Patrick Monnot with Pod Transcript

Royce Hall

Patrick, thanks for joining me today. Patrick Monnot is the founder of Pod, which is an AI tool. I love it.

It's an AI tool for sellers and complex sales cycles. So a lot of times that's your B2B sellers that are doing enterprise mid-market. Great to have you.

I'd love to hear more about what you're doing with Pod.

Patrick Monnot

First of all, thank you so much for having me on. I'm super excited about the conversations. I'm Patrick.

I'm the founder of Pod. Pod, in a nutshell, is an AI deal coach, deal intelligence platform for B2B sellers. Like you rightfully mentioned, we really focus on full cycle sellers that are working on their complex selling motion.

Mid-market enterprise where you have long sales cycle, large buying committee, high ACV type deals. And what we've realized is that a lot of reps end up making mistakes and losing deals because they lack the guidance and the know-how, so to speak, on how to navigate these complex deals. They don't engage with the right stakeholders.

They don't prioritize the right deal. They don't know how to engage with these stakeholders. They drop the ball on day-to-day deal execution.

And that ultimately leads to a lot of missed opportunities, so to speak, and a lower win rate in many situations. So we think that's a very important problem. And at the end of the day, especially for these enterprise AEs, it's an effectiveness problem.

Are they making the right decisions at the right time in the right way? So ultimately, what we're building at Pod is the equivalent of the virtual top sales performer that we can get by the size of the rep and guide them on the best actions to take to close deals faster. That's what it is in essence.

And I think the way that we do this is that we connect with their existing data, their CRM, email, calendar, call, recording tools, social media data. We pull all that in, and then we're able to tell them, hey, here are the specific deals you should be focused on, and here's specifically what we think you should do on this deal to improve your likelihood of winning it, and winning it faster. So it's super fun and very interesting.

It's not about automation. It's about, like I mentioned, effectiveness, helping them make better faster and smarter kind of decisions in their day-to-day. And I really, really think, Royce, that there's a lot of value that is not being captured for organization.

There's so much money being spent on generating leads, right, with prospecting or like intend data in the top of the funnel. There's so much money being spent there. And then when the lead is qualified, it's kind of thrown on the lap of an account executive, and not as much effort and thoughtfulness and investment is being put into converting them.

So it's basically, in many organizations, a lot of them are basically throwing money into a leaky bucket, and we think that's like a huge, huge opportunity for an organization to create more sustainable growth. So anyways, big problem, fun problem, very top of mind for many sales leaders, and we're trying to do something cool with it, leveraging artificial intelligence.

Royce Hall

Yeah, well, that's super cool. I think that, you know, that strikes a particular nerve with me. You know, you mentioned, you know, companies are spending a ton of money on lead generation.

And I think about the lifecycle of the salesperson, right? So you often start out as a BDR or SDR. And you're the one that's like doing that frontline lead gen, and then you hand it off to AE and you're like, man, I wish someday, I'm gonna be the AE, right? Yeah.

But you know, how do you develop those skills? And I love that you're giving that kind of deal coaching. And I imagine like a lot of times, you know, SDRs, BDRs are doing a lot of similar emotions as your AE as well.

So like, you know, what are the important things? Like, who am I talking to? You know, I know I've talked to AEs before, I won't say who, but you know, AEs before, they're like, Oh, like, my SDRs are idiot, like, they're talking to the wrong person entirely.

And it's like, just tell them that.

Patrick Monnot

Exactly. Share the best practices. And I think what's interesting is, whether you talk to BDRs who are transitioning into an AE role, or more junior AEs, or AEs that are in the new business, I think a lot of what makes in many situations, you know, a president's club performer is that know-how, that pattern recognition of understanding, okay, well, in this situation, I should talk to this type of person, say this type of thing.

And I think pot is my perspective, a great use case for these to get these younger reps or BDRs that are transitioning into a roles to kind of ramp up faster. And, you know, act, think and sell like a top performer from day one. So yeah, I think there's, you know, that's a normal journey to get to an account executive role.

