How AI Is Changing Sales And Why Your Humanity Matters

What if the more we automate sales, the more buyers crave what only humans can deliver? We sit down with Jeff Kirchick, VP of Sales at Zorro, to unpack how authenticity becomes a competitive edge as AI makes personalization cheap and point-solution tools interchangeable. Jeff shares how a creative writing background shaped his sales philosophy, why seven-figure deals still hinge on trust, and how leaders can coach teams beyond scripts to real connection.

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Transcript

Framing AI’s Rise In Sales

Speaker 0:00

The tools that were being used there were going to start coming into the sales world. And the general thought is that as more and more people adopt AI, it'll become commoditized. And what will allow people to really stand out from the crowd is by kind of zigging when everyone's hacks.

Speaker 2 0:15

At Elements of Culture, we sit down with experts in leadership and team building to explore the DNA that drives a thriving organization.

Speaker 3 0:22

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Elements of Culture podcast. My name is Taryn, and I'm joined with my co-host Julie. And today we are talking with Jeff Kirchek. He is the VP of sales for a company called Zorro. They provide tech-driven employee benefits. And you also have some new offerings called ICRA, which I hope you're going to explain to me because Jeff, I have no idea what that is. This is not my space. I'm glad you're here joining us to give us all the details, but also just a little bit about your background. We're going to touch on a lot of topics, including AI. You've also written a book. So I'm excited just to dive into the conversation. But tell us a little bit about your background and we'll we'll get going.

Jeff’s Nontraditional Path To Sales

Speaker 1:06

Sure. So I guess I don't know how I don't know what a traditional sales background is, but I was an English major, focused on creative writing in college. So I kind of fell into sales. I like this idea. I think the company I first worked at said the harder you work, the more money you'll make. And that really um stood out to me just because I really liked having the ball in my hands. I liked the idea that I had agency and uh what would you know my own outcome, I guess. And so I fell into it. 15 years later, I'm still doing it. I've been working mostly in early stage um tech startups and I've seen good ones and bad ones, I guess you could say. I think the the most noteworthy one was I spent half my career as a first employee in a company called Nextcaller, where I was the first employee, um, saw it go into Y Combinator all the way through to an acquisition um, you know, four years ago or so. Um so I've kind of seen it all in the world of startups. And uh I also enjoy writing. As you pointed out, I wrote a couple books. Um, one was about, you know, AI and authenticity five years ago, um, kind of predicting a lot of what we're seeing today in terms of AI adoption and how it would change the way people think about um leaning into what makes them human. So um I live in Boston and I've got a wife and a daughter and dog and a cat. And um that's basically it for me.

Speaker 3 2:30

All the things to keep you balanced in the world of tech and AI and sales is you have to have pets and family to balance it all out, right?

Speaker 2:40

Exactly. Yeah, that's what it's all for.

Speaker 3 2:42

Yeah, absolutely. I it's so funny, Jeff. We we have the pleasure of talking with so many folks like yourself that are in sales leadership. And every time it comes to talking about the foundation, like of how they got into sales, more times than not, they're like, I don't, I just kind of walked into sales, it just kind of fell on my lap. It's like no one ever really has an intention to just like, I'm gonna go pursue sales, and then it happens. It just kind of gradually falls into place. And I think over time you kind of develop that skill set and that that uh passion for for the space for sure.

Speaker 3:14

Yeah, absolutely. Um, yeah, I went, you know, I was I went to school with a lot of kids who I think, you know, knew that they wanted to, they came out of the womb, I think, knowing they want to be doctors or lawyers or working on Wall Street or consulting or this or that. And so for for where I was, it was a pretty non-traditional approach. And I, you know, I think a lot of people looked at, you know, I had an English major and they're like, what are you gonna do for a living? Or, you know, uh, they didn't know what I was doing with my time. But um, you know, I think everything happens for a reason, as they say. So to your point, yeah, maybe wasn't uh what I set out to do, but I'm very glad that it worked out the way that it did.

