How to build scalable businesses with AI

Shane Mahi
[00.00.00]

 So

Tony Dicks
[00.00.01]

 guys, we are back. Another episode. I think we are approaching, I think 400 episodes now. We've gotta get that done in what? Just over a year from last May 2023. Yeah. So a little bit over a year now, a little bit over a year. Today I'm with Tony Mr. DevOps crow at Cloud Tops. I've known him now for five years. He's helped me hire some quite amazing talent. Obviously a great mind to pick up and look at. Tony will jump right into it. Who are you? What do you do and why should people stay on this podcast for the next hour?

Shane Mahi
[00.00.38]

 Ah, why should they stay on the podcast for the next hour? That's the most difficult one of the questions. So I will go ahead though and start out with my name is Tony Dicks. Um, I operate as the, uh, chief Revenue officer at the cloud SAS marketplace, among other things. Um, and I would say that listen, guys, my background is running sales teams, running brand teams globally and, uh, and domestically, and I'm a lean Six Sigma black belt. So at the end of the day, when we start talking about systematizing your marketing and your sales, using AI, using all the cool new stuff and technology, then I've got some perspective that may interest you related to that, I may have also undergone or dealt with some challenges that you faced, so hopefully you'll be able to get some value out of the conversation. Well, why should

Tony Dicks
[00.01.26]

 do they stay though? Why should they stay?

Shane Mahi
[00.01.30]

 Because of that? Because you'll get some. Hopefully. I've experienced some challenges that you may be going through that I either figured out an answer for, or ran an experiment on so that you don't have to experiment with

Tony Dicks
[00.01.43]

 it for yourself. Hopefully.

Shane Mahi
[00.01.45]

 So if that is the case, I don't want to miss out on that because it's all about experimentation, right? If you could go ahead and scratch some things off the list of experiments, you're that. I had this conversation with my business partner about four years ago, and I got through it. So I've been through my chain of events since I was a young boy going to the UK, then living in America and wanting to fit in and going through the motions. Um, I learned that very quickly. So, Tony, I want to ask you, I've heard a number of times this

Tony Dicks
[00.02.18]

 line lean Six Sigma, and the only time I've ever heard those phrases were in college at fraternities and sororities. So what? What is lean six? I understand it's a business kind of certification, but what is Lean Six Sigma for those that don't have a clue what it is?

Shane Mahi
[00.02.41]

 Yeah. Uh, Lean Six Sigma is a methodology. It's really a decision making methodology that comes from the manufacturing industry. And to be fair, I came out of undergrad in 2002, started working for GE, and that's when I did my green belt in Six Sigma. And I can tell you that having done a green belt, having done a black belt and gotten certified, which means that you've you've done projects of a certain valuation, uh, that you delivered on in order to get certified, that in general, the average company that tries to apply Six Sigma to sales and marketing does not do an awesome job of it. It virtually doesn't exist. It doesn't matter how long they've been running it. Go to Motorola, go to GE, go to whichever company you want to check out. And I bet if you go ahead and look behind the curtain that they're really not running Six Sigma appropriately for commercial operations. And the reason why is because marketing and sales is the function where everybody thinks they can do it. Everybody thinks that needs to be done a little differently. And there's a severe lack of standardization. So if you don't do the same thing the same way every time, because everybody's got an opinion and everybody's opinion counts, guess what? You're not going to be able to create a system that you do consistently that also allows you to look at it, find where there might be a kink, a bottleneck, and then remove that bottleneck. Everybody's business is different, but the framework is the framework, bro. You sell this stuff, you sell this stuff, right? How can you sell stuff without a list of people? Some sequences that you might be running, whether you automate them or not, and some way to track performance. Really.

Tony Dicks
[00.04.18]

 So when did you discover you had a knack for diving deep into this? It's a common problem. I'm in the same world as you, but into this problem of solving an unorganized and unplanned,

Shane Mahi
[00.04.32]

 um,

Tony Dicks
[00.04.33]

 a bad process driven sales and marketing system that doesn't work. When did you kind of find out? Yeah. This is something I want to be involved in.

Shane Mahi
[00.04.46]

 You know what I found out? This was something I wanted to be involved in when I went broke doing mortgages. Um, 100% commission. At 23, I left ge. I got exposed to some of these things. I had read a lot of Rich Dad, Poor Dad books. I was highly interested in real estate, so I kind of wanted to align some of my career to selling something that was involved in something I was already really interested in, right? Like real estate investing. And when I jumped out there to do that with a shop that seemed like it could be cool, um, I ran out of money in four months. And the reality is, that for me, the drive was really around. How do I test my ideas? Because I was a typical sales personality. And by the way, putting this out there is to say it's not bad. You know, you break up these different ones, you get people that are analytical drivers, uh, more of them, uh, communicator. What is it called? Uh, they have another one that's called, like an expressive and another one called an amiable. And you've got these different, um, archetypes, if you will, that you will find more commonly in certain work functions and in sales. We tend to have a lot of folks that, because of the nature of it or the old school nature of it, was like, you know, gift of gab, shaking hands, kissing babies. Ooh, what a personality. But that's not the only way to sell, right? But I was that archetype at that time and hitting that wall, I felt like, I don't want to feel this way anymore. I don't want to be chasing my food in the dark all the time. And one of the things is, is that I have a lot of ideas, but I don't know how to differentiate a good idea from a true opportunity that I should pursue. So that, I would say, was really a defining moment. That kind of put me on the track of at least I didn't know it was necessarily Six Sigma at that time, but it put me on the track of being like, I want to figure out ways to make things more predictable and profitable. I'll go to the next step. Interestingly enough, after I got back on my feet, I moved and I started working with enterprise Rent-A-Car, and that's where I learned from that experience. And I could go into detail, but from that experience was where I learned that actually I could programmatically deliver a sales pitch and get amazing results every time. Because I started out the first 30 days, I started out in Rent and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. You sell rental insurance to people that are renting a car, primarily because their cars are in the shop, which means they have insurance. But what they had over there was a matrix, right? And the deal was, is that everybody that came through, you weren't scored on just, uh, getting them in a car. The deal was your performance was based on the customer service score for your branch, which means that they had to have a good experience. And to your sales, which were three different levels of insurance sales that were happening when they rented that car. And the deal is, at that time I was like, well, how do I sell some stuff that, you know, they don't need? Well, guess what the first thing is, is that you may have something someone needs, but your ability to figure out, not that you got something that's interesting for people to buy, but what problem does it solve directly correlates with the outcomes you get from the standpoint of conversion, right? That's one. So I go to the training right. And I'm like to I don't know how to

Tony Dicks
[00.08.09]

 sell this stuff. Like people come in, they

Shane Mahi
[00.08.10]

 got a car. They tell me they don't want this assurance. No they don't want to. You know, so do I. So the guy tells me this, it was basically an assumptive sale. He was like, Tony, this is what I want you to do when you go back to your branch. Don't talk about all these features and benefits and all these things. Just go ahead. And when you go around the car, you check everything out. I want you to look at the person and say, I assume that you don't want to have any responsibility for anything that happens to this car while it's in your position. Is that correct? They answer, and normally they'll be like, yeah, I don't want to have any responsibility. All right. Cool. So I'm right here. It's gonna it's going to just add, you know, x number of dollars per month, a year to uh, per day to your rate. And you'll have exactly what you want. And that was it. And then shut up. So you can imagine, Shane, bro, I go in there with this information and literally I remember the first time I tried it, I get with the client and I'm sitting there nervous, am I

