If you’re an AI nerd (like me) you’ll laugh at what I’m about to reveal to you because it’s so simple.
But it made a lot of money.
So it’ll be copied like crazy.
A few months ago, my friend Chandler Bolt had two huge realizations.
He runs Selfpublishing.com, a >$10 million business that publishes 2-5 books per day. To publish that many books, his sales team makes lots of calls.
Realization 1:
What does a good sales manager do?
They give good feedback to sales reps based on individual sales calls.
But there’s a problem with that.
They could only review a limited number of calls per week, per rep.
Realization 2:
AI doesn’t have that limitation. It can coach EVERY salesperson on EVERY call.
That led him to build this:
It’s an AI system that “listens” to every sales call, compares it to the ideal sales flow, and gives feedback.
Suddenly, every salesperson got feedback on every call — instantly. That helped them improve. Which led sales to grow.
I interviewed him about it. Check out how it works and why it’s so effective.
HubSpot - His company’s CRM, which comes with meeting transcriptions.
His sales playbook - Like other sales organizations, Selfpublishing.com’s team has a guide for running sales calls. It’s based on their analysis of their past successful calls.
Lovable - The AI software builder. It takes his meeting transcripts (from HubSpot), compares each part with the playbook.
That’s it.
If you haven’t seen Lovable yet, this is what it looks like. You tell it what you want in the left chat window. It creates it on the right.
At the end of a call, the salesperson gets a report that shows how their call compared to the sales playbook.
There’s a rating for the full call, and for each part of it.
There’s also coaching for each part of the call:
Chandler and his leadership team get to see an overview of how their salespeople are doing on their big dashboard:
Chandler says the managers at his company and at other companies will be replaced by AI.
But a new role will become more powerful and more important: The Leader.
Honestly, that sounded a little silly to me, like he was replacing the title of “Manager” with “Leader.” He cracked up when I said that and told me:
Managers = sameness. Their job is quality control: holding people accountable to standards, enforcing a rubric or script, and giving routine feedback. It's repeatable, consistent work. That’s why AI can do it.
Leaders = growth. Their job is the soft, human stuff: encouragement, motivation, recruiting, and personalizing growth opportunities to individuals. They can be armed with the AI's facts and data, but the value they add is the human touch AI can't replicate.
He showed me one person on his team who struggled with storytelling. He said it's a perfect opportunity for a leader to step in and coach.
Now that he has measurable wins with his sales team, he’s going to do the same thing for his Author Success department. That team takes meetings with clients and helps them write and publish their books.
Soooo?
Are you upset by what he’s doing? Or inspired?
Andrew Warner
Founder, The Next New Thing, and your lifelong friend
PS The part of Austin where I live lost all internet the other day. I raced to a WeWork and put together my interview setup within 5 minutes. Since it’s so easy, I should probably travel more, don’t you think?