Authentic Selling Origins And Big Deals

Speaker 3 3:49

Yeah, absolutely. And I will say this is might just be my own personal bias. I don't know, but I I do think that there is just a huge benefit uh for sales and having a sales background because you have to be adaptable, you have to be quick on your feet dealing with different problems. You're you're a quick problem solver. You oftentimes have to be, whether you are selling directly or you're managing people in the sales space. So tell me, tell me a little bit about the book. One of the books that you wrote was called uh authentic selling. And you mentioned you have such a passion for authenticity, as do we. And so I'd love to dive into that topic because what we have been seeing as such a trend over the last, even conversations we're having recently, but really even like the last five years, it seems like there's such a desire, I think, from an employee standpoint as well as um leaders, where they're wanting more of that authentic approach in their communication and their culture in their workspace. So give me a little bit of background on the book and then what you're what you see with the trend of authenticity in the workspace.

AI Spam, Personalization, And Trust

Scripts, Generations, And Real “Why”

Speaker 5:00

Yeah. Um, so you know, with with the book, um, you know, this was five years ago before a lot of this stuff was going on. And I I think part of the impetus to write it was that I had not come from an overly formulaic background with sales. Like I had been working in startups, so I didn't go through any like, you know, I didn't go through like Salesforces or Oracle's sales training program or something like that. A lot of what I had been doing was kind of organic, and um some of my strengths are my greatest weaknesses, I think, which are that I kind of wear my heart on my sleeve um with people. But I had found that at this company I was at leading up to its acquisition, I had been able to sell seven-figure contracts to um Fortune 100 brands and without being too rigid in my process, and I thought, well, I think I'm winning because of the relationships that I'm building with people, and I've there I'm earning trust, and I think there's something worth sharing there. And what I was also starting to see was that there was this idea of automation. I'd actually been working in the call center space in that company. So I was very familiar with a lot of the automation that was taking place in the call center world, that the half of what they're trying to do is automate people out of needing to ask questions, right? So I was starting to see that the tools that were being used there were going to start coming into the sales world. And the general thought is that as more and more people adopt AI, it'll become commoditized. And what will allow people to really stand out from the crowd is by kind of zigging when everyone's asked. So I think the best example of this is on like cold email is probably the best example because I think we're all getting inundated with, you know, AI written uh messages right now. Um and I get them too. I've had people reach out to me or bots that reach out and say, you know, I read your book and yada, yada, yada. And then I'll reply and I'll say, like, what was your favorite chapter and why? And it like, it'll just give me like a canned response. It's like, oh, like I like how you like authenticity or whatever. So what that does is actually it's not even a neutral thing. Well, like that actually makes me dislike whoever is behind that campaign because they're leading off by being disingenuous. They're trying to fool me, right? It's no different than someone spoofing their phone number when they call me to try to get me to answer. You know, if I think that maybe it's my family member and then I answer and it's a recruiter in London who's trying to, you know, one of a million recruiters that's trying to call me, that's annoying. That's not the that's not a really good way to start a relationship with someone. Um, on the contrary, if you can, and what I've been preaching for a long time is leaning into the shared values. So, you know, if I can find something that me and my buyer have in common that only I could talk about, that'll actually make me stand out from every other message that they get. Um, and the reason personalization used to be important back in the day was because when you personalized a message, the person knew that you took the time to write to them. Well, now AI can personalize everything, right? So now personalization isn't enough. You need to go beyond personalization. It actually needs to be shared. It needs to be something that we both share together because AI doesn't have an experience. AI doesn't have AI didn't go to the University of Michigan. It can't reach out to a fellow Michigan alum and say, hey, I'm a fellow Wolverine like you, and I went to the football games. It can't do that, right? I mean, it can, but only if it lies, right? And then you can't get on the phone with the bot and you know, at a certain point the lie runs out. So my point is just to bring this full circle that with all of these use cases for AI, if everyone can access them and it's democratized, then at a certain point it's a commodity, right? At a certain point, what will actually allow people to build trust is by being a good version of themselves. And that will change the way we sell, yes, but it will still elevate the importance of the person behind the sale. There might be less of them, they might have different roles, but it doesn't mean that they're gonna go away. And so what I encourage people to think about in the book is hey, you should do this A, because it works, but B, at a bare minimum, do it because it's what's gonna allow you to keep your job. Um, because it's the only thing that you have against the machine is your humanity. So that's the premise of uh the book.

