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#53: Digital Sales Rooms and AI Integration with Andy Mewborn
Explore how digital sales rooms are not just a trend but a necessity in creating a buyer-focused selling process. From Andy's journey at Outreach and Tapleo to the inception of Distribute, learn how integrating AI and leveraging existing data can streamline content creation, empowering salespeople to captivate buyers and close deals faster. This episode promises to help you cut through the clutter of sales tools by concentrating on essentials, ensuring your team stands out in the competitive market.
Andy Mewborn
Distribute.so
Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than $50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support.
Gary:Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. Now, all right, we are going to dive right in, because we have not a lot of time with Andy and we're going to, we're going to squeeze every ounce of value out of this handful of minutes that we have. So, andy Muborn, with Distribute, if you've spent any time on LinkedIn and you're in the sales space, you definitely know Andy, one of the colorful personalities, and we love the spirit that you bring to this. But we're here today to talk about the origin story of Distribute and digital sales rooms and just the whole movement towards, if you will, a buyer-focused selling process. So we'll dive into that.
Andy:Welcome, Andy. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me y'all. Yeah, we're gonna go quick today, Sorry about that, but yeah, we'll have some fun. Get through this. We can always continue later if needed.
Andy:But yeah, I think I'll start with, like you know, my background and, coming from the go-to-market world, you know we I was early at outreach, so that was fun Uh, right, we were there. Um, that was when go-to-market tech was, you know, really just kind of popping off and getting started and so, um, we were lucky enough to kind of, you know, be um trailblazers in that space of building sales tech, Right? Um, so, building all the sales tech, spending years doing that. I left after about being there seven and a half, eight years and continued building out something called Tapleo, which is a content tool, again to help people make sales using LinkedIn. We sold that over to Limlist and then after that I kind of sat down for a while. I was like, all right, what am I going to do next? No more sales tech and three months later, building sales tech, Right. So I just can't get away from it. You know, I love it. That's where all my connections are. You know there's always problems to be solved there.
Andy:Now that leads me into why did we build Distribute specifically. I think why we built Distribute was for a few different reasons, the first one being that there was a ton of different go-to-market tools out there and reps were using like 50 different tools. And I came from a world where, you know, we built outreach at the time, early in the early days. It was one of the only go to market you know sales tools out there, which is great, which is why it kind of grew so fast, Right. But then it just got out of hand and there was just so many tools everywhere and what I realized is like, if we think about first principles in terms of what reps are really doing on a day to day basis, it's like they're jumping on calls, they have a sales process within that sales process.
Andy:Every stage of that sales processing, they're producing some type of asset or collateral or material, Right. Every step of a sales process is tied to one is is tied to like a piece of material you're building. For example, when you're early stage, you're probably, you know, in a deal, a mid market enterprise strategic deal. You're probably doing like a you know how we differentiate from everyone else out there. Now, on the other side of the deal, you're probably doing something like a business case, right? Well, when you map those stages to different pieces of content, that's really what reps are doing on a day-to-day basis, right? And they're trying to push that next piece of material that they're creating.
Andy:So we said, all right, well, if that's really what we're doing on a day-to-day basis, once you're in a deal, then what are they using in order to, like, manage this process of generating the content that they need that helps them win faster, win better, stand out from the competition? And what we said is, well, they're using all these fragmented tools to create content. They're waiting for marketing. They don't know what to write, right, when it comes to creating a business case, how do you make a great business case? What's that look like? How do I share it? How do I measure engagement on it? So you have all these different pieces of that.
Andy:And then we said, let's hone in on that and let's actually one help them create the content with this new AI thing that's coming out here.
Andy:Right, let's use data that is already available, like call transcripts, like CRM data, like data within their current content management tools, in order to surface all the data points in a business case, for example, that they can share and make their buyers go. Wow, thank you for helping me, making this easy and doing this quickly, based on all the calls that we've had. So that was our thinking right. It's really just like coming down and like I think the market got a little bit out of hand with, like we need this tool, we need this tool, we need this tool, and it was, you know, I thought of it as my my job to say no, no, no, no, no. Let's bring it back to like what is the essence of people, Like what are they actually doing, and let's build something for that. And so we focus, you know, on that avatar that's, like, you know, the salesperson that's, you know, running their process and, within that process, needing to create these materials.
