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Tips on how to improve sales with AI-powered CRM from Adam Honig
- Spiro is a sales automation CRM that uses artificial intelligence to organize your contacts, reach more prospects and close bigger deals.
- I was presenting at a conference and I asked a bunch of salespeople to raise their hands if they liked CRM and one guy threw something at me.
- Yeah. So, our vision is, well, what if there was a CRM that nobody actually had to use?
- And what we learned by working with this particular client is that they were literally able to speak to 30% more prospects during the week.
- There are so many distractions in today’s world. Can you really have time to focus and think about what’s super important? And that’s one of the things that Spiro helps you with because it’s constantly looking at the data to say, “Where are these gaps of things that you need to do?”
- As a sales person who gets paid upon the success of their actions, you want to just keep taking more actions and not typing in data. So that’s kind of what it’s about.
- Somebody who’s dealing with lots of small transactions is going to have a different experience than somebody who’s selling a few big deals. And so, Spiro notices those things over time it just gets stronger, and stronger in terms of what it recommends.
- Spiro can give you push alerts about actions that you need to take. Also, within the app itself, there’s a self-writing to do list, which is literally a log of everybody that Spiro thinks that you need to follow up with.
- Frankly, it’s so cheap to provide data storage. I don’t know why anybody charges that way.
- Well, one of my pet peeves is people who get worried about like, AI taking over the world.
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IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
Spiro is a sales automation CRM that uses artificial intelligence to organize your contacts, reach more prospects and close bigger deals.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast.
I really don’t know the best way to introduce you to the topic today, because as you all know, I’m a huge fan of technology, and leveraging technology for sales, and marketing and the guest that I just spoke to in this episode that you’re gonna hear shortly, absolutely blew my mind. It’s not very often that I pause, because I’m not sure what the next question should be, but I was just taken back and overwhelmed. I can’t imagine what our sales and the marketing world’s going to look like using his technology.
When I say, “Hey Siri, what sales prospects should I call today?” And Siri’s using his software sorts out the most likely prospect is closest to buying my product or service and sends me their name and phone number to follow up. So, that’s we’re going to talk about today.
We’re gonna talk about sales, and marketing and my guest kind of got in the studio to do this. His name is Adam Honig, and he is the founder of a company called Spiro, Spiro’s technology.
It’s a CRM company that’s focused on breathing new life into sales technology to help salespeople like you, and I reach new heights. So, Adam has worked in the tech space for over 25 years, building companies that have delivered enterprise software solutions as well as delivering, and developing award-winning teams across the globe.
So, Adam is a founder of Spiro, and he developed tech solutions for over 300,000 salespeople in the last 10 years so, he’s learned some really invaluable lessons throughout his career. And today on this episode, he’s gonna share some of his expertise on how you, and I can use artificial intelligence and a new software platform.
It’s new. Actually, it’s been out for about four years to help us move the sales dial in a big way, but in an easy to use application. So, I’d like to welcome Adam to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast. Well, welcome to the podcast, Adam. I am super stoked to talk to you because I love sales, and I love sales and marketing, and you apparently, in terms of looking at your background and what you’re doing, have a new solution that you’re gonna share with us today.
Adam Honig: Thanks. So again, I’m super excited to be here too. Nothing, nothing like going really fast that gets me excited. So thank you, for having me on.
Doug: Well, and I’m not sure how new your solution is, but I mean, it’s new to me. And you guys have a pretty big value proposition that you make right up front, which is a pretty bold statement. So, do you just want to share a little bit of background on how that all came about?
Adam Honig: Sure. My company’s name is Spiro, and our website is spiro.ai ’cause we’re all about the artificial intelligence, of course. But in our domain, which is CRM, what that really means is that we’re trying to use AI so that people never actually have to use CRM. Because the vast majority of salespeople in the world, I mean, let’s be honest, they hate CRM. I was presenting at a conference, and at a sales conference, and I asked a bunch of salespeople to raise their hands if they liked CRM and one guy threw something at me. I mean, it’s just bad out there.
