Ep. #20 – Special Guest McKenah Elizabeth, AI & Sales

Sales with AI and Social Media Insights with McKenah Elizabeth

Show Notes

Sales with AI and Social Media Insights with McKenah Elizabeth

Topics Covered:

1. Introduction of McKenah Elizabeth, a TikTok influencer and sales leader.

2. McKenah's background in tech roles, sales, and customer success.

3. Her career transition from elementary education to tech roles and sales.

4. Use of TikTok for video editing and professional marketing.

5. Focus of McKenah's online persona on sales and career advice.

6. The role of AI in modern sales techniques and efficiency.

7. Discussion of Sales Loft and its AI features for sales enhancement.

8. The predictive aspect of AI in sales and its potential ethical considerations.

9. The future of AI in customer service and account management.

10. Building a massive TikTok audience and content creation strategies.

11. McKenah's transition to independent consulting for tech companies through Tech Social.

12. Discussion on AI sales tools like Sales Loft, and new AI tools like Flike.

13. Relevance of AI BDRs, and overall impact of AI on sales roles.

Relevant Quotes:

- McKenah on her use of TikTok: "I started using TikTok as a way to edit videos to post on LinkedIn so that my clients would see."

- On the role of AI in sales: "I use Sales Loft every day. And they have a lot of AI features within Sales Loft... It'll summarize all the action items and I can boom, put them in an email."

- Regarding the AI's augmentation in sales: "I think buyer behavior is just getting full visibility to that, and then that AI component... is actually taking all those data points and then organizing my to-do list."

- On ethical considerations in sales with AI: "I don't think we're gonna get to a point where it's obvious... if it was looking at how I frame things... and it could take on my tone, I'd really like to see it sort of like morph to me."

- Advice on building a TikTok audience: "The biggest thing is the hook, sounds, and then captions are super important."

The podcast provides insights into using AI tools to enhance sales performance, discusses ethical considerations, explores McKenah's personal journey and expertise in social media influence for sales, and talks about the future prospects of AI in the sales industry.

And welcome back to the Big Cheese AI podcast.

My name is DeAndre Herakles,

one of the world's top moderators,

joined by Brandon Corbin, Jacob Wise,

and a special, very special guest.

We have our first TikTok influencer, sales leader.

I mean, seriously guys, when I first,

I first found her before,

like I didn't know she was coming on the podcast.

And then Jacob's like,

"Hey, this is the person joining on Thursday."

And I'm like, I'm like a little starstruck.

I'm like, oh my gosh,

it's like I've literally watched this person's sales content

and I watched your video, made a sales script off of it.

So it's super excited, super excited to have you,

McKenna Elizabeth.

So we'd love for you to just intro yourself real quick

and we can get rolling.

- Yeah, well, thanks for having me.

My name is McKenna Elizabeth

and I've worked in different tech roles,

our tech companies for the past five years

in sales and customer success and account management

and have lived in Indianapolis

for about the same amount of time, so.

- Where were you before, Indy?

- I, Northern Indiana, just like out in the corn.

- Right, right.

- Not a whole lot.

- Is it the region or is it the other side?

- That's what everybody says.

No one told me it was called the region

until I got here.

I'm like, well, I guess.

- Well, hold on, what's the region?

- It's like anything near Chicago

is kind of how I understand it, right?

- Right.

- Yeah, that up Northwest area.

- And so then the TikTok,

the TikTok work that you've been doing,

was it, you said that was about five years ago or?

- So when I started, when I,

I was in a sales role for a IT professional services company

that didn't have marketing.

And so I was like, okay,

well, how do I like start marketing our services?

So I started using TikTok as a way to edit videos

to post on LinkedIn so that my clients would see.

- Sorry, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,

hold on.

We got to delve into that a little bit.

So you found TikTok's phone editing,

or we can play footsie, it's okay.

The TikTok editing features was good enough for you

that you just wanted to use it

for the editing of the videos

to then share across other platforms.

- Right.

- Wow, okay.

- Yeah, I wasn't even trying to do anything with TikTok.

- Interesting.

- Brilliant.

- It is pretty amazing of a tool

in terms of editing on your phone, right?

Like, I mean, they've crammed a lot of great functionality

into a very small user interface.

So that's cool.

So sorry, anyway.

- Yeah.

So I started doing that, started creating the videos.

I posted them on LinkedIn and my clients

or like prospects and things like,

oh yeah, I saw your video or whatever else.

So it started to become like just a good

like marketing thing to do.

And then I moved and worked for a SaaS company

and took a job in customer success.

And I was like, I didn't even know that this job existed.

I'm gonna start talking about it.

So I started telling people about it

'cause my degree is actually in elementary education.

So I didn't, you know, there's this whole transition

of like all the careers out there that I never knew about

that I wish somebody had told me about.

- Right.

- Customer success being one of them

'cause it's great for people

with education type personalities,

the like, you know, training and things like that.

And then, so I started making videos about that

and started doing like paid partnerships and stuff

with different certifications and productivity tools

and things like that.

And then moved in to sales within that same company

and then started talking about software sales

and things like that.

And yeah, it's just been a fun journey.

- So would you say almost your entire persona online

is around sales?

- Yeah, so right now that's purely

what I have like really divulged.

I've talked over the years, I've talked about careers,

I've talked about, you know, different roles in tech.

I've even done like some partnerships with AWS

to talk about different certifications

you get in the cloud and things like that.

But the past, you know, six months to a year

has been really sales focused.

- And so, but you have, education was kind of the,

what you were aiming for in terms of like,

you wanted to be a teacher.

And so what, if you don't mind me prodding a little bit,

like what happened there,

you decided not to pursue that?

- Yeah, so when I, so first of all,

I grew up in a small town.

