2432 - Integrating AI to Transform Sales and Accelerate SMB Revenue Growth with G Squared Advisors' Greg Grand

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0:46Visit podverify.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 greg grand greg you are the founder of g squared advisors and you are also the creator of the ai sales leader found on the web at the ai sales leader.com greg it's great to have you thank you josh i appreciate you having me on today all right so before we get going talking about your superpowers a muse you love jamming on the guitar i um you and i were just kind of talking about this beforehand. I've got my base over there. I've, I just put this thing up about, you know, about just over two years ago and it has been such a joy.

1:31It is such a, for me, it's a release. Like it's, especially for the music that I just have so much nostalgia and appreciation and love for to finally, you know, be a part of that experience rather than just a listener. It's just so much fun. But tell, tell me about your, like when, as you know, again, as a leader, you know, you love to be able to have these outlets. Tell me how long you've been playing, what kind of music you play and what your experience is with that. Sure. Yeah, I started playing, gosh, probably when I was about 10 years old. So quite a long time, but I've had stints, you know, I played a lot.

2:07I was in bands and then I got burned out and then play for a couple of years. So we've had this stop start kind of thing, but generally always around rock, blues. I'm kind of a heavy metal guy. So I like to play a lot of that with the distortion. your point is real valid right it's that escape so with what we do as businessmen we're you know brains running 24 7 and like when you're playing music there's nothing left no more room in your brain to process anything else because you're so engaged that's what I love about it you're like in another world for a period of time that's beautiful yeah not not worried about work not thinking about you know the you know the thing that was stressing you out you know even you know like budgets and that sort of thing.

2:47Not right now, not right now when I've, you know, not when I'm, uh, you know, working through some, um, you know, some Metallica or whatever, your favorite bands, but I play a lot of eighties nights, a lot of grunge, a lot of, yeah, yeah. It's, it's kind of my favorite, uh, genre. It's, it's a lot of, it's not that difficult. So I can, you know, it's kind of like what I got started on. What are some of the, what are the, some of the songs or bands that you really love doing? Uh, you know, it's interesting. So right now we have a female singer so we're doing a lot of stuff like 70s 80s like stevie nix and um just all kinds of stuff from linda ronstadt and just all kinds of yeah and i a lot of times i play an instrumental band so it's actually interesting playing with a female singer and getting that whole different side of stuff i'm 58 and i never played any of that music before so same kind of thing it's bringing me back to being a kid and have my mom listening to like fleetwood mac vacuuming the house or something like that you know i mean just so yeah it's it's a great release and i don't have many because i work really hard so uh yeah it's it's definitely a good one so i'm glad you picked up the instrument because when people do it and it doesn't matter how old you are just pick it up and learn a basic song some of the most impressive powerful songs ever in the history of music have been two or three chords yeah yeah i was gonna say you know lindsey buckingham is you know some of the songs are very doable and then some of the songs he goes to town yeah yeah yeah for sure oh he's a really underrated guitar player he's amazing but he doesn't get to shine as much i saw them live and he was just tearing it up up there oh man man yeah i you know can i ask you one question before we move on to this sure please um so as you know right now i just play you know i play with a lot of backing tracks i got the tabs on the screen so it's it's kind of a little bit of guitar hero for me i've been doing that for a couple years i flirted with the idea of getting together with some other folks and just like let's just jam together um any any advice uh for Oh, do it.

4:37That's the best way to learn. In fact, I'm a fair guitar player. I'm not going to say I'm an expert in any way. But I've always tried to play with people better than me. Because it challenged me to get better at my instrument. And I always felt a little bit, eh? So yes, do it. I don't know what it's like out here. Out here we have this thing called band mix. And then I've met a lot of my band members on Craigslist, strangely enough. If you go to the musician section on Craigslist, I don't know how it is in Florida, but in California, i've formed three or four bands just meeting people through craigslist you meet some weird people and kiss some frogs but playing yeah so playing to the tracks is good but the energy of being in a live room with other musicians when it's clicking man that's like almost a spiritual experience dude i get chills just thinking about it it's that good yeah my son plays guitar and that's how i got into it because i saw how good he got in about six months he just took my old guitar which i never played and you know i saw how good he got in six months i'm like man if he can do it i feel like i could probably you know muddle my way and but now you know now i could probably do about 150 songs pretty easily nice so you got enough dude yes definitely play with humans it's really fun isn't it it's crazy the thing that's holding me back is i'm afraid i'm going to get with other humans and the humans are going to go you suck yeah that's in your head man like you gotta watch the and you know what you do is when you get into those first sessions don't go crazy If you're going to play, first of all, before I figure out maybe if there's songs you all know that are the same, come up with like three or five songs you could play.

