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Sales Leaders Manage the One Thing We Can’t Create More Of: TIME - Stu Pike at ServiceNow

• Amplified Group • Season 7 • Episode 6

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Where Does Your Time Go?
And why your sales motion might be the reason you have less of it.

In this episode, we sit down with Stu Pike, VP and COO of ServiceNow APAC, to get into what’s actually going on with the GTM motion and what to do about it. 

Stu’s seen this from every angle over the last 30 years, and he brings it back to something simple: design your go-to-market around how buyers actually make decisions, not how your org is structured.

Most revenue teams feel this, even if they don’t always say it out loud, it’s not effort that slows things down, it’s friction.

Stuff gets lost between demand gen, sales, solutions, customer success. Deals start to drag and discovery gets repeated. And before you know it, you’re talking more about the internal process than the customer’s problem. That’s usually when trust starts to wobble a bit too.

We get into the handoffs that quietly kill momentum, a really simple question that exposes where things break, and why so many “transformations” fall flat.

We also talk about what’s changing right now, how teams are starting to use AI to carry customer context, clean up CRM gaps, and make coaching way more useful (and less painful).

But the thread running through all of it is time. How do you give it back to your reps, your managers, your leaders so they can spend more of it with customers and, honestly, more of it outside of work too.

If it resonates, give it a share with someone who’s rethinking how their team sells, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Here is the blueprint that Stu refers to

https://fortune.com/2025/10/29/ai-doesnt-fail-on-tech-fails-on-leadership-servicenow-commentary/

We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn! 

https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Sam

Welcome to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group, the podcast about the people that power the tech industry. After a little rain this morning, I'm looking out at glorious sunshine. Vicky, what's the weather doing in your rain?

Vic

Well, it sounds like I'm in a different bit of the country to you because I don't think it's really rain this morning. And yet I'm just down the road.

Sam

I've got cricket practice tonight, so I'm hoping the rain stays clear. Yes, first match on Sunday as well. Exciting times. So who have we got on today?

Vic

Ah, right. Now, today we have Stu Pike, who is the VP and COO of ServiceNow APAC. And I just want to just give you some context here. So I first met Stu at a leadership workshop that I was running in APAC. Um, and I can vividly see you there, Stu. You were standing in front of a flip chart and you had a picture of a mountain and a forest and a river that you drawn. And you had the whole room absolutely inspired by you talking about the importance about being up at the top of the mountain and looking about where you need to be going. And I got a bit starstruck if I'm completely wrong. I don't think I've said that to you. Yeah, honestly, uh, I was blown away. Anyway, today uh in Stu's new role, or it's not so new at Service Now, from what we've talked about, Stu, you have now built the vehicle to navigate from looking out the mountains and the forest and the river. And I just can't wait to learn some more about it. So thank you so much for being here.

Stu

Oh my God, my absolute pleasure. Vicky, thank you. And firstly, thank thanks so much for that. There was probably, you know, me drawing pictures because I'm not good with words. You know, that's a that's a compliment. And secondly, as you know in in Dynatrace and all of the, I'm sure the guests you've had and the people you've spoken to, nothing is done alone. So you it it only happens when the team actually aligns to the same vision and actually gets stuff done. So whilst it's very kind of you to say it's it's not about me, it's about the people that that are around you and and the way they react and the things they do. So much appreciated.

Vic

Actually, we had Troy on the podcast fairly recently talking about wonderful results that have happened as an outcome of that, of the work that we did together. So that's uh really, really great. Anyway, I'm gonna shut up now and hand over to Sam.

Sam

Yeah,

Stu Pike’s Career In Enterprise Tech

Sam

brilliant. Well, you're very welcome, Stuart. Great to have you on the podcast. Thanks, Sam. Appreciate you joining us. It'd be great if you could start by just giving our listeners a quick canter through your career history to date, if you don't mind.

Vic

And I know it's very long. So canter, please.