Speaker 1 9:16

Yeah, that is absolutely amazing. And I feel like you've been listening to Taryn and I's conversations because we do um we do come across teams, and this, and I'll ask you this question just candidly, is and we are noticing, especially with sales teams in general, we've noticed they're very um, and I don't know if this is a training thing, I don't know if this is a newer thing, that we are seeing what I would consider transactional relationships. And so what we're looking at are people that um probably have given us been given a script um and they are going off that script, but they almost, it's almost like when you're asking them to be get personal, it's always it's almost like a robot like that that's losing its um doesn't know how to function. And I see like I'm like, okay, we lost her, we lost her. Like as soon as we get personal, what's happening? Like what's happening in our culture? Because I'm I have concerns about like the I think they almost get a little bit uncomfortable when it gets personable. And I think there's not only an authenticity issue there, a transparency issue there just to be human. And so I think we are seeing that in sales teams. Tara and I see it all the time as sales teams, where even when we're trying to ask just a personal question, there's almost like a glitch. There's a glitch. Like they don't know how because it's off the script. Um, they're not sure how to answer what's happening in our culture. And and and I love the fact that authenticity is making a comeback with all this tech and AI coming, but what's actually happening here?

Leading With Vulnerability At Work

Speaker 10:46

Yeah, it's a great question. I think what this is just me spitballing here, but I think it's a clash of different generations because one of the questions that I like to ask when I interview people is what is your why? Like, what is it that you want for yourself? Um, and what I'm trying to figure out, I mean, look, nobody, nobody's why is to like work at the company they're applying for. Like, no matter how much you're passionate about it, if I handed anyone a billion dollars, they wouldn't be applying for the job. They would, they would go be, they'd be doing something else. And that could be anything. Like maybe they'd just be spending time with their family, maybe they'd be traveling, maybe they would like start a business because they're passionate about like changing the world in some way. But like the point is that, hey, I need to figure out what it is that you actually care about. And like, have you actually anchored around something or are you just running through the hamster wheel? And so, anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up is because of what I've been finding recently is that when I ask this question, generally the like younger folks, again, not all the time, but a lot of the time, they're giving me an answer that they think I want to hear. You know, they'll kind of say, like, well, I'm like really interested in like finding like a company with a, you know, a mission that does X because I want to be part of this. And it's like, that wasn't really what I was asking you, though. I'm asking you, like, what do you want? Like, not what do you think I want? Don't give me like the chat GPT answer, what do you want? Whereas I find like when I find folks that are maybe a little bit um more established in their career and I'm having a conversation with them, um, like they just tell me what it is. It's like I'm a single mom and like I need to support my daughter. Like it's like that's fine. Like that's a great answer because that's the truth, right? So I just want to know um, you know, what what it is for people. I think it's a generational thing. Um, and I'm not I'm not trying to say like younger people are bad and older people are good or anything like that. It's just that, you know, when you grow up with a certain types of technology at your fingertips, um, even when I've been giving out assignments for SDRs now, they're all using ChatGPT to write me cold emails as part of my like cold email exercise. Again, like I actually think that's okay because I expect that they'll probably do that in the job too. But are they able to add the type of human touch that I'm asking them to do? Like, can they follow instructions is kind of like where I'm at right now when I index for are they gonna be a good fit? Um, so I think it's a generational thing. I still think you can teach people out of it and you can explain to them, you know, hey, like it's fine if you want to use these tools to help you, but here's why it's not gonna work in the job. Now show me that you're able to do that, right? Um, so I think it's a gener, I think it's just kind of a um the technology that they're accustomed to and cultural, um, but it can be coached out of them, I guess, if uh if done well.

