You're Losing 20% of Your ARR and Don't Know It

I actually met the CEO of Outreach a couple weeks ago and I told him, "You're gonna hate what I'm going to tell you, but I think that sequencers are obsolete in 2026." He responded to me, "I actually agree with you."

I don't tell anyone, hey, if you guys are using something like Outreach, like just cut it off because there is a new way of doing things. No one responds to sequences of 14 emails anymore except to say, "Hey, stop reaching out."

So on GTM Uncensored, we always like to open with a scenario that's going to put you on the clock, Anise. So here we go. Ventura Ops—they're a $20 million B2B SaaS company. Their CRO just walked in with a big problem. The sales team's running 14 different tools. Reps are spending 40% of their week on CRM updates and note-taking, and close rates have dropped two quarters in a row. This sounds very familiar to your everyday, right? The board is asking whether the go-to-market stack is the problem or whether the people are. So you're the CEO of an AI native revenue operating system. Go figure. What's the very first question you're asking the CRO and what's the one thing you're going to tell them to cut before they add anything new at all?

**ANISE:** The first question I would ask them is why were you brought in, right? What is your objective? When you're looking at your business a year from now from a revenue perspective, where would you like to get? I try to understand that. Let's say he or she tells me we're at $20 million and we want to double to $40 million next year, right? The next question I'll ask them is, what is your growth rate looking like? What are the things preventing you from getting to that objective right now? Once I know their objective, where they want to get, what are the blockers to get there, what are the potential friction points, right? You start very top down, especially when you're talking to a CRO. Understand what are some of the things that have been blocking them recently from or preventing them from hitting their numbers, and then I start getting more and more into the weeds of some of the pain points and get more and more tactical over time.

**HOST:** I like it. What's the first thing you would tell them to cut before they add anything new? Because you see this every day, right? You guys are a revenue intelligence platform. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But you walk into people that have 5, 10, 15 tools other than a competitor. What's normally the first thing that you're like, "Dude, get rid of it. Useless."

I actually met the CEO of Outreach, Chuck Gartner, a couple weeks ago, and I told him, "You're going to hate what I'm going to tell you, but I think that sequencers are obsolete in 2026." And he responded to me, "I actually agree with you."

So I would tell anyone, hey, if you guys are using something like Outreach, like just cut it off because there is a new way of doing things. No one responds to sequences of 14 emails anymore except to say, "Hey, stop reaching out to me."

**HOST:** Stop sending me. Stop sending me 14 sequences.

**ANISE:** That's very interesting to me. There are some AI native tools that are more focused on next best actions versus actually having the sequencer. The next best actions are different things, right? Rather than like a fixed sequence, it's more like the right message via the right format via the right place to the right person. That's a lot smarter. I can shout out maybe some tools like Ample Market or Regai or Unifi that are kind of smarter there. But even to close the loop there, the CEO of Outreach told me, "Hey, the next best action is the next thing we're focused on."

**HOST:** Exactly. It's like insight to action, right? What is the insight? What is the action that should be driven off that insight?

**ANISE:** Right. And the insight could be even something like, let's say you were to build everything ideally internally, right? It could be something like, hey, the exact sponsor that you should be connected with actually used to work with one of your power users. Now, if you were to build things internally like this is a lot of the stuff that we're doing internally, right? Take your power users and then try to map out their connections. It's easy to build, but over time now you know, hey, I'm trying to get to the CRO of this company that we don't have access to. That CRO used to actually work with someone else at their last company, right? That someone else loves our product. We can ask that someone else to introduce us.

**HOST:** You mean actually go to network actually works instead of, you know, a sequence? And now I think it has moved so much from email to LinkedIn. I'm getting so many LinkedIn sequences that it's so clear it's a sequence. And to your point, like I don't even respond to tell them to stop. I just delete it. It's obnoxious.

**ANISE:** I block people now, right? Like the third message I block people.

**HOST:** It's always been about value, but it's not now. It's not like static value. It's not like send me a PDF file of a case study. It's like, how do I put in information to generate a calculation based on what I'm trying to accomplish or something? So I think it's different. This comes back to a question that we've been thinking about with Attention for a while. You describe Attention as a revenue operating system. It's evolved over time, right? I remember when we first talked and it's not a sales tool. That's a really big claim. What's the scope of an operating system and isn't it the scope of like a CRM or like a sales engagement platform? Like what's the difference?

