No One Wants to Use Your @$!@#% CRM

00:03 - Dave (Guest)

One of the top reasons has to do with the complexity of the system. What I mean by that is the technical debt that's built up in the system over the years. Even the finest CRM systems that are out there, like Salesforce, especially the earlier adopters, they've just made it into this monster with so many customizations that they're so far out of the box that they cannot take advantage of the new features that are being released by the vendor that's providing them. What I mean by technical debt is they're going rogue in terms of creating their own objects or duplicating them, creating tons of fields. Me as a user sitting down looking at the screen and I've got a hundred fields on the screen. In reality, the only thing I really need to do in order to put in there to manage my business is maybe a name and a phone number and an email.

00:59

In some instances they're being asked to enter. All these things that are being asked probably aren't going to even be used. In the end, the card will send in UX. Is you never want to put anything below the fold on the screen, meaning the bottom edge of your screen? You should not have to scroll. Everything you need at this moment should be right in front of you and it's not.

01:31 - Fred (Host)

of Banking on Disruption for: 2023

02:26

lot of surprises planned for: 2024

03:55

o of our top five episodes in: 2023

05:02

Josh, eric and I make our top: 2024

05:41

I am super excited for our special holiday episode, this time to have our first time return guest. Regulators of the show will know that we did have one of our early guests come back to the show now as a regular contributor in our quick takes segment and you'll be hearing from Eric, like you do every week in quick takes after the interview. But today, for the first time, we have a guest coming back for an interview as the first two for and the exciting part about it for me is that this is not only our first two time guest, this is our first guest that we have now tried to record three different times. So, dave, I appreciate your patience, I appreciate your fixing your bandwidth, I appreciate you're putting up with me not pushing the record button when we did this 20 minutes ago, but if this episode isn't the best one just from a practice perspective, I will be highly disappointed. Welcome back, David Dal Pos.

06:46 - Dave (Guest)

Fred, great to talk to you again and again and again.

06:53 - Josh (Other)

It's a good thing we like each other.

06:54 - Fred (Host)

You're nailing this time. No, I'll tell you what One of the reasons why I'm not bothered at all about this is. This is a topic that they knew. When I talk about a lot, I mean we've known each other and worked together and worked apart for over 10 years now, way back to Cloud Sherpa days, and this is a problem that never goes away. And it's a problem we talk about a lot because to me, there's really nothing more critical as a consultant, as an SI, to solve for my clients, which is usability. But when you and I, I think, first talked about this as a topic, it was a few months ago. I was in Florida or Florida Dreaming. We had lunch and I think you mentioned to me like, oh yeah, I really want to do this as a topic at Dreamforce, but I think you said they're not going to want to take it because they're not going to like my title. Nobody wants to use your CRM.

08:04 - Dave (Guest)

Yeah, I don't know why, I don't know why?

08:09 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, and I said you know what, maybe the title could use a little bit of work for Salesforce, but the subject matter is gold, and I'll tell you that one of the most popular episodes that we had this year was an early episode with Paul Risk, and Paul was a former CIO of a couple of large insurance companies and he really went wall to wall with Salesforce in early days. But when it was uncommon to go world to wall with Salesforce and because Paul's a sharp guy and really a visionary, he did a lot of things right from an adoption perspective and his show was all about user adoption and it told like the golden side of the story, like here's all the things to do, right, I think this show might be as or more popular, because we're going to talk about the other side of the show, like where does everything go sideways, like what are you looking for in you? Whether you're just starting the journey, whether you're stepping into a role where you're taking over an org that maybe has been around for two, five, 10 years, what are the warning signs? Or, wherever you are in that journey, how do you make it so people actually want to use your CRM? And so, dave, I love the topic.

09:27

I'm glad we're doing it on the show and I'm going to highly encourage you to do two things. One, when call for Dreamforce comes out next year, submit the session. I'll come up and co-present it with you if you want me to. And you should try to hit the Dreaming Circuit. I mean Florida Dreaming is literally a mile from your house.

09:46 - Dave (Guest)

I know, I can't believe I missed it.

09:49 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, if you don't submit at least to that one and maybe some of the other Dreaming conferences, I think you and they will be missing out. But let's just start with a little bit of your background, like why is this a topic that's so passionate for you?

10:06 - Dave (Guest)

latform. He's like. I have my: 1998

10:58

I had actually inherited it. I showed up and inherited it from some other kid at the time, but we were at the time as a $6 billion in assets under management and we were managing our sales activities with Microsoft Access and spitting out Excel spreadsheets which finance operations. Marketing expected it in that form. So one day somebody in IT who felt we needed to institutionalize this stuff and move to the big boy systems decided on the big boy pants.

11:32

real software in here. Circa: 1996

11:46

But we went through all the usual efforts get people involved, look at it, contribute to it, do the testing, do the training and then the big day came. We did the launch. Everybody was excited and I told you earlier it was probably a week, but I would say it was probably several hours and we were back using Microsoft Access, because all the reasons that we're going to talk about it fell on its face. And my key thing is and this is why it's like nobody wants to use your CRM is because nothing has changed since that time. You and I have been into some of the largest financial institutions in the world and talk to some companies and they are running their business on Excel spreadsheets. Still, they've got their top of the funnel billions of dollars, in rows in a spreadsheet, and that's how they're managing their business. So that's just the way it is. It's still that way.

12:47 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, you're absolutely right and it's one of the things. It's a problem for a couple of different ways. One is these CRM projects are not inexpensive. They take a lot of dollars for licenses, a lot of dollars for services, whether you're using your own employees or you're bringing in an SI firm to partner. And it takes a lot of time, a lot of resources, right, your internal stakeholders, your product owner, all the people that are working on building out the solution. So it takes a lot of time and focus from the organization, a lot of money from the organization.

13:23

And on the flip side of it, if you spend all this time and money and resource and people still aren't using the system, there's still this shadow book of records on the side where the real stuff is happening. And then people run to CRM when you have to do something for some kind of a stage gate, right, like well, I've got to get a proposal out, so I've got to go put these seven things in the op so I can get to the next thing from somebody else. You're losing over half, probably 80%, of the value of why you would stand up a CRM project. So you're not solving the problem that you have and you're spending a lot of money and not getting the return that you're looking for.

14:08 - Dave (Guest)

No doubt, and usually by the time we're getting the phone call, there's a level of desperation at that point because leadership is not getting the information that they need to be able to effectively forecast right, and so they're trying to figure. You know, they're basically thinking we're going to have to relaunch this thing to make it right and I've heard this before several times and that is we only get one chance to do it again, the third time you're out, and sometimes it could be career breaking for some of these people who are saying they need to do it. So yeah, absolutely it's mission critical.

14:47 - Fred (Host)

f you have a Dave Dalpas a la: 1996

15:28 - Dave (Guest)

Yeah, and I think one of the top reasons has to do with the complexity of the system.

15:34

What do I mean by that is the technical debt that's built up in the system over the years.

15:40

Even the finest CRM systems that are out there, like Salesforce, especially the earlier adopters, they've just made it into this monster with so many customizations.

15:53

Then they're so far out of the box that they cannot take advantage of the new features that are being released by the vendor that's providing them. And what I mean by technical debt is they're going rogue in terms of creating their own objects or duplicating them, creating tons of fields. Me as a user sitting down looking at the screen and I've got a hundred fields on the screen and in reality, the only thing I really need to do in order to put in there to manage my business is maybe some a name and a phone number and an email in some instances, and they're being asked to enter. All these things that are being asked probably aren't going to even be used in the end and the card will send in UX. Is you never want to put anything below the fold on the screen, meaning the bottom edge of your screen? You should not have to scroll. Everything you need at this moment should be right in front of you, and it's not.

16:47 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, it frequently is, and I'll say this, like to be kind and generous to a lot of the companies to find themselves in these situations A lot of times not always a lot of times these custom objects were created because, you know, salesforce 10 years ago, five years ago, didn't have objects for a lot of these things, right, salesforce? That's part of the beauty of Salesforce is they're always improving the platform three times a year. Major updates there. If you, if I walked back I first touched Salesforce 16 years ago and if I went back to that org, it would be unrecognizable to somebody. That's a brand new admin today, you know it looks completely different. Half the objects are aren't there or better, right. So it's not always the fault of the org. You know the system improves but you have to keep up with the system as new releases and new features coming out, whether it be standard objects for somebody you had a custom object for before, whether it be the ability now, I mean for years and years.

17:59

I think back to some of the orgs I've seen they have so many different page layouts in a way to solve for what you were talking about, which is too many fields on the screen, right? Well, what was the tool we had for a bunch of years? Well, page layouts. Well, let's create a bunch of page layouts and assign them to a bunch of different people so everybody only has the view that they want. Then that becomes a nightmare to manage. So part of it is keeping up with where the system is evolving and growing right.

18:28 - Dave (Guest)

No doubt, no doubt. So that's the big one is well, that's the first one, because that's the thing you see when you first get in there. The next thing thing, and probably the core thing that we hear most frequently, is around data quality. When you have a system that isn't being used, your data quality is going to disappear pretty quickly. It's going to be stale, there's going to be. We see a lot of duplicates at the company and contact level, for instance. There's inconsistent formatting and it just gets pretty bad. The worst of those things are errors in the data. If there's an important field that is just plain wrong, it's going to be bad. Which actually reminds me of going back to that first wave.

19:13

Take control brokerage example I gave you. I'll never forget we had done a marketing campaign with the data in our access database. I remember the senior vice president of operations came and threw a letter on my desk and he said Pat is a woman, not a man, or vice versa One of those two because we got the prefix wrong. So the guy was like you guys don't even know what you're doing, just threw the whole thing because we didn't get the prefix wrong. Talk about a way to immediately discredit your entire system. Get the portfolio value of a client Wrong or stale in the system for financial advisor, they will completely dismiss the system and they'll tell other people in the process absolutely that is.

20:03 - Fred (Host)

That is, a Having the right data, having the data be accurate in in a way that's well understood, is critical, and Once you lose that trust, it takes months and years to walk that back. Oh, no doubt you know they'll, you, you could you get it wrong one time and Everly they'll. They'll question every other piece of data in the system, and even six months from now or or nine months from now, if they see something that's novel but right, they'll say, oh, but I remember nine months ago that portfolio value was wrong, so this is probably junk as well. It's still so, and and you know I love what you mentioned you know, if people aren't using the data, the data becomes stale.

