(888) 815-0802Revenue Rumble in the Jungle, with Charlie Cowan [Episode 1142]
In this week’s episode, Howard and Alastair dive deep into the future of revenue operations with special guest Charlie Cowan (RevOpsCharlie), author and Revenue Acceleration Expert. They explore the transformative power of AI and automation in sales, highlighting how these tools are reshaping the role of sales professionals and the importance of data organization. The discussion also emphasizes the value of curiosity and specialization in an evolving business landscape, making this episode a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of RevOps and AI in sales.
Podcast Transcript:
00:00:00:10 – 00:00:17:12
Speaker
There’s two ads and revenue operations. Revenue and operations and revenue is the most important one. So you had me ad revenue. I love it.
00:00:17:14 – 00:00:55:15
Speaker
Welcome back, everybody, to this week’s Sales Strategy and Enablement podcast. I’m Alastair Woolcock, CSRO here at Revenue.io joined by my famous AI genius, co-host, founder, CEO and a lifelong learner of all things, revenue science, Howard Brown. Howard, how are you doing today? I’m fabulous. These intros keep getting more and more fabulous. Well, in the spirit of Fabulous Howard, we are thrilled to have with us today Charlie, Charlie Cowan, the RevOpsCharlie, as is famously known, and also author of How to Sell Tech, a brilliant piece for those that haven’t seen it out there.
00:00:55:17 – 00:01:14:11
Speaker
Charlie joining us live from England. How are you? I am great. Thank you both. How it not surviving beyond. Appreciate it. Absolute, Ali. So, Charlie, we love to start off with the things that are happening in the news and things like that. You’ve been in this field and seen the advance of rev ops. You know where it’s going.
00:01:14:11 – 00:01:43:03
Speaker
How much is changing across enterprises around the world at this point? But, you know, the world is getting disrupted yet again. And I want to point us to your a recent article from Gartner. The predicted the B2B sales organizations using generative AI embedded in sales tax are going to reduce the amount of time spent prospecting and customer prep by 50% over the next 24 months.
00:01:43:05 – 00:02:11:11
Speaker
So, you know, we think about that now that to predict that’s where things are going. But you know, Troy, you’re in the thick of DevOps. That’s going to be front and center in terms of how that intelligence and automation, those tools are being applied. Do you think they have that right? What what your thoughts? I think absolutely I’m seeing that AI is eating up so many of these low level sales activities just coming off the back of Dreamforce this week.
00:02:11:11 – 00:02:49:15
Speaker
And for Salesforce positioning it as the AI event of the year as just automating and automating so many of, let’s say, the low level processes. But when I started in sales, you had a phone, you got out on the street, you went and spoke to people, maybe sent some brochures out afterwards. It’s a very, very manual process. And then in these last five or six years, this rise of automating emails, automating video, automating all the outbound messaging, it doesn’t take an expert to realize that if you’re going to automate a lot of that stuff, you don’t actually need a human body behind a lot of it.
00:02:49:15 – 00:03:17:13
Speaker
After a very short period of time. So that doesn’t get rid of salespeople, it doesn’t get rid of the need for us, but it means that we both stores and sellers can focus more of that effort on the human element of selling, of really understanding what’s going on in a customer’s world, of really helping them to connect the dots between their own business and what other people in their own industry or other industries are doing and really being human.
00:03:17:13 – 00:03:38:18
Speaker
Whilst the AI takes up a lot of the automates its aspect of the job. I think you’re bang on Charlie. And you know, as I think about this, it’s pretty daunting for people. And the common thing that I hear from a lot of leaders are they’re actually almost scared of what this is going to do. Should they be scared about how impactful this can be?
00:03:38:18 – 00:03:59:05
Speaker
Like just just that number, if we all agree that 50% of time spent on friend and prospecting is about to be disrupted, that that’s a big chunk of a lot of organizations flow and how this in it work is this excitement or fear like well what do you what are you hearing? Howard Look, I’m an optimist, so I think change always creates fear.