You have to start by pounding the phone and sending emails as a BDR. But that transition to AE shouldn't be left to luck, right? It's not just like, hey, well, figure it out now. And we think that technology can do a great job at helping them.

Royce Hall

Yeah. Well, one of the things that I love about pod, you demoed this for me a while ago. But, you know, I think most of us come to, come to sales with our own particular framework, right?

Is it med pick? Is it spin selling? Is it, you know, Sandler selling?

Whatever, whatever it is, or, you know, most of us, like, it's a mix of everything, right? It's a little bit of this and that.

Patrick Monnot

A good old custom one.

Royce Hall

Yeah, exactly. And what I like about your tool is actually has like frameworks that you can utilize and see like, okay, what, what am I missing in this particular deal? What am I missing for my spin selling or challenger sale?

What are the particular things I need to track down? So I love that. I love that tool.

Patrick Monnot

Yeah, I think framework, sales methodology frameworks become very important when you're in the territories of more complex deals, because it's not a recipe to follow. There's a lot more nuances to how to, you know, navigate that deal. And whether it is a qualification framework, or a, you know, a way to discovery framework later on in the sales cycle, I think that many organizations know that those are great.

Yeah, everyone's heard of med pick or spiced or spin or bent, they've all heard of it. But oftentimes, they're going to train their team on it. And then they are basically going to add fields in their Salesforce or their CRM to fill up.

And that's, that's pretty much it, right? Like, okay, cool. We've implemented the sales methodology framework.

But at the end of the day, when you talk to reps on the ground, and even first line managers, they're like, well, I don't trust the data that's in there. I don't really use it. It's kind of basically just a rule that it needs to be filled in to move to another stage.

But the reality is that a sales methodology framework has to be used kind of in game, right? Like in the moment to guide the rep, that's what it's like before a call or after a call, or to diagnose the hell for the progress of the deal. And I think one thing like you've mentioned, with framework analysis, really think about pod coaching as a way to operationalize, so to speak, these frameworks, make them helpful for the rep when they're looking at a deal or before a call to know what to say.

And I think whether it is again, met picks by spin or your own custom ones, pod is able to tell you, hey, well, for each of the letters in your sales methodology framework, how well have you covered it? What have you discussed so far? And most importantly, what are next step or suggested things that you should be aiming to better understand on this deal, to increase your or improve your understanding of this one topic.

And I think that's what differentiates just a cool framework for the sake of it, and actually being helpful and helping reps to be more thoughtful in their approach to the deal. So yeah, I'm a big fan of frameworks, I think that a lot of people know about them, a lot of people want to use them, I think very few organizations leverage them correctly, or to their, I don't think correctly to their full potential.

Royce Hall

Well, you know, that's an interesting topic, you know, I think about salespeople, you know, a lot of times we're very, you know, there's a lot of personality that comes into that a lot of like, grid into determination, a lot of like, I think improvisation as well. So I think a lot, you know, a lot of us are like, hey, like, I just got to go out and get it done. However, I have to get it done.

So like, layering on a framework, you know, helps guide and refine that kind of chaos that, you know, people like myself can bring you to those conversations sometimes.

Patrick Monnot

Yeah, but I think that's the reality. It's not it's not it shouldn't be intention to that very natural, organic, let's try to hustle and figure it out type of mentality. I think it has to be it's in tandem, right?

It's like, hey, within the compound of like, either a process or a methodology or an approach, then like, you have as a rep, the responsibility to build that rapport, to like, to build trust, to ask the right questions at the right time to listen actively, like that remains the same, you know, the objective of a framework isn't to, you know, get you to look at a paper and just pound the questions one at a time in a very robotic way, right, people end up buying from people.