6:05And if not, just pick out two or three chord songs. Don't pick anything crazy and complex with lots of changes. Knock on heaven's door, like three chords, play it for a half hour, just groove and feel each other out. You'll be fine. I love it. The best players in the world, and we get together, if I've never played with them, like pick two chords and let's just jam. That's it. Yeah. Okay. We're going to talk about a really important topic right now, and that's the intersection of AI and sales. uh again your your two websites i want to mention g squared advisors.com and the ai sales leader.com greg could you just start off with just kind of a manifesto of sorts uh yeah the 30 000 foot view um yeah so originally from new york went to school i'm actually electrical engineer out of schooling went to school in wonderful buffalo new york great place to be but a little cold so came to san diego after that thinking i was going to be an electrical engineer and ended up getting offers for sales, right?

7:01And I didn't get it. Finally went to the dark side. And then that's where the career went. Semiconductors, high-end manufacturing, salesperson for my whole career. So I went down into the dark side. And a lot of very successful years in corporate, built about a$200 million business for a company called Celestica with Google and Apple doing all of their computer infrastructure. I've always stayed close to technology because that's my heritage. And then about nine years ago, just due to the fact of seeing so many companies small medium-sized business owners where their infrastructure for sales just wasn't set up right didn't have the right processes strategies there's no accountability no execution so that's when I started being a fractional chief revenue officer and what I do there is I help small and medium business owners scale their sales organizations help them hire help them build everything out if they have a broken sales team I help them fix it and then my job is to work myself out of a job three or six months I hire a full-time replacement they help somebody else during that process of the nine years, I found out some other really interesting things.

7:58And the big thing was the aha moment about a year ago was, wait a minute, I work with all these sales leaders who are thrown into the seat and have never had any sales training. Hey, you're the best salesperson, now you're a sales leader. Okay, go. Really? Cool. Thanks for the promotion. So there's no good sales leaders training programs particularly. And every sales leader right now, and I always joke around, say like 64.3 % of statistics are made up. But the statistic that I will tell you that I know is pretty accurate because it's come from big organizations. North of 75 % of sales organizations and companies have a directive to roll out a AI sales strategy this year.

8:34Under 10 % actually have a strategy to do so. Yeah, it's a big number, right? Everybody's thinking about it and talking about it, but who's doing it and who's doing it the right way. So the first part of the program was developing the AI sales leadership training program where I work with sales leaders and I teach them my best practices of being a sales leader for years and heavily weave AI throughout that. And then in concert with that, I have programs for salespeople that are out getting new business, also for salespeople that are responsible for expanding business in their new accounts. And then I have a sales leadership forum, which is a safe place for sales leaders to meet once a month and do mastermind.

9:12So I kind of looked at what I saw were gaps in the market from a sales training standpoint. And with my expertise as an engineer and being heavily into AI and being in sales for 40 years now, I built all that into sales training programs. And so far, it's been just a raging hit. Yeah. Well, Greg, give us, you know, here we are in the middle of 2026. I mean, things have changed so fast. I think you illustrated quite accurately. I'll just say, if nothing else, the pressure that I think a lot of leaders or founders are thinking, like, listen, I know we need to expand on this. I know we need to be using AI-enabled tools.

9:52Obviously, I don't want to make mistakes at it. We should be doing that because I think that's smart. And I believe our competition is doing it or wants to do it as well. But where are we right now in terms of, you know, the level at which, like, where does AI belong in the sales flow or the sales ecosystem as opposed to maybe not there just yet? Can you give us a bit of a 101 on where we are today? Yeah. So, I mean, it really can fit everywhere in the sales organization. The places I'm seeing the biggest impact for sure is on research, right? So a lot of times, I'm big in consultative selling.