**ANISE:** I think we started in sales and we got market pull towards account management teams and customer success teams and VR teams, right? But our bread and butter has always been sales. Whenever we even launch new products, we're always going to start with sales before we start thinking about the other teams that we start expanding to, right? And they end up being more of an afterthought than really us working really hard to please the other teams. Everything has to be a byproduct of us actually super serving sales teams eventually. Those are the teams not only that lead with the experiments but also this is where you get all the revenue coming from.

The second thing is we started as a simple product that will autofill your CRM, right? One input, which was your call recordings, and then one output, which was your CRM. Over time we started growing the different number of inputs—so including emails and including Slack, just everything that you want to ingest—and then wherever you want to output the information. It could be not only your CRM now but obviously Slack and email reports and wherever you want the information to go. And that led us into what we call Arsenals, which is the equivalent for us of next best action. From a deal execution perspective, it's like, how do you best execute on your deal today? It's not just like how do you generate cold pipeline on your end, it's how do you make sure that your deals are getting all the follow-ups done properly, right? Like you finish your call, you should obviously write a follow-up email to your prospect, but also the other thing is you need to multi-thread better, right? So populating these actions for multi-threading is very important. And then you grow into more and more actions that are given to you as a rep to better win your deals.

It's a tremendous amount of work that we need to do. We need to also understand what drove success and what drove outcomes in the past in order to now give you better and better insights, better actions for you to drive your deals. And then the last thing is as a manager, you need to understand, how is your team performing? Where are things slipping through the cracks, right? So we're giving a view to the managers not only in terms of, hey, this is where your team is actually messing up, this is where your team is not taking action on certain deals—you should nudge them. But also, here are some insights, proactively about some of the things that you should know about your team, right? Like your reps are not setting up next steps the right way. Your team is just simple as that, right? But also, your team is actually (we've seen it even using our own tool), a rep will try to get way too technical with their buyers and lose them along the way, right? In the old world, you had to go in, listen to transcripts in your call reporter. In the new world, we surface this to you as a leader. We'll be surfacing this more and more to you as a leader proactively. I think the word "proactive" is extremely important here.

**HOST:** I could elaborate more. I think the days of having to go and pull calls to find your data and listen to calls to find your data are long, long gone. And if it's not being proactive and not saving time, the tool, whether Attention or anything else, isn't going to exist. The game has changed. It arguably is changing every single day transparently.

Anise, you've worked with God knows how many sales teams using Attention. I'm super curious where most of them start and where they get stuck, not just with Attention. But specifically when they try to bring AI into their sales motion because I'd imagine your conversations are spanning much more than Attention.

**ANISE:** Yeah. They generally start with a very simple pain point that very few tools actually do. It's just autofilling the...

# Cleaned Transcript

Info in your CRM. You have one single source of truth, right? And then whether you know that single source of truth is actually your CRM or your data warehouse, that's a different problem, right? But we'll autofill your CRM and then you can have that information sent to your data warehouse. So that's when your primitive mass load—that's a basic need, right?

The next thing though is where we see teams getting a little stuck is on knowing what to do, right? Like if you go in and tell them, "Hey, you can build whatever agent you want," they won't know exactly. They'll just tell you what are the other teams doing. That's something very often that we hear from clients, which is "Tell me what your best customers are doing." We can be very prescriptive about things, but the issue is that if you tell them, "Hey, we'll give you the five top pages that clients are using over time," they'll tell you, "Oh, only one or two was useful to us." And you know which ones they are, right?

Generally, it's pre-call prep, which helps the reps. And then another one would be just give me an analysis—close one or close lost—after deals are successful or not. The other things are not as useful to them.

The reality and how I see the best teams operationalizing it is that they go something that they've been doing very manually in the past and they just try to build an agent around it, right? What is a manual workflow that they do and how do they get that workflow going from manual to fully automated, right? And so rather than doing it top down—"Hey, these are all the things that we see the most successful teams do"—it should just be like "What are you doing internally that's taking you a lot of time or that's blocking you that we should now operationalize for you?"