Doug: [crosstalk 00:03:09]
Adam Honig: Yeah. So, our vision is, well, what if there was a CRM that nobody actually had to use? It basically works in the background to watch your email conversations, listens to your phone calls, creates contacts, updates opportunities, puts deals in the right stage in the pipeline for you, so that all you’re really doing is selling, and leadership and marketing get all of the data that they want out of the CRM, ’cause that’s really what it’s there for.
And, you can go ahead and work with customers. I mean, that’s the dream and that’s what’s really Spiro is all about. And so, right. I think what you’re alluding to, Doug is right on our website. We have 100% CRM adoption guarantee, and this is sort of our stake in the ground of saying that, “Hey, listen, we, the founders of this company are all CRM industry veterans. We know that the big Achilles heel of CRM is that frankly, nobody uses it so, how do we get around that?”
First of all, we’re gonna guarantee that it’s gonna happen, and then we’re gonna make the software so smart that it doesn’t have to be used. So that’s kind of the idea behind Spiro.
Doug: That almost sounds too good to be true. I’m not gonna name names, but I’ve used several different CRM systems, and my clients use a variety of them and easy has never been in my conversation when I’m talking about CRM. It’s always a hassle to get people to use it, to data entry, to get the right data and to integrate with your existing tools. So, can you walk us through maybe a case study of somebody that you helped them to solve this pain point?
Adam Honig: Sure. So, we focus on companies that sell b2b and so our customers are selling a wide range of products and services, but always to businesses. And so, we have a large customer who is in the cardboard box business. I know that doesn’t sound very sexy, but this company provides all of the cardboard boxes for major cereal brands, and Amazon and all kinds of people like that. So, it’s a big business.
When we started working with them, their 50-person sales team was basically tracking everything that they were doing all of their deals on a big complicated Excel spreadsheet. And 50 person sales team running everything on Excel is, that’s pretty tricky. And so, I said …
Doug: Wow.
Adam Honig: … to the head of sales, I said, “Hey, how is this possible? Why aren’t you guys using CRM?” And he said, “I’ve seen CRM.” Like sort of implying that this was like, I was just crazy tone for like even suggesting it to them. And honestly, this …
Doug: That’s funny.
Adam Honig: …. is sort of the attitude of a lot of people. And so, we said, well, our pitch is pretty straightforward. It’s like, “Well, okay, no. I understand, but what if there is a CRM that the team didn’t need to use?”And that really got his attention, and we started to show him how this would work. And basically, that this company, it’s doing a lot of outbound prospecting and meeting with people who need cardboard boxes, which turns out to be a lot of different companies. And Spiro, because of its nature, is just starting to automatically catalog all of those interactions. It learns who the important contacts are at a company based upon how the outreach is going, and then it starts making recommendations in the gaps.
So if, let’s just say Procter and Gamble is one of the accounts that we’re targeting, and we’ve neglected to follow up with them in a certain period of time. Spiro is gonna proactively remind people to do that. And one of the features that it has is, it’s kind of what we call a self-writing to do a list of everything that the salesperson needs to do based upon these gaps. And what we learned by working with this particular client is that, because we were removing all of this data entry work that they needed to do plus making these recommendations, they were literally able to speak to 30% more prospects during the week.
Doug: Wow.
Adam Honig: Now, I always say this when I say that, because speaking to more prospects does not mean that sales are gonna go up. I’d like to tell you that it would, and there’s a lot of factors involved in that. But Doug, what I can guarantee you is that, if you didn’t speak to prospects, sales would go down, right? So there’s some sort of relationship in there. I don’t know what it is, but our mission is, “Hey, can we get you more at-bats? Can we put you in touch with more people?” And you have to take it from there.
Doug: Well, I think the thing that I’d heard is, our pastor once said that if you’re not bringing your wife roses, somebody will.
Adam Honig: Duh, that’s a really good example. Exactly.
Doug: So, if you’re not talking to your client, and even really, you may not be getting a sale when you talk to them. You might identify a problem they have early on, and be able to resolve that before it becomes an issue.