Tony Dicks
[00.09.10]

 gonna try this on my job? Right? But I force these words out and I shut up. And you know what she said? Yes. And she bought it. And then I went and I did it again. That person said yes and blah. And then I went and did it again. They used to run these little competitions that day. I was out half a day because I had won the competition that said, you could get paid another half a day. Whoever's got the most full boats, that means I sold all three levels of insurance in that time frame, and I didn't do anything special. So it turned out saying less actually got me more in that case. And then the last part I'll share that I think is very important is guess what I learned after that? That was the training wheels. Don't be shy about being on training wheels. I'm in a new space. Give me the training wheels. Give me the script. How many salespeople I really don't want to sell like a robot that's on you, bro? Yeah, the script is just a guide. So that I'm not saying too much, and I'm not saying too little so that this person is compelled to buy. Right? So by the time I started getting comfortable, I took the training wheels off. Guess what? I knew now, I wasn't as nervous when I was going to say it. And I started also, uh, having like customer stories in my head where, hey, guess what? You know what? There's an example right there. Somebody that didn't have the insurance. But how did they feel? What did they have to do? And blah, blah, blah, blah blah. What happened to get them in there? And as those start coming to my head as well, now all of a sudden I'm creating more relevant storylines, not just I assume not you tell me no. Now all of a sudden I could be like, well, all right, just something to consider, though. This is what happened to a guy last week. You're saying that's what you want? If that's if that's what you want. Cool. I want to make sure you're happy. But if you want to avoid that, you could do this. Boom. So that's where that kind of series of events, which I would say was like a year and a half, was probably hitting rock bottom, discovering I don't want this anymore. Going into another situation where I fortunately got introduced to an approach that was built on consistency. And I can tell you this, that after 5 or 6 months, normally to get promoted to assistant manager, it was six months. No, I'm sorry. One year they were trying to promote me to assistant manager. In six months, I had already gotten up to the next level. In four months. I had a record. I never went one month without being in the President's Club or the sales club, because they did it every month.

Shane Mahi
[00.11.32]

 I was always at the dinners, and I had a record for the area for sales and the whole region in the same course. I left after six months, by the way. I flipped that into a role in pharmaceutical sales, but that's just to give you an idea of how impactful that was. And I've carried that thing kind of I've carried.

Tony Dicks
[00.11.49]

 Wow, that's a huge snippet to jump into. So all right, let's break that down. A lot of what I do Tony in this is I built this podcast at first to get me through a very hard time in my life. Right. And it was the hardest time in my life, which was a separation with my wife, uh, a whole kind of massive crisis, and I didn't. It was so much so that the business was usually sales driven when we were doing our thing. And then there was a big point of a huge dip, right? And there were no more clients. There was no more passion. There was no more drive in me. And the only thing I knew how to do very, very well was build conversations with people. Right. And based on true stories. And like I said, fast forward 18 months into this. This podcast is what it is today because it's about a story of underdogs. CEOs that were underdogs, business owners, crows, whatever, just people that have made it in life. They've gone from underdog to top dog, and it's because they followed a process and they trusted in their ability to just say, let me just let me just take that jump. Let me just take that jump, let me see what happens. And then you do you get into it. And what I'd love to know. My story has been shared on this multiple times, but question one: how old were you when you went through that rock bottom and then kind of bounced back?

Shane Mahi
[00.13.17]

 That was it seems like that's a very, very common age where you get these big, big lessons. Right. So walk me through then, which I'm actually going through right now. And I'm helping a client transition the orthodox old ways of thinking. Cold calling is the only silver bullet to make fast engagement conversion happen, versus educating an entire market and drawing attention, building curiosity, and then taking them through that way. But for you, it's. And one more point. It's funny that you mentioned Enterprise Car, because literally last week I just went to Enterprise Car and I went through that same conversation and he just said, English guy bored 9 to 5 are, uh, you don't want insurance, do you? And for me, it's like I'm just like, nope, absolutely not. And then what I do, because I know I take my phone and I'm going all the way around that car and that's my insurance until then. But from then till now, what kind of things have you seen changed from being an enterprise sell, aligning a script, and then kind of like just adding color to this blank canvas. And now today you're sitting in hundreds of conversations a month speaking at a level where companies are generating billions of dollars. How do you see the sales process even with Six Sigma changing from then till now? What's changed mostly between then and now is literally the way people buy access to information, the comfort with the internet and the thing that's important about what you're talking about there. Shane. Like, if you look, the educational piece is the difference between one representative and another representative. And there's look, are any of you all listening? You have to admit that it's true. Who hasn't called for customer service, and they get told one thing by somebody, if you hang up and you call back, you get told something different. And that's the consistency of so today it's not about content, it's about context. Because right now, what's going to happen with more AI, more B.S. information on the internet, where do we go to get our information? The internet, you know, now all of a sudden if you talk to five, let's talk about sales. If you talk to 100 people and ask them what's a lead, you can get 100 different definitions of what a lead is. At some point you have to decide, right? But the first thing is to build trust in who you're receiving information from. And I don't need somebody to tell me the price of the car, the color of the car anymore, what? I can go online and I probably checked out your lot before I got there. If you don't have a website where I could check out your inventory, shame on you. You might lose the business to somebody else that was there when I was ready. If you're not there when the person is researching information, you're already out. If you're waiting for them to talk to you in person, and then if you think that your job is to go ahead and kiss, kiss, shake hands and kiss babies and just, you know, not answer questions directly. You're going to get some sales, but you're not going to keep those customers over the long term. Because the reality is, the more educated the buyer becomes about what they're buying, then the higher the standard is going to be on the level of service you give them. So if I buy some outsourced Legion services, or if I buy your CRM product the first time and I don't know what I'm doing, it's happened to me with HubSpot. Sorry, HubSpot, shout out to HubSpot. There's a lot of good information there. But guess what? Sometimes HubSpot wasn't running its own play. So when I first became a HubSpot partner, I said to them, I'm dealing with dental practices in my area, the average dental practice with four chairs should be able to generate $1 million in revenue. That's $250,000 a chair. All right. In their practice. However, in my area, on average, they're at about $650,000 in revenue. My objective is to go find those customers who are underperforming and help them with solutions that get them to that million dollar mark. My question for you, HubSpot is. Is your CRM indicated for that target market? Is it a good choice for that? Oh yeah, of course. Yeah, people are using it. There's some dental practices using it. But you know what happened then when I went through their training and they said, hey, who is our ideal target? You know, for our platform at this time, businesses generate 3 million to 10 million in annual revenue. Because you analyze, you decide whoever was there decided they were going to take my money and think about their top line and place that over my bottom line. And that was another experience. That was a sucky experience. I was in good company. But the people you have selling could be selling dreams, selling lies, doing whatever so they could make their commission. And that could throw off everything from a customer experience standpoint. And keeping me as a customer over the long term is the actual game. Not just getting the money now, but keeping it customer lifetime value. That should be the metric that we use to measure success. Great business. I agree with what we just said. We. It's funny you just spoke about HubSpot too, because what was it? We started off with Pipedrive at the beginning of the year. Pipedrive then went to play around with ATO, which looked really, really sweet. It looked sharp, really sharp. But then the integration piece was the necessity. And the amount of software that we're using. Everything integrates with HubSpot, making it an easy choice. And just like you said, HubSpot is a fantastic company. It's very confusing to buy. They're also massive concessions that you might miss out on, like 90% discounts. Working with your web development, uh, studio, uh, that could give you that so you don't have to spend 500 bucks a quarter. You're spending whatever. It's like 100, 200 bucks. We didn't, we didn't get that. We got shafted. Right. And we ended up paying a big bill. But on top of that, speaking to this freaking sales rep, yes, we want to do this, this, this, this, this. As soon as we purchased

