Shed Geek Podcast

How AI is Shaping the Future of Sales

• Shed Geek Podcast • Season 4 • Episode 104

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Can AI revolutionize the sales landscape of the home service industry? Visionary CEO Moe Abbas joins us to unpack how AI-powered tools are transforming sales strategies, especially within the shed industry. Embark on Moe's journey from founding his first company at 19 to spearheading Sales Ask, a company at the forefront of AI-driven sales innovation. Learn how their cutting-edge app captures and analyzes sales conversations, providing virtual coaching and insights to enhance lead conversion rates. Discover how AI, particularly large language models, is rewriting the playbook for modern sales processes.

Unearth the hidden potential of AI to drive sales success and consistency beyond human capabilities. Through compelling narratives, such as the triumph of a standout pest control agent, we explore AI's role in replicating winning strategies and generating superior notes and action items. This episode shines a light on how AI can precisely identify key client pain points and objections, allowing sales reps to adjust their strategies and lock in more deals effectively. Revel in the power of targeted coaching driven by AI insights, transforming underperformance into success and fostering stronger relationships between sales reps and management.

As we look to the future, we discuss AI's role as an amplifier in the job market, enhancing customer service and creating new opportunities for tech-savvy individuals. This episode emphasizes the importance of adapting to emerging technologies to remain competitive, showcasing the delicate balance between leveraging technology and maintaining personal connections in sales. Engage with Moe Abbas as we outline a roadmap for businesses ready to harness AI's transformative power to boost growth and success, highlighting the exciting possibilities of AI coaches and AI-generated podcasts in the ever-evolving world of sales.

For more information or to know more about the Shed Geek Podcast visit us at our website.

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To suggest show topics or ask questions you want answered email us at info@shedgeek.com.

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Studio Sponsor: Union Grove Lumber

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Shed Geek:

All right, welcome back to another episode of the Shed Geek podcast and, Moe, I want to thank you for joining me here today. Do you care to introduce yourself to the audience, for those who don't know who you are or what you do, yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Moe Abbas:

My name is Moe Abbas and I'm the CEO and founder of Sales Ask, where we help you make more sales through virtual ride-alongs and our AI-powered sales tools. I've been in the home service industry pretty much my whole life, started when I was 19, going to my first home service company and grew that to $20 million in sales. I have another one as well. That was $10 million in sales, and we decided to build Sales Ask and help other home service companies grow their revenues.

Shed Geek:

Excellent, well excited to have you on the show today. Excellent, well excited to have you on the show today. The, the buzzword around the industry as it pertains to sales, is always an interesting one, and figuring out the different avenues and just the, the nuance of our industry and how it works and operates. And, uh, it's kind of exciting for the first be at the first year, you know, at the Shed Expo, where we kind of had like a sales-related event that was kind of focused on that. So, it's definitely something that the industry, I think, strives to learn more about. So now do you work in the industry? How did you find the Shed industry? First of all, you're in the home service industry and Shed just kind of ends up falling into that market. But tell me your story, man.

Moe Abbas:

Yeah, I mean we have a bunch of clients that use our products, that are in the Shed industry Ryan Hinton at Hinton Builders and we're chatting with Ulrich Lifestyle as well, which is one of the players in the industry, and you know that's how we got connected as well. Some of our clients, our mutual clients, who use our product, and they love it, they find value in it, thought it'd be wise for us to get on this podcast. And here we are. I started the company a few years ago now. This is not my first technology company, but it is the marriage of my home service experience with technology.

Moe Abbas:

A couple of years ago, something happened in the technology world which has been groundbreaking and is just really in its infancy, and that was the birth of AI, where language models for the first time became extremely useful and competent and they were on the brink of passing the Turing test, where they were indistinguishable from humans. And this opened up a whole new world of opportunity for companies, companies like us which utilize these large language models. And what's particularly interesting about large language models is, you know, we have to talk about AI all the time AI, ai, ai. But the real AI that's been, you know, that is the most advanced. Are these language models right? When we communicate as humans and we think as humans, a lot of that thought is related to you know words and putting those words together to form. You know different concepts, and that's what these systems are really good at doing, and they're getting advanced at a rate that's incredible. A lot of people believe that this is going to be the most significant advancement in the history of humanity bigger than the internet, bigger than mobile phones because it's going to allow our consciousness to expand. When you look at the internet, the benefit of there is it allowed your reach to expand. You can just reach a lot more people. Same with mobile phones it didn't amplify your intelligence, but when you look at AI, you're going to be connected to pretty much a brain that can think. That is super, super powerful.