I'll give you an example and this is where our MDEs are very helpful. A client will tell us whenever there's a deal that's closed one, in addition to having a handover note to the CSTA team, they also fill manually this Google sheet every single time with a ton of information. They do that manually, right? What we really did for them really simply was have Attention autofill that Google sheet for them every single time a deal gets done. That's very custom to them and this is how they work, but we automated that. Attention automated that for them.

I think that problem exists everywhere. I was just working with a client that was working on—it's kind of funny, you know, like next best action has been around forever. I remember being in the retail space and rule engine technology and decision engines were always best action. You go to like Amazon—they were great at it, right? It's "Okay, you buy this, now I'm going to sell you that." And so this has been around forever.

And if we looked at sequencing the way we should really be looking at sequencing, that's really what it should be anyway. It should never be a straight line. It shouldn't be like "Do this and then do that, then do this." It could be like "Do this, then there's a decision point and then you do something else."

Compensation plans—and so they were like, "We'll I built out compensation plans for them," and as it always happens, the territory shifted, somebody left, you had to reallocate accounts, like all this stuff happened. And then she's like, "Well I have to go rebuild all these account plans, the compensation plans." And I'm like, "Okay, hold on, let's take what we originally built out and I'll build you a Claude skill for you, right? Like it was super simple and it'll just start asking you questions to go through the process."

It took her two to two and a half hours to build one comp plan. We did it in ten minutes based on the template that was already built. And then the very next conversation, the very next statement was "Before I can build all these comp plans with this, I have to go reallocate and rebuild the territory plan, the territories again." And I'm like, "Hold on. You just—we just went through this process and exercise. Let's map out like all the things you do." And she's like, "No, it's too complicated."

And then like we started digging into it, asking one question at a time. And she's like, "Okay, I think we can automate that." I was like, "Okay, you make a decision here." She's like, "Yes, I make a decision here." "Okay, you write that down or put it on a Lucidchart or like how do we map it out?" And then all of a sudden, yes, there are things that you're not going to be able to automate completely. But like if I can take eighty percent of what you're doing manually and I can cut a two-hour process and you have ten of them, now you have twenty hours and I can do it in twenty minutes. People just aren't thinking that way. And I think it's a complete mindset shift.

**100%. I was talking to a client yesterday about PLG versus, let's say, human-led onboardings with top down. And what that client was saying in their case is that it's way too hard to properly onboard a client because there are so many different nuances that you need to capture. And the reality is no, you can actually do it with AI now. It's not as hard as you think. It's just kind of intellectual laziness, right?**

The intellectual laziness goes back to the very first thing you said, which is "Tell me what your best customers are doing." And this is a balance, right? We see it all the time. Just because someone else is doing it doesn't mean that it's right for you. But on the flip side, asking where your bottlenecks are doesn't mean we want to fix stupid.

We had a client that migrated from Salesforce to HubSpot and they had a very archaic process in Salesforce that they're like, "Well, we need to rebuild this in HubSpot." Well, why? It's a stupid process. We don't want to carry it over.

I think you have to find this balance in the middle of like what is best in class, but at the same time, what are your specific problems to your business that could be solved with AI? I could bring all of the AI that Attention uses for Attention into Revenue Reimagined. And if it doesn't fit my use case or my business model, it's absolutely useless and I've wasted all of these cycles and all of this money. It's a balance.

**100%.**

It's interesting. All of this though, when we talk about AI, ties to data, right? Like there's a data problem underneath an AI problem, and you and I have talked about this. Dale and I have talked about this when he's actually willing to get on the phone with me. But garbage in, garbage out. So you're building on top of sales data that's often incomplete, certainly inconsistently entered, sporadic at best. How do you solve for this and how do you train people to solve for this on an infrastructure level so that they're not getting bad outputs?

It's all about your single source of truth, right? I'll maybe get out of sales for a second because an hour ago I was talking with my co-founder about this and we're right now in the process ourselves of just building processes and systems across the entire business, right? And so within sales, we're doing things really well because that's our bread and butter and we have our source of truth being our CRM and then we operate everything on top of it.

