This special episode kicks off our Mastering Sales with AI series with a candid, high-impact discussion on how revenue leaders can move beyond AI buzzwords and actually apply intelligent selling strategies—especially in volatile markets.

Stephen Messer and Paul Melchiorre join Mark Petruzzi to break down the hard truths about what makes AI work in real sales orgs: leadership alignment, data readiness, and daily execution. This is your first step toward modern, adaptive selling—driven by signal, not guesswork.

What You’ll Learn:

• Execution Beats Ambition: Why success with AI doesn’t start with big vision decks—but with specific, high-impact use cases.
• Your CRM Can’t Keep Up: Why traditional tools break in volatile markets, and how neural net AI models adjust in real time.
• Forecasting Needs a Reboot: How daily deal signals—red, yellow, green—are replacing “gut feel” and weekly sales meetings.
• Buyer-Centric Strategy: Why studying sellers won’t help you predict revenue—but studying buyers will.
• Leading with Insight: How top CROs gain board trust through data, not opinions.

Key Topics:

• Moving from AI theory to operational reality
• Fixing broken forecasting processes
• Leveraging volatility as a growth advantage
• Redefining enablement with signal-based coaching
• Why AI is a co-pilot, not a replacement
• How to scale insights across sellers, teams, and time zones
• 
  

Event Recap – Top Takeaways:

• Start small, win big: Tie AI to real revenue use cases.
• Clean data wins: No insights without data discipline.
• AI empowers, not replaces: Give time back to sellers, and sharpen execution.
• Execution > tools: Adoption follows alignment.

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more episodes in our Mastering Sales with AI series. New sessions coming soon.

Mark Petruzzi (00:39)

Welcome to this special edition of the Selling the Cloud podcast. Today we're digging in one of the most pressing questions facing revenue teams right now, today. How do you sell and lead when the market gets shaky? We're thrilled to be joined again by our friend and Selling the Cloud regular, Stephen Messer, co-founder of Collective Eye. Stephen is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and one of the most innovative thinkers

when it comes to applying AI to real world business challenges. With Collective Eye, he's created a platform that brings predictive sales intelligence, once reserved for Fortune 500 companies, into the hand of every seller and sales leader in companies of all sizes. As economic uncertainty rises, many organizations instinctively pull back, but strong sellers and smart leaders lean in. Collective Eye helps them do that with confidence.

providing real-time insight into which deals are likely to close, where risk exists, and how to act before it's too late. In today's episode, we're gonna dive deep into three key topics. Why volatility separates strong sellers from the rest, and how leaders can help their team step up. Why traditional forecasting tools break in a shifting market, and how AI gives you the edge.

and then how to create urgency when customers are tempted to delay and how to guide them to take action. Okay, let's jump in. Stephen, welcome back to Selling the Cloud.

Stephen Messer (02:17)

I love being here. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, KK, for having me. You know I love talking to your audience and frankly just talking to you too.

Mark Petruzzi (02:24)

We love it too.

KK (02:24)

⁓ that is

awesome. We're so happy to have you, Stephen. So let's dive into the first topic, which is how volatility reveals the real sellers. Like, will the real sellers please stand up? And so right now, one of the things that we're seeing across, you know, so many of our clients is hesitation, right? And it's exposing when deals stall and push and delay, it's really exposing sellers

who have relied historically on tailwinds or relied on having a ⁓ well-known logo that they're selling for. And strong sellers, right, they're typically going to thrive in this kind of environment because they're truly meeting the needs and the outcomes of the customer. So what, like in this, just kind of backing up a little bit and thinking about how you sell in volatile times, like what,

What do you see or what do you think top performers are doing differently than them?

Stephen Messer (03:29)

Yeah, well,

let's talk about top performers, top organizations, because remember market share is always hard to get in any market. But when there's change, that's usually when markets shift pretty dynamically. And volatility is something that a lot of organizations are sitting today looking around and realizing that they and their architectures are very rigid. They're not very flexible to make change.

They're also not getting feedback loops fast enough. And that translates from leadership down to seller. So I say that because, you know, historically we're well, let's put it this way, market volatility, especially when it's external volatility can be very hard to understand. You're asking an individual seller to figure out what's going on or the organization is coming to a group think mentality. And the reason why that's so challenging is because they're using themselves.

to try to figure out what's going to change in the world. I think there's nothing harder, right? One, your assumption is it's you. And then the second thing is your assumption is somehow the group think will get us there fast enough. But I think what you've heard me say this before, which is the hardest part about listening to your customer in a high volatility, especially when it's negative market impacts, which is really what we're living through.

right now is sort of these shocks to the market that keep coming every other day. And that makes it very hard. What you're hearing from your customer and what their conversations are with you aren't going to help you. They're giving you sort of the Instagram view of the world. And I always joke, the happiest couples look on Instagram in the two months prior to their divorce. They're out there telling you what a great thing is. And I think when market challenges arise,

A lot of your customers are afraid to say we're hitting headwinds in our market. That's why we may not be buying and or other things that are going on because they're not sure if it's just them or if it's everyone else and nobody wants to look like they're in trouble because that creates a death spiral and all these other things around it. So what I think I'll highlight is you are talking about the sellers who are able to pick up on those subtle signals or are testing and trying messages almost immediately to test for what's really happening.

as opposed to playbook people, or as opposed to people who are just trying to follow the med pic steps. They recognize that as soon as the market changes, I have to start figuring out and sensing what's going on in the market. I think that is one of the more important things to do. But I think I wanted to bring back, because everyone thinks, no, ⁓ it has to do with an individual. So I think it's the whole work fixating on themselves, not trying to understand what the entire market's telling them.

and the best people know how to do that.

