Beyond the Comfort Zone with Jeff Pedowitz: Getting Your Business AI Ready

foreign first of all welcome Jeff and welcome to everybody today um welcome to beyond the comfort zone live it's a show that helps you step out of your comfort zone into a place of growth and learning and I think getting Zoom stream is still probably a little outside my comfort zone is what I'm learning right now and making sure they're alive for those of you who are joining us for the first time today I'm Aviva Wilmer and I'm a vistage chair in Atlanta Georgia I lead three groups of incredibly driven and ambitious CEOs who won't accelerate towards their goals faster I also facilitate a group of growth oriented key Executives who are dedicating to driving to Transformer transformative change uh within their organizations um our peer groups are amazing Mastermind collectives where members come together regularly to share ideas experiences and support one another and no matter how many years of experience anyone has the reality is their knowledge is capped by their experiences and their experiences are still limited they don't know what they don't know because they haven't experienced it yet a pure environment creates valuable opportunities to explore the unknown be more proactive and make better decisions by leveraging Collective wisdom and diverse perspectives of their peers members are able to achieve more than they ever could on their own Our Guest today is Jeff padowitz he's the president and CEO of the pedowitz group Jeff is dissatisfied with traditional perception of marketing teams as cost centers he believes they can be profit centers and they serve as the creative core of adaptable companies the pedowitz group has gained a strong reputation in the marketing community and focuses on areas like AI Hot Topic today digital transformation customer centricity business accountability and marketing technology they have a track record of generating revenue for over 1500 corporate clients including Fortune 500 companies as well as Boutique organizations he's an expert in using AI to drive revenue and he recently authored the book the AI Revenue architect building your time machine for exponential sales growth I'm really excited to have him with us today to talk more about how AI can drive revenue for your businesses foreign apologize to you guys um since we're live I can't use AI to get rid of the red nose or the nasal voice today but uh you guys will just have to deal with that and we'll make sure Jeff talks a whole lot more than I do today um so welcome Jeff how are you oh okay thank you I hope you feel better but I should be on the program awesome um Jeff the high is such a Hot Topic right now I'm curious how do you think it's going to change how companies pursue Revenue growth well it's certainly going to get them out of their comfort zone if it hasn't already um and it's really ai's been around for a long time I think it's just since Chad gbt came on the market back in November this these last nine months I think have been eye-opening for so many different people but it's really going to transform Revenue growth for companies in so many ways first of all the the clearest and most obvious ways in efficiency and productivity there are so many manual tasks that sales and marketing teams use in the pursuit of Revenue and these can be automated repeated in scaled and optimized using AI the second The Drudge of every business data getting it keeping it clean standardizing working with it I mean we all say that we want to make data-driven decisions but we can only do that if the data is is good so AI will help us improve our data get stronger data and that ultimately will lead to better decisions third personalization through multiple channels and experiences that we've all gotten spoiled by Amazon and Netflix and and we now expect even in a multi-million dollar business transactions we still want to get that experience and AI will make that possible and finally AI really unlocks the power of developing new revenue streams so in in businesses the more revenue streams the more ways we can go the market around our products and services the better and stronger business we have and so AI will help with that as well now AI you know talk about this a lot with my members and a lot of them are more probably small medium-sized businesses and the question is ai's out there but we can't necessarily afford it how does AI affect small and medium-sized businesses is it something that they can play with at this point in time well AI is going to impact the average size business uh and and so if there are cost-effective solutions on the market for every size business no one has to go out and spend hundreds or millions of dollars on AI for marketing teams there's tools like Jasper that start only at uh 10 20 hours a user per month Microsoft comes out next month with copilot built on this 365 platform almost there everybody uses office in one way shape or form Google will be coming to Market with products and services and so the arms race is on there's going to be a lot of options for small businesses to be able to leverage AI as part of their day-to-day that's great to hear um because I think there's a lot of testing and playing with it but not necessarily a lot of understanding on how to execute it within that environment without bringing in big consultants and investing a ton of money in your book you have the Make It Rain framework um can you tell my viewers a little bit more about that what does rain stand for and what does it mean yeah um while rain in itself doesn't stand for anything it's just uh well sorry erain the book it does I was thinking about the components of rain as I was describing to in a minute ago absolutely stands for something uh Revenue artificial intelligence network is what rain means um and it's really about how do you connect use AI to connect your people your processes your systems both insight and outside the Enterprise in order to be able to drive scalable revenue and then the components of writing which I talked about a couple minutes ago being uh performance optimization data personalization and and new revenue