Stu

It is. I'll I'll canter, I'll I'll keep it really simple. Thank Sam, thank, thanks very much for the um for the for the time on your podcast. I've been in and around enterprise tech for 30 years, which either means I'm very experienced or I studied young. I'll let you decide which. Um I I started on the sales floor. So I started as a sales A at Apple, then IBM, kind of learning the fundamentals of how you earn a customer's trust and build a commercial relationship from scratch. From there, increasingly complex selling at Oracle and SAP, leading strategic accounts and regional businesses across APAC. I set up and ran financial services at SAP, where the systems company use to sell are almost never designed around the customer. They're designed around internal constraints. And that's not a criticism of SAP. That's a criticism of the way we as an industry, I guess, have and operated. Um, then I did something that changed my perspective permanently. I actually crossed onto the client side. So I went to Virgin Australia and airline in Australia, and I ran the sales business. So two and a half billion dollar part of probably at then a four and a half billion dollar sales and airline. Uh overnight, I went from being that technology vendor knocking on the door to being the one actually opening it to technology vendors. And you learn things.

Sam

Or not as the case may be.

Stu

Correct, correct. And it's it's there, you kind of learn things on that side. You simply can't learn from others, right? What actually drives a buying decision? What makes a technology partner generally valuable? What it costs in time, change management and trust when the deployment doesn't deliver, right? So after that, I had a stint in Accenture on the management consulting and delivery side. As MD of technology and cloud transformation running, you know, large-scale enterprise change. I learned a huge amount from the management consulting and the delivery side. And then into AWS at the cloud, um, you know, as a sort of premier cloud business setting up the strategic customer engagements, the private pricing business really for AWS. For the last couple of years, I guess, you know, Dyna Trace, and then now as COO with ServiceNow and APEC, where I've really connected into AI and our data warehouse and redesigned our go-to-market motion across the business, um, across sort of three markets, eight countries, um, really from ground up. So every role is reinforced the same belief, to be honest, which is to start with start with the customer and work backwards. Everything else has to earn its place in that logic. And that belief is exactly what discovered about AI and I'll go to market. So for the first time, you know, technology is capable of doing that, not in theory, but actually in practice. So, yeah, that's that's my group.

Sam

Cool. It's been a good run then.

Stu

It has, it's been I've been very blessed. I've been very blessed.

Joining The Dots With AI

Sam

That was an amazing experience. So Vicky kindly sent me a LinkedIn article that you published recently about um using AI to sort of join the dots around the sales motion. Um can you give us some some sort of real world on that, if you don't mind?

Speaker 2

Yeah, I'm a great believer of you know in a growth mindset. I think two things are going to sustain people through the market. One is having a growth mindset, the other is having resilience. And I think if I sort of take that growth mindset, the insight that unlocked everything for me really came from sitting on both sides of the table over the 30 years. So you can kind of look in the rear view mirror and say, you know, what a great career, how privileged I was. But actually, it's what what do you learn in each role? And I've been through cloud computing, I've been through client server, you know, that kind of marks my age. But when I was at Virgin Australia, I watched, you know, technology vendors pitching transformation programs really engineered around their own delivery model, their milestones, their specialisms, their handoffs. Almost none of it was designed how we actually made buying decisions. So for me, in Virgin, my problem was as the head of sales, it wasn't revenue that was a problem. My problem was how did I fix profitability? Because I needed to create more revenue per ticket to fund the initiatives and the capability that Virgin wanted to invest in to continue the service that they provided to their customers. So, you know, it's not a it's not a criticism of those vendors, it's a structural problem. It's the same structural problem inside every go-to-market organization I've run. You know, the traditional model was never designed around the customers' buying process. It was actually designed around either, you know, a brand awareness and go-to-market demand gen, then a sales process, then a separate selling process. But actually, if you connect all three of those as a flywheel, that's the way the customers buy. So it was a bit of a light bulb moment for me. And you think about what the costs are in that process. So you hire a demand gen specialist six to 12 months before they're productive, an AE, the same ramp, a solutions consultant at CSM, each brilliant. You know, each you you expect to have the best knowledge, but each is almost silent. And every handoff, generate pipe, progress pipe, close pipe, those are the only three things we really do in a sales business. Knowledge degrades. You know, the deal that should take three months takes five because someone's waiting for someone else to do something, you assume you've got the best specialists and the best people with the best knowledge available at any point. Uh so it was never the point, it was the constraint that actually, you know, I kind of thought about. And when I connected our AI to our internal data, the custom history, buying signals, competitive context, what they bought, who had bought it, what it was relevant to, all of that sort of surfaced before you'd even had the conversation with a with a customer. So you were able to start with a conversation of trust. You know, the AE writing outreach had the same depth of insight that previously only existed after three discovery calls and a specialist overlay. The knowledge that lives in people's heads became available at every stage, right? Not just into one person. And also not just to people, it became available to the agents that were able to do those tasks for you. So the performance floor rose, not because we hired better people, but because we'd sort of started removing that constraint. And I it kind of what sort of inspired me, I guess, was you know, Jensen from NVIDIA talked about, you know, every industry is going to be transformed by AI. The question is whether you're going to be a driver or a passenger.

