Will AI Steal MY Sales Job? Ft. Scott Leese

Well, I think we're going in kind of the near term—a lot of these zombie companies are gonna die.

[Welcome back to the Revenue Reimagine Podcast. We are here with Scott Leese, who is the founder of Scott Leese Consulting. Very creative name, similar to my company, the Surf and Sales Summit, which is amazing. I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit, and GTM United. Scott is also a six-time sales leader, four-time founder, three-time best-selling author, and odds are probably your mentor's mentor. Scott, welcome to the show, man.]

Thanks for having me, guys. I don't know if I've told you this yet or not, but I love the name of the show. I think it is very, very creative. Good alliteration. And yeah, I think it's great. So happy to be here.

I'm gonna cut Dale off because Dale normally goes next, but more creative than Scott Leese's Consulting and Adam J Consulting?

Yeah, it's a lot more creative than that. A lot more creative. The problem though is that now you have to get Revenue Reimagined branded, whereas Adam Jay and Scott Leese's Consulting are already branded. So that was actually my logic for why I didn't create some name for my consulting company—was nobody would know what it is, whereas people know my name a little bit. Though I mean, in my case that's good or bad. People might see Adam J Consulting and be like, "I'm going the other way."

But fair point, Dale. I'm sorry. I mean, you know, I enjoy interrupting you, but I'll—you always interrupt me.

It's all good, man. It's all good.

But coming into the name like, "Let's Reimagine Revenue"—so you're a tremendous sales leader, but now let's reimagine it. What other GTM function would you go to if it wasn't sales? I mean, does founder count?

No, like marketing. I don't know, Adam. So many founders are giving sales advice lately. Are you sure?

So we could go down that path all the time. There are a ton of people who give sales advice who shouldn't, and it's akin to me giving engineering and product advice. I'm not remotely qualified. But no, in this sense—if you woke up tomorrow morning you can't be a founder, you have to go back and work full-time, right? But you can't work sales. Are you going to lead success? Are you going to lead marketing? Are you going to lead RevOps? Like, where would you go?

Yeah, I think I'm going to RevOps. I think I'm going to RevOps because I think that they have not peaked as a category in a profession yet. I think it's relatively new, and I think that they are going to survive a decent amount of the purge, if you will, or the AI assassination of roles. I think that making all these different systems buzz and hum and talk to each other and being able to extract insight from all that data that can inform an executive team—I think that's a skill that not that many people have, and that's where I would go. And to know your tech savviness, right? I didn't say that I would be good at it. I just said that this is where I would go if I was twenty-two years old and starting over. This might be where I would start.

I was gonna say—it's funny because I've been to Surf and Sales. I have followed you for a long time, and I will tell the story of how I met you shortly. But one thing you're very open about is that you're not tech savvy, right? You run your business off Google Sheets, which is great. Yeah, but like, how does a guy who runs his business off a Google Sheet now put together the sum of all the parts? And the problem is, and I'm curious if you agree—there's too many parts. Number one, which is why we're seeing not just the purge of people but the purge of tech.

Yeah, I think there's too many parts. It got all sort of siloed. I think we more or less just discarded the human spirit out of the sales process for the sake of increased productivity. That's what we did. And did we get more productive? I mean, I think we did for a minute. But then productivity just became like noisy, and we bombarded everybody, and then everybody tuned out. And now I don't think that we're more productive.

So for a minute, maybe we did.

I'm gonna push back though. I think we became busy. We became really busy, right? And there's a big difference between being busy and being productive.

Yeah, but there was a moment in time where the new technology took you from making, I don't know, fifty calls a day to two hundred fifty, and people were still picking up the phone. There was a moment in time where that worked. And there was a moment in time where rather than sending a few emails a day, we could math blast out sequences and people still replied. So I'm talking about those moments in time.

Fair enough. But then I don't think it's made us more productive.

No. So when there's overlapping tech all over the place now, right? I mean, it's like if you look at the—I think you're talking about engagement tools in particular.