That being said, all the other functions, I'll go with a very tactical problem that we have internally here. There's a big gap between what our engineering teams know about the development of the product and then what sales and growth know about product timelines and how things are getting built, right? And so the conversation I had with my co-founder was really simple. It was all right. Rather than doing what people have been doing for the past twenty years, which is you build an entire slide deck with your product, your product roadmap and your timelines and so on, let's actually rethink this from first principles.

And so what we were doing instead is similar to sales basically—we have Linear, that is our source of truth for customer tickets but also product features getting built. We autofill or auto-close tickets in Linear based on the GitHub pushes that are happening from the engineers, right? So that's kind of like your source of truth within Slack. Then we get a message every single day about how things are evolving against the timelines that we've set up internally, right?

And now you start having this source of truth for product that can go in and auto-build your Google slides based on that source of truth, right? You can just program now a Claude to go in and automatically build all of your slides based on that source of truth that you set up, right?

You can have the same thing, let's say now for hiring, right? If your source of truth is your ATS and you're actually tracking everything in your ATS, then at that point you can do a lot more work based on that. You will probably see that some data is missing over time. That's okay. You can figure out how you include more and more of that data in that source of truth and then things get automated, right?

So if you're spending too much time as an org manually updating your Notion documentation or manually updating your Google slides or creating additional and additional documentation that gets lost and outdated, you're probably doing things wrong. The reality is you should have all the right processes and systems that update only once that source of truth based on the right inputs and then everything else should stem from that.

And I think what's happening is we have a lot of data all over the place. It's all about digestibility of the—

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Data. So you could have a single data stream that a CEO needs to see, but your head of sales needs to see something in that data stream in a completely different way. It's not like he doesn't need all of your data and you don't need all of his data, but the data stream's the same. So I look at things as: can we get digestible data in a place where we can make decisions on them? Because if we don't, the problem is we will always go to a place of either "I can't get the data" or "I can't get it in the way I can make a decision," and then people quit on it.

And I think until we get to that place of figuring out—because like you were saying, in Linear you have the product stuff but you also have tickets, right? And so it's the same data flow, but both processes need to digest it in a different way.

100%. Yeah, it's how you present it to the teams that are not used to reading it that way, right? The sponsor, the growth team won't be able to read the information Linear like the engineers are reading it. And similarly, the engineers, if they want to know something about your sales, they won't know how to go into Salesforce and read the reports, right? How you represent that or rearchitect that information to people so that they digest it the right way, I think cloud actually will do it really easily, right? Just present this information like your sales pipeline, present it in a way that's digestible to an engineer in case they're actually interested in learning more about what the other teams are working on.

But back to the intellectual laziness as well—a lot of people, we were just having this conversation right before you jumped on with a client. They're looking to grow their business. They are trying to have all these measurements. So one of the things I said to Adam is: do they even have access to all this data? And the answer is the data is available, but it's not accessible. That's a difference as well. It's like I have stuff in CRM and I have stuff in Linear. I have stuff in Notion or I have stuff in Jira, and it's like all over the place.

Yeah, that's a good question. This is an exercise that we're currently going through. The main question is: okay, we have all the info—for example, from our group, for the growth team hosted in our data warehouse. Does that mean that our BRs or our AEs should have access to the data warehouse? Definitely not. But if it can be digested elsewhere, either it can be clouded, right? But at that point, you need to set up the right MCP to that place. To the data warehouse, there's probably an easier format for them to digest it, and that's what your business operations teams should be focusing on: how do we take things coming from only one place where a specific function is working out of and how do we bring that up to a format where everyone can read this more and more easily over time?

Here's something I keep seeing with sales teams I work with: generic sequences don't work anymore. We've all gotten so good at turning out the noise that even your own buyers are ignoring you. The problem isn't your reps. It's that your sequences are static and your signals are somewhere else entirely. That's why our clients use Nooks. And the thing that stuck with me is that their sequences actually stay fresh because the signals update them automatically. Right buyer, right moment with no manual babysitting. If your outbound feels like it's shouting into a void, go check them out at nooks.ai/bridgethe gap.

