What’s Left For Humans When AI Can Handle Everything? Podcast With John Barrows

Sell Like A Leader – Episode 30

In this episode, David and John tackle the anxiety many parents and sales leaders feel about the future of work. Here are the questions they try to answer during their conversation:

• What skills will remain uniquely human and valuable?
• What are the fundamentals for success in an AI world?
• What does adding value mean when AI can generate insights?
• Have we over-systematized everything to the point where people are easily replaceable?

This episode is a must-listen not just for parents, but also for sales leaders who want to help their teams thrive in this AI-driven world.

About John Barrows

John Barrows is the founder and lead trainer of JBarrows Consulting, working with teams at Salesforce, LinkedIn, Google, and more. He brings 25 years of hands-on experience, including leading a self-funded startup all the way to acquisition.

He’s also the author of I Want to Be in Sales When I Grow Up!.

Podcast Key Takeaways

• The future of work involves using AI to augment human capabilities and add value, not to automate tasks.
• Emotional intelligence (EQ), critical thinking, curiosity, and adaptability are the most valuable skills for future generations, as AI cannot replicate them.
• Buyers are already using AI to get information, making outdated multi-stage sales processes with junior reps inefficient and unnecessary.
• Organizations need to evolve into “sales labs” to foster continuous learning, agility, and business acumen among their teams.

Connects

Connect with John Barrows: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows/

JB Sales Elite Program: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KzlX0ByV4Cp8LBfCz50vYde2KyaMlcHL/

Connect with David Kreiger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkreiger

Subscribe to the podcast and follow our Podcast LinkedIn page so you don’t miss any episodes!

Transcript

David Krieger: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of the Sell Like a Leader podcast. The podcast for revenue leaders who are on a mission to cultivate a high-performing sales organization. 

I'm your host, David Krieger, founder of SalesRoads, America's most trusted sales outsourcing and appointment setting firm, and I have an awesome guest here today who really needs no introduction, but I'll do it anyway. John Barrows and I actually got the opportunity to meet John about two years ago. 

We were down in South America at a conference, and I got to hear him speak. I'd always heard him on LinkedIn. He has great insights. He just tells it like it is and just such a dynamic sales leader that I wanted to come back and eventually have him on the show. And I had a topic that I really wanted to dive into. So I thought it was an opportune time. So, John, thanks so much for being here and taking the time to chat with me.

John Barrows: For having me on, appreciate it.

David Krieger: [00:01:00] So, your speech two years ago stood out to me. It was about AI. It was right around when ChatGPT was coming out. And I think we all were excited, surprised, scared. And I'm not sure if that much has changed since then. Maybe similar emotions. The big thing that stood out was you gave me a book that you wrote, and I've got it here. You actually even filled it out for my two kids, Jonah and Ari. 

And I just love that and the book is, "I Wanna Be in Sales When I Grow Up." And I think, you know, I wanna hear from you one of the things that stuck out with me is I think a lot of times kids want to be firemen, they wanna be doctors, they wanna be lawyers, they wanna be entrepreneurs, but they don't necessarily ever say salespeople. So I think you kind of encapsulated that in the book. And so can you tell me a little bit about why you wrote the book, how it came to be, and give our listeners a little bit of an overview.

John Barrows: Yeah. No, I appreciate it. So it was, first of all, before COVID, I was traveling, my daughter was born in [00:02:00] 2010 and I was traveling all over the world, and I was a weekend dad. I always committed to never traveling on the weekends, but I would pretty much leave almost every Monday and come home every Friday, which obviously sucks, right? 

As a dad who wants to be around, but couldn't figure out a way to get myself off of an airplane. So I'm always looking for ways to connect with my daughter and help her understand a little bit about what I did, so why I was traveling and what I was doing. 

And you know, it's funny to your point, kids know what a doctor is. A lawyer is a firefighter, right? They see it on TV, but when you tell your kid you're in sales, they look at you sideways. What do you mean by that? It's like you just talk to people all day long. It's like, well, yes and right. 

How do I figure out a way to do something and connect with my daughter? Around the same time, and for years, people have been telling me like, when are you gonna write a book? When are you gonna write a book? I drank my way through four years of college. I probably read about 10 books in my life. 

And so that's just not the way I learned. I learned by having conversations and stuff. So I figured I'd be a little bit of a hypocrite to write a book and plus what am I gonna write about sales that hasn't already been written a billion [00:03:00] times before? So, you know, I was struggling with that. 

And then she was six and she came to me and she had started with the Girl Scouts and she comes to me and she goes, "Dad, daddy, I have this link here, right? I gotta sell Girl Scout cookies. I have this link here that people can buy Girl Scout cookies from me. And I know you have a big social media following, so would you mind sharing this out to your network?" And I was like, "No. No, I'm not gonna do that." And she's "Why not?" I was like "A, that's my network and I built my ass off to get it there. And B, why would they buy from you over anybody else? Every other kid's asking, you know, whatever." 

So she's "What do I need to do?" I'm like, "You need to give me your pitch, right?" So we practiced a little bit and then she put on a wig. You can actually go to I Wanna Be In Sales When I Grow Up.com and you can see this whole thing. And she was like "I like the Samoas and this is why there's sweet taste in my mouth" and all this stuff. So that she drew adorable little video. I then write a blog post about it and it blows up, obviously. And she becomes the number one seller in the town. 

