AI Announcer (00:05.634)
This is Prompt This, the podcast for business leaders who've had it with AI hype and want the real deal. Clint and Greg cut through the noise to bring you analysis and playbooks on using AI to launch new ideas. Scale your business and stop getting left behind. Now, here are your hosts.
Greg (00:28.11)
Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast. I'm Greg. My co-host Clint and I started this podcast to explore how business leaders are using AI in the real world. We found that our friends and colleagues aren't just talking about AI, they're actually building with it. So we decided to bring them in one by one to share their stories. And that's prompt this. Now I'm the sales guy focused on sales leadership.
I've run many sales teams and have learned to harness the power of blending AI systems with human effort to succeed.
And I'm Clint. I've been involved in starting buying and selling software companies and a little while ago I set out to learn what's happening with AI. So teamed up with Greg to turn that journey into a podcast. Our guest today founded an AI sales assistant company and has learned all of the tips and tricks of rolling out AI for sales teams.
Yeah, you know, I found this one a fascinating discussion. I really liked where Ganesh started talking about gardeners learning styles and how people learn differently and and go to their strengths. It's a it's a powerful conversation.
Yeah, the part that I thought was really cool is he started talking about some of the capabilities of his AI sales assistant software, how they've built this digital twin concept where you create an avatar of yourself in the software and it can give briefings of your stuff to other people. And they even have it set up so that you can have an avatar of an ex-employee give you a briefing about what's went on with a customer back when that employee was around. I thought that was a really cool twist.
Greg (02:07.79)
Well, let's get into the show.
Clint (02:16.258)
This is Clint. Welcome to Prompt This.
And this is Greg!
Today we have Ganesh Iyer joining us. He's a technology CEO with deep expertise in sales tech, digital transformation, and building companies. Ganesh is passionate about aligning technology with human performance to create lasting business impact.
Hello, hello. Thank you guys for having me here.
It's great to have you here and Clint, you're just going to have to move over because this is sales AI tech. So this is my side of the topic. I'm really excited for the conversation today. It's going be fun.
Clint (02:51.288)
You're right, this is about digging into how AI is impacting sales organizations. And Ganesh is a fantastic person to talk to because that's what he thinks about and talks about every single day.
I was looking at your LinkedIn. I really liked your tagline. It's you're on a mission to make every sales rep the best. So I couldn't think of a better mission to dig into. I love it. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what you're doing right now at Aspr.
Sure. So my journey started by as part of a startup. We worked towards building chipsets for NASA or Atheon, Northrop Grumman for satellites. Learned a lot in the process in terms of what does it take to sell on the technical side. I was the technical sales person in that process. Worked in companies like AMD, then Cisco. Saw what does it take to sell on the enterprise side. And from there, was fortunate enough to build a startup.
from the ground up, which was all about how do you understand what are the motivations of people, how do you align the motivations to the right opportunities. And consistently I saw in all those themes, an opportunity for a tool or a process or technology to help the selling of any product, service to be aligned to what the business needs are.
This is exciting to me because as you're talking about it, I'm just already putting myself into experiences that I've been in where it's really around the ramp up or coming into a company. You can be a fantastic salesperson and if the bootcamp or the documents aren't there to help you ramp up, you have to turn to tribal knowledge and find the four or five people that know how to do this. That can take a lot of time.
Ganesh Iyer (04:45.486)
One of the things that I've also noticed is sometimes the companies go overboard in getting a lot more tools and some of these tools do point solutions really well. But the problem with point solution is they don't talk to each other. And when you step back and look at the entire end-to-end process, then it creates more inefficiencies in the process. So the sales guys end up not solving the problem, which is connecting with the customers. They struggle with then connecting the dots between the tools.
And that inefficiencies takes them away from just having a normal conversation with the customer. And that lack of context again, not only impedes your ramp up for a newcomer, but also it creates a lot more inefficiencies for any even existing top-notch sales guys who are spending more time just doing paperwork versus just talking to customers.
Are you finding that when you're working to get people ramped up on new technology and new sales processes and things like that, all the things that your software solution is helping companies achieve, do people learn the same way or do we find that different salespeople have different skill sets and they also learn different ways?
