Managing AI Agents Is Just Like Managing A New Employee | Kristie Jones - 2047

Kristie Jones treats her AI agent like a four year old. Not as an insult, as a management strategy. The same way she taught her son "no touch" before he understood why, she's learned that agents need boundaries, check-ins, and correction, just like any new hire. Kristie https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristiekjones, founder of Sales Acceleration Group and author of the upcoming book The Sales Leadership Gap: Leading Humans in an AI Augmented World, walked me through what it actually looks like to lead a sales team that's now part human, part automation, and part AI agent. Why Most Sales Teams Are Only Talking About AI, Not Using It Kristie's blunt read on the market: sales leaders are talking a good game on AI adoption, but very few are actually walking it. She calls the hesitation "freeze mode," people waiting for the technology to settle down before they commit to anything. Her pushback: the pace of AI isn't going to slow down, so waiting for the dust to settle just means a competitor gets the head start instead. From Pilot to Control Tower: Managing a Hybrid Team Kristie's analogy for what's changed: sales leaders used to be the pilot, flying the plane directly. Now the job is running the control tower. A modern sales team isn't just a group of humans anymore. It's humans, automation, and AI agents all working together, and leading that requires a 360-degree view no single seat inside the plane can give you. She hasn't seen a single sales leadership course that actually teaches this. Most leaders are being asked to figure it out on their own, in real time, while still being expected to hit quota. Treat Your Agent Like a New Employee (or a Four-Year-Old) Kristie's favorite framing, borrowed from someone else: manage your agent the way you'd manage a toddler, with simple, repeated boundaries, like teaching a child "no touch," some for safety and some just to prevent a mess. Building an agent isn't a "set it and forget it" project. Just like a new hire, it needs a handbook, but it also needs regular check-ins, since no handbook covers every exception. If your business is changing, and it always is, an agent that never gets revisited will quietly drift out of step with how your team actually works. Trust But Verify Kristie built an agent that reviews her AI notetaker every Friday at 4pm and delivers her to-do list by day. The first Friday it was supposed to run, it didn't. Her response mirrored exactly how she'd handle a new employee's mistake: no anger, just a direct conversation about what happened and how to prevent it next time. Her rule going forward: trust the agent to do the work, but verify the output regularly, the same discipline she'd apply to any new hire still earning full independence. Where to Start: Update Your Playbook Before You Automate It Kristie pushes back hard on the idea that sales playbooks are dead. They're not, but most of them are badly out of date, built once and handed to new hires without ever being revisited. Her recommended first step for any leader building agents: go back to the actual playbook, confirm it reflects how work really gets done today, then look at it again through a new lens, asking which of these tasks could be automated. Skipping this step means building automation around a process that's already wrong, which just makes the wrong process faster. Two Agents Kristie Actually Built Her first agent connects Claude Cowork to HubSpot, Granola (her AI notetaker), and Google. Every Friday at 4pm, it reviews her week's meetings and delivers a day-by-day to-do list of everything she committed to. Her second is a research agent, built to be extensive enough that she now teaches a class on building one at Sales Gravy University. Neither required a dedicated engineering team. She built both herself as a sales leader, which is exactly the point: if your company doesn't have a go-to-market engineer or enablement team, this becomes your job by default. Write a "Role Brief" for Every Agent Kristie's upcoming book outlines five leadership competencies and five AI competencies leaders