Moe Abbas:

Now, for us, it was very, very interesting because I've been running sales teams my whole life. This is what I've been doing for 20 years in home services and tech companies now, and when you look at sales, it is a conversation. Essentially, that's what it is it's words, it's a language. So when you combine these large language models, these AI models, with sales, you have the most useful combination of the application of AI out there right now and this is what we're seeing, of the application of ai out there right now, and this is what we're seeing. Okay, it's starting out with you know, and to give you guys a bit of background of what our product does and you know how it leverages ai and how this all works is the first big innovation was just turning speech to text, right, when you look at the in sales.

Moe Abbas:

So, right now, there's three ways that you can grow your company. The first way is you could get more leads. Okay, that's the first way. The second way is you can convert more leads. That's sales, now it goes from marketing to sales. And then the third way is you can convert those leads for more money, so higher ticket items.

Moe Abbas:

Now, when you are looking to increase your revenues as a shed company, your clients are meeting your sales team. Typically, it's an in-person meeting and you don't know what's happening between clients and reps, right? So, you could imagine you're generating these leads, you're paying all this money and you're giving these precious valuable leads to your sales team. They're going to meet these clients and then they come back to you, and they tell you yeah, this client's going to sign, this client's going to sign, the client never ends up signing, but then another one does, and you really just don't know what's happening between clients and sales reps. So, what we've done is we have a mobile app that will listen to the conversation that your reps have with clients and allow you to coach them virtually. So instead of doing a physical ride-along where you, as the owner or manager goes with your reps and sits there and listens and coaches them, instead of doing that, you're able to do it remotely. So, right away, you have 10x the leverage. All right, cool. One of the AIs will convert the speech to text, which then can be analyzed. Okay, valuable.

Moe Abbas:

But then you have to look a little bit deeper than that, and the second problem that we help solve is. So, the first problem is the physical ride-along. You don't have to go physically, you can now coach your team remotely. The second problem is you're super busy and you can't coach 100% of your reps. If you have a team of 5, 10, 15, 20 reps who are out there talking to clients, that could be like dozens of meetings a day and you have a lot of things to do.

Moe Abbas:

So, what we have developed is an AI coach, and this is where the language models start really becoming more useful. There is an AI coach that can be customized to your sales process or any sales process, and it will listen to the conversation that your reps have, and it will check to make sure that your process is being followed and, if it's not, it will coach your reps for you. So, you have an AI coach in your pocket. 100% of your meetings can now get coaching. Now, if you want to grow your business, you have to invest in your people and your process. You have to build a coaching culture, a culture of self-improvement, right? So how are you going to do that? You're going to have to get tools, and you have to implement these systems. So, this AI coach gives you 100% coverage on all of your meetings that you have with clients, and it's super, super valuable and it's incredibly powerful, right?

Moe Abbas:

Like you could ask open-ended questions like hey, what are the objections that the client listed? Did my sales rep offer the extended warranty? Did my sales rep set the next steps? What date is the next meeting that was specified? What was the budget that the reps that the client had Did. They ask the client if where they parked was okay, and the AI will do all the heavy lifting for you on every single meeting. So, we've built that Okay. But let's go back to I'm a busy manager Okay. I love that I can now have access and transparency to all of my conversations, and I can see where I'm losing money Great. And I love that my refs will get 100% coaching on all of their meetings Great. But I don't have time to go in there and check all of these meetings.