And if they feel like they're just being the buyers being shocked through a sales methodology framework, they'll react negatively, and you're most likely going to lose the deal. So I think I like to think about it as like, as both of both that that characteristic that make a lot of great salespeople great with a framework is being kind of synergetic, so to speak, it helps them to connect the focus a lot of that energy in a way that will push the deal forward and not just a way to, and not just a way to, you know, to build great rapport and relationship, which is great, but has to be in the right direction, or else the deal, it'll be a great relationship, but you won't close great deals.

Royce Hall

Yeah, well, it's like the, you know, the old idea of like, a plan is worthless, but planning is invaluable, right? And so it's like, I know where I want to get, like, I don't have to like, hit, you know, 12345 in that order, you know, in the first five minutes, I still have to get to that, that end goal. So being, you know, having flexibility around that framework of like, we still have to lay in the same the plane in the same way, right?

Patrick Monnot

Yeah, exactly. And I know which direction I need to take, but I'm not bound to like, follow it to the letter every single conversation. So I think that, that that's why we can debate about artificial intelligence and sales for a thousand years, right?

But maybe in a thousand years, it's all gonna be robots, and it's gonna be a non debate. But right now, like the debate between automation versus augmentation, I'm not gonna argue for BDRs or more transactional sales, I think it's very different. In the case of more complex selling motions, I think it's human is always going to play an important role.

You're not signing a million dollar contract with an automated robot, you're talking to someone, you have to look at them in the eye, build trust, build report, build partnership. And I think that's where AI is used to make that job easier so that the rep can focus on the truly human part of their work more often or a bigger percentage of their account. So yeah, I think that's that's what's exciting about it.

Royce Hall

I love that. And I am in total agreement with that. Like, I tell people, I'm like, until we have robots buying this stuff, we need, you know, human selling, right?

Patrick Monnot

Yeah, that's the point, right? It's not going to be human to robot interface, it has to be either robot to robot or human to human.

Royce Hall

Yeah, exactly. So like, you know, you can inform the human. And you know, I think that there are things that you know, bots can do in sales, maybe if you have like a very transactional, so like, you know, I go to Amazon, I buy stuff without talking to anybody, like, whatever.

I didn't buy my house that way, though. You know, but like, you know, I can do research on my house, I can get, you know, estimates, I can get comparisons of my house of value to the one next to it versus what they're asking, like, I can do all these things, you know, by myself with a bot. Yeah.

But at the end of the day, like, I want to look the person in the eye and try to figure out like, yeah, what are they lying to me about? What are you? Can we make a deal here?

Because, you know, I whatever you're asking, I don't want to give you so like, you know, we got a it's still human to human.

Patrick Monnot

Absolutely. 100% agree.

Royce Hall

Right on. Well, Patrick, how did you get into this? Like, you clearly have a lot of thoughts about sales, a lot of expertise that you've turned into a product?

Like, how did you end up where you are?

Patrick Monnot

A big part of my career has been in the intersection of go to market and product management, that I think has been quite interesting. Initially, when I was in the consulting world, I, I looked at go to market at a very macro level, understanding how the different pieces fit together from, you know, marketing, sales, customer success. And then afterwards joined a startup, and it was at the ground level, basically doing go to market operations, I was also selling was a startup, so I had to roll up your sleeves and get things done no matter what.

And that's where I got very good exposure to, I guess, the pains of enterprise account executives, what made it difficult as a job and what were perhaps the areas for improvement or areas where we could get teams to more systematically kind of perform, or be more effective. And I just thought that it was like a super interesting problem to solve, because it's very nuanced. It's also very difficult problem to solve, because there's a human aspect to it.

But that's when I decided to, you know, to start pod. And I think that's been, you know, I've all to be very honest, I've also learned a lot in the past, you know, three years, you know, talking to self leaders, sales reps, revenue enablement folks, you know, RevOps people like, you know, talking to different stakeholders in the sales world. And, you know, over three years talking to them and understanding the problems and scratching your head to try and figure out how am I going to solve this for them, gets you to put a lot of thought into and or try to develop a very good understanding of what's actually going on on the ground and you know, build a perspective on how things can be better for folks.