00:03:59:07 – 00:04:34:11
Speaker
But I think great change manager hopefully alleviates fear and shows people the opportunities that exist. My take is the more we can help humanize people, the better we help people connect with others, the more job satisfaction that will occur. I think that the benefit of AI goes beyond just automation to really providing the opportunity for our human sense, our human connection, our empathy, our connection with other people, our desire to help, to really emerge.
00:04:34:13 – 00:05:05:22
Speaker
And so if I think about everything that AI is doing today and dreaming of where it will take us in the next few years, I feel incredibly optimistic because it’s not A.I. that will replace us or our work. It is the folks that don’t use A.I. as a tool, as a weapon those folks should fear because the people who are using AI for a strategic benefit, they will outperform.
00:05:06:00 – 00:05:33:02
Speaker
They will better connect. As a buyer, what I really need is I need a trusted advisor. I need somebody to understand me and the challenges I face within my business. A.I. will arm reps will arm our sales organizations to better connect to solve those problems, because they’re not doing the mundane, they’re not doing a bunch of note taking, they’re not doing a bunch of data entry.
00:05:33:04 – 00:05:54:21
Speaker
They’re doing the things that matter, which is connecting, and they’re being provided the information at their fingertips to help them help their customers and prospects. I’m very bullish and I think, look, fear will always exist. We know that. But let’s put the fear aside and let’s let’s look at all the amazing opportunities that exist for all of us.
00:05:55:02 – 00:06:14:22
Speaker
I want to just click a little further on the fear factor here, if you guys don’t mind, because I think people should be downright scared. And like, I just want to give a perspective here to everybody. Okay. So so Charlie and our do you think of let’s just use chatbots as the example? Is this the one most people know the most is a large language model that’s existing?
00:06:15:00 – 00:06:46:01
Speaker
I am not advocating saying that’s the tool that is going to drive all of what we’re talking in sales. But but just is this intelligence is growth. You have to appreciate that within under two quarters it has got it’s IQ to an estimated equivalent now of 155. Now, I don’t think any of us are not intelligent, but just for perspective, Albert Einstein, it’s a 160, so it’s five points off Albert Einstein at this point, and he’s done that in under two quarters.
00:06:46:01 – 00:07:14:13
Speaker
If we assume he’s going to keep his same compounding rate of intelligence growth, that means against Gardner’s predict of, you know, a little over 24 months that you will be looking at systems that are in the range of 2 to 3000 times the intelligence are be singular human like we’re coming up on the smartest people in the world 2 to 3000 times that of Albert Einstein.
00:07:14:15 – 00:07:35:18
Speaker
Just think about that. And that’s that’s just using the standard approach. The technology increases ten X on each cycle and it’s got to go that that simple compounding of intelligence 2 to 3000 times smarter in the same time period where Gardner say 50% of prospecting is going to be disrupted by journey, technology is mind boggling. It is mind boggling.
00:07:35:18 – 00:08:01:08
Speaker
And when’s the last time you talked to someone with 160 IQ? And that’s part of the challenge, right? And when you do meet someone with an extremely high IQ, it’s actually hard to communicate, right? It’s hard to bring them down to your level. And your challenge is they’re up here. And I’m not saying that. Look, I love that there is this intelligence engine that is going to benefit us and hopefully humanity.
00:08:01:10 – 00:08:26:21
Speaker
But I also know that I need to connect with a human being that understands me, that doesn’t talk above me, that understands the contextual issues that I’m dealing with, and the kind of situations that are unique to me. It’s great. I would love to have the most intelligent people around me, but if I’m not connecting with them, if I don’t feel like they’re at my level, then they’re talking above me.
00:08:26:23 – 00:08:46:08
Speaker
So yeah, great. I’ll have an IQ is something with an IQ of 2000. That thing needs to help me connect with other human beings because guess what? I don’t need to talk to the world’s smartest thing. I need to talk to someone who I can connect with and solve. Problems were hard enough to talk to you and you got, what, an 84 IQ On a good day.