streams uh the make it approach really is about how you start with your data and your use cases and you're modeling out scenarios and fixing it one use case at the time so AI can be overwhelming just in its sheer potential and then all the noise we're seeing out there so my advice to everyone in the book is to start off with a specific use case look maybe it's just you want to get better email open rates you want to get better at processing your leads through the funnel you want to be able to improve reporting or you want to get more efficient at transcription and these are all practical use cases that you can use for AI and and take the low hanging fruit first now out of curiosity what motivated you to write the book well you know I I uh being a technology and and working with I started working with tattoo PT back in November December when it when it first came out and AI itself has been around for a long time but this these are time which models were new and I saw the potential then and realized that things were going to shift dramatically now I I would be lying to you if I could say I could predict every single Trend and think that's going to happen because of AI I don't think anybody could but I sense that it's going to be once in a generational type of thing and uh our whole business is around helping our clients figure out how to take advantage of emerging Trends in digital and Technology to grow their revenue and so we like everything else we wanted to get out on top of it and we thought that getting a book out around how companies could use AI to drive Revenue would be really important okay so I gotta ask the title um we're building your time machine for exponential growth where Revenue growth come from so as I was writing the book um I was just started thinking about Ai and science fiction and you know growing up and watching movies like The Terminator and other kinds of things I mean these are all very popular movies and I've always been intrigued by the possibility of time travel and when I was thinking about Ai and it being so futuristic but it's now here I'm like well not maybe not a literal time machine but how could I use that metaphor in business and what would that look like and for all the talk we make about building repeatable revenue and getting making data-driven decisions the fact is that we have poor data we have disconnected systems broken processes overlapping functions on people and so it's really hard for us to build an accurate forecast many many people in sales struggle with their Pipeline and accurate forecasting to drive predictable Revenue unless you might happen to be in a SAS business and you know you can deduct churn so if you can actually use AI to go back in time and start to analyze all this data all this history all these processes it could actually help you make much better decisions and so then you can move forward in time and so you could finally start to be much more accurate with your forecasting and so that's really how I marry those two concepts together very cool I will say I uh agree with you on the um sales pipeline because I don't know a business I work with that feels like their sales pipeline is good nor have I ever been a part of a company that's had an accurate forecast so if you can manage that one I think uh here's America World Cup for all miracle workers with AI tools I think our many businesses pipelines like a constant disappearing magic trick you know you started off the month or the quarter and your pipeline looks like one thing I mean you get to that the end of the quarter and all of a sudden it disappears what happened you know um and and look It ultimately as as the buying process becomes more involved especially in B2B you see I have a lot more people that are involved and a lot more buyer-centric and more unpredictable uh it really is hard to definitively know when a customer is going to sign a contract even if you use the best sales process in the world the best qualification criteria customers are still going to buy when they buy they are can you give some examples because you know we're talking but we're talking very much in theory right now for our viewers of how AI has significantly improved Revenue operations for your business well there's a lot of things already I mean let's just start off with basic analysis um whether it's an Excel spreadsheet or you're consuming large amounts of information transcriptions surveys where you have to analyze a lot a lot of data and come up with an analysis to make a recommendations so in Revenue Ops now we're looking at customer data marketing data sales data Tech data Trends and we're synthesizing this and we're trying to provide updated support and reports so that helps a lot with productivity so we can start providing better decision making support it helps with Communications and prospecting so doing research in real time about customers pulling of their public pulling in their 10K reports and sympathizing that with your value proposition resequencing your sales process and Cadence so it's Dynamic and unique to each individual customer or Prospect these things are already happening marketing is using AI to help with creative and content so they can now produce emails landing pages website Pages videos even social media posts and a fraction of the time that it took them a year ago so that lowers their cost while increasing their speed so they can get better campaigns out the door faster they can lower their cost of delivery improve their Roi and drive better conversion and all these things have an impact on Revenue awesome that's a lot of great examples um how again kind of going back to the businesses the tools that are coming out do they allow individuals to really access doing those specific things or how do you know where to go if you're like you said start with one project if we were going to pick one how do you know where to go to start well you know at in the face of it a lot of businesses don't know what they don't know they don't know where to start they at a high level they get it yes this is something I should be doing something with everyone's talking about this I need to do something