20:45

I think duplicates is another huge issue one for me, and I think I don't know if this was the source of what you were thinking about from some of those portfolio values. It's integrations and latency, right? You know, if you've got today, I think everybody I don't know, maybe I hope everybody is is looking at real-time values when they're, you know, from a Managing client portfolio perspective, right, People are are, you know, more active in their portfolios looking at thing. Everybody you know logs into their phone. I know I'm showing my phone this is an audio podcast, but everybody logs into their phone and, you know, can look anytime at what their current value is. And if you're asking, to your example, your advisor to go to a CRM system and use that to manage their portfolio, and you're looking at yesterday's values and Unless, unless you're managing a mutual fund portfolio, you're you're behind the times, right? So you the data's got to be not latent and accurate, and I I think that's Absolutely critical.

21:49 - Dave (Guest)

Well, and it needs to be in this system, right? You don't want that swivel chair, exactly. You know which is the other thing. It's like I can go over here and I know the data is right. You know you'll see that often it's building that, that single, that single pain right.

22:03

Like not only do we not want to go people Below the fold and have to scroll down, we don't want people to have to go to two or three different places To try to get one task done exactly exactly so that's so I would say those are the two, the big two, but then from there, no, I'm gonna say there's a big three, and the biggest of those is what we're gonna talk about, and that has to do with the change management element of it.

22:29

Right, and we can uncover that a little bit more. But part of that has to do with, you know, when you think about a system like this, if it doesn't have Senior leadership support. You know, in terms of they're Asking users to use this system, they're putting the resources into supporting the system for it. You know that's. You're just not going to see that success without it. So, and part of that has to do with what we talked about before around the whole carrot and stick model carrot being, you know, here's, here's the benefit of you using the system. Stick is, you know, here's the, the punishment you get for not right, and Oftentimes I know I've seen mostly stick as and I'm sure you have as well over any carrot.

23:19 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, I know, absolutely. I think that Left to their own devices. Frequently, the the clients I've worked with think first about the stick. Well, we're gonna force somebody to do this and if they don't do it, we're not going to pay them their commission, or we're gonna, you know, give them a negative Multiplier on their commission, or we're gonna, you know, do this. We're gonna do that.

23:43

And, and I gotta tell you, I am a carrot man when it comes to this, for for a couple of different reasons. One is I the biggest favor that you can do yourself from a user adoption perspective is to design the system in a way that it's paying dividends back to the users. You know, a lot of times you come in from the top and and I'm not discounting the fact that it is important for leadership and management to have More accurate sales forecasts and a better ability to plan for waves of ups and downs in the business, and it's, you know, great for customers to be able to have a single Place to go to to potentially, you know, self-serve Solutions and submit cases, that kind of stuff. There's. There's lots of payoffs for lots of stakeholders, and those are all important, but if you're not also thinking about the payoff for your daily user, the, the person that's going to be in there from a sales or service perspective, entering those opportunities, entering those cases, managing stuff, and what are they getting out of it? You're gonna have an uphill battle and so you want people, for I always like to think of it as a multiplier effect.

24:53

If I'm putting in One piece of effort, I want to get 2x back out. You know if I, if you're asking me, put your context in here log your meetings, log your opportunities, keep the opportunity updated. I want the system to pay me back with. It's gonna tell me what I should focus on. It's gonna tell me here's where you have white space of this account. It's gonna tell me here's an account that you you've gotten a lot of business out of historically but hasn't done anything with you in the last three months. Baby, you should call them right. If the system's not paying me back a dividend for what I'm putting into it, then you don't have that's what, what's in it for me and you're gonna have to result to the stack.

25:34 - Dave (Guest)

What is the tool set nowadays? That's really hot. That would help in that capacity.

25:40 - Fred (Host)

I'm not saying you tell me. Are you talking about sales, for sorry?

25:43 - Dave (Guest)

No, I know that little two Letter acronym that's all over the place nowadays. That gives you those insights. I'm still not good.

25:52 - Fred (Host)

Are you? Oh, I know where. I know where you're going with. This ends in an.

25:56 - Dave (Guest)

AI.

25:57 - Fred (Host)

As with an eye. Well, absolutely, you know, some of it is definitely AI, right, you know, and and we can't have a show this this year without talking about AI at some point. But but no, I mean, I think that absolutely. I mean some of it's AI powered, some of it's just, you know, well designed. You know system interfaces, right, if you know. Back to one of your points, if you want me to update an opportunity, when I open the opportunity object and I'm looking at it in a certain stage, only the feels that are relevant to that stage to be visible, right, so I don't have to go three or four different places to update something that's not relevant. If it's, if it's an early stage opportunity, I don't need to see end stage fields and vice versa, right, it's, it's. You know there's a lot that goes into, you know, giving the users a whiff of no doubt.

26:49 - Dave (Guest)

Well, I guess what I? The reason why I brought it up is we know that the large language models of artificial intelligence, gen, ai. I need a lot of data, and not only does it need a lot of data, it needs good data, right.

27:07 - Fred (Host)

What I think.

27:08 - Dave (Guest)

I'm pretty sure I think the L, the, the first L large, yeah, I think. Lots of data. So you know, so that's a big thing. You know what and you know I talked to a CIO recently and they were all about AI. They were all excited about it, but the preceding that conversation was our 3, 4, 5 instances of Salesforce across the year. Organization are Really bad and our data isn't great. So how can you have a good conversation about gen AI and driving insights when you've got fundamental problems you got to deal with that are basically driving your users away, you know, exacerbating the problem.

27:49 - Fred (Host)

So no, absolutely getting getting the data right in the system and making sure that it's it's current, it's robust. That's that's going to pay dividends, as you're looking to Invest in more AI and and and frankly, you know one of the things that I want to turn this into an AI conversation but there's a spectrum of AI and there's a lot of value in you know what I'll even call like, you know, older school or like non generative AI. I mean a lot of the, the stuff that's in Einstein and other methodologies for, you know, prioritization and and leads. I mean a lot of that is AI, adjacent and so, and all of it depends on what you mentioned, which is robust data and good data, and so you're really doing yourself a ton of favors on On on both sides if you give your users a reason to keep that data current and then you give them in return Something to pay off from that.

28:51

No doubt, no doubt. So are those you mentioned, the big three. Are there any other kind of on the on the problems, or should we start to Walk people back out of the deep, dark forest and give them some solutions to these problems?

29:08 - Dave (Guest)

Yeah, let's. I think folks need to understand that this. These things can be fixed and we have fixed them before. But you know, it requires commitment and it requires acceptance of some of changing some of the norms. Like we already talked about change management.

29:23

Right, change management has to be a discipline, right, that's a big one. It's critical, yeah, so, but before we do that, you know the cleaning a house. You got to take care of those things. You got to get the system cleaned up. You got to get rid of those fields. You got to have a UX. You know exercise, where you look at your screens and you simplify them. You know the. The example I give is if I was to charge you a million bucks for this field, do you still want the field? You know you're gonna be a lot more Degish us about what things you're gonna put on the screen if it's gonna cost you, right, so skinny it down. I joke. In the perfect world, the best CRM has three to five fields on the screen and a big giant red button to hit submit or something, and that's it. That's my ideal. But you should only be really showing the information that's relevant to the user, based on what they need to do at that time right, so that that's critical. That's the first thing we got to get done Right.

30:21

And then we talked about the data. Data is low-hanging fruit. It really is getting in there and doing the cleanup and communicating it to the users that you have done some cleanup will be readily evident when they go in the system and see that, when they do search results in particular, that it's much cleaner and the results are getting irrelevant. So, and the other huge part around data and you mentioned it earlier is Around integrations. Well, integrations provide enrichment of data right.

30:53

Getting that data Piped into your CRM, be it sales force or whatever it may be, and Presenting it prominently to users is gonna be really important to do, and I would go so far as to suggest and I've had clients do this and they even suggested it themselves is okay, you've now got you know what morning start. You've got you know whatever the platform is, broad ridge, whatever Piped in to the CRM will shut it off. Shut off those systems in terms of access by regular users so that you're pushing them to the CRM. But the caveat is is man, you better have that integration rock solid and it better be perfect.

31:37 - Fred (Host)

So take it's kind of a kind of a burn. The ships approach right, like once, once you have the integration built in and they can access it in sales force. And you've done the other things Right. You've cleaned up the data, you've optimized the page layout so people are only seeing the data that they need to see. Don't give them another way to do it. Don't give them a workaround right.

31:59 - Dave (Guest)

You know, burn, burn, the boats burn the boats, damn the O-rings, you know, launch, yeah, the. And then the other big thing is add new data sources as well that they haven't been getting before. Be it, you know, like in the B2B environment, board Memberships of the people you already have in your system are very valuable. Using tools like board acts, capital IQ, things like that, those are great morning star. Getting those put in is really going to make it a more shiny object for users. So so that's key.

32:34

Touching briefly on things like reports, you talk about getting things out right.

32:37

A lot of times you'll have clients who are like God, we've got thousands of reports out there, we want to clean it up.

32:44

Well, I'd argue that there's probably a small set of Fundamental tabular reports that you can stick out there that people can use as a starting point, and then let them go ahead and create their own reports and make it easy for them to do so, and Let them just download to excel. You know, you hear about, you know, some IT professionals saying, hey, can we disable the download to CSV or Excel buttons on this screen so that they can't do that? Oh, why you want them to get the data out right. You want to get the value, facilitate that and I would even go so far as to say and I did, we did do this with several clients is Go ahead, download it, update that data and then give it back to me and I'll actually do the updates and inserts into sale, into Salesforce or whatever the CRM is for you. Which can be critical, especially at the beginning of a launch or a relaunch of the CRM, to get folks Confidence in that new system, that the data is right and their participation in it is going to make it better.