00:08:46:11 – 00:09:10:19
Speaker
On a good day. All right, let’s get back to Bali. Alister and I can banter back and forth all day long. The Charlie, as you think about that, we’re clearly aligned in this huge impact there. Yeah. And you think of Revolve specifically where you’ve helped so many companies on this journey and you’re seeing the impact now of what generated by and is bringing you know, there’s a saying that you have that I’m going to quote here, which is great.
00:09:10:19 – 00:09:30:17
Speaker
The best time to invest in rev ops was when you started the company. The second best time is today. Now, now, take that statement. Just explain what you mean to all of us for that. And is this a time to achieve those that even are already doing rib ops to rethink it overall, a rethink what they’re doing? What what do you see?
00:09:30:17 – 00:10:04:23
Speaker
What are you telling people? Yeah, I’m just in terms of that that statement, you know, when a founder sets up a business, they may come from an engineering background. They may have been focusing with their leadership team. Absolutely. On finding product market fit and getting to that initial seed round and crawling their way up to a Series A And it’s all about product and it’s all about those initial customers that are probably coming in through your network, through your Y’SEE batch or whoever it might be, as anyone that will will speak to you and will pay some some money for the product.
00:10:05:01 – 00:10:35:19
Speaker
And as you then get through that series and start building out your team, it is really easy to to keep that entrepreneurial experimental focus and you just hiring people, building, building out the playbooks and revenue operations. And this idea of building a data led and structured and metrics based system around it can always seem like the thing that we can do next month, the next quarter, because we’ve got to get these deals coming through.
00:10:35:21 – 00:11:03:12
Speaker
And then before you know it, this month turns into next month, turns out the next quarter turns into next year and suddenly you’re trying to raise Series B and we haven’t got this. And now our data is in ten different places, our systems on integrated. We haven’t got the playbook, so we haven’t got the right org structure. And now trying to rewind that and rebuild a revenue operations system that you should have built a year ago, two years ago, you know, it’s much harder.
00:11:03:14 – 00:11:27:12
Speaker
So it’s I think it’s an old Japanese saying the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today. And it’s exactly the same for four for rev ups. Yeah, it definitely is. And I think, you know, so as you’re thinking of these companies and they’re expanding rapidly or they’re maybe having to redo this of their their large organization automation is we kind of throw around a lot.
00:11:27:14 – 00:11:57:15
Speaker
But you know, the automation speed of what is now doing is fundamentally shifting. That’s right. So when we think of the tenants grab ops, marketing, sales, customers success, and then the ops organization itself, right? It’s not just a sales function. You know, these areas are being disrupted right now. To Howard’s point, the need to have better engagement, better conversations means you cannot be doing the mundane, you cannot be worried about data entry, you cannot be worried about, you know, what, what am I going to do?
00:11:57:15 – 00:12:37:07
Speaker
You got to take the guesswork out of the actions and focus on improving the conversation. That starts with automation. Are you you seen that progression on the automation And and really what we’re now moving to is hyper automation. Many thing I think for for many business people, I’m not a technical expert, I can’t claim to be, but for anyone that’s in business, it’s important to quickly get your head around what a is and how you could explain that to your mother, to your father in non-technical terms, and so from from my understanding, the easy way of explaining it is that artificial intelligence is good.
00:12:37:10 – 00:13:10:05
Speaker
On the one hand, perceiving large amounts of data and lots of disparate systems, synthesizing all of that into one single model and then inferring some kind of result or output from that and machine learning is taking that output and putting that back in at the store into the the perceived. So this model continues to learn. So in my non-technical world that is these are the three things and it reminds me a bit of when I started my career and is about cloud.