will need, and one of the practical tools she recommends is what she calls a role brief. A role brief is a formal, written document for an agent, similar to a job description but for AI: what decisions it's allowed to make, what decisions always stay human, what the output should look like, and who owns checking it. Every agent a team builds should have one of these, the same way every human hire gets a real job description instead of a vague verbal understanding of the role. The Two Things That Make AI Dangerous If Left Unchecked First, AI is built to solve problems, which means if it can't find a real one, it may manufacture one to justify itself. Second, AI essentially never says it doesn't know, and it almost never asks for a leader's opinion. It delivers a confident answer even when the underlying accuracy is shaky. Both are reasons an agent can never be treated as fully autonomous. Someone still has to be checking the actual output, not just assuming the system is right because it sounds certain. We've Been Here Before: What the World Wide Web Panic Teaches Us Kristie points to the early internet as the closest historical parallel: people worried about losing control over where their information came from, the same fear now aimed at AI. Entire households once relied on a single printed encyclopedia set as the trusted source of information. That system eventually gave way, the same way old assumptions about static CRMs and manual workflows are giving way now. Her takeaway isn't to ignore the risk, but to recognize that fear of a major shift isn't new, and the companies that adapt early are the ones that come out ahead of it. What AI Fluency Actually Means Kristie is now asking about AI fluency directly in client hiring processes, and she defines it as a systems-level understanding of AI, not just knowing how to use one tool. That includes prompt literacy (can someone actually write a prompt that gets a useful result), output evaluation (how do you know if the agent's work is accurate or has quietly drifted), and tool selection (which AI platforms actually get adopted, standardized, and connected across the team). She's blunt with companies that call themselves "AI forward" but don't teach any of this during onboarding. Claiming the identity without building the actual skill doesn't hold up. Your First Step to Becoming AI Fluent Kristie's advice for any seller or leader who hasn't started: pick one tool, whether that's ChatGPT or Claude, and go build something small, like a custom GPT or a simple project. If you don't already use an AI notetaker, that's the bare minimum starting point, and she recommends having one in place within the week. Her closing advice is permission to fail: go make a mistake. Her own Friday agent didn't run the first time she built it, and that's a normal, expected part of learning the tool, not a sign it isn't worth doing. "I treat my agent like a four year old." — Kristie Jones Resources Connect with Kristie Jones on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristiekjonesVisit Kristie's site, Sales Acceleration Group. https://kristiekjones.com/Join our LinkedIn cohort and learn to prospect the right way. https://thesalesevangelist.com/linkedin-prospecting-course/Visit Blue Mango Studios for help creating podcast production content. https://bluemangostudios.com/ Credits As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey http://thesalesevangelist.com/survey. https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/lc5yAa8P We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sales-evangelist/id788738885, Google Podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3RoZXNhbGVzZXZhbmdlbGlzdC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5kaXI3Pj2AhVKcjABHW5PDVwQ9sEGegQIARAC, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-sales-evangelist-sales-trainingspeakingbusiness-marketingdonald, or Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/1NjzsFjQwVrgboUfDvbzd5?si=LdQOJDc1T-WBPMxr1h3RsA. Audio provided by Free SFX, https://freesfx.co.uk/ Soundstripe https://soundstripe.com/, and Bensound http://www.bensound.com/. Other songs used in the episodes are as...