Adam Honig: Absolutely, and I think, one of the things that a lot of people are focused on today is, there are so many distractions in today’s world. You get so many alerts, and emails, and news articles, and Twitter and who the heck knows what, right? And then, can you really have time to focus and think about what’s super important, right? And that’s one of the things that Spiro helps you with because it’s constantly looking at the data to say, “Where are these gaps of things that you need to do?”
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IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
Spiro is a sales automation CRM that uses artificial intelligence to organize your contacts, reach more prospects and close bigger deals.
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Adam Honig: And so, it’s just not taking away from a sales person’s acumen, or the marketing teams lead scoring or anything like that, but it’s another input to help you get really focused on the things that matter.
Doug: Well, and I think on the other side is to take an opposing view to that is that lots of times, I find clients are spending time doing things in the name of sales and marketing. So, they might be data entering into their CRM, they might be looking in to their lead funnel, they might be spending hours and hours in there because they can say, “Hey, this is what I’m doing for sales and marketing,” when they really should be like you said, talking to the customers. So that also eliminates that from the people who like to have all the tasks on the desk, and put some back in front of the prospect.
Adam Honig: Absolutely, and I’m sort of that old school guy, I guess. I really believe in the power of conversation, and engaging with people, and talking with them. And I think that there’s a lot of resistance to, especially for newer salespeople about picking up the phone, and talking to somebody instead of texting or emailing, and whatnot.
I think that solutions like Spiro that remind you about these things can be a very good way for sales leaders to help encourage their teams in that direction.
Doug: Well, I mean AI is all over the place right now. I mean, I was at an email marketing conference at the time about using AI, and that, and they’re using it for content. We’re using it now for generating ads, and to see who’s responding. So, how does it, specifically apply to your technology? Because I spend a lot of time online every day, and I spend a lot of time looking for solutions to my client’s problems.
So, this is a brand new topic for me. So it may also be a brand new topic to our listeners that there is technology that can assist you in this way.
Adam Honig: Yeah. So AI, of course, is a very general term that can mean a lot of different things. We used two very specific components of AI technology. One is called natural language processing. And what this is, basically computer algorithms that recognize and learn from the language, the literal text of emails that people are sending, and the words that are literally said in phone conversations between salespeople and prospects. And we use that data, the language data itself to form a view of the salesperson’s sales process, and to also create data within Spiro.
So for example, if I’m emailing [email protected], and it seems like I’m pitching her asking for a meeting, or following up on a proposal or some sort of sales related language in that, Spiro is gonna recognize that, and it’s gonna take action based upon that. Adam Honig: It might create a contact, it might associate an email with a company. If staples is already in my pipeline, and this is a new contact, it’s gonna, boom, go ahead and add them in.
It’s gonna start looking for their phone numbers in the body of that email. If I say on a phone call, “Hey, Doug, I’m gonna follow up with you next week, or I’m gonna give you the quote or whatever.” Spiro is gonna can recognize that, and know that that’s something that it needs to remind you of.
So, this AI technology is very powerful because from a technology standpoint, in the past, we would basically have to write thousands, and thousands of individual rules to look for this kind of context. But now using natural language processing, the AI learns what the relationships are between those words to do it without us having to explicitly tell it. That got a little technical in there, but does that make any sense?
Doug: Yeah, it does, ’cause I’m thinking of the typical process. So, if we go to today’s CRM, I can have a conversation with you, and then when I’m done my conversation, I’m gonna go in and I’m gonna make some notes about what we talked about. “Hey, talk to Adam today. We talked about this, this and this. I got an update on some stuff that’s happening with his family, or a trip that he’s going on, or a favorite restaurant he likes.” I got an action item, I need to call him back in 30 days. So then, I have to go in and take a box to do a follow-up action.
So, it’s really dependent on me spending a lot of time with my hands on the keyboard. And in today’s mobile world, my keyboard now is my phone and so, I don’t wanna type all that stuff on my phone.
Adam Honig: Right, Right. So, imagine you didn’t have to. Imagine at the end of the call, Spiro would just say to you, “Hey, I think that went pretty well. Is that right?” And you’d say, “Yes.” And it already had the transcription of your conversation. It already knew what the next steps were. And then it could say to you, “Oh, great call with Adam. Now call Joe ’cause he really needs to call.”