Tony Dicks
[00.19.32]

 this chick Gerard, we needed help. She's not there. My first experience and it will lead me to the next point. My first experience with HubSpot, a multi-billion dollar brand, was that it sucked. It was awful, right? Luckily, I had an integration partner that could help. Like trying to solve the problem for me. But again, the experience that you have in today's buying journey is half the reason why people are either, uh, receptive to buying or they want to neglect that buying or stay as far away as possible. So the question I have for you is, in today's environment, how do you build trust with new customers the right way?

Shane Mahi
[00.20.21]

 You know, I always liked it. And it's funny because anything I mentioned is probably something I already knew for years, and it's just a matter of knowing about it. But I've always liked insight selling, right? I appreciate when people give me the information. I want you to not not serve me. If it doesn't make sense, I want you to educate me through the process. I don't want you to just be freaking telling me some stuff that you feel like is going to get me over the buying curve. No, I mean, I want you to lead me to the right path because you know what's going to happen if you go ahead and let me know. For example, let's go ahead and stay on the CRM thing. Right? Digital is difficult. Digital has made things more complicated. There's an opportunity for it to be easier for you. But if you don't know how to harness digital, you don't understand it. Then you're that person that's out there with these ideas and you just want your ideas to come to life. But you have no clue how to connect the dots, and you sometimes will not let your team do their jobs because you've got opinions and fears that are involved. So that's a space where when someone is selling SEO services, well, you know what, SEO guy, tell me a little bit about SEO. Anybody that does SEO knows it's going to take you about six months before you actually get results. So who is the person out there that's telling you something different? And why do you want to believe it or. I mean, this information is available online. Are you reading it or are you looking for something to support your biases? These are things that we deal with as being bad buyers, right? I want somebody to tell me what I want to hear, but then I'm mad when that salesperson tells me what I want to hear, I buy it, and now it's

Tony Dicks
[00.21.54]

 funny. Did you create that environment or did they create that environment? Right. So these are things that, you know, for. So insight selling for me is like you know what again, teach me, educate me. Uh, show me that you're competent to build trust. Right. And you know what? Keep it real. Be honest. At the end of the day, just because it's not a fit doesn't mean I'm not going to buy. But you have to have some level of ethics and pride in yourself to say, you know what? I'm not going to take that money, I, I am, I love to not take people's money. I love to say, hey, you know what? You might buy it from someone, but you ain't going to buy it from me because you're not ready for it. If I give you this Ferrari and you haven't even taken your driver's license, you can't even drive a Honda

Shane Mahi
[00.22.38]

 Accord. Honda Civic. Why am I putting you in this Ferrari? Well, he wants it. And I could say, like, hey, you might get to a point where I'm like, you know, put the Ferrari over there. We'll hold on to it. But I know I'm doing you wrong. I'm doing you dirty because you're going to hop in there with your lack of skills, and you're going to crash it. It's expensive. It performs well. But is it for you at this stage in your knowledge of using this thing? It hurts. So it would be nice if

Tony Dicks
[00.23.08]

 I said you need a Jeep Grand Cherokee instead if you're learning how to drive

Shane Mahi
[00.23.12]

 you. Did you know about the Grand Cherokee? Something else, something that you know you could throw away? But you know that for me, builds credibility, right? Is that you're you're teaching me. And you know what? Even if you say, if I decide. You know what, Shane? Thanks for that insight, bro. But I'm going to do it anyway. At least you gave me the information. And I can't say Shane did this to me. So I just had to tell the wife to turn the TV down. Past the

Tony Dicks
[00.23.39]

 joys of working from home. Right. But. Yeah, right. You got to the South Pole. But then

Shane Mahi
[00.23.46]

 was the ice. Dude that ice. So look, in terms of this by the buyers trust buyer enablement, having the right process to be a top seller in today's environment are definitely some of the foundations that you need. But to become a business owner, which is a lot of the transition that a lot of these viewers are making, and it's from, again, like we were we were salesmen working for somebody, which is where you have to kind of earn your stripes and then how it happens, right where wherever you start, it has to it has to start somewhere. But then you get into that, that, that, that environment where you sell, you become a top performer, and then the things your manager tells you to do pisses you off because you know that you could do it better than him, right? Or, you know, there comes a point. It just happened the other day. There was a client of mine, and he said something to me and I was just like, wow, you're an idiot.

Tony Dicks
[00.24.47]

 This is public. But don't be that. Don't be that client where

Shane Mahi
[00.24.51]

 you literally can shoot yourself in the foot for saying the wrong thing and losing all credibility. Right? That just shows if you know what to do or not to do. And when that point happens, that's when you have that idea. I can do this better than him. I should be CEO. I should

Tony Dicks
[00.25.07]

 be the owner of this company. Well, I could go do it myself. So what makes somebody a good business owner versus being a good salesman?

Shane Mahi
[00.25.19]

 Yeah. Great question. So I've come to a book by Robert Kiyosaki called The Cashflow Quadrant. It talks about moving from employee to sole proprietor to business owner to investor. And when you look in that book, then, you know, the deal is that you'll have one perspective. But now, after years of experience, I've got a different perspective than that star sales person that was a star employee somewhere, right? As they move into being a solopreneur they should make that step. They have an opportunity now to figure out how to actually implement their systems on their own. Right. That's equivalent to taking the training wheels off. But there are. Quote unquote business owners with employees and all this good stuff that are actually just solopreneurs with employees. And I say that because the difference between this person over here that's got a scalable system where they can get other people that don't necessarily have the same skills and abilities as them to produce something consistently at the same level of quality. That means you've got systems. This person over here that's a solopreneur living off of their success as an individual, and then they set up a business, right. But nobody's got any guidance. Nobody's got any SOPs, nobody's got any coaching. They just have statements and ideas of what's going to be happening. It's going to be grandiose, but nothing else to support them. No supporting structure. That means you don't have a business system. You're not a business owner at that point. You're a solopreneur with people working for you. And it's a dangerous place to be because you're responsible, to an extent, for these people's livelihood. When you decide to take on employees, it's like having kids as a parent. Right. And you gotta nurture them. You gotta grow them. You gotta help them to grow. You can't just be like, yo, do things that I said and and make it great and walk away, and everybody's not built for that. Right? So it's to the person to know, what do you want to deal with? Because you can design your business to work for you. That's what you need to do. And you don't have to have a $1 billion business. You know what? There's a person with generating, uh, 10 million in revenue that's walking away with the same amount as that real estate agent that sold several properties, and who knows? They go home. They both have 300,000 to spend. They go home. They have 400,000 to spend. Right. So the deal is, is that are you building something because you want to do the things necessary to be successful in this, uh, stage of this owner versus a solopreneur, or you're just doing it because you think that's what everybody wants you to do, or that's what success looks like. Are you thinking about what makes you feel good about yourself, or what you think other people are thinking about you? Well, if you're basing your thing, what other people are thinking about you before you think about what you think about yourself and what works for you and what you want your life to look like,