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• 1:53Speaker 00

  AI is coming to take your job. Not, I mean, for many of us as sales professionals, we've heard that before and we've been concerned. Like, is this going to really replace me? I don't think it is going to replace you. I think, I mean, for the ones who ain't working, if you're not a consultant, if you're not bringing value to people, yeah. But in some of the menial tasks, it's definitely going to take the menial task. What we're talking about is how can we use AI today to make us more efficient, more effective, and to be intricate into our organization? And some of the things you're not even paying attention to right now that you should pay attention to. Christy Jones, very fluent. She's going to talk to us a little bit more about this. Check it out.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Hey, hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the Sales Evangelist Podcast. I'm your host, Donald C. Kelly, the Sales Evangelist. And I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. On this episode, I'm talking with my good friend, Christy Jones, and we're going to be talking about, well, you guessed it, AI. And in particular, what can we do to make sure we're, our organization is adopting, is adopting AI effectively and properly? And some of the things that we may not necessarily be thinking about. You may think you're fluent, but you probably are not when it comes to AI. Some of us are fearful of it, and you probably should not be. You should be cautious, but you should also be embracing how this can really help our organization. And Christy's going to lay list out and share some ideas that you should be, pay attention to.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  She has a new book coming out as well, and it's dropping here in October. So if you haven't done so already, check out Christy, connect with her, and also check out her book. If this is your first time listening to our podcast too, I don't know why you haven't done so already. Go ahead and subscribe. And also, please tell one other person about the show if you've been listening for a minute. Listen as we dive in and start talking to Christy and how she starts to share some of the strategies and ideas and concepts that's helping her when she works with her clients around, one, training and working with a hybrid team of humans and AI. Two, how you can make sure that your organization is adopting it properly and that you're getting training. And then, three, how to ensure that you're being fluent as a seller, individual, or as a sales leader. Listen to the first piece and see how this can help you. Check it out.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Christy, welcome back to the show.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Donald, always a pleasure. We always love talking shop.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Well, you got me today. And I tell everyone, I bragged about it in the teaser. If you haven't done so already, I mean, get your notebook, get your AI agent up or get whoever is, take the notes on this one, because there's a, you're going to get masterclass today on this. Christy, you are right now very, very passionate about AI. I mean, there's some obvious reasons why in society, but why in particular are you so pumped and excited about where we are in the world of sales and AI?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Again, like there's, you know, in our lifetime, I'm a little older than you are. There have been, you know, three major events that I'm living through. The first one was, you know, on-prem to cloud. I was around for that. The CRM transition where we went with having, you know, really Excel spreadsheets and some other things to having a dedicated customer, you know, relationship management platform. And I think this is the third. I'm probably not going to live through a fourth. So I'm super excited about this one. This is a game changer, but it also, just like all of the, just like those other two, brings a lot of challenges to the table.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  And I think many of us, a lot of people, we talked about this before we started. Where do you see everyone is adopting AI at a rapidly fast rate, correct?

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yes, well, no, actually, no. That was a trick question. That's a trick question. No, the answer is no. No, they're not adopting. They're talking about a good game, but they're not walking a good game.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, you know, we, we know of it. Everyone know they should be eating well or should be having a, you know, exercise in their, their life, but we're not necessarily doing that. And I, I'll be curious to find out though, with the AI side, why though? Why are we not embracing it as much?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  I think it's a few things. One, I think the pace at which things are moving, people are afraid to embrace anything for fear that tomorrow, something better, cooler, whatever will come along. And so I'm fine, I'm talking to people and I'm hearing what I call freeze mode. People are waiting for the dust to settle and it's not going to, right? Like, if you're waiting for the dust to settle, your competitor will be there and you'll be gone. And so there is, like, you have to just take action. I mean, I was a beta tester for ChatGPT. You know, now I'm using Claude, I'm starting to play around with perplexity for different applications, for different things. I mean, even within Claude, which I spend the majority of my time in, I swear every, I swear every week they're coming out with a new version of, you know, a new, right? And I'm just like, well, what's this one? What 5.2 and 6.1?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  And I'm like, should I be using that one or this one? And, you know, and I mean, like, you have to stay on your toes. They're not, nobody's sending, like, you know, Anthropic is not sending me an email memo saying, hey, just wanted to let you know. And here's the new map and this is what you should be using for what? I'm like, no, they're expecting you to get, to be, you know, naturally curious and figure it out. And so if you're not naturally curious, I think this scares the heck out of you.

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  And I think especially that, like you for sure on that, and some of those, how would you say, conservative businesses? That they may feel like I'm just.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Manufacturing, some of the lower to adoption.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's like, dude, think about AI and manufacturing, like, it's a game changer. Like, you've seen what automation have done over the years. So this is game changing. From a sales perspective, there's a lot going on with this, Christy. And the first one I want to talk about, you got my attention with was the workforce is not looking like how it did for us five years ago, two years ago. The workforce is evolving. Talk to us about that, what that, the teams look like nowadays.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we as sales leaders have never managed what I'll call the hybrid team. We've never managed humans plus automation, plus AI augmentation, plus agents. We know, we're not managing a team of humans anymore. We're managing an entire system. And I have yet to see a sales leadership course out there that talks about how to do that. And so, you know, as usual, we're expected to figure it out ourselves, but I don't think everybody knows where to start. I don't think they understand the competencies that they're going to need. You know, how do we design the system in a way that has some safeguards? So you and I talked about several things, but I'm like, you know, we, we used to have one throat to choke. When a deal went south or things didn't go well, we knew who to go to.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Now there are going to be so many things involved in the process that it could be the go-to-market engineer whose throat needs to be choked, right? Because the agent didn't do what we built it to do or gave misinformation. So you're going to have to stay on your toes in a way you've never had to before. Oh, and by the way, hit the quota they gave you.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Oh, boy. And that part is never going to change, right?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Nope, never go and change.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  We would hope with AI that it can help us to work faster and more effective. Or I get to that quota faster. But again, but if you don't know, you don't. If you're not using it, you don't even know how to use it and you don't have the tools in place. And you're, it's a mute conversation for you at this point. But go deeper on how do we like the managing of the like the hybrid team? Like, I mean, what do you mean by managing that? Like you used an example before of like, we're not necessarily on the ground, so to speak. We're in a tower. Can you just go deeper on this side, Kristie?