I have a quick question on this: do you believe there's a place where the CRM, like all of these systems, are actually going to be obsolete and there's just going to be a UI layer that's sitting on top, calling all these different systems? Like to me, the CRM is like you're trying to build a CRM that's configurable enough to be widespread for everybody in the world. When in reality, a team may not need all the different types of things that are happening in HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever, but you have really specific needs and processes that say, "Look, these are the data elements I need, and if I need another one I just go create it and I'll just relaunch the UI layer."

Yeah, we actively think about this right now. Today, the value of a CRM is to have these tables—accounts, contacts, opportunities—and just compress information in those from these tables. Then you can plug in an entire ecosystem of tools, which is the second value of it, right? Like your sequencer will work out of your Salesforce because of all these tables that are getting created. Today, you know, with limited resources, we focus on the things that have not been built yet, which is your system of action, having the right ontology, the right brain, the right memory for your teams that will drive smarter and smarter decisions. Because no one's built that, and that's where the money is today.

Over time, what will happen? I'm sure companies like Salesforce and HubSpot, I know for a fact that they're also going in that direction, right? In our case, it would be foolish to try to rebuild a CRM. But the reality is we're already rebuilding a shadow, an AI-native version of your CRM in the background when we're ingesting all that information. But we decide, you know, from a go-to-market perspective, that we don't want to go in and replace your CRM because that increases the amount of responsibility that we have to carry for you as a business, right?

So this is a good point though. You don't want to recreate it, but you have a shadow of the data. So it doesn't mean customer A doesn't say like, "Look, I already have all the data. Why am I paying HubSpot or Salesforce when I can actually go create my own visualization of the data?" Back to digestibility for my users.

100%. Well, actually, I'll give you even a better understanding of what's happening with your opportunities and accounts than what a CRM will do, right? Because we don't necessarily compress the data. We will actually give you an exact understanding of your opportunities, let's say, based on metric or space or whatever it is—some form of data compression. But you still have all your calls. You still have all the raw data. And then the intelligence and the insights that are getting out of it.

For us though, if we started carrying the responsibility of being a CRM today, we will get pulled in a million other directions. I can't even imagine where our business would go. By deciding to reject the entire responsibility of being a CRM, right—which is what I'm seeing with AI-native CRMs today—they're getting pulled into the wrong directions because they have carried that responsibility. In our case, that just allows us to focus on the one thing that customers care about, which is driving more revenue for you through the next best actions and the deal execution that we're giving every user. With smarter and smarter actions, we're actually helping you drive more revenue. That's what customers should only care about, and it's what we should only care about. That allows us to get to this world where eventually, instead of charging from a consumption basis or a seat basis, we end up charging from an outcome-based model because we're actually helping you drive better and better action. At that point, if you're able to drive so much revenue for your clients, then the notion of a CRM becomes obsolete, right? And we can say, "Hey, who cares about you? Just drive it—driving a million different, connecting a million different things to these tables. We're just driving 90% plus of the value here across your entire stack of tools."

I'm a big believer that CRMs are going to go away. I don't know. And when I say CRM, I mean the HubSpot, Salesforce pipelines of the CRM world as we know them today. So do you believe a CRM is going to be a differentiation to an organization in the marketplace? Like, can a company that goes and builds their own CRM with their own logic trees underneath, only based on the data, can they become almost a proprietary CRM in the future?

You can, but I think there are two things that matter for a CRM, right? The data structure and then the ecosystem of integrations. This second piece gets a little more impacted, right? Which is all the different tools that you're currently using today, right? And that we don't want to go out and replace today, right? It can be your scheduler, right? Like Chili Piper or default or whatever you're using. There's an entire ecosystem of tools that people still use today.

But why? Why not have a cloud code to be like, "Here's Chili Piper. I don't need every single functionality that's costing me $2,000 a month for five people. Go recreate it."

Yeah. Because in my opinion, at least today, there's an entire maintenance of the API structure.

Good point.

And so if you want to go in and rebuild that, like it ends up being a nightmare.

I agree. I just was curious where you're going with it.

So if memory serves me correct, prior to building companies, you had an investment banking and M&A background. Is that right?