10:33So the first thing I try and teach my sales teams is you don't go up and when I joke around, say, show up and throw up. If you go up there with a slide deck or one pager and you're gonna go and tell them what you do I don't mean to be rude but anybody who is on this call they don't care what they care about is can you provide a solution to the problems that they're having and you don't ask them what keeps you up at night because you I would kick you out of the room if I was with you but you know you have to find out what are their challenges a true salesperson isn't pushing anything I view it sales is I'm trying to buy solutions to people and if I don't have a fit that's not the right fit cool I'll walk away maybe I'll refer you but I am looking at what and it is that thing of what keeps them up at night you don't say it that way but how can I help so okay first of all sales leaders would tell me gosh my salespeople complain they're spending four hours a week on research to prep for meetings well you don't need to do that anymore you can use whatever large language model you want put in the deep research mode put in the website I've got a meeting with this person put in their LinkedIn profile we have a meeting about this give me ten questions I should ask and you know ten things that might come up you can do that you can actually use an AI roleplay tool and build the functionality of how that meeting would go and do literally a mock meeting with the AI before, take that transcript, run it through, and then have it do some coaching as well.

11:42So it helps with research. It helps with messaging. You know, say if you're going to do, and you know this from the marketing background, a sequence, right, of sending six or eight emails. Well, think about that. The time to do that, the time to write the sequence, the time to put it into your system. AI can do all that for you, right? Now, you still need to have the human eye there for sure but time savings without a doubt is a big thing there uh content powerpoint presentations i haven't done a powerpoint presentation in two years i tell my ai what i want the presentation to look like and it spits something out and then we iterate so a lot of the creation now to address the other inevitable question which always comes up as well ai is going to take everybody's jobs so my view on this is we're in the middle of the biggest revolution industrial revolution we've ever seen in our lives and ever will see right so are jobs going to be displaced yeah absolutely they will what is also going to happen at the same time my belief is tons of other jobs are going to be created to support it the more you use ai the more you realize ai is not okay by itself there needs to be human interaction i can't tell you how many times i've said do this and it comes and you've done it too right you put in your prompt you get this out and You go, what's this?

12:56Right. And then you spend a half hour negotiating back and forth to try and get your output. So there will be, I believe that, you know, there's two views on AI right now, in my mind. One, you can stick your head in the sand and I hate it. And it's, you know, it's, I don't like it. Well, good. Then you're going to get run over. Or you can learn to use these tools, be the orchestrator, stop using it like a chat bot and have it start actually doing work and being, I feel with my AI, who's called Archer, because he's always sharp and right on point, I feel that that's a coworker for me. I can tell him to go do tasks for me and I go walk the dog and come back and they're done.

13:30That's really cool. So all the way across process, strategy, accountability, execution, all those big overarching areas in sales organization, AI can help with. Yeah. And Greg, I love your energy and passion. Just FYI, when you hit the table. Oh, sorry. It's actually carrying over the microphone. Okay, sorry about that. Especially if our listener has the bass turned up in their car right now. They're thumping and everyone's driving by like, whoa. Yeah, this mic is a bit sensitive. I think I probably need to put it on some kind of software. I apologize about that. Yes, passionate is part of what I do.

14:03Yeah. So I think what you illustrated here is that, you know, an AI empowered sales team or sales director or sales manager has the opportunity. I forget what that paradox is called, right? It's just like when we develop better, when we have better tools and AI is a better tool, it enables now, you know, a salesperson who, you know, they may have had to take, you know, 10, 12 hours out of their week's schedule because they have to put together a PowerPoint presentation. And now they can outsource that to their AI tools and team now has an additional 10 to 12 hours that they can either use to do more sales, build more systems, make sure that they are taking care of them.

14:50They have more time for self-care so that when they absolutely need to be on, when the moment is critical, they're not overly tired, overworked, frustrated because they're having to do all this menial stuff. How do we get to a point where, you know, our teams are not doing things just the old-fashioned way and that they are leveraging all of the best and available tools where maybe the managers and the leaders aren't aware of this? Like, obviously, one solution is bring you in because, you know, you can help them set this up. But, you know, help our leaders and our leader friend who's listening to this right now who might feel a little overwhelmed.

15:36Like, I don't know what to tell them to do. Like, how can they get a grasp on this? Yeah, that's a great question. And the first answer is that's the wrong way to do it, right? You have to have buy-in from the top. This has to come from the top. AI is not a decision that should be left to IT. You need business leaders in the room. But this is what happens, Josh, often. Oh, yeah, the IT guy's got that. What? This is going to run your business, guys. Like, what are we doing? So it comes that. And I think, you know, the most basic thing is understanding. I think that the trap that people fall into, and I did myself, is if you start learning.