So it's very interesting. There is this concept called Gardner's learning style. So humans are geared towards learning in eight different formats. It's very popular at the same time, a little controversial, because what Gardner learning style talks about is humans learn in distinct ways. Some people are very vocal. They love to read blogs. They love to read a lot of text. Some people are very visual. They love to see infographics. Some people love to
They are musical in nature, so they love to listen to podcasts. They love to listen through some kind of video format. How do you appeal to what resonates in terms of your learning style? So one of the things that we have learned in the process is you can't have a broad brush stroke when it comes to training, and that also goes towards coaching. Two parts to it. One is what are the learning styles that would appeal to you? How do you put the content in a way that would resonate to you? And the second part is...
Ganesh Iyer (06:53.816)
How do we play to your strengths to make sure that we can always give you that you will excel faster versus tell you something that you're not doing well, which takes a lot more energy for you to get things done right. And this is actually Gallup had published an article which talked about sales team members in terms of training where you focus on the strengths. The company ends up having 30 % more profit compared to
training that is done purely just based on the figuring out the weakness and trying to make it better. So that is something.
like that, let's drill into that one for a second. So focusing your training on what people already do well and make it even better, or focusing on the things that people don't do well and try and get them up to minimum effectiveness. And you're saying focusing on those strengths, that really is what helps people ultimately do best.
That is correct. Focusing on strengths is one part, and the second part is how do you cater to them in a way that would resonate to them as a part of content consumption. So one is the learning style. The second part is strength. And how do you marry best of both worlds to make you really efficient in terms of not only paying attention, but also doing the right things that would help you to close the deals.
That makes sense. you know, from just training brand new managers who have to train teams. That's a concept that we talk about a lot. People learn in different ways. And one of the fun things about doing this podcast with Clint is we've been friends for a long time. We've never actually worked together. So discovering how we, how we learn, we are opposites.
Clint (08:38.926)
Yeah, that's the truth. So let's bring this back to your company, Asper.ai. What problems are you solving for folks out there?
We talked about more than 100 plus chief revenue officer, chief growth officer, head of sales, asking those simple questions. What is your pain point? What are you doing to mitigate the pain points? There were eight themes that came out of those conversations. Number one, as I said earlier, too many sales tools. Don't bring me one more. I'm not going to adopt it. But if you can consolidate three, they were very specific, three or more, then we can probably have some conversation and that too, if we can do it at a fractional cost.
That was like if and then, right? But the second part that they talked about was lack of preparation getting into the call. How do you make sure that you know who is your customer, who is your stakeholder? What is the right way to connect with this audience based on your past history of closed one deals? And if you don't do that right, you end up losing at least 20, if not 30 % of your deals in your pipeline. The third part is basically how do you help with respect to ensuring that
Coming out of the call, you do all the hygiene work required to make sure you can project the numbers better, which is updating CRM, sending the emails on time, do the follow up on time. So there is an agent that we built specifically to address that, which is pre and post meeting automation, and also helping with CRM updates. That is the first agent.
So now we're starting to talk about AI. This is what AI is doing for people is summarizing this information, getting them prepared, as well as summarizing after the meeting and helping them keep track of it,
Ganesh Iyer (10:14.968)
that is correct. And in some cases, it does it for them, which is updating everything back into your CRM and just basically updates the user saying that, we have done this for you. If you want, can review it just to have a sanity check. If you don't, that's OK. We have done this for you. That was the first piece of the pain points that we heard, and we built an agent around it. The second part that was talked about was, there are a lot of documents that are created. And many of these documents, like Winning,
deals, we don't have we don't have access to it. How do I know what documents were used when and what were the languages that were used that helped them win the deal? Can I get a
That age-old challenge slash opportunity in sales, right, Greg? What deck did you use to close that deal? Not the deck that came from marketing, but I want the deck that you used to
Close that deal. Yeah, Yeah, the secret decks, ones that pass around to the sales orgs, yeah?
So what we did was we built this resident knowledge, which is basically taking all the information from your emails, from your conversations, from your transcripts, and focuses more on the documents and the exchange of content and the tone at which the exchange happened so that we can use the same style of content being created. So we have the Document Agent, which looks at, depending on the stage at which you are, it starts cranking out the documents, SORW proposal, RFP, deal.