KK (06:24)

Really interesting. ⁓ So what if we think about the end-door performers? Like how do, like the ones who aren't pushing and asking the right questions, like how do we, like if I'm a sales leader, is kind of what I'm getting at. If I'm a sales leader and I've got a sales team, I'm gonna have some strong sellers and medium sellers, probably some low sellers. How do I know?

How do I know when the times get volatile like this, like who's doing what needs to be done? Like how do I know what's real, what's not, who has happy ears? What do I look for?

Stephen Messer (06:51)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look, Warren Buffett always said it best when the tide goes out is only when you see who's naked. And I think what a lot of the sales organization is going to experience is that a lot of the people that they liked the most in sales were the people who followed their playbooks, were there people who followed the steps exactly. They may, they're probably never the top producers, but they liked it. And what's happening now is

the market has shifted and all those playbooks fail. Always, inevitably. They're doing yesterday's messages, yesterday's sale, yesterday's behavior. And by the way, all their systems are looking at, especially if they're using the older form of AI called machine learning, they're probably looking at the last two years to predict what's going on today. Nothing to do with what today is. So all their systems are falling apart.

There's probably a few outliers that are their best sellers and historically been their best sellers, but never listened to anyone, never cared, never paid attention. Those are the players that are best. And I bring that up because those are the players who are just going about doing their job of selling. But the top producers are on their own. All the systems that you're looking at that people have installed.

you know, unless they're neural net, they're not adjusting daily to what's going on. So they're all their entire systems are falling apart. Can I, can I give an explanation of what I mean by that? All right. I want you to imagine that if you pick the technology, the older workflow technologies, you know, for forecasting, for deal review, for conversational intelligence, whatever you're looking at, they're all looking at just your company's data.

Mark Petruzzi (08:35)

Yes, please.

Stephen Messer (08:53)

for the last two years and using machine learning to look for the average. called, it's a regression model. They're looking at what's the average. So they're trying to figure out whatever worked over the last two years is going to be assigned for what works today. That is a real problem. And I'll give an analogy to try to make it easy. I want you to imagine a plane where all your gauges will work fine so long as the plane is working perfectly.

But if an engine catches on fire, something that hasn't happened in the last two years, all your gauges break. Now, I want to be clear. The only time you needed the gauges was when the emergency came up. But they're all designed to break the minute there's something new or unusual that occurs. So if you are using the most common tools that are out there, I'm not going to name their names.

Cadence tools, forecasting tools, et cetera. And they're not like Collective Eye where we're using entire networks in a neural net. What's happening is they're not adjusting to the change. Everything just looks like it's broken and you can't figure out what's going on. So you've lost all your tooling to understand daily change. think of this. Most people are still doing weekly forecasting. Or they're figuring out that deals don't work at the end of a quarter.

So when you're having volatility, think about what's happened in the last five days, ⁓ Tariffs on, tariffs off, tariffs doubled ⁓ to China. Then it was the Federal Reserve Chief is gonna get fired, then he's getting saved. I mean, I can go through the dailyness. And by the way, this is like the first 120 days. Like, this is like not minor stuff. And everyone's trying to look at their tooling to get a sense of what's happening with their deals.

And that tooling is using the last two years that had none of this to decide what's going on. I think that's terrifying. If I'm them, you're flying without gauges in fog. You are literally trying to hope for, does anyone see anything? Does anyone hear anything? I don't know how you do it. And this is a good warning. We're shot over the bow that if you don't have, in our world we call it collective, which is obviously our name.

Which is if an AI like a neural net, these newer types of AI aren't learning from everything going on, you are literally trying to ask the people in your org to figure out from a limited amount of data what's actually happening on a macro level. I think that's crazy.

Mark Petruzzi (11:31)

Yeah. And it's especially crazy, Steven, when we're also in the midst of software and SaaS, software as a service, being entirely different in the world than ⁓ AI. So maybe we can touch a little bit there and maybe tie it back to how the sales leaders leverage the new tools to leverage and figure out who their highest performing reps.

Stephen Messer (11:43)

displaced. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (12:01)

and highest potential reps are going to be in this new environment and in this new technology space as well.

Stephen Messer (12:09)

Yeah. Look, ⁓ I think in these times, there's two types of leaders. There's the back to basics leaders. All right. These are the guys where they're like, my God, we're going through this, but I've experienced other problems in the past. So I'm going to follow my old, wait, look, I just really need people to hunker down and do this thing. Now that's kind of like when Walmart started getting hit by Amazon and

I could see Walmart executives being like, it has nothing to do with online shopping. What it has to do is we have to get back to better greeters. If we could just do the basics really well, then people come in, people love greeters. You can't do that online. Like you could see this kind of logic. Back to basics, people don't realize that the world is the paradigm has completely shifted. And now again, I wouldn't say this if it wasn't for we're in the midst of this AI revolution where everyone's doing these things. Cause if you had traditional tools and a market collapse, fine.

That may be what you do is back to basics. But in the midst of a market change, what happens is people retool everything when they realize there's a better way to handle a downturn like this. This is what happened. If you think about the dot com collapse, everyone shifted over to digital marketing. We came out of the dot com collapse and more companies had web presences, more companies had.

Uh, online shopping more companies had shifted their advertising from traditional things like television, radio, and newspapers to online. Like the entire world shifted. switched to Google, like everything moved because there was a better approach. Well, let me tell you, there is another kind of manager that looks and says, okay, everything is changing. How do I now adjust to it and what else, what is going to happen? And if you think about the AI first sales organization, we are not talking about people who are thinking weekly cadences.