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Moe Abbas:

So, we have a different AI that will listen to all of these conversations, and this is where the latest and greatest is in these large language models. This is where they are today. The most advanced you're going to find them today. It will listen to all of these meetings, all you know, a hundred meetings that happened today, or whatever many meetings happened, and it will identify the worst meetings and the best meetings. It'll list them for you. It'll tell you why this meeting is likely to close, why this meeting is likely not to be closed, and then we send you a daily email with that summary. Okay, that is where AI is today, but where is it going tomorrow?

Moe Abbas:

Tomorrow, what's going to happen is it'll listen to all the conversations that you've had in your organization forever, since day one, since you started recording these conversations, and then it'll develop a client profile that will go out and have these sales agents that are AI agents that sell the client based on the conversation they had with your team, because all of the information about that client is in the conversation that your reps had with them. Okay, so when they go and they meet them, they get all the information. The AI will learn all of that and it'll start sending the client emails. It'll surface insights oh, today's the client's birthday. They mentioned that they're actually interested in getting a new shed in the fall. It's now the first day of fall. You should follow up with this client. It's almost like an automated CRM, in a way, mixed with a sales agent that reps are going to have, and this is where things are going, and they're getting more and more powerful. Now the key to all this is you need to start understanding what's happening with this technology. This is like you know, the internet came out and you were late to build a website. Meanwhile, your competitors built these massive companies only because they got there first. They weren't a better company than you, they just took advantage of technology a little quicker than you did. So, this is why I like to educate everyone on what's happening in the AI world.

Moe Abbas:

Look, we do it for sales. There's a lot more than just sales happening. I know in marketing, there's a lot of things happening in ai, um, and soon it's going to transcend outside of software into robotics as well. But you know, we're not quite there yet. Uh, and it's exciting like we're seeing companies, and I'll give you a story. Like we, we had a company that we were working with, and they had one of their agents that was doing, on average, $600 per visit Okay, for it was a pest control company. And then another agent was doing half of that Okay. Now they had three agents that were doing about $300 and one that was doing $600. The difference of that is $1.2 million a year. They're both taking the same leads, they're both going to the same kind of clients. One of them is making an extra $300,000 per year and doing the exact same thing for the company, right? So, imagine they could take that winning strategy, and they could replicate that to their other reps and help those other reps, right?

Shed Geek:

I think that, yeah, that's definitely so much of what you know the task of a sales manager is often trying to find I mean, I don't know if you've ever heard, but you know, like a lot of the books I like to read and different, uh, just seminars you attend, you hear the consistent message that you know never take your best salesperson and make them your sales manager. Why? Because they want to keep selling, right, like the consistency of trying to find that top producing sales personality. Uh, you know, in a dealer network where you might have 20, uh, independent shed lots or 300 independent shed lots or two independent shed lots, you want to find out what's working and to me, part of a lot of what you're saying sounds like you know it. It's just, it's the consistency that the human mind can no longer bear. Um, because mental notes are dangerous. Right, I'll remember that. I'll do that.

Shed Geek:

They said the fall got it. We'll, we'll reach back out in the fall. You have no CRM system, you have no follow-up system. You have, no, you don't even have the original CRM of paper where you're writing this down. You'll just remember it, right, you'll just remember it. And that's the failure of the limitations of the human mind and you're pulling on the consistency that AI can pull from these conversations. You can take the most successful experiences and duplicate them and say, hey, you see why this was successful. Now let's take a look at the language and let's figure out what they did, the kind of different things that helped make them successful in that moment. Is that fair?

Moe Abbas:

Yeah, yeah, that's just one part of it. Right, like you can generate notes and action items anything that was spoken in the conversation and it'll do a better job than any rep will Like. When I look at the notes that's generated from sales asks, it's way better than anything I would have taken myself. Right. It's like it identifies the client's location. It gives you know information that they mentioned they went to this school or whatever it may be Like that's useful for you. We call it surfacing sales insights. All right, because these are insights are going to help you sell ultimately. And ai action items and notes are great. But what's even better is when the ai is intelligent enough to remind you of these things at the right time. The right information at the right time to get the client over the line right. And not only is it AI action items and notes, it could also help you specify the exact things that are preventing the client from buying.