00:13:10:09 – 00:13:38:17
Speaker
Suddenly everything was cloud, everything was cloud washed. I remember seeing some hard drive marked it as cloud in your pocket. I’m like, That’s the opposite of cloud. And so you’re seeing that with air and everything’s got air. They’re saying that. But it all for me comes back to perceiving large amounts of disparate data that a human being would find it difficult to get their head around synthesizing that into something and then inferring some kind of output that as a human would find it difficult.
00:13:38:20 – 00:14:01:01
Speaker
I’ve just finished reading a book called Range, which I’m not sure if you’ve come across. That’s about how generalists can succeed in this world. And there’s there’s a couple of things in that which Sunny jumped out to me in terms of AI. So one is that systems like chess, computers, you know, they started in the eighties to beat the humans, but they’re very good in what’s called a kind environment.
00:14:01:03 – 00:14:23:19
Speaker
A game of chess, whilst very complicated, has got a set of discrete rules. And as long as the computer is big enough, you can teach it and it can play that. But the world is not kind. You go in and speak to one customer and actually the thing that could help a customer and CPG could be something that you had from a customer and energy.
00:14:23:21 – 00:14:58:12
Speaker
And it’s the human ability to see in someone’s eyes to infer emotion and to understand when’s the right time to do this kind of thing. Which is why I think being a human in a revenue role is always going to be important. And the second thing that jumped out of this book to me was a story about teachers and parents that help their children when they are doing their homework or that prep and as a, you know, a kind parent that wants to help their child or you just want to get supper on and get things done, you sort of think that you’re doing the child a favor.
00:14:58:14 – 00:15:20:02
Speaker
But the evidence showed that every time that you made it easier for that child, their ability to retain knowledge later on in life around that topic or topics near it was degraded. So bringing this back to sales, every time I see an SDR typing in to chat, GPT, one of the top ten priorities is for a CFO in retail.
00:15:20:03 – 00:15:40:11
Speaker
They’re not doing the work, they’re getting someone else to tell them the answer. And I have to believe that over the next five or ten years, as these people go through their careers, they’re going to find it more challenging. And I think that’s going to be something that tends to hamper them later on. I love Charlie, how you use the example of tree learning and chess.
00:15:40:11 – 00:16:06:14
Speaker
I think that coming back to rev ops, there are pieces of RAB ops that are critical, right? The idea that data lives in disparate systems, figuring out what it is you want to automate the governance involved in your organization. When you think about AI today servicing a much more complicated problem than meeting a a human being and chess, right?
00:16:06:16 – 00:16:35:02
Speaker
What is required is not just a simple tree model. What’s required is a lot of information that is very contextual to the multitude of problems that a business needs to solve. Right? Sure. You have all kinds of variables where RGB ops is critical for any organization, and that is truly investing in AI is the requirement that your data needs to be well organized.
00:16:35:02 – 00:17:18:21
Speaker
It needs to be in a place that it’s not pulling from a variety of different systems and simply allowing the AI to hallucinate based on information that exists all over the place. There needs to be a structure, any discipline on the data that you bring into the organization and you continually feed the machine. If that is not there, then you’re using AI and the AI will not give you reliable and trustworthy answers to the questions you have that will create a distrust for the AI, which ultimately, if you don’t trust the AI and the suggestions and the next best actions that it is giving you, then it will become a failure.
00:17:18:21 – 00:17:46:14
Speaker
So right now the world is excited about AI, but we’re also seeing things. Alister You talk about it getting smarter, but the more we train the foundational models on lots of people’s feedback and information, they’re actually losing some of that intelligence and not able to solve even more basic math questions. So if an organization is creating AI to serve its interest, it needs to think about the data.
00:17:46:14 – 00:18:07:23
Speaker
It needs to think about the problems and systems it has in place to better serve its customers as well as its employees. So you both hit on something there, and I’m going to bring us up from the data to the wrap, because Howard, I think you’re suggesting is your specialized data. And the way we we we use that and train the models is really important.
00:18:08:03 – 00:18:31:05
Speaker
You know, I Charlie, you’re saying, yes, we need good data hygiene. We got to put that all together. Absolutely. And is that because the future of a sales rep needs to be more specialized or more generalized? The good question I’ll throw out how I’d answer that I think to to the data point. I love talking to clients about like our data.