And as a person who gets paid upon the success of their actions, you wanna just keep taking more actions and not typing in that data. So that’s kind of what it’s about.
Doug: I am almost a bit afraid about the technology if my wife knew this existed. I mean, I would have no excuse for the things that I’m not doing.
Adam Honig: Well, thankfully, we don’t license it to your wife. No, I’m just kidding but …
Doug: just [inaudible 00:13:04] to be.
Adam Honig: Well, if [crosstalk 00:13:07]
Doug: You don’t wanna say it.
Adam Honig: So, I’m a really big baseball fan, Doug and I was thinking about sales in the context of baseball. And one of the great things about working in sales technologies is knowing that salespeople, and I’m a salesperson. We tend to do the same things over and over again. Just like a baseball player, they can really only have three outcomes when they step up to the bat. A salesperson getting off a sales call, there’s a limited set of things that happen. And so we know what those are and we learn from the language which one is most likely over time.
But in your scenario with your wife, I mean, what you’re doing in your life in general, is much, much broader and so, designing AI to kind of capture a wide range of different options and things that you could be doing is way harder than what we’re up to.
Doug: Sure. Fair enough. Now, does the technology then learn based on the team? So, the example you gave with the box company, they’ve got 50 staff. A and so, while the company probably got some processes in place in terms of how people conduct themselves, each person is gonna be individual.
Adam Honig: Yes. So, we trained Spiro just so that you know, on 15,000 salespeople of all different kinds for free for a year when we were setting it up, and that’s one of the things about AI that you really need to do. You need to train it with data. And so, Spiro has a default view of things right off the bat. So, every new person who comes on kind of starts with a default view, and then it learns about their particular sales process and their team’s sales process.
So, if somebody whose sales cycle takes two weeks is gonna get a different experience with Spiro than somebody whose sales cycle takes six months. Somebody who’s dealing with lots of small transactions is gonna have a different experience than somebody who’s selling a few big deals. And so, it notices those things over time it just gets stronger, and stronger in terms of what it recommends.
Doug: Wow. I don’t even know what to say. I mean, I’m listening to this, I’m thinking, I can’t believe this actually exists in the marketplace. This has got to be just an answer to a starving crowd.
Adam Honig: Well, we’ve grown very rapidly. So, I think that there must be some resonance with people on the market. But I do wanna say that, as I mentioned, I’ve been working in CRM for about 20 years, and we started Spiro about four years ago and I think we were very fortunate to start the company at a time where all of this AI technology was just coming together. Timing is so much of the name of the game and so, we were able to build in the AI right from the ground up with the product, and I think that’s given us a big advantage over companies that kind of want to layer it on after the fact.
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IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
Spiro is a sales automation CRM that uses artificial intelligence to organize your contacts, reach more prospects and close bigger deals.
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Doug: Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking of those. I was thinking of some of the big brands that we’ve we’ve engaged with in the past, and how difficult it would be to now refitting your software, your CRM solution with AI, with all the Legacy data and hardware that you’re currently using to run it.
Adam Honig: Right, and not to mention like, I mean, Salesforce, they’re a great company, they have a great product. But we’ve tried working with Spiro to connect it to Salesforce and companies, they customize the heck out of it so much that it’s very hard to get AI to really understand what’s going on within those organizations. And then, when companies spend all that time customizing it, then they also, frankly, they actually tend to make it harder for their salespeople to use it. So, it’s sort of funny that way.
Doug: So, can we just dive in just a different direction? I was kind of looking at your one sheet, and your background and I’m curious to get your feedback on the top eight reasons why no one’s buying from you.
Adam Honig: Wow. Well, that’s definitely a big topic. I mean, I believe that there’s many reasons. I mean, people will take any excuse not to buy from you, right? And I’d say that in no particular order, really trying to have a genuine relationship and understanding of what somebody is about, is definitely a big point of failure for a lot of sales people. So, people feel like they should be talking about the product or kind of pushing something instead of listening. That’s very key. The other thing that’s super related to that is timing.
