2410 - Blending AI and Human Insight to Revolutionize Sales Enablement with DevRev's Laura Fu

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0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it's Laura Fu. Laura, you are the head of revenue operations and strategy for DevRev. You are the author of the new book, Designing for Excellence, Sales Enablement in the AI Native World. What an important topic for us to be talking about. Your personal website is laurafu.ai. We've got that all linked up for a friend that's listening. Laura, it's great to have you. Thank you so much, Josh. Great to be on the show. I am so excited to talk about AI or sales enablement using all of the latest and greatest AI tools that exist for us today.

1:29We're going to get to that. Before we do, I have to ask you about your background experience. Normally, I ask about your, you know, your hobbies and kind of what you're doing for fun or geeking out on. I would assume that you are still cooking and that's still a passion of yours. So if I could point out the fact that you went to Cordon Bleu. I did, yeah. Yeah. What was that experience like, California Culinary Academy? Yeah. So I actually went to culinary school after doing my engineering degree at University of Michigan because I felt like I was going to be an extremely terrible engineer. But I thought, hey, I love cooking.

2:08I'm really good at it. I had a small catering business in college. And so that's actually originally what brought me out to the Bay Area, which led eventually into a job and career in tech. You know, so I'm very grateful to be out here, even though, you know, my my journey took a little few detours. I think that the thing that culinary school taught me and just working, working in really good Michelin star kitchens, what it taught me was was the rigor of things. and you know you don't really get to people think I think that in the kitchen and as a chef you get to be really creative you know you're the artistic type that kind of thing you don't really actually get to express a lot of your own creativity in the kitchen the best restaurants are the best because they are predictable and things are the outcome is is the same and consistent every single way every single time it's done and I think that you know as we're talking about sales sales is like that as well.

3:08It's more about being consistent and predictable in every step of the motion. And so that you can produce an outcome that you know can be reliable on. Your undergrad was in mechanical engineering. I've got two sons. One is about to graduate next month with his bachelor's in mechanical engineering. The other one is in his second year. and I see how hard they work. So I have to ask you, in terms of like stressful moments, did you have more stressful moments in your mechanical engineering bachelors or at Cordon Bleu, did you have also stressful moments that I don't know how they compared? I think both are stressful in different ways, right?

3:51In mechanical engineering, if the problem is difficult, you can take the time to go and resolve it. and that's the great thing about the American education where it's not like it's an exam you know and your your whole grade is is based on the exam it's there's a lot of like thought and homework and and projects and stuff like that so that's something I really appreciated about my college experience I would say in the kitchen if something goes wrong or like there's something you don't know you have to figure it out on that moment in on the spot because customers don't wait customers don't wait for food.

4:25That is actually one of the things that we're most impatient about, whether or not our food comes out on time. Amazing. Well, Laura, I'm so excited to talk about your book. It's called Designing for Excellence, Sales Enablement in the AI Native World. I feel like I just want to give you the floor and just teach us. Would you mind maybe just kind of starting with an overview of where we are today? And listen, Laura, by the time this airs in a few weeks, the world may be different, but let's do our best based on where we are today. Yeah. And you know, ChatGPT, so generative AI became sort of more mainstream about three years ago.

5:05And in that three years, like hundreds of companies popped up and a lot of them were specifically for the sales use case of which I was a target audience. So I got to hear a lot of pitches, which I love. There's a lot of innovation being done in AI right now. I work for an AI native company. So I'm at the forefront of it. And one of the things that I learned about AI, you know, I'm still with Deverev, but at the time that I started writing this book, I was nine months in and I was like, I'm getting an MBA in AI and how it can actually help us a lot. And one of the things that I learned was AI is helping us become better experts, but it's not helping us if we don't know what we're doing.

5:57The importance of human judgment and critical thinking actually becomes more important as we become more exposed to AI. And this was the thing that I think was particularly troubling for me as I was the audience of a lot of these, you know, pitches for these new products, where I did feel that a lot of what we were trying to do to help the sales rep, even though with good intentions to help them become more productive, more efficient, we're actually taking away some of the skills that actually make us good salespeople, right? And so this book about sales enablement, it's called sales enablement, but we I think about it as kind of like sales engagement, how do we make sales teams become more efficient and more productive.

6:45It actually starts out by talking about what does good sales engagement look like in the first place, regardless of AI. Laura, what are those general best practices for great sales engagement? Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is that it starts with being a system rather than a program. Sales enablement isn't one person teaching you something. It's about having a system that involves the entire company, you know, content, right? Delivery. It's about the leaders being involved in actually wanting to nurture their reps. So it's all of these things around that. And a big part of sales enablement is actually about how the leaders interact and develop their sales team.

7:31And so generally speaking, we say that on a good sales team, the coverage ratio should be no more than six to seven reps, which is lower than any other functional organization that you have out there in a traditional, you know, org, right? You can have 10, you know, 8, 10 direct reports. But in sales organizations, because it's so customer facing, because there's such a huge amount of like rep coaching involved, having a lower rep to manage ratio does make sense. So those are some things about, you know, sales enablement in general. And then the other thing, too, is about the metrics that we use and that the metrics that we use have to be leading indicators more specifically around activity and how we're doing the activity, whether or not we're doing the activity in the right way.