Speaker 3 13:25

Yeah, that's so good. You you kind of touched on it already, but earlier we were talking about, you know, we you mentioned everyone has access to the same stuff, right? Same information through Chat GPT and different tools. And it's like, you know, how do you really stand out? So how are these salespeople standing out if they're just all, you know, looking for the same thing and pulling the same content? And I think part of me, yes, I agree, I think is generational, but also think just right now that people don't know how to be as transparent. Um, I think that there's a fear of being transparent as a human. I think there's a little bit of fear of being rejected in that place of transparency. And, you know, I think what would you say, Jeff, for leaders that are maybe coaching their teams or salespeople out of that, you know, kind of mindset and approach to be more human, to have that ability to connect with others. How does one go about coaching that in a way that's, you know, compassionate but also effective?

Five-Year AI Forecast And Tool Shakeout

Speaker 14:31

Yeah. Well, before I answer that, I want to go back, just like you said, I agree with you 100%. Like it is hard for people to be present an honest version of themselves and not to make this like really dark really fast or anything. But, you know, I think I saw some data about how teenage girls are going through depression and things like that and suicide, even at like the highest rates ever, just because you know, they go on social media and all their friends or influencers they see are depicting like these unrealistic versions of themselves or others. And um, and I think the best way, I mean, I'm a parent of a you know, near two-year-old daughter. So like it's something that I think about. I think the best thing to do is you lead from the front. You know, you show people that being yourself is a is a good thing and that that it's great to be the person that you are. Um, and so in in in my workplace, um I'm vulnerable with my team, you know, and we had an on-site back in June, and like the first thing I did was said, what is your why? And I wanted everyone to talk about it. For me, it had to do with my family, but my grandmother had just passed away. And um, you know, I had talked about, I had shown them a picture of my daughter meeting my grandmother and the four generations and you know how much it meant to me. You know, I I actually cried like during this presentation with the team. And um that that created an opportunity for others to do the same. And there were some very touching, you know, it created an opportunity for people to be honest about what they really wanted for themselves. Um and I won't share, you know, other people's business, you know, publicly here, but you know, a lot of the, the, the, the reasons that people care about making our business a success are very personal reasons and um things that you would not expect maybe people to share with their colleagues. And I think that has created an opportunity for us to understand the real stakes that other people have within the organization. But if I had gotten up there and just given them some cheesy thing about like, you know, how I just want to have a capital W on our resume or whatever, then they would have kind of reciprocated in kind. You know, they wouldn't have shared those things with the group. So I think part of it is just do it yourself, right? Like I and I'm honest with our team. Like if we, you know, I'm honest about like what's going well, what's not going well. Um, I care more than anything that they just believe me and trust me more than I care about whether or not we're doing well, because if I don't have that belief and trust, then we're we're just not going to succeed in the future. Um, so I just think that that's the mindset that people need to have. Uh, when you position yourself as like this person who knows everything or this person who's infallible, people can't relate to that because everyone is imperfect. And so, you know, you can be this guy who knows everything, a girl who knows everything, and you can be that person who's always giving people advice. But until you are vulnerable and you admit the things that you did wrong or the things where you wish you had done better earlier in your career, they will not relate to you in a in a positive way. Um, so that's a long-winded answer, but that's what I think is really important.

Where To Start With AI Without FOMO

Speaker 1 17:32

No, Jeff, I completely agree with you. I had a leader who once told me, you know, your people cannot be, will only be transparent with you to the level you're transparent with them. And so whatever level of transparency that we provide is the level they they feel comfortable meeting. And so um I think that is so essential for people uh to meet you in that place to actually know the why of what they're doing and helping them understand their own why. I think when you create a safe space, it allows people to have those thoughts and think those things through. Like, why am I doing this? Um, I do have a question for you. With social media and just AI, I I only see we have more AI implementation, more of these, and they're great tools and they're wonderful things that are happening, more social media. I have a two-fold question for you. Talk to me a little bit about um what's gonna happen in five years? What tools are we using now that we're not gonna see? Or maybe vice versa. What are some more things that you think AI is going to do that's gonna be replaced? And how do we balance that with more authenticity and more transparency without losing our way? I was telling Taryn the other day, I was like, I remember when we didn't have this many social media platforms. And so everything is like filtered. And I don't know that it's gonna be any less. I think if anything, it's gonna be more. Um, and so for authenticity's sake, like how do we balance that? And as a company, how do you balance that?