Royce Hall

So yeah, that's awesome. And that's kind of what got me into sales, like I've always worked in small companies. So like that, that roll up your sleeves, you know, be flexible, do whatever needs to be done mentality, like, I find that invigorating, because it's like, there's always something new, there's always something different.

And you have to put your thinking cap on, right? Like you have to be flexible and and get after it. And that's very interesting.

Like, yeah, I'm sure that in your sales career, like you've you've tackled particular things, learn particular things. But then like, as you are trying to implement that for other people, we're like, oh, you don't do it that way. Like, okay.

Patrick Monnot

Exactly. I mean, that was the when I first was thinking about this problem to solve. The first thing I did was talk to 50 to 100 different account executives, people that I knew people that I didn't know, I reached out to a bunch of folks had a 30 minute conversation.

Basically, the agenda was tell me about your work, right, was keeping you up at night, what is getting you to pull your hair out. And the first conclusion was like, holy shit, part of my language, but everyone kind of has their different approach. Right.

And I think that's what makes it very interesting. As a product category, generally sells tech is that you have to, it can be rigid, because a number one is going to, you know, sell or have different workflows than a number two. But I think after these, you know, 100 conversation, kind of identify kind of a common ground across all of them, even if they do something a bit different, like a lot of them leverages sales methodology framework, a lot of them think very actively about their buying committee, a lot of them, you know, spend a bit of their time trying to do, you know, housekeeping work with their CRM.

So like, those are things that even if people do it slightly differently, it's common to all of them. And ends up being like a center point to the platform that we built, say like, okay, well, if we are to affect change amongst reps, like it has to be in these ways, because everyone, irrespective of whether you sell, you know, nuclear submarine, or an MRI machine, or software, sales has these common elements to it. And you try to identify people to talk to, identify if they're the right fit, try to understand their needs, their pain points, their concern, and try to qualify the deal, and then ultimately try to push the deal forward.

Like those are things that are true, irrespective of the type of sales that you do. So yeah, the biggest conclusion was like, it is very different, from my own experience, but also from one company to another.

Royce Hall

Sure. Well, why don't you unpack for us, you know, a couple of things that you've learned along the way, like, you know, you've talked about like, okay, there's, you know, so different, you know, methodologies, but what are a few key things that you've learned, kind of in the sales operations world, along the way here?

Patrick Monnot

Yeah, it's a good, it's a great question. There's three, there's a few things, but there are some of the biggest learnings I've had. And the first one I'll show doesn't really relate to sales offs, specifically, but it's more for from a product development and problem solving perspective is, over time, I've learned that everyone should spend a lot more time than you think, defining the problem that you're trying to solve, before jumping into the solution, because the solution, once you've really well understood and defined the problem, the solution is going to, going to be much easier to define. And I think that's, it kind of relates to my last point is like spending the time to understand, you know, what is the challenge or the pain that is worth solving in enterprise sales is, is very interesting. And whether it's like a project internally, I bring that learning to the table.

And I think that many organization, and I think it's true for RevOps as well, when it comes to like, implementing new process, or implementing a new tool, a lot of a lot of a organization are going to start with a solution, like, hey, I found this great tool, I want to apply it. But I encourage a lot of companies, whether they it's about using pot or not, is like, hey, let's take a step back here. Like, what is it that you're trying to solve?

What is the problem statement that is worth solving? What's the value of it? And now let's talk about solution.

And, you know, the solution might be the initial hypothesis might be the right one, or it might not be. But I think that's, anyways, that's something that we're arching that over my career as a whole. But especially since starting pot, I've learned, I've learned a lot.

So that's number one.

Royce Hall

That's great. And I, you know, I talked to a lot of people in the SaaS world, you know, I'm in the Salesforce world, but also talking to folks like yourself, who have a product that can connect to Salesforce and make it more of, you know, even more valuable, right? Your value added products here.

