#224 John Bevitt - The Future of Sales: AI's Role in Decision Making

John Bivett: 0:00

If you ask ChatGPT to write a 10 minute survey to evaluate customer satisfaction, it can do it in about six seconds. When I first did that, it made me really go well. What role does research play in the world of AI? For me, I'm not just looking for a supplier, I'm looking for a thought leader, Like I want to be on the cutting edge of what's going on. And I'm sure they were working on it and I'm sure they weren't talking to us because they're busy working on it. Like you don't know what, you don't know right, and if you don't hear what's going on or you don't get any guidance around how to make the most of the situation, you start looking elsewhere, especially when you're hearing that value and seeing that value elsewhere.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 0:33

Welcome back to the how to Sell podcast. I'm your host, luigi Preston-Enzi, and, as always, I'm pumped on it and excited that you've joined us what will be a cracking episode. Now, if you're a first-time listener, I just want to say thank you so much for joining. We hope you take away some valuable insight that will help you sell more. And, if you're a long-time listener, thanks for showing up each and every week. Both my co-host and I value having you part of our community every single week, you help us sort of get inspired to create this content. And there I said it Dave, my co-host.

Dave Fastuca: 1:09

You did it. It felt natural this time, apart from the last few episodes where it's been a struggle for you.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 1:16

Yeah, I still can't deal with the fact that You've got a co-host. But before we jump on to this week's episode and introduce our guest, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and follow wherever you're listening to this podcast, because the more subscribers we get, it's not just so that we can inflate Dave's ego, because we know that Dave loves his ego getting inflated. It's so that we can continue to bring some incredible guests like we have today. So, Dave, I'll let you do the honors of introducing this week's guest and our topic 100%.

Dave Fastuca: 1:51

Thanks, louis. So we've got John Bevert and he's the MD CEO, the head honcho, at Honeycomb Strategy. John runs one of these interesting companies where they're interviewing, they're doing studies on different brands and their consumers, and I've always been captivated by the research that John and the team do. There's always some crazy insight. So today's going to be really interesting and packed full of some golden nuggets, so I can't wait to dive into it.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 2:18

All right. So, John, thank you and welcome to the how to Sell podcast.

John Bivett: 2:23

Thanks for having me here, guys. It's great to be here.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 2:27

Yeah, awesome. So, mate, before we jump into this week's episode to pick your brain about how you buy, we'd love that if you could maybe just give us a quick introduction. I know that Dave introduced you, but could you maybe just give us a quick intro, a bit about your background and what you're currently doing, your role.

John Bivett: 2:47

Yeah for sure. So to give you a bit of background around Honeycomb and the work that I do, I have to think about how I would explain it to my mum, because it's a very hard industry to explain to people who don't know what market research is. Every time I tell my mum, she's like are you the one doing the phone calls about the surveys? I'm like, yeah, sort of mum. But essentially what we do is we work with big corporates to essentially help to make sure that their products are delivering a fit for purpose and serving customer needs. So in terms of what that means in practical terms, it's about how can we accelerate product market fit, how can we develop a compelling go-to-market strategy and how can we deliver an effective brand campaign. So that's kind of our trifecta that we do. In terms of my role at the company, so as MD, it's really about directing the big picture and the strategic direction of the company and where in peak scale at the moment. So it's about building, I guess, a series of automated engines that run on its own and building a team of great people with great minds and I love to work with great clients.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 3:56

Yeah, awesome. So we'd love to know, and thank you for sharing that, and I can't wait to break this topic down right, because what we love to do on this podcast and this podcast is designed to help sellers rethink the way they approach buyers, so they can actually start seeing things from the buyers' perspective, right Would you be able to maybe share with us a recent purchase and I'm not talking, you know, like a laptop purchase. I'm talking of a significant purchase that required yourself and multiple people in your team to get consensus on a decision that you were making where there was a bit of money involved. Could you maybe talk us through? You know what did you buy. You don't have to talk about company names or anything like that.