And, people are gonna buy most of the time within their timeframe, and I feel like a lot of salespeople want people to buy on their timeframe. And so the tactics that they’re taking can really turn buyers off, and I see this a lot in our working with salespeople.
Adam Honig: It’s trying to get to encourage them to get inside of the buyers head instead of kind of, what’s my need? This is my month, my quota, my quarter and stuff like that going on. So, I’d say those are the probably, the most present ones for me at this moment.
Doug: So, how does your software solution address that issue?
Adam Honig: Well, so I’d say that it doesn’t directly address it so much, but the concept that we were talking about before about giving you more at-bats, if you will, right?
Doug: Sure.
Adam Honig: The ability to have more conversations, the ability to widen your pipeline so that you’re dealing with a wider set of buyers means that you don’t have to be so concerned about that one buyer’s timings, because it should even out more as you have a wider pipeline. So that’s the way I would encourage people to take a look at it, instead of just being so single focused on that one buyer that you need to make your quarter.
Doug: Well, and what I was thinking of is, because AI is doing the heavy lifting is really difficult for me to maintain a relationship with the say, more than 100 people. Even that’s gonna be difficult, but with AI, it’s gonna help identify where people are, and based on the conversations and follow up, maybe indicate what their timing is like.
Adam Honig: Absolutely, and I think we’ve all had this issue that like you’re walking down the street one day and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I forgot to call Joe.” And you’re like, just like it’s suddenly remembering that, right? And like imagine if you were able to avoid all of those moments because the AI is helping you remember that, and putting you in the right place at the right time.
Doug: So, how does [inaudible 00:19:12] your solution … How does Spiro work with me? So, if I’m using your tool, and I’ve got my iPhone or my android, how do these alerts show up and how does this interaction happen?
Adam Honig: Well, there’s a couple of different ways. So, Spiro can certainly give you push alerts about actions that you need to take. Also, within the app itself, there’s this self-writing to do list, which is literally a log of everybody that Spiro thinks that you need to follow up with.
And the use case for that often for field-based sales reps is that they have an hour maybe before a meeting or something like that. They can open up Spiro, they can get their top people that they need to follow up with and boom, boom, boom, make a whole bunch of calls and just be super productive before their next meeting.
The other thing that Spiro does, Doug, which is really cool, is it will also enable an email, you to have an email conversation with it. So, you can literally email Spiro and say, “Who should I follow up with next,” and they’ll give you some person’s name, and phone number and a little bit of context. And then, you can have an email conversation with Spiro about your deals, about your pipeline. If you’re a sales manager, you can ask it things like, “Hey, what did Doug do last week?” And kind of get an update on it.
So, we’ve enabled sort of like a chat kind of functionality with Spiro over email to make it super easy for you to get information, and know what you should be doing.
Doug: Wow, that’s crazy. I can’t imagine not having to log into an app, and go dig all that stuff out the hard way.
Adam Honig: I know and we’re gonna have to. We’re going to be supporting Siri, and google assistant in the current quarter so, I’m super excited about that as well. So, you can basically just say, “Hey, Siri. I just met with Doug. I think the deal is gonna happen, add a note.” Boom, and it will do it for you.
Or you could say, just ask Siri, “Hey, what’s going on with staples?” And it’ll give you the update on the account or whatever. So, yeah. That’s it. This is all real. This is not science fiction. This will be happening in the next couple of months.
Doug: Wow. So, how long have you guys been in business? Tell us about the background of the company.
Adam Honig: Yeah, sure. So, we’ve been in business for about four years at this point. We’ve raised about five and a half million dollars. Almost all what we’ve invested in building the technology. We started the business really because I went and saw a movie and so, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the movie “Her” at all.
Doug: Yeah.
Adam Honig: So Joaquin Phoenix, in the future, downloads a new version of his phone software, and which is played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson. She doesn’t appear in the movie, just her voice is enough to make Joaquin Phoenix fall in love with her. And in the way that the Scarlett Johansson software works is, it kind of reads what’s going on in his life, and gives him advice and helps him out. And I’m watching this movie, Doug and I’m thinking to myself, salespeople don’t need Salesforce, they need Scarlett Johansson telling them what to do all day. And that’s really where the inspiration for the business came from.