33:51 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, I definitely think this is one of the areas that I've had a lot of controversy and a lot of, you know, good discussions. I see both sides of it. You know one is, you know we talked about burning the boats. You don't want to give people a couple of different ways to do something, but I think that fundamentally, if and you know thinking about you know this is, you know fundamentally Frequently a, you know, salesforce oriented podcast. So every system is a little bit different.

34:19

But sales source reporting, you know, for for everything it can do, has, you know, a fair amount of limitations, and so there are a lot of things that users, especially power users, might want to do from a reporting standpoint that you just can't do using sales force reporting functionality. You know, if you've got CRMA or you've got Tableau or you've got other things, you know that might not be the case, but you don't want to stand in the way of users being productive on on the updating data. I mean I would. I would argue there's a lot of other ways, including optimizing screens and and there's there's all kinds of apps that let you Basically have excel like interfaces in Salesforce to do those kinds of updates. But you know those all require time to implement, you know, and and some of it is, you know, triage. What you can do quickly and and sometimes you know that's the that's the best solution, at least in the short time is to download, make updates and and re-upsert, and so I think that's that's critical, too. Where I hear the most things is a couple things like how do we make sure People are creating reports that are that are meaningful, right, you know? I think that investing this goes back to change management, in training aids, in in initial training, in in just in time training, so that people understand, you know, what the different fields are, what filters mean, so they're creating reports that actually, you know, reflect, you know, accurately what's happening in the business, versus, you know, sometimes creating reports that might not filter in the appropriate way or include too much Data, include not enough data. So everybody's really looking at the same results, right, and I think that can be a training and change management Fix. The other is somebody's going to download everything and walk out the door, right, they're just gonna download all the data and they're gonna leave, and there's a lot of things.

36:17

I'm a big shield advocate. I think people buy shield. They're like oh, you know, we've got. We've got encryption, we're done. You know she does a lot more than just encryption, and one of the things you can do with shield is you can you can set up alerts that alert you when users are using the system in ways that are outside of predefined bounds, and one of those can be A number of records access. One of those can be amount of data downloaded, so you can monitor and stop the leakage as well. But to your point, dave, I think that drawing a hard line on downloading without solving some of these other issues Is is absolutely going to just create people finding their own workarounds and tracking things themselves out of the system, which is 100% what we don't want them to do. Agreed, agreed.

37:08 - Dave (Guest)

I think, a couple of other areas before we get to talking about the big one around Change management and and again, these are foundational things, right? Just to set the level playing field as to what should be their Table stakes, as you call them. Right Is you have to, of course, have support for the users. Users should be able to pick up the phone and get answers to their questions or fix their problems, and they have to be good SLAs. You got to have the follow-up. Just the fundamentals of support have to be there and it's a good investment, right, if people know you know it's, it's late Friday afternoon I finally have a minute to breathe and look at my CRM system and see my data. If I stumble, you know, having someone at the other end who can answer my question helps, but it's it's not just. You got to have people who understand the business that you're in as well, in your specific business, in order to effectively answer that question.

38:05 - Fred (Host)

How, how have you helped clients set that up and I'm thinking especially For for smaller to mid-size, where you might not have, you know, a lot dedicated team doing it? You know how do you, how do you coach them to identify who are the right people and get them you know, get them going?

38:25 - Dave (Guest)

Yeah, I think. Well, I mean there's a several different approaches to it. I said there's still some stuff outside of that that can help, right, but it's going to take a little bit longer. I mean you can get managed services, you can hire managed services and have those people do it. But I will tell you that again, if the requirement is they need to know your business, then they need to know your business. They need to be. They do need to be somewhat dedicated, or at least maybe second level support needs to be dedicated.

38:53

What you definitely don't want is Is an answering service where people call and say, okay, got your problem, created a case, some will get back to you. That's, that's death. Now to your CRM if you do that. But I think there are a number. There's always Super users in the organization, always, and One of the key tenets of a good change management discipline Is really having a network of champions throughout the organization.

39:22

Those people are the ones who are going to be sitting next to the people using the system, who will be able to quickly answer the questions they're going to see firsthand and where the challenges are not only for their use and for the people who are consuming the work that they're generating, but you know, for the parallel users that are doing it as well, and creating a change champion network where people come together on a periodic basis, like be a month, that they meet monthly to talk about what's missing, what needs to be added. They can even be empowered to make the ultimate decisions as to what enhancements need to be made to the system. You know so. They're very valuable and I've seen it actually be written into people's job description that, hey, you are a change champion for sales, for microsoft dynamics, whatever it is, and it's part of how we're gonna measure, you know, your participation in your help in that regard, so that's, that's really helpful.

40:18 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, I love, I love that, I love the idea of it being, you know, some more democratize, some, what more of like a appear, you know, kind of help approach and where it is, you know, carved out.

40:31

As you know, this is 10% of what you do, this is 15% of what you do and I think it helps with the context. Right, you know, to your point, it's not just an it person that you know understands the, the mechanics of sales force, but maybe not the job of the person who's using the system, and it also just makes it a lot easier to not have to Higher, you know, specifically for this in some of this is obviously going to be outside of a rollout event. You probably very lumpy demand, right, you know, hopefully, if, if you've got people burning up the phone lines to your crem support 24 seven, you've got big problems, right, I'm assuming this is something that you know, obviously, size of the organization dependent, but it's probably, you know, infrequent. You know calls oh, I do this maybe once a month and I haven't done it for last month because I was on vacation. I totally forgot how to do acts. Can you help me time situations?

41:32 - Dave (Guest)

Well, you can well, and the opposite is true to right meaning you don't get in if you're not getting any calls. That's also pretty good indicator that nobody's using it at all.

41:44 - Fred (Host)

That is true to. That is absolutely true to. I love the other thing you talked about as well, which is, you know, the incorporating the feedback of the exchange champions. I think you know I've had to recently Talk a lot less and convince a lot fewer companies about the, the advantages of being agile, the advantage of treating sales force as a product. That is constantly evolving. But what one thing that I think still is has a little bit of confusion or you know I try to talk a lot about best practices is Two things about it. One is what's the right frequency I don't want you to give me the consultant answer of it depends and the other is going back to one of the things you talked about before tech debt. How much Time, how much effort, what percentage of sprint should be dedicated to new stuff? For which percentage of sprint should be dedicated to, you know, technical debt and and bringing the system along to keep up with enhancements.

42:49 - Dave (Guest)

Well, I think, in terms of the technical debt right, I mean you've got to really address that categorically right, I mean out of the gate, and I think you know I've talked about the concept of if there's really a dramatic amount of technical debt, then I mean that's a project right, and in fact it is even. It's a good justification for a total relaunch member. That second attempt you only get two chances of that with this stuff. Getting that technical debt is good, I think from a more minor Was it, and I totally get that right there.

43:21 - Fred (Host)

There are some times, if you're walking into a system that's been around for two years, five years, ten years and just has a lot of technical debt, I'm thinking more like, let's assume I just went live, right, I have got my new greenfield sales force. You know, I had a great partner, I had great buy in a great change. Champions, we did you a tea and and and s and s I t and everything's working great. Right, the perfect project that nobody's ever had. But let's assume that happened and I'm launching day one. I've got no technical debt. And here comes sales force winter release. You know.

43:58

And here's a new feature, not all pull it out right over the last, you know, 18 months, 24 months, sales force has moved from, from the tried and true workflow rules that we all knew and loved 15 years ago, to flow. Right that that is technical debt, like it's not burning fire. Right, your workflow rules are going to keep working and probably you keep working forever. But you should be migrating things over the flows. Right that that should be on everybody's roadmap right now. You need to address that, otherwise your in 10 years, your system's going to look as as bad as that ugly technical debt situation we're talking about before.

44:40

So when I'm thinking about now, I've convinced, you know, everybody, all the stakeholders, that we're going to treat sales force like a product. We're going to be running enhancement cycles. Everybody's saying, oh great, I want this new thing, or I want to plug in this new data source, or I want to roll out this new functionality. You've got to carve out some of that time to say I also have to, like you know, trim the bushes. You know I've got to keep up with the technical debt so it doesn't get ugly. So how do you, how do you decide what the right ratio is?

45:10 - Dave (Guest)

Yeah. So I think, underpinning whatever you ultimately decide to do, you bring up a critical element, and that is you do need to continue To enhance and fix the system just fundamentally. Yeah, like what he's done, right, right, and I think it's not unreasonable to actually be on a two week sprint cycle where you're doing these changes, where you're addressing the minor enhancements, little things, where you're chipping away at what you described as a great example of transitioning from older technology on the same platform to newer workflow technology. You know you can run those things in parallel as part of your sprint, but you gotta make sure that you're addressing the most important thing of all and that's the users. You know what you and I think is important.

45:58

From a technical perspective, they could probably care less. They want you know, but if they want field xyz to show up on that screen, if that's gonna ensure that people are going to continue to come to the table and use a system, then you know they may prioritize that. I think the key point is is you meaning you know the company and you champions and you super users? You own it, you're the ones who decide what the priority is. But you know I'm you and I are gonna also Explain to them. Well, hey, you know, if you don't also chip away at this workflow thing, you know we're gonna have bigger problems down the down the path. So I I don't think I can give you a fifty, fifty, sixty, forty, you know, answer that question. I think ebbs and flows right, like a big change, like that that's a project could be.

46:48 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, and I, I I definitely get ebbs and flows and you know that that when I picked it because it's a, it's a big example everybody can can recognize that one might, you know, be a project, even a series of projects, but there's always things that come up. I always like to use an end to your point. You know, is the very consultancy answer. It depends and ebs and flows, but, like as a rule of thumb, if I were to put one out there, I like to say twenty percent. If you're not spending twenty percent on average of your releases, working on enhancements, earn, sorry, working on Keeping, keeping pace with how the system is evolving, retiring technical debt, you know, keep moving, moving things that are not necessarily New user facing features, but keep the system working well in current, then you're probably falling behind. That's, that's kind of how I think about it.

47:41 - Dave (Guest)

I'm going to say that twenty percent is the industry standard and from now on that shall always be stated in every discussion, from here forward.

47:51 - Fred (Host)

Perfect. Thank you, dave. Yeah, no, and then we've been surrounded quite a bit, but it is. It is critical, and I definitely want to move to really dig in a little bit on the importance of change management. So what, what's your take on change management?