And then the following year, we were going door to door, right? And mind you, Girl Scout cookies go on sale in February. We live in Boston. February in Boston is about as bad as it gets. Okay? And so [00:04:00] we're going door to door, which I think is a really healthy thing for a kid to do, right? Like I think door to door sales is the most purest form of sales you can get, right? Getting doors literally slammed in your face in five degree weather. So we practiced objection handling. 

All that came together of me being like this is a really good way for me to relate to my daughter, help her do something that she's interested in, help her get a sense of what sales really is and how it's not just tricking people into doing, you know, that type of stuff. 

And this feels like a book that I can make a difference with because to your point, no kid ever says I want to be in sales when I grow up. And we are the default profession. There are finally, I think there's about 200 colleges or universities in the United States right now that you can actually get your degree in sales. But that's just recent. And so all of us go to school to think wherever we want to be when we grow up at 18 years old, which I think is ridiculous to ask a kid to do. 

And then they get out into the real world and they're like, "Ew, I don't wanna do this." And because sales is low barrier to entry and you don't really need a degree for it, you get into it. But because it's such a hard profession, three outta four people [00:05:00] that get into it every single year get out. 'Cause it's that hard. 

And my take is, if you thought about it early as a real profession and you studied it and you learned the psychology and all that other stuff. To me, it's one of the greatest professions in the world when done right, one of the worst when done wrong, but one of the best when done right, because not only, it's not about people talk about selling ice to an Eskimo, like those are the worst sales reps in my opinion. 

Those are the sleazy, gross ones that we all look at and go, "Ugh." Sales isn't about convincing anybody of anything. It's about helping people solve problems or achieve goals. So it's, I think one of the most rewarding professions there is out there. 'Cause when you can see the difference that you make, when you introduce a new solution to a client, it actually makes a difference. 

It makes a world of difference. So it's one of the most rewarding. But if your industry is tech or whatever it is, and AI all of a sudden just erases the need for that you can take your sales skills and go apply them to something else. And you can adapt. 

The more effort you put in, typically the more you get paid. So for like [00:06:00] women and disadvantaged people or people who aren't white males like me, and get all the advantages out there, it gives them an opportunity to break out of nine to five, the hourly rate scenarios. 'Cause you know, if they've learned how to do it, they can do it. 

And it's just, for me it's, it's really important skill to have. Because everything to me is sales. You go for an interview, you're selling yourself. You got an idea that you wanna pitch upstream to get a promotion, you gotta sell it. 

My dad was an engineer and he always, he always thought that his work should speak for itself. 'Cause it was so good. And it was, he was a genius. He was literally a genius. But he just always hit the ceiling and he always got so frustrated because other people who were not nearly as talented as him knew how to work things, you know, the game and relationships and all this other stuff and would get promoted and everything over him. 

And he would just always be so frustrated. And I noticed that and I was like, "Dad, you gotta tell people about it. Like you can't just do it, you gotta tell people about it." And I look at business and I say, I've rarely seen a business fail because [00:07:00] of product market fit, the product didn't work, whatever it is, right? I see tons of businesses fail because they can't sell it.

David Krieger: Yeah. That's awesome, John. And there's a lot in that. So a few things. One, I think you're right. This is a ubiquitous problem if you want to call it that. There's not schooling around sales. And I'll break it down in a few different ways. First of all, that means that there are more bad salespeople, like you said, because people don't know, they see the images on TV as to what is good sales. 

And we know those images and those movies are exactly what bad sales is. Right. And you know, when I got my MBA, there was one sales class and it was for sales management. And you know, when I look at the people from my MBA class who are most financially successful, they're the best salespeople. They are. You know, the people who went into investment banking, the ones who stay in it and make the most money, are the ones who know how to sell deals in investment banking. 

They're not necessarily the best modelers doing Excel. They're the best sales people. Same goes for [00:08:00] attorneys, right? The partners are the ones who bring in the business, not necessarily the ones who are the best in the courtroom. You know, and you can say that's unfortunate or fortunate what? 

But sales is such an important skill and I think there is now a movement for a course on financial literacy in high school, which I think is really important. But I also think, to your point, having a half unit class on sales, because it's not just a profession, it is a way of interacting with people you meet every day. And when you can do it right, and you approach it with the right type of prism, like you said, that it's not about a zero sum game. And me selling ice, an Eskimo doesn't need ice, you know, like, it's about understanding people's needs. 

I love how you encapsulated it in a book. And, love how you took, not the route of having the book for salespeople, but for future salespeople, which is in many ways more important.

John Barrows: Yeah.

David Krieger: So with that, were there any specific things that you feel like both, either through the process that you guys got to learn together that she took away, and [00:09:00] important life lessons that you feel are important for both her or other folks, as they think about sales and learning sales, whether it's selling Girl Scout cookies or whatever they're doing as kids.

John Barrows: Yeah, I mean, I tried to hit a lot of those. And I think the back summarizes the five or six key takeaways, about how, ultimately, sales isn't just about making money, do you make money? Absolutely. If you do it right. It's about helping people solve problems and achieve goals. If you lead with that money, like effectively, if you lead with value, money tends to follow, right? 

But if you start with trying to make money and you don't have value. The money ain't gonna be there. It's always I love business owners who start a business with the idea of selling it to X, Y, Z company. It's wait, you're already thinking about selling this company. 