Coaching Teams: Frameworks Not Scripts

Speaker 18:55

Sure. It's a great question. Um, so I'll start with the first part of it. Um, I think that the tool landscape is gonna change significantly. And I have a perspective on this that um I don't know, I don't know if it's a radical one, but maybe it's a different one than maybe a lot what a lot of other people are thinking. I've been a big proponent of gong personally and you know, conversational intelligence tools. And I really believe that the conversational intelligence is really the holy grail of information for any business. And I also think that all these tools are going to become extinct. Um so you might wonder, well, well, why is that? And the reason why is because with the way that AI is maturing, you can now essentially create your own infrastructure in-house. Like in theory, if I want to do something interesting with my calls, all I really need at the end of the day is the call transcript. I just need to know what was said in the call. And then with that, I can manipulate whatever I want. So give you an example, something that I'm about to start building in my organization. I'm gonna take the call transcript. Using that data, I will update our CRM so that the reps never need to go into the CRM and update anything. I can have a scorecard on every deal that gets updated based on what's happening in all of the call transcripts and emails, right? So now it's objective. You know, did we or did we not do this thing? You know, what was the answer to this question? We could update a score for every deal. I can also coach the reps in real time based off of their transcripts, because if I score enough of these calls myself and give it feedback, it'll learn how I coach and it will coach them. It'll give them an updated coaching scorecard after every call. That's just the tip of the iceberg, right? But that's something I can build on my own. So I don't need a separate, I don't need these point solutions to do that, right? And so I do think that there's gonna be basically anything that's dot AI, then it's a sales tool. If its job is not to unify your entire tech stack, I think it goes kaput. Um, and whether that's in like two years or five years, I don't know. And like we'll see five years from now if I look stupid for making this prediction. But I really think that that's where we're going. Um I also think though, if there is one saving grace for some of these tools, it is that what AI has not yet started doing, but what it will start doing is it will start to look at tone, uh, facial cues, um, body language. You can start to build consortium data on people. So if people are on different calls, you can start to build a personality behind them and how their behavior might impact their receptiveness to doing something. Um, so I do think there's some opportunity there. I think there's this idea of ontology as well. So ontology would be that the way you refer to something on a call, even just the difference of one word, might actually have a massive impact on a specific buyer persona's receptiveness to what you're selling. It's actually a very uh interesting concept, but it's really true. Like we all have different personality types, and sometimes the difference between hey and hello can be a big difference in terms of whether or not someone likes you. Obviously, you do this at scale in terms of how you communicate to that person, but I do think there's a world where that becomes significant as well. Um, so that's the one piece of it. As the social media side, I'll be honest, I'm not a big social media person, so I'm not the right person to talk to that one. I do think that brands will have a harder and harder time, you know, kind of understanding how do they build their persona across these different networks because they're all different in nature. Like TikTok, for example, is just a completely different persona than, you know, Facebook, right? Um, and so I do think there's going to be some interesting challenges ahead on that one.

Focus, Automation, And Removing Friction

Speaker 3 22:58

Yeah, that's so good. I think, you know, we talk to a lot of different companies, Jeff. And I know there's a lot of um different folks that are listening to the content too in these conversations. Many companies still are not yet even integrating some AI for their tools and for their systems. So based on what you're saying, how does how does one go about knowing what to implement first in order to not fall behind? Because here's what I'm concerned of is the companies who are not stepping forward and integrating AI into some of their systems and processes, they're gonna fall way behind. And then they're gonna end up having to outsource that to someone else. And we just recently had a conversation um about that. And then they're gonna be paying, you know, tons of money to be able to have someone else do it for them. And so for a company like that who doesn't currently have um, you know, kind of the those solutions in place, where do they start? If they know that it's going to be changing so quickly, do they just not even start? Like, what do you say to those people?