Like I told you the corn of, corn of Indiana.

And so I didn't really know like really

what my options were.

- That's fair, yeah.

- I had no idea.

And especially being like women,

you see women in like teaching, nursing or mom roles.

Like that's, you just, you know, like, okay,

well, those are my options.

And so I went into education because of that.

And towards the end, I was kind of like,

you know, I don't know if this is like, this is a lot.

This is a lot.

And I had, I went to Indiana Wesleyan University.

- Same.

(laughing)

- For anybody that knows who's listened for a while,

you might've heard that this is actually happening

in the Indiana Wesleyan, one of the buildings

is where the podcast studio is.

- Yeah, and so I--

- The Wildcats.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Is that what they're called, the Wildcats?

- Wildcats, yeah.

- Nice.

- So I don't know about you,

but I graduated with a lot of student loan debt.

And I had scholarships and all that,

but I graduated with so much debt that it was like,

I couldn't even be a teacher if I wanted to be.

And so kind of doing the math on that, you know,

my senior year being like, okay,

we're gonna have to figure something else out.

And it was fine because I was kind of like

leaning away from it anyway.

So that's when I started my first role ever.

I found through LinkedIn and I was an IT recruiter.

So I recruited software developers,

data analysts, project managers.

- So recruiting was where you landed,

but was that not something that you actually

like long-term saw yourself doing?

- It was kind of like my pathway to sales.

- Okay.

- 'Cause that's really kind of where I wanted to be.

- Right, that's awesome.

That's very cool.

- Yeah, well, I didn't,

I saw on your LinkedIn you went to Dean & Wesley.

I didn't know if it was like a masters or what have you.

So yeah, shout out to being a Wildcat.

This episode, we're talking about the AI salesman.

And look, we get a lot of sales emails.

Jacob got one the other day.

And they literally still had like the part of Chad GPT

that like summarizes what it gave you

at the bottom of the email.

And so in your experience, like you're in this world, right?

You're a thought leader.

You're leading people right now.

You led me when I went out to go do cold calling,

which is so cool.

Like what's your advice?

What platforms are you seeing that actually are beneficial?

And like being in the sales space with AI,

like how is it actually augmenting the sales process

as a salesperson?

- Mm-hmm, so I'm a big advocate for Sales Loft.

I use that every day.

And they have a lot of AI features within Sales Loft,

specifically that I use to make me more efficient.

So like after my calls,

it'll summarize all the action items

and I can boom, put them in an email,

send it off to the customer,

maybe tweak it a little bit, things like that.

It's looking at how often are my customers

clicking on websites and it's like pinging me.

I can see how often they've opened my emails and all that.

I can see content, data sheets that they're engaging with,

consensus, demo videos, all of those things.

And then it's actually making a to-do list for me

based on that data that it's pulling in.

- And this is Sales Loft.

- Mm-hmm, Sales Loft.

- So sales, L-O-F-T.com.

- Yes.

- Would they be a competitor to HubSpot, Salesforce?

- They sit on top of Salesforce.

- Okay.

- Kind of so it's like a really UI,

like the UI is just super, super nice.

- So they made a very sales-focused experience

that basically sits on top of Salesforce.

- Right. - Got it, okay.

- I'm sure it sits on top of other products too.

- But it can integrate with your Salesforce

and all of your data there.

- Yeah. - Got it.

- Yeah, a couple of things that you said

that kind of stood out to me was

when people think about AI, they're always like,

oh, it's magic, it can do everything for me.

All I have to do is just tell it,

here's a list of people, go sell to them now.

And what it sounds like you're using it for,

which makes more sense to me,

is augmenting and telling you the just-in-time actions

of like, hey, this person is clicking the website,

maybe it's a good time to reach back out to them

after this email, or how are you seeing it

of creating or building onto relationships

and using it as that augmentation

of what you're already good at,

which is building relationships

and communicating to people?

- How am I seeing it, like building on that?

- Yeah, in what ways is it adding value to you

on a daily basis of, oh, I was able to sell this

or be more enabled because of this feature,

or that's how you're using it to get to more people faster?

- Yeah, I think buyer behavior

is just getting full visibility to that,

and then that AI component

where it's actually taking all those data points

and then organizing my to-do list.

Hey, you should spend more time on this deal,

because we're getting all these points

that's saying that this customer is likely to buy

based on all their behavior

that we're getting from emails, websites, all of that.

So I really like that predictive piece of it.

But I think, I mean, even writing cadences,

like a series flow of emails,

it's not a replacement for that.

I wouldn't have AI write all of my cadences,

but it definitely eliminates that writer's block

that you get sometimes where you can just tweak it.

But I'm more, I don't know about you guys,

but I like shorter, sweeter, to-the-point type of emails.

And just a couple sentences, boom, boom, boom.

And AI could go on for days.

It could go on.

But it's funny, I even had it,

I had it just kind of testing.

I was like, write me a sales email

to a new potential prospect with a golf humor.

And it had integrated golf puns throughout the whole email.

It's funny how we could just do that tone.

- Yeah, I was actually using it today

to write an email to a client.

So I did a whole estimate, and I was like,

okay, now I have to tell them I did the estimate

and what the next steps are.

And it was so verbose, but it was still good

as like, here's my starting point.

And it got me past that initial writer's block

of looking at a blank page and like,

okay, how do I even start this thing?

So all I did was tell it,

here's the points that I wanna say,

it's a follow-up on this.

Here's why I'm doing it and why I'm resuming this.

So it was just one of those instances

where it just reduces that cognitive load

and helps me get unstuck,

and now I can move on to things that I want to do,

which is not write emails.

- Did it work?

- It worked great.

I used Cloud 3, by the way.

- Oh, did you? - Yeah, yeah.

- One of the questions that I had was,

so we can get off on tangents.