So are you building this 'cause you're passionate about solving a problem? Or are you doing this to exit at a high level? The people that go into like exit at a high level type of thing, rarely get there because entrepreneurship is not [00:10:00] for the week, right? 

If you are not insanely passionate about the problem you are trying to solve, you won't last. Like, I think that the failure rate of startups is something like 90 something percent after five years, right? Just 'cause people don't have the drive to stay with it or the passion to stay with it because it's such a fucking hard, brutal slug, right? 

Sales is entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship is sales in a lot of ways. You know, there was a piece about timing in there about making sure that you're going where the fish are if you will. You know what I mean? Like, she went before dinner time, you know, when she was going knocking on doors and everybody's like, "No, we're actually at dinner. Thanks. But come back later." 

So next time she went back out after dinner, right? With dessert time for cookies. One of them was, she sold cookies with nuts in them and some kid had a nut allergy and so she felt bad about it. And because that kid couldn't have the cookies because she saw the kid's face. And he was disappointed that he couldn't have them 'cause they had nuts in them. 

So she went home and just baked non nut cookies and brought them back to the kid later and just gave them to him instead of trying to sell them to him. 'Cause he felt bad and made the kid happy and then got a bunch of referrals, [00:11:00] obviously, of other kids in the neighborhood. 

So, you know, I think all of it and I think that's it. I think probably the biggest one is the realization of my opinion, what sales is. And that was, that's the first part, which is, you know, she goes and she's at school and they have to pick a profession outta the hat to write a report on. And kids get lawyer, doctor, and all this, and she gets sales and she's bummed about it 'cause she doesn't even know what it is, right. And so she comes home and she's "I'm gonna do this project and I gotta do something about sales. 

And I don't even know what it is." And I was like "Let's think about it here for a second." And it, in the book I'm holding like a butter dish, right? And I'm like, "So here's sales isn't about, you know, what you see on TV? See this butter dish right here? Somebody had to sell somebody the materials so that they could make this butter dish, right? So whoever made this butter dish had to go get materials, and whoever that was had to effectively sell them. Then that person who made the butter dish had to then sell it to the store. [00:12:00] 

So it could be on the shelves, right? That store sold it to us so that we're now holding a butter dish with butter in it, as opposed to holding butter in our hand and being all messy." So that when you start to reframe sales in that it, to me, it's everything. 

Literally everything is about sales. And I don't mean the sleazy part of it that everybody else thinks. You know the movies, people ask me all the time, "John, what are the best sales movies?" Right? And it all Glengarry Glen Ross, Wolf of Wall Street, Boiler Room. Wrong. Those are the worst sales movies I've ever seen in my life. Don't get me wrong, they're funny movies. They're hysterical. But they're the worst sales movies. Everything that's wrong about this profession. 

Like they're just trying to screw people outta money. They don't give a shit about what they're selling, any of that stuff, right? The best sales movies, in my opinion, the two best are, the second best sales movie is a little rough to watch, which is why you have to watch my favorite one after that. 

But the second best sales movie is Pursuit of Happyness. With Will Smith and 'cause he, you know, selling bone density scanners and just [00:13:00] grinding and trying it. And, saving seven seconds on a cold call so that he could go home and have his kid at the shelter center. 

But it's rough because the last, it's brutal for 95% of the movie and then finally at the end you're like, "Oh my God, thank God he did it," right. So that's why you have to watch my favorite sales movie, which is Tommy Boy. And Tommy Boy to me is the essence of sales. 'Cause I always talk about there's this moment in sales that every sales rep wakes up and, I call catching your sales groove, right? Where you just kinda wake up one day and it is just a little bit easier today than it was yesterday. And there's not like a defined moment. It just tends to happen. 

When that happens, it's when you stop pitching your solutions and you start having conversations about your solutions, right? You stop caring about your commission check. You start caring more about the client's needs than you do about your commission check. And oddly enough, that's when your commission check goes through the roof, right? 

And there's this beautiful scene in Tommy Boy when he catches his sales groove, right? Which is "Helen. You look like a Helen. Lemme tell you why I suck as a salesman," right? The point on that is like that to me is the essence. He was doing it for the purest of reasons, right? He was trying to save his town. He was trying to save the plant, keep his dad's [00:14:00] legacy going, knew he had great parts, knew he had a great product, and then transfer that enthusiasm over to these people. 

But stopped trying, stopped reading the scripts, stopped like going through the sequences and the cadences and all that crap that we're all doing today, which I think is just criminal. I've been somebody who's always said that sales is an art and a science, obviously, and I actually lean more towards the science than the art because I think the science lays the foundation, the structure of the process and be put in place. But I think over the past 10, 15 years we have way over scienced sales, and I think we've completely lost the art. We've over manufactured everything. 

There's a sequence, there's a conversion, there's a this, there's a, that I have to get them through this stage of the sales process. And then we have to show them this demo and then we have to do this. And it's just it's such a robotic thing. And the sad part is, is that we've turned a lot of reps into robots. And guess what? Now they're getting replaced by robots.

David Krieger: Yeah. And that is what I really wanna dive into. With you, because I think it's on [00:15:00] everyone's mind. I've been thinking about it with my kids a lot because they talk about what they wanna be and my kids want to be right now an engineer and an architect. I'm like, "Oh, that's awesome." And then I break it down and I'm like all these things are potentially replaceable by AI, at least in the current manifestation.