Right, you've seen this Mark. Daily optimization means you're adjusting to what's happening to your customer, but you're starting with studying your customer. That's what these models do. Like in our model, our customers, we track 5 % of the globe's economy is feeding this model. That's all feeding back everyone a daily view. You know what that's going to happen to your customer before they've told you just cause you're getting feedback loops.

Mark Petruzzi (14:17)

Yeah.

And the old traditional approaches of this, that your competitors, they're just looking at what happened two years ago and what's happening in that company. There is nothing about the buyer and the buyer's journey and what's happening on that side and what the thought process is. And that's where these AI tools that are especially yours being built in a collective fashion

You're getting perspectives and guidance and coaching from your buyers as well. It's not just coming from you or your team because by their actions, your buyers are coaching you on what you should be doing next.

Stephen Messer (14:51)

Yeah.

Look, think about it this way. You are literally, it's April 23rd. For most of the SaaS world, this will be the end of their fiscal year in a few days. And I'm going to bet you that there are a whole bunch of leaders out there who are freaking out because they're going to rely on the last day or the last few days to try to figure out what's actually coming in. And they're relying on quantifying the opinion.

of all their reps of what's going to happen as the world is changing. I, as someone who's out there, can't tell you. I can watch all the news in the world. I still don't know what it's going to mean. But my neural net knows exactly what it's going to mean. I can start to see which deals that I thought were good are starting to go red. Because I promise you, if they're a manufacturing org, or they sell to manufacturing orgs, or they're dealing with people who have to import products, their world is changing. But I bet you there's a lot of people you didn't think were going to have downsides that are now.

having downsides or reconsidering purchases because they just want to wait and see. And I bet you nobody's paying attention to that because they think I'm going to get this deal over the finish line. I'm going to have to do a little bit more discounting, but I'm going to get it there. And I think they're going to find out discounting is not the problem.

KK (16:11)

It's not a race to the bottom this time. And so a couple of things that I'm thinking about as I listen. So one, it feels like the last decade, the theme de jour before the AI revolution really was process. Write your sales process, document your process, have everyone doing the same thing. And then we've got all of these systems that allow like

very generic, know, spray and pray is what we call it, know, cadences and, and outreaches and everyone, you know, it was all around activity and process and not really necessarily the right activity or even the right process. Right. And so now with volatility, right, that, that you don't want your sellers like the blind leading the blind, right? You don't want to be like an ostrich with your head in the sand while the

you know, with happy ears, right? That's something that I keep thinking about a lot. so a sales leader needs to be agile and they need to be able to like move on a dime and bag some of the stuff that they've been doing that is actually causing them to go slower. Like what's your thought on that?

Stephen Messer (17:31)

Look, this is the terrifying thing of what's happening when you have these grounds swells where everything changes, these paradigm shifts that hit. People are really afraid. used to call it in my last company, we used to call it the Tarzan syndrome, where they're afraid to let go of the rope that they're holding onto until they firmly feel they understand the new one. But you never really hold onto the new rope if you're holding onto the old one so tightly, you're just never gonna let go. And what you saw during the dot com change,

really when that switched over is you saw changing of the guards. There were some people who just wouldn't let go of the rope. And there are other people who like, this is a time we have to change everything. And I fear that, you you brought it up first. I have heard crazy things like forecasting is a process. Well, if forecasting was a process, Goldman Sachs would have the ultimate process. They don't. They recognize that volatility is the norm. Like this is what neural nets are great for. If you have a large enough data set, we've spent 10 years.

tracking the globe's economy, building this model to do this stuff. This stuff can change the way you think about things. I've also heard people tell me how buyer centric they are while only studying their seller. like, there's like, there's a point where you have a realization. Life makes things hard to make it easy for you to change. Not everyone gets that message. Sometimes they think hard is what you have to work through.

Mark Petruzzi (18:41)

you

Stephen Messer (18:56)

No, I would say if you're sitting there today, if you are watching this and you were wondering, am I going to make my end of fiscal year? Because you are sitting there worried. You have put in place all the wrong systems. You think it works because it worked for 10 years and you are mistaking that what works in the past will work in the future. That is like saying, I'm going to give them all my salespeople quarters to call me from the road because cell phones don't exist.

So I'm not going to think about my Salesforce as having a computer in their pocket because now it's a smartphone. Like you change with the times. And if you're using something you bought five years ago, you are using an infrastructure that makes no sense for the modern world. You just haven't gotten there yet. So KK, you are right. I will tell you what the new sales org looks like. And you know it because it's your best sellers are already doing this. One, it is one to one selling. If you are doing mass marketing,

Cadence tools, auto dialers, SDRs, I will tell you that is going the way of the Dodo. You can call it a cadence, I promise you your customer's calling it spam. And I know that, and you know that, because when you get it from other people, you think to yourself, my God, I can't believe they sent me this message. I will tell you a few more things that they already know. They're not answering their phones anymore.

They're not like these are heads of sales who won't do the stuff that they're telling people to do bombard people. No buyers want you to know them. So why do I bring that up? If you had a daily feedback loop and you guys know this more than anyone else when you see a deal go in the odds change and go down you change your pitch to adjust to what's happening in the market. I'll tell you we sell volatility now. If you are worried about volatility that is why you need daily forecasting with traditional process forecasting as an example.