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. The analogy I'm using is, you know, we're used to being the pilot and sitting in the pilot seat, flying the plane and with, you know, with all of our teammates in the cabin in the back. That's not how it's going to work anymore. We're going to have to get out of the cockpit and into the control tower because now we're not managing just a team of humans. We're managing a system and you're going to need a 360 degree view. And the only way to get that is up in the control tower. And so, you know, you're going to need to have the skills that you've always had to manage humans. But you're also going to have, you know, need to have AI fluency in systems design, in workflow management, in things that you've never been required to have competency in before.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think like, we have an agent that we have right now on our team with one of our other businesses. And for me, I know the hesitation that I had before, I'm like, is it going to be able to get the work done properly? And the part of it is not like, in some cases, we have experienced some of it before with a little bit of automation, like workflow. And I think that's where a lot of people get mixed up. They feel like it's going to be this, you know, this autonomous being that could take over the company. But if you give it the guardrails and you give it the guidance, like you have the ability to, you know, just lock it down, what programs it's going into. So it's not that big of a deal. But it's really automation, just way more intelligent and efficient. Am I making sense on this, Kristie?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  That's funny. I had, I heard somebody put it really nicely a couple of days ago. He said, yeah, I treat my agent like a four year old. And I think about when I, when my son was a toddler, we taught him no touch. Like just those two words. The minute he would go to something, we'd be like, no touch.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  No touch.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Right? And he'd be like, you know, and some of it was for safety reasons, like don't touch the burner. Some of it was your grandmother will kill you if you break that porcelain thing, right? So for your own protection, like we taught him no touch. And I think like, people don't understand that, you know, it's like building an agent and managing an agent is just like having a new employee, right? You can't just give it the handbook and say, go for it because there's exceptions to every rule. There's out of the box things that happen. There are do this, not that type scenarios. And so if you think about it that way, you know, and just like you would have a one-on-one with your employee every week, you're going to have to check in, right? Because your business, if you set it and forget it, that is also assumes that your business is not changing.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  And we can't do that anymore. And so it's going to take a lot more experience, skills and patience to lead a sales team than it has in the past because of all of the demands that are going to be put on you.

• 11:53Speaker 00

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• 12:36Speaker 00

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• 12:56Speaker 00

  So here's, I mean, this is not your cup of tea, but I'm a sales leader. I'm listening to this and I'm like, Kristie, this sounds good and all, but how do I even build an agent? Where do I even go to get started on that? I know you can probably go a lot more in different conversations with people. What is that? What do I have an agent do? What are some of the things that we can, a mixed team can have agents do right now? So let's maybe start off with that. What can you do? And then what's the first step if I was going to do that?