Yeah, I mean, much more productive in the short term, but made it much more complicated in the long term. Because everyone's trying to take that little bit—like, I can do everything that Outreach does, but I'll put a little piece into it and we'll charge less money. And so you start stacking technology.

Let's double down on that, Scott. Before you answer—so I want to be careful how I word this, right? I was part of an organization that sold a platform play, and everyone's selling platform, right? We could do your forecasting, and we could do your this, and we could do your that, and we could put it all together. And everyone's coming out and saying, "Oh, we could do it." And to your point, Dale, we can consolidate your tools and have this all-in-one approach, but if you can't really do it, you probably shouldn't say you could do it. So Scott, I want to go to you—like, you've been doing this a lot longer than Dale and I have. You talk to a lot of companies. When you look at consolidation versus individual tools and silos, and then you bring in AI, and I love that you use the word "purge"—where is all this going? Like, what's going to reign supreme? What's going to rain supreme?

Um, well, I think where we're going in kind of the near term is a lot of these zombie companies are gonna die. There is no soft landing in the form of mergers and acquisitions. There is no private equity money potentially going to bail people out. So I think what's going to happen is there's a lot of companies that had a good idea, got a little bit of traction, but really were unable to scale in this kind of brutal situation that we're in, and they're not going to be able to get funded again, and they're not going to get acquired. Because to Dale's point, a lot of the people that used to do the acquiring have now built some of this functionality, and they themselves have tinkered around with becoming the "we do everything" platform. So they're not gonna. So I think there's going to be a lot of companies that die off. The B2B zombie apocalypse.

Yeah, the B2B purge.

Yeah, yeah. And I agree. I think there is going to be a purge. And I love talking about, you know, the zombie companies. But when we talk about kind of all-in-one, right? So I think you both know—I, Dale, you know, Scott—I think you know like I spent a good amount of time working for Toast, and part of our sales pitch was, "We're the all-in-one," right? You have your restaurant processing, your restaurant operations, your marketing automation, your credit card processing, and everything in one space. And a lot of the feedback we got from particularly large enterprise groups is, "We don't want all-in-one because then we're tied to you for everything, and if there's something we don't like, we're stuck." How does that play in B2B tech when you have—and we won't call anyone out in particular—about Gong or whatever, all of these companies that do everything? Do founders or RevOps leaders want an all-in-one platform, or do they want some flexibility where if I don't like my MarOps, I can pull that out and bring something else in?

Well, I think my personal opinion would be they prefer some flexibility in working with a couple partners. But I think mostly that's because nobody out there has the best of the best of all the pieces all under one platform. So I don't know how to talk about this without calling people out, but like you've got Tool A, B, and C that are really good at three different things, and Tool Four is pretty good at all three of those things plus something else. Yeah, what are you gonna buy? Well, right now, what I think people still buy is Tool One, Two, and Three because those are superior products, and the all-in-one thing is inferior at what it does. But when that all-in-one thing is actually the superior product across all these different categories—now I think, at least as a revenue leader, I would be like, "Okay, now I'll buy that for sure." And I personally would rather only have one relationship that I have to manage than four. One tool that I have to learn versus four. Whether everybody else feels like that I don't know, but I believe that part of the reason that the consolidation hasn't happened—

Is it because the platforms haven't delivered as good of an experience in each particular piece that some of the companies that only do the piece have built?

Yeah, because they talk about it. They sell it to you, right? And then you go use it and you're like, "Well, that didn't really do what it was supposed to do." But now you're hearing in communities like people are talking about products, how those products are being used, are they seeing ROI?

And I know you're big into the go-to-market network space. So how do we rationalize all the things that are happening? That products aren't delivering yet, things are being talked about in community.

So I'm interested to talk to you. I don't know. I don't know how we rationalize it. As much as how we endure it. I think we're enduring it right now. I mean, I don't want to beat up the labor at this point too much, but think about everybody that we know who is pretty damn good at what they do, who has a lot of experience, who doesn't have a job working for somebody else right now because they got laid off for whatever reason.