Moe Abbas:

A lot of time when reps are talking with clients, they're not listening to the objections, the client saying something and they're so busy in their pitch they don't understand. They're not listening to why this client's not buying, so they leave and they think they did a great job because you know they followed some pitch but they didn't get the sale. And the AI will tell them hey, the client's main objections were these are what they're really interested in. This is the pain point. And if it's a shed, maybe they're having trouble with some storage, maybe they have a new toy they want to put in the backyard or some new equipment that they bought. And if your reps are not listening to those pain points and like understanding maybe the weather of that location or the budget of that or the sizing that they had in their backyard, or you know, there was one I heard where the guy really wanted a certain size of window and it was a deal breaker for him and the rep never acknowledged this. They just went into their normal.

Moe Abbas:

This is what we do, this is our sizing, and I was like you're going to lose the sale. This person wants a window. This is what you need to be addressing in this meeting right here, and I'll tell you what they did. Lose that sale, right. But with sales ask they have a chance to correct that behavior going forward, right. Also, it drives managers and owners crazy when they don't know why this particular person is outselling the other person. So I had one client who they had a rep been in the company for 10 years and I guess something's happened. He started missing his targets and the owner brings him to this office and starts coaching him. Hey man, like you're missing your targets, like we gotta, we gotta step it up. I think that's the most favorite statement of sales managers we gotta step it up, let's go to the next level.

Moe Abbas:

Yeah, it's like their favorite thing to say and the rep takes this is like, yeah, you're right, like you know, first maybe a little defensive and then, like you know what you're right, I'm gonna I'm gonna step it up. And this sales rep stayed late, worked on weekends, did his absolute best and got no difference in his sales, and the manager would go and get angry at him. Your job was on the line and I need you to do this and we're going to miss revenue and it's going to be bad for you. Or you're going to make more money or there's a bonus fee. He tried everything.

Moe Abbas:

Now the problem was that he didn't know what specific coaching he needed to be doing. It's like you have a basketball team and you're losing and you're trying to motivate your players to play better. I need you to play better and you can play harder, but it's like no, you have a bad matchup. If you look at the matchup, you're putting your smallest guy on their biggest guy and he's getting like 40 points. All you have to do is switch the defensive position. You're going to stop that from happening. But they don't have any vision. They don't see what's happening in those conversations, right? So, they're giving this generic coaching and then they're getting frustrated and it's creating a bad relationship between the sales rep and the management. The management is like okay, so what happened at that point is the rep the owner, finally is like he hears about sales ads, he implements sales ads.

Moe Abbas:

Within the first couple of conversations, he was able to identify exactly why this rep was missing the mark. They were not asking the client to come to the next step into the office and review the designs. They were not asking for a commitment in the client. They were not listening to the specific needs of that client.

Moe Abbas:

At that point the manager brings the rep in and is able to say hey, in this section of the conversation you left the client meeting and there was no next step. So, here's what I want you to do the next time you meet a client, you're going to ask them, and you'll be very explicit Can you come in the next day or the next two days? And do not leave the meeting until you have a definitive answer of when they can come into the office. And you know what he did, exactly that. He only coached them on that one thing, just that one thing. And within a month that rep tripled his sales Right. So, this is what happens when you could see the game transform, happen in front of you, and then you're able to coach your people on the specific areas that they need.

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Shed Geek:

I find that most people who end up in sales fall into sales, right Like it may be changing. That landscape may be changing a little bit now, where you hear about even not just trainings or big events and expos that you can attend, but even more of a educational segment that's dedicated to the sales professional, educational segment that's dedicated to the sales professional. But, typically speaking, most people I know that fell into sales, including myself. That's not exactly what you set out to do. My journey started with customer service and then you begin to develop this niche where you understand sales a little bit more.