- Yeah, we can, sorry.

- And-- - We're going back in.

- Oh, we might not be, don't worry.

I'm not going that direction.

In the first couple of episodes of the Big Cheese Pod,

like, we're going deep into like,

people are gonna lose their jobs, right?

And we went directly towards marketers.

There's been AI platforms at this point

over the next 24 months.

They'll be created for everything,

software developers, salespeople.

But you brought up a good point in that,

and I agree with you,

the augmentation of what you're doing

in helping you maybe gather data

and summarize it in a better way for you

than go make better emails to go write a sequence.

But how far are we away?

This would just be an estimate,

just whatever you think of,

'cause right now,

if you just let ChachiBT write the email,

it's gonna be clear that it wrote the email.

Do you see a future where like,

that actual sequence is completely written by AI

and is almost like, unnoticeable to the receiver?

Or, like, what is your opinion on that?

Like, is it even close to what you can actually do?

- I'd like to see, so, you know,

there's some tools out there which will,

they'll really analyze your writing style

and how you frame information

and then start to write as though it were you.

And that's what I'd like to see,

because I don't think we're gonna get to a point

where it's obvious.

I mean, it would be great if you could,

but if it was looking at how I frame things

and maybe like, not being as wordy

and it could be more to the point and things like that,

and it could take on my tone,

I'd really like to see it sort of like, morph to me,

more than just like, take over everyone's,

you know, roles or, you know, in a way.

- Right, so I guess that kind of stacks

onto the next question, which is like,

how do, then we go to chatbots in customer service.

- Yeah.

- And we're a little bit more adept to responding to a bot,

but with AI, like, how do you think

that's gonna be augmented?

'Cause you said you started in customer service

or at some point you were involved with it, right?

- So, yeah, so customer success is a little bit different

in that it's more of like, account management

and it's more of like, product adoption,

more than like, resolving tickets or errors

or things like that.

But with customer service,

so a lot of my customers are e-commerce,

they're selling on Shopify, BigCommerce,

Magento, whatever else.

And so, they've had the ability to kind of outsource

a lot of those initial questions to the chatbots,

or at least remove that tier one level of support,

which I think is more of just a money saver than anything.

But I think ultimately, what would be really cool

is if there was like, sort of like a self-service

type of portal that customers could go in,

like even asking like, order statuses, updates,

like that would be where you have data

from all of your systems.

And maybe it's not all accessible to the customer,

but that you could even as like,

maybe a higher level customer service person,

pull data from Zendesk and from Salesforce

and from your shipping, your 3PL, whatever it is,

and have visibility to all of that at once,

so you could really like, answer a complex question

pretty quickly.

- Yeah, we talk about that quite a bit of like,

first of all, we think the place that makes the most sense

to implement AI is back office.

So people who are helping customers

and getting to asking or answering questions,

those types of tools are coming,

and he actually works with a company,

I'll let you tell a little bit more about that.

- Yeah, same premise though, is that, again,

we've just seen enough where if you give customers

direct access to your AI,

that they're going to make it do stupid things, right?

So like, having that barrier and say, okay,

our customer service reps,

they absolutely should be augmented with AI.

They should absolutely be able to ask those questions,

'cause they can then go and say,

oh, well, I see that it's hallucinating,

let's not go ahead and do this, right?

And so, and we're seeing that too

with another one of my clients is,

that a lot of the work we think is really in,

all of the back office stuff,

there's a lot of great things that you can do

in terms of leveraging AI,

that is not as high risk of exposing it

at the customer level.

Because that one, man, it does,

that just scares the hell out of me.

Every time it's just like,

you're going to release a chat bot,

you're basically letting people directly interact

with a large language model.

They're going to do it, they're going to,

I mean, 'cause I would.

Like every time that I have access

to try to screw around with somebody's searches,

I want to hack it, right?

And I know that I'm not alone,

and that everybody, like when Microsoft did the first,

I always talk about this one,

but the Microsoft released one on Twitter

years and years ago,

and by the end of the day,

it was talking like Hitler.

And they had to shut it down,

because again, everybody just figured out,

oh, well, if you say this, you do this,

you do this, you do this,

and you can, so they're going to manipulate it.

And it's like all these people

who've never been on Reddit,

and never, or 4chan,

and realize how bottom feeding majority

of the people on the internet are.

And so that's why I think having that buffer,

until again, let the companies like OpenAI

and Microsoft, and the ones who have the resources,

allow people to interface directly

with a large language model.

But if I was a company, I would be like,

yeah, yeah, we need to,

I mean, you need to put some serious guardrails

onto this stuff.

Yeah, and we had Aubrey Anon on,

who is a enterprise level consultant

on the technical side,

and just dove into what data swamps,

is that what we said?

Yeah.

And we made up that term.

And so 100%, but there's like a huge barrier

in that like, at least to the degree I understood it,

which is like that much compared to this much.

Like they, to do something like that,

and like what you mentioned,

to be able to come back with this very complex,

precise answer based off all the different systems,

it's just, it's really, really difficult.

So there's an idea.

We can go build that as the next startup.

So last episode, we dove a lot into the ethics of AI.

Right?

And we were all over the place.

So if you listened to it,

I hope you had fun listening to that.

But is there any ethical considerations to be had?

- In sales?

(laughing)

- Look, look.

- Hey now, hey now.

- Look, look.

- Hey, I'm just saying.

It's sales, baby.

- But you know, like, from the perspective of this,

okay, there's probably a reality

where we can get so much data on someone,

and these big companies can gather that data,

and then serve that up to a sales rep,

where it's almost like you're, you know,

taking candy from a baby, potentially.

Sales are never easy.

Right?

But like, are there any ethical things to consider

when we're adopting AI,

in terms of like how we're approaching a client,

or just how you're using it in the sales process?