16:16And the way you start learning, the most basic way, look, just like go on YouTube. watch a video, 30 minutes of how to use Gemini or Claude or whatever. Just start learning. That's it. It is intimidating. It can be overwhelming. Just start. And the best way to learn AI is to ask AI, hey, I want to do this. I have no idea how to do this. How do you think I should do this? It will collaborate with you and get there. So the biggest trap you can get into is, let's say you sign up for two AI newsletters. Now you're getting all the new stuff that's happening every day. It gets assimilated, right? That's cool.

16:47But then what do you do? You see this ad in there and you see this really cool new tool and I'm going to download that one. That's great. Or better yet, what I would do is I take the website and put it on my website or my desktop. I was going to look at it later. But what ends up happening is you end up having 50 disjointed tools. None of them connect. None of them talk to each other. So then I stopped and said, OK, what's the core problem I'm trying to solve here? And how can AI help me solve that problem? OK, now I got it. I need to do this. Are there any tools that are commercially available yet?

17:15If not, can I create one? So that's it. Look at the problem. Look at the issue. I want to use AI. Well, why? That's your first question. Why do you even want to use AI? How do you see it helping your business? Right. All right. 30 ,000 foot. Step back before you go into the bits and the pieces. Come up with a strategy. Now, to your point, the other point is really important. And this is kind of a warning message. So I just know this because I had a client in cybersecurity. There's this thing called shadow AI right now. And what that is, is you have an organization where everybody, they don't have the IT controls.

17:47And everybody's downloading their own stuff to their, this guy's using Gemini and this guy's using chat TPT. There are some dangerous things that happen, which are called prompt injections, where they may cut something off the website. And there can be these little things that you can't see with the human eye that are actually, can be virus attacks and things like that. So it's not a fear and mongering thing, but it's just saying to make sure that you have governance. they say, okay, we're all using Copilot Gemini, like that. Smaller clients, and you don't know what apps they're downloading and what they're putting on your, it can get very dangerous.

18:20So long answer, short question, but starts at the top, CEO, business owner, executive staff. What are the top three things we could do with AI this year and how would it help us? What's the ROI? I can tell with ROI. If I can do under a salesperson another day a week, right? That's four days a month, right? That's, you know, 48 days a year times their productivity. I can come up with some kind of ROI. Otherwise, you could just be throwing good money after bad and not getting the results, which a lot of people do too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, you know, running experiments that end up degrading relationships, human relationships with potential customers are like, oh, come on, are you just out?

18:57Is this just AI? Like, I would be, you know, as a customer, and you know, if this were a sizable engagement, if I felt that the human touch left off, and I was being outsourced to AI, I would feel a little bit cheated. And I think that's a concern, a valid concern that I think a lot of leaders have. They're like, oh, my God, I would never want that to happen. Greg, I'd love to go down that rabbit hole, but I'm looking at the time. We got to wrap up. And that's unfortunate because I have so many other questions I'd love to chat with you about. Theaisalesleader.com. I want to make sure that our friend that's listening to our conversation or, again, gsquaredadvisors.com.

19:39I want to make sure that folks are empowered and they know, because I know you've got resources. Where should our friend go from here? So if they're interested in having some support at a high level to look at the overall structure and design of their organization, just from a pure sales standpoint, that's where I can help on the fractional CRO side, where I do all the things we were talking about, process, strategy, execution. I work side by side with the CEO. I'm a doer. I'm a builder. I don't just give you a proposal and give you someone on my team. I'm there from the beginning to the end. And then if your sales team or leaders or yourself and your CEO leading a sales team by default and you want to get some sales training, either sales leadership training or sales training for how to acquire new clients or get new business out of your existing clients, that would be the AISalesLeader.com.

20:23All those programs are up and running and been working with people on it already. So, so far, the results have been fantastic and people are getting really good, really good feedback. Yeah. You're a great follow on LinkedIn as well. But again, those websites, theaisalesleader.com and gsquaredadvisors.com. Greg Grand, you're the founder and creator. Thank you so much. It was a great conversation. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Josh.

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