And I had started and sold a couple of other ventures, and I called up my co-founder and I’m like, “Andy, Andy, we’re gonna build Scarlett Johansson for Salesforce.” And he was totally confused.
Now, Scarlett was having a baby at the time so, she couldn’t really be involved with the project and stuff like that, but we went ahead without her anyway, and that’s really how we got our start.
Doug: So looking at the kind of, from a typical CRM, just because of my ignorance in terms of using your platform at this point, I remember reading, you’ve seen your old school guy so, you may remember Harvey McKay’s book, and then his list in the case 66 where his idea was to get people to gather sufficient information on their prospects so they can have a conversation that wasn’t always around buying my stuff.
Adam Honig: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Doug: Are there any restrictions if I wanna compare what your solution is to all the other CRMs or how much data I can store in terms of fields, and tagging and all the traditional stuff, social media accounts?
Adam Honig: Yeah. So, it’s a really good question. So, no there’s no restrictions within the product about that. You can store an unlimited number of contacts, an unlimited amount of data. Frankly, it’s so cheap to provide data storage. I don’t know why anybody charges that way. So that’s a really weird thing for me but no, it’s completely unlimited. Now, I do wanna say that you can customize Spiro, you can add fields, you can do all kinds of interesting stuff with it. But I do caution people that, and I think this is especially important for the marketers who are listening in because what I’ve seen with CRM is, often the more data we try to collect by adding additional fields, and stuff like that we actually wind up with less. And so, we always encourage our clients to go very, very light …
Doug: Okay.
Adam Honig: … in terms of the customization of the product. To put as much data in as you can, but try to restrict the number of fields.
Doug: Right, but I am thinking more like I’m traveling. I’m traveling to Boston, and I’m gonna send an email to Spiro saying, “Hey, who are all the Red Sox fans in Boston? They’re playing, I wanna hook up and go to a game.”
Adam Honig: Yep, yep. No, that you can certainly do that within Spiro. There are no limitations. I mean, the technology to ask your questions on email is progressing very rapidly. We have about 54 different things that you can do today. We’re adding a dozen or so every month. That particular one asking it about Red Sox fans in Boston, I don’t think that’s gonna work, but you can go and lot.
Yeah, I mean, Spiro does have a user interface. You can log in, you can set up an explicit list saying of the people who live in Boston. I wanna send an email or do a calling campaign to them or something like that. So that’s all certainly possible.
Doug: So, I can still go log in physically, and have access to that data like I do today with the other CRM systems?
Adam Honig: Absolutely, yes. So, you can still log in and use it just like a regular piece of business software like you can with other platforms. I’d say that we designed it to be super easy to use, to not give users many options when they’re working with the software, and I think that’s part of the trick of adoption as well, to give people kind of a single path through the application. But yes, absolutely.
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IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
Spiro is a sales automation CRM that uses artificial intelligence to organize your contacts, reach more prospects and close bigger deals.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Doug: So, you brought up the point adoption. So, if I’m gonna log in and sign up today for an account, how long is it gonna take me to be actually up, and running and using it?
Adam Honig: So, we’re onboarding teams of users on Spiro anywhere from a couple of days to a month or so. And typically, when a new client starts using Spiro, we do all of the setup, the data migration. Whether it’s from Salesforce or HubSpot, or from Excel spreadsheets. We do all of the work to get their customers setup, including customizing the software, creating the reports that they need and so on. So the elapsed time, from two days to a month is the range that we look at.
Doug: So, based on kind of how you’re leading this industry into the AI space, what are you most excited about in the next six to 12 months?
Adam Honig: Wow, there’s so much stuff out there. I mean, I’m super excited about the voice interface that we are talking about. I mean, I love using products like Siri, and Alexa, and stuff like that and it kind of makes my business partner kind of look at me funny when I’m talking to myself a little but I really …
Doug: Yeah.