Is there any kind of like red flags

that you're seeing at all in the industry?

- Yeah.

I mean, well, Amazon and Facebook and Google

are all doing it.

So I think it's gonna be really hard to, you know,

to put boundaries around that,

unless you do it for everybody.

So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

I know that there's a lot of people working on that.

But I think like, specifically with sales, right?

Like cold calling.

Like, is it ethical to have an AI bot cold call somebody?

Like, is there, 'cause there's regulation.

- Yeah, they just passed the regulation

that says no robo calls from an AI bot.

Now, again, that's in the US.

That's not gonna stop, you know,

every other country to be calling us

and doing the same thing.

- Yeah.

- But yeah, from an ethical side, you know,

I mean, ethics and sales don't necessarily align.

And I'm not saying that as a bad thing, right?

Like, again, our job as a salesperson

is to extract money from this person

by selling them something, whether they need it or not.

Right?

Like, again, and that's not-

- Or provide, I don't know if we agree with that.

- You and I are very different.

- Yeah, no, no, no, no.

But I'm not saying this is a bad thing.

Again, there's a lot of salespeople that are out there

that are, I wanna just make the money.

And that's totally fine.

Like, I'm not judging anybody for doing that.

And again, you're, you know,

what's the saying where there's a pool born every minute

or whatever it is.

- Tree, bear in the woods or something like that?

- Something like that.

- High tides raise all shit.

(everyone laughs)

- I'm just gonna start throwing out all of them shit.

But the robocall thing, I totally get,

like, I'm just not, I'm not one to like a lot of regulation

just for the sake of regulation, right?

Like, again, I've got people calling me up from India

saying that they're in, you know, Norfolk

and that their name's Susan and it's bullshit.

And so like, I know that.

And we know that we're gonna just start seeing that

from an AI sales call standpoint.

So I don't know.

I struggle with the whole ethics thing and AI as it is,

but from a sales standpoint, yeah.

Can you think of anything that it's like,

other than maybe robocalls that would be sketchy?

- I mean, Zoom has a lot to gain, right?

Like, Zoom is hosting all of these meetings

and having, I mean, access, quote unquote,

to, you know, all of this buyer knowledge.

So if you're, they would have a lot to gain

from, you know, selling the data or whatever else.

So it'll be, but it's interesting

because even if you record, you're recording a meeting,

right, that other person gets a notification

that you're, you know, that you're recording

and they have to accept it and all of that.

And so it was like, well, is there gonna be all of these

like sort of like accept, like you can use my data

for sales?

I mean, I feel like there would have to be

some sort of like agreement.

- Yeah. - So what's interesting is,

so again, I'm cheap, I don't like to pay for anything.

I would spend two months building something

so I don't have to pay like $2.99 a month for it, right?

But one of the things that I've set up now

is my own recording process.

So when I'm on a call, I can just hit record,

it's gonna record the whole conversation

and it's gonna, at the end of it,

it's gonna then take that, it's gonna transcribe it

using a lot of the same processes

that we do for the podcast.

And then I'll go through and I'll turn that into like

cleaned up show notes and like the takeaways

and whatever other things that might have come up.

And for me, that's just been like an absolute game changer,

but nobody has any idea, right?

This isn't because I'm recording just the audio

on my computer, right?

I'm not, and it's not going out,

it's all using my local large language models.

So I'm not like sending all this data to OpenAI,

it's all completely private.

- It's just one way consent, right?

Like, or one party consent.

- Yeah, but that's an, it's an interesting question, right?

And what is, what I'm doing is what I'm doing legal.

- You just committed a felony on camera probably.

- I might have, I don't know if those recording things

actually apply to online, obviously does to the phone,

right, because again, telecom is its own beast,

but does those same laws of like,

if you're in a state of California

where you need two people buy in,

sorry, this is a complete sidetrack.

But I'm kind of curious if that,

if anybody knows, leave it in the comments,

that if you're doing a Zoom call,

does that fall into the same jurisdiction

of recording when one or two party requirement states?

I don't know, yeah.

- I'm interested in like the data training aspect of it,

'cause like Zoom, you kind of made me think

of a good point of like, Zoom has all this data.

They can probably analyze a video and be like,

that person said this, this person reacted positively

because facial expressions and all that.

And you can also like mark that, oh, that was a sale.

This meeting ended in a sale.

Same thing with SalesLoft.

You could totally train all that data on,

these are the emails that got me the best responses,

and I'm sure they're doing that now.

In SalesLoft, can you literally say like,

this email was well-received or like something like that?

- You can see, yeah, you can see like,

track opened rates and successive campaigns.

- Yeah, so like, over time, those companies will win

because they're gonna have a bunch of data

and they're gonna say that they kind of know

what that user looks like.

So this type of user responded well to this type of email

and they'll build up a database at some point.

And who owns that?

I mean, it's like, I don't know.

I mean, I assume like it's anything else.

There's some fine friend that says,

if you get on here and reply to this email

and they own that, so.

- But as a salesperson, I would not want my competitors

having access to that data.

Like if I'm talking to a prospect and it's going well

and they're interested and they're like,

my competitors are over there like,

yeah, well, we can see that this is, you know,

I don't want them to know.

So like, I feel like even in sales, you're like,

you might use it, but you don't want other people

using your prospect data

because they're gonna be hounding your customers.

- Yeah, and honestly, I think a lot of these,

the Zooms, the Teams, all of those platforms,

they might end up having some of the best content available,

right, versus just websites, where websites,

we have just this, you know, a stream of content,

or even Reddit, right?

Reddit text, back and forth, but with real conversations

that are happening on these things

and the data that they can mine,

not only the audio, but the video, you know?

- There's gonna be like real time, like, you're losing 'em!