Think about the fact that only four out of ten sellers right now, I think, are on track to hit their quota this year. And you've got big, huge companies that we've always assumed are really good and will hit their numbers. Those people are having RIFs and laying people off, and they're not hitting their numbers.

Number one salesperson at XYZ company last year missing their number. Worried about getting turned. Those conversations are happening on top of the conversation about "What do you all think about this tool? What do you all think about that tool?" And the people making those decisions are now terrified of making the wrong decision because that one wrong decision could mean their head in the guillotine, and it's a wrap.

So you've got elongated sales cycles. You've got frozen budgets. If there is any, it's because a lot of people are scared to just put their neck out there and be like, "No, this is the right thing. We're going to change, and this is why." And I think that we're all seeing the results of that right now, which is just a painful moment in time.

So let's talk about that a little. Everything you said, I agree with wholeheartedly. I am sitting here doing what I do because of what's going on in the economy partly, and then part of it is I just got tired of the politics of working for one particular organization and wanted to help many.

But literally before we started recording, I got a message from someone who is a top performer at their company who says their comp is being messed with and they're tired of being screwed around. They're probably going to get laid off because their company doesn't want to pay them for the deal they just closed. What should they do?

I want to transition into what you're trying to build and talk a little bit about GTMU and go-to-network and how that can not only help sales professionals who are getting screwed over but also ultimately help the companies on the other side too. Because I do believe it's beneficial to both versus the insanity that we're going through now.

Well, the idea and the thesis behind it is that our traditional methods do not work as well as they used to. Meaning telephone, email, even social and LinkedIn DMs and that type of thing. I mean, hit up Five Guys ten times a day.

Yeah, exactly. I've still yet to buy one.

It's my belief—there's lots of data to support it. There's a lot of people based on their personal experiences that might not believe it right now, but I'm talking about a collective whole. I don't believe you can make a sound argument to tell me that people communicate on the phone as much as they did five, ten years ago, nor over email as much five to ten years ago. And there's data to support it.

So I've been trying to imagine, like, well, in the future, how are we going to open opportunities? And the only thing I can come up with is through people that we know and trust, through our network.

If I say to you, "Adam, hey, I'm trying to get a hold of this guy Dale. Looks like you've worked with them before or you know him. I'm trying to solve XYZ problems for companies. Do you mind asking him? Do you mind asking him if he's experienced this problem at all and if he's open to a conversation with me?"

And then you're going to, you know me. You presumably trust me. You know him. You trust him. You're going to go to Dale and be like, "Hey, this dude Scott wants to talk to you if you're dealing with this problem. I'll make an intro. If you're not, no worries. I'll leave it alone."

Dale trusts you and is going to be like, "Well, if Adam says this guy Scott is a decent person and he's got a decent piece of software, I should take a look at. Yeah, I'll take that meeting."

That's the only type of way that I believe meetings are going to be had and decisions are going to get made. That can come from your network like LinkedIn. It can come from communities like Go-to-Market United or Thursday Night Sales, which you both used to go to, that I run—Surf and Sales things like that. It can come from your customers, current customers. It can come from your cap table, meaning investors, advisors, current employees.

So if it's this network-led growth kind of motion, this benefits individuals in an obvious way, which is like we don't need them to do these painful activities anymore of like cold calling a hundred times a day and literally talking to no one, or wondering why nobody's responding to my emails that I spent thirty-five minutes crafting a subject line for, right?

It benefits the company because you don't have to pay people anything for this prospecting function potentially anymore.

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If you had enough people doing kind of referral selling and network-led growth motions on your behalf, you could eliminate your SDR org. Think about that for a second. SDR is maybe paid sixty K base, maybe they have a ninety to one hundred K on-target earnings. Plus you're paying insurance and taxes. Plus you're paying healthcare coverage. Plus you've got to send them a laptop. Plus you've got liability, right?