00:18:31:06 – 00:19:12:15
Speaker
Our data. What is our data? Data is across first, second and third party data sources. Now, there is no such thing really as all data like the first party, what our sellers are doing in our CRM system and what our customers maybe are doing in our product second party is anything that’s coming in from our partners, maybe either our technology partners or consulting partners, and then increasingly now with things like Snowflake marketplace data that’s coming in, economic data, environmental data, economic data as be able to pull all of this into one central repository, which is going to allow me to provide you much more insight than you would have had just building out report of
00:19:12:15 – 00:19:37:07
Speaker
your internal data. One of the reasons why I think that external data is is so important is to your point about being a generalist or a specialist as a rep, having as much knowledge about your customers business and their industry and the trends that are going on, there is as much as important, no more important than what you know about your own product and your own sales process.
00:19:37:11 – 00:19:57:14
Speaker
It’s one of the reasons why I got into sales and why I love sales is getting to learn about another person’s business and how that works and almost, you know, tinkering around with it. And I think as over the last sort of five or six years, what we’ve been a lot more internally focused become email machines. People have lost a bit of that curiosity.
00:19:57:20 – 00:20:17:21
Speaker
Lots of salespeople like to say curious at the start of a question because I think they’ve been told to say curious, but they’re not actually curious. And I think the more that people do learn about what’s going on and their customers industries and that companies, it’ll help them to be more successful in their work. Howard, your thoughts there as well?
00:20:17:23 – 00:20:45:07
Speaker
Rationalists are generalist. Well, I always think that having a specialty allows you to provide more value. I think there is plenty of room for generalists. I think that for me what adds the most value to any interaction is helping me solve specific problems. And I can’t find one book that I can read that will completely change everything I do.
00:20:45:07 – 00:21:12:06
Speaker
I can’t speak to one individual that understands every single part of my business, just like my family, right? Like I it’s complicated. And there is help with parenting. There is help with education, there is tutoring, there is child relation ships that like life is complicated and and there are reasons why we look towards specialists in the same way.
00:21:12:06 – 00:21:50:20
Speaker
I think taking information and specializing it by role, by problem, by value is critically important. Right? If I, if I just try to solve everything, I’m probably solving nothing. And so how do we figure out how to really identify the problem that an organization has, that an individual has truly understand that and use our experience benchmark arcs, data, and other customers with similar situations to solve that problem because there is not a solve for everything.
00:21:50:20 – 00:22:14:09
Speaker
What there is, is unique situations and the better I understand them, the better I’m able to solve for it. And you see that, Charlie, you were a consultant, right? The ability of a consultant to truly understand the situation and all aspects of it requires you bring in a team of specialists to really solve that problem. It’s not a single person.
00:22:14:09 – 00:22:45:01
Speaker
And so I always believe that specialize and and truly understanding the problem and the solution goes the furthest and increasingly as we’re selling into the business. And a CFO that problem they’ve got, it’s not a technical one. It’s a financial one, it’s a cashflow one, it’s a budgeting one, it’s a business problem. And for sellers, if they’re going to be a specialist, be a specialist, and the business that your customer is running as opposed to your your product.
00:22:45:04 – 00:23:17:15
Speaker
That was some research I saw recently about corporate visions of CVI, the sales training organization, and they talk about how exact they want to have a conversation about their business and their balance sheet and their peer panel, but they write salespeople as virtually nonexistent. And being able to have that type of conversation, they can go barely a few minutes, both for having to revert back to talking about the product because they just can’t talk about the commercial aspects of it.
00:23:17:17 – 00:23:38:21
Speaker
So, you know, if I was coaching salespeople on where are you going to spend time being a specialist, it would be on on that topic. Oh, it’s great advice. And I love the the very key insight. Charlie, you mentioned and and throughout my career, I think some of the best salespeople and rev ups people have the hallmark of curiosity.