Sam

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So this is kind of fixing CRM, isn't it?

Stu

It's it's not just fixing CRM. It's actually, I guess for me, it's really saying we we've got the opportunity to redesign the process around a customer's buying process rather than you know process automation and and execution. You think about the vendors that have gone into the SaaS market, it's really about do the same process the same way at lowest cost, automate it, build-in policy and process. Well, actually, you you do that, but then you've got different mega processes that actually are part of a customer process. So the first is joining them up. The second is how do you make it simpler so that actually you're talking in the customer's language at the point that matters to them and and creating a trusted relationship before you sell them anything. So understand my business. Like when I was in Virgin, hundreds of people from the industry would would come and ring, hey Stu, how are you? And you kind of realize, hang on, this is so bad. Because no one actually was was starting with, well, Stu, what problem are you trying to fix? That's that's number one. Number two is who cares and who can do about it? So if you're you know, if you're running sales and you've got a two and a half billion, you've still got a CIO who has to deliver the technology. So you might care about it, but is it your CIO that can do something about it? The third question is, well, what's the value to you, Stu? And for me, it was about the profitability rather than the revenue. You know, I had a certain number of people, revenue targets. So it's what's the value to me, which was the profitability. If I can get $8 per ticket more profit, sell the same number of tickets, bingo. I'm fixing that problem. And then the third is well, what's the risk? Sorry, the fourth is what's the risk of doing what you're proposing? So if I just tried to do it myself, if I went to an external firm, or what if I do what you're asking me to do? What's the risk to me? Not just technology, but operational change, you know, all the other pieces. So being able to think about those four questions, I think I I've always coached sales teams to say, if you can answer those four questions, then you know, we're we're gonna have a good relationship with the customer.

Sam

Yeah, that makes sense. I'm you know, I remember drilling our salespeople at SoftCat and saying, you know, you're not gonna sell somebody something that they don't need, or then that there isn't a compelling business initiative that or problem that it supports or solves. You know, you can't just phone up and sell a load of tech, whiz bangs, one of our security guys used to call them, new, you know, new bits of tech. Just because it's cool and new, it doesn't work like that. You might buy the latest iPhone because it's cool and new, but you ain't gonna buy just enterprise grade IT because it's cool and new.

Stu

It's a great point, Sam. You know, that that example about the iPhone. So if you're a technical buyer, you're gonna be impressed by the camera and the RAM and the whatever. Yeah. If if you're a business buyer, you you probably don't know anything about that.

Sam

And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

Stu

Exactly. Yeah, so it's yeah, it's gotta you gotta give the same story, but to two different people relevant to their horizon and and what they're trying to trying to get out of it.

Sam

Yeah.

Overcoming Resistance And Driving Adoption

Sam

So by implementing this sort of sounds almost like human middleware using AI to do that, you're connecting various different functions. Did you have any resistance? You know, people sometimes like to keep their stuff close to their chests. How did you get everybody to pull in the same direction?

Stu

I think the the first thing is it's a journey, right? So it's so I think the technology is never the hard part. People are the hard part, right?

Vic

And from 30 years, we do what we do.

Stu

100%. And and also the the other thing I've realized in 30 years, like people who are advocates of change drive it. People who are resistive, you know, so you you've got to you've got to respect both parties, right? So from 30 years running enterprise change programs, the mistake I think most people make is is particularly in AI, is is treating AR adoption like a software rollout. So you look at you know, market research, and I think there was published research from MIS and others that talk about 95% of those projects fail because it becomes a you know proof of concept, but actually deploying it into production, someone A has to think about the risk of it, B, the CFO saying, Well, what's the difference between my efficiency and effectiveness benefits from technology and my hard benefits from deploying AI? So the the shift I made was starting with a different question, which is not not how can I use AI, but where's the human coordination friction cost us the most time, quality, and value?

Sam

Yeah.