But, you know, I talked to a lot of sales teams that are like, okay, we need people that are, you know, really kind of taking a consultative approach. I think that's what they're getting at it, right? Is, okay, like, I'm here to sell you Salesforce.

I'm here to sell you pot or whatever it may be. Like, that's transparent. But why?

Like, what are you actually going to do for me? And, you know, really digging in on that. And I know that I've been in parts of conversations where I've had a client who's like, I want to, I want to talk about buying this thing.

I'm like, why? And they're like, well, I don't know. And like, we're talking around things.

And it's like, I'm just kind of interested. I'm like, yeah, like, I can't help you buy that unless I know what you're actually trying to do.

Patrick Monnot

And, you know, there's always, I'm gonna take your money if you give it to me, but let's try to do it.

Royce Hall

You can make sales that way. Like, it doesn't work. But, you know, you end up with an unhappy client because they're like, I overbought because they didn't understand what they wanted.

Or, you know, a lot of times people are like, tell me the art of the possible. So, again, that's where that consultation comes from. It's like, I've seen people do X, Y, and Z.

You know, can I paint that picture for you so that you do get the most out of it? Yeah, absolutely.

Patrick Monnot

I guess second, second learning for me, and I alluded to it a bit earlier, but I think the one thing that I've realized is the the best sales reps or account executives in B2B sales are ones that are very intentional and, I'd say to an extent, obsessed with their buying committee in every deal. They're very thoughtful about it. They don't just walk into it and navigate willy-nilly, but they put a lot of thoughts into who should be on the marketing committee.

Do I have the right people? How are they engaged? Right?

Are they on board? Do they have concerns? Do you have areas for areas of excitement, etc?

And then, like, what should I do or say or have to leverage it to ultimately push the deal forward? And I think that's very, to me, that's very interesting. I think a lot of companies are going to stay at the first level and say, like, oh, well, our ICP is a director of IT.

Or, hey, we sell into marketing, so the VP of marketing is the ICP. Well, when you sell a six-figure contract or seven-figure contract, there's a lot more than that person involved, and they ultimately have a lot of influence into whether or not it's going to close. You can think about legal, IT, procurement, naming, right?

Finance is another big one. And I think that a lot of the best sales reps out there are going to be very, very thoughtful and deliberate and intentional about that, like, trying to understand and map the buying committee, trying to understand, okay, well, what is the sentiment of each of them? What are their concerns?

How do I build the business case for each kind of department that is involved? Because ultimately, you might be selling to the VP of marketing, but, you know, you have to build a business case for IT to be on board, you have to build a business case for finance, you have to bring on board legal. And I think that that's been, I think, a biggest learning for me of what differentiates the top sellers from maybe the less performing sellers, but ultimately, it's enabled by the organization how they think about their processes.

So, as an example, we worked with a small team, they were five AEs, two months ago, started working with them. And I think one of the things they really liked about Pod is this thing that we call like contact sentiment. So you're able to see your buying committee and learning from all your discussion, all your emails, all your notes, it's able to tell you like, hey, well, John here has a positive sentiment that is trending down and you have Anna here who has a neutral sentiment trending up.

That helps reps to be a lot more thoughtful and see around the corner to say, well, okay, well, I need to talk to John here because John is my decision maker. And it's, you know, his sentiment is trending down. And I think huge impact on your ability to close the deal, because you've probably heard that story a thousand times, but if someone sells, try to sell things, they're, you know, 90% of the way.

And then at the 11th hour, procurement jumps in and derails the deal, right? I think that's a behavior from a rep that doesn't necessarily is as thoughtful about the buying committee and optimizing it. I think that to me has been super interesting.

And that just reinforces the reason why sales ends up being or at least enterprise or mid market sales ends up being like a very intrinsically human craft. And it's like it ends up being about people and people buy from people. So that's kind of I think the second big learning for me in the past few years about enterprise sales and something that I think a lot of sales organization can enable their team to do more of.