Shed Geek:

But I've never run into for the most part I've never run into folks who they're driven by commission for instance, maybe on their, on their, uh, their, their sales, Uh, they want to do a good job. They just don't know how to get better at times. No one wants to do a bad job in sales because their commission, their livelihood is on the line. It's like you said, when a boss comes in and says you know you're going to have to do more, what does that mean? Work later hours, like do more of what's not working, like I've got to change something inside of me. And if and if you don't have the right person or, in this case, the right technology to identify that deficiency, how can you really change the most obvious thing? That's uh, that's stopping you from stepping up, from going to that next level, right, Moe, like, how do they get there without having a direct avenue to what the problem is?

Moe Abbas:

that's stopping them from getting there what, like we alluded to this earlier where there's only three ways you're going to grow your business, and every single business that we deal with is one that wants to grow. They want to solve a problem or they want to grow their business. Only three ways you get more leads cost you a lot of money to do that as well, but you're kind of wasting those leads if they're not converting them or if they're leaving money on the table when they do convert them, right? So a common rebuttal that we get is like look, people are busy, they don't want to implement a new technology, right? But then the question is what's more important to the company than impacting revenue? Isn't that kind of the point of having a business is to grow it and make more revenue. The other thing is like if you were going to go and increase your output let's just say you want to get eight percent more output out of your company, okay, that's one month more of productivity that doing the exact same as you are right now, changing nothing, you'd have to put 170 hours per person in your company to get 8% more. But what if you could just improve 8% on your conversion rates? You wouldn't have to spend a month of salary on that person to get that same kind of ROI.

Moe Abbas:

Another thing is, what we find is when people commit to sales, ask they, by that commitment, now they're forcing themselves to solve the problem. It's not like, you know, I don't have time for this. It's okay, I don't have time for it, but I'm going to say let's get started in like two weeks or a month or whatever, like whatever you, you know, call it within, like within four weeks, and one to four weeks. That commitment forces them to be like I actually have to solve this problem now, right. And then three months later it's solved. So instead of it being solved in three months or started sorry, in three months, it's solved in three months. And there's a huge difference that we've noticed with companies that move fast versus companies that move slow.

Moe Abbas:

We like to make it really easy. So, a lot of the product has out of the box templates that people could use so they can just get started within 30 minutes, right. And then we do weekly check-ins to make sure that everybody's getting success out of the product. So, every week we're going to check in. The first. Onboarding is super easy 30 minutes, boom, you're done, you're recording. That's it. The team is ready to go One weekend. We look at the recordings, we see how it's going. We customize the AI coach, we customize maybe some of the topics as well some of the other features of the product, and then we do a weekly check-in to see how that's going. But I mean, the main thing is like imagine the internet just came out and you said you're too busy to build a website, while all of your competitors moved online. Right, and the ai is going to be bigger than the internet, right?

Shed Geek:

yeah, we're recognizing. We're recognizing this. Just even in the marketing segment of what you're talking about. Sales has been a passion for mine, sort of in the shed industry, but it's been really nice to see some other folks come along and sort of take that uh by the horns. I mean to me there's. There's never a lack of opportunity in terms of like, um, uh, creating new ideas, casting new vision, figuring out new things. There's only a hard time in implementing that and that's where tools like AI come in and help you do that. But we found that on the marketing side as well generating those leads One of the most frustrating things for us is hey, you received 200 leads this week or this month or whatever their budget kind of allows for, but we noticed that you're not following up.

Shed Geek:

That could show, in your mind, as a direct result of our failure. Hey, you got me a bunch of leads, but nobody bought anything. And now we have to start asking about the sales process. We have to immediately. It's the first thing we do is we go into, and we look and we say, well, this lead hasn't been touched, they haven't been called back yet, this lead hasn't been followed up on.

Shed Geek:

I mean, of course, we do all the things. We set up automations in terms of like texting, email campaigns, drip campaigns, all the stuff CRMs, you know, where we get them to understand, where we can even I don't even think they're really understanding that you can use the benefit of technology, even in your follow-up process, and the first thing we're going to get back is what Moe, like, that doesn't sound like me. Well, we take your language, and we use that language to help set up these automations, which is essentially the same thing that you're attempting to do in the sales process. Right, you're trying to take their natural language, figure out the things that are working best and utilize it to the best possible. Well, that's fake, Moe. That's fake. That's not really me. That works. Fake, that's not really me. That works. Yeah, I'll tell you how it works, and I'll give you an example and I want you to get back on the microphone.