but what do I do where do I start so the advice I've been giving to every business owner that I interact with is treat this like any other business planning exercise right you go down through all your processes internally um and all your services and products and say if I added AI to this and I could automate this I can improve this what would it look like and come up with a scenario of what that looks like then go back and put a rating what's the level of effort low medium high what's the level of investment low medium high and then just like I mean businesses have gone through dozens of planning exercises over the years right so you sequence okay um high impact low cost you know low impact medium costs right sequence them and then just pick the lowest hanging fruit and then pick no more than one rock equator like pick one big thing that you want to work on do that across your company and then move forward and then there'll be plenty of time don't feel like you have to suddenly solve the World overnight because of AI this is a rapidly transforming rapidly iterating and and I can guarantee you if you just start with those you're already going to be ahead of 80 of the people that are out there so I think what you just said is really important to highlight and that's you know everyone's I think feeling like they've got to jump right in and be at 110 with that right now um and I think the reality is start small start playing with it see how it works and then build from there I think that's a really good point for most of the businesses that I work with to hear um yeah I mean but don't don't stay on the sidelines either because the world will pass you by don't let fear or uncertainty drive all your decisions and you still have plenty of other things to work on as a business AI will help those in many cases um but yeah just being searchable about it so let's talk about the fear and uncertainty for a minute I hear that a lot for business owners that some it's just a fad some it's going to take over and all humankind and so I don't want to touch or mess with it I mean these are some of the extremes but you know what are some of the concerns you're hearing and you know how are you answering some of those for your clients you know I think it's very common in in humanity that we always fear what we don't understand and and until we understand it it's hard to know what to do with it so it can feel very overwhelming especially when it comes to technology but let's just take a reality check for a minute and it's only been 50 years ago that we sent someone to the minute it's uh we haven't even had television for 100 years the internet started in the 90s we got our smartphone in 2007. um you know there it's a relatively very thin slice of time in terms of how things are are iterating um change is a constant and we have proven as humans that while we like change we don't like to be changed so we don't like change forced upon us we like to have the choice of choosing when and how we want to change um I'm more of a pregnant pragmatic futurist I guess I don't think that um AI is going to become sentient and take over the world and then we're going to be ducking for cover as as human beings anytime soon I do think that AI will eliminate some jobs and I do think new jobs will be created and I think mostly though um it will be the people that know how to use AI will replace the people that don't so for everyone it's worth getting educated and understanding and just like we use our smartphones and we use our laptops and we have other kinds of tools we have calculators I mean AI will become a tool that we use as part of our day-to-day we have to learn how to embrace it how to understand it and the future has got to be written I mean I there's so much Innovation going on right now the World's Gonna at least that's the earliest AI anyway it's going to look very different in 12 months than than it does at this moment because there's a lot of people throwing a lot of innovative power out there but that's the beautiful part about humanity is that we're so creative you know and that that that we are constantly ideating dreaming and building upon the latest iteration to make our world better that is pretty cool and uh you know there's a lot of information and misinformation about AI out there right now where do you recommend people go to stay up to date and to start really paying attention well I I think it depends on what you're looking for you know you're looking for AI applications or you're looking for AI news and news related to AI or specific to your industry um I certainly would work with your industry Association so if you're if you're in one uh they're they're also doing the job of aggregating information that's relevant to that industry and getting educated there um I stay up to date on the movements of open Ai and Bard and meta and Oracle and some of these big companies that are investing a lot of money Salesforce um and I just keep an eye on on the news but like every other news story out there you know keep one eye ear open and one ear being a little skeptical um I I think for the predominantly many news organizations I don't know about being a tire that operate in the middle you know they they ask you one way or the other so you probably have to go to multiple Outlets to get to get a handle on a story so take it with a grain of salt yes uh as I I like without getting too political just use that old raging quote because it applies here trust for verifying right just just you know the same thing even when you're working with these large language models like tattoo BT and Bart like don't just take what it spits out for gospel and use it and read it understand it validate it make sure it's real um because sometimes it isn't I mean sometimes it's wildly off and sometimes it could be a small thing and sometimes it's perfectly right but yet you have to go through it and you have to analyze it and trust and bear and and verify well one of the things I've noticed even with chat GPT is it's still up to human error so if you put something in the same feed you just had something you don't realize and it mixes the subject