John Barrows: Not potentially. They are replaceable.

David Krieger: All right. Well, let's dive into it. With that perspective, since you feel that they are replaceable, what is the advice you're giving or how are you guiding Charlotte through this? What is your perspective on what kids should be doing right now as they, at least a few years before they go and have to be full-time in the work world, how are you maneuvering through this as a father and thinking through this right now?

John Barrows: A lot of anxiety, a lot of sleepless nights about thinking about the future she's walking into and. If I was recommending her to go into college or I don't think she, I don't even know if college is gonna be a thing in three years. I'm gonna be very serious with that. I think anything that has to do with IQ is over. 

It's [00:16:00] already smarter than us. It's already better than us. The key is EQ. The key is critical thinking. The key is learning how to learn. So what I've told her is. I don't give a shit. If you get an A in math, in science, I don't care. Honestly, I do not care. I think it's important that, you know, shows you your effort in it, all that other stuff. What I care about is that you learn how to learn, right? 

Because critical thinking has gone away. You know, we teach to the test, the, you know, the kids just memorize shit. My wife talks about it all the time. She has an insane memory. So she got through school pretty easy because she could just memorize whatever it was, take the test. And she was great at taking the test. I struggled. I had to figure this shit out. I had to like, I wasn't that smart. So I had to really think about it and work through it. I think now I don't care about, okay, you memorized this thing. So you got an A on that test. I care about. How did you get to the answer? 

What was your thought process around that? If you got it wrong, do you know why you got it wrong? Neil deGrasse Tyson said something that really opened up my eyes [00:17:00] to it and he said, the learning of calculus isn't the point. 

It's actually how you learn calculus, because as you're learning calculus, it's rewiring your brain to think a certain way to problem solve. And that wiring of your brain is gonna help you in the future, learn other things, figure other things out. So I think a lot of the EQ stuff, empathy, passion, curiosity, and probably one of the most proud things that has happened for me in a long time, with her is, I'm always proud of her, obviously. 

But the thing that this stood out was I, we got an email about a month ago from her school unsolicited, and said, "Congratulations, Charlotte, you have gotten the distinct award for whatever in science." The reasoning is for your passion for the topic, your unfettered curiosity, your work ethic in getting things done. And there was a fourth one, I forget. I pinned it up on the refrigerator. But they were like my four favorite characteristics. Passion. 

You can't teach passion. [00:18:00] You can't teach curiosity. You can't teach work ethic. Right. So if we can instill those, I think a kid has a chance, right? Because adaptability is gonna be the only skill that you can really apply moving forward. 'Cause it's gonna change fast. I also think values. 

I don't think we as adults talk to kids enough about values and help them figure out what their core values are and how to look at the world. Because I think once you center on that, and obviously a kid's values evolve. They don't know. But we talked about values early and so she has this lens of how she looks through friends, relationships, schools, and that type of thing that she can center on those values. 

And I always tell her, I'm like, "Look, you're gonna fail. You're gonna, but if, if you stay true to your values, then you're, you'll be all right. You know what I mean? Yeah, you'll disappoint some people, whatever. And sometimes you'll break your values and that's why it feels so bad when certain things happen." And so I think if you ground a kid with values, which those values lead to confidence. 

And I think, with social media and all that stuff, there's no way you're gonna protect your kid from social media. You can [00:19:00] try to, restrict good luck. They'll figure out a way to get it. And you're never gonna protect them from everything that's online, all the weirdos and predators and all that shit or the, just the mirror to their anxiety and whatever the FOMO and all that stuff is happening. 

So you're never gonna protect them from that. So the only way you can to me is give them values and confidence. So whatever they see, they'll be like, "You know what, that's okay." And so if you start with values, build confidence, and then you focus on like getting them engaged and getting them curious and those type of things, I think they have a chance because, my concern right now, when we were growing up in sales and business, right? 

The first five years of our lives were just shit work. You know what I mean? Just like I'm knocking on doors, I'm writing shit down, I didn't even have a CRM back then. But what all that did was that gave me grit. That gave me confidence. That gave me insights and business acumen so I can be the sales professional that I am today. And I don't need a script. I don't need a checklist to go through. It's like I can have this conversation and be genuine with it, right? [00:20:00] 

Now, all that entry level stuff and pick a job, I don't care. Lawyers, doctors, all of it, all the entry level stuff can now be done way better by AI. Way better. We used to accept it as a society that learning curve was there for the younger generation, right. Yeah, okay. 

I gotta talk to an SDR who kind of doesn't know what the f they're talking about so I can get to the AE who still doesn't know what they're talking about so I can get to the SE so I can have that conversation. Or like the lawyer that we worked with, because we didn't wanna pay $700 an hour. 

We'll pay $150 an hour for some of the younger lawyers to go do some of the admin bullshit work and wait two weeks to get it to the real lawyer so we could have the real conversation right. Hey, ChatGPT. Can you, right. So now if all the learning curve stuff is now done better, faster, more efficiently than any junior anything could ever do. 

The two questions I have that I'm struggling with and trying to figure out on my podcast, on every conversation I have is A, where do the fundamentals come [00:21:00] from? B, I think more interesting is what are the fundamentals anymore? And I don't know what the answer to that is. I think it's EQ. I think it's the curiosity, passion, engagement, those type of things. I think that's the fundamentals. I think we gotta get back to learning how to connect with humans. 'Cause that's gonna be the only thing that's left.