Ganesh Iyer (11:41.198)
debriefing stop reasons why icons are getting lost or one is DR to AE handover, AE to CSM handover. So all these that are required for you to know what needs to be done next, and a system that can tell you hey, this is what has happened with respect to your closed one deal so that if I replicate the same thing, there is a high degree of chance I may win the deal. So that is the second agent. just
to hone in on that, you're actually doing the responses for an RFP.
That is correct. So RFP is basically multiple questions that is answered through a repository or through an Excel sheet. And we have a third agent, which is basically a resident knowledge agent. Ask any questions and get contextualized response. will also show you all the sources from where it is picking up the answers. RFP is an extension of that resident knowledge agent, which is instead of answering one question, we are answering multiple questions within a document framework.
Great. So as a sales rep, have access to three agents to update my update CRM and, and make sure I don't miss any followups. have a research agent and I have one that will create quotes and RFPs and use intelligence across the entire history of the company and history of the opportunities to make sure that it's nuanced in a way for the best win probability.
That is correct. Those are the three, but we also have two more.
Greg (13:14.366)
wait, there's more!
One of the things that we are trying to do here is consolidate all of this through these agents that are specializing just in not in one, but it also helps each other to complete multiple tasks in the workflow. So the next agent is basically helping you answer any questions, get contextualized response, which is the resident knowledge agent. But what we have done here is we have built a digital twin of your ex-employees. So this is...
based on my personal pain point, every time a salesperson walks out the door, they not only take the relationship for them, but also the knowledge in terms of how do they sell. And if you lose the best performer, it takes forever to get a good one. And it really puts a dent in your closures. So what we have done in this process is the resident knowledge not only captures all your document insights, but you have the ability to bring in your ex-employee into the repository.
and we recognize that being an ex-employee and you can chat to that person as if you're talking to that person in the company, but right now it's in a chat view. Probably it will be extended as a voice maybe in the next six months from now, right?
You're making kind of a digital version of an ex-employee and somebody can just chat with that ex-employee about the old account.
Ganesh Iyer (14:31.512)
That is correct. Old account, what is the way that they have dealt with certain personas? Or you can also tap into, you are the best performer. I'm going to meet with this customer. What is the best way to basically reach out to this customer that would help me to close the deals, right? So how do you capture that experience and transfer it to somebody who is just learning?
This is amazing. mean, that is probably an area that is glossed over, but one of the biggest misses in what happens on a sales floor when someone leaves. I think in practice for many, many years, when someone's ready to leave, we wait till the final 48 hours of them walking out the door and we sit down and we have an interview with them and try and get nine years worth of account knowledge out of them.
and they're already checked out. They're not very interested in helping us, right? Then the new rep gets the territory. The new rep sits down with a mountain of quotes and a drive. And we say, you know, Hey, get yourself familiar with this account. You know, you're going out in 10 days. You know, you better be ready. And if you're are that rep, which I have been, you take a look at maybe two quotes and you're, and you don't even have any product knowledge yet. So you're like,
I'll just go to the account and start from there. So completely lost knowledge. This is, this is amazing to be able to.
I got a problem with it. Sometimes they're an ex-employee for a reason. I don't know if you want to bring that person back. I hope you're not capturing necessarily too much of the personality. What if that person was a jerk or difficult to work with? Is that going to manifest when you're chatting with them? Okay.
Greg (16:07.202)
Right?
Ganesh Iyer (16:16.778)
Not yet. yet. We stay away from bringing any personality. We focus on the wins, not on the loss. Loss is more for learning overall. But wins, what did they do differently that helped them to close the deal faster? If it is closing faster than the normal median seen within your pipe, right? And how do we project that as a part of learning that helped them? And if there is a similar customer that I'm dealing with, what is the best practices that I can pick from there?
great. I guess if you could, I know you talked about interviewing, you know, many, teams. wait, there's one more agent to go.
To moon.
He keeps adding two more. I think we're up to 12.
I think he's building this company while we're on this podcast. Like agents while we're talking.