John Bivett: 4:43

But could you just start with?

Luigi Prestinenzi: 4:46

Yeah, what did you buy and what was the trigger Like what happened in your business for this to become something that you and your team had to look into?

John Bivett: 4:57

Yeah, so a really good one that comes to mind and I'm sure a lot of people have experienced this recently is a third-party AI solution. So, being in market research, if you ask ChatGPT to write a 10-minute, If you ask ChatGPT to write a 10-minute survey to evaluate customer satisfaction, it can do it in about six seconds. When I first did that, it scared the shit out of me part of the French and it made me really go well, what role does research play in the world of AI? And I guess when I took a step out, went for a walk with the dogs and came back, I then went how can I use AI to augment what we do? So essentially what we did, I'd say, about 18 months ago, started to just experiment with different AI platforms, and some are great, some are not so great, but there was one that we tried for about six months and the product itself was really good, but the offering itself wasn't fit for purpose and in the end, we had to make a call to drop it because it didn't serve us.

Dave Fastuca: 6:00

Okay how did that make you feel, John? Going into that space where you're looking at purchasing something that's critical to the business, it could change the business. What was that sort of emotional roller coaster like?

John Bivett: 6:15

Being forever the optimist. I was quite excited about it because I had known about AI. I had known, like many of us, that was going to disrupt us in some form or fashion. I didn't know it was going to go straight to the heart and the wallet. So I was very curious and I was quite excited, but I was also quite, I guess, critical because I knew how quickly things were changing. And that makes for interesting context when, I guess, the company is trying to marry you and lock you into a long term contract, when there's an industry that's changing every week.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 6:49

Yeah, and just want to confirm. You went down the process but you didn't buy.

John Bivett: 6:55

We went through. We ended up using them for about six months and then made a call that it wasn't feasible to lock into a contract, just given the economies and the maths and the value of getting back for it.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 7:10

Okay, so you and this is interesting so six months, and do you mind sharing with our audience who in your team was involved in that, in that selection process?

John Bivett: 7:23

Yeah, for sure. So our business is composed of 80% researchers, so client facing researchers, a mix of qualitative researchers so they're the ones that do focus groups and stuff and quantitative researchers that do the surveys. This impacted them both. So we had a. We actually had most of the team involved, running from juniors, who would be end users, through to our senior researchers, who would be the most strategic kind of executors of it, and then, yeah, managing director and my partner, the founder.

Dave Fastuca: 7:54

John when, during that process, so like you, made the decision to give it a try, right? So all that six month period. How was that decision made? What was the sales process like during that? Was it a trial or was it we're going to sign up for six months and then look to pursue further? How was the sales process during that engagement like?

John Bivett: 8:16

Yeah, so it landed and ended up in a trial, but it was one of the very few cold emails we actually responded to and I get a lot of cold emails. A lot of them end up in junk. But what got us, got our attention, was that it was quite well thought out. It spoke specifically to our industry and our industry challenges and it got my name right, which is always a win, and so that kind of made us go actually, yeah, this is very topical. We've been curious about it. They we like risk reversal. They had a really good framing about going you can trial this Grisbury actually knew in this industry, so, king, to get your thoughts, because they didn't have a proposition for research as well. So if it was framed more as a bit of an exploration partnership type thing, which made us a lot more furious about it- yeah, that's interesting, I love that.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 9:12

So, and I was going to ask you what was the origin. You know, how did you come up? How about this conversation got started? So it's great to hear so somebody proactively reached out to you. Obviously, the the topic was something that was on, you know, on the top of your mind. So it was a kind of a good timing. And they knew your industry challenges and they knew the industry that you're working with. So it goes to show that they did a little level of research right. Do you mind walking us through the fact that you started the trial, so something picked your interest. You're like yep, it's topical, let's talk to them. At what point in the sales process Did they start to define the problem that you are experiencing, that their solution could help, or did that not occur at all?