(laughing)

- Wait, is that not what Gong already is?

- Yeah. - Is it?

- It is, it is.

- I don't use Gong, yeah, is it?

- Teams has a thing where it's like,

so one of my clients, he has kind of a thick Asian accent,

so he uses Teams, like, speech coach to help him go,

oh, you know, either speak up or slow down,

do this, do that, so it's monitoring it in real time

to kind of give him better practices.

Now, everybody who's used it at that company says,

ah, I ended up just ignoring it,

because it always tells me I talk too fast or whatever,

but it's kind of an interesting thing

that they're doing, too,

and you know they're cataloging all of this,

like, all of this, and that it's gonna be trained

for models and all sorts of crazy shit.

So now on to the big question.

How do you build a massive TikTok audience?

(laughing)

- Pivot.

- This might be a little bit of a DeAndre

also wanting to just know,

how do you build a huge TikTok audience?

- Seriously, when I see things like this,

I'm like, that is what I want to know how to do,

and I mean, for a lot of people,

having 113,000 followers, right, 976,000 likes,

like, you've achieved something

that very few people have been able to do.

How do you do it?

- Well, this is a fun story.

'Cause there is a system by it,

but how this all started was kind of by,

like I told you, by accident.

I just started making TikTok videos to market,

and then I accidentally went viral one time,

and it was on a video that was like,

six things not to say in an interview,

and it was basic stuff,

like don't talk bad about your last boss,

and don't complain about the commute,

and I had this 1950s music going on in the background,

and I had this shameful look on my face,

and it was just popping up on the screen,

like these six things not to say,

and I woke up the next day,

and I had 6,000 followers overnight.

I went from a couple hundred, boom, 6,000, 24 hours.

And the comments were going crazy,

because everyone has something to say.

Like, oh, I said that in an interview,

or what about this, da-da-da-da-da.

People are having full-on fights in the comments.

Like, there's this whole, like thousands and thousands,

and like, people are ripping me to shreds.

You know, everybody has, some people are like,

yeah, I totally agree.

Some people are ripping me to shreds.

It's like, I'm like breaking out into highs.

I'm like, I don't never have this much feedback.

Like, at one time, I was like,

I don't know what to do.

So, I was like, do I keep riding this wave?

Like, I don't know.

So, I kept making a couple other videos,

and then switched roles,

and then kind of pivoted my content a little bit,

and did a lot of study of the algorithm,

and what is it that, what does it make videos do well?

How do you say a hook, like how,

you have to have hooks at the beginning

of all of your TikTok videos.

What are, so like, when you pull in your audience,

how do you make it about them?

So, like, my best hook is like, if you're in sales,

and then I just start talking.

And I'm like, so it pulls in that ideal viewer.

And then even like subliminal hooks, which are like sounds,

like people will like stir their coffee,

which like, it's like, you know,

if you have headphones on or whatever else,

the clinking of the ice glass, like,

or even like, I'll walk outside,

and I'll be like filming while walking my dog,

and you can hear like the leash slapping against my leg,

or whatever else, or the wind rustling through.

Or I'll be like throwing ball with my dog,

and it's like, you know, the sound of the,

like, Chuck stick, like going through the air.

So there's other like artistic things that you can do,

but the biggest thing is the hook,

sounds, and then captions are super important.

I saw you guys already do a lot of that on your TikTok,

you do the captions.

And then-

- But you have like, on your TikTok,

you have pretty much everyone has like,

that first, your cover screen is like majority of it's text

that says something, right?

You find that-

- So having the text above, to attract your ideal viewer,

having that hook to, you know, at first,

'cause you only have like three or four seconds

to like hook them in to be like,

yes, this video is for me.

- Right.

- Oh, you're going back to my original stuff!

- We got to compete!

See, this is a new thing, we're a very iterative podcast.

- Yeah, you're looking for my original,

I know, I'm telling you, I deleted it.

Like it got two million views,

and I couldn't handle the crazy stuff.

- So let me, okay, so-

- So which one is, this one got,

so explain to me on your journey here.

- Like where was the viral video?

- Like we're at the bottom right now.

- Yeah.

(laughing)

It was somewhere, like I think here.

- This one, let's watch it.

- Or it was somewhere like in this timeframe,

and then afterwards I made these other videos

I was talking about.

- What are we rocking, 240 pixels?

(laughing)

240 by 180, what the hell?

- Listen, this was an iPhone five, maybe?

(laughing)

- I think it might just be

how we're sharing it to the screen.

- It could be, yeah.

Oh no, we're like going down the graveyard,

like terrible content, can we not?

- No, so but actually, so again, great content,

but, and I know you deleted it because of the stress

of the bullshit that goes on with it,

but it seems like the real way to kind of go viral

is you have to have something that is divisive enough,

that you're gonna get some people that are gonna watch it

because they agree with you,

you're gonna get some people that are gonna watch it

because they disagree with you,

then they're gonna go to the comments

and they're gonna go to fucking war.

- You need your trolls, I'm telling you,

the videos that have done the best for me,

because the algorithm cares about comments,

shares and likes, are the ones where people

have different opinions and they're gonna challenge things,

like I did one about public school system

and just how generally, 'cause I went through four years

of going to school to be a teacher

and looked at the curriculum and all of that

and just how the public school system

doesn't teach a lot of things that are actually used

in business or life. - Really?

(laughing)

- Really, I know. - Actually?

- Yeah, and so I made a video,

I just did like a commentary on that

and it was just like, it wasn't even my video,

I was just kind of like integrating myself

and my own thoughts and edits into it

and it got like two million views

and everybody was just, people love to be negative,

they love to hate on something.

I'm like, I'm glad we can all agree

that the public education system

is not preparing people for life and careers,

at least not when I was going.