You're going to get a weekly forecast based on people's opinions. I need to know what the world is telling me daily. That, that is the message we didn't sell prior to 90 or 120 days ago. It's a feature of our product. You all have features of your products and services. You're figuring out which features of your products matter more. But if you can't recognize that the old pitch isn't working or not working for this buyer at this company in this region on this day, if you're not getting a daily feedback,

You're not going to, you're going to try one, two messages. Yeah, maybe good luck. hope that's enough. Ours we're trying six, seven, eight, nine, 10 different messages with different people. And we all collaborate so we can share which messages worked in which scenarios. And we're sharing that across our whole company. It means we're getting at bats much more frequently. And our message in 90 days, I can tell you has dramatically changed and will continue to change. That is the playbook. Now everybody is unique. Treat them that

KK (21:46)

Hmm.

Mark Petruzzi (21:47)

Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Let's move to ⁓ topic two. And maybe we'll even switch it up a little bit. Topic two is when forecasting breaks, what to trust instead. But I'd even like to take it a step further and just put it out there to your point when everything has changed and will continue to change in ways that we're not used to. We're not used to the

know, speed of change keeps getting faster and faster. And it's, it's kind of been unleashed. It's, know, we, got a real feel for it during the pandemic. You know, I think amazingly, most companies were able to really be nimble and efficient in that. But they're, they're gonna, they're gonna have to get used to that being the, the standard, not the exception. So when you look at that and you look at just general forecasting tools,

Stephen Messer (22:16)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (22:45)

you know, most forecasting tools or anything that's called the forecasting process is pretty much looking only at historical data. And when the market's changing as quickly as it is today, that data becomes irrelevant very, very quickly. So what are the biggest risks in relying on those outdated forecasting methods? you know, and where does it even go from here? Because...

your product is going to keep evolving and changing and daily forecasting is going to turn into hourly forecasting.

Stephen Messer (23:19)

Yeah. You know, you're a hundred percent right. mean, I will tell you, we could turn on hourly today if you wanted, by the way. We're already set up for that. think, if your forecasting process relies on interviewing your sellers, if your forecasting process relies on using machine learning only on your data, yourself, I think...

KK (23:39)

your own core force instance, your own, yeah.

Stephen Messer (23:43)

You are driving a car through your rear view mirror. You are going to crash into something. It is inevitable. It will be deadly. It will be bad. You just don't realize it because you think it's better than it was last year. And there was a period of time when you only had your own data to make predictions on. I look the reason why we look at our whole network, the reason why our customers pull it, the reason why the Wall Street Journal called us the ways for sales.

KK (23:46)

Eee.

Stephen Messer (24:13)

was because our assumption was it was easier to study the buyer to predict what the buyer was going to do than studying the seller to predict what the buyer is going to do. That should be obvious. It is crazy. There is an insanity that thinks that by studying my seller, I will predict what the buyer is doing. You are looking at the wrong person. These moments are the moments you realize the logic failure that you have.

If you're going daily, you are reacting at the speed your customer is feeling a pain. You will be buyer centric by its nature because you are studying the buyer. If you are doing a forecasting process, you are basically all trying to agree that none of you really know what's going on. It may make you feel good, but it doesn't matter. When we are driving on a distance in a trip that matters, we don't ask our four friends

what the trip should be, what direction we should take, and how long we will arrive. We go to Google Maps in ways for a reason. It knows about the road ahead. It's learning for more people. These are the moments you realize your systems are broken. They feel familiar. They feel good. But I think we're going to look back in a year, and nobody is going to believe that they used those antiquated systems and antiquated approaches. If you've done it for 30 years, it's antiquated.

I think this is a moment where you see a giant transformation. Now, is it that hard to learn? No. It feels like it. When we did COVID, do you remember when everyone was like, how is the country going to survive? And in two weeks, everybody learned to do business on Zoom.

KK (25:57)

Mm-hmm. It's pretty great actually when you think about that.

Stephen Messer (25:59)

This is one of those, this is one of those

moments where like you literally could turn it on. We get our customers live in no time. Literally, you could be live and have it. Yeah, you could literally be there tomorrow seeing how it works. And you could use people like you guys and say, how the hell do I use this thing? It is so easy. It's fear. But you know what? These moments drive people to have to overcome their fear. And that's when they make these big moments of change.

KK (26:08)

Right. Like, overnight. ⁓

Yeah.

Well, some of the, you know, historically, when you think back to any recessionary period, some of the some of our greatest companies were founded and took off in a recessionary time. And I'm not saying that that I think we're headed towards a recession, just knowing that things are volatile and people have the same reaction where they tend to sit on their hands. And coupled that with knowing that really and truly there's a massive opportunity.

when you have volatility like this, like this is when you can really shine and figure out how your product or service that you're selling can really help your customer solve the problems that they need to solve, like whatever it is, right?

Mark Petruzzi (27:11)

Yeah.

Stephen Messer (27:13)

You are 100 % right.

Mark Petruzzi (27:13)

And KK, just, KK, you just brought us in a great direction here. And I'd like to take the whole conversation up to that point. And I'll start it with a quick story. I've been fortunate enough to have met John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco a few different times. And the last time I was with him, he told the story to a bunch of us about Cisco and then more generally about

his view on capturing growth and capturing market share. And his point of view is that there's never any growth that's captured or market share that's captured in high growth situations. Because in his theory, companies just, get on, they catch the wave, they get a little sloppy, which we've seen that over and over again, and they all kind of become more like each other and become more commodities.

Stephen Messer (28:04)

.

Mark Petruzzi (28:08)

difficult times and he used the example of I believe it was the Kyoto earthquake in Japan when he just instead of like taking his Asia pack unit and just going into protection mode He looked at that and he said this is when we're gonna grab market share and he took a extremely difficult market environment and turned it into a

huge market share grab for Cisco and I mean that really hit home because

We're in that situation now globally. What an opportunity to go and really look at this, especially because we have this little word that means so much now and means different things to every different person. But this little word, this little acronym AI, like you can use that and leverage it into that market share grab today.