Yeah.

Now you eliminate all those expenses, or maybe half of them. If you eliminate some of them and now you're just paying people based on actual closed revenue in a way, it's like back to the old school commission-only style.

If you dial me with local presence, I'm going to answer my phone, right?

Yeah, those days are long gone, man. But you know, if I can generate a million dollars in business for somebody, okay, and they pay me, I don't know, ten percent of that. That costs the company a hundred grand. They didn't have to manage me. They don't have to give me a computer like I said. They don't have to deal with my insurance stuff, my medical, nothing. They don't have to deal with me at all other than just what they want to deal with, which is opportunities showing up. One hundred grand that they would pay out.

So economically, what you're saying is that this is going to kill the SDR role?

No, yeah. But this will kill the SDR role. It should kill the SDR role.

Yeah, but think about this. And Scott, you and I have spoken about this also. I think it's good for another purpose as well. If, and I'll use your example, I reach out to Dale on your behalf and Dale tells me, "Not interested. Like, not a problem." Now, like, yes, ideally I make that introduction and you get a sale. But now, from one trusted source to another, the company knows, "Take Dale out of your damn pipeline. Stop having the SDR reach out to Dale twenty-seven times over the next fourteen weeks and go focus on someone that has a damn chance of closing."

Yeah. Because data hygiene. You've performed a data hygiene function in some way. You also might run into... I mean, I've been running into people who say, "Hey, can you reach out? It looks like you have a relationship with this guy Adam over at such and such company." And I'm like, "Adam doesn't work there anymore."

How'd you get your data? Your data is... right.

Oh, there's ancillary benefits, you know, there as well.

All right. So the AI piece. Like, I am not one of these people that is unafraid of AI. I am on the opposite side. And if I had to bet, I think that AI will replace far more jobs than we think.

Tell me more.

Well, I think it's just going to change jobs, right? I mean, I heard John Barrows talk about this a little bit, and it's not like good or great reps are going to be like even better because they're going to be more productive. Back to the productive conversation in nature. But average reps are going to be gone. Like, they're not going to be around, like kind of like the SDR hold on.

Yeah, but I think I want to hear...

# Podcast Transcript

Scott, you said it's going to take more jobs than we think. Yeah, tell me more. Well, how long do you think until an AI entity can be as good of an account executive as somebody who's really good right now?

The power of generative AI right now at its current rate is doubling every 12 months. That means seven years from now, AI will be 128 times more capable than it is right now. Now you look me in the eye, Dale, and my good friend John Barrows, you look me in the eye and tell me a 128 times more powerful AI entity will not be able to sell better than a current top producing account executive. I personally do not believe that will be the case. And by the way, that's if the speed of its ability to double down on its capacity does not accelerate in the next seven years, which of course it will.

So how does the profession of sales evolve?

It's a great question. I really don't know. It's a great question that I do not know the answer to. It is entirely capable that we might not exist in the way that we do right now. We might only—

I totally align with you. What you're saying makes complete sense. Like, you listen to Air.AI, that whole Tesla call. I don't know if you've heard that.

I thought the call sucked.

Well, I didn't listen to it, but even if it does suck, you have to imagine it wanted to be 128 times better, right? And it was close enough. Like, the guy thought he was talking to a human. It was close enough. He got him through the process of why he was having a challenge. So like, it's better than some of the cold calling or some of the people I hear on the phone today babbling through scripts that they have no idea what they're talking about.

So I do totally agree with these people. I do this because, and Scott will agree with me, that's because you have founders who are insistent that every word be scripted. There's no variation, and we have to go down a checklist.

Well, but I knew what you said, but anyway you slice it, like okay, that AI call was trash, but there's trash sales calls happening every single day.

Yes, sir. Regardless of scripting, regardless of what company, we all have listened to them and coached and tried to provide feedback around it. I just refuse to believe that in a few years the capability of that will not be superior to almost every current salesperson that is out there right now.