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, first off is hopefully you have formal and documented processes, right? So step one is to go review your current processes. A, are they up to date, which most peoples are not, right? We all know that, you know, we built that and then we gave it to the newbies and then we forgot about it. So you got to go back to your playbook. So the playbook is not dead. Let me start by saying that. I'm tired of seeing people on LinkedIn talk about the playbook is dead. The 2020 version of the B2B SaaS playbook is outdated. Playbooks are not dead. People still need playbooks, processes, frameworks, all the things. But when's the last time you updated your playbook? So the first thing you have to do is go to the playbook and update it, right? How do things get done in my organization? How do things get done in the sales department? And then, once it's updated, then go look at it with a different lens.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  So which of these tasks can be automated? You know, are we going to use, you know, some sort of software or automation to do that? Like, i.e. we've all got an AI note taker now, right? So your company invested in an AI note taker, hopefully, although I've been interviewing candidates this week. And the answer I've been getting with them is no. I talked to a guy this morning who said he had not used an AI note taker yet. So I mean, that's where we're at though, right? Like people are at a very different stages. He came from a 200 person company, no AI note taker.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  What?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Right? Yep. Enterprise account executive, million and a half plus quota. Yep. Had not done it. Gave him some suggestions, told him to go play around.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  I know. Because we live in like, you know, I live in the startup world where everybody's kind of a little bit faster in some cases. But yeah, nimble and faster in some cases, but I've been hearing a lot of no's to that question. So that's its activity. But look, you've got to look at all your processes. So what needs to be automated? Like, do we have an AI note taker? And then which, like, let's talk about like, here's some of the early things I've done. I'm using Claude Co-Work currently. I attached it to HubSpot. I attached it to Granola, which is my AI note taker. I attached it to Google, which is my operating system. And on Fridays at four o'clock, the agent goes into my Granola, looks at every meeting I had this week and gives me my to-dos by day. Here are all the things that you committed to or that you made, you know, that all the action items that either someone gave you

• 15:25Speaker 01

  or you gave yourself for last week, so that I can make sure I didn't miss anything along the way and I can pick that up. I also built recently a research agent. So, and it was extensive, right?

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Is this through Claude?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Claude Co-Work is where I'm currently playing. Yep. So I built a research agent, you know, again, very extensive. I just got back actually from Sales Gravy University. I'm an instructor there. So I just built a bunch of new courses at Jeb Blunt Sales Gravy University. And one of the classes I'm teaching is how to build your research agent, right? So, you know, again, like there's lots of different, every company has a different structure, right? Maybe you have a GTM engineer, maybe you don't, maybe you've got sales enablement, maybe you don't. But if you don't, you're responsible for this yourself. So there's an easy one, right? Like that you can build yourself that, you know, even as a sales leader, go build a research agent for your team. Go build an agent that takes their AI note taker and gives them the, gives you and then the to-do list.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  So on Monday, you know, when you start your one-on-ones next week, like, hey, these look like the top five things you were supposed to accomplish last week. Do we get those done? Attaching it to your CRM system that like reporting on, no matter which CRM system you're using, reporting leaves a bit to be desired always. So like, these are things that you should have already done in fairness. Like, you know, did you decide, I mean, Donald, you and I talked about before we hit the record button. Did your company even invest in an enterprise version of X, right? Do you have an enterprise version of whatever, whether that's Copilot or Chat or Claude, Perplexity, whatever it is? Like, do you have an enterprise version so that A, you're protected? So your stuff's not going outside your four walls. PS, that's probably one of the main reasons to do it. But secondarily, so that everybody in the company is learning together and their agents are learning from each other.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  But those are easy, simple ones that, you know, again, like the first time I built the thing, the next Friday didn't run, right? I'm like, hey, I mean, I was like, hey, yo.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  I need you to work, bro.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Right. I'm like, yo, I'm like, uh, how come my email's not in my inbox? They're like, oh, my bad. Sorry. Right? Like, you know, like it apologized. But, you know, so I was like, my bad. Sorry. Like, I'm on it. And then, you know, then I had to figure out. So I said, okay, I'm like, not mad, just want to understand what happened. And then it gave me the whole like, what happened? I said, great. So how do we make sure that never happens again? Well, I'm going to need to do this. Great. So why don't we stop and do that now? Right? I mean, like, just like I would with a new employee, you know, like you gave misinformation to a prospect. Like, hey, like, that actually wasn't true. Here's what's true. How do we make sure that doesn't happen again? He's like, I wrote it down. Okay, great.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. That is awesome. I love it. So this is really cool. Really cool. Hey, it's just like human guys, but just a little bit more efficient.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  You cheered something with me.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Like, this is the same comment. Trust but verify. It's trust but verify. I trusted, I went four o'clock on Friday, trusted it would be there and it wasn't.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  You mentioned to me about the idea of professional development, how this can be utilized to, your agent can be utilized to create, do professional development for you. I mean, sorry, let's back up. How you need to have professional development to help with your agent and to help some of our leaders. Talk to me a little bit more about that.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've got a book coming out in October called The Sales Leadership Gap: Leading Humans in an AI-Augmented World. And in the book, I outline five core leadership competencies and then five AI competencies. So again, it's what I sort of mentioned before about my pilot and the control tower example. You need to be a systems thinker, right? The ability to see how parts of that sales motion connect and what breaks them. So you need to, you know, you're not going to be in charge of a system, not just a group of individuals, which means you're going to have to also understand workflow design, how to design the workflow, who should own what parts? How do we know when things are wrong? Or, you know, who's in charge of watching the AI or the automation to ensure that it's doing what it should do? Where are we verifying?