areas up you can get a response that makes absolutely no sense so you know as correct as it is we can also still create really bad inputs into it yeah and if you keep the same window open you know start a new chat it's trying to draw context within your chat history so you've been keeping a running window open all week and you're throwing all kinds of stuff in that you're like recipes and Health Data and business data and Technology data it uh yes it's your stream of conscience in the moment but it's still software it doesn't necessarily always understand that that's your stream of conscience and then in the moment and it might take these things and mix them together and like you said produce an outcome wildly unexpected but it's also very powerful but I think we shouldn't be expecting so much of this that don't we because when that happens we get also really disappointed like we're expecting these machines to be perfect and so then we either outright dismiss it I don't think that's very constructive either you know we have to recognize it for what it is it's a very powerful piece of machine learning um that's been built on the back of thousands of hours of people's effort and billions of dollars of investment into expensive software machines and databases and training and it will get better over time as more people interact with it it becomes smarter but it is not sentient it is not self-aware it doesn't understand emotion or context it can't have a sophisticated conversation it can't get into deep strategy you can't pivot and adapt um in many ways um it's and look at the T and the GPT it's transformative it's not creating it's transforming so it's taking the inputs that you give it and it's transforming it into something better then you might be able to produce on your own so let's talk about some other use cases because I think people will find these interesting um how does AI it would say enable better decision making um as a part of the revenue generation process well um let's start off with ICP for example uh you know you could talk to a lot of Executives especially marketers and they'll spat out their ICP they're very proud of it and and they know it and then if you actually look in the data inside their CRM system and their win loss analysis A lot of times you'll find other segments that they've actually been selling to that they're not aware of and that's both good and bad right it's good the obviously they have another product Market or segment that could sell to but bad they've been over investing in a segment that might not be producing maybe they need to change and so this is an area where AI can help it can get much better at analyzing past purchase Behavior Market data clinical competitors it can read the economic Trends and it can help you make smarter decisions as to where to invest your marketing and sales and product dollars so that you can get better growth so that would be one area um customer service and support and and you know look it's it's always a fine line between trying to provide customer service and then but do it in a cost-effective manner we've all gotten so sick and tired of ivr and you know talking to people in some country I can't we can't understand and it's a very frustrating experience but I I think with chat Bots and more interaction on the websites that customers can have more real-time intelligent conversations with their brands get the answers they need quicker I think we're going to see search change dramatically in the next 12 to 24 months so the page of results that we get today and you know we're scanning down the page and you know and then based upon how well the site optimize this page do they pay to be ads stuff I think that model is going to go away I think we're going to see more of like a bubble in the middle of the page where it's a much more contextual around it understanding us what we're looking for I think websites are going to change too the traditional nav structure is going to go away um it's going to be more something that we interact with um and that that starts to understand us and helps us get a more contextual answer all these things have impact on how we Market how we sell how we engage with our customer our level of transparency what we share what we don't share I think we're going to see software change you know if the ability to code is much easier now and AI can start to generate software been is a traditional licensing model whether it's a SAS based subscription or an Enterprise model is that the right model anymore because you might be able to build a completely bespoke architecture for your business and a cost-effective way that gives you everything that you need and at a fraction of the cost so uh and then there's there's just so many different ways that this will impact our ability to to drive revenue and engage with our customer how will it uh help companies like better understand customer Behavior specifically well today at least in uh in B2B anyway we rely on the cookie which is going away uh we rely on third-party engines like bambora or we use ABX platforms like sixth sense or demand base or zoom and and then we're licensing that data to help us make decisions but we're still manually segmenting and scoring from there so the way that we do scoring of customer Behavior today is still completely manual at least in designing the model anyway um we're assigning five points for an email open 10 points for a website visit and then we create an arbitrary scale and then the marketing automation platforms of course then can keep a running score but that model is very arbitrary because it's us the humans coming up with arbitrary points based upon arbitrary rules whereas AI can actually start to analyze a customer's Behavior across the web and on your website and all your channels in real time and create Dynamic models uh to to engage with so you can then really start to understand the behavior of your customers really imagine that ties in then too as you're looking at lead generation as well lead scoring things like that segmentation Etc yeah all that nurturing advertising so I mean we're already seeing the ability for AI to generate