48:08 - Dave (Guest)

yeah. So change management it's not just training, set it and forget it kind of thing. There's a number of key elements things like micro learning we talked about change champions. There's communication, using tools like gamification, measuring, adoption, reporting on adoption. There's also, you know, communication is a huge part of it. You know, if we kind of unpack each one of those things individually, if you're doing a relaunch of this of a solution, it's really you got to treat it as a campaign and you got to have the resources dedicated to doing it, that relaunch is gonna get to be far more intense if you want to be successful, than you imagined.

48:51

That means absolutely yes. It means you've got to have Weekly scheduled training sessions that people can call into. You got scripts laid out. You can answer questions for people. That's a, that's table stakes. You got to get that there. That's part of it. It also needs to be buttressed by the things we mentioned earlier on micro learning, that bite size learning which Can include things. You know, short video clips, for instance, little mini test to test proficiency. Those are really helpful. They reinforce learning. And badging that's another cool one where people can earn badges. You know much like sales force. You know trail heads, you get badges and things like that. It works badges.

49:30 - Fred (Host)

We don't need no badges.

49:35 - Dave (Guest)

Exactly. You know we need badges for sure. The communication piece communicating when the training is it will numb your brain how hard communication can be, because the first thing you're gonna get is stop sending the emails. So you got to start communicating in other channels. You got to do it on the internet. You know one client we were talking about. You know, when you get into an elevator and there's a little panel up that, you're staring at the door and they run ads and things like that, we can put ads there. We literally did that. You know, talk about doing that kind of stuff. So you've got to have communication and it's got to be there all the time. I personally love gamification. I think that's cool, very cool stuff you're gonna say something good about.

50:22 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, I was gonna say I love them as well, but I also really big advocate of the way that I frequently introduce it to clients when I'm talking to them is you know, treat this like you would any other marketing and sales effort. Right, this is you're not getting, you're not getting new customers. You're not gaining while it's share, but you are selling the value of this new technology investment to your internal customers and you. You want to get something out of it. The dividends you're gonna get are better reporting, you're gonna get better understanding of your pipeline or you get better customer service, but you need to sell them on the value and that you know. You've got a craft message you've got to. You know, get spokespeople out there. It should be leaders in the organization, formal leaders and informal leaders. Right, you've got to. You know, put that message in every channel you have. I love that. Put it in the elevator, that's phenomenal.

51:20

But as as vehemently as you plan for a new product launch out to the market, you need to plan for a new product launch internally and it's not like a one time, set it and forget it, like there should be for every enhancement. There should be constant communication. There should be here's what's coming, we're doing this for you and here's, here's coming, and now it's coming out. Now, now it's launched, and what do you think? And I mean it's, it's an ongoing, you know, and the more you have that message in front of people, the more you know you get, you get more buy in. So I couldn't agree more with that approach.

51:58 - Dave (Guest)

Yeah, and it's funny not to go back to the complaining part. But no matter how much communication you do, it's still not enough and nobody's gonna like it. But they have to be done and it will work. It will work. I like the thing I like in sales for some particular is using. You know the end up guidance, like where it literally puts it. Here is a new button for you user. You know what it does. You got to do that.

52:26 - Fred (Host)

I think is yeah, no, I love it, I'm getting. I think it's phenomenal and it's. It's one of those things. I'm surprised I've not seen more adoption of it then because, it's.

52:37

It really is fantastic and it mirrors what I see frequently from consumer applications. Right, I think that companies could learn a lot of lessons from the Instagram is the Facebook's and places that are constantly rolling out features and then creating Consumable change management that that nobody is being paid for right. Nobody is being paid to learn how to use Instagram better or to learn how to use, you know, x, y, z consumer facing application better. But they find ways to package those change management messages into things like in app guidance, into things like, you know, micro videos, like oh, you need here, come, you know here, highlight this button. And this is this is step two and this is step three. And they do it to make things sticky. And if companies take, you know, a similar approach when rolling out enhancements, they will get the same type of results.

53:31 - Dave (Guest)

Agreed, absolutely, absolutely. So you know. We touched for a second on gamification. Let's talk about it a little bit more, because gamification, for folks that are familiar with it, is basically gamifying the use of of your CRM system, where people accumulate, earn points for doing things like logging calls, creating activities, progressing their opportunities, those kinds of things and they achieve certain levels. And A good gamification campaign has corresponding incentives and they can be simple, they can be as simple as okay. After sixty days, whoever is the highest scoring person, you get a set of air pods. People love air pods for some reason. I'm a big fan, you know. Three hundred bucks right for two, or yeah, they're expensive.

54:26

I think they're two ninety nine yeah that's a lot of money for these little things. You're gonna lose one in the uber on your way to the client anyway. But other things like run the gamut, like there's companies that have Set goals for the entire organization that after you know six, eight months of using the tool set, if we hit this threshold of measurement of adoption, everybody gets a week off in the summer. That actually happened, I said, was that in France, no is, which is pretty cool, I mean. I talk about an incentive. You're seeing executives coming out of meetings fighting over who gets to put the opportunity into the system you know, to earn the points. But the other benefit of having gamification is it requires you to establish adoption metrics right. So it's not logins, it's use of the system, the way you want people to use it, right. So measuring those Call logs, those opportunity progressions, those things.

55:23

And I think it's really important as business to change your expectations a little bit. I think there's a lot of companies have expectations of hundred percent, ninety percent, ninety five percent, which makes sense in a call center environment where that's all you're doing all day is using that system and working calls and things like. But in a sales environment it needs to be a bit lower. And what you need to do in your gamification system, adoption is change the scale on which you're measuring things. Okay, and let me explain that.

55:55

You know you don't want to look on a day to day basis, because our lives are very busy from day to day, but maybe look on a week or monthly basis, the different statistics that you're measuring. Okay, because of that ebbing and flowing of activity that you have to do, and say you know what, over the course of this month I'm expecting you to log you know fifty calls or something to that effect, as opposed to saying I expect you to log ten calls every single day. It's just not going to work. You need to go a little bit wider weekly, monthly, to do the measurements and just adjust the thresholds as you see fit to measure that. But I think you know, bring bring those expectations down a bit there, because they've been historically a bit high.

56:39 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, I definitely hear you. I mean, I would like to think that you know, by and large, people, people are tracking things somewhere, like I work with people and they'll go in and do you know serum updates weekly and I get that and sometimes it's because the CRM is very clunky, but they, they, they, they're not doing it from memory. In most cases they're not thinking back. All Monday I did this and Tuesday I did that. Right, you know they're using their outlook calendar, they're using another notes program, they're using something else. And if you make, using technology and integrations and using good user design your CRM system as seamless to use as those other tools, so you have have a well working integration with outlook. So when there are meetings they get logged automatically, make your notes component in that, in that meeting or, you know, in that activity record. Make that easy to use so somebody doesn't want to go use another notes record because the the downside is two things. One is the more late in the data, the harder it is for the organization to benefit from CRM. So buying teams are bigger, selling teams are bigger.

57:58

If if I've had, say, as a, as a, as an, as an AE or as a banker in financial services a conversation with one of my customers on Monday, and I don't enter it to Friday, and they walk into the branch on a Wednesday or they speak to somebody else at the bank about a related issue on Wednesday. That conversation isn't in there. The customer expects the organization to know that that conversation happened and the organization has no way of knowing because it's sitting on somebody's notebook. So I hear what you're saying and I think that what I, what I would say you know on top of it, is make your, your expectations, commiserate with how easy you've made your system to use. If you've really invested in a system that has those tight integrations, makes it easy, you know, is not cumbersome, then real time, or close to real time, I think, is a reasonable expectation If you have made it difficult for your users to navigate that system.

58:59

Number one listen to the the earlier part of the podcast. We talk about things you can do to make it easier and set your expectations accordingly. Right, you know that you're just not going to get the benefit, but I don't want to give people an out that you know. Latent batch data entry, you know, on a weekly basis or even less frequent, you know, is the goal and I think, I think we can do better.

59:24 - Dave (Guest)

Yeah, well, and putting that. Those see to me, those are business rules, unique to your business. Put them, put that into your information that you're using to train people on using the system. Don't just tell me how to click buttons. Tell me why I need to do it. You know the you gave is perfect. It's like hey, you know putting this in will prevent your customer from going into the branch them basically starting from scratch, you know, and showing that your company, you know you guys, don't talk to each other. That's a good thing to put into that training material and, at the end of the day, they need to use their bleep and CRM right?

:: 00:07

Absolutely, and this has been a fantastic conversation and hopefully, from listening perspective, you guys got a lot of value out of it. But you know, dave works with clients all the time and if, if somebody wants to talk more about next steps, talk about what they can do in their particular system. What's the best way for them to get a hold of you?

:: 00:31

Yeah, usually I mean LinkedIn is always best. I'm out there. Dave Delpas, you can email. Email me at David Delpas at idelpascom or talk to Fred. Fred will send you my way.

:: 00:45

Well, fantastic, well, really appreciate it. Hope you have a happy holiday and maybe we'll have you back for as the first three Pete sometime next year.

:: 00:55

Oh, that'd be crazy.

:: 00:56

I think people, I don't know people might have had enough day yeah of me.

:: 01:03

Awesome, thanks. Have a good one you too. Bye, bye.

:: 01:10

And welcome back. I am really excited to be back with a quick take segment. This episode doing something a little bit different. Since it's the week between Christmas and New Year's or at least this will air the week between Christmas and New Year's I figured it'd be a great time for us to get together and throw our hats in the ring, put our names behind a few predictions for 2024. And so I've asked Eric and Josh and I have as well to come to this with three top predictions for next year. And why don't we go ahead and kick it off, eric? What's your number one top prediction for 2024.

:: 01:44

All right.

:: 01:45

Well, I know this probably won't be the first or the last time that we talk about artificial intelligence, but my prediction as it relates to AI is, while it's certainly going to not go away, I think businesses and individuals and brands are going to have to start leveraging more real time in the moment, in person activities like live audio events, live video events, live streaming, and the importance of like real conferences where you're actually interacting and you know that you're enacting with a carbon based life form and not not an AI generated proxy of said carbon based life form, because I think it's going to get really, really hard to tell the difference.