Stu

That answer is always obvious once you ask it honestly. And it's and it it's difficult to do because you know there's existing processes and you know it's a bit of a holy grail. But if you if you look at that, you know, for us it was the handoffs between each of the go-to-market stages and between the brand awareness, demand gen, sales, and customer success. Because I thought, well, if if we can connect all of those together, we've got more insight at the beginning of the process. So we're actually focused on things and problems that customers have that we're able to solve. And honestly, if we can't, let's not spend time and effort on it. Then, you know, that's the trust builder. You solve that specific problem for the best people first, you give them time back. That's I think one of the other things is to drive adoption. It has to be something that gives them time back because it's it's hugely complex, right? So the first piece was uh get people using the genetic capability internally so that they're comfortable with that. The second is give them something that that's valuable to them. You know, they everyone's got compensation plans, whatever. But what we can't do is create more time. So if you can create more time for them to spend time doing the things that make them more successful, spend time with the family, that's something that's really valuable. And then the third is you know, drive that at scale. So, you know, the biggest AI adoption unlock, I think isn't it isn't a training program. It's the moment your best person turns to the skeptic next to them and says, Let me show what this did for me.

Sam

Yeah. So yeah, yeah, and and actually develop advocates within the business.

Stu

That's 100%. Like a COO, I I can I can be as biggest advocate, but people still go, oh, you know, maybe he's sitting in an ivory tower, and you know, he's got three regions, and you know, but but at the end of the day, if you can if you can get people saying to their peers, particularly, and we'll talk about it maybe later on, is is the frontline managers, they're the they're the pivotal point between the customer, the sales teams, and then the company goals. That's a different thing.

Vic

And they're the ones that are time pressured the most in our experience.

Stu

100%. 100%. And it's got to be, I think, Vicky, you you talk about being in a trusted space, right? A safe space.

Vic

Yeah.

Stu

Um, they they've got to know because honestly, I I feel like you know, my experience is that there's there's kind of three types of people, honestly. And I go back to the kind of the growth mindset and and resilience. There's three types of people I see. One is the people who immediately get it and they become the advocates. It's not perfect, but it's better than what I had yesterday. It's giving me time back, great. And here's how I can improve it. The second type of people are the people who go, you know, I'm kind of interested, I'm curious, but I don't know quite yet. And they need some support. So that's either from their peers or their manager, or you know, they're not really probably going to listen to me as COO. I've done one-to-one coaching with with people, but at the end of the day, they want to learn like everyone does from someone they trust. And then honestly, there's the third part where people just don't want to do it. And that's okay, but go and do something different if it's not something that interests you. If you're not intellectually curious and don't want to change, honestly, it's it's not for you.

Sam

Yeah, the best. Yeah, yeah. It's a good analogy.

AI That Strengthens Human Connection

Sam

Um I mean, it almost sounds like following this route, you're taking out the human connection. You you know, you've got virtual agents or whatever passing information around. Sorry, Vicky?

Vic

I said I hope not.

Sam

Well, that's it.

Vic

And knowing too, it won't be.

Sam

Human connection is so important, it's a secret source. Otherwise, we just let these these AIs do it for do it all, and nobody would have a job anymore. You know. But so how does that how does that carry across in this new world where you've got all these all these software robots doing stuff for you?

Stu

So Mark, I'm gonna push back on you generally with the greatest respect. Please do. Yeah. Because I I think, you know, the the idea that AI and human connection are intention, it it's actually complementary. It's like governance as well. I think people don't understand the power of governance. They think governance is something that slows people down, but actually it helps. And I'll I'll touch on that in a minute why. But it's actually the human dividend that actually is the beneficiary from AI. So what AI does, and you and you've got to design this in at the beginning, what do you expect from AI? Because in the human-AI interaction, it's really the empathy, the complex negotiation, the reading room, you know, that's a humanistic piece that people want. That doesn't go away.

Vic

Can it?

Stu

100%, 100% can't. And you know, I've I've been in sales 30 years. Nothing's really changed in sales, right? It's still part of sales is this science of selling. So it's, you know, how do you plan? How do you progress? How do you qualify? You know, all of the science piece. And part of it is the art. Why buy from me? Why now? Why me? Why my company? You know, so what it allows is the humanistic piece. You you can spend more time and provide more quality on the art and allow the agents to do the science. So what I'm that is let the agents do the qualification. If you've got, you know, hundreds of agents that do pipeline management, quality control, checking to make sure your sales stages are right when you're coaching, if you're using it to do the research, if you're using it to write proposals, it doesn't mean that's going to be 100% right. But you know what? It's 80% right. And then you can put your humanistic piece on top of it. So the the second part is when you deploy the humanistic or the agentic within the company, what it means is does it mean if you embed governance that actually you don't need people to do post-compliance checking, or you don't need people to do consolidation of deals that are exceptions? Probably not. But does that mean you can then retrain or repurpose them to stuff that creates value for the customer and therefore more revenue for you? 100%. I keep coming back to that, you know, customer successfully adopting and using the agentic and the humanistic, it really creates genuine value. Does that make sense?