David Krieger: So I agree. I think a lot of it is being able to have interpersonal skills, being able to work with people, being able to understand people. As I think about what AI can or can't do, because I think that's a really fundamental question, and not just today, right? Because we're talking about exponential growth of these things and getting better and better, and so it's hard even to comprehend it. 

There's, I dunno if you remember, there's a scene in Good Will Hunting when, Robin Williams is trying to, get through to Matt Damon and the scene before basically torn him a new one by telling him he saw this painting. He looked into his soul. And he reflected on it, and he sat down with him and [00:22:00] he's "For about six hours, I couldn't sleep. I couldn't deal with what you said. But then I realized, you're just a kid and you haven't, gone to war and seen your best friend die in your arms and," all these things.

John Barrows: Sistine Chapel. You can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.

David Krieger: Exactly. And at a fundamental level, I feel like AI is like, you know, Will Hunting, right? That they will be able to quote every soliloquy, be able to give all the Michelangelo and everything. But at its essence, and he can fake it a little, just like he could, but at its essence something's missing. Just like a LinkedIn post where, you know, somebody's just like saying what they need to say, but there's always something fundamentally missing. 

There's a place where you just sense they're not human. They haven't had those life experiences, and I feel like that's where we have to really, lean in. Because I think both for that EQ and relating. There's gonna be something missing that fakes it and people are already having a relationship with AI and I get it, but there's [00:23:00] something fundamentally missing there. 

And then also from a maybe more hopeful standpoint, 'cause this would even be, resistant to AI being able to perfectly fake it. Is that. Hopefully there's both a backlash and there is a fundamental level where people do want to relate to people. Just like people don't wanna buy a fake Van Gogh, just like you said, on those things that make us uniquely human and we can do, but where I'm a little pessimistic is unfortunately those are the skills that have gotten worse.

John Barrows: Yeah. Everything's transactional now. Yeah. We've lost that skill. And you're right. I think there is almost always going to be just something off about the AI message, the, you know what I mean? I can sense it. I tell people this to this day. 

You give me a hundred emails, 50 developed by AI and 50 developed by humans. I'll tell you which, I'll be 95% accurate. I almost guarantee it. Because I just, the only way I can describe it is it doesn't have a soul. And that is a hopeful component to this, right? 

As a human, I want to talk to somebody, make myself feel [00:24:00] like, yeah, that's assuming humans keep buying shit. When you flip that, what I'm more worried about ever gonna talk all these cadence tools and all these tools are gonna take over sales bullshit. I don't care about any of that stuff. I care about when the buyer wakes up and realizes they don't need us, man. Because and I'll give you a very specific example that just happened to me with my daughter. Let's take doctors. 

My daughter's 14. She's always had a little lactose intolerance, but funny, right? Just she's farting a little bit after she drinks. That type of stuff. Who cares? But two months ago, like it went from zero to 60, like her gut just turned on her right and it was awful. Anything she ate, she was. Super big pain and she felt like she was gonna throw up and it was like, "Jesus, what's happening?" 

So we talked to doctors and duct tests and all this other stuff and this, I don't know if you've been through doctors and shit, like it is mind numbing. Like most of them talk over you. They like, you don't know what do you mean? And this is, I'm nervous. My daughter, I'm panicking, right? 

So I created a custom GPT Charlotte's [00:25:00] Gut Health GPT. I said, act as a GI specialist for a 14-year-old girl. I want you to be the best GI specialist in the world. I then took every blood test that she took and put it in there. I said, "What does this mean? 

Here's some red and green, and tell me what I should be looking for." I then took, every doctor appointment that we went on, I recorded and transcribed and put it into the GPT. Then, we have a scale where she tracks all her food and then we have the scale of one to 10 of like, how does she feel after she ate, so is it a one, no problem at all. 10. I gotta go to the hospital. So four or five, whatever. 

So I had her all document that, put that into the GPT. Every conversation I had with a friend, everybody's got stories about their kids and gut health and them, "Oh, have you heard of this? And have you heard of that?" And that's it. And it's "Jesus, I never heard of that before." Take that. "Hey, have you ever heard of SBO? Have you ever heard of, does anxiety make a difference?" 

Yeah. So then what I'm asking questions. "What else should I be thinking about here? Tell me more." Right? I'm not looking at it for the answer 'cause I don't believe them. It's pulling off the internet. It can only be so accurate. I have critical thinking [00:26:00] ability. I know where to call bullshit and not, but I also know I'm not the expert, but I don't necessarily know if I trust all the experts these days, especially doctors. My dad passed away and it was, my dad died from this weird virus. 

And it was and if the doctor had been exposed to what that virus was, they would've figured it out immediately as soon as they saw him. But because of the doctors he went to, they had no idea what it was. And they didn't figure it out until he was on his deathbed. Too many people put so much trust in a doctor to tell them, okay, the doctor's one person with only a certain amount of knowledge like you, we can only retain a certain amount of knowledge. So one of our visits was a nutritionist. 

I said, "Hey, ChatGPT could you do me a favor? Print out a two page document that summarizes everything we've done so far, and I want you to make the document summary specific for what a nutritionist should know versus her GI specialist. Also give me 10 questions. I should be asking this nutritionist so that I can get some clarity on a plan moving forward with my daughter." We go to the appointment. I hand her the two page document and I'm like, "Could you just [00:27:00] read this please? 