KK (28:40)

We are.

Steven, one of the things that you always say, and I quote you all the time, is that a seller with super intelligence on their side will outperform a seller without it any day of the week. And it's like, so we've got this volatile time, which is an incredible opportunity, as we've discussed, we've got AI in our corner that we can leverage to be incredibly differentiated. Like, I'm excited. Like, I'm excited about this.

Stephen Messer (29:02)

Lucky.

Yep.

Look, if you are a seller or a leader and you're freaking out right now, you are not seeing market opportunity. You have the wrong tooling. If you are there trying to figure out, I going to make my end of quarter? And you've got all these systems that's not working. It is not working for a reason, right? These are the moments where you realize the water has gone out. I am naked. Please help me. And you can make that change and transition very quickly. I think there are companies like us.

We are grabbing market share like crazy now because they have installed all these systems. And I'm able to point out, you used forecasting example. We do a lot more than forecasting, but let's just use forecasting because you brought it up. It's taking 20 % of their activity on Friday. You only have so many days left in this quarter and you're going to give up one of them to debate with each other. Your opinions based on what news you read and what you're hearing from customers of what your outcome is going to be. Do you know how many CROs are going to get fired?

for missing their number because they had no ability to tell in advance what was going on. And the board who's asking right now, what is this going to mean for our quarter? They are saying things like, I am hearing from my teams, as opposed to, we use a product like Collective Eye, which there's only us, but let's just say, I use Collective Eye and I'm seeing that the AI is telling me.

Mark Petruzzi (30:45)

Yeah. ⁓

Stephen Messer (30:50)

this is what's happening with my deals and I know exactly which ones to go into right away and I know exactly which person to talk to and I know exactly how to handle the situation and I'm going to do my best to deal with it but here are strategies that I'm going out there with because I'm trying to do what I can to salvage this crazy market and that is the difference between someone who can show the board that they like.

I would argue a lot of these people who are out there, and I'm sorry if they're listening and you're upset, if you're thinking I have put in tooling and I'm trying to manage it, you should be fired. The board should not be relying on you or your company or your team's opinion. That is insane. Can you imagine a banker or a broker saying to you, my personal opinion was this stock was going to do well? No, you better have a quantitative analysis that tells me exactly what's happening so at least I understand what's going on.

You are not doing your fiduciary obligation by appalling people's opinion. This is insane. It's insane.

Mark Petruzzi (31:45)

Yeah. And you know what, Stephen?

Stephen, you're taking me into a whole nother point as well. ⁓ And I'll try to make this a little bit of an analogy. But first, I'll start with a premise and a hypothesis. And this is something I truly believe. But sales reps are incredible manipulators. And some of them more than others. But they are really good at delivering their narrative. And what they want to see happen

and managing up to their CRO, to their CEO as well. So you're doing this polling as you're describing, and you're getting all these different sales reps to kind of put in their agenda. It almost feels to me like if you were, no matter what your political background is, if you were to say, I want to find out about something that happened, the Ukrainian-Russian peace talks,

and you brought on individuals and you brought one commentator from Fox News, one from CNN and one from MSNBC and you found some of the new brands out there. I mean, could you imagine what kind of information you would have at the end of that day and how they would, you would go into one thing and you'd be told one thing and then you go into the other thing and you'd be told an entirely different thing. But that is what happens and we know it.

Stephen Messer (32:47)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (33:10)

because we've all been CROs, we've all been sales leaders on this call. And that's what I've never thought of it this way. Maybe it's the political environment we're in today. But that's what some of those days have felt like to me now that I think back at them, because I would be amazed. I would have one sales leader telling me one thing about the economy and another one telling me an entirely different thing. One group that's saying they're gonna hit every one of their commit deals.

and one of them coming in and saying, I'm not gonna hit any. And then only to find out that the one that said they weren't gonna hit any hit half. And the one that said they were gonna hit all hit 30%. So it's amazing and your tool does take a lot of that out of the equation. And what it also does is it takes the wasted time because same thing, if you're just gonna listen to political commentary all day long for 12 hours a day, you're kind of wasting your time because

Stephen Messer (33:44)

Yep.

Mark Petruzzi (34:07)

no matter what and no matter how smart you are, you're not gonna get like, you're not gonna get an answer, because there's not one answer.

Stephen Messer (34:13)

Yeah.

KK (34:14)

It's impossible to

know without that. And I'll say one thing, and then I want to ask you a question about kind of trusting the data, because I know that there's listeners out there thinking, yeah, this sounds really cool, but how do I know I can trust this data? So I want to go there in a minute. So for us at AGS, where Mark and I are a firm, we

Stephen Messer (34:28)

Yeah.

KK (34:37)

you know, we use collective eye. And so we, log in every morning and I, and I look at the odds of the different opportunities that, we're, that we're working on. And I always think to myself, you know, red light, yellow light, green light, right? And if a deal has an odds that is like 80 % or higher, I'm like green light, everything's tracking well there. And if we have a team members that have deals that are in the yellow light, which is like, you know, I would say 60 to 75 % or 80%.

Stephen Messer (34:50)

you

KK (35:05)

That's where I'm now gonna spend my day. And when I make that phone call to our seller and say, hey, how can I support, how can we create differentiation in XYZ opportunity because it's a yellow light, right? And I know that we really want this and this would be a really great win for us. It's a yellow light. Like, what can we do to really make sure we understand everything at play? And then that's a true coaching conversation, not a...