Tony Dicks
[00.28.10]

 I think that comes down to values. So for you, it'd be interesting for people to learn what good values are then and how it kind of makes you who you are to be trusted, to walk the path, to be responsible for others. And you're absolutely right when you are like that. At first you become a business owner because of ego, because you think you could do something better than somebody else. But then you realize there is another mouth to feed, and you are you and that person. Let's say it's two people that started. You become very, very under-resourced very, very quickly. And you need to hire another person. And then you need to start doing processes, and then people start telling you they have problems and this happens and that happens. And just like you said, I got to the point where, yeah, people need certain new things for their new baby that's coming or this is happening. They've got problems with that. And you become a dad. And for me, I'm. I own this very proudly that I did not like being CEO. After a while I didn't because there are other elements that come with it. When you're building a business, there's the payroll, right? And if money ain't coming in from clients that mismatch on that thing, if you don't have that huge cushion that is going to start to affect you, then like the emotional intelligence that starts to affect you. And the only thing that mattered to me was that when I was 32, which is now six years ago, I read, uh, seven Habits of Highly Successful People by Stephen Covey. I'm sure you've read that book, and the one thing that stuck true to me was my values. And as long as my values were aligned that I'm honest, I always was truthful with everybody. I 100% showed them the cash flow, showed them the business, everything that they needed to know what was happening when, and started to modify to work well with people. My values were the thing that helped me stay afloat. But for yourself, what would you say are the most important values that Tony possesses that has helped you transition from a salesman to being an executive at a company? Being responsible, responsible for hundreds of meetings a month, people in the like. You've got tons of people to deal with. What are those values like for you?

Shane Mahi
[00.30.29]

 Well, I guess I want to answer that with two things, right? Um, and I want to rewind a little bit. Then for those of you all who are like, you know what? You're right, Shane. A lot of people have decided to start their own business because they just feel like, I don't want to report to anybody. Um, I would say that if you think about starting a business, and that's the only reason you have for it, I want to make money. I don't want to report for anybody. I won't be my own boss. Scratch it right now, you're. Everybody's got a boss. The only difference is your boss becomes your customers, or your boss becomes your employees or whatever it may be. So you need something more than that. And I suggest that your drive should be to solve this problem for these people. And I believe that we could do a better job solving this problem for those people delivered this way. And so I'm going to take on that challenge, because if it's anything other than that, you could get lucky. But you know what? The idea is to have self-actualization, right? And to feel satisfied in what you're doing. And it can only be because you're out there solving problems for people. Um, right. In a better way. The next part, I guess, going into the part around the values for me is it's a lot about, um. I like to see people have good experiences. I don't want to be involved with people having crappy freaking experiences. So I guess the ideal would be, um, I came up in sales as under-promise and overdeliver, and that value for me is like one of my biggest values. It doesn't matter if I'm talking to a person internally, like an employee or a customer. The idea is I want to understand what the need is. I want to deliver, I want to over deliver on that, and I don't want to be making a bunch of promises that I can't, I can't actually deliver on. And just that by itself changes the

Tony Dicks
[00.32.24]

 dynamic. So, Tony, what's it like building a business in 2024? You service hundreds of customers at cloud tasks. You help hundreds of clients

Shane Mahi
[00.32.32]

 build or create throughput so that their shitty lead generation strategy with their crappy VP, uh, that's underperforming. And they think just by saying, I think I can have 30 meetings a month and you should do it because you just should do it. So

Tony Dicks
[00.32.51]

 describe what it's like being the CRO at Cloud Tops Marketplace and helping hundreds of companies solve that problem every day. You see me? I'm back. I'm back. We lost me once.

Shane Mahi
[00.33.17]

 Right now. So I had a bit of a technical glitch, but

Tony Dicks
[00.33.22]

 this was one that back then. Um, so what's it like? Uh, what's it like, uh, being cro. Well, I guess we had two things, right. What's it like starting a business in 2024? And what's it like being a CRO? We're dealing with day to day at, um, at, um, cloud task and the cloud task marketplace. You know, I'm going to share my answer this way, I think, and I hope it helps people that are listening. Um, one cloud has started out as a BPO company, right. So essentially it was a sales agency building

Shane Mahi
[00.33.52]

 teams to do outbound lead generation primarily for clients. Um, between 2020 and 2022, we started making the transition, uh, from being the people that build all the teams to kind of brokering the deals, meaning connecting small and mid-sized businesses in the United States, primarily with offshore individuals, that they could hire directly, or agencies that they could hire to do marketing, sales, customer success, and customer service stuff. Right. Task. Um, I will say that through this experience that I think what I think relates really well for the listeners of this podcast is I've come down to one, two, three, four, five, six things that tend to be repeatedly important and establishing and optimizing and scaling any business concept. First is you need to have a problem that you're solving for some group of people. Are you clear on what that problem is if you can't state it as a problem yet? Do some more research on it. Fortunately, now we have AI that helps us do research. I like it best for that right now. Right? But hey, what problems are these people that I think I could serve facing most of the time? And then pick a problem that you're going to solve, right. Uh, the next one is going to dictate what your promise is. So if I use an example like six minute abs that I'm saying there's a problem, there are people out here that want to have chiseled abs but don't have the time to do chiseled abs, using traditional approaches to working out. So let me figure out something I could promise. What would make that look different? Uh, man, if they could do a workout for six minutes a day and get chiseled abs, then boom, that would be amazing.