• 19:11Speaker 01

  What decisions should AI never make? What decisions are always human? Like, you have to do, you have to call that out. I'm actually calling that, Donald, a role brief. So as you're building out agents, it's not a job description that's for people. The role brief is, again, a formalized written document for every one of your agents that outlines what their role is, you know, what decisions they can make, what they can't make, what the outcome should look like, who owns managing that workflow? And, you know, how often are we checking it for accuracy? Like, all the things. So everybody's going to need to start writing a role brief.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  But how do you, you mentioned that, but I mean, AI, it seems it's gonna, it's, can think on its own and do all these things. How do you ensure that it's not, it's following that brief? Like, how can a company know that?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  You'll need to go in and see what's, what, just like you with the human, what work is it producing? Is it producing what you intended it? Is it overstepping its boundaries that you gave it? Is it making assumptions? Is it providing, you know, opinions? Again, the, I think the most dangerous thing about AI and agents is two things. One, they're, it's built to be a problem solver. So when it doesn't find a problem, it might create one to solve it because it's constantly looking for improvement in problems to solve. And then, secondly, it never thinks it's wrong. I have yet, and I bet you're the same way, Donald. When's the last time your AI agent asked for your opinion?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Never, never. Occasionally, it asks for your opinion?

• 20:46Speaker 00

  Let me say, no, it didn't ask me.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, it didn't ask me either. Right, no, it's not saying like, so what do you, so what do you think about this, Christie? It always has a very concrete answer, right? Even if it sometimes has to fudge the accuracy.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Which is why you can't just set it and forget it.

• 21:09Speaker 00

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• 21:53Speaker 00

  The most dynamic buyer network, working just for you. Accelerate your sales with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Try LinkedIn Sales Navigator now with a free 60-day trial at LinkedIn.com/sell. That's LinkedIn.com/sell. Terms and conditions apply.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Since 2013, we launched this podcast. The goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information, and I feel that we've successfully done so. As a natural byproduct, listeners like you would reach out and ask, could I coach them? Could I train their team? Could I come and speak in an S K O? Could I consult for them? And that is how we gain the majority of our business, and still to this day. So in 2019, one of our clients saw what we did and asked, could we do that for them? We experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency. Now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world, and it's amazing. I would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source, but also educational and a lead generation.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  If you're interested, go to bluemangostudios.com. Again, bluemangostudios.com, and our team can show you exactly what we did. It's amazing.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  And I think that's where people get mixed up too, sometimes thinking like, you know, this is going to take over. I don't have to do anything else. Like, no, there's a world where we're coexisting, and I think you're, you're making a, you know, this may sound silly. I feel like, let's back up. Have we been to this point before in history, Christie? Where there was a huge change societally, like as a society that we were apprehensive for? Can you think of any? I'm not, I don't have any.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Sure, I mean, the World Wide Web. People thought that was never going to last. Like, that's never going to.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  What were some of the dangers that we saw with that?