Yeah, that's correct.

Yeah. Okay. Want to make sure I'm talking to the right person. Sometimes my memory fades away. So, interesting background for a sales tech CEO. I'm super curious: when you take that background, how did that train you? Or what does that make you see about RevOps and sales that just most founders in this space miss? What lens does that...

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That's your competitive moat.

Yeah, it's interesting. The other day I was actually thinking that if I hadn't done Attention, I would probably have built something like Rogo or Hebia, right? AI for investment bankers. I mean, that's beside the question that you're asking. But I think I had imagined something like this back in 2013 or 2014, which is just like auto building your slide decks based on information that's online and so on. Anyway, today how it's helping me though is that I deeply understand the finances of the business. At the end of the day, it's simple math, right? But when I talk to a PE back firm, for example, I'll go in and talk to them about EBITDA improvement versus just the traditional other things that most software startups will care about, right? Which is how do we improve efficiency? How do you grow revenue? There's also an entire cost component. I think the other thing truly is just when you go have M&A, you just normalize 100-hour weeks, and so you're a work machine. And so it does not help me necessarily in the product that we're building, but it helps me be extremely not only hardworking but really strong with attention to detail—no pun intended—and you just make sure that everything's really well structured overall. If I had become an MD at a bank, then at that point I'd have been exposed to selling a lot more to really large committees, which would probably help me in certain ways through enterprise selling one way or another. But it's still a very different skill set that you have, right? Selling an M&A project to a large company to a CFO versus going out and selling.

Do you miss that world at all?

No. I mean, believe it or not, I loved it. I loved actually the torture of working really late. It made me a bit of a workaholic, right? I just remember that you and I were messaging at what, 11:00 last night?

Yeah. Yeah, I got better lately. I try to go to bed at 11:00 p.m. But yeah, I remember in my investment banking days, I would grab dinner with my mom near the bank at 8:00 p.m. on a Sunday and then go back to the office until 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. on that Sunday before I start the week the next day. Obviously here at Attention, the level of intensity is not as insane, right? Because I really and deeply believe in sleep and being energized so that you make the right decisions, right? If I had stayed up until 1 or 2 a.m. working last night, I would not be fresh for this conversation. Right.

You sit across from a ton of sales teams, both on the vendor side, likely on the customer side. What's the most common thing you see that leadership teams think is a pipeline problem, but it's actually something totally different? Everyone likes to say we need more pipeline.

The easiest thing is just conversion in general, right? Think about how to convert your pipeline better. Actually, I'll give you something that's very few people think about that I think is important: how do you route that pipeline to the right people in your team? I actually got back from my honeymoon on Sunday, and the one thing that I immediately did, I think I got back home around 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, and the first thing I did is I opened my laptop—which I didn't have with me on my honeymoon—and I went into Cloud and did a full analysis of our Attention data. Like, what is each AE best at closing and what is each AE really bad at closing? Right, because we were routing each lead randomly across reps. I know that larger teams today will break down the reps across teams, enterprise AE versus SMB market AE, and so on. That breakdown might still be wrong because it's not backed with data. But now I asked Cloud code to analyze all of this across our conversations, our CRM data, and so on. And actually we found out that some of our AEs who we thought were really good at larger deals were actually not very good at larger deals. They weren't multi-threading as well as some of our top AEs, for example. And so it gave us actually an extremely precise breakdown of which types of leads each AE should get so that we optimize our revenue. And so we actually realized that had we done this a year ago, we would have gotten 20% more ARR than we got today, right? And it's conservatively even more than that. And so your teams are probably sitting on 20% plus missed ARR because they're not routing the leads effectively. And it's not just at the company level, but even at the person level, right?

Sure. Using it like your schedule or if someone went to the same school as you did, there could be a chance that a contact level first call probably goes a little better, and they include more people in the next conversation than if they didn't, right? If that person has the same—I'll give you an example, but I'm French obviously, and if there's someone who's French coming in, I'll definitely jump into that first call at one point or another. I won't be the one driving it, but I'll say hello. I'll make sure that I introduce myself, and I know that this is going to help the deal, right? If people have the same background, same countries, same ethnicities, whatever you want it to be, believe it or not, it will actually have a way better impact on the rest of your deal than if you just route it to someone who does not have these same traits. So that's something to think about.