:: 02:34

And that's going to create some opportunities as well, which we're exploring. But, at the end of the day, I think these types of events I know this isn't real time, but you know this is because of all the squirrels we chase difficult to phone in on AI. But even like live audio events, like what we do with our link bank or happy hour which, fred, you've been on and I really appreciate you being there those are going to start becoming more important to humanize the individual as well as the brand.

:: 03:02

Yeah, I like that. Just you know, I guess, like you've already. To summarize it, the the increasing frequency of AI generated content and the better, more realistic AI generated content is going to leave a vacuum and a hunger for more. Live in person, real connection.

:: 03:24

Yeah, almost like the swing we saw in COVID when we went to Zoom. It was nice that it was there, but then everybody's like, oh, we got to get back to the human. I think we're in that moment now.

:: 03:39

Yeah, that was exactly what I thought about when you mentioned it. It was at the beginning of COVID. I had to shift very quickly, like my client relations and my partner relations strategy, from a lot of in-person to a lot of virtuals. I'll tell you what you can only do somebody wine tastings, chocolate tastings, pizza-making classes over Zoom before you really get tired of that weekend and week out. I love it, josh. What do you think about that?

:: 04:08

Yeah, I think that's a fantastic prediction. What we're talking about is the pendulum swing. It's like this design If AI is going to do anything aside from helping us to produce information, communications and build websites, whatever it's going to be doing, expect hyper-personalization to be occurring in the marketplace. If you're not doing it, then your competitors are. Eric's point is fantastic, because there's nothing more personal than being in person. I mean, that's as personal as it gets the more you can be old school while protecting your time so that you can have the time to be old school. Because that's the thing. I don't think there's a world for guys like us in 2024 where we just lean into AI on 100 percent of everything and then come out. We're having the same session a year from now and we had as much success as if we leverage AI to help save us time and then use that spare time for actual, real human contact and personalization. I think it's a great prediction.

:: 05:17

Fantastic, Justin, you're talking. What's your top prediction for 2024?

:: 05:22

My top prediction. It's all tied into this, but my top prediction and this is one of my predictions and I'll get into that later it's kind of on the heels of that, so I'll just share my top one, which is that risks are rewarded in 2024. A lot of people took risks they had to take risks in 2023, but not everybody did, and those that didn't are a little bit in the dust right now. The people who saw the down market and invested in their businesses, invested in their customers, invested in their staff, divided the herd, got real clear about who their customer base is, got real clear about what they're wanting to do, at the risk of alienating. Certain groups, I think, are the ones that are paying off. That just sort of bleeds into the personalization thing, and I think that that's going to continue in 2024.

:: 06:17

I don't think I mean it depends what industry you're in, but for talking sales, forest banking, careers, all of these sorts of things, I think you're going to have to really stand out. There's so many players that are leveraging AI right now. The things that I was doing from a marketing perspective back in 2018, it's like I get five or six emails a day now that look like what I was doing five years ago when no one was doing it, and so you're going to have to take some risks to stand out. So risks will be rewarded, and that goes for your resume, that goes for your career, that goes for your ambition. That goes, and really what it's all about is getting really clear and articulate with yourself and the people that you're in contact with about what you can do, what you're great at, how you're going to do that and why going with you or going with your business makes you know is an obvious choice for people. So I think you're going to have to take risks.

:: 07:14

Yeah, Eric, what do you think about that?

:: 07:16

Well, it makes me think of a book that was released I think it was released this year this year's kind of a blur, so I don't know. I think it was released this year Think like a brand, not a bank by Allison Netzer and Liz Hyde. And in that book as you're talking, josh, I you know they talk about resisting the urge to be all things to all people, and there is a component of that embracing risk and being comfortable. You know, in the financial services industry a lot of times risk is seen as a bad thing and if you fail you'll be punished, as opposed to if you take a risk and you don't succeed, what do you learn from it? And counting that as tuition for the next step in the process versus you can't fail, you can't make a mistake, so a lot of people don't even try. But in their book, part of what they also propose is you can't be all things to all people, and if you talk to a lot of providers of services out there, you know it's.

:: 08:18

You know who do you want to bank? Who do you want to serve? Who do you want to take care of? And it's like well, anybody with a checkbook if you want to make a deposit if you need this. You know, and I think the law firms that focus on a particular area of the law, banks that particularly focus on a segment, whether it's business, customer customers, a particular societal niche or niche, you know they say the riches are in the niches, which doesn't work real well if you're. You know, not. In the United States we pronounce it niche, because then that really is cool.

:: 08:49

The reashes are in the niches. I do like that the reashes.

:: 08:52

That sounds like even fancier rich.

:: 08:55

So yeah, like I'm from Europe or something, but. But that book jumped into my ad. When you say you know what you're talking about and it was actually one of my other items is you know, brands are going to have to figure out who they're best put on the planet to serve. So I'm jumping ahead. There's my number two, I see.

:: 09:12

You, you, no, no, no. It's not time for your number two, yet I want to. I want to just come back quickly to what Josh was saying yeah, hold that for a second which is, you know, I inevitably think on the on the flip side of that prediction, which is the implication is to those brands, to those individuals who have not taken the risk to focus, who have not taken the risk to really feel out who they are, to the exclusion of what they're not. The easy times are going. I guess you know you're going to get punished in the market by not being specific enough about who your market is If you're a brand, by not being specific enough about kind of role you want if you're an individual. Is that kind of the other side of the coin from what I'm hearing and in what you're saying, josh?

:: 10:01

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You are going to be punished and people are being punished right now. I mean, all of the companies that didn't make investments in 23 when things were down, are going to come back. Maybe they're still alive because of their decisions and maybe it was 100% out of need, financial need to let a bunch of people go, cut a bunch of products, cut a bunch of services, and whether the storm and there have been plenty that have done that that is a strategy and it can work, but now they're playing catch up. I don't give you an example, this is just a personal example of ours.

:: 10:33

So we spent a fair amount of money and many, many hours, weeks, months developing our new website to make sure that it was current, because the old one is just like the Josh Matthews show and we're a whole company right, like it's not just me now and so we needed to refresh that In the last four days. I've had four new client inquiries in the last four days just through my contact page. Now, how did that happen? That's about what we would get through the contact page in a year, not in a four day span. So how did that happen? Well, we spent money that maybe we didn't have right On a website that we knew that we needed. We took time away from trying to acquire clients during that time when things were down, and now it's paying off right. It's a rewarded risk that we took. It's like let's just throw everything at this thing and this will be good for us for the next two or three years and let's just run with it and now it should pay for itself by the end of January and then really help the business all along. That's just a micro example of someone taking a risk and investing in better technology, better branding, better whatever right, come up with new services, get rid of crappy ones.

:: 11:46

And in this discussion, thinking about where risk is, it reminds me of a study I'd read about hospitals and where their costs are, and I think this was in Texas, I can't remember, but they found that something like 80% of their extra costs in the ER were for 100 repeat offenders. These are mostly homeless people who are coming in because they've got a toothache and using the very expensive ER instead of going to a clinic. Of course, they don't have healthcare, so they're spending so much money on a very few number of people and I think it's safe to say that 80% of our problems come from 20% of our customers. And what happens when we allow those customers to continue to be customers Because they're never happy, like they're never happy, right and now? It sucks away all of our time.

:: 12:37

And isn't our moral obligation, if you are providing a valuable, high quality service, to make sure that people are aware of that so that they can save time, save money, have a better life, whatever it is? But if you spend all your time attracting the wrong kinds of people or not knowing how to say no to a customer, that's going to cause you headaches. If you haven't figured that out yet, you will, at great expense, get a cost more than 30 grand to figure that out. You might cost you a quarter million or might cost you a million dollars to learn that lesson. But learn it now.

:: 13:09

Well, it'll cost you a lot in revenue that you don't earn because of the lack of focus. And I think you know, speaking of risk, one of the hardest risks to ever take and I was lucky to learn early in my career is the risk in fiery a customer especially a big customer, a strategic customer, if they no longer fit your profile, if they're not the right customer, if they're not treating your people right. It can be hard to give up on that revenue. But almost every time, as long as you don't do it willy-nilly and you really kind of think through the consequences, it pays off in spades from renewed focus. You know happier people, you know kind of all in. So I know, I love, I love that prediction.

:: 13:51

I'm going to go ahead and lay one out, and this one might be a little surprising to you both and the audience, because I feel like every time AI comes up, I'm the guy that's typically in the, in the detractor role, saying oh, oh, wait a minute, you know it's, you know early days and you know it's not everything that you think it is and it's not magic, but I do think that I'm seeing a lot of stuff coming over the horizon as far as commercially available AI.

:: 14:19

That is going to be a lot more useful to individuals in their day to day lives, and the prediction I have specifically around it is that by this time in 2024, more than half of the US white collar workforce is going to be using AI pretty much day to day to handle the tasks that would typically be done by administrative assistant, which is great, because a lot of white collar workers don't have administrative assistance today and spend a lot of time on these administrative tasks things like, you know, answering phones, writing calls, scheduling appointments, booking travel, preparing reports, taking meeting notes. Some of the things are already out there, kind of hodgepodge. I think there's going to be a couple of people, maybe Microsoft being one, maybe Salesforce being one, that bring these together into one platform and let you plug it in to various travel sites, various, you know, calendar sites, et cetera, and and really like move the needle on helping employees become more efficient. So that's prediction number one for me.

:: 15:24

That's a pretty, that's a big prediction. Man, 50% is a lot. It's a lot, I love it. I wonder what percentage of those people who are using it will even know that they're using it Like how many? Will be signing up for a site that's going to help them do XYZ and they don't even know. Ai is, you know, a part of it?