Adam Honig: … feel like that’s the future for a lot of these things. And I feel like the voice interface, it’s just so natural for people that I think we’re gonna see a lot of that. The other thing that I’m super excited about … So, we’re doing this other AI project within Spiro, what’s called natural language generation. So, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but if you read the box scores for basketball games, or baseball games, or anything like that, most of the … like the summary of what happened to the game is written by computer now. It’s using AI to write a lot of those scores summaries.
Doug: I had no idea. Yeah.
Adam Honig: And so, we wanna use that same approach to kind of activity timelines. So, if you’re login to Spiro or any kind of CRM, you might see a long list of things that happened related to the same account.
Doug: Right. Yeah.
Adam Honig: And you have to, like, digest that information to figure out what it means. Well, what if instead, it just kind of gave you the summary so that you could quickly be like, “Oh, great, I know what’s going on without having to like search through all these different emails.” So that’s another thing that we’re working on to allow Spiro to write stuff itself, and that’s gonna be super cool.
Doug: Yeah, and I’m seeing it as time-saving too, and the ability to increase your final size, and the number of people you’re talking to, because now you’ve got some intelligence in terms of the computer doing the work and not the individual trying to process it all yourself.
Adam Honig: Right. Right. And not to mention, it’s also very taxing to do that kind of work. And so, like there’s a lot of people who will only schedule surgeries in the morning, right? And I always think about that is related to sales. Like, if you have a sales call in the afternoon, are you [inaudible 00:28:00] worst job because your brain is just bogged down by everything that you had to do to that point. So, if we can reduce the mental tax on you as part of this, are we gonna see an improvement in performance? I don’t know, but I think it’d be really interesting to see.
Doug: Yeah, I think so. I mean, one of the things that I had to learn was, and admit to was what my most productive times of day are, and say, “Okay, I need to put my most important tasks there.” So, all my outbound sales stuff needs to be there, and then if people are going to sell me and pitch me, I honestly, I do that in the afternoon. So, it’s after three o’clock because I’m not necessarily at my sharpest so, I’m in a listening mode not as engaged.
Adam Honig: Right. Right now, it’s not something we’re working on right now, but it would be super cool of Spiro was able to figure that out as well, right? Like we looked at the results of your morning sales calls, and we saw they were better than your afternoon sales calls, and we could start nudging you to make more outbound calls then or something. I think that’s, yeah, that’s definitely within the range of possible too.
Doug: Well, I mean, if you’re collecting the data, absolutely, that stuff’s possible. That’s just mind-blowing.
Adam Honig: Yeah.
Doug: So, what’s some of the bad advice that you hear around the AI space adoption, like moving into new technology? So you’re out at a conference, and you overhear somebody speaking and you kind of like, “I hate when people say that”
Adam Honig: Well, one of my pet peeves is really people who get worried about like, ai taking over the world. Like, everybody who’ve seen the Terminator. So, there are some people who believe that what we’re doing is gonna be threatening to human life. And I just, I feel very skeptical of that, I have to say and for a number of reasons. One is, AI, all it really means is that the computer is able to make a really good prediction about something.
We look at a block of text, and we can predict whether it’s sales related or not. We look at a phone call conversation, and we predict what the right next steps would be. It’s not intelligence in the same way that we think about Arnold Schwarzenegger walking down the street blowing people away. So, there’s that, and there’s also just this misconception I think, that AI can basically do everything.
Like, we were talking about a little bit earlier in terms of getting you to follow up better with the activities your wife wanna do. So, it’s like, it’s not a general purpose tool like that at all. It has to be very context specific. And so, maybe there’ll be self-aware robots in the future, but even if that’s the case, I think it’s gonna be a really long way from now.
Doug: So, in terms of opportunity for our listeners that are hearing this, what will kind of the next steps for them to investigate to say, “Hey, should I get out of my Google sheets or my Excel spreadsheet? Or should I move from, fill in the blank X CRM system that I’m currently using?”
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IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
Spiro is a sales automation CRM that uses artificial intelligence to organize your contacts, reach more prospects and close bigger deals.
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Adam Honig: Yeah. So certainly, people can visit the spiro.ai website, and we’ve put up a special page for listeners of your podcast @spirit.airmrf, which of course, stands for real marketing real fast. So spiro.ai/rmrf. And what was pretty typical for folks is to look at a video of the product, or sign up for a demo, and see if it might be a good fit for their organization. We’ve also put up some popular content that we have on that page.