Yeah. How do you figure that out though? Because you're bringing people in. You're like, "Okay, you should be good at enterprise, you should be good at SMB and midmarket." Do you do like a trial almost, and then based on the data on the trial? Because I can imagine there's a world where in one organization you may have been good at SMB, but in another organization you could actually be better at mid-market depending on your knowledge and a lot of other dimensions. And this is going into a place where I've actually started thinking a lot about which macro decisions are made up of a lot of micro decisions that are only based on the best data you have available today. But the data in the future, like three months later, is more perfect data than you have today to make that decision.

Yeah, totally. I mean in our case, for example, the latest hires we weren't getting enough data on them. So we'll have to wait. But obviously, the people that you've had for the past, let's say at least eight months, you have enough data to route the right leads to them. You'll need to try it out, right? Based on where they sold before and your gut feeling as a leader, which is something that AI does not replace today. But as a leader, you put them in a specific seat. You see how they sell. Then over time you adjust. Thinking out loud, you can probably use some role-playing tool and see how it goes. But I really don't believe in that, right? Within a few months you rerun this every now and then and see how AEs are evolving over time and how the new AEs are adjusting to specific deals, and you just send them to certain leads that they might be able to close better. That's the first thing. The second thing is it also shows you where each AE has room for progression and you assess this every quarter or so.

Yeah, I love that. I think there's something there for sure, and I think there's some learnings there that we need to keep digging in on. As we start wrapping some of this stuff up, I could keep going forever. I love having conversations with you. We have started something called Monday Morning Move. The Monday Morning Move is a key takeaway, and we do want your opinion. It is to look at the last five deals that went dark and for each one to go look and see what was the last human action that the rep took. And if you can't answer that, it's not a pipeline problem you have. It's a visibility problem. The issue isn't more activity. It's knowing and figuring out exactly where that human judgment left off.

So if you cannot find, for example, the last activity, it's definitely that you haven't piped your system together, right? You need to connect your emails and your call recording to your CRM so that the activity gets logged properly. Attention will also just show you in your deal view what is happening within that opportunity. Right? I would say the one thing that can't be automated is if a rep actually texted directly, went outside of the systems, and texted.

Nonsequenced stuff.

Exactly, right. They use their actual cell phone to text. What I know, you can't really go out and connect it unless the rep goes and manually logs the activity in Salesforce, right? And so that's where you have to—

And no one does that. But I will say, and I've done this analysis at several companies, that if you aren't on a texting basis with your champion, your likelihood of closing that deal is substantially less.

But to your point, how do you validate that? How do you track that? Like, because it's just a leadership thing. It's a leadership thing because if these deals are so important, that leader, the sales leader, should be like, "How did we progress the deals forward this week?" At some point they're like, "Oh..."

"I texted them." Okay. You didn't put it in a CRM. You have to put it in a CRM.

So Dale, should reps log every time that they text someone?

I think they should. I think as much as they should, as many times as you're connecting because how do you really have an understanding of how many touch points it takes to close a deal if you're only logging it when you feel like it?

I hear you. But the good reps are texting their champions about more than just a deal. Listen, it's full transparency. It's no secret that we're partners with Attention, but I text Anise about things other than deals with Attention. Do I have to log that every time? Does Anise log in his CRM every time we text?

But you're not selling to Anise. The context is totally wrong. Anise said this earlier. Do you want to know that the person has his birthday or whatever that is?

Those micro decisions once again become a macro vision strategy execution.

So do you log in HubSpot every time that you text one of our prospects?

No, I don't. I guess that's a sales leadership problem.

I've seen one of our reps really good at this. Later in the process, he starts actually creating a shared Slack channel with a prospect, and that's almost an equivalent to text, right?

Good. Yeah. And at that point, you can ingest the data from the Slack messages because the prospect is more likely to respond to you over Slack. Someone can ghost you as much over text than via Slack. On Slack, you see that the person's online.

I ghost Dale on both.

No, he just goes mad because I never respond to him. At least I keep mine unread.