:: 15:44

Yeah, I mean, I think I think it's one of those things is it's going to become a little bit like second nature. You know it's going to be far less. Here's this cool AI thing that you check out to, here's a service that helps you streamline and organize your day, and, yes, there's AI behind the scenes and, you know, there's various technologies that make it work. But I think the vast majority of people don't care, don't geek out as much as, as you know, we do. Some of the people we hang out with every day, they just want the result. Right, and I think you know, I think we're about to hockey stick, you know. I think back to some of the, the early days with things like, you know, uber or Airbnb, and I know this is kind of a different kind of thing. Right, it was under the radar, under the radar, under the radar, and then, you know, overnight you know, it has a strong adoption.

:: 16:32

Yeah, it's no longer an option.

:: 16:34

Exactly, yeah, so that's. That's kind of where I'm going.

:: 16:38

Can I ask you something about that, like, do you have a prediction around the number of people that will be using a text-based AI platform? Claude Bard, chatgbt4, something like that over a more packaged, seamless, sort of the wizard still behind the curtain kind of product.

:: 16:58

Yeah, I mean, I think that everything is I wouldn't say everything I think there'll still be, you know, more transactional text interfaces like ChatGBT and Claude that exist out there. I think that it's going to become more seamless and I still think that more seamless thing is going to be multi-channel, right, you know it could be something that in some cases you go speech. Some cases it's very, you know, very much a gooey graphical interface. Some cases you may want to type something in. It's very detailed, right, like, if you, I think about some of the trips that I plan, if I need to be in two or three different cities over the course of a week and in various specific parts, I want to maybe like list out like I've got meetings at this place, at this city, this place in this city, in this place in this city. That might be easier to do over text, but I do think that, by and large, we'll have more voice and more, you know, kind of graphical, you know kind of mobile interface interactions than everything being over a text interface.

:: 17:55

Okay, and what about prompts? Right? Because, like, for instance, on the career show, the Salesforce career show podcast, last week, we had David Giller on there, right, and David was talking a little bit about certain prompts that he uses to build out business functions or Salesforce admin stuff, whatever it is Like. Do you feel like there's going to be some plugins for GPT where it just gets like, hey, here, sort of like an if this, then that, like, here you go, you know, okay, what are you trying to do? I'm trying to book travel, all right, so these are the different ways that you can prompt it. And then it's almost like when software development started to get frameworks, so you could be like, oh, click, you know, you click it. I want this GUI, I want this thing to kind of do this, and you just click and drag and drop it in and boom, there's your code Right. Do you think it's going to be more like that?

:: 18:47

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that there will always be room or at least in the near to intermediate terms, always be room, for people to design very, very specific prompts, in the same sort of way that there's, you know, room for data analysts to go in and write very, very specific blocks of code to generate very specific types of reports and dashboards. But I think for average users, you know, you'll be able to put in, like you know, whether it's by voice hey, I need to be in San Francisco next week. Tuesday, wednesday and Thursday, my meetings are in the Moscone Center and the Salesforce Tower. You know, book me a flight and make sure that I've got a car waiting for me, with the airport to pick me up. It'll just go do it. You don't have to worry about the prompt engineering piece. That's almost like a necessary component for the. You know the adoption curve that I'm expecting to see.

:: 19:38

I think it's awesome man Cool, all right Back around to you, back around to me.

:: 19:45

Well, I should probably drop number two, because I already alluded to it, but kind of playing off of that, and you mentioned the 80-20 rule, which goes in the other direction, where 80% of your profits are coming from 20% of your customers, as opposed to the other way of the wasted time, but going back to the power of the niche and making sure that you're comfortable doubling down on what it is that you're really good at, or who you're really good at serving, and being comfortable with letting the others go, because people are going to want to work with experts that understand them really well, and by letting go of the ones that you're not doing a really good job of taking care of, that's going to open the doors for you to be able to serve those that you really can serve well, charge a premium for it, because they'll appreciate it and ultimately be happier on both sides of the equation.

:: 20:41

So I already tipped my hat as to how number two is going to go, so I don't know if there's any other thoughts on that. But the 80-20 rule that you mentioned, josh, in the other direction, and really kind of defining your key personas and what makes them tick and what do they want, what are their pain points and how do you serve them Really kind of digging in. I think AI can help you explore those in more detail so you can really get super granular. That really being comfortable with saying no and it's okay to say no.

:: 21:13

So I like everything you said. I think I might have not been 100% clear on the prediction piece of it.

:: 21:19

I just think more and more businesses are going to have to become comfortable with that, because the ability to be a jack of all trades is going to become more and more difficult. Because I guess that's the prediction the jack of all trades are going to become masters of none and servers of none, and those businesses that double down on their niche and their focus are going to be able to find greater success In the banking space. It's going to be finding a niche and capitalizing on it, whether it's in your own local community or if it's the national scale. And is it physicians, is it lawyers? Is it doctors? Is it truckers? Is it technology companies? Are you going to partner with the FinTech and really take it to the next level and be comfortable with that level of risk? Because the traditional will be all things to all people. You're just going to become even more of a commodity and it's going to be hard to differentiate and demand a premium and stand out.

:: 22:25

Yeah, I like that. I don't want to put you too much on the spot, but I'm going to ask it can be in banking, or it can be outside of banking technology, whatever else. Are there a couple of companies, of brands, that you think are on the bubble right now, that they need to either figure this out or they may not be around at the end of 2024? And if so, who are they and you think they're going to figure it out or not?

:: 22:50

And can I piggyback on that real quick too, just while you're? I know it's a lot of information, but it's kind of thematically the same thing, which would be this could you have made that prediction last December? And had it been true? Also, it's unique about 24, how it ties to the 80-20 rule.

:: 23:13

I think it could have been predicted last year. It could have probably been predicted the year before, but I think, with the accelerated speed at which AI and competitors are ending the marketplace, I think that is likely going to and it could probably be said for hey, in 2025, you gotta figure out your key market niche and you gotta make sure that you're capitalizing on it. I don't know when the finish line on this prediction is going to hit, but I think I see it more so now than I've seen it in years past.

:: 23:47

There's this speed with which AI is pushing things.

:: 23:50

Yeah, yeah it makes it a big thing. As far as we've got clients that we work with that are in the community banking space and I'd prefer not to name them because the other part of your comment there, fred, was or they're going to be out of business in 2024. I don't think that's the case. I'm certainly not predicting the demise of any of our clients, but I know a number of them are struggling with deposit generation, customer acquisition and debating about whether or not what they've got is sufficient to carry them for the foreseeable future. I don't think anybody's really looking at the end of their organizational existence in 2024, but I think they're looking at.

:: 24:36

It's going to be a challenge in the coming year because of where we positioned ourselves and how we're going to go about standing out, because having an awesome checking account that pays a certain amount up to a certain dollar amount, that strategy has sailed. You've got to figure out who it is that you're best serving and we're working on identifying the ability to go out and find some of those customers that you've done a really good job for whether it's your awesome at first-time customers that have never bought a house challenge in the current economic environment with rates and that allow people jumping into the new home area but that's a niche, or particular business segments. But finding that voice, I think, is going to be critically important for all types of businesses to be able to toot their horn and to be relevant when they're going out, trying to differentiate themselves amongst a sea of other competitors that are likely going to be saying the same thing.

:: 25:40

No, I like that and I respect the fact that you don't want to put into your banking clients of the spot. I have a lot of banking clients as well. I wouldn't put them on the spot. The couple of names that come to mind to me outside of banking that are in that boat would be Lyft and Twitter. Lyft right now has been struggling to kind of find exactly where they fit in the market. They're competing with Uber in some markets in some ways, but there's really not a lot of differentiation other than being cheaper, and that really has not worked much for them.

:: 26:14

I think they need to figure out what their unique value proposition is, and kind of the same thing with Twitter. I mean Twitter's only around today because somebody is writing checks every week, every month, to keep the lights on. They're not generating any income. I don't know that they will figure out what the platform wants to be. It seems like the next thing they want to use it for is as a font of AI training data, which I think could potentially be great, but if they don't figure something out soon, I mean nobody wants to say like the richest guy in the world is going to run out of money to pay for it, but it's certainly not viable the way that it is right now, and so I think for a lot of other businesses, and certainly in the banking space, like figuring out those same answers are going to become critical or they're going to continue to underperform.

:: 27:04

Yeah, you know Lyft. I mean they initially were doing a better job at attracting drivers, not initially, but after both kind of came out of beta. They were doing a better job of attracting drivers because you could tip. And drivers were like, yeah, I'd much rather be on Lyft. And there was the made for TV movie about Uber, the Uber scandal stuff, and get what it deserves, like all that kind of bad press, which is still positive press, but it's still bad press. And Lyft was like well, come work for us, we treat our drivers well and you can get tipped.

:: 27:39

And then what did Uber do? Well, they adopted tipping. So it's not like a patent tipping. So now it's like okay, well, where's the differentiator? And I think companies really need to figure out, like, what's the differentiator that you can do? That's very difficult to replicate, right, whether that's in a patent or whether that's in the level of service or the timeliness of your service, the speed or the quality. I mean we always said in staffing, you can get who you want when you want, for the price. You want the wait a second? No, you can't pick two, right, it's not gonna get all three. And then you just kind of like like, for my business. We do, we really do. You know who you want, when you want them, price you want. I can't guarantee that right, but if you want talk people fast like you, come to us. We'll help you out. So you gotta pick and lean into it.

:: 28:31

Yeah, it's good stuff man Cheap, fast and good. Those are the three that I remember hearing. There you go.

:: 28:37

You can get two of the three. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

:: 28:39

Yeah, exactly, Josh. What about you? What's number two on your list?

:: 28:44

Number two on my list is a better market, but not an incredible one. Okay, so I don't. You know, when we came out of COVID, when the vaccine started to flow to every state and people felt more comfortable, there was all of this pent up demand and that demand created an incredible economy for about 12 to 18 months, before people started to realize that they, you know, overhired. They opened up too many retail shops in malls, right, they expanded so fast they thought, for whatever reason, covid's gonna be here forever and their strategies came to bite them because of their overzealousness to meet their immediate market demands and somehow predicting that that wasn't gonna change and that when it would change, it wouldn't change very fast. So I don't think we're going to have that same level of a banner like post COVID year in the economy, and you know. But there are some positive signs. I'm not an economist, I don't report on the economy.

:: 29:47

I'm not particularly known for my, you don't play one on TV.