Andy:So, that's what we got here today and, yeah, that's what, that's what we're on a journey to do, and we're we're still early, we're getting started, but you know, once people see what we've built out, they go wow, why didn't I have this?
Gary:earlier which is always a good sign. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly so. Break this down a little bit. So a couple of components there. I'm going to start in the middle, where the content goes. It has a very Notion-like feel. Maybe that's not by accident, because it's a familiar user interface and very flexible. But even prior to that, then, as you referenced, using the data that's available to you to feed into that, are you recording sales calls or pulling transcripts to be able to summarize that, structuring those, putting them into the, into the uh, the pages or templates, or however you're setting it up, like how, how are you the extraction of the data, the massaging of the data or information, I should say, and then the presentation and then tracking, kind of how do you think about the process, almost jobs to be done? Ask yeah.
Andy:So you know, the the bigger the context window you have of data, the better the output, Right? So what that means is, if you like, let's say you're using you know, the first thing we're relying on is call transcriptions and call data. So we have a partnership with Gong. They're great. You know. We're also launching our own call recorder soon, Like, is it going to be all the bells and whistles like Gong? No, it's going to be the bare needs of what you need, Right, and so we'll be launching that, uh, in two or so weeks. So we'll have a recorder as well.
Andy:So you'll have kind of all that in one right You'll have. You'll have um. You know our own context window will be like your calls recorded video. You've created um as well, and then you can create the digital sales rooms and then you have content management so you can bring in content that you're already using now. But, going back to this, when you create a piece of content like a business case, um, you can use the call transcript, but guess what? It's going to be better if you also have the email data and understand, uh, you know that context as well. So, um, I'm kind of giving you all how the sausage is going to be made, kind of the vision here of where this is going. But what we're going to do is continue to add different inputs that you can utilize in order to make better outputs, right Cause, like shitty in is shitty out. So, right now, call transcripts, I think, is the gold standard, which is why we started there, because that has the kind of the best context there is fidelity.
Andy:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then we're going to continue to add other things, like we're adding Salesforce, so we're going to pull what's available in Salesforce. We'll eventually pull what's in Jira and what's in uh, basically you'll be able to plug in you know 50 different tools that your organization may use. That help. But that helps us widen that context video so that when reps go, hey, AI and distribute, make me a mutual action plan, it actually can use that context window to create a exact mutual action plan that you need right, yeah, yeah um, you know.
Andy:So people are have said it's kind of funny. They're like, whoa, when you, when you build outreach, you know why we love this? Because it just it helped us be a little bit lazier. You know, with cold email, and they're like you're kind of doing it again, cause now I don't really have to think about all this stuff I'm creating. I'm like, yeah, I guess that's kind of the secret sauce is like how do we? How do we? You know, some people call it make lives easier is what I would position it as. But some people are like how do you make me a little bit lazier, right? So yeah, that's, that's the goal there and that that's essentially where we're going with this product.
Gary:Got it and then. So now we have the creation and obviously you know you hit on these points. Rob, as a seller is there. There's like the concept of these digital sales rooms. It's not like it's brand new, but I think in a lot of cases it was more marketing driven Right. It's almost like the, the sales enablement tools, where marketing content went to die and you know cause.
Gary:It wasn't specifically relevant for that situation and and we could get away with flooding our buyer with information. But I think what's interesting about the approach that Distribute is taking is at least it appears it's. It's more it's taking the information that's relevant specifically for that customer, putting it in a structure that makes sense and is consumable but is not overwhelming the recipient with just like here. Here's 57 case studies, and not that you couldn't do that if you wanted to.
Andy:But being more tailored.
Gary:Yeah yeah, being more tailored.
Andy:Yeah, exactly, spot on, gary, the way to think about that too. Another way to think about it is like if you, if you look at what we did early at Outreach is like we, it was personalization 1.0. Right, it was like, ok, top of funnel, right, you have, like you, imagine your funnel. Everyone knows the funnel. You know we started with how do you personalize stuff, stuff at the top of funnel, and that was your cold emails, right?