Tony Dicks
[00.35.40]

 People would want it. Okay, great. Right? But after you create that promise, you have to do the next step. Number three is product. It doesn't matter if it's a product or service. The word product just means something you're going to deliver, right to deliver on the promise. And if I could just do six minute abs, if I could do ten minutes, if I get

Shane Mahi
[00.35.57]

 whatever it is now you got to build the program. What's that program going to look like then? All right. Well, there's going to be a calendar. These are the workouts. These are the different elements that this product has to have. So I could deliver on the promise that's going to solve the problem. All right. Great. If you don't do that, which I understand, I learned this idea of product management while we're making that transition to digital. And it became hugely important because now all of a sudden it went from I've got an idea of what the platform should look like to you literally need to map it out and say how it's going to function, and you could understand how that would relate. Whether you have a team of individuals implementing for you, or you have automation implementing for you, if you don't have the business rules or the step by steps and the rules and the limitations of this is in and this is not identified, then you're not going to have as good a business system at all. Right. Um, next step. Now you need the process that supports the product. So when we talk about a product it implies some process steps, but it's not the product. My product is uh, six minute abs. So what's my process for shipping it out? What's my process for reaching out to prospects and turning them into customers? What's my process for onboarding the customer onto the product? These are the processes we're talking about, not the process of getting six minute abs anymore. Difference between product and process. Product delivers on the promise. Process delivers on the product. Next platforms that you're going to use to support the process. Now you can automate certain things, right? So automate the things you can automate. And then the last step is you're going to delegate the things that you need people to run. Those are going to be manual tasks that people need to do. But now when you just hire the people that you need to run the process and you know these other things, guess what? Training them and onboarding them to do a good job is going to be easier. And at the end of the day, you're not going to get it right on the first pass, right? All we're trying to do is set a foundation that allows us now to monitor what's happening and identify bottlenecks, remove bottlenecks, update the SOP, update the software that we use, update the promise. All of that's going on all the time. It's called continuous improvement. And that's at the heart of Six Sigma as well. Right. But the deal is you're building all of this to deliver on a customer promise to solve a problem for a customer that they're facing. And that way it's always focused on creating the best customer experience possible. And then as you're building out your system and improving it, all you're trying to do is reduce the cost of operating that system, reduce the number of errors when operating that system. That means dissatisfied customers ideally, right, and reduce the amount of time it takes, because that's where your profitability comes from. And that's the game of business right there, right? Everything else is about figuring out how it is to run your thing for the people you want to serve, and the way that makes you feel good and operates the way you need to.

Tony Dicks
[00.39.03]

 Super, super simple and super short process. Tony, I think more need to hear like again from this is the difference from having bombs on your podcast versus people who have the actual know how. And this is the thing I want. I would like people to see this as a source of truth, because one of the next things is on that piece where like process and everything makes sense. But how to buy a solution, right? Based on what is very important. And I have a question in my mind now, where do I want to learn or recognize new things to do from Forbes magazine, or do I want to learn it from the podcast? That makes sense to me. And hearing from Tony, who actually does this multiple times over and over, right? It makes a huge, huge, huge difference. So.

Shane Mahi
[00.40.00]

 In

Tony Dicks
[00.40.01]

 terms of you finding information now in today's environment. I used to

Shane Mahi
[00.40.05]

 go to Google

Tony Dicks
[00.40.07]

 and now with AI, I don't go to ChatGPT. I used perplexity. I don't know if you've ever heard of perplexity. I use

Shane Mahi
[00.40.13]

 perplexity to, uh, it's my go to exactly. And even on that now. So sources of truth, let's say the news or podcasts.

Tony Dicks
[00.40.24]

 Which one are you going with? More trusted source of information. You can only pick one.

Shane Mahi
[00.40.29]

 If I could only pick one. Um, I'm going to go with, uh, podcasts.

Tony Dicks
[00.40.39]

 Okay. Relative to your industry to,

Shane Mahi
[00.40.42]

 relative to whatever subject matter I want to go on. And the reason is, is because I will still have to evaluate the person's comments on the podcast, but I feel like there's less of an inclination that the ratings and any driven thing by the network is influencing or anyone else that's a constituent of the network, right? A beneficiary of what they're doing is part of why they're telling me the information. I was like, you're right, sponsored information versus

Tony Dicks
[00.41.13]

 of course. And there's political agendas behind everything in certain periods of time. Right. Which obviously changed things to Google or perplexity when you're trying to find out ads or direct

Shane Mahi
[00.41.23]

 perplexity only because I use perplexity to skim the web and find the information I want, and kind of contextualize it the way I want it. So I use it as a, as a shortcut, and it tells me what the reference sources are. So those two things are why I like perplexity, because I like to know. All right. Well, what did you reference? And then I can go ahead and make adjustments to it based on that. Right. Perplexity does not give me more accurate information per se than anything out there. It's the car I want to drive to get to the destination I want to get to.

Tony Dicks
[00.41.56]

 It's more, I like to say, it's just more concise. It's simple. It's a simple way to compress 14 different pages into one paragraph. And I think that leads us into the next piece, which is enough about Tony. Uh, now I want to hear about Tony's views. So one of the major things that we're doing at Mega is deploying voice AI into financial services, financial operations. And at first the notion was, let's put AI everywhere and supercharge your business, which is kind of the wrong way to look at it. It's how we amplify or augment human behavior so you can take key players and turn them into A+ players. So for me, I see it, and Salesforce and HubSpot have done it absolutely perfectly. I don't know if you've ever seen anything that they've kind of released on Agent Force and how they're using AI agents in their system now to really, really supercharge workflows. You can do some incredible things. My views are that AI is here not as a bubble. There are certain things that this thing really, really helps you do so much faster and so much better. So what are your views though, from where you sit on the evolution of AI? And I would say 2024, but it's almost a wrap. So let's say going into mid 2025, what are your views on the evolution of AI from this year going into next year?

Shane Mahi
[00.43.22]

 I would say AI has been evolving really quickly, right? So I mean my future vision, we are for me, my future vision of AI is already what we've seen in movies like Terminator

Tony Dicks
[00.43.31]

 and yeah, and The Matrix

Shane Mahi
[00.43.33]

 and stuff like that. Like we're going to get there someday. It's going to be there, right? But as far as where we are right now, for me, it's just like any tech. Tech still needs to be controlled by a person. So the deal is that one of the lags for me in tech adoption is even understanding. Let's take it. Let's use a loose example like math, right? Hey, you can give me a calculator, but if I don't know how to do algebra, how am I going to use a calculator to do algebra faster? So to your point, right? It's an amplifier, right? And in order to do that, even things that people, uh, when you think about digital marketing, a lot of people still don't understand digital marketing. They don't understand the tactic. They don't understand how to measure it. The deal is, which one should you be doing? Should you be doing inbound? Outbound? Both. You're not doing it for you. You're doing it for the audience that you're trying to engage with at different stages of their journey. And you don't know where those are. But you do know people are searching for answers on Google, and sometimes people are picking up the phone and asking for suggestions from people. If they don't pick up the phone and ask for a suggestion from you, but they're over there researching something that you might be able to help them with online and you're not there. What are you doing for yourself? What are you doing for your business? How much impact are you set up to make? Not as much. So that's a simple answer, right? Uh, when it comes to AI, then like we're talking about, look, Hubspot's putting some cool little AI tools into the system. So guess what? Some people are going to benefit and some won't. Who will? I know for a fact that one of the things they've added some AI to is, hey, you know what? You want to build a workflow, tell the AI what you want, and it'll give you a recommendation of how to build the workflow. Well, great. If you don't know what a workflow is though, and you don't have even the basic idea of how to build one, the AI, the likelihood is, that you won't be able to manage the AI, because sometimes the AI is going to give you the wrong answer. So you still need to go ahead and do some basic training and understanding on what it is you're trying to get done. There are two ways to learn. You can learn through experience. You can learn in a structured way by also consuming other people's stuff. Right. And my mom used to have a saying, you know, smart people learn from their mistakes. Wise people learn from the mistakes of others. That means you're going to have both that have to happen. If you don't do any structured learning for yourself and you just want to learn by experimentation, cool, that's cool, but you're just going to lose more along the way in order to get to the point where you actually know what you're talking about and know how to put these things together. If you balance the two out, say, hey, you know what? I'm going to use the AI tool to make workflows faster, but I'm also going to try to learn about what are some of the best practices in building workflows. What are the things I need to be thinking about? Do I need all these integrations or not? Am I using tools that I don't need or not? That's all going to come down to what's my objective? What are my process steps? It's going to be the answer every time for you to know. That is for you to know that, right? So you need to get comfortable with that idea and then move forward. So I think the AI is going to be great, but you gotta know how to wield it. In order to know how to wield it. You're going to have to actually know what you're talking about without tech, because tech is an amplifier.