Ganesh Iyer (17:06.061)
Probably I need to go for a math class here. Sorry. So the next one is primarily coaching agent, which helps you to identify the wins and this where when we look at the coaching agent, the way we have built it as there are 10 parameters that we benchmark every salesperson, but we look for the strengths for those 10. And we try to emphasize more on few where we see you're doing well, and areas where you need to improve is more for you.
to know what your blind spots are. But we always give you coaching for the next 30, 60, 90 to hone in on your strengths and also if possible work on your areas to improvement. But if you can focus on your strengths, that can really help you to close the conversation. But the key part over there is all the coaching tools that I've seen so far is more of a static tool. You get some coaching insights, you pick that up, you try to read through it. And as you go through your day to day activity, for me personally, I forget what is that.
I have to do that will help me to close the deal. What we have done here is we have built an evolving 306090 learning plan, which allows you to take a look at it every day that you're having conversations with the customers, how you're progressing, and based on the progress done in the first 30 days, your next 60 and 90 gets a word. So basically, when you move to the next month, a new 306090 will be shown to you. So what a period of a year.
We show you a snapshot in terms of where you were, what are the actions that you have taken and how you are evolving yourself as a salesperson. And what we're also trying to do here is tie it back to their wins and loss. Is this impacting your wins and loss? And if yes, automatically you see them paying more attention in place, right? So that is a coaching agent. And the last one is finally a training agent. And in this, we have created a unique way to...
connect with the audience. And in this case, have created these two agents that are talking to each other, similar to you guys, but not as elegant as you both do, but two agents talking to each
Greg (19:11.63)
to make they're better.
They're talking about deals, Joe is talking to Oprah or Megan, and they're talking about not only the deals that I'm working on, which is closed one, they're talking about how do I improve myself in the process? And as I'm listening through this, I can raise my hand, ask questions, so that I can make it more interactive in nature. So because this is tied back to your opportunity, we have seen sales guys paying more attention because they can correlate to what has happened.
and what can be done differently. They can easily correlate if this is going to help them or not. And in the same piece, we allow you to bring in your static content. You may have your sales playbook, upload it, we create a podcast, which can be interactive. We can read through it and also talk to this agent. It's a free flow podcast. We don't write a script. They basically pick on the information and they start talking to each other. So many times we have seen the script is completely different from one podcast to another.
because they focus on, we also hinge on MedPic, banned or spiced, depending on what framework the companies are using. And they always hinge to that framework and always come back with, hey, this is what the person should be doing better, or this is what the person has done well, please focus more on this so that you can increase the wallet share.
That's great. This is like all the mechanics of the sales organization built into agents. It's amazing. So, you know, as you're out there selling Asperger, when does, see a company realize that they're going to need something like this?
Ganesh Iyer (20:45.422)
Good question. I think what you have seen traditionally is a company that is having some selling motion, at least a million dollars in revenue, because we need some history of understanding the patterns of wins and loss. If you don't have the history, that's okay. The agent comes in with a pre-baked knowledge based on your industry and what kind of customer base that you may be going after, your ICP. But when it becomes effective is when it sees what has happened in reality in your environment.
At least five salespeople, which primarily includes SDR, AE and CSM. If you have at least five, it will start basically humming. Five to maybe 10 is an ideal scenario where we have seen it really impacts the sales organization. Between 10 to maybe 50, it has a sweet spot where we see quicker transaction happenings. But the bigger value comes into play when it's an enterprise. When you have massive sales organization, how do you put a sales ops sales
coach with every salesperson who does their back office and they then only focus on selling. Imagine a sales ops person or a coach nudging you every morning, hey Ganesh, you probably have to focus on these three accounts and not only focus on these three accounts, these are the agenda points and the three discovery questions you should ask getting into this call to this person because we have identified this is the intent signal for this person you're going to talk to.
And as we do that, basically feeds documents. helps me identify the next steps. It also tells me whom I should ping where so that I can keep the deal moving forward.
Let's flip it around to the other side. So you've actually deployed Asper for a customer. What are the challenges that you typically see with adopting these new AI sales tools?
Ganesh Iyer (22:33.836)
I think the biggest friction for everyone is how can I trust you as a vendor to give data which is all going to be exposing us with respect to what is our core business and how do I trust you with our data? That is to me the biggest component that I've seen. That's number one.
The security topic as a whole? Is that what you're saying?