Stephen Messer (35:33)

Yeah.

KK (35:34)

you know, saying the same, you know, stuff to every single salesperson that you talk to on every single call, you feel like you're saying the same thing like a broken record, right? So that red light, yellow light, green light is really cool as far as productivity and being able to coach in the moment, those types of things. But take me back to how do I know I can trust this? Like I know we're going to have some skeptics out there.

Stephen Messer (35:43)

Yeah.

Look, there are, look, my ideal a lot, as you know, with a lot of people say they're snowflake, our business works differently. Our, I would say there's two things to realize. One is everyone thinks that the challenge that they went through to figure out how to sell their product is what an AI has to. And the other thing is they think they're selling a product. Here's what makes all this stuff work so well. One is just understand we're studying the buyer across everyone in our network. It's pooled data.

It is like Google Maps. learns from every driver. what part of the challenge that the selling team always is dealing with is trying to figure out how to sell their product, but they don't realize it's a random walk. Their buyer is going through a buying process. They think they're selling it. No, they're going about their process of buying it. Their process is pretty consistent. They're pro. In fact, if you've ever had a customer, you're selling every month.

more more stuff to you know their process really well. You know exactly how long it takes. know who needs to sign it off. You know how to pick that one pretty well. It's all the fact that you're selling to new customers all the time that it looks like a random walk. It is things that are feeling similar. It is things that have kind of commonalities, but generally it's a buying process. So when we study that buyer at buying organizations all day long across our network, we're able to make really good predictions.

We're taking in your data to learn about you. Yeah, there's some uniqueness. We're going to learn about that. But generally, we're learning that. So the first thing is conceptually recognize that what we're studying is the actual person who can make the decision and their team and their company and everything that's going on all day long. If you understand that, when you start to see the use of the product, because the only way you'll ever believe it is using it. If you use Google Maps or Waze,

Mark Petruzzi (37:35)

Yeah.

Stephen Messer (37:45)

And someone told you it could tell you where the police were, you would say, that's BS. Until you see your first example, or where it routes you in a shortcut, or it knows about an accident beforehand, you see an example. If I had told you three years ago about this amazing thing called ChatGBT that could draft and do all these great things, that you would say, Steve, you're crazy. But then you played with it, and you were like, my goodness. And then you played more, and you realized there's better and better ways to write prompts.

to get even better results, you start to go down the rabbit hole. There is no way that I, KK, you or Mark will convince people to believe something until they see it for themselves. But here's what I love. What I love are all the people who say, I don't believe it, so I'm not gonna give it a try. I think you need to prove me wrong. That is like me commenting, I don't like Paris, but I've never visited France.

Okay, that is not a fair representation. That is an opinion based on nothing. So if you can't take that gamble to try it out, and we give lots of free ways for people to try it out. Intelligence.com is one free way. We give people 14 days to try it and opt out if they don't like it without any cost. We do lots of really cool things to give people the chance to try it. But if you don't try it, you've got a bigger problem. That means you're just trying to reinforce your own bias.

that it can't work because you're afraid of something, whether you're afraid it's going to take over your job or whether you're it's not going to work or whether you're afraid you're going to look stupid or you're afraid. Trust me, until you're in it, you just, you don't have the ability to make that decision. Now, can I point out one last thing before I jump off that subject? Cause I think this fear is an important thing. The one group we haven't talked about that will affect every seller that will affect every sales leader and every org right now is

The only natural predator for a CRO is the board. And there are a lot of people out there thinking, I can manage the board. But the statistics of a 15 month tenure on average for CROs say boards don't believe your BS. They have gotten the place where you have spent all this money on tooling that is based on studying the seller, not the buyer.

So they do not believe anything you are saying. And if you show up at the end of this quarter or during the quarter when they're asking questions about how is this stuff that's going on affecting our business, and it starts with I think, or my team believes, you have a shark circling around you waiting to feed on you because they are thinking I have a fiduciary obligation to shareholders.

whether I'm a PE firm, whether I'm a VC firm, or whether there's gesture investors and they are saying, think, you think the entire business, we have to make decisions on how to do capital allocation, whether we should be staffing up, staffing down, building or retracting. have debt holders and your argument is I've spoken to my team. You don't have a quantitative way to say we use collective eye, it studies the entire.

sales world and what it's telling me right now is that we're going to get hit and here's where we're going to get hit or we should be doubling down in this sector because this sector is growing and we can put our money there and we can make up for our numbers because if the answer is I met with my team on Friday and we believe that we're still going to be on track.

Mark Petruzzi (41:28)

It's trouble.

Stephen Messer (41:28)

You can hear

and you can see the shark circling, thinking, how do we let this guy be in charge of our business?

Mark Petruzzi (41:36)

Well, especially Steven, you've kind of used the shark analogy, but it is the DNA of those women and men who are typically on boards are entirely different than the typical DNA for a CRO. And they are only, it's black and white. It's what are the reports show? What does the data show? I mean, that's why data as, know, leveraging data science in every function within a company

why do you think that is such an easy investment for a board to make? They're like, yes, I want more data. And I've been asking you to get more data from your customers for years. And you've got this CRM system. And every time you go and do a presentation, you start the presentation by saying, we don't really have great information on our customers. And we're trying to get better. And we're working on it. So you're 100 %

Stephen Messer (42:28)

Yeah.

We have pipeline cleanup.

here's how our pipeline's grown, but we have some cleanup we need to do. Yeah, I sit on boards. I sit on public boards. I sit on private boards. Trust me, here's what they don't see, What they don't see is the CFO comes in, perfect numbers, no opinions. The CMO comes in and shows what's happening in the market.