Andy:That was like hey, how do we personalize cold emails and scale that process to multiple people at once, right? Well, now we're kind of just moving down the funnel a little bit. If you about it, you know we're saying now this is personalization 2.0, which is like okay. Now, once you're in the deal, how do you personalize those materials based on their use case? Right, and that's kind of the big opportunity that we're looking at too, because you don't want to send a buyer a vanilla white paper, right?
Andy:it's like you know, with a bunch of like you know fluff in it with buzzwords like revolutionize and you know all the fun stuff. But streamline.
Gary:Yeah, exactly.
Andy:One. No one reads those two. They're not personalized at all. So the other way that we're thinking about it too is like, okay, we did where personalization 1.0 with, like, how do you personalize a cold email? Now, how do we move that down the funnel a little bit and have the reps allow personalization for everything else later in the deal cycle, once they get that meeting, how do they continue to personalize and build their case? Cause, as you know, once you get that initial meeting, you're only five, 10% of the way there, right? So you know, what do you do with the other 90% of things you need to do in order to, you know, get that deal done?
Andy:So that's the way we're thinking about it, and there's a lot there, right. There's case studies, business cases, mutual action plans, you know, medic stuff, scoping documents, all that crazy stuff that you have to do if you want to do more of a enterprise sale. Right For transactional, you know, we don't work as well because the reps aren't really doing like a full sales cycle, needing to create all this material. So for SMB, it's not as useful. Right To do transparent, um. So a lot of this is for people listening. The context here is going to be uh for more of those like longer 30, 60 day plus deal cycles.
Gary:Yeah, although, when you say that, though, one of the things that we have seen, we work with several clients that are sub-10K, 20k, more transactional, but the reality is that even those have gotten more and more complicated because of the ecosystem into which they have to go to.
Gary:So in some ways, I could see you know done. Well, you know, perhaps it's a little, it's a little less. Uh, you know you don't aggregate information over time because there's less touch points, but you have to actually be more prescriptive so that you can provide the champion everything that they need to be able to go to their committee or whatever that you don't get a chance to talk to or see, so that they're representing your story in the best way manner, versus a bunch of generic, you know, templated information and then actually carrying that over to onboarding as well. Which curious are you seeing that it's one thing to be in the sales cycle, but all of this information and knowledge about the customer and what they're doing and what they're trying to accomplish and the objectives and who's involved, and you know, you know the, the concerns that they have about implementation or whatever all that's getting collected and gathered in that period Are you seeing companies extend it then into great. Now we're into activation. Let's just keep running with the same document.
Andy:Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's funny you say that. Naturally good for us. But yeah, it typically extends into implementation and customer success, kind of the the approach there. Right, so not not wanting, I don't want this to be totally about like distribute the product, but kind of you know insights on on teams in the market. But you know, if you look at implementation, if you look at customer success, each one of those profiles as well is like their goal is to create assets that move the needle and push forward their objective right.
Andy:Implementation does implementation plans, task assignments you know all that fun stuff. Customer success what do they do? You know, depending on the org, like it could be anything from best practices to troubleshooting documents to you know it's just a lot of assets and material all day long. It's content all day long. You know all those roles we're focusing on sales specifically. Just you's, it's content all day long. You know all those roles we're focusing on sales specifically.
Andy:Just you know that's how we get in our foot in the door, although you know there is a lot of noise because there's so many go-to-market products out there in in some strategic scenarios we definitely do kind of like knock on doors and the implementation side of customer success. But, yeah, sales typically looks at it and says, hey, I see it, this will help us run our medic process. Or, you know, our, our new sales process, aligned with the CRO that he wants to implement. So, um, yeah, but it's definitely, you know, I would say, part of the process kind of, you know, wall to wall within the, within the go-to-market organization, for sure no-transcript.