John Bivett: 9:59

It didn't occur. So essentially they went. We have the solution and for one of the better where they're looking for the right problem to solve in our industry, and I think in this case I was glad that it came into my inbox because I knew exactly what problem it was solving. And for us in AI it was about being able to look through unstructured data at scale, because we have a lot of that in research and, like I read in you, and the outcome for us was that it reduced the, I guess, amount of time it took us to get to an insight by 80%, so that's time that our team can spend on higher-order, more valuable tasks. So they essentially had the solution, but they didn't know the problem and I think they were quite fortunate that I knew exactly what it would solve for. And that's when I jumped on and organized the call with them and it was great. There was a human I could interact with on the other end and that's when we got to experiment with things a bit.

Dave Fastuca: 10:55

And during the trial process, John, was that same salesperson involved in helping you to adopt the technology, or did it turn into handballing it to someone else? Look, what was that sort of experience like from? Okay, we've got you on a trial. That's part one of the sale done. Part two of the sale is adoption and ensuring that you get value from that product. Can you walk us through that process?

John Bivett: 11:22

Yeah for sure. So they were involved, or at least looked in the comms end to end, and I found that very valuable because, just being an agency ourselves, the last thing I know our clients want is to be handballed to someone. They often commit to a specific person in professional services and that person that I'd spoken to had been given all the context of our business and so it was important for us that they were involved and they were essentially the key contact and they were very helpful in, I guess, evolving the solution to work around our problems. So it was still a work in progress for them and they were able to go call. Based on this, we could actually work on making it more relevant to you guys. So being able to have that opportunity to be in the frontline and be able to experiment and feed into the product itself was pretty exciting.

Dave Fastuca: 12:11

Pardon the interruption, but I have to let you know about this free resource. The Grow Forum newsletter has over 10,000 subscribers that are learning how to sell. Each and every week we send you tips, strategies and also some tools and tech on how to achieve the most out of your sales pipeline. If you're ready to level up, sign up for free at growforumio forward slash newsletter and get the first issue this week.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 12:37

So, obviously, if you had the problem, you were clear on the problem that you were seeking to solve. Like you said, you got all these instructor data. You wanted your team to spend time on higher value tasks, so you had a clear understanding of that problem. Where did it break down? Where it went from? I know the problem. I can see it's going to solve this. I can put my people to X. Did it break down for you guys to say you know what? This is not the right solution for us.

John Bivett: 13:11

Where it broke down was in how they structured their pricing. In the end which is a really weird thing I could almost feel that they were chasing bigger companies. So in terms of their pricing strategy, it was a locked in contract you pay for a 12-month subscription up front, all that sort of thing and as a leaner, smaller company, that wasn't sustainable for us, where we were like, can we structure it in a more monthly proposition? That sort of thing, and it seemed a little tone deaf. So, knowing everything that was happening in AI, what I felt with how their model changed because they actually changed how their pricing structure was offered when we were trialing it it felt like they were trying to hold on to their nest egg for D-Life before chat GPT took their business elsewhere. That was the story I had in my head. Whether that was true or not is another story. But we were going hey, given everything that's happening and how things are changing, they weren't giving us confidence that they were able to evolve as quickly as what's happening more broadly, and so we made a call not to lock into a long-term contract.