Mark Petruzzi (42:36)

It's the same thing.

Stephen Messer (42:55)

with quantifiable, here's how we got our cact down. Here's where we're spending. We're seeing less conversion right here. The seller comes in, leans back. So let me tell you what's going on. Here's what we're hearing. Here's what we're feeling. Here's what we're saying. Here's how we're changing. We're going to implement methodologies. We're going to change some of our hiring practices. And they're just like, give me something I can rely on. And the numbers they put in the board book come out of systems that they know are fake.

like CRM, they come out of things where they're looking at the numbers and nothing adds up because they're like, last quarter, you came and said you had 10 million in ⁓ new pipe, but I'm seeing now 15. Should I read that? And they're like, well, we have cleanup and ⁓ we still have work to do. We're still implementing some things. Our CRM needs to get redone. They're just like, what the hell is going on here? And they're done with it.

Mark Petruzzi (43:24)

Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

Stephen Messer (43:53)

That's what

you see happening when you see the high turnover. They're basically saying we have to find someone who can actually manage this business with data. And that is not a process. Let me come back to that. That is a machine spitting out trustworthy, consistently quantified, up-to-date information. I would rather be a CRO walking in saying, look, I'll show you the trend of where the AI was predicting. You can see here.

And you know, you could do this in tele. It'll say, you could see here when the tariffs went on, immediately our odds went down and you can see which deals got pushed back out. You could see the impact of that. Now the tariffs came off and you could see exactly how it rippled through. And by the way, when they asked me questions, how great would it be to be able to go on a tele and just say, okay, which parts of our business or which regions or which industries had the biggest impact? And it comes back immediately with an answer. So now you're giving them hard answers with factual information.

And then you could bring them to examples and show them. Here's where you can see the customer started saying these things and look how the odds started changing. And now they're like, okay, you have control of your revenue. You have control of your business. That's what people care about.

Mark Petruzzi (45:01)

Yes.

KK (45:01)

My heart.

Mark Petruzzi (45:04)

And Stephen, what they also get, you also get to do as a CRO there is say, okay, this even when you have bad news to report and you could say, well, this is what the numbers with Collective Eye started showing me 30 days ago. And this is what we did. And this is my response. And this is what the team came up with. And guess what? We've seen this response now. We've seen the numbers going up. We're back in a better point.

KK (45:24)

Yes.

Mark Petruzzi (45:34)

And like I do that all day long. mean, and when I started using Collective Eye, you know, I, I wanted this to be as amazing of a product. And, and, you know, for me, this started all the way back in, in work that I was doing with BCG where, you know, there was a lot of really smart people that right at the beginning were like, this isn't going to work. Collective Eye isn't going to do what it said. And, and there's all these things and these are people I respect. And so I kind of went in with first like,

I didn't believe anything. I was testing all kinds of things. The things you and I have talked about, Stephen, like where, okay, I have three meetings on an account. Well, is that gonna make my account jump up 20 points in the forecast ⁓ odds? And I've done that and I've seen it. And again, yes, do meetings and interaction help your forecast? Usually, but is it the main driver?

And right now, like for example, in accounts that me and KK have, that we've had a bunch of great interaction and emails, but the numbers are still going down because there's macroeconomic and geopolitical things happening here that are bigger than our little meetings that I'm having. That's the difference. But I love the concept and I want to just share it one more time for our audience of, you get to do this stuff almost real time.

Stephen Messer (46:35)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (47:00)

and see what your actions and your thoughts and those great strategic ideas that you come up with and you get to see how it's really gonna impact your revenue at the end of the day. That's amazing to me.

Stephen Messer (47:09)

Thank

KK (47:14)

And if you're going to be like in this case, there's a deal that Mark and I

Stephen Messer (47:17)

you.

KK (47:17)

are working on right now actually, we, gosh, we feel so good about it, but man, the odds are not good and we're not happy about that. And it's telling us, you know what, don't spend five hours working on that. Go, go bark up another tree, go find something else, go prospect. You know, you, you know, it's, it's, you, you see the immediate impact of the markets on your pipeline, but then that education.

Stephen Messer (47:33)

Yeah.

KK (47:44)

just makes you so much smarter. Right? And yeah.

Stephen Messer (47:47)

So cool.

It's so cool. What's so cool about it is what you're both saying is it's hard if you haven't seen this as a someone who's watching this via it's hard to get that like you will see deals where you have tons of activities and the odds keep going down and you'll have deals where you have no activities. The answer shooting up. You're like what's going on? And what it is is that's the market that we're capturing telling you something. And so you all of sudden you're like I mean the first time you'll see it. They're like something's wrong. I didn't do anything on that. I'm like no.

KK (48:08)

Yeah.

Stephen Messer (48:15)

Pick up the phone. You pick up the phone, they're like, what great timing. You're like, how did it know? But that's the power of these network models is you start to get this wow factor and you start to realize tons of activity does not indicate that it's working well. Sometimes they're just being really polite. Sometimes even if they wanted to buy, they just don't have the dollars, but they want to learn. There's so many things you learn. And in these moments, I'll give a great example. KK called me up today and she's like, my God, the macro. She's like, I can see in certain deals.

Mark Petruzzi (48:30)

Yeah

KK (48:36)

Mm-hmm.