'Cause this gets rid of those." So tell me what's been going on. Like, here, read this. She reads it, she's "Holy shit. This is incredible. This is great. Thanks for the update." I'm like, "Thank you. I know." So we got some questions and I start going through these questions and this woman doctor proceeded to talk in circles for about 30 to 40 minutes. And I didn't wanna be rude 'cause my daughter was sitting right there. 

I didn't wanna just interrupt her and be like, "What the fuck?" But about 35, 40 minutes in, I go "I'm sorry. I need to stop. I'm actually more confused now. Than I was before I walked in the door here. My goal here was to come to you as the expert and ask some questions so we can get very specific advice on what we should be doing, and have a game plan to address what's happening to my daughter right now. 

And I feel like you've there's a lot of maybes and possibly and try and could and might, are we gonna get to a concrete plan to help my daughter here?" And then she talked in circles for another 10 minutes. I said, "Thank you very much. We have a hard stop here at three o'clock. 

Appreciate your insights. Thank you very much. See [00:28:00] you later." I looked at my insurance. We have a high deductible premium, so I paid $500 for that meeting. It took three hours outta my life, and it took two weeks to schedule. I walked outta there dumber than I walked in. 

Now let's apply that to sales. I'm gonna sit on the phone with an SDR 22 years old who doesn't know shit from shit, who's gonna ask me a bunch of piece of shit BANT questions. And if I'm interested in that conversation, I'm then gonna have to wait another week to talk to an AE. Who's probably gonna ask me the same questions and give me maybe a little bit more insight, and then I'm probably gonna have to wait a week for an SE to get on the phone, who probably is the one I need to talk to, but is probably gonna ask me the same fucking questions I asked that AE. 

Or I go into ChatGPT and I say, "Hey, ChatGPT, here's my 12 to 24 month business plan. I'm thinking of evaluating these type of vendors. Here's the solution I'm thinking, tell me what I need to know about this. What are the pros and cons? How [00:29:00] does it, how do you compare against the top three other vendors in this state? What questions am I missing? 

What, help me understand that da, da, da." And by the time, you know, so we've all heard that by the time somebody comes to us, they're already 60 to 70% of the way through the sales process. That stat has been way overused because to me that's an inbound lead. Okay. 

It's an inbound lead. Yes. I've done my homework. I don't need to be sold. I need to be helped to buy. So backing me into your sales process, piss off. I used to say, let's stop it. Outbound's different, now if you ping me with one of your SDR emails, that happens to hit me at a point where I'm like "That's interesting." And I do schedule a call because I wanna talk to a sales rep. 

Well, five minutes before I get on that fucking call. "Tell me about this business. What should I need to know? What questions I should ask this rep? Pros and cons." In literally five minutes. Then I get on the phone and some 22-year-old kid who has no idea what they're talking about is gonna try to add value to my life. I wanna talk to an SE, I wanna talk to a customer success. 

So that's the fear is buyers doing what I did to that doctor. As a positive note, the GI specialist, we went [00:30:00] to all the confidence of the world. I did the same thing, gave him the two pages. He looks at it, he goes, "Yep, this is legit." He goes, "Yeah, I get where you're going with these things, but those are gonna be later. Here's the plan. We're gonna start with the easy stuff first to knock those things off. 

And then if we have to do those type of tests for this, then we will, but let's start here." We have six weeks, we're gonna do this. And I was like, "Oh my God, you are insanely valuable to me." Unfortunately, I think that's gonna be about 10 to 20% of our population at best.

David Krieger: So let's break that down and what that means for organizations and people who are trying to organize their sales teams around this new dynamic. And because I think let's talk about the power of this. And let me also frame this with, you had a great LinkedIn post. 

There's a Microsoft report that came out with the professions that are gonna be most likely replaced by [00:31:00] AI in the near future. And so before I ask you this question, let me ground it in this. So I loved reading down it. So number one, I think we all would call, interpreters and translators. Two, historians. I don't know where that gets, seems, I mean.

John Barrows: I don't know how many historians there are, but yeah, they're in trouble.

David Krieger: I know the two that are gonna lose their job. Passenger attendants, which I'm not sure what those are either. But then number four, sales representatives of service, which sounds very fancy. I've never been called a sales representative service. I kind of like that. But that is number four. So the highest. 

And basically they took different skill sets and things that these professions do, and looked at the correlation between what they do and how well AI can replace them. So eventually as these tools become more ubiquitous and then instead of Googling things, it's just, you know, they're chatting it, it's gonna happen more and more. So I'm a sales leader who's trying to set up my organization around these buyer patterns. I think on the flip side too, sales teams now have tools. 

We've been telling them, you gotta do pre-call research, you gotta do research, you gotta now, and they. Very few do it now. It's at least a lot easier for them to [00:32:00] do it right and do get really good research and and whatnot. So how do sales leaders look at this to try to maximize the tools that now are at their fingertips to allow their teams to do things that they never could get them to do before very easily and actually make it more fun. 

While trying to meet the buyers where they are, which like you said, they're doing most of this research themselves. They're already annoyed by division of labor. And so what your perspective, I guess, both in the short term and then we'll finish up here in the long term with where sales is going.

John Barrows: So I think we're in such a flux mode right now that it's evident to me that we're all living in a legacy model and we're transitioning right now, and we just don't know what that future model is. I would look at my team and my suggestion to organizations I work with is turn your sales org into a sales lab. Analyze your sales process. 