Dave Fastuca: 14:22

Right, luigi, do you think there's an issue there with the right questions being asked to John? Based on the size of their business, they would know if they're chasing a particular price point type of customer, that they may have missed the mark. It seems like something so simple there.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 14:40

Yeah, but I think, yeah, something's obviously and obviously we can. We will break this down. But if the problem from a, if the customer, the client or, in this case, the prospect, had a clear definition of the problem, but they didn't clearly define the problem and they weren't able to say capture, what's it costing? Because in my opinion and in my eyes, I go. Well, if I'm actually able to say this is how much time you're allocating, this is the cost per hour that your team is spending on X, and if we redeploy these resources to B, that's the opportunity gain, right, because they're not just saving time, but they're gaining something, and that's that's. That's the sort of criteria that needs to be in the business case, because if it's not there, then all you know, all John and his team are seeing is well, this is what we have to pay for this service, right? So if that's quantified, I don't know. That's actually a question I would love to ask Was that quantified internally, without them? Because usually you know what our practice is we like to actually co, you know, co create that business case, but. But obviously they didn't do it. But did you at any stage, with your team, actually quantify what that saving will be and what the impact of redeploying resources would be.

John Bivett: 16:02

Yeah, we did the maths pretty quickly, given we're data nerds, so we'll just like okay, how much did you actually save? We even created some specialized time sheets to actually do a control group and test against it, like we went nuts on it, and we could definitely see that we're getting the benefit for it. I think the biggest thing for us was that we were afraid that we would be left behind by committing to them for more than a year.

Dave Fastuca: 16:26

So, given like every couple weeks, something was new coming out on chat GPT as an example- so it was a big fear element there, you know, in confidence to pursue the, you know that particular vendor I mean just to John. Did you end up solving the problem since you met with this group?

John Bivett: 16:46

Yeah, so we end up using a couple of different tools chat GPT is one of them like a whole team has on their favorites as a go to. That just keeps evolving and, to end, we have a pro version of that as well. So that gets us, I'd say, about 80% there to what we're paying for the other player. So it's interesting in a space of disruption, like I feel like we made the right call. But yeah, to your point, I was one like I was actually disappointed that we left them because they were doing so well up to a point and then I felt like they changed direction and all of a sudden we felt that we weren't being supported anymore.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 17:27

Yeah, it's an interesting right because you know you found a way to get it done. But if you, if, upon reflecting on that process because obviously that's a bit of a time commitment right you also spent six months investing in that, in that process. If you were reflecting sorry, darren, cut that out. Sorry, my words got jumbled I'm reflecting on that process, john. You know, if you could go back and do it again, what would you do differently?

John Bivett: 18:01

Yeah, good question. To be honest, I'd probably be a lot more transparent with them and I think by the pointy end of it we were pretty transparent. But I think it was like we're getting just enough value from it, that we're like, yeah, I feel like this trial is working. The economics of it was working as well for a little bit, but then it didn't. You know what I mean. Like if, if, if we're in this space and everything was stable, it would have been fine. It would have been just another subscription we sat on, but there was just so much, I guess, turmoil and excitement going on more broadly and that was. It was very hard to ignore that, and so it was very much like a grasses greener type of issue we had there.

Dave Fastuca: 18:46

During the trial, john, like what was any additional value that the vendor tried to create to reinforce the position? Like you mentioned in there, there's a whole range of, you know, turmoil. Changes happening in the marketplace, especially within AI, is changing weekly at the moment the day. Obviously, it seems like they didn't generate enough confidence that they were staying ahead of the curve. And was that the case?

John Bivett: 19:09

Yeah, absolutely. We weren't getting any comms in terms of going well, here's what's happening, here's how we're addressing it or here's how we're solving for something similar. So it's that whole like in in a in an information vacuum. You tend to fill that in yourself and it wasn't being filled in with anything good.