Stephen Messer (48:44)

that are in certain areas exactly what's going on. It's like you can see it on a daily basis. We call it cycle time, which is if I can get down to a daily feedback loop of how did yesterday affect my tomorrow. That doesn't just mean me. That means like everything. How does it, what's happening? I can now quickly react to it because even if it's just putting in a phone call to say, my God, I saw what happened yesterday with Powell. How are you guys holding up? And if they're like, this stuff is whiplash is killing me.

Tell me what's going on. Can I give you an introduction to someone? Can I help with this problem in some other way? Like, hey, do you need me to slow down because you're worried about it? You're gonna find out faster and you're gonna not invest the wrong time or good time in bad places. And you also might be able to build a relationship that grows. I will tell you, we are growing faster in the last month and a half than we've ever grown and we've been growing fast. It is because all of a sudden everyone's like, I can't.

KK (49:28)

I'm not.

Stephen Messer (49:41)

wait a week to know what's going on. And I definitely don't want to ask people who themselves don't know what's going on. And all of sudden now we're dropping in fast, showing people and they're grateful because they're like, imagine if I had this and it's not too late, right? I have a feeling we're in for a lot more volatility because the world is becoming like.

There's a risk of Taiwan going to war. There is a risk that India goes to war with China. There's a risk that the Ukraine problem doesn't get better, that it gets worse. We have Yemen shooting missiles again. We have the threat of Iran war. Like just macro things like that, yet alone what's happening day to day and the disruption that AI is causing in all parts of the business. I don't think we're going through a very volatile period, which is for me, thankfully using collective eye, my own product, because I eat my own dog food. I am excited.

KK (50:20)

your life.

Stephen Messer (50:30)

because this is the moment that people realize everything they're doing needs to change. That doesn't happen often. I want to grab it. I want every one of your people listening here to feel excited, not fearful what's going to happen each day.

Mark Petruzzi (50:35)

Yeah.

Yeah, incredible.

KK (50:44)

Right.

One thing I'll also say before we wrap up, this has been such a fun episode. It took me, gosh, what am I now? Almost 49. It took me a lot of years to get to a point where I actually look forward to challenges. Because when I see them, when I find myself in a challenge, my first thought is,

cannot wait to grow. I cannot wait to see how I get better and stronger as a result of this. I almost welcome it. I go as far as to say I'm almost looking for them. And so that's sort of the lens and the perspective that we have to have as sales leaders, as sellers going into these times. Don't be afraid to change. Don't be afraid to jump in.

That's just my perspective there. And I will say, we're going to put in the show notes here a link to be able to learn more about these great systems as well. So ⁓ head there and make sure you go to learn more.

Mark Petruzzi (51:55)

Yeah.

Stephen Messer (51:56)

Look,

pair yourself up with the super intelligence. That's my main point. I think you said it best, KK, which is, you ⁓ you can overcome any challenge if you're aware of it. If you're unaware of it, it's just you're living in fear that something is going to drop that's going to blow your quarter. Something's going to drop that's going to blow your pipe. Something's going to drop. That's not going to give you the ability to overcome it because you're going to find out far too late to fix it. Overcoming things is what makes a great seller.

KK (51:59)

Yep.

Stephen Messer (52:24)

wake up in the morning and think today is the day I earned my keep. I did something great. And if you get a daily feedback like Collective Eye gives, you will literally wake up saying, this is where I need to be, or it's not worth it. You're not going to get surprises anymore. And I love the point of we can overcome anything. KK, I've seen you do it. I've seen Mark do it. Every one of us who's listening to this has seen great people do it. If given the chance, you can overcome something.

not given the chance because you didn't want to listen, which is really what Collective Eye is doing. It's just listening on your behalf and telling you what this means for it's a translator of what the buyer is trying to tell you. If you're not listening, you're not in the game. You think you are, but you're not.

Mark Petruzzi (52:54)

Yeah, you don't have a chance.

KK (53:08)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Petruzzi (53:09)

Yeah.

Stephen, I'll close real quickly with a little bit of another story here. it's when I was ⁓ kind of college time, you know, year or two after college. Well, my whole life, I had a friend who actually went into the Green Beret and the special forces and we would always meet up and there would be seven or eight special forces, individuals with two or three of us that were

you know, the ones who don't have that kind of training and background. And I don't want to make it seem like I'm someone who would ever be looking to get into a fight in a bar or something. But there were bars that we would go to when we knew we had those Green Berets with us, then where we would, you know, we'd never even think about going to without them. And that's kind of the way I feel with Collective Eye. And you just got to use it for good, not...

not evil and that's goal.

Stephen Messer (54:08)

Amen.

KK (54:09)

Yeah

Stephen Messer (54:09)

Amen. Amen. And we will.

Mark Petruzzi (54:11)

Beautiful.

Yep. it's, well, Stephen, first off, it's amazing. We are so grateful for the relationship we have with you and your team. And we're so grateful to have been an early, early adopter and get to leverage it every day. And thank you for taking the time with us today. This was awesome.

Stephen Messer (54:33)

That's mutual and I hope your community communicates to you because they could get a lot of their questions answered really easily from you guys. You guys are power users. You're amazing. We've loved working with you. We've learned from you and ⁓ so grateful to be on today and hopefully give people some excitement, not fear around this volatile market.

Mark Petruzzi (54:52)

Yeah, beautiful. Thank you again. All the best.

KK (54:53)

Absolutely. Thank you, Stephen. We'll see

you next time, okay?

Stephen Messer (54:56)

Thank

you guys. Can't wait anytime you want.

Mark Petruzzi (55:00)

Perfect. And thanks to our amazing audience. Have a great day all. Cheers.

KK (55:00)

Absolutely.

Mark Petruzzi (55:12)

It will not let me, there we go, okay.

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