:: 29:52

No, I don't, I don't at all, but.

:: 29:55

I do. Did you, however, say at a holiday and express last night?

:: 29:59

I did not. Oh shit, why? Why is that? Did you see me?

:: 30:06

That was their marketing campaign once you know.

:: 30:09

I stated holiday and express. I'm not a doctor, but I did stay in a holiday and express last night. That's weird.

:: 30:14

Okay, that would be. Do you guys watch regular cable television? Is that where you're getting that from? I don't see ads.

:: 30:21

That was like five years old bro. It's a. Yeah, I haven't seen ads in a while.

:: 30:27

Okay, I haven't seen ads in a very, very, very long time, okay, so basically there's that Like we are seeing and I can you know, I think I've got a pretty good gauge of how the economy is doing based on how my customers are doing. We deal with a lot of different groups and they of course have multiple, multiple customers, and so I can get a read on this stuff a little bit through my own little pocket of the universe over here. So I think we're gonna get a lift. I don't think it's gonna be a long, dry, hot summer again, starting January, with basically waiting till next December for business to really pick up. I think we're already starting to feel that.

:: 31:06

I think we're gonna see a spring hiring season that looks more average and normal than terrible, but might not be like oh my God, like no one's available, can't find anybody, that kind of a thing. So there are a lot of companies that have gone out of business in the last 12 months. There are more companies that are going to go out of business in the next six months and there are going to be a lot of businesses that have been hanging on by their fingernails, that have survived it this far and will now get some lift in the next six months, so that means more market share for all those organizations and consultants that have survived the last 12. So I think it's gonna be better. I don't think it's gonna be incredible, but I think it's gonna be better.

:: 31:44

Do you think it's gonna be more broad-basin? And you started off with the market this year. If you looked at your portfolio and we're recording this on the 18th, I think Friday was an all-time high on the S&P 500, but it's really been seven stocks, right, seven tech stocks. I think it's what Meta, apple, mac, microsoft, amazon, google, there's a couple more that are carrying the whole market. Do you think it's gonna be more broad-based next year? Do you think it's gonna be tech-led again?

:: 32:17

Yeah, I know, I mean look, I mean, yeah, I think it's gonna be broad-based, but I don't know where that comes from. I mean, that's just like an intuition. So again, not an economist, not a robot, not a girl, whatever Like.

:: 32:31

I don't know, I really don't know, but I do think that they're good key indicators, right?

:: 32:35

Because when we look at tech 12 months ago and everybody started firing everybody by the tens of thousands of people, many from over hiring we've discussed this ad nauseam for the last year, right? So I think that what we see in tech has a trickle-down effect.

:: 32:52

Yeah, no, I hear you. Well, that ties in a little bit with my prediction number two and it's specifically about Salesforce and it's about Salesforce and its acquisitions and if you had asked me last year, I would have said Salesforce is done with big acquisitions. There's a lot of activist investors pushing back on the Slack acquisition, which cost Salesforce $27.5 billion, and I said no, salesforce is probably gonna hang up the acquisition tool belt for a while, at least for big companies. But the more I look at where Salesforce is going and where there's a gap today in the product suite, I predict by the end of 2024 that Salesforce is gonna acquire Databricks.

:: 33:39

Now, databricks is a private company. Most recently, they raised money in September at a $43 billion valuation. Salesforce is probably gonna have to pay north of that, which would make it probably equivalent to or greater than the biggest three acquisition Salesforce has ever done, which was Slack, tableau and MuleSoft. That combined basically $50 billion. That being said, salesforce doesn't really have a data lake, data warehouse, data lake house solution. They're wanting to do more and more with AI. They're doing to do more and more with using data to help companies better understand their customers, better present office to their customers, and I think it's a real gap, as evidenced by the fact that they signed a very cozy partnership with Databricks back in September as well. So I will be very surprised if we end 2024 without Salesforce making a major acquisition of the space, and I think the best player or I'll say the best position player for them to buy is Databricks.

:: 34:45

Okay, I don't have any comment on that, I mean, I'm so not. I had to ask you on the show last week like, okay, well, what's the difference between Snowflake and Databricks? And like why Databricks versus Snowflake, that sort of thing? My understanding is Snowflake's a little bit more plug and play and Databricks is a little bit more like enterprise level, big, big, heavy customer stuff. Right, is that accurate? I mean, am I wrong?

:: 35:08

Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's accurate, but Snowflake is definitely a little bit more user friendly, a little bit more plug and play. Databricks requires a little bit more technical chops to stand up. I think the main reason that I lean towards Databricks other than the fact that when you look at where sales versus been putting more partnership and has been playing tighter with, you know they've been playing tighter with Databricks and Snowflake Snowflake is a public company, making that acquisition significantly more difficult and potentially expensive. I mean, I don't have any knowledge on you know who's running Databricks and I actually don't even know like what VC firms are backing them and the rest. It may end up being equally as expensive, but I just think Databricks is better positioned as an acquisition target.

:: 35:58

All right, good one man.

:: 36:00

All right.

:: 36:01

We're on three.

:: 36:02

We're on three, Eric, kick us off. I think you're on mute, Eric.

:: 36:07

I was. I entered into a coughing fit and had to go on mute, but thank you for the reminder there. So it is the season for coughing, I guess? Yeah, so I guess my third one and I came to this with a lot of ones listed, so I didn't have a top three, but I would say somewhat. Related back to AI and I think when Microsoft enters the field officially and makes it easier for all brands to take advantage of its co-pilot, to live up to the demo, that it showed. And I'm kind of having some re-visitation to our last conversation about the demo, where I kind of you go because you said Microsoft.

:: 36:49

I did say Microsoft, but I'm gonna mention Google here because I remember it seems like just yesterday I got a little fired up because the Google demo wasn't entirely true. But then I got to thinking and I listened to some things and, fred, your voice has been gnawing in the back of my noggin. We all got fired up when we saw the Microsoft co-pilot demo and none of that has been delivered. And for those that know people that have actually started using co-pilot, not everything that was in the co-pilot demo that Microsoft put out is available yet. So I guess I have to be a little bit more relaxed and give my friends at Google a break that their Gemini maybe wasn't entirely ready for prime time, but either was co-pilot, and I've been pretty fired up about them. But back to the Microsoft co-pilot. When that finally becomes released in businesses, especially FIs that are using Office 365, can start baking some of that into their existing products and services like Excel and Word and PowerPoint.

:: 37:55

I also have a feeling that the AI is going to allow for the brand's voice to be baked into that as well.

:: 38:05

So, as it's creating content, because it will be used for content creation in addition to data analysis, it's going to be really important for the brand to have a defined voice so that anything that the employees are using to create presentations, sales letters, emails, press releases that there's going to be the necessity for AI to be able to give a business the ability to create a brand voice and allow for it to permeate across the organization and create some consistency.

:: 38:41

And we've had that ability inside of ChadGPT+, with the capability of giving you a couple of ways where you can say define the brand and how do you want it to answer questions. But I think that's going to be something that's going to have to be at a bigger organization level and it's going to cause businesses to really sit back and go okay, what is it that we really want to be known for? What is our brand voice? If we're going to have people creating content and that's going to create, I think, an opportunity for consistency and unification of that message. But I think there's going to be a challenge with businesses who haven't fought to that extent to really put that together and get it in black and white. It's going to force us to do that, I think.

:: 39:29

Yeah, no, I like it. So full disclosure I have not used Microsoft Copilot. I don't have access to a Fortune 500, fortune 1000, microsoft 365 instance. I have talked to a couple of senior technology leaders that have started seeing it in their orgs and using it and I think you're right, eric, it's not doing everything they promised but it is pretty impressive. Again, somebody who has not actually seen it and used it. I've talked to people that have actually seen it and used it that are pretty blown away. There's a lot of things I'm excited about for it and I don't know that it's eventually going to do it. But you know, I like the idea.

:: 40:10

I think what I heard in your comments was the ability to have some consistency. You know, one of the things I've struggled with in consulting is partly my anal retentive nature is just like having consistent looks and feel across even one deck, much less you know every deck that an organization has. So if it's things that can, I mean that's obviously probably not the greatest value, although I will say as a customer, I noticed those kinds of things when I was on the buying side of services. But I think there's a tremendous amount of value. I just wonder are smaller companies outside of the enterprise, going to swallow $30 a user a month, which is more than most people pay right now, just to get Microsoft 365? I just think that price tag is pretty significant.

:: 41:06

I don't think they're going to do it for everybody in the organization, but I think they're going to need, or they will recognize, that certain individuals are going to be able to take advantage of it, and it's going to start with a pilot process of now that we've got access to it. We trust Microsoft. They're already being used for Excel and Word and PowerPoint. Let's figure out does the marketing person, does the chief financial officer, does the HR, head of corporate training, whoever the case may be, maybe roll the dice on a handful of those individuals, but the custom instructions that we've all got access to. If you're using the paid version of ChadGPT, that's going to be an element that's going to incorporate so that when those individuals that are part of a pilot process are going to be using it, they're going to be able to speak legitimately and consistently on behalf of the organization.

:: 42:10

Yeah, I'm with you, eric. I think that people are going to just every time there's a massive expense to a company and it's untested, what do they do? Well, they go test it. So who are our top performers or who would get the most value? I want two people in every field office, or I want one quarter of this department to be using it. Let's see how it's looking three months from now. Should we pull the trigger? And then that's when they realize like, oh, we gave it to 500 people. Only 200 really used it. So let's figure out who the people are actually going to use it by licenses for them, that kind of thing.

:: 42:45

Yeah, yeah. Now I think it makes a lot of sense, josh, what's number three on your plate?

:: 42:51

Yeah, look, I've just kind of tweaked it because we talked already about AI integrations and that was on there, but I'll share something else that I think is worthy of sharing. That is that people are going to have sort of a mental map, pattern recognition around AI visually, with writing, with their eyes, with advertisements. They're going to have a sense until it gets really tightened up. Right, you're going to understand. Oh, this is the voice of GBT, claude or Bard. Right, you're going to. You're going to just get a sense of it because you're going to know culturally, who, the person who wrote it. Potentially, you know it's like, oh, a 24 year old did not write that right. Or like a 60 year old did not write that, like.