• 23:43Speaker 01

  You know, we're not getting our, you know, we're not doing our, we're not getting our own information from the source that we want to get it from.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  You know, when you type into the World Wide Web, they get to choose the source versus Encyclopedia Britannica, right? I mean, we used to get, again, I'm older than you are, but Encyclopedia Britannica, every household had a set of Encyclopedia Britannica alphabetized, right?

• 24:02Speaker 00

  We just got rid of the one from my mom's place, like.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  It was like.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  That's a relic, my friend. You could have put that on eBay.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  I was telling her, hold on to them suckers, man. We could go sell that, sell them now. But we did have some at my mom's place, and so it was pretty funny. But we explained, Christine explained to Caleb, she did a, yeah. My wife was explaining to our, our son about, like, we're doing a, she was doing a project on Michael Jordan, you know, the three, you know, to open up the three board, the board, science board, and how it was the encyclopedia and then going to the library, getting books, copying them and getting information out. And, you know, still, yet, we had those worries then. And then now we came through that era, we came through more eras. And this is a, it's a big leap forward. But I think it's easy to think on the dangers and the negative, such as the Terminator. But what about the Jetsons, though?

• 24:55Speaker 00

  You know, like, and I think that's the world we're going to at Rosie. Like, Rosie was, nobody saw Rosie as a threat. I think there's one episode of Rosie kind of got, you know, deprogrammed. But everybody loved Rosie, they trust Rosie to cook food, they trust Rosie to prepare and to take care of the kids, Elroy. But the point is, I feel there's a world where AI can do that and is trying, and we can use it to do that. Not so much as a world, and I'm not saying go in this blindfold, you know, Rosie, I, no pun intended, and not realize some of the dangers that can happen. But I think it's a world where we coexist that we're going to have, where we can utilize this tool to help us to be able to do more of what we can do more effectively. So the human, yes, manages it.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  You're not necessarily the one doing the research anymore. Let AI do that, but you manage it. So your job is evolving. And anyways, I'm sorry for the rant there, but.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  No worries. I mean, everybody, again, like, everybody now can have their own assistant.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  You know, if you look at it that way, I mean, like, you know, how many times did a sales rep walk into your office and be like, I need an assistant, like, I need a part-time whatever to help me do this. I'm like, asked and answered, here you go.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Get an AI agent, bro.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  I want to tap on this last one before we wrap up, Christie, is AI fluency. You told me you're using that, and you're talking to that a lot more in interviews. But explain to me what fluency is. Go deeper on that.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, your understanding of AI, again, from a systems point of view, not just a tunnel vision point of view. Again, like, people, like, I can't believe we're still not teaching prompt literacy. Like, as part of, I'm doing a hiring project for a client right now, and they're very AI-forward, right? And so I said to them, I said to the CEO, I said, so how are you providing AI training during onboarding? Very silence.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Cricket, just like that, right?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, just like that. And I'm like, I'm like, you can't say you're AI-forward and not be providing as part of your onboarding. So, you know, are you providing formal prompt writing, you know, prompt literacy? Do we have people that can really write a decent prompt so that you can, you know, make sure that you've got the agent the way you wanted to, or even the information coming out? The other thing is output evaluation. So you mentioned it, right? We're building it, but how are we going to check it? How do we know whether it's doing what we want it to do? How do we know that it hasn't veered? I mean, again, just like an employee, right? Bad habits form very quickly. How do we know it hasn't veered to the left? Like, what does the output evaluation look like? Tool selection, like, we as leaders are going to be making the decisions about which AI tools

• 27:32Speaker 01

  we're bringing into our organization, how we're connecting them to existing tools that we have. So, you know, you're going to have to probably do more demos and be more discerning about what you're bringing in and how does it tie, you know, in ways we haven't been before. Like, everything was like, you know, before, it's like everything was bolted onto Salesforce, where Salesforce was the center of the universe. Well, what if Anthropic becomes the center of your universe, as opposed to the CRM system moving forward?