ads not just the copy but the image and the video and then it can place the ads so what will that mean and so if AI is actually doing all that you know then is it the person in reading the ads well we all all have our own AI agents or avatars representing us to read the ads that the AIS are serving up uh and let's let the AIS battle it out amongst each other I think you know I think it's going to be a definitely interesting so this is also where this is one of those forces it's going to be so disruptive it's hard to predict completely how everything's going to change um there's a couple Universal truths though about Humanity uh one we ought to be social you know we're not meant to be isolated in our case you know the pandemic proved that it so for as much as AI will make things easier and more accessible if it doesn't help us Bridge the device if it doesn't bring us closer give us opportunities to interact with each other not just with a machine I think Society will adapt I think we'll find other ways I don't think we want to have machine if it means that we lose the ability to have a relationship with Humanity um and in our and our fellow humans so I think that's going to be one important disrupter that comes out of this um you got me thinking because you said you know many times you said I don't know exactly where this is going to go um so not from a prediction standpoint but just from a creativity standpoint if there was something that could come about through AI that you've always wanted to see from a visioning idea what would it be what would you like AI to be able to do for the world well I mean that regard and let's move past Revenue right but revenue is a business construct um I think there are so many more important things like can it help solve pollution can it help uh develop renewable energy can it cure our most insufferable diseases right can it provide cost-effective solutions for for our families I mean there's can it solve literacy I I mean I I think there's so many ways where let's like if we have this much powerful science let's cure our planet let's take care of people let's build a better Society Let's Build a Better World sure revenue is nice that's my business that's what I happen to be doing but I think Life's greatest answers are much bigger than that I'm glad to hear you say that um but it's great vision I think there's so many wonderful things people are scared of my eye they're missing the possibilities that lie within it to fix some of probably the greatest problems we have um so I look forward to seeing that world as well um going back to your book so for a lot of my listeners who have not yet read it what are some key takeaways that you would hope they'd get to encourage them to go out and go buy your book right now and read it um I think one it starts with data and and AI is powerful but it's still it doesn't feed itself it only works on the data and the input that's being provided to it and for as a business if you've been ignoring your data this is a wake-up call right you can really revolutionize your business what they are the next couple years but only if your date is right and if you're not going to put the time and effort into cleaning up your data getting better data that feeds this machine you're going to be sorely left behind so that's definitely one big takeaway um the second one is you know a time machine doesn't have to go forward hundreds of years it can go forward a day a week a month you know six months so make the small wins and invest in the small things they just keep moving the needle progress not Perfection that's that's really another important thing and third um use AI to help you dream and unlock the power of your business to discover new audiences to discover new ways of working to increase productivity to increase your employee satisfaction to deliver a better customer experience and to Define new ways to grow um and and then it really starts to unlock the possibilities okay so I gotta ask this is there anything that you can give us a sneak peek on what's coming next another book or project you're working on gosh I think my whole show would kill me if I try to come out with another book we're still working on uh get you know getting people to read this one um well I think you know for us it's the focus is really going to be on helping our clients to figure out what to do and I think everyone's at that stage right now don't know what we don't know don't know where to start um no it's important see all Muse in the buzzword and and for the people that get past the point of being scared now what so I think we're really happy our biggest focus is on the what you know like and helping them get to that next step so if our listeners are interested in connecting with you just to learn more about AI or to understand more about how you help businesses with eye and revenue Generation Um one of the best ways to get in touch uh LinkedIn so Jeff pedowitz so LinkedIn slash pedowitz uh you can go to my URL Jeff petterwitz.com um our website pedowitzgroup.com so uh contact information is all pretty straightforward awesome I also throw it into chat after a while we get off and close here so I ask every uh guest on my show this question it has nothing to do with AI although maybe you'll make it have to do with AI but what is something outside of your comfort zone that you have never done before skydive it's a lot of fun I'll have to take your word for it I'm not doing it oh I might have to push you on that one Jeff no pun intended there you go well thank you so much for joining me today it is an honor to have you as a guest on my show um talking about one of the most important topics I think Business Leaders can be talking about right now um because I don't think we should be shying away I think we should be engaging and embracing our new reality um thank you to everyone who was a guest today or was a viewer today oh um I definitely need some AI work here today and until next time on beyond the comfort zone I encourage all of my viewers to try something new outside of your comfort zone because that's where growth occurs and Life Begins thank you everyone [Music]