I know it's gotten a lot better since then

and there have been improvements, but you know.

- Maybe.

- So how often are you posting?

- Every day.

- I mean, how many times a day?

- Sometimes multiple times a day.

- At least once a day?

- But it's not like systemized,

I just drink coffee, a day comes and I shoot it

and that's why as I'm going and transitioning,

quitting my job and all of that,

I want to be a lot more structured about my content,

actually sit down and just bust out a ton of stuff.

'Cause right now I just like,

I have a break between a meeting,

I go outside or I sit in front of my desk

and I talk about a concept

or something that I just applied in a sales call.

- I love that because it can be applied

to almost anything in life,

but it's more about the, just do the thing.

Like we, what is this, episode 20 or 21?

- It's episode 20.

- 20, hey, we made it.

- Yeah, and like we were, so episode one,

we came in with a lot of big ideas

and we were like, all right, we're gonna do this,

and then we realized quickly that,

okay, we just need to, at bats,

we just need to record, get comfortable recording,

and then get better and the next time

we're gonna just iterate on that.

And I think what Andre is kind of getting at too

is like we're kind of on that path with our shorts

and like everything right now has been like,

how can we do this at the lowest effort kind of possible

while still getting at bats and learning as we go

and then adding on those layers.

And that's just good to hear 'cause like,

and the next question I had was,

do you use AI or any sort of tooling

when you're generating your content?

- So I did, recently I started a series on the book,

like How to Win Friends and Influence People.

- Oh yeah, I saw, yeah.

- Yeah, and so I'm like, okay,

I'm gonna plan a series.

So yesterday I was just like sitting in front of,

and I used ChatGPT to summarize the main points

of that hit home in that book.

And then I'm like, okay, I'm gonna make a video

on each one of these points.

- Yeah. - And so it can,

you know, I think it definitely helps you

to organize yourself.

- Yeah, and this is the total sidebar.

We can take this out if you want.

But one thing that this gave me the idea was,

I follow a lot of like developers on Instagram

and TikTok and all that.

And like what they're saying is not like new information,

but they're putting their opinions

and their takes on that information.

And I think like, I always get stuck in,

oh, well, what I say has to be this grandiose original idea

that no one's ever had before.

And like maybe part of it's like imposter syndrome

or whatever, but no, I just, I like that approach.

- Yeah. - Yeah.

- So you said you quit your job.

So first of all, congratulations.

- Thank you. - Cheers.

- Being a 1099er, welcome to the party.

- Welcome to the club.

(laughing)

- So what's gonna be the focus for you?

What kind of services will you be offering

to companies out there?

- Yeah, so I kinda, it's a two part.

So I'm really passionate about making content.

Love it.

It's like my favorite thing to do.

If I could just do that all day, I would.

So I'll be doing some consulting work for tech companies

and social media consulting.

So my company for that is called Tech Social.

And then on the other front,

like a lot of the content that I've made is about sales

and different soft skills and sales

on different things like that.

And a lot of people have reached out to me,

asked me to come do coaching or coach their teams

or whatever else I'm actually currently building

kind of a course model.

It'd be more of like a passive income stream teaching

specifically like body language and tonality

within sales specifically and kind of how to use that

in customer interactions.

- So real quick, I'm gonna just drop a name,

Denny Ward, if you happen to be listening to this

at Sales Velocity, I think you would be a great asset

for him. - Yeah.

- He's doing a very similar thing.

He ended up, apparently we have trains.

- I've never heard of trains.

- Right by the building, he's a train on 465.

- He might be a train.

- What is going on?

- That was a horn, that was nice.

- Oh yeah.

- But so he's kind of doing a similar thing

where he was a sales guy, he found some success

and now he's rolled out and started a consulting company

that helps salespeople basically be better salespeople.

There's a lot of companies that are out there,

has no really good presence in social media side of things.

And I think that those companies would be able

to just leverage you just left and right.

- Yeah, that's interesting.

Are you looking for, when you say tech social media,

are you looking for like the SaaS, the startups?

Like what's your sweet spot on like how you want,

or the market you're looking for?

- So my vision, I'm not closed off to other things,

but I am for that specific brand,

like looking at startups and tech companies.

'Cause that's the other thing,

it's like because I've worked in that world

for the past five years, like a lot of marketing people

don't understand tech and don't know how to translate it

into language that people can understand.

And I do that, because I understand

the content creation side, I've worked in tech,

I've helped hire people in technical roles.

I feel like that's kind of like where my strengths are.

Not that I wouldn't take on social media consulting

in other industries.

Maybe I like kind of niched myself in that name a little bit.

(laughing)

But--

- No, that makes sense.

You go to where, the product of the people

that you know first and kind of expand from there.

- Well, but I mean, again, tech social in terms of

two terms is pretty broad.

I think you can cover a whole--

- I can spin a little bit.

- Yeah, a whole lot of stuff that you can spin there.

- Tech knows, you can get into tech knows in social media.

I'm not sure, there's a lot of tech knows still, right?

- Tech knows?

- Like the music?

- Like tech know music?

I don't think of discos.

- Got it. - Edit that out.

- He's dating himself at this point.

- This is an edited podcast.

(laughing)

Is there anything else that you'd like to cover on the pod?

- Well, are we not gonna go through any of those tools?

Or did you guys wanna talk about the--

- We can.

- Yeah. - Yeah.

- 'Cause I thought there was a couple

interesting ones on there.

- Did somebody share her the document?

- I did. - Oh!

- Yeah, she has it.

- Yeah, well, absolutely.

I think we can talk about some of them

if we wanna go through any of them.

- Let's do it.

- What was the one that you had mentioned earlier?

'Cause I--

- Kite. - Kite.

- Or,

Fly, flick?