Speaker 24:05

Yeah. Well, my answer may be a little ironic, but it I would say actually don't panic, because I think a lot of times people try to jam a square peg into a round hole, if you will. You know, they're like, well, everyone else is doing this thing, so I have to be doing it. The reality is, is you don't have to do anything unless you have a problem that you need to solve. Um, and I would so what I would think about really, and I know this I'm not saying anything, you know, novel here, but think about like what are the challenges that I'm trying to solve within my business? Um, a lot of businesses don't necessarily need to do much with AI just based on their nature of what they sell and what they do, or their use of AI may look very different. You know, when I worked at that company that I was at for a long time, we had a very limited scope of like who we could sell to. Like the total available market was just not a lot of different brands. And so you could think of like AI being more useful for research on conversations and um building collateral more so than for outbound, for like not necessarily doing like tons of outbound campaigns, because we needed to be a little more strategic on how we contacted those users. So, long story short is the use cases and like what makes sense for a business really vary depending on where are the challenge areas. Um, and so in my business, um, you know, based on our, you know, give you an example, we sell through healthcare brokers. We don't really go direct to the employer. So there's actually not a lot that I can do on the persona level because I don't know who the clients are of a specific broker. There's no way for me to know that. And so the way that I use AI there is maybe different than others would from an outbound perspective. Um, I do think that like the most basic way, though, for someone to just like dip their towel in the water is really just to get like a paid, you know, Chat GPT account or Gemini or something, and then just start figuring out the art of the possible. You'll find out quickly that you can do uh get uh feedback on your transcripts. It can auto-write follow-up emails for you, it can build lead lists for you. There's some basic stuff that you can do right away, just with like a $20 a month license from one of these tools. I would start there just so you can get your feet wet, but really don't try to don't don't just go crazy with this for the sake of doing it. Figure out if you actually have a problem that that you need to solve.

Speaker 1 26:28

So, Jeff, I like that. You don't have to do change just for the sake of change. Um and I think it's the same, like you don't want to be if you don't you're not needing it necessarily, there's no reason to jump on the bandwagon quite yet. Um so I I do really uh I agree with that because I think there are a lot of companies that are investing a lot of resources into that. And I think the resources they currently and the tools they currently have are working. Um and so I think there is, I but I think they're so they have FOMO, they're afraid of being left behind and missing out. And so I think that is uh is actually happening in real time. Um, let me ask you a question. So, like you are building when you talk about authenticity and you talk about the future of AI and what you're doing, talk to me about how you're coaching leaders to be both, to be innovative in the side of AI, but also remain authentic in the type of relationships they're building with their clients.

Speaker 27:21

Yeah. Um, we actually did a little bit of this on our team where we demonstrate use cases. So what I like to try to do is brainstorm um use cases for AI that I demonstrate to the team. And I like to give people um a framework, but I don't tell them what to do. What I mean by that is I give them, you know, ideas of what can work, or if if we're doing discovery, for example, but these are examples of good questions that would get you to the outcome that we're searching for. So I'd like to kind of create these frameworks. And with AI, you know, one of the things that we've done is we've I've displayed to the team like, hey, here's a way that you could build um a you know, uh a GPT for your RFIs, right? Where, you know, if you get an RFI and you want to quickly be able to fill it out or not have to spend too much time, um, you can do this ver really quickly, right? And you could be a lot more efficient because we get a lot of those. Um or if you're doing an outbound campaign, um, here is a heat map that shows what counties in the United States are the best for what we sell. And maybe you could automate, you know, you could build some automations that could hit our target networks in these counties, right? So I've demonstrated these as ideas for them. But at the end of the day, like they're adults and they're, you know, they've got numbers that they want to try to hit. And so it's up to them to decide how they want to dive in and leverage. Like if and some folks are just really good at picking up the phone and calling people. So I'm not gonna tell them like, stop doing what you're good at and do this other thing because I think it's cool. It's just to say, hey, this is cool. It's there for you. If you, if calling stops working for you, like this is there for you too, right? So I think like one of the things I try to do is I try to be out in there and like figuring out what other what are other people doing. Um, I'm an LP in a company uh in a fund called uh VC called Stage 2 Capital. A lot of their portfolio companies are putting out, you know, research on what they're doing with AI. I like very well, every time they put out a new newsletter, I'm like all over it. I'm like talking to the person who built whatever the thing is. I want to know what other people are doing so that if it's relevant to what we can be doing, I can share some of that feedback with the team and make it available to them, but without mandating that, okay, now you're a machine, act like a machine. It's there for you. If it, if it augments what you're working on, here's another idea for you. Um, so that's what I try to do. And I think part of that is just making sure that you are up to trend or like what's going on in the in the in what's going on with my peers.