You know, I remember I was, when I was at Thrive Networks, my first company, and I had reps, [00:33:00] and I'd be like, "I need you to be more strategic," right? Like "John, like I'm not a strategic thinker." I'm like, "Let me demystify strategic thinking for you. Okay. All strategic thinking is, is outlining a process, right? And then figuring out the weakest link of that process, picking that piece out, figuring out a solution for it, plugging it back in and seeing how it works. 

And then just iterating and iterating. Like that's strategic thinking at the end of the day, in my opinion." Every rep right now is playing around is scared shitless of AI that we're all looking over our shoulders going, "When is this stuff gonna replace us?" 

Some are diving into it, some are avoiding it, some are you know, wasting a lot of time with it. So it's, it's happening within these organizations, whether you like it or not. And the days of top down decision making of tools these days I think is ridiculous because think about AI for a second. If you determine as an executive that, okay, this is our, I'm gonna look at this. 

Let me evaluate, here's the problem that we have. Let me evaluate some solutions here, then let me implement that solution. Let me onboard everybody with it. You're, you're six to nine months out at best of implementing any systemic AI [00:34:00] solution, right? Or technology at this point. 

Can you genuinely look at me in the eyes, David, and say in the next, what the world's gonna look like in nine months. I have no fucking idea. So my point is, is like, I think that's over and you don't get buy-in from the org. You get reps who are just there just to get a job and get paid and who cares and get in and out. We gotta start working together better as teams here at this point. 

So my solution is turn your sales into a sales lab, sales org into a sales lab. Pick Friday afternoons, two hours every Friday afternoon. Get everybody together, Zoom, whatever. It doesn't matter. And break up into groups. So you put like senior reps with junior reps. 

So you got the business acumen, you got the tech savvy, you put some SEs in there 'cause they're really good with prompting and code, right? That type of, you put some marketers in there 'cause they get some messaging and stuff like that, right? So you put a team of five or six reps that are very diverse within the organization, right? 

And it's kind like, you know, how engineers have hackathons. Where they pick something and they nerd out on it for a little while and see if they can fix it. I think we should do the same thing in sales. You outline your sales process and you figure out where are we falling down the most? Is it meeting prep, is it [00:35:00] follow ups? Is it updating CRM, is it whatever? What is it? 

You frame the problem and then you give some guidelines on what you're looking for everybody to figure out. And then you let every team use AI, whatever it is, to figure out a way to better address that problem. Give them an hour, whatever it is, and then at the end of that hour, everybody has to present what they came up with and then the team votes. "Yeah, that's awesome. Great winner." You know, gift cards, whatever the hell you wanna do. 

And then you apply that immediately the next week. So now we learn together, we pick something. Ideally we find something that's a solution for it. So now you got buy-in from your organization 'cause the team is doing it. You'll probably reduce your tech stack because there's a ton of free stuff out there right now that you can do with AI without having to try too hard and you're gonna improve employee satisfaction, business acumen, and all that fun stuff if you do it right and you just do that every single week. 

That way you evolve and any new thing, you're just like, "Hey guys, this new thing came out. Let's all beat it up for another hour here. See what [00:36:00] people can figure out on it." Cool. Next week, next week. Next week. That to me, creates business acumen, employee satisfaction, growth, agility, all of it, and you don't need training. You can be your own training org if you do this the right way.

David Krieger: Yeah. I love that. The other principle from tech folks is like the Google 10% time and give people, you know, for the next, you know, six months, 10% of the time just to play.

John Barrows: Yeah, so that's exactly it. Just get play because they're doing it anyways. So control it, give it some structure, and then have some outputs that you're looking for.

David Krieger: Yeah, and I think that, you know, tying it to also the kids' stuff here, my thinking is, like you said, we don't know what it's gonna be like in six months, let alone five years from now, 10 years from now. But the key thing is just we know it's gonna be there. 

And so we gotta lean in. Every major change that has happened, whether it's industrial revolution, internet, people were scared about all jobs going [00:37:00] away. We're gonna have nothing to do. And a few things I think are always true. One is that we didn't necessarily see a lot of these types of things coming. We don't know what the iteration is, right? 

You need the internet, you need the iPhone, you need the app store, and then you need somebody to start Uber, right? So there's five iterations of things that might change, and we just don't know what those are. We just know that it's gonna change and it's gonna change a lot faster than any of these other things, which is the scariest part. 

Like society is just not ready for how quickly this is gonna change. But then the other thing is, I think, I hope again, the humans wanna be productive for the most part, right? And they want to have meaning and they wanna have meaningful careers. And so hopefully we will create that, even if it isn't an incarnation of what it was when we were growing up, is now. And so with that, John, what is your perspective for sales and whatnot over the next few years? Where are you landing here?

John Barrows: I think sales is everything, right? I mean, I think it's a human skill of relationships and, [00:38:00] and working with people. So I think, people are always gonna need help making decisions, right? So therefore, if you look at sales as, you know, helping people solve problems or achieve goals, then I think sales is always gonna be relevant, right? 

If you look at it as. I'm an SDR and I'm making cold calls and I need to send out cadences. Quite frankly, I don't think that's sales. I don't mean to offend any SDRs out there, but I, I just don't think that's sales. That's, just hammering out sequences and cadences. You know, the ones who are maybe doing some research, having good conversations. 