Sam

So it promotes the human connection rather than being deleterious to it.

Stu

Yeah, if if you think about anthropic as a company, and they they talk about the human-in-the-loop design philosophy, right? The the goal it's not to automate people out of the loop, the goal is to put people back in the parts of the loop where they actually matter.

Sam

Where they can make a difference, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's the summary, that's the killer, isn't it? Yeah.

Vic

The piece that I love the most about it, and I think the piece that will resonate the most with our audience is about the power of giving people time back.

Stu

You're you're bang on, Vicky, because there was a guy, Steve Watts, and SAP, who said to me, he was the president of SAP when I was kind of building my career, I guess. And he said to me, sure, the only thing we do as executives is manage time. And I thought, oh thanks, Steve, you're a bit of a strange cat. What does that mean? But it it's actually a great thing because actually you're constantly managing time around where do you invest the time to produce the best outcome?

Time As The Leader’s Real Asset

Vic

Yeah.

Stu

Who do you invest in? And then also, you know, I I went through 30 years of my career, and you know, I I probably spent too much time at work. And you look back and you say, Oh, do I regret that? And you go, Well, in ways, yeah, I do. I kind of went through a divorce and all of the things that you know that that brings with it. But it also had a humility that said, you know what, it it's actually because it was no one else's fault. It was my fault for not managing time.

Vic

Yeah.

Stu

So yeah, I think that that's that's my sense.

Vic

So I suppose there's two pieces to it. There's time inside a company, and then there's the looking after yourself and the time at home as well. The number of leaders that we're working with at the minute that are feeling so under pressure. I mean, one is there's the crisis of prioritization all over again. So that's one piece of it. But this what you're sharing about being able to give people time back. We're we're putting out a post on LinkedIn, I think, today, about the most important place you can spend your time as a leader is with your team and doing those one-on-ones and those coaching bits. And I know that that was that was something that we talked about as well, wasn't it?

Stu

Yeah, absolutely. And it it really is it's it's having that time to understand the operational context is the real moat around the business, right? So you can't fight everything, you can't fix everything. You know, we were very intentional in the decisions we've made around our business strategy. Like we can't we can't fix every problem for every customer in every market. So we have to be conscious about where we do. And what that means is also it means very carefully you put down things that you're not going to do. It doesn't mean we don't care, it doesn't mean we might use a different channel or different solution to do that. But you know, we need to focus on fixing things we can control, and and that will change. But your point is well made, Vicky, right? Which is you know, I keep going back to it. The only thing you have is time.

Vic

Yeah, it is. It's the most precious thing, isn't it?

Sam

Yeah, yeah.

Vic

Yeah, so that that for me is the magic of what you're talking about today.

Sam

Thanks for that. That makes sense. So if we skip forward an a couple of years, AI is widely adopted.

What Good Looks Like With AI

Sam

What will good look like? What will the best go-to-market teams have done that sets them apart from the pack?

Stu

Oh, that's a great question. Look, firstly, I don't think it's three years, right? I think it's probably sooner than that. It's probably three months. It's like dog years, like three years, it's now three weeks.

Vic

In AI. Yeah.

Stu

Yeah. 100%. 100%. Um, so I remember there was a CEO of a bank said to me once, and when he was talking about innovation, he said, at the point we have to have an innovation department. He said, We've lost the plot. Because innovation, innovation should be embedded in everything we do. It's a great point. Phil Cronikan, a great guy. So the first thing I'd say is don't start with an AI strategy, right? So start with a friction order. So if anyone's thinking about how do I how do I start with AI, start with a friction order. And what I mean is get a whiteboard, map your go to market motion, like we did, right? A few people who understand and not how it should be, how it is. Like be, and you've got to be brutally honest and look in the mirror. So from first contact all the way to customer value realization. So that flywheel, Vicky.

Vic

I remember it very well.