Security is a big part of it. Security and viability of the company, that's number one. The second one that we have seen as, and I'm seeing this more for non-IT service companies or product-based companies, even the point of just recording a conversation is seen as like overlooking more with respect to your day-to-day activities.
There are companies, they don't like to record any part of the conversation. It's interesting. Just before this call, I was talking to a prospect and they were saying out of a hundred calls that they have in a week, they are only recording maybe 18 to 20, which means that the other 80, there is a big opportunity for them to help the salesperson to do the right things, but they are not able to because there is this inherent fear from the buyer that their conversations are being recorded. So that is the second-
for the company to track me.
Ganesh Iyer (23:53.57)
Yeah, yeah. And I think that is a bigger impediment. That's an impediment for everyone across the sales aisle. The third one is just the sheer frustration. There is a lot of over promise under delivering with respect to especially AI part where there is SDR AI that took quite a bit of hype last year. And everyone realized that, hey, this can only send information, but it doesn't have any context. And it starts hallucinating quite a bit in the process.
So hallucination is something creating disservice along with too many sales tools. There is this distaste that, hey, I don't want to bring in one more AI tool that's going to hallucinate, and I may look bad in the process. So that is something that we heard again and again as how do we reduce the hallucination. And one of the things that we have built from the ground up is we have built statistical tools that can couple with large language models to avoid the hallucinations and plagues. But that's the third one that we are hearing.
How are you seeing adoption when Asperger's brought into a company? take a look at like a sales organization. It's kind of a sacred culture, right? You know, we don't even tell the company everything we're doing, right? You we don't, you know, we have our own traditions. We have our own ways of doing things. I just, brought AI forecasting in and just the fight down through my organization of trusting this, how is it going to know we're better, even just to get them to enter the data.
So are you finding when Asper comes in, there's a, is there any kind of fight to using it or the top down management, you know, making you follow these, these 90 day recommendations coming from your agents.
I think the adoption for us, we focused on helping the end users, account executives and CSMs to not worry about their mundane boring tasks that everyone hates to do, like updating CRM, creating documents.
Greg (25:53.326)
Clean
updating CRM automatically. Love it.
making sure that they can send the information to the right person at the right time. They don't forget if especially CSMs I feel for them. Sometimes they have 7280 accounts. It's humanly impossible to know what would be the next steps that they need to do at a given day because many times they're just doing firework every day, right? So is there some reminder that can tell them hey, just focus on this. You are OK not to send emails to XYZ for the next two days to.
to a week, just focus on these two accounts, which would be more important today, right? So if there is a reminder nudge that can be softly given, if there is an assistant that can take care of all these mundane and boring tasks for the end users, automatically then it becomes bottom up approach, right? And that's.
Yeah, so you're helping the actual end user be better at their job and take away some of the mundane tasks so I can see the adoption once they understand it probably pretty quick actually.
Ganesh Iyer (26:58.316)
And what we have seen is if we can be in the workflow, be within Slack, be within your existing workflow, the adoption skyrockets very fast. So we just released a Slack app. And what we are seeing is there is high appetite for users to just be within that flow, ping more of these agents. The agents also ping them or nudge them through the Slack. And we are seeing the actions 3x more compared to what we see through a web interface.
Here's a question that I don't think we've asked any of our guests. I want to get your opinion on it. When you've launched a company before without AI and created a culture and then started to bring AI into your company, how did that affect the culture as opposed to I'd imagine with Asper when you've started, you probably started this company with AI as part of the culture from day one. Can you talk about any differences or is there any?
I think that is just my opinion. My previous venture was also a global company. So we used to have team members outside US, in Canada, in Europe, in India. And I always felt it's harder to communicate, especially virtually, to all these team members. One of the things that we have noticed with respect to AI is it really helps you to put your thoughts in the frame of mind that is easy to consume.
to the other person who may be more native to a language that the other person is not in. So the communication that what we have seen in one part is the communication becomes easier. To me, culture is, it's all about the values that you want to inculcate and the tools only help you to get that adoption faster. So before, if it is a non-native AI company, it takes a lot more effort for you to...
share those values in a way that makes sense to every employee within the company. But with all these new tools, Gen.EI, it becomes easier for me personally to communicate in a way that resonates with each of my team members, looking at the style at which they consume the content. That is one part that we are seeing that is helping us with. The second part, especially for us being a startup, think it just level-feels the aspect of knowledge that
Ganesh Iyer (29:18.306)
we have access to. And that is something that I'm seeing a big difference in terms of it may not be directly aligned to culture, but it's knowledge has a part of cultural implication. What we are seeing is it really democratizes the aspect of everyone has the best knowledge in their fingertip. Now it's up to them how they can leverage to improvise themselves in the process. So to me, it really accelerates this
post-genia, it really accelerates the process of learning, development, and alignment across the organization.