Dave Fastuca: 19:28

But that's a great comment there, right? So, like if it's not being explained to you or told to you, you're making your own assumption up and the assumption is always unfortunately they're negative. They're not doing X, they're not doing Y. You know, it's always the narrative that the, the consumer, always has in the head, which is a something that we really need to be cognizant of when selling To to organizations. If we're not communicating enough of about the situation, especially in a crazy changing environment, yeah, our customers are making those decisions on their own behalf.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 20:00

Yeah, we, we see this all the time. Right, those soul, and then they become soul and objections that you never hear. And the clients made the decision and to some extent, they've actually made the decision based on the wrong information. Right, because they've they've come up with their own answers and you know it's really interesting, john. I'm actually in the moment I mean, in the process of renovating a house, right, and there are so many decisions that you have to make and and this is where I like to relate this back to a good sales process because I'm needing experts like an electrician and a plumber. Now, sure, you can watch a YouTube clip and try to fumble your way around and hopefully, if you're an electrician, if you're working with electrical, you don't kill yourself, right? But there's a reason why you pay these professionals. And there's been moments where I've kind of been looking at Problems and going this is how I would solve it, right, with plumbing and even carpentry. But then, when I've got the experts in there, like, no, don't tackle it this way, this is how you do it. And who am I to say, no, don't tackle it that way? Like they're the actual experts. And I'm like, and they say well, this is why you do it in this way and this is what we'll do, and I'm like here's my money, right? There is no. You know now that they've, and I sometimes think that the sales process and the sales person Don't see themselves as that professional and they're not leading with that level of expertise and guiding the buyer through the process to say, hey, you might not be purchasing this. All the time. We are doing this all the time, we are experiencing these problems all the time and therefore you should probably navigate it this way if you want to get this outcome right.

John Bivett: 21:38

Absolutely like for me. I'm not just looking for a supplier, I'm looking for a thought leader, like I want to be on the cutting edge of what's going on. And I'm sure they were working on it and I'm sure they weren't talking to us because they're busy working on it. But yeah, like you don't know what you don't know right, and if you don't hear what's going on or you don't get any guidance around how to make the most of the situation, you start looking elsewhere and especially when you're hearing that value and seeing that value elsewhere.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 22:05

Yeah, well, this has been great and I think, dave, as we come to the, to the end of our first segment, I've been and I always judge, john, always judge a good episode by the amount of notes that I've taken, and I've got a whole page of notes here, right. So there's been a lot of key takeaways. I don't know if you've realized how many nuggets of gold that you've dropped for our audience, but there's heaps, there's actually heaps of stuff and, dave, we've got a lot of stuff to jump into. So, just before we let you go though, john, where is the best place for our audience to find? Connect with you?

John Bivett: 22:35

Yeah, you can hit me up on LinkedIn to jump ever J, o, h, n, b, e, v, I double T. Or reach out to us on our website, honeycombstrategycomau.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 22:44

Awesome. We'll make sure those links are in the show notes, but, dave, I'll let you, given that you are the co-host.

John Bivett: 22:53

Thank you.

Luigi Prestinenzi: 22:53

The intro. I'll let you do the outro for our, for our guests this week, before we jump into the second segment of the how to sell podcast.

Dave Fastuca: 23:00

No problems. Well, again, thank you, john, for joining us today. You know, shared some great nuggets, as Louis mentioned. We're gonna dive in now to how we're going to. How would we approach selling to you, and then maybe with Louis, this time here we can tackle, in this very similar format of Getting John's team into a trial, and how will, we would nurture that through to close, based on, you know, what we've learned today. So again, thank you, john, and catch you at the next event. We see each other at.

John Bivett: 23:27

Thanks for having me, guys. I'm actually keen to hear what you guys have to say.