00:23:38:23 – 00:24:11:16
Speaker
And so the threat this all together you know what you’re saying there be curious about your customer, not your product. As a rev UPS leader. Rethinking Building Rev Ops today. Be curious about your customer, which is sales, marketing, customer success. Use the AI tools and the general tools to give you the intelligence to understand. So the scenario you’re talking about where maybe people don’t know all of the complexities, the financials of the company they’re talking to, you can use these tools to help you understand.
00:24:11:17 – 00:24:46:13
Speaker
From there you can be curious enough to then inquisitively ask and formulate opinions and drive things ahead in rev ops. If you’re wondering where you could automate something, why not query in us? Ask these tools for help. Have them analyze the loads and the data and see what the schemas are that we could change. Have them look at the inbound and outbound data and marketing and make recommendations, but be curious enough to use the tools to analyze how to analyze the churn data, have it analyzed to support ticket flow, and instead of doing that manually and anatomists, use the tools to help you do that.
00:24:46:15 – 00:25:13:07
Speaker
That’s the scale. That’s the curious nature of robots and how this is and disrupt that. And that’s where we’re going to get those 50% gains that Gartner speaks of. Be relentlessly curious, because these tools, so far as I’m aware, so far and asking many questions of us, but they are very powerful to help us ask questions. Absolutely. Charlie, our fantastic conversation there.
00:25:13:07 – 00:25:37:09
Speaker
Charlie, we I get go on all day with you with this. But unfortunately, you know, we are getting told time is our enemy here. So as we think about this and where we’re going going forward, look, we always love to finish off with a little bit of trivia and we’d love to have you back on a future episode and really dive into, you know, this notion of, you know, now we have clean air, now we’re applying a lot of the automation.
00:25:37:09 – 00:25:55:13
Speaker
We got our data organized. What’s the flywheel look? How do we actually stitch this all together? Because you know it you’ve tremendous background in what I call the flywheel approach of rev up. So love to have you back on that. But before we do, we got to take you through a little trivia piece here and then ask you what your favorite moment is for.
00:25:55:13 – 00:26:25:10
Speaker
We are we wrap up here today. So you feeling good for a couple pop questions here? Yeah, let’s go. All right, we’ll go. We had a pretty heavy conversations. We’ll go more to the fun side here. Now, if Rev ops through a party, Charlie, what would be its theme? A back to the future of sales. Be streamline and shine see Great Gatsby Growth Gala or D revenue rumble in the jungle.
00:26:25:12 – 00:26:49:12
Speaker
Eye of Revenue Rumble in the Jungle. For me, there’s two ads in revenue operations. Revenue and operations and revenue is the most important one. So you had me a revenue. I love it. There’s no wrong answer is the secret on that. We’ll go with revenue. Rumble in the Jungle. Charlie Cowan, head of Redbox. Charlie, we love it. You’re doing fantastic work around the world, Charlie.
00:26:49:12 – 00:27:18:15
Speaker
How close are you getting contact with you as well? The easiest ways rev ups Charlie dot com and then you’ll find a lot of my content maturity assessment there and lots of videos and you can get in contact with me there. Brilliant. Well please I encourage you be check it out. I’ve known of RevOpsCharlie for many many years through the Gardner days through to here as had Howard awesome content awesome thought leadership and advice there www.revopscharlie.com. thanks so much Charlie Cowan great to have you on with us.
00:27:18:15 – 00:27:38:10
Speaker
We’ll see you hopefully on a future episode. Everybody else listening in please remember to like and subscribe. Do call in your questions and emails. Howard and I love seeing them. We love the feedback and we will attempt to get to some of those on future episodes. Thanks, Charlie. We’ll see you next time. Appreciate it. By the way, Alastair, I probably should make a correction.
00:27:38:10 – 00:27:45:01
Speaker
I think I said your IQ was 84. It’s actually 86, so I want to stick with the facts here.