Tony Dicks
[00.46.47]

 I think. I think you hit the nail on the head. Where I see it being most important is that I had the conversation with Jake, Jake Dunlap and Tony Barros and they again, their whole thing was it's the underlying knowledge through experience that helps you use AI the right way. So financial reviews of software download all of these, show me the costs, show me which ones I should be using, which ones I should need to get rid of, which ones are delivering ROI. Like I didn't know about that. Tony knows that from his stuff in his industry. Jake, how to deliver an amplified sales process by knowing I've gone through thousands of discovery calls that went like this from this structured process. Now, how can I kind of supercharge that with AI? So but again, you have a very different view, and it seems like it's a very structured, process driven view on how sales and marketing and even the use of AI can kind of collaborate. What's your view on how sales and marketing teams should be using AI in their businesses based on the operation that you're helping to create that throughput? So inbound outbound lead gen. How do you think they should be using it today? One

Shane Mahi
[00.48.06]

 they have to create their recipe first, right? You're programming a bot to do something just like your programming and employee on your team to do something a certain way. Right? So the deal is, is that one, they're going to have to identify their processes, classify them, and actually get conscious about what they're doing. Because none of us was born. And when I'm talking about all this stuff, guys, by the way, keep in mind I'm talking about things that I'm having to try to come to grips with or overcome myself. Not like I'm some super expert out here telling everybody the gospel, you know what I'm saying? But the deal is, is that what I've noticed is that in order to go from analog to digital or to automated, you have to start like when we were in our analog world before the internet, I'm going out and I'm talking to people, and I am finding people that are interested and I'm making them an offer and I'm and and somebody pays me money. And that's how I think about it, because I don't have to go into more detail because that's all I need. Hey, Shane, go out and talk to people, offer them this thing and then get them to pay you. That's it. Now, when I want to all of a sudden go into systems, I have to start breaking that down. And that's why anytime you get with an agency is like, oh, go out and talk to people. Okay, wait, who are we talking to? Because now we need to be specific in order to tell an automation, a random individual off the street or even a Facebook ad system. Right? It's automation. I have to be specific because otherwise I'm serving it to everybody. Do you want to serve it to everyone or not? Who do you want to serve it to? Okay. What do you want me to say to them? Okay. When do you want me to send them a message? Okay. Like, it just means that we're starting to break down our high level generalizations and the things more specific. So because computers and automation work in ones and zeros, ones and zeros. So if it's not black and white and it's too gray, then it's just going to go haywire. And it's a tough process. I feel personally like it's a weight. It's like building muscles in the gym. It's like doing the pull ups you were doing on the video.

Tony Dicks
[00.50.13]

 It's

Shane Mahi
[00.50.14]

 work guys. But you know what the deal is, it is about the journey, right? The marathon. It's the journey that makes it a little bit fun. So again. If you don't like the work of making that transition, that's fine. It's better for you to know that. But if you're going to take advantage of these new things and try to create a competitive advantage for you, guess what? You gotta learn something new. And that new thing is not going to be easy. But I can tell you right now it's about structured thinking. It's about now going from whatever gets with your team. You write down what are all the things that we do to get a customer in marketing? What are all the things that we do in sales? And then you start trying to connect those dots so that they're now working in sync with each other, right? So you start breaking them out. These are the things this is how we do it. You start finding the similarities and figuring out what you can cut out. First step is eliminating stuff that you don't need because it doesn't. It's not necessary to get to the goal. Then you start identifying the things that are business business value added activities and customer value added activities. I'm throwing in some Six Sigma language, right? But the idea there is then you start prioritizing the highest priority is something that's a customer value added activity. The second. So that's a nine. The second will be something that's a business value added activity that's scored at a three. So you can create enough variance between the scoring system. Right. And then anything that's a non value add gives that a 1 or 0. Because you don't need to be doing things that don't add value but you eliminate. Then you go ahead and you standardize. Then you automate. Then you delegate and assign it out. And a lot of this is academic exercise. But guys, once again I hear a lot of things from the average person that's out there. And the issue is success is that success doesn't. Success leaves clues, but it doesn't give you the answers all the time. Right? There's a successful person out there that you're looking at. You're saying this is what they did and it's a false positive. You absolutely should not be doing any of that.

Tony Dicks
[00.52.09]

 Right.

Shane Mahi
[00.52.10]

 False positives as false negatives. Hey, that person did that and he did it all the right way and it didn't work. So what? How many times did that experiment run a thousand or won? You know, these are basic principles of, uh, statistics, of science, of whatever that because of the nature of sales and marketing, we just never had to deal with that before that billboard was a billboard out there. It's anybody's guess how much business that billboard sent to us until we started being able to put special numbers up there and do different things to kind of know what's happening. But again, those of us before the internet, there's a lot of people in decision making roles right now. Most of them were born before the internet. So I mean, when I go ahead and you're like, well, look, my opinion counts, I don't know. I've been doing this for years and I know what drives it. It's a new logic, guys. It's just not the same logic as before. And as we start getting more scientific about being sales and marketing, get more scientific about how we explore, uncover customer insights, um, allocate resources based on those customer insights and measure our results, then we're going to get better results. But these are skills that have to be developed over time, and you've got to embrace the learning process. If you're 40 plus like me, and you don't want to learn anymore because you're like, look, I've already done my thing, I just want to go ahead. Cash checks. Cool, but know where you are. Don't get into a conversation about AI. You don't need to. You anything that wasn't built between for 2020, you probably don't need to talk about. Just keep going. There's somebody that wants to. How you serve. That's it. Go to the bank. And you, you're the teller at the bank. People are coming in and meeting with you physically and putting money over there. You go drop the deposit. That's fine, that's fine. But there's another segment out here where the puck is going. I haven't been, I don't go, I don't, I can't count on my hand. I'm going to the bank branch over the course of the last ten years, if I and if and you know what? There's a bank right now I'm going to break up with. I'm doing more with Robinhood right now because

Tony Dicks
[00.54.14]