All right, now I want to learn some tools that you know about. this is how I expand my AI playground, basically.
I love to play around with something which is very visual. So I love anything which is more visual in nature. So from the time Gemini came out with their video editing feature, even Sora when they came out with the first version, we actually were playing with the APIs even before they had launched the version where you can test it out with prompts. And what is interesting is how quickly it has evolved in the process. So a couple of tools that I'm using at least for our...
marketing efforts. So if we go into a LinkedIn page, we have created a bunch of videos. The same videos in my previous company used to cost me about $10,000 for creating maybe 15 to 20 second bytes. The same video we are able to create multiple with just $20 subscription. we are using Canva. Yeah, so we are using Canva. We're using Gemini. We are also using the Nano Banana from Gemini.
Ganesh Iyer (31:05.111)
so I'm just testing out the APIs. It's amazing.
I want to pause there for a second. I love hearing some new names. We've been hearing Heygen over and over and over for similar to it. And now you're saying you can do that with Canva and Gemini. So a whole new area for us to go explore, Greg.
Right, yeah. It is, it is, yeah. You are the first person not to say, Jen, I love it.
Yeah, Hegen is something we have tried it, but I've seen the mix of Canva. If you take the videos from Gemini, mix it with Canva, the outcomes are really cool. I've also seen there are tools like Powtoons. I'm not sure if you have used it. It is more of a tool that can bring in the fun version of PowerPoint, but you can bring in some building cartoons. So how do you bring that element along with
bringing a professional element together. You can check them out. It's called as PowTunes.
Clint (32:03.906)
Our tunes was the name.
That's cool. That's really cool.
Clint (32:20.312)
So, Greg, this week's AI voice intro, you created a new one for us again using what? Microsoft, was it?
Yeah, it's the co-pilot audio expressions and they added some new new pieces in there, but I sent you the first one and I, I chose determination. What'd you think?
frankly a little overboard. was kind of a bit pokey, a little creepy in there. So we had to redo it. That's just loud and aggressive. Well, you will follow this podcast.
It aggressive, wasn't it? aggressive. Yeah, The cool part about it is you don't have to change the words. I just hit generate button again and I got a new version and it worked.
That's awesome. So easy.
Greg (33:06.326)
Alright, it's time for this week's AI challenge. Now the AI challenge is a takeaway assignment for our listeners to get more comfortable with these AI tools and get your hands on it.
This week's AI challenge is all about talking to AI. What you're going to do is go to the asper.ai website and work with their agent, their sales assistant agent, and get a sense of what it means to work with an AI in a sales setting.
So look down into the show notes and you'll find a link. It's going to take you to the blog with all the information you need to complete the challenge. When you're done, why don't you share your experience in the comments section. If you're using AI in business and have a story to tell about it, go to our contact us page at www.promptthis.ai. We'll reach out and get you on a future show.
Clint (34:05.72)
We appreciate you coming and joining us today, Ganesh, and sharing all your insights with our audience.
Thank you.
Where do people connect with you if they want to connect and continue the conversation?
You can always reach out to me through LinkedIn. can type in my name, Ganesh Iyer, and ESPR AI is the company name. You will see the name pop up. I'd love to connect with anybody who wants to talk more about it. Or send me an email, ganesh at aspr.ai.
Great, well thanks for being on the podcast. Thank you. You have a great day, man.
Ganesh Iyer (34:40.088)
Thank you.
And that's another episode of Prompt This.
Thanks for joining Clinton Greg today. You can find all of the prompt this episodes and more in depth articles at www.promptthis.ai and be sure to click the follow button below. We look forward to having you back.