Stu

Everyone's sick of me talking about the flywheel. You know, not not to contract signature all the way to value realisation, you know, because that's where the real pipeline lives. At every handoff, every point where something passes from one team or one person to the other, ask one question. What does the receiving person not know the handing person does? You know, that gap is your AI opportunity. Every time, without exception, when I did this, the answer was obvious within an hour. You know, I walked through with clients in Accenture. I just didn't know how we could do it with the pace that we now can do it.

Vic

Yeah.

Stu

That constraint reveals itself when you look honestly. And one practical note, you know, over time, honestly, creating agents will become a commodity like building a website. What won't be commoditized is how those agents are orchestrated, how they pass context, how they operate within policy, how you invent policy, how you get smarter from your data over time. Honestly, if it's like reporting, if you if you put AI over the top of crappy data, you're gonna get a crappy outcome.

Sam

Of course, garbage, garbage in, garbage out.

Stu

Yeah, if you put AI over a broken process, it's still a broken process, it might just be a bit more efficient, right? So invest in a system, not the individual agent. The compounding value actually lives in the orchestration of that between the humanistic and the agentic, and in the way you deploy it. You know, Ahmed, who's who's the chief product officer in ServiceNow, he wrote an amazing document. It's called the Agentic Blueprint. It's on ServiceNow's website. Honestly, I I'm not pushing ServiceNow, but read it because it's one of the clearest thinking. It talks about the four pieces of agentic deployment, from sensing through to you know, um deciding through to act through to governance and having all four orchestrated, because that's that's really the differentiator. So start start with your coordination costs, not your AI costs. Yeah, the answer is usually obvious once you ask the question, to be honest.

Vic

Yeah. We had we had um another guest on uh a week or so ago. Again, so she led operations at Meta for the AI team. Um and she was talking about because she's consulting now, the number of organizations that she talks to that look at their existing processes and go, how can we make these? You are making AI from dysfunction to start with. So don't reinforce the dysfunctions. At least start with where you want to go.

Stu

And it's back, it's back to that first question in sales, right? So what problem am I trying to fix? Yeah. Too often in technology we go with, oh look, we've got a technology that's looking for a problem, right? Or it's, you know, but actually, yeah. Honestly, I think it was Andrew, one of the AI pioneers in in deep learning. He said five years AI is gonna be like electricity.

Vic

Yeah.

Stu

The question won't be whether you're using it, the question will be whether you understand how to think with it.

Vic

That's yeah, that's yeah. That that makes sense.

Stu

And people sort of say, oh, you know, is AI gonna replace jobs? No, it's not. But I I'm gonna tell you for sure, and people might not want to hear it. People who use AI are gonna replace the jobs that people who use. People who don't do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's 100% gonna be true.

Vic

Yeah, it's almost if you don't cannibalize yourself in somehow, you'll be cannibalized out anyway.

When AI Goes Wrong Without Governance

Stu

My my son is 20, he's just got himself a job, very proud dad moment, as a trainee analyst for a fund in in Melbourne, Australia. But you know, he he's 20. The the wisdom that that generation has is quite mind-blowing. He gave me two examples. Firstly, he showed me how he used Chat GPT and AI to help him buy his own car. So he how he did the research, how he engaged, how he negotiated. He asked the negotiation strategy, drove an unbelievable like 30 years in sales. I was like, oh my god, he I'm embarrassed. I I don't I reckon I would have caved much easier than he did. But he he ran it perfectly. The other one he gave me was we were having a chat about AI and when it goes wrong, because everyone was worried about hallucination and this, that and he said, Oh, yeah, yeah. I'll give you an example, Dad, of where where it goes wrong. And he he talked about Robin Hood as a stock. So Robin Hood had this amazing, because they went to you know fractional share ownership, they had this amazing growth to the point that everyone was expecting they were gonna become part of the SP 200. So the the day everyone was expecting the SP to announce it, Bloomberg's announced, oh, it's gonna happen, Robin Hood is is gonna become part of the SP 200. What happened was all of the algorithmic engines started then buying. And this was at 9.07, and and you can see the share price kind of dropping until the announcement comes out, and then it then it starts climbing. Then at 927, uh SP themselves came out with a validated source and said, no, it's not happening, and it dropped again. So you kind of go in that 27-minute period, there was a non-market 10% or 15% bounce in the share price. That was actually, in my mind, quite a clean example of when things can go wrong. Yeah, so there should there should have been some human intervention that said no, Bloomberg's wasn't a trusted source, so why are the engines buying? Does that make sense?