 America is still sending me freaking paper and PDFs that I gotta go print out and send in with a wet signature. What is that? These are big companies. Do you want to be like Bank of America, or are you able to cut into Bank of America's business in

Shane Mahi
[00.54.27]

 2024? Steal some market share, be like Bank of America? Answers probably fucking

Tony Dicks
[00.54.33]

 no. No. Absolutely not. So what do you do where do you see us going in the next. Let's say let's keep it. Let's keep it concise. Where do you think we're going in the next six months? What do you what kind of opportunities will we see with using AI from

Shane Mahi
[00.54.48]

 where you. I guess what you were talking about with, uh, with some of the voice AI stuff and enabling people that are like, I think we're going to see more now and we're seeing it already of AI now going to the step of not just large language models, but also being able to execute tasks. And, um, and those things are going to be phenomenal as we think about them as first, uh, something that just kind of covers a lot of what it could do now, right, at basic tasks. So there's going to be some limitations and later on some more complex tasks, which is why it's a complement to your actual regular staff and everything like that, but not necessarily replacement. Um, I think we'll see more people actually getting good at understanding how to operate what's under the hood in a structured way, so that they can pass that information on so that more people could have success. I think we're at the point of uncovering the frameworks and some, some standard ways to go about programming AI and thinking about your business so you can pull the right things forward and tell it what to do in a way that would be successful for you and your customers. Dove and what about the concerns? What are Tony's concerns for the use of AI? The improper use of AI, let's say specific to customer experience. Who specifically? Well, my concern primarily with AI is like with any tool, people using it and not knowing how to use it. There's nothing more dangerous than having someone with a tool that's very valuable that, you know, they think they know how to use. They don't have any idea how to use it. Right. So you've got more salespeople that think they're marketers right now, and they're sending spammy stuff all over the place because they, you know, and they're creating blog posts that mean nothing, but they don't know

Tony Dicks
[00.56.26]

 because they don't have they

Shane Mahi
[00.56.28]

 don't have enough product knowledge to understand that you just wrote whatever written flowery language it was that ChatGPT just gave you meant nothing. It didn't help anybody move from one stage to, you know. So that's what I fear when it comes to customer success. And I, I would say probably, uh, anyone who's out there having one of them, one of those bots call me and ask me survey questions. Um, um, automated it already existed. What they call IVR

Tony Dicks
[00.56.58]

 I think. Yeah, IVR

Shane Mahi
[00.56.59]

 yeah, they're systems. Right. And that's just being, you know, it's the same old thing like, oh, we had an IVR, now we got an AI bot doing it. Different tools doing the same stuff at the same crappy level of delivery. That. But you know, that worries me right now. You know what else worries me is. Is that, honestly, uh, the tech I have, even on my phone now that I can see, kind of like this number is not in there, it might be spam. Now, I also know that sometimes from a customer success standpoint, you're going to be reaching out to me. And I don't answer it because you're calling me from some number. I don't know what this number is. I don't know if I want to talk to you. It's spam likely or scam likely or whatever. Uh, I actually, I mean, um, I'm a I'm going to say, uh, shout out to scriptify. Actually, I did a show episode with guys that was a script of five with, uh, Davon shoes over there, and he put me on to this thing that happens where it's the. All the regulation now around phone numbers is almost like it was with emails. And so you could have phone numbers that you're using that are just bad numbers are marked as spam that are affecting whether someone picks up the phone. And again, and I didn't know this stuff existed. So this is the cool thing too, about having these conversations and learning new things. We have to be learners forever. If you are not a lifelong learner, there's no such thing as an expert because the way things change now is you could be an expert today and a fool tomorrow because everything's changed. So the deal is, if you're not a lifelong learner, you need to be one. That's what you're signing up for in this entrepreneurial journey or whatever. And you should be old. And your people that work in your organization are accountable to that. But I learned this from the show. And again, what worries me, I'm not only worried as a person that would be running a business, I'm worried as a consumer that I might miss it. You sent me, you contacted me about renewing my contract, and I didn't know it was you with this block calling me. So I didn't want to renew and you renewed me anyway. And now we're going back and forth about a financial dispute. Uh, you told me I needed to get my information to the government, and by December 31st, you told me, but you sent it to my email. My email is overloaded with a bunch of spammy, cold outreach messages from people I don't want to talk to. And now I didn't see that message. And I'm screwed with some fine from the government. Like, these are the things that concern me about it. Okay. All right. So we're approaching the top of the hour. And I think in terms of those concerns, you're absolutely right. The misuse of AI to use it to fool people in their customer experience. Um, a big problem that I see already is people have a lack of creativity and people who do have that creative mind and can see opportunity even when it doesn't exist. Those are going to capture some major, major wins. But I think what would be more interesting to wrap it up is if we step into your mind for a bit and see how

Tony Dicks
[00.59.56]

 How are you using AI to better your life and your job?

Shane Mahi
[01.00.01]

 Right now I'm using AI specifically. It is my brainstorming partner, especially when I'm trying to formulate my own ideas or try to like, get down to the bottom of something. Uh, it's a frustrating partner sometimes. I can't tell you how many times I spent hours of a day on one thing, just because sometimes the prompts are it's going, it's tired, it comes out, it starts telling me something that's not relevant

Tony Dicks
[01.00.26]

 or I'm trying to

Shane Mahi
[01.00.28]

 do right. But that's how I also know that your ability to use the AI and also fact check the AI is directly correlated with the actual results you get from it. Um, so that's how I'm using it. It's my research partner right now, primarily. Um, and I like it so far. I spent a lot of time on it sometimes. But I tell you what, it's been a

Tony Dicks
[01.00.49]

 a lot more helpful to getting down to exactly what we talked about earlier. Why I like to use perplexity, sifting through a bunch of information out there on the internet, getting to some of the roots stuff that I actually want. Discovery is much easier, and what took me a year might be able to. I might be able to get it done in a day, or like 12 hours of real focus over X amount of time, and that's where I think it's best used right now. If you have AI writing everything for you, there's probably a piece there where at least you know it could do the first draft, but you're going to have to know how to make sure it's saying the things you want to say, the way you want to say it. And there we go again. If you're depending on AI to be your voice because you ain't figured out your voice yet. You're in your I mean, eventually you're not going to be getting the most out of AI because that's not what it's designed for, to be your voice and you're going to sound like everyone else. Give you an example, I checked this, I put a top again and I said, write me an article about this topic. I read the article besides thinking it was kind of a vanilla article because by the way to give you a background, I did. I spent $30,000 running an experiment one time on building a blog, and I hired everything out. They were doing six posts a day, blog posts a day. Well, one, I mean, I'm sorry, six blog posts a week. One of those was a roundup post, and they were posting on social media six times a week as well. At the end of, uh, what was I paying 5000 a month? So I ran for six months. At the end of six months, I was like, well, where's the traffic? Where are those leads? I thought it could be basically a site that was like a money making website, right? Those things weren't there. Out of 200 visitors, most of them were out of the Philippines, where that agency was getting the stuff written. So the deal was. And so I got a coach, right? I got a coach that has a program for building blog sites and, uh, and paying for the program. I got two free coaching sessions. I only use one of the two so far. And this was, I don't know, five years ago or something like that. And the deal is, is that because when I got into that session, he said, hey, you've got 180 articles here. I can tell you talk