• 27:57Speaker 00

  We could go on for it on that one, but I think like, it is like, the CRM now, I think they're outdated. Like, I think, and one of my clients put me on this, Christie, it just needs to be agentic. Like, I don't need to do anything in inputting in a CRM in the. Future, just like imagine that if I'm on a and right now you've mentioned it. If I'm on the granola and I have my CRM connected, why do I need to do a recap note myself? It can do that. The agent should be able to do that and help to schedule some of the stuff. And I know HubSpot has some of that and Salesforce has some of that capability, but it schedules that. And then as far as like, you know, some of those day to day management, bringing stuff to my attention, it's gone are the days where it's a manual side.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  It's an agentic world. And I think Salesforce is evolving, but I think there's a young whippersnapper out there, like you could be like a Claude or whatever, could be like totally change a game on a Salesforce concept. Like you don't need to do anything.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, but if that starts with, you can, we can only get there though. If the organization has picked an AI tool of choice, everybody's got a note taker in the same note take, like, you know, you have to be, that's the tool selection. We can only do that if you're making those decisions around those tools, mandating them, training on them, and then and only then we'll be able to do what you just said. We might not be dependent on a Salesforce, a HubSpot, an Apollo in the future.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Oh, that's, I think it's way closer, a year or two out.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  I do too, I do too.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Are out there. Christie, this is awesome. I want to become proficient in fluent in AI. I'm a seller listening to this or a sales leader. What is, what's my first task? My one, my major takeaway that a task that I need to do to become fluent in this?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Go make a mistake. So go pick a tool if your company hasn't. Go pick ChatGPT or Claude. If you're a ChatGPT user, then go build a custom GPT. It's the first place I started. Go build a custom GPT. If you're a Claude user, go build a project, you know, make an agent. Again, you should all be using an AI note taker. So if you don't step one, if you're, you're a seller, you either have a note taker or you need to have a note taker by the end of the week. And then do what I did. Build an agent that tells you what your to do list is. You can do it every, at the end of every day. You can do it at the end of every week. Like just go start with something super simple like that and see what happens. Again, like I thought, I mean, I've been doing this for three years, pretty much with, I started with ChatGPT almost three years. I thought I knew what I was doing.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  I know, right? It is, it is. I was a beta tester early on. But, you know, I thought I knew what I was doing and the dang thing didn't run on Friday, right? Like go, go, go, go make a mistake, right? Go try something and go try something and make a mistake. It's not as scary as it seems once you start, you know, once you get into it.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. Love it. Well, Christie, thank you for taking the time to come on the show today. Folks want to get in touch with you, maybe to connect with you and see if you can help them in their team. What's the best way to do so?

• 30:49Speaker 01

  I would love for you to reach out to me on LinkedIn, drop me a note, connect with me, drop me a note and tell me what your one takeaway was from my conversation with Donald today.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Awesome. I'll put that in the show notes and a quick link so they can get access to you. Christie, thanks for coming on the show.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Thank you. It was good to talk to you.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Hey, that was Christie Jones and I hope that first piece did our first part in that the three points was very effective. I'm telling you, the fluency part is important. The idea of utilizing the note taker in, in more effectively, if you're not using a note taker, it's a game changer. I don't write my own recap emails anymore. I get the AI to do so and then I review it and edit it and me. And I'm grateful for my executive assistant, but she helps out as well. And this allows us to be so much more effective. I'm just telling you, man, we're in a new era and you can be so much more effective. If you're not, please, and you want to connect with Christie, find her details in the show notes. And if you want to learn a little bit more about what she's doing when it comes to AI, check with her as well. The book is dropping and you are going to love it. I got early access to the manuscript, so I was privileged to see that. So listen,

• 31:54Speaker 00

  check out it, connect with Christie. As always, I want you to thrive. I want you to succeed. But most importantly, I want you to raise your level of thinking and I want you to go out and do big things. See you on the next one.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  The Sales Evangelist Podcast is created by the Sales Evangelist Sales Training Organization. It is produced by TSC Studios. Our podcast production manager is Nancy Paul. Our audio engineer is Jershun Obayal. Our video engineer is Dasan Kunado. Guest management is done by Jill Vito and Christie Virtus. Our content writer is Carlisa Galberith. Our graphic designer is Yurvish Savalia. And I'm your host and executive producer, Donald C. Kelly.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Sales Podcast Network.