Vic

Yes, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's having the right humour and interactions at the right place, isn't it? But that's the AI piece, but it's still coming back to people buy from people.

Stu

Yeah. I think, and this is back to your point, Sam. So are the robots going to replace it? You know what? It's that humanistic, it's the empathetic human currency, which is trust. So when when you look someone in the eyes and they say, I'm gonna be here when it goes wrong or whether it goes right, but we've done as much planning as possible to make sure it goes right, when it does go wrong, knowing that they're gonna take that responsibility and stand up, that's a trust moment. And that's the point about the flywheel, right? So if you're if you're thinking about in our market consumption as new pipeline, what that means is if you focus on the consumption, the point you go and have a conversation, you're actually talking about proof, not PowerPoint. That's a trust moment. And it means the next decision will take less time because actually you've established that you can be trusted and what you're doing is is the right thing.

Coaching Agents And CRM That Helps

Vic

So something that I thought about when we had our first conversation and has kind of stuck with me is if I'm observing I'm gonna say bad sales leadership, the language that I hear is about deal inspections, and that that is a real red flag to me. When we spoke, you were talking about leaders being able to sit with reps and coach them through where holes are in the data. And for me, that is so critical for this being successful. Can you just talk to that a bit more?

Stu

So when I talk about giving time back, one of the biggest issues is deal reviews, you know, people, you know, we we all know we work in an industry where there's people who kind of make stuff happen, there's people who watch stuff happen, and there's people who go, What happened?

Sam

Nice. I like that. I like that a lot.

Stu

And you you know, you you have to work with all of those teams, right? But it's the what happened questions or the why is that happened, because people look at dashboards and and they're trained to say, Well, you know, I've looked at the dashboard and you know, and it's not a bad thing. It's there's this operational mentality. The reality is what they're saying, and this is the way I looked at it, I looked at it and said, Well, hang on, that's actually a symptom. What's the cause? The cause is they don't, they, they, the pipeline, the deal didn't close. There's something that caused them to say, why do we need to do that?

Vic

Yeah.

Stu

So what I focused on was trying to fix the cause of that. And what I realized, we have the sales methodology, everyone's trained in it, and they go through boot camp. But what I realized is as you go over time, it changes. There's sales stages, uh forecast, there's you know, different parts. So what I did was I said, okay, well, hang on, let me just again use Claude, pull all of the documents together into a single document to create a single document that says for every sales stage, what should the forecast be? What should the stage be? What are the five things that need to be done before it moves from one stage to the next? Who should be doing that? Then what are the agentic agents that we've developed to help them do that job?

Vic

So what it gives is that one-way, same way clarity, consistency, removes ambiguity, all of that. I can see that.

Stu

Well, then so having done that, so you go, okay, that's great. So you'd expect everyone knows that, but generally, like people forget, they don't know, they're in the heat of the moment, you know. So what it allows is a standard, it sets a standard that says the this is what we as a company and and as a sales team set up to as a standard. Now you can take the approach that say, okay, now we're gonna beat people up and do inspections to maintain those standards. My approach was slightly different. Mine was so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a coaching agent. I'm gonna write in Claude, and I actually wrote it myself with another guy, Grant Thompson, over a weekend. We did about 10 iterations, a coaching tool that actually goes into the back end, picks up all the pipeline data, looks at all the pipeline data, says, okay, the rep might have 23 accounts. If they've got 23 accounts and there's only pipeline for four of the accounts, question number one, ask them a coaching question. What can I do to help you with pipeline on the other 18? Then question two. Yeah, so the the agent actually runs that script for the manager on on behalf of the rep. So it picks up all the CRM data and it runs all these coaching so that they can literally run it, do a coaching session with a rep in 15 minutes. They put that into their diary on a Friday. So they say to the rep, here's the coaching. So for each stage, it assumes that, you know, a commit stage, it assumes it's a paperwork. So what's the close plan? What's the work back plan? Then if it's a expect, what's the med pig? What are the risks that we need to move it to a closed plan? Right. What I also did was I into the agent, I talking about policy and governance. I uploaded the document that I created with all the policy and processing. And I said, now apply that to all of the data.

Sam

Right.

Stu

So then call out to the sales manager where it's not meeting it. So instead of it being after the event, someone saying, Oh, here's a cause, what it was doing was it's fixing the symptom. So actually it called it out so the sales manager can fix it in that coaching moment with the rep alongside looking at pipeline and giving them the rep then knows, okay, all I've got to do is it this is at the wrong stage, or it should be this forecast, or my SC should have opened this thing or closed that thing, goes into CRM. The beauty is once they do it in CRM, that update goes to all the other agents that are working for them. So suddenly they do it once, and it's it's populated to every agent.