Shane Mahi
[01.03.01]

 about digital marketing. Um, I have two questions for you. I have one question for you. I'll ask first. And it was, what are you selling? And what do you mean, what am I selling? I thought I was going to build an audience, and then I kind of asked them what they want to

Tony Dicks
[01.03.13]

 buy, you know? So

Shane Mahi
[01.03.17]

 that's something I've been introduced to somewhere,

Tony Dicks
[01.03.19]

 right? Yeah. But at the time when

Shane Mahi
[01.03.21]

 people weren't already, we're past the point of just clicking on anything. So it was a failed strategy, built on some stuff that worked before but didn't work at that time. So I wasn't clear on what I was selling in the first place. That directly affected my content strategy. And the second thing was he was like, look, a lot of you got a lot of articles, but there's no focus there. They just scratched the surface there, like, so, uh, surface level that there's not enough depth to them, context that it would make it interesting for people to come back to it and, and think of it as an authoritative source. So this is what you're giving up when you decide to let me write all your stuff for you and you're like, I don't even check it. By the way, what was I not doing with that agency that was cranking that stuff out? I wasn't reading my own stuff, so I'm like, yeah, let's make money and build content and make money. If you don't inspect what you expect, everything you do is going to be suspect and you just gotta own it. There ain't no way around it. So if you want to use AI, that's cool. Write your articles. But you have to read the article and review it, or have somebody else do it. And you have to have a platform. Just like in politics. What do you stand for? What do you want the market to believe? And then you go out there and you deliver that message. But you gotta be able to make sure that your AI and everybody in your organization is delivering the message and knows what that is, so they could do it the right way and that's it, a copy. I'll cut it off right there.

Tony Dicks
[01.04.50]

 Hey, man. Hey, you're the second person that said it, right? There's another guy, Tim Cook, here. I think his name is Turkish Guy living in the UK.

Shane Mahi
[01.04.58]

 He. He

Tony Dicks
[01.05.00]

 opened my Pandora's box. Dude, I use the The Voice feature now, and I speak to it and I've gone into like I've got some case law that I look into also. And I was quoted a lawyer from California, $90,000 for a retainer just to look into the case. And I thought, oh, let me actually look into this myself. Here's da da da da da da da da da da. Find me case law on this. And it gave me the exact scenarios of when who is where. Then you just like the opportunity that's in front of us right now is absolutely tremendous. So, Tony, last words for you. What do you want to do well, what are your last words? Where can people find you in any last words for you. You can find me on LinkedIn. Uh, Mr. DevOps. Oh, am I in there? Yeah. Oh, God.

Shane Mahi
[01.06.36]

 Yeah, this does some weird shit on the, um, recording, but it does some weird stuff sometimes. So for me, it says your browser is running in incognito mode. Shout out a podcast, so you need to fix this. You're running? No I'm not. I'm running normally. Exactly.

Tony Dicks
[01.06.52]

 A lot of memories on your own clothes. Down some browsers. This is the only one that's open. Yeah, dude, but you had the high CPU usage.

Shane Mahi
[01.07.02]

 I had a CPU usage warning. Like what? And it's possible, but I'm like, I'm on this thing all day. I don't have an issue normally. So what's going on now? Um, yeah. Man. Technology, man. Technology. When it works well, it works well. When it doesn't, it doesn't.

Tony Dicks
[01.07.20]

 Where can I find you, Tony? And what are they? What are your last words?

Shane Mahi
[01.07.23]

 All right, so you can find me on LinkedIn. Uh, Mr. DevOps. Uh, I believe I did. Mr.. Underscore rev ups, I believe. Uh uh, but yeah Tony dicks Mr.. Rev ups. Um, also, I will say since we were talking about I, uh, and we were talking about voice, I do want to shout out a couple, uh, products that I actually had an opportunity to talk with them. And that might be helpful for folks here that might be looking for AI tools. Uh, one of them is called Sail Maker at Get Sail maker.com. That's a cool one for, um, automating your content creation. Uh, I think it'll be pretty dope, and it's actually pretty affordable. Um, get vocal AI for building some, uh, agents, uh, that can make phone calls and everything like that. I'll actually share some information, because I did a show with them where we did even a little demo. It was very cool to be able to go ahead and get that done. So amazing opportunities there. And I would say, I want to call out one more. And the one more I want to call out is called, uh. Uh, nope. I'm not going to call out one more right now. I'm not going to call out one more right now. That's it. I want to call out those two. Uh, and I will say, just because I mentioned it earlier, once again, scripted five or if you do a cold calling, but, um, literally, uh, lake up. I want to be talking to other folks that are, uh, moving sales forward, transforming sales, adopting technology, and adopting these new processes. Last, and even though he said the last thing, I gotta break this out. Very important. This Harvard Business Review issue. I've had this since like 2012. And it's interesting because it says the secret to smarter sales and this whole, uh, issue, or enough of the articles in the issue, were really about how sales was changing from being this kissing, uh, babies and shaking hands kind of thing to something that required more technical expertise. And that's what we've been talking about. And the deal is, that was in 2012 and Hot damn is 2024. And if and

Tony Dicks
[01.09.27]

 if it's absolutely

Shane Mahi
[01.09.29]

 true, you know, and when I was in grad school, when I was in grad school, I remember discovering that people didn't really respect the sales profession. They're like, I want to go into strategy. I want to do this well, how do you have a business if there's no revenue generation going on? Brand management was more sexy and more and more respectable than sales like, and that's got to change. And I think it's happening now with revenue operations and the connection between everything revenue. And I think I just want to say, any of you all who are serious, committed and on this path of trying to figure out how to sell more predictably and profitably, create selling systems that deliver those results more predictably and profitably. I want to be in conversation with you. I want to learn with you. I want to evolve with you over time. Please connect with me and let's keep the conversation going. And Shane, thanks for having me on the show. I love the fact that you know everything, that I've been there since I've known you, that you're always transparent, and I feel like we learn more from our failures than from our successes. And that's a really important part to us taking our games to the next level. Because acting like everything's a success story all day, it's not even realistic. You know, get two hits, two shots going to the goal, eight don't. So the more we talk about what's not working, the closer we'll get to what's working. And I hope I could be, you know, a part of your journey.

Tony Dicks
[01.10.50]

 Well, this is coming from, again, one of the most articulate and well spoken guests and people I know genuinely. Do you have a narrative and a patter that is sharp as fuck. So, guys, you know, LinkedIn, that's where you find him. He's all over the cloud tops marketplace. He's the guy you want to go to. If you want deep insights and you want to know the truth from the false falsities and what's going on, reach out to Tony, all of those links. We'll have those available in the summary. So if you click down here you'll find those and how to access Tony and get more information. But guys that's it. That's a wrap. So I'll end it here.

Shane Mahi
[01.11.31]

 They say they have.