there and then. So now you need to go in for the close. And that's what executive helps you do. Yeah.

12:51Who is using your platform? Is this primarily an enterprise level solution for larger B2B sales teams? Or do you have also SMBs? Like, let's say, might be a small agency or consultancy. Yeah, so our primary target audience is the large enterprises, because these are the guys who are dealing in those multi-million dollar deals, complex sales, but it's not reserved to that. So if you look at our portfolio of clients, we have a lot of large tech companies like Dell, like VMware, like ServiceNow, like Pure Storage, and then a lot of large companies like Entity Data or Thermo Fisher Scientific or Alight.

13:32you know big large companies but we also help those companies that are relatively smaller in size but are doing businesses with big companies and one of the beauties of our platform is that it can very quickly and easily help small companies appear a lot larger and talk a lot more with intellectual horsepower than potentially larger companies because again we condense the ability to do your research. And we provide very targeted and precise information to sellers in a manner that can project them in a very favorable light in front of their prospects. So large enterprises and those companies that are selling into those large enterprises.

14:14Yeah, I'm going to point this out because I think this is pretty good. So obviously you practice what you preach. One thing I want to point out, your website, XIQ Inc., I really love your resources tab. You know, when I go to a website, Certainly when I'm having a conversation with a podcast guest, I always love to click on resources to see what's just available. You guys pull out all the stops when it comes to resources. So what I'm talking about is user guides, e-books, case studies, infographics, webinars, podcasts, video gallery, press. Like you've got a lot here. Would you mind? Can we get a little meta here?

14:52Tell me about why. Because I suspect that you believe strongly in this. Why is it really important that we provide a lot of resources for people that might be taking a look at us? Yeah, so I think it's important that people can find what they're looking for. For every one size fit all doesn't work. Somebody is looking to hear what do customers have to say. So the case studies come into play. Somebody is much more visually oriented. So the infographics come into play. And we like to communicate across all different medium. Video infographics are big for us. And also we are very interested in partnering with podcasters, for example, like yourself and ensuring that we have a win-win opportunity with you as well as us, because you are at the end of the day doing a great service to your audience and to us by helping us amplify our message across to these audiences.

15:45And so that's not only just a sign of gratitude, but it's also a very practical way of us helping our clients understand there's all sorts of different messages being broadcast to different. And, you know, somebody might be a fan of yours and they come into our website, go to the resource, and then see the video that we've done or the podcast we've done and clips out of that. And they might be gravitating towards that. So I think it's very, very important as you're pointing out that, you know, we use a lot of channels to reach out to the world and we give everybody an option as to choose the one that you like to be able to quench your sales for information.

16:24Yeah. Your website, xiqinc.com. And so, Usman, for someone that's been listening to our conversation, maybe they're on the research phase. That's why they found this podcast. And now they're ready for the next step. What would you recommend kind of that next step after listening to this conversation be? Yeah. So, you know, there are two very concrete next steps. So if you're just wanting to learn a little bit about our XIQ, of course, there's a lot of videos. There's some, you know, the hype kind of videos like you see on our first page. We've just released the winning formula video, which is about the same things that work in sports.

16:59For example, F1 are the same practices like preparation, teamwork, collaboration, knowing your competitors. These are things that are common between sports, for example, as well as sales. So you can get those kind of high-level views. You can dive deeper into the webinars, product information, deep, much more product information, or schedule a demo with us. And we will walk you through. And then once you're through the demo and you're interested in really going a little bit further, we can even mark up a use case. So we call those strategic opportunity assessment clients or prospective client to us and say, how would we sell our product or service to these executives?

17:41Show us. And we will take one hour to mock this up and show it to them. This is how you would do it. And those are very successful ways. And we let those people that are coming to those SOAs, strategic opportunity assessment workshops, take all that collateral. And that could include an account plan. It could include a business plan, stakeholder analysis, identify who to sell to, a couple of examples of emails and some marketing campaigns that we would build. And the beauty of all of this is that using this AI, we can actually do that and we can pack that up and show it to you in less than an hour.

18:17So this is unprecedented in the world of B2B is that speed and agility and that intelligence all packed up in less than an hour is extremely unprecedented. case abilities. So one thing would be watch those videos, schedule them. If you'd like to proceed further, schedule a demo. And thirdly, if you'd like it even more, come to a strategic opportunity assessment and see what the tool can actually specifically do for you. Yeah. Usman Sheikh, again, founder, CEO of XIQ, your website, xiqinc.com. Usman, thank you so much for the conversation. Josh, great pleasure to be here. Great question. I really enjoyed it.

19:01Thank you so much.

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