- Flick? - Flick?

- That was the one that was most interesting to me.

- All right, yeah, so I think--

- So let's talk about, what is it?

- F-L-I-K-E. - F-L-I-K-E.

- Dot app.

- Yeah, and so all of these were the ones

that just come up on our Big Cheese Weekly.

So this is like us going and trying to grab

the latest AI products that are coming out.

And I'm gonna call it Flick just because I don't like flike.

Like, I don't know if it's called flike, but F-L-I-K-E.

And they're calling themselves an AI sales copilot.

And it integrates with LinkedIn, Outreach,

Gmail, Sales Loft, Snowflake, and Salesforce.

And it does seem like a pretty powerful tool in terms,

and price-wise it looked like there's maybe like

30 bucks a month or whatever that standard is.

But I think the AI sales copilot technologies

are gonna be a very interesting tool.

But I struggle to see how is,

like when Salesforce rolls out their AI,

how does it just not eat these other companies?

You know, I don't know.

- What do you think?

- Well, I liked the part, the feature within that

where it's talking about pulling up,

pulling in like previous history

and like information with the customer.

And I feel like that's the biggest piece of lack

right now in sales is like,

yeah, I can write an email or yeah, I can do this.

But I'm like, I need it to pull,

like I need it to read through the whole thread.

I need it to pull in the last meeting that I had with them.

Or if I'm gonna run a cadence or I'm gonna run a,

what did you call it?

A sequence. - Sequence, yeah.

- Like gone on a customer, I want it to like pull in,

hey, in our last conversation, you mentioned XYZ.

This is why I think that this,

you'd be interested in this feature or whatever else.

- But for me, from a sales loft perspective,

that's just some technical changes, right?

Versus, so, and that's the only thing that I see

anytime that there's a new,

like I'm an AI for this or an AI for that.

I really do view AI as just another form of technology,

right, and it can be implemented.

And like there's no moat here that I see

that sales loft or Salesforce for that matter,

can't just go and basically just stomp on them

and make them completely irrelevant.

- Or maybe they're just like,

oh, I'm gonna go grab some customers

and then try to get acquired by them.

- But so from a pricing standpoint,

Flick, Flike, Fluke, whatever the hell you call yourselves,

pronounce it, put it on the website.

Tell us how you pronounce it.

49 bucks a month for a single account.

Growth is 79 bucks per user per month.

And then of course, enterprises contact us for later.

But the growth one does have HubSpot integration,

outreach and sales loft integration.

- Yeah, I think the context piece

is definitely a big missing component.

Anyone I talk to that has an AI idea,

it's generally AI 4X and then what they're describing

is the brain or the rag architecture

or basically the database of information that's happened

that they're attaching to to search

and go find the context.

So in your case, it's like the most recent emails.

And that kind of stuff is like,

I'm not actually sure why these,

like the sales lofts of the world

don't have that kind of stuff already,

to be perfectly honest with you.

But maybe they baby step it into it

where it's like, click the emails

that you think are relevant to this,

writing this new one would be like the first step.

Maybe they're afraid that, or yeah,

I guess it is kind of hard to discern,

like, okay, what is relevant?

If there's 100 past emails,

like what is relevant to this one now?

- So the real question is, would you buy it?

Would you buy this product?

- Fleek.

(laughs)

- Fleek.

- Can we just call it?

- I'm definitely giving it a try.

- All right.

- See what the ROI would be, yeah.

- What would you need it to actually do

for you to really use it?

- Like, is this assuming I have nothing, no other tools?

- This is your existing, what you currently use.

- Well, but she just transitioned to now being on her own.

So do you have sales loft anymore?

Or was that with the previous company?

- Previously, like relatively recently.

- So I don't know, that's, that'd be interesting to see.

Like, what does it look like when it's just me?

'Cause I won't be necessarily needing this huge CRM.

- Enterprise level, right?

And that's the piece that I'm kind of curious about, right?

Is that now that you're kind of going on your own,

again, I'm always for anybody who wants to go on their own

and not necessarily be part of a big company.

So I'd be really curious to see which tools you end up

saying, all right, this one's actually worth my time

as kind of an independent.

- Yes, 'cause they're gonna be different.

- Yeah, for sure, for sure.

- I think on the independent side,

my mind goes to startups and small businesses.

And I think that one of the biggest advantages

that AI has is kind of like you mentioned,

it is in the details.

And so like building out the infrastructure

from a literature perspective on your sales process

and how your system works.

So let's say you start to grow your agency,

you have a team, they need information

and like how your structure works

before you'd have to go type it out.

Now you can just, this is our entire sales mantra

and portfolio, just boom on multiple pages and documents

and things like that.

So that's just chat GPT though,

there's nothing special to that.

- Do we know what Sales Loft is using behind the scenes

by chance?

- Like, hmm.

- You're like which AI model that they're actually using?

- I don't know.

- Yeah, I guess you'd probably be maybe look at like

how the emails are written

and maybe you could kind of discern

but you probably don't know like right out of the gate.

- Yeah, I started to develop something inside of Sales Loft

and I think that they put some pretty tight guardrails

on that too 'cause obviously chat GPT

can get a little wild, but, or open AIs, APIs.

- So then there's AI Steve and I think this is,

oh shit, oops, I shouldn't have done that.

This is one thing I think we just need to discuss

in terms of product marketing,

that name, like the personification of these products

where it's like, this is Steve, this is Devin,

this is Frank, this is blah, it's like stop it.

- No, the big cheese didn't have names for our--

- Well, no, but those were agents,

like the agents had names,

so but we weren't going to market as like Steve.

- Yeah, right, right.

- Like, you know, 'cause everybody wants to be the--

- Siri and--

- Yeah, Siri was the one.

- Alexa.