Andy:Yeah, we, we it's funny you say that we, we, we actually um, influence a lot of process. Um, yeah, and you know that's part of the game, right, it's if you want to build something transformational, like that's kind of what you're doing is changing the process a little bit, not entirely because, you know, at the end of the day, you have your, you know, you have your, your discovery, your scoping, your, it's all a lot of the same stuff just to be, you know, with different lipstick on it, right, Like a pig with different lipstick sometimes, but it's, you know, it's a lot of the same stuff, but definitely what. We have some challenges and going into orgs, right, that are like, hey, we love this, we want to use it, but like we don't have a dialed process, and so what you have to do is then put on your consulting hat, right, and say like, okay, well, what's your product? Okay, well, our product is pretty complicated. Okay, so you have an implementation process. You integrate with a lot of things. You should probably do this, this and this in the middle of it to understand, like, the full complexity.
Andy:So, yeah, it, definitely, we come across that for sure, which, honestly, is good and bad, right, good, because then we can kind of lock our teeth into that org and like influence a lot of the process, but then on the other side of that it's it's definitely a lot more um handholding that we have to do in a longer sales process Right.
Andy:So give and take, there's advantages, disadvantages to it. But you know, if you want to build like outreach, right, like because a lot of people know outreach and I bring it up and I was there but like same thing. Like we came in and people were like wait, we don't really. We're just kind of like telling reps here's your email and go like send cold emails Like they had no system around it how to tie it to the CRM, how to create a sequence and like what that looks like, right, so like you influence the process as well and I think you know that is typically where you get these transformational products and products that last that are built to last, because you're like, hey, I run my whole process around this, my methodology is ran around this, and it makes it just more sticky, so we're happy to do that.
Andy:Actually, I'm glad I have the background in doing that kind of stuff Because if not, I don't know if it would be a way harder launch to this product. If I, if I didn't have that kind of insight and like what orgs already do and world-class ways to do things and all that?
Gary:Yeah, you can see it a mile away An empathetic founder, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's one of the things we find as well is that you know somebody wants to step in to implement a tool. I'm like, well, the tool is only as good as the process into which you put it and the content that you provided is only as good as the questions that you ask, which means you need to understand your icp and their pain points, and well, you know. So it's this cascading thing like getting the cart before the horse oftentimes.
Andy:Yeah, yeah, like you can have. You know, we should do a whole episode on like cheesy analogies. But the cheesy analogy for this one is like you can have, like you know, a race car, but like, if you've ever raced a car on like a racetrack, right, you can have the two different people in the same exact car, but one can like just pull away entirely from another one because they know how to drive the car faster and in the best way possible, right, and I'm talking not like by seconds, I'm talking about like like multiple seconds and minutes, right. So, um, yeah, like the, you know, if you don't know how to drive, stick shift and you get in the car, you're probably not going to go very fast. And if it's a stick shift, right. So, like, yes, you have to definitely come in and understand, like, okay, not just give someone the tool or the race car, but like how do they drive it, how do they implement it, how do they understand, like, how to take what speed, to take what turns and what to you know how to tune certain things. So, definitely an important part.
Andy:I think that's where a lot of um, that's where that, that's where I don't think I'm kind of like transitioning here. But that's where I don't think like AI is going to take salespeople's jobs, like at least in the mid market, in enterprise side, right, like for more of the transactional stuff. Maybe, who knows, we'll, we'll, we'll know in five to 10 years. But, um, on the mid market, in the, in the enterprise side, like one. Could you ask AI like like hey, here's my whole situation and how should we implement this thing?
Andy:sure, but like you want to talk to a human yeah so and and for something that big, if you think about what people have on the line their jobs and implementing something new they're not going to rely on, just like well, the bot told me that yeah exactly right like it's. Just, unfortunately, I don't think that's, that's how humans are ever gonna um, work, um, at least not in the next 10 to 20 years, um, so, yeah, so I think you know, with that being said, um, actually I'll stop there, because then I'm gonna go on another rant.
Gary:I was gonna say because, because I know you were you gotta go here in a second um, two last questions and we might need a part two of this as you think about readiness or level of preparation that an organization we talked a little bit about, you got to have a good structure, a good plan. Anything else that you've seen look to really take off or you need to be prepared. You need to consider, as a buyer of distributor or any digital sales room, a as a buyer of distributor, any digital sales room, um, you know, is there a certain rev ops capability or they have to think about you know how it's gonna in, come into the process. Um, you know where the involvement of marketing, if at all, like what? What have you seen as kind of the good ingredients for success for you?