:: 43:37

It's just sort of this universal thing. I sort of think of it in the way that you know, well, what's, what is it to be an American and have no accent? Well, that's bread basket stuff. Almost all you know news anchors over the last 40 years have come from the Midwest and that's like the bread basket. You know name, you know sort of typical accent that you hear that we distinguish as American. Of course, you go to England and what do they do? Everybody, everybody talks like they're a gangster from New York, right? Or does a cowboy accent, because they're not subtle, because they're like these, really obviously different accents.

:: 44:13

Well, I think we're going to become accustomed to that bread basket Midwest voice that AI delivers, because so many people are using it right now and they're not developing personas, they're not prompting it to have a specific tone to sound like their voice, that kind of thing, and I think people are going to just kind of get used to it.

:: 44:31

You guys get an email and you know right now, you're like, oh, that's spam. You get a text and you know that spam and that same sort of innate pattern recognition for those types of things I think is already being activated with AI and consequently, that's where we have to get even better with AI and we actually have to inject personality and you actually have to spend some time on this. You actually have to pay attention and do your homework and maybe take two or three days off from work just to build your stuff out, right. So my prediction is that this time next year, not only will more people be using AI, but more people will be bored of it and will be dismissive of the content and recognize that it's really only a helpful tool when you're using it. You know when you're really using all of it for the personalization side of things.

:: 45:22

Yeah, no, I love that. I was reminded immediately. I don't know if you guys saw this. I know this isn't like an article clips show, but I think it was three or four weeks ago.

:: 45:33

Sports Illustrated got called out for using a guy drew or tease that didn't actually exist.

:: 45:40

They took a picture out of a AI generated picture set.

:: 45:45

They used AI tool to write the articles. I think they actually came from a third party, but they were published on Sports Illustratedcom and the way that it was discovered is people just, you know, to your point, josh increasingly got the sense that this isn't something that somebody would actually write. You know, and you know they saw a pattern in the drew or tease articles and Sports Illustrated was forced to kind of, you know, come out and take them all down. So I think that's true and I think that it's related to the prediction I have of the hockey stick moment. I think the more people that use it, the less people that are going to be in the David camp of really like thinking intentionally and putting a lot of thought into it and getting, you know, good results out of it, and the more people are going to get lazy and just kind of throw something in and then copy and paste the output, and I think that'll become very clear when somebody's not really you know leveraging AI to enhance their work, but using AI as a substitute for work.

:: 46:50

I've not looked at it other than watch the demo video, but check out channel one, the number one dot AI. It's essentially a news network that is going to be all AI based, very similar to the Sports Illustrated, where you're going to come up with topics and ideas and things that are legitimate and relevant to the world, but the news anchors, the delivery, everything is all disclosed, clear and transparent in its AI presentation. But the news itself could very well be very legitimate and real and unbiased and maybe it's something that we can talk about in a future episode. But I've had a couple of colleagues within the WSI network bring that to my attention through our AI work group and there's been some interesting discussion as to is this good or bad or we'll just have to wait and see. But channel one dot AI, check it out.

:: 47:44

Josh, I think you're on mute, no.

:: 47:46

I saw the channel one or stupid. I mean, it might not be good or bad, it might just be stupid.

:: 47:52

Right, exactly, or all of the above.

:: 47:56

Look, guys, we're already patterned people, right, Like the human brain, we just do patterns, right? You watch movies like Amazon Prime knows what movies I like, right? Oh yeah, there's a lot twists, there's some sort of tension, there's some sort of thrill, Maybe there's a you know chase scene, Like it knows all that stuff that I like. And I can watch a movie and in about 10 minutes pretty much tell you what's going to happen. And only when I'm super surprised am I like yeah, that's a good movie because it fooled me and that, like, that's really good stuff.

:: 48:27

I'm still waiting for AI to surprise me, and I don't think you can, because it's it's following, like okay, well, what? There's 13, 15 primary plots that you can have in a story, so I'm going to say 30 or 35. It's like you can only have so many, right, you chase. There's the adventure, there's that you know, like whatever it is. So I think that, as long as you accept it, it's like well, I know, I like this stuff. I don't care if it's AI generated like whatever, in the same way that we've compensated and and sort of taken into our, taken in or not taken in CGI, like you let it go Like when the CGI is so obvious. It's a little bit like well, I feel like I'm watching a fancy cartoon and maybe I don't want to spend 17 bucks at the movie theater and watch a fancy cartoon, Like I might just not want to do that, Right. So you know, it's sort of somewhere in there.

:: 49:18

It's. It's it's lazy in kind of a similar way than just layering AI in as lazy. I think, though like I see a difference between the two right the stuff that when you were talking about your prediction, josh, I started thinking about more creative uses for AI. You know, I want AI to create something new, interesting, novel, and when it does and it would does without human intervention it will feel two dimensional and flat the channel.

:: 49:46

One thing I think is interesting, because I use AI for that all the time, not creating a news network, but I will go and find, frequently long articles that I don't want to take the time to read, and I'll throw it in there and I'll say give me the highlights, give me the high points. Like, to me, that's what channel one is doing. It's not I. People are not going to channel one for deep, thoughtful, introspective, investigative reports. They're going there for like, give me the breakdown, right, give me the. Give me the highlights, give me the headlines. I think AI is really good at that. I think less good at the other stuff, and I know, josh, you're up against the stop here, so I'm going to throw my last prediction out and, if you need to drop, eric, and I'll wrap up.

:: 50:26

Okay, thanks.

:: 50:27

But but my last prediction for 2024, and, eric, you might have a little more to say about this coming from the banking side, I think by Q3, we're going to see 75, maybe 100 Bips drop in the lending rates and we're going to see swing from an insatiable demand and hunger for deposits to a spike in demand for lending. I think you know the balance sheet dynamics are going to be very different for banks in Q4 of next year than they are today.

:: 50:57

And for the dummies out, there is 100 Bips 1% 1% yes. See, I talk like normal people, Fred.

:: 51:06

If you say 100 Bips, you sound more intelligent.

:: 51:10

Yeah, well, that's good. I just had to go with that B IPS. Oh, you mean Bs for second. You know it's 100 Bips. I'll tell you 100 Bips and then I'm going to go. If you ever want to know what 100 Bips is, you just sing, sing to yourself the song Stayin Alive. That's 100 Bips for second, which they use in CPR. Okay, I gotta go, guys. Great to see you. Merry Christmas.

:: 51:38

Josh, merry Christmas, merry Christmas.

:: 51:40

All right, see you guys.

:: 51:42

See you, Eric. Thoughts on that last prediction.

:: 51:46

Yeah, so I wouldn't be surprised. I don't know if it's going to be a full point, and I've. You know, I talked to a lot of bank CEOs and I've had some that have said that rates are still going to go up, and then I've heard some that have said, at least most recently, that things are probably going to head in the other direction. I don't know whether there's any correlation to it being an election year. If there's any political component to it, I don't dig in as deep as that. I do believe that there is going to be slowing in the desire for deposits. Probably, I don't know maybe halfway through the year I would say I think there's still definitely a desire from the banks that we're talking to that are still trying to get out there.

:: 52:35

Absolutely, and me too, right now. Right, this is a late 2024 prediction and I'm not saying, you know, 100 basis points in one go. I mean, I just think that we'll see a slow decline over the course of the year that'll culminate in a total of, you know, maybe a three quarter point to a full point.

:: 52:58

Yeah, I think for the bankers out there that would, especially those that are involved on the mortgage side and sitting around going when are we going to be able to start writing loans again? That's going to probably help with inventory. People are going to be more comfortable moving because they can get finance, so when they move that creates an opportunity for somebody to buy a house. That's been the biggest challenge on the mortgage side from the bankers as well as the consumers is no inventory high rates. Home equities have done well, but I think most people have pretty much either tapped that reserve and gone to the home equity well and they're good.

:: 53:37

So yeah, I still worry about inventories, right, because there's a lot of people out there sitting in sub four percent land and, unless they have a very, very compelling reason to move, they're going to end up spending significantly more, even at a point reduction. They're going to spend significantly more on a mortgage or buy significantly less of a house Just based on. I mean, I think inventory is going to be an issue for a while. I hate to say it, but I do think there is going to be much more demand for loans this time next year than there is for deposits. I'll go with that Well, fantastic. Well, I think this was a good prediction episode. Look forward to this time next year getting back around and seeing how well we did or didn't do.

:: 54:28

Going to say we're going to have to replay that and see were we on the mark or were we off the mark or somewhere between?

:: 54:36

Exactly Well before we go. I'm assuming we're here at the end of December. Probably not a lot of business travel on the horizon for you, but any exciting holiday plans.

:: 54:48

I'm just praying for snow so I can get out on that snowmobile at some point this season. So that's doing my snow dance. That's what I'm doing.

:: 54:56

Well, good luck up in Upper Michigan. I'm sure you have a better chance of it, so I hope you get it For me. I would be pleased if any snow stopped a couple of days after Christmas and we started getting to spring weather.

:: 55:16

You obviously didn't buy your snowmobile last year.

:: 55:18

I did not. Well, that's how you guarantee that you're not going to get any snow right. Just invest in some snow equipment and then you're done.

:: 55:28

That's like the case. So everybody that's going to get a mild winter can send me thank you cards.

:: 55:35

Yeah, with a $5 check in it.

:: 55:38

I'm sure. Yeah, that'd be even better.

:: 55:42

Awesome and we'll take care. Have a good holiday and we'll talk again in the new year.

:: 55:47

You as well, and thanks everybody for listening. Have a great holiday as well.

:: 55:51

See you Well, everyone. We hope you enjoyed episode 19 of Banking on Disruption. Don't forget you can find show notes and a full transcript of the show on our website, bankingondisruptioncom. New episodes drop every other Thursday, so we'll see you in two weeks and in the meantime, don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at at bankingondisruption. From all of us here at the Banking on Disruption team, we wish you the happiest of holidays and we can't wait to see you back here in 2024 for more banking, sales force and general technology talk. Until next time. This is Fred Cadena, wishing you success in your digital pursuits.