Speaker 3 30:00

Yeah, that's so good. I think we have to always be learning and have a a hunger to deep dive, especially as leaders. Because I think so often, and you know, we've seen this too, is where you have leaders that they just kind of put it on someone else to take ownership or to kind of champion something. And it's like, no, if if you are gro going together as a team, you really and it it does flow kind of from the top down when you have when you want to make a real impact with the culture. And so I do think that it requires that. Um, Jeff, in a world of AI and um maybe a lack of full authenticity um in the workplace, what would you say that you're seeing um before we wrap up here? What would you say are some of the big challenges that you see for sales teams that um maybe might even be distracted with some of the tools that could even help with efficiency? How do you effectively help a team to stay focused and scale as an individual to hit their numbers, their quotas, but to thrive as a as a healthy individual? Um, because we're we are surrounded by a world where there's just a lot going on. So in your space, specifically with Zorro, um, how do you help scale the team when it comes to sales?

Speaker 31:22

Yeah, I think to help them feel good about not like not being distracted, they need to feel good that that I'm kind of doing a lot of that research myself and that I'm making available to them anything that they would need, and that the process we have affords them all the tools that they need to be successful. There are parts of our process that we've identified which, if we were to automate them, uh, would make us a lot more efficient, right? And so one of the things that I do is I try to figure out like, well, where are you getting held up time-wise? And then I go and try to specifically address that. So unfortunately, you know, the next four weeks for us are like basically the rest of our selling season. So we're not gonna go and make any major changes over the next four weeks. But my goal, November, December, as we get into 2026, I'm actually gonna build the fixes to these challenges, right? There's like a couple parts of our sales process that take up a lot of time where if I were to build some automation, and by the way, these are things that uh don't require human touch anyway. So like taking the taking it off their plate is actually good for everybody, right? Um, so I think it's just being like not reactive. Like you got to be proactive and ask the question, like, hey, what is it? Like what what sucks about your day? Like, tell me what's bad about your day right now, and like figure out like, is there a trend in that feedback? And if, and like how much, how much time is being wasted there, right? Um, I think if they have confidence that you're actually going to go out and address the big challenges they have, they will not get hung up in the little things, right? All they really, I mean, again, this is my sense, but my sense is that what salespeople get hung up on are the big things that really eat up chunks of time in their day. Um, so that's where I that's where I really try to focus is identifying if there's a trend there and then getting consensus on it from everybody that like this is what we're gonna focus on solving for.

Speaker 3 33:14

Absolutely. I I think that's great. I totally agree. I think for salespeople, it's like anything that consumes their time is the most frustrating thing, right? So I think as leaders, you have to be able to identify those pain points and really bring a solution that's going to solve for that. Um, it's so important. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for your time today and just talking about the way that you lead your team, your approach to, you know, authentic leadership, I think is so valuable in the workplace today. And thank you for sharing that with us today on Elements of Culture.

Speaker 33:48

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 33:51

Yeah, thank you, Jeff.