So what is our profession anyway? Revenue is being reimagined. I mean, sales have been getting cut out for a while now. Like, you're not—they don't talk to salespeople anymore. Going back to network space, like it's already happening. So like, if you don't think AI is going to accelerate that, yeah, but that's everywhere. I mean, I was car shopping this weekend. I bought a new car this weekend, and the only time we spoke to the sales guy was literally to talk and sign the paperwork. Like, great, there you go.

And that's today, and that was too much sales guy for me personally.

Now imagine two, three, five, seven years from now. You're going to walk in, you're going to have an AI bot where you sign on the tablet, it's going to spit your keys out, and off you go. Where will all the car salesmen be?

I don't know. I don't think they'll be selling cars, though, not in the way that we think about it. Think about air traffic controllers who are standing out there on the tarmac. Any mistakes get made every single day, or injuries that can happen out there. Or like, also, who wants to stand out there in the freezing cold in Chicago or whatever? Robots. Why wouldn't we?

Yeah, theoretically, why wouldn't we? Cheaper, safer, not a job that any person really likes to do. Why wouldn't we replace it?

So people don't like to talk about this because it gets very dystopian very quickly, and that scares people. So people, when they're scared, their immediate response is to poke fun and make fun and call somebody crazy, right? And then they try to combat it with like whatever they know and are very familiar with, so they dig in on that. That's fine. I'm prepared to be proven wrong, but I believe what I believe the same way that other people believe. I'm not really out here trying to convince you otherwise, but you asked me that question: what's AI going to do and where's the profession going? I don't know, and I don't know that we will be needed in the same way that we have been needed historically.

What will that do to businesses? I don't know. But I don't think that somebody's going to need 200 salespeople anymore, and I don't think companies are going to exist with 10, 15, 20,000 people. I think there will be lots more individual solopreneurs, small entity partnership style businesses where it takes a couple people to kind of have an idea, create the product, and then you can automate damn near everything else happening and get by just fine. That's what I kind of think we may start to see coming to a theater near you.

Yes, but literally coming to a theater near you. Like, damn near every movie has to do with like the end of the world. But listen, we have to be real about it because if we bury our heads in the sand and say, "Oh no, we're all fine. AI is never going to take our job," like then you're screwed one day when you wake up and you haven't planned at all and you have no backup income. You haven't saved because you go gamble or do whatever it is you do, and then you're really screwed.

Yeah, but every day we see the spectrum. Do we see different ends of the spectrum every day in the content that we consume? I saw two things this morning when I woke up that were literally saying, "AI is not going to take your job," and then I saw another piece of content that was like, "AI is going to take every single job that's out there." No, there's no way to know. We'll see how much the government intervenes. No way to know for sure. But yeah, we should all be thinking about it and prepping and planning and trying to diversify our skill sets, our income streams, and our careers because we don't know what's going to happen, and it feels really spooky.

We should always be doing that, but I think it's the pace at which we have to do it at now. Like, you should always be learning, changing, going through that process, but the pace right now is insane. Like, what happened six months ago, what's going to happen in the next six months is going to look totally different.

Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Cool. So one of the big things that we do at Revenue Reimagined is get back to the audience. What is one thing that you want to give to the audience, Scott?

I mean, my time is probably the best thing that I can give somebody every single day. Probably like you guys, I get God knows how many DMs asking me for career advice or sales advice or leadership advice or whatever. And you know, I try to respond to all those messages, but sometimes a good old-fashioned phone conversation works a little better. So I'm happy to talk to people for 30 minutes. Pop.

Wow, wow. That, you guys decide with whatever the criteria is. You know, listen to this podcast, comment on it, share your review of it, something like this. And then, Adam and Dale, here's the catch, though, and this is perfect right before we head into some rapid fire. Don't—and I teased this earlier—don't do what I did the first time I was introduced to Scott. Scott, I don't even know if you remember this.

At the moment, I don't remember you.