Vic

Yeah. So what you've really just described so beautifully there, you can see how the time is given back then to then spend those time on those coaching sessions with the reps. I don't know. When I was in sales, I flipping hated filling in the CRM. It was then talking to customers and understanding what their problems are, no problem. Coming back and putting it in the system, flipping hated it. But I can go and spend time where I want to now.

Sam

Stuff always felt like you were doing stuff that wasn't actually impacting the sales cycle. Because yeah, as you say, Vicky, you're not talking to customers.

Stu

Yeah. So there's two things. One is with the agentic, right? So firstly, by putting it into CRM, you have to do it once. If your manager helps coach you what's out of compliance, no one has to ask you about a deal review, no one has to ask you about compliance. It removes all of it. Takes all it upstream. The second thing is, because we're we're now operating in complex agentic-driven world, right? So you need multiple teams, agentic and human.

Vic

Yes.

Stu

So you put it in CRM. What it means is everyone's got the update. The third thing is by putting that update in, you might have 10 people in your team, but there's 150 agents that are working to do the research or the update. Well, guess what? You only have to put the update in. They can only work on what you tell them. Back to the data thing, right?

Vic

Yeah. Yeah.

Stu

So as a rep, it's like, would you spend Friday nights having beers with your teammates? Would you go and have a coffee with your solution consultant to talk about? Well, if you spend one-tenth of that time, i.e., two minutes, just updating CRM, you're updating, you're spending coffee and updating the 86 agents that are working for you that don't require coffee or beer. Does that make sense?

Sam

Yeah. Totally.

Stu

That's the way I think about it.

Sam

Yeah. Brilliant. Absolutely fascinating, though, isn't it? Yeah. A brave new world, as they say.

Vic

Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Book Recommendations And Closing Thoughts

Sam

We should probably stop taking up your time, Stu, and bring this towards a conclusion. But I was just wondering, are you a reader? Have you got any books you could recommend for our readers? You know, potentially on the subject we'd cover today, but or not, stuff that might be of interest.

Stu

As Vicky started at the beginning of the podcast, I'm probably more a picture guy, right? You know, sitting on the top of the hill and whatever. But no, I do I do read.

Sam

Um it can be a picture book, that's fine.

Stu

I think there's there's two. One I mentioned earlier, but I'll start with another one. So I think the first I'd recommend is a book called Thinking in Systems by Donnella Meadows. It's, I think, from 2008 or something. It's nothing to do with AI, but it's the best framework I know for understanding how complex systems actually behave. Where the leverage points are, why well-intentioned interventions sometimes make things worse, why go to market's a system. I think Meadows gives you that thinking and the tools, as I say, nothing to do with AI, well before AI. The second, I think I mentioned earlier is it's Amit Xaveri, who's our chief product officer, an amazing human being, ex-Google, X Oracle. So he's one of the presidents of service now. If you're a COO, a CFO building an AI business case for the board, read his document. Blueprint for genetic business. It's not the hype, the architecture, the governance, the business design. This is actually the strategic foundation behind everything I've shared today. It was it was a, you know, Vicky, I I think you know me, right? It was an aha moment that actually gave me a framework to hang all of thinking off.

Vic

Right. Yeah. Can't wait to see what you're going to achieve.

Stu

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. No, I've loved it. It's as I say at the beginning, I've been blessed and very lucky. Great people trust me to have courage for a tenure on their businesses. And yeah, you know, great people trust me to to work with me. So um, and and customers have trusted me through through that career. So yeah, I'm very grateful for what I've got and what I continue to get.

Sam

Long may that continue, or for as long as you want it to continue. Exactly. Exactly.

Stu

Yeah, yeah, that's another question.

Sam

Yeah, no, no, no, totally. I I feel you're on that front. Um no, brilliant, absolutely fascinating. Thank you. There's so much stuff that is of value in there. So I doubt there'll be an awful lot of editing on this one, Vicky.

Stu

Uh-uh.

Sam

Yeah, which is fab. So it just remains to me to say thanks, Stu, for being with us for for this uh this period of time, just brilliant stuff. And uh thanks to my listeners, as always, for paying attention. Your likes and your subscribes are always gratefully received.