8:18So those are things that are irrespective of whether or not AI is in the picture. Yeah. And, you know, of course, there's this balance between maintaining, you know, human to human connections, because at the end of the day, these are likely two humans that are going to be at least sharing the decision making process and leading the, you know, the education and moving the other human forward. Right. And so we don't want to lose that. And I've seen that executed. And I think we've all maybe seen that executed in a not great way. How do you recommend that part or that side of it? Or, you know, when you look at AI enablement, are you kind of just more on, hey, listen, let's just kind of manage the group and kind of let them do what they want?

9:12Or are you suggesting that that frontline sales rep or sales director is also leveraging a lot of AI tools? Yeah, I think what I'm suggesting is not to have AI replace things that we used to do, but rather help us do the things that we do in a faster and more efficient way. So I'll give you an example, right, where instead of having the rep write notes and transcribe notes as the call is going on, right, it's okay for the AI to transcribe and summarize. Okay. What's not okay is to have the AI fill in all of the details around qualifying the deal and putting judgment on whether or not this deal is qualified.

10:00that part of it should still be done by the rep because then they are forced to look over the notes validate that information and say yes even though this is what the customer said this is actually what they meant and then update okay here's what that deal inspection looks like here's what that field actually looks i do have a champion because they've demonstrated these things not that they've said these things, which is what the AI can only assess what you say, but not really kind of like your tone or, you know, the things outside of the digital world, right? Laura, so tell me more about the transformation that you would expect.

10:44First off, is designing for excellence? Is this for the sales director? Is this for the C-suite? Who is this for? And then, And if you want to follow that up, what would be the transformation you would expect for the reader? Yeah. So it's for really sales leaders that are looking to transform their organization and bring AI into their organization. It's also actually for builders of AI. So people that are building sales tools for companies and are doing it in an AI-native way. I'm hoping to bring some perspective from a buyer to these folks. And I would say that actually there's a whole chapter around what's needed to get moving on the AI front here.

11:33But I just say a couple of things here. I think the first thing is that first you have to set up the pillars and the systems for how they would work without AI. Okay. Then you put AI in to articulate and tune those efficiencies. How do you make research faster? How do you make the things that the reps are already doing, just do them in a faster way, but make sure that you're not replacing any kind of human judgment with AI. I think that's really key. And then the last thing that I did say about bringing AI into organizations is that AI moves at the speed of humans, which means that just like any kind of change management, you have to get people and human beings to buy into those changes and those experiments.

12:26And if they're not bought in that way, no kind of change management is going to go well. Laura, there are a lot of folks out there, a lot of leaders out there who are not listening to your advice. We're seeing that in the new, not going well. I appreciate how excited some leaders are, but there are real costs to not managing your change well. And this is a big change that you're expecting because not only is that obviously affecting the people that you're supposedly, I just talked with someone yesterday who received a riff because they want to, you know, he was training, you know, all their AI systems.

13:03And then they were like, okay, thanks. Bye. See ya. And it's like, well, that kind of sucks. And it sucks for him. And it also sucks for the people who are still part of the organization because they're like, okay, am I next? Right. Exactly. Exactly. So I think it's really important that you have a good change management and determine what's acceptable for you. You know, I do think that AI will become just embedded into our systems, just like the internet was. We don't need to teach people how to use the internet, right? So in the same way, we won't need to teach people how to use that, to use AI down the line, but it's going to be down the line.

13:37Between now and then, I think there's going to be some transformative efforts required, and we have to be really clear on what they should be for and whether we're willing to experiment and try new things. All right. And Laura, do you, I mean, obviously you're doing great work with DevRev. Do you mind just giving them a shout out? Like what do you do with DevRev? What is DevRev.ai? Yeah, thank you for asking. So DevRev is an AI native platform that allows anyone in the organization and their customers to search for information, get contextual answers, and then take action on the contextual answers.

14:13And we do that by consolidating all of the fragmented data into one system that the AI agents can use so that they can understand the relationships between those data sets and operate properly. The website devrev.ai. uh what what um so if someone wanted obviously they could go to the website what would you recommend they do when they when they go visit devrev they should chat with the with the agent on our website and figure out what uh some efficiencies they could they could use devrev for our three main use cases our three main use cases are actually um transformative for the for the cio's office um for support agents and then uh for the sales organizations actually uh-huh Yeah, you have a really cool chat function.

15:01I've not, so it's powered by DevRev. So I like it. And then of course, let's make sure that the right folks are grabbing Designing for Excellence. It's on Amazon, it's everywhere. You've got it both on Kindle, paperback, all the versions. Folks can find that at laurafoo.ai. And then Laura, you are also, I know you're active on podcasts and you've got your own podcast. Is that right? State of the AI Union? That's right. It's called the State of the AI Union. It's found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and it's about bringing AI, making it more consumable to buyer, sellers, investors and builders of AI.

15:46Excellent. So again, you could do a quick search to our friend that's listening right now in your podcast app, State of the AI Union. You can go to Amazon or you can go to laurafoo.ai and grab the new book, Designing for Excellence, Sales Enablement in the AI Native World. Laura Fu, it's been a pleasure having you. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Josh.

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