Dave Fastuca: 23:30

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Luigi Prestinenzi: 24:48

You know, there's the reason why I really like that conversation because it just it reinforced again, dave, the importance of thinking about the wider buying committee and even in a smaller type business, there is always more than one person involved in that decision-making process and John, you know, mentioned he had his senior researchers, he had his junior researchers, so the strategic thinkers to the users, to his co-founder, so there was a lot of people involved in that process that they weren't taking the decision lightly, right, there was also, as he mentioned, there was a lot of fear and emotion that was driving their actions. Yeah, because he said these things were happening and that, in the end, was what killed the deal, which we'll talk about in a moment. Right, but how would I have approached that a little bit differently to sell to John and his team? First things first. I think the gap in the process was the lack of communication and education. Right, and we often think, you know, from a marketing perspective, that, hey, you've generated the lead, you've got an op marketing jobs done, and this is where the alignment piece is so, so important. And bringing the two together, because even though he decided to sign up for a trial, which it looked like it was more of an intense trial because they were. It was kind of like part of the sales process. There was no information that was being shared, there was no value that was being created right. And you heard, john, he's looking. He's not just looking for a vendor, he's looking for a thought leader. What killed the deal in the end was the lack of confidence that had that the product could continue to pivot to enable them to achieve their goals. Yeah, so, and, and the reality could be that the product could actually achieve that outcome. But John and his team answered those questions themselves, and we see this often in the sales process that the buying committee has questions and they Answer those questions themselves and in some cases they're not giving, they're answering them wrong. Yeah, there's a lack of information, so they actually are not creating the right, relevant picture for themselves Based on those questions and they become solid objections. That killed the deal.

Dave Fastuca: 27:05

We spoke about this before the before the episode, right about yeah, asked ourselves starting to do a bit of multisferting with accounts in a situation when someone's in a trial. Would this be a perfect case of trying to reach out to more than just John and, just from a place of you know, expertise, try and share a bit of information so they know that you're a thought leader, or do you think that's too much?

Luigi Prestinenzi: 27:29

Well, I think, I think In this case, and what I would have done differently, and what we do, dave, is as they're progressing through that funnel, right from top of funnel, and they did a great job. They created a new opportunity from a cold outreach message tick yeah, right time, right trigger, right message got even ended in spam and they still got the call. Hey, fantastic, right, so that's a big tick, but as they went from that first meeting, they didn't this is the other gap they didn't do any business case analysis. They didn't actually work with him on developing the business case. They, john and his team did it, but the, the actual provider, didn't, and potentially they might not have actually created the right business case for them to make their final decision. Because he mentioned Pricing, was the the reason why they didn't progress? And that's really unusual, because a lot of the times, pricing isn't the reason why people don't progress. There's something else, right, there's a hidden, hidden objection, yeah, and that hidden objection actually he shared it with us it was the confidence. It was a black. They had a bit of fear in the product's capability, right, so it actually wasn't price, yeah, if you pick that up during that conversation, it was fear that stopped him from moving forward. So this is where, again, there was a couple of key things that we would have done differently. We would have helped them develop the business case. We would have determined what were the key questions they were looking to be educated on and we would have nurtured them with a level of content and education and checking before progressing, right. Big key, yeah, checking before progressing to make sure that they were comfortable as they progress through the buying journey. And I think the key takeaway for all of our audience listening to this it's as your buyer progresses through the funnel, their level of education, the requirement starts to change and the message that we deliver top of funnel needs to be different bottom of the funnel. And as you're getting to that bottom of the funnel, remember, task tension starts to kick in. People start to second guess. It's that whole bar. You know that buyer's remorse Actually kicks in before they make the decision. So think about what could those concerns be and how do you address it through your content, through your engagement and, ultimately, through the final proposal that you put on the table. It should absolutely address those concerns and it should show a clear roadmap on how you would mitigate those concerns to achieve a certain outcome.

Dave Fastuca: 30:06

Well, we thanks, mate. Another masterclass reversal selling session with yourself, another great episode. Plenty more to come out, I think let's wrap it up here, great way to end it. And just one thing as well Just so happen to be that we've done our own grow forum survey and it's this survey, it's 15 rapid fire yes or no questions that will help you. That's it. You listening to this episode because you're in beta b sales. If you're listening to us or uncover the gaps in your selling process, so that, linked to this survey, is going to be in the show notes when you're listening to this episode, and it's going to give you an instant report once you fill in those 15 rapid fire questions On how you can overcome those results. So click the link, go through the process and, like we do every week, we'll see you next week on the how to sell show.

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