Shed Geek:

But a perfect example is I've got AI taking notes for this, this podcast. It's going to break down all the high points whenever we're done. I have AI taking notes for every conversation we have, because whenever you're doing four hours of phone calls and you're doing four hours of video chats every day they all start to run together, and you may need to go back and revisit that and sometimes you just need that condensed version that gets down to the meat and potatoes of our. What are my call to actions? What was I supposed to do on this? Oh yeah, that's right. Check it out. It says I'm supposed to get them a proposal. I forgot all about that.

Shed Geek:

Boom, you get a proposal over to them, whatever it looks like

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Shed Geek:

AI is being used in the podcast, nothing less. Ai is being used in the podcast, not so much in the way that you would think, as in the conversation, but there's a transcript actually being recorded as we speak right now which is available to the public. If you go to that transcript and you want to read it over as opposed to listening to it, you know it's boom. It's like a magazine now right, Because you could go read it. The AI generates a better show topic than I can, as savvy as I think I am, Moe, at the end of this I could say sales ask blah, blah, blah and think I've created this beautiful title, but instead it'll give me five options to choose from when we're done here, and I promise you it will always give me a better option than I can come up with my own and I'm like that's it.

Shed Geek:

The summary of today's show is written by ai, and maybe one of my most favorite uh, my favorite moments is whenever one of the Amish listeners called in and said uh, you know we do get your emails and I started looking at your summary on this week.

Shed Geek:

Who was on the show this week or this Wednesday or Monday or Friday or whatever it was, and I don't know what you've done to your writing style, but you've really improved it, because I used to really enjoy listening to your summary and reading your summary Cause I could tell that you wrote it out and it seemed kind of savvy. But you've changed your writing style to where every one of them make me want to go listen to every episode now, and I had to admit that's not me, that's ai generating a better summary of today's conversation that I could come up with on my own. So, I want you to get back on the mic. I'm just trying to show examples of like how it does not necessarily replace jobs or always. It doesn't always replace the authenticity of communication in a more natural setting.

Moe Abbas:

It just benefits what you're already doing yeah, yeah, exactly, I completely agree with that. It's an amplifier. Um, the people who basically the bottom or I wouldn't say it wouldn't replace talk it's definitely going to shake up a lot because the bottom quartile of people, they're going to be out of jobs. To be honest, because you're going to have the people who know how to use AI are going to be so much more applications where you can call, like customer service line, and it'll have a full conversation with you and it's a high quality, like you know. It's not like a bot First one, it's like hey, Moe, yeah, no problem, and it'll even check all your past history as well, kind of like what we're doing, but voice, okay. So that's really, really interesting because you could imagine all the customer service centers out there. 80% of those jobs now are going to be done by AI agents. That's one of the most interesting applications that I've seen come about. Obviously. Marketing is another big one that I've seen come about. Obviously, marketing is another big one these personalized follow-ups that you're going to get from AI that will consistently message a client to get them into a meeting with you. And then sales, which is what we're kind of the leaders in right now, which is how do you take the conversation that you had in person and turn that into a high-ticket sale, right?

Moe Abbas:

A lot of people say I don't have time to coach? Right, they're busy. But the answer to that is like well, there's two answers. One is you have to inspect what you expect. So, if you're expecting your people to sell, you know you have to inspect that. Like you got to make sure that that's happening. And are you not already spending time checking in with reps to see how this leads going? What's going on? What do your numbers look like? So, it would be wise to use a tool that lets you do a much better job of that. I mean, what we do is we surface the right meetings that need a coach's attention so they aren't wasting time, and it leads to better relationships.