- Alexa Cortana back in the day with Microsoft.

You know, that I think you have to,

yeah, stop with the personification.

Steve, are you kidding me?

- That reminds me of, this is such an old movie,

Multiplicity, anybody ever seen that movie?

- Oh yeah, great movie.

With, what the hell is his name?

- Michael Keaton. - Michael Keaton.

- I'm gonna eat a dolphin.

- And then there's like 14 or 15 or 20 different--

- So sorry.

- It's great.

- When a pet a dolphin.

- Oh, okay, so nevermind.

- Steve looks cool, Steve Jobs.

- It is Steve Jobs, that's why.

It's an AI product growth consultant.

You can basically go and get free insights

into your product.

- Acts like Steve Jobs.

- Just a huge asshole, demands.

- He's just gonna tell you your idea is dog shit.

- Or Carter. - Just go away.

What are you doing even here?

What am I even talking to you?

So nevermind, we'll scratch that one.

(laughing)

- Was there another one you wanted to talk about?

- No, the main one is the Flake one, that was interesting.

The other one, what was the BDR one

that basically is like your own AI BDR?

- Yes. - No?

- Ava, the sales rep artisan.

- Yeah.

- We had Cellmate, which is a revolutionary e-commerce

AI driven cross-listing blah, blah, blah, blah.

- Was it Ava?

- Yeah, I think it was Ava.

- Yeah, Ava. - That was interesting

'cause there's a lot of people that are asking

is AI gonna replace the business development rep role?

But if it can't, if there's regulation around cold calling,

then that just leaves you with emailing

and maybe chatbot stuff on the website

for incoming prospects.

- Yeah, see, I really--

- I don't think you replaced the BDRs.

- No, I honestly struggle with the whole concept

that you're gonna be replacing anything fully.

- Yeah, if it's just another one of those,

you replace the 50%-- - Manual work.

- Or you replace the underperformers

and the people who are the overperformers,

overachievers are just gonna pick up the slack

and become more efficient kind of thing.

- That the people are still, you're gonna have,

yes, you're gonna have autonomous AI agents, no question.

They're gonna be doing a lot of that kind of back office

stuff that we were talking about, operations,

optimization, things like that.

But there's always gonna be a human in the loop.

And that human, and so when I was just talking

to somebody at the restaurant, Arnie's,

that I go to before the podcast for my pizza

and my lubrication, and there's this lovely girl

that we're just sitting there and we're having

a conversation and the waitress,

'cause she knows I do this podcast,

so she was asking what we were covering today.

And so the lady next to me started asking about it.

And she actually had a lot of strong opinions

on how AI is and what it's doing.

- Yeah, I mean, you talk a lot about that

and just authenticity and building those relationships.

And you're not gonna replace, people buy from people

that we want the communication, we wanna be sold to

in some ways.

So I guess talk about that of what are the dangers

or things that people are doing that aren't working well

that they think are gonna work right now?

Like replacing all the representatives

or things that just are short-term thoughts

that eventually you think are gonna come back around.

- That's interesting.

I don't know if anybody's really, really replaced

a full entire team yet, but I mean,

but I think it's definitely reducing headcount.

- Yeah, I totally agree.

There's no question that people are going to get,

jobs are going to be replaced.

Entire employees, I don't think will be.

Will be reduced, will it be high performers

basically interacting with AI, maybe.

Low performers potentially being augmented with AI

that brings them up to kind of senior levels

where we can don't have to pay them as much.

Sure, I just am not convinced that entire teams

and maybe in five, 10 years when we truly have

like an AGI going and that this thing can truly be

not just like, you know, instructionally smarter than us,

but like creatively smarter than us

and like all of the things that AGI should bring,

you could see it be a problem then.

I just don't see it now.

- Oh, Elon did say at the end of the year

that AI is gonna be smarter than all the humans combined.

- I don't, yeah.

- He tweeted it this morning.

- Oh, really?

- He did, I saw that too.

And I don't necessarily disagree,

but being smarter doesn't mean shit to me, right?

There's a lot of people who are way smarter than me

that I can outperform because I'm way more creative, right?

I'm way more scrappy, I'm way more retentive.

- What does that even mean?

Like does an AI agent, okay,

so an AI agent knows about heart surgery.

- Yeah, or quantum physics.

- Cool, what can it do without today?

- I think all it means is that the richest man in the world

has fun tweeting every single day.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Dude, I'm so, oh, Sightrack,

I came up with a new trick

to make Twitter fucking bearable now.

- I saw that, it's pretty good.

- By the way.

- I'm gonna implement that.

- I'm serious, if you guys wanna do this,

this will make Twitter way better for you.

You can go to settings,

and then it's something like privacy and safety,

and then it's like muted words.

You're looking for muted words.

Go in, put muted words,

and I want you to include Trump, Biden, MAGA,

LibTard, politics, all of these words,

and all of a sudden, Twitter becomes bearable again.

- Twitter knows how to get hook me every time.

I do not follow this stupid account called End of Wokeness,

and it sends me an update about every tweet,

and I'm like, I'm a sucker.

- That would be another one.

- I read it, and I'm like, hmm.

- I know, I know, and it pisses me off,

and I get angry, and I'm just like,

oh, I hate where we're going as a country, right?

And then I'm just like, turn all this off,

and look, I'm fine.

I've got a bunch of nerds in my feed.

It's great.

We're talking about technology.

I don't care about the politics.

Stop it.

Anyway.

- Well, before we go, I want to thank you.

(laughing)

McKenna, thank you so much for joining us.

- Yeah, thanks for having me.

- Yeah, it was a ton of fun.

Hopefully, you enjoyed yourself.

My name's DeAndre, Brandon Corbin, Jacob Wise.

This is the Big Cheese Podcast.

See you guys next week.

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