We published an E-book, which is very, very popular, called the 44 best sales tips of all time. I don’t know why it was in 45, but at 44, I felt like the right number to us. And, this is sort of a compilation of some of our most popular blog posts over the years that we’ve developed that have gotten a lot of great reviews from folks. So, you can definitely check that out or, learn a little bit more about Spiro while you’re there.
Doug: And are there any resources you’d recommend in terms of people that are looking to adopt your technology? I mean, does it integrate with other software that they’re currently using? So if I’m using Slack, and I’m using Google Suites, or I’m using Outlook, is that sort of documentation available as well for them to look?
Adam Honig: Yeah. So, we have a lot of information about that on our website. I mean, Spiro integrates with everything that you just mentioned and more. So, we have customers who integrate Spiro with ERP software like NetSuite or SAP. We integrate with practically, every bit of marketing software out there from MailChimp, to HubSpot, to Infusionsoft, to Pardot, all of these different platforms that are out there.
Yes, so we have a lot of information about that on the website, and we also have a lot of like guides as well. If you’re in the construction industry or manufacturing industry, how to get the most out of CRM. You can find all of that on our website as well.
Doug: Yeah, your website is pretty thorough. I had a chance to go through your website and look at the case studies in the industry that you’re in. I was really surprised at how diverse your offering was with the studies that you’ve shared.
Adam Honig: Yeah, well, it’s interesting. I mean, as long as you’re selling in a b2b context, and you have a sales cycle. I mean, those are the criteria that we really need to make the product work. So, if you’re selling pharmaceutical sales or something like that, probably not a good fit. But if you’re selling a product or a service, and you’ve got a sale cycle to businesses, it’s gonna work well.
Doug: Well, that’s really cool, thanks. I really appreciate you taking time out of your day today. I was super excited to learn more about this. I don’t know listeners, what thoughts you have. I’d be interested to get your feedback.
But I’m amazed that our technology in the world is advanced to this level that the solution you guys are offering to small business, and businesses are large and afar.
Adam Honig: Yeah. No, it’s really exciting. I feel like really so happy to be part of it, that delivering a solution that people really love, so … And I really appreciate it also, you’re bringing me on to the podcast. So thank you, very much for that, Doug.
Doug: So, a couple of questions, and I’ll let you go. One question is, who’s one guest you think I absolutely have to have on my podcast?
Adam Honig: So, I don’t know if you know my friend, Christopher Lochhead at all. Chris and I go back many years. He’s the author of a number of different books in the marketing space. “Play Bigger” as well as “Niche Down”. Do you know Chris?
Doug: Just read “Niche Down” and we’re talking about Christopher and the mastermind, and I mean, with Tom Schwab and Jamie who does Christopher’s podcast. So, great recommendation.
Adam Honig: Yeah, Chris is just like anytime when I’m feeling like I need some inspiration, Chris is like the perfect guy for that. He’s just such a bundle of energy, and of all times.
Doug: Now, what is the best social platform to connect with you?
Adam Honig: I’m a big Twitter fan so, my Twitter handle is Adamhonig, all one word, of course. A-D-A-M-H-O-N-I-G. And we definitely engage with a lot of people on Twitter. I think it’s a great open medium. I know we’re connected, Doug so, feel free to connect with me there as well.
Doug: Well, thanks again. So, listeners, I hope you enjoyed this. I am super inspired, and I look forward to going to Adam’s site to Spiro and getting signed up for a demo to see how I can use this for myself and for my clients, and I encourage you to do the same thing. We’ll make sure that any of the information that Adam shared that has a website or social media account attached to it, we’ll have it transcribed in the show notes, and we’ll get those posted when the episode is live.
So thanks again, for listening in and look forward to serving you on our next episode.
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IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
IMPROVE SALES WITH AI POWERED CRM
Spiro is a sales automation CRM that uses artificial intelligence to organize your contacts, reach more prospects and close bigger deals.
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