Andy:you, um, oh, I had a. I had matt curl, um the ceo of apollo, on my podcast yesterday and, uh, he said something great which I've never been able to pinpoint. It, so shout out to matt curl on this. But he said, um, you have to think about your go-to-market as not a process. And I was like, oh yeah, I've been trying to like put that into words, but like it's not just like, okay, load people in a sequence, hit, play and, you know, start cold emailing Like it's an entire product. How does everything play together with itself? Right, how does how does marketing play with sales? How does sales play with customer success? And how do you build a product where all these pieces are are really like, um, going in the same direction in a harmonious way?
Gary:Right.
Andy:And so that's what I would say is kind of a high level thing I've been thinking about just as a buyer. You know you got to think about when you're thinking about tooling and you're thinking about what to buy next and all this AI stuff that you know is making people dizzy because they don't know like what's. What you know that's that's a big thing is is don't think about like the tool that your friend told you to buy. Think about like your, your product in its entirety and how it's going to fit into that there, going to fit into that there. So that's what I would say from a buyer perspective that I would lead people with you know and see how you know these tools may fit in with the entire kind of like landscape of what you're trying to achieve, what your North Star is.
Gary:Yep, yep, yeah, we refer to that as the systems thinking right, it's an, it's a. You've changed one part of the system, you're changing every other part of the system. It's going to have an impact.
Andy:Exactly, if you pull one lever, then some other levers are going to. You know like? I have another analogy for this. I actually do. I actually fly planes too, and so, um, you know a lot of that.
Andy:If you, if you change one little setting okay, if I pitch my nose up on a plane, guess what? I might get more lift, I might gain altitude, but I'm going to get more friction. I'm probably going to go a lot slower. So every little movement that you do, it's like an airplane. Right, if I go left my rudder, I'm going to increase drag, that's going to fall, and I have to think about the other components that are being affected by that. That is the same thing as as as all of these systems. Right, that's just thinking how everything's correlated. So, um, yeah, I think there is the rise of this. Like, um, gtm engineer, you, right now you know like someone that's, that's not just like hey, here's how sales works and you know right now it's very siloed in an organization, and so I think where it's going is in. This should be not just the CRO's job, because he's like overlooking, like maybe marketing and CS and all this, but like who's on the ground floor in the weeds yeah that understands how all of these things play together.
Andy:So, like the chief GTM officer, let's call him right, um, I think you're going to see a lot of that, where it's someone in the weeds seeing how all these things tie together, um, probably in the next few years, right, and like there there's two places there's the high level, the CRO, but then there's also going to be, you know, the person that's like on the ground floor seeing doing all the systems and the operating for all of these and putting all the puzzle pieces together.
Andy:So that's definitely going to have to happen. If you want to. I think we're on a world-class team moving forward.
Gary:Yeah, totally agree. All right, Well, we're at time. Really appreciate it, andy. Thank you. Where can people find you?
Andy:LinkedIn Andy Mewborn. Hit me on LinkedIn. Easy peasy, andy, at distributeso. If you have any questions, email me. I respond to everyone, yeah, and if you haven't seen it.
Gary:you got to go to distributeso and check out the video right there on the homepage, Probably one of the best you know most like your personality just comes screaming out of that. It's awesome. We love that.
Andy:I love it. I love it yes. Another validation yeah.
Gary:Keep doing it, keep doing it how?
Andy:stupid, do I? Look? I'm like you know what I'm going all in baby. You got to own it, man, own it, I'm owning I'm owning it, so thank you guys so much. Hey, appreciate gary andy great name, uh, tiana. Thank y'all, um, and then we'll chat soon and looking forward to this coming out, y'all sounds great.
Gary:Hold on just a minute. Uh, for the rest of the pros, out there be a pro. Bye. Thank you for tuning in to GTM Pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit gtmproco and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go-to-market skills. Until next time, go Be A Pro.