Okay. But, if you think of me walking you through BANT and MEDDIC and then giving you a presentation and, droning through a demo is sales then. No, I think that's all irrelevant. I think if it's helping people put context around what's happening, helping people make decisions, asking questions, that the AI based on my having the experience to smell what it's like at the Sistine Chapel, [00:39:00] I think that's there, but the challenges is that we're lazy as humans. 

We're lazy. And the problem is, is we've gone from a search engine to an answer engine. We can all argue that Google fed us whatever it felt like feeding us anyways, right? So it didn't matter, but, but at least there was a perception of choice. 

At least I had to kind of look through a couple of links and, you know, read an article or two and be like, "Yeah, that's my truth. I believe that and I'll use that as context." Well, now it's just, it gives you the answer and inherently it can't be right. I think the number one source of content on AI is Reddit. 

You know what I mean? Like that's what it's pulling from. So like, so inherently it can't be right all the time or even a lot of the time. And again, for people like you and I who have context, who have interests, who are curious, who are, you know, who kind of question like, "I don't know about that. Tell me more, give me the different perspective on this. Ask me 10 questions so that you know exactly what I'm trying to get at here." 

It is a superpower and I think that that's gonna be [00:40:00] relevant for a long time ahead. But for the vast majority of people who are lazy, they're gonna ask ChatGPT for the answer. They're gonna take that answer, copy it, and paste it. And in that sense, I have no idea what the use of that human is. I just don't. So my, my vision for the future for sales reps is Iron Man, Iron Woman. Because if you think of Tony Stark, right? As a human, he had it all. 

He's good looking and he's rich. He's super smart, right? Jerk. Anyways, but if he tried to fight all those aliens, right, he'd get killed. So what does he have to do? He has to create the suit, but the suit, that first suit right, was like all clunky and, you know, broke up in the desert. He didn't really become Iron Man until he introduced Jarvis, the AI. 

So now you have the human. Suit and AI and you can whoop some ass. So that's why I think the future is the ones who dive into this headfirst. As much as I can argue that it's horrifying because of the environmental impact [00:41:00] and all, we're all headed towards, you know, extinction and all that other stuff. I don't think we have a choice right now. 

You either completely and just go live on a beach in Costa Rica, which is where I'm headed. Or you dive into this shit and you learn everything about it, because it is the biggest superpower you could ever imagine if you learn how to use it. 

And for those of us who learn how to use it, we can educate others on how to use it. I actually think it's easier now to add value to somebody's life more than ever before. 'Cause if I wanted to prospect to you, for instance, like we always say add value. How do you add value to somebody? Right. Well. 

"Hey, ChatGPT I'm meeting with this person. This is what their persona is. This is what their role, this is their company. Give me five ideas of, of valuable content or insights that I can bring to that person and share with them on an email." 

I like those. "Oh, deep research Could, could you go do a deep project for me on that topic and give me a three page white paper on that topic specific to David so I can send it to him." "Hey, David, I've been paying attention to your business for a little while now, and actually people like you that we've worked with in the past have challenges, and I'm not sure if you're seeing these, but I actually had ChatGPT do some research [00:42:00] for you on how you might be able to strategize from a business standpoint. 

Thought you might get some value out of that." Like, and most people aren't there yet. They think it's funny. They think it's, it's like Google, but it's a funny Google, right? And that's something I'm like, "Holy shit, you have no idea what's coming." And so I think for those of us that are those not bleeding edge, I think bleeding edge is already out there, right? 

The leading edge ones that are willing to try, willing to put in the work. And have that work ethic, have that curiosity, have that passion. I think the world is gonna be just, I think you're gonna be able to make so much money and make such a difference in this world, but for everybody else who's looking to automate what they're doing with AI, that's why I say augmentation, not automation. If you are looking to automate with AI, I think you are. It's a fool's errand if you are looking to augment right, your superpower.

David Krieger: Well, that is actually a fairly optimistic way to end this.

John Barrows: For those of us who care, this is where I'm at. I'm insanely optimistic, at least here, for the short to midterm. And, you know, maybe like within the next five years, [00:43:00] for those of us who are willing to put in the work and who are, curious and are, you know, and have that interest, right? I'm insanely pessimistic for everybody who isn't.

David Krieger: Alright, well, John, this has been a fantastic conversation. Folks who don't know how to find you, tell them where to go.

John Barrows: Yeah, website's the easiest, jbarrows.com. So letter J-B-A-R-R-O-W-S.com. That's where you can get, I get my free YouTube channels, all my content's on there. LinkedIn, obviously you can hit me up there. Unfortunately I can't accept any more connections there. I've hit the limit. 

And then, you know, Instagram handle is John Barrows, and right now I just launched, so if anybody's interested, you know, I do training and you can get all my content right on my website. But I'm doing for the first time, one-on-one engagement. So three months is called my Elite program. 

And so I'm looking for, I'm not trying to do 50 people, right. I'm probably, you know, five to 10, where I work with them on a one-on-one basis, you know, over the course of three months on, on not just sales, but you know, life shit, you know, values, those type of things that we talked about. And so if anybody [00:44:00] out there is looking for some one-on-one coaching, you know, you can hit me up and, we'll have a conversation, see where it goes.

David Krieger: That's great well, John, thanks again for taking the time to chat with me.