Will you? So I had reached out to you, very similar to other people. I said, "Listen, like, I'm looking for some advice, possibly looking at hiring a coach. You know, I would love to have a chat with you and understand what, whatever it was." And you were super gracious. You're like, "Great, like, here I'll give you half an hour. Here's my calendar." I booked it. We were scheduled, and I canceled on you five minutes before.

I had a valid reason, but it gets even better. Not only did I cancel—you were so generous, dude. You were like, "No big deal. Shit happens. We'll reschedule." We rescheduled, and when we rescheduled, I live in Florida, the power went out, and I canceled on you 30 seconds before. For all intents and purposes, I should be dead to you because I burned an hour of your time.

You got two strikes. Did you deliver on the third?

I mean, I'd like to say—well, you're here. I gave you three strikes. Don't do what I did. Take advantage of this and show up.

With that said, as we wrap up, let's kick it into high gear and throw out some rapid fire out there.

Um, so what song would you use to describe your revenue strategy?

"I Don't Want to Be an Asshole Anymore" by the Messengers.

I like it. I like it. I'm waiting for someone to say "Living on a Prayer" and admit it, but I like it.

You say it every time in the beginning of every show.

So Scott, what's—

# Cleaned Transcript

One trend or strategy that you predict will take center stage in the next 12 to 18 months? Rather than AI—well, that's obvious to me—it's go-to-network, nearbound network-led growth type strategies.

I like it. All right, you could only choose one: are you focusing on customer retention or customer acquisition and why?

For whom am I giving this advice? To myself, in the context of revenue generation. You can only choose one.

So you are a startup. Well, if I'm a startup right now, I am focused on retention and expansion of current customers more than I'm focused on new logos. If I'm Scott Leese, I have a different answer.

We've seen you putting out some hot videos lately.

Oh yeah, my video proficiency is through the roof now.

What's one lesser-known tactic that made a surprising difference in your revenue outcomes?

One surprising tactic—well, I don't know if it's surprising or not—but throwing events, like Surf and Sales, creating a conference or whatnot. I think people go to those conferences from a vendor standpoint and you book a booth and you're scanning badges and you're hoping to get leads. That kind of thing. I'm sure big timers like Salesforce, they're also hoping that people purchase Salesforce, of course. But other conferences like SaaStr or whatever, there's no product. They're only making money from the conference as far as I know.

So I threw Surf and Sales conferences for the last few years, and what happened is people came to Surf and Sales, joined communities, and some of those communities are paid. Then they get advice, they build relationships, and then some of them pay for coaching, and then some of them get hired at startups and want me to help consult for those startups. The surprising part, I guess, is the interconnectivity of all the different things one does and the different businesses, and how they can all be kind of lead magnets and funnels for each other.

I love that, and I would encourage people to think about that a little bit as they're building different businesses. It's very different than like, "Oh, I own a bunch of vending machines and I make money on vending machines." That doesn't connect to startup consulting. But the way I've constructed my different businesses, they all kind of can flow and touch one another.

Love that. Very cool. As someone who's been to Surf and Sales—for everyone listening, if you haven't been, you want to go. I actually learned to surf, which I did not think was possible because I have no coordination whatsoever. So if Adam can surf, if I can surf, anyone can learn to surf. That's a fact of life.

Scott, thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you? Where can people follow you? Go ahead and have some shameless plugs.

Yeah, the easiest thing is just follow me on LinkedIn. DM me on LinkedIn if I can be helpful. Check out my profile—you know, I've got everything up there from consulting to Surf and Sales to GTM United. Yeah, we'd love to hear from you and appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to be one of the early guests on your new show.

Thanks for being here, man. Earlier in the show, you said you sent to RevOps tomorrow morning. What's the very first thing that you're doing as a VP of RevOps?

I'm calling everyone I know who's been doing that role for a while and asking for help. That's what I'm doing. I'm hammering my network to learn and grow and get support. I'm building my own RevOps advisory board. That's what I'm doing. Very first thing.

I love it. Scott, thanks so much for being here, man.