Okay, so let's do some unique questions. You work with tons of sales teams. What percentage of them actually have the discipline of their own process? We were just talking about this for ourselves—to get from AI and what happened to what didn't happen. So what percentage of the people that you work with actually do what you're asking them to do and then execute on that?

It ends up being a spectrum, right? It's not a black and white thing. And it depends also on what they sell, how they sell. It depends on a lot of things, and the amount of data that they collect all ends up being back to the data. I would say it's an 80/20 where 80% will actually do the minimum of the things. 80% of them will have all the data at least in the CRM. So 80% of them will have 20%—the bare minimum done.

Yeah.

And then you'll start seeing some more teams that will actually use the deal view and have all the data in there and track it there religiously. And then you have the remaining few users who are actually very cloud built. That fraction of users is growing over time. And those people will actually create their own internal dashboards, their own internal systems, their own command centers where things actually match exactly how they want everything to be presented.

That makes sense. All right, question number two. Every sales vendor says they're different, right? Every single one.

You've been on the buy side, you're on the selling side. What's the one pitch that you would never make that's technically true, but is misleading?

Wait, let me try to understand better. Why would it—if it's technically true—why would it be misleading?

It's a great question. So there are often times, in my opinion, pitches that could be technically true. Like, we can technically speed this up, or we could technically change this, or we could technically tweak that. But that might not be what you need, and it might not be the best thing for you.

Yeah. I would say that we had a collection of 30-plus AI agents that you can roll out in your business that will get you AI native. That's technically true, but does that necessarily mean that you need it? You don't need it, right? You might need two or three of these things, and actually at the end of the day, we might just need to help you recreate from scratch some of the manual things that you're doing.

Yeah, and I can attest to that because I don't use half of the features that we should be using in Attention. So I think that makes sense.

You never need 100% of the things that we offer in our tool. And generally we—

But you see it and you're like, "That looks cool. I want to try it."

Yeah, exactly. And I end up having situations where we post very often on LinkedIn things that come out, and we end up having clients getting frustrated, telling me, "Why are we not using this?" Our response is generally, "Hey, yeah, let us help you activate that for you. No problem. You don't have to use 100% of the features that we offer. And as a matter of fact, you never need to use 100% of the features that any vendor offers. You need to always just think about it bottom-up and think, what do we actually need that we're going to need to activate? And if you need to activate it, that's great. But yeah, that's how we think about that."

Awesome. So we actually had this battle conversation, and we're going to put it to bed once and for all. CRM has been the system for 25 years. Is it going to survive AI, or is something like Attention eventually going to replace it entirely?

Well, that's what we're banging on, right?

I think we know that answer, right?

Anise, what's one thing the go-to-market world collectively believes about AI and sales that you think is just flat-out wrong?

My thought is, especially since the Gong era to name them, hey, replicate your top performer. I think that's wrong. I think that you don't replicate your top performer across your team. What you do though is you understand what are some of the traits that top performer has that can be shared in a way with the other people. Right. I think each person has actually their own style of selling, and they should triple down on their own core strength to best sell. But if you try to kind of replicate someone across the entire team, you end up having a disaster, right? I've seen, for example, an AE try to sell exactly like another AE, and things went wrong. Right? There are just certain traits that might work out for the whole team, and generally it's next best actions things like that are outside the call. But overall, if you try to force a rep to follow a methodology when that rep is already killing it in their own way of progressing a deal, maybe let them actually progress that deal however they want to progress it, right? Sometimes if you try to enforce things a little too much and you try to make them uniform across everyone, then you might end up killing your golden goose.

I think that's a great take. Love that.

And as we wrap this one up, you just went on an amazing honeymoon and vacation. But so now you have to dream bigger. What's your dream vacation destination now after you went on your great honeymoon? Where's next?

I don't know. I think that this was the best trip I've ever done. I went to Bora with my wife. I went to Tokyo recently, which was on my to-do list. I would say actually a place I haven't been to—a few places I haven't been to—that I would really go to will include Australia or South Africa.

Awesome. Thank you, Anise.

Thank you, guys.

Anise, thanks for joining, man. We appreciate it. Thank you.