Royce Hall

Yeah, I love that as well. You know, talking about, you know, do we have the right people on our buying committee? Because, you know, as you mentioned, you have your kind of ICP profile.

But, you know, it differs from company to company, you know, I've, there's there's a local fortune 500 company that I know, and their management is like, man, it's like a bowl of spaghetti. Like, I know people that are like very high level leadership there. I'm like, so who is the person here?

And like, I don't know. I'm like, well, just tell me the title. And they're like, it doesn't work that way.

I'm like, it doesn't work that way. What do you mean? So it's like, well, okay, that's difficult.

So like, you're being able to, you know, you can't always tell that from the outside. But you know, once you get into an organization and you get, you know, kind of find the champion of your deal, you know, can you have them fill in the gaps? And I had a sales coach at one point, and his tip was like, if you want to figure out like an org structure, you know, just like, say things that are wrong, like, oh, so you report up to like, Janus over here?

No, no, no, no, no. And she reports to Janus, and Janus reported out, oh, cool.

Patrick Monnot

Well, yeah, I think I'm a very data driven, I think he was a very data driven guy. And I think there's a lot that can be learned from historical deals. You know, if you look at a thousand deals that your company has closed in the past, identify, you know, create pockets of organization or deal that have similar characteristics, I don't know, it could be the size of the deal, the geography, the type of industry that you sold into type of product that you sold, whatever it might be.

And then you look at trends within these companies, hey, well, which ones have closed? And who did they involve in the buying committee? And which one lost?

And who was involved then? And if you're able to compare that, you're actually able, even if, yes, every organization is unique, like, it gives you a very, you know, a very objective way to understand, well, hey, this might be a trend worth investigating in that one deal, because I know that in 90% of the deals that are similar to the one I'm working on right now, a, again, a VP of procurement was involved at this point in the stage.

And I think that very, it goes back to like marrying the data to the human aspect of it is that it just gives more ammunition to an account executive to be able to like, be very intentional when they go out there and try to, you know, talk to their prospects. So I did even if, you know, I similar to you, I've heard 1000 times, no, but this deal is very unique. No, it's not, you know, it's not, you know, there, there's foundationally, or there might be elements that are unique to every organization.

But, you know, if you look at a large enough data set, and you look at, you have enough statistical relevance in your, your data set, then you're able to like, draw very interesting insights. So I think that's what it's very interesting to bring that angle to the reps. And a lot of them, you know, they see that and they're like, we help.

Yeah, actually, yeah, that was someone that had a decision making power in this company. And that's where you see the magic, in my opinion.

Royce Hall

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, Patrick, what's what's next for pod? Where can people find you?

What should we be looking for? Give us more information about what you're doing.

Patrick Monnot

A lot of cool things, we're, we're onboarding new clients. As we speak, a lot of new product launches that we've done recently, a lot of cool things happening in the next few months, including integration with new data providers, on, you know, the call recording side on the CRM side. So we're working hard to bring on board new companies and ultimately make them more performant and happy. So if anyone out there is looking to bring a deal intelligence platform to their team, you should definitely reach out through our website, workwithpod.com or on LinkedIn, I'm pretty active. I try to share my opinion, maybe a bit too much according to my girlfriend, but try to share my opinion and thoughts on anything sales.

So Patrick Munnot on LinkedIn, you know, reach out, DM me. I love talking about this stuff. So I do it for a living.

Yeah.

Royce Hall

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot

On YouTube as well. I'm part of Workspace on YouTube. So we love talking to revenue leaders, RevOps leaders, you know, fractional sales leaders, sales reps about what sales is for them and what they learn over time.

So a lot of great content out there that we put our heart into.

Royce Hall

Fantastic. Well, I appreciate it. I love what you're doing at Pod.

I love what you're doing with your content. And thanks for sharing with us today. I appreciate it.

Patrick Monnot

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Enjoy the conversation.

Royce Hall

Thanks, Patrick.