Moe Abbas:

I find when you're able to give the specific coaching instead of the general coaching, you can do better one-on-ones, you can have better talking points with your reps. You get more respect from them because you understand what they're going through a lot better, which leads to more confidence, which gives you better leadership, uh abilities as well. Um, so these are some of the things like when people say, like I don't have time to coach, like, look, I don't have time to coach either. So, I'm not gonna lie, I'm in that boat too. I like to use the insights and the ai coach myself to figure out where to um, where to put my attention, and one of the main things that we get is oh, the reps, you know they may not want. We got to get the reps buy-ins. They're not going to want to be recorded, right? That's a common objection that we deal with.

Moe Abbas:

But you know, the way we like to explain this is you have a challenge as a manager, as an owner. You're trying to grow the company. So, you got to explain the challenge you face as a coach manager. You're trying to help them and you can't help your people without visibility. So, this is about helping them, as a manager, do a better job, right?

Moe Abbas:

So, you associate something like sales ask with the company-wide growth goal, which includes improving sales, improving sales systems and promoting a culture of coaching in the company. You assign a champion so other can follow that person who uses it well. You get feedback from the team. You use it as a tool for celebration, not necessarily punishment. So, you celebrate when someone gets an awesome sale, when they get you know when they generate, you know twice the revenue with somebody else. You promote that and you share that conversation around and you know you explain the benefit of the reps to get notes, action items, sales insights and then, obviously, like the very best athletes in the world, they all have coaches.

Moe Abbas:

Like coaches. Like you're not going to get a LeBron James or Kobe Bryant without a Phil Jackson. All right, it was literally there. They don't, they don't exist without Phil Jackson, who is the coach of, uh, the Chicago Bulls and the LA Lakers when Jordan and Kobe Bryant, right. So, you need that dynamic between your players and the team and obviously we do a lot to help with that. Like we had the. You know the templates for the AI, so it saves you a lot of time and that's. That's where we're at, man. Like, we're in this beautiful place in time where the AI is just good enough now to be useful and it's only going to get an order of magnitude better.

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Moe Abbas:

You know what we are seeing right now, even from six months ago, even from like six weeks ago, it's just so much better. There's never been any technology that's improving at this speed. Why? Because it's mostly software, Like even the phones. Do you remember the old phones that we had? Oh, yeah, the old iPhone, the first, yeah, the flip phones and the iPhone, yeah. Now this is like. This is like a magic wand, it's like how is this even possible? Like it's a little. I grew up without the internet, right. So, I'm a 90s kid and we had no internet. We had definitely no cell phones, and when I look at this now, I had to go to my friend's house like I had to physically go and, on my little bicycle and, you know, travel across the neighborhood just to see if they're home, you know. Let alone I can text them and get real-time location updates from them, right?

Shed Geek:

I love what you said early on in the call, though you said this isn't just like the Internet, which is creating availability, or like what did you say? Like creating, you know, like reach, reach. You're actually diving into the consciousness of, you know kind of the mentality of people. The way we, the way we think, the way we communicate I mean at the, the mentality of people, the way we, the way we think, the way we communicate, I mean at the the root of communicate is community. I mean that's something we identify with all of our listeners.

Shed Geek:

I think about my Amish listeners and you know how they talk about community and I'm like you know that's what everyone wants. They want high levels of communication, uh, and they want to be able to build community both locally and regionally and through their state and through their country and really through the world. Because with these things, it's not just like riding down the road on your bicycle to find your friend. Now you can actually text, call, email, video chat someone that's your friend across the country, across the world. I was on a phone call this morning through video, with someone in another country, just because it was convenient for us to line up our schedules and be able to chat. How else would you do that it?

Moe Abbas:

wasn't even available a decade ago, right, like a decade ago, we had dial up. When the internet dial up, you'd have to wait like four minutes to load an image, like a single image, right. And then now you have, like real-time fiber that just gives you this 4k definition in real time, right? So's? Can you imagine where the AI is going to be in 10 years, in 20 years?

Shed Geek:

I can't. And I think people you know, especially in our industry, are maybe even a bit skeptical. You know, I think especially the more conservative personalities are skeptical about certain things. And it can be, it's, uh, it can be a challenge to overcome that, because there's to me, there's education. That has to happen first, because you know they'll either be convinced on their own or they'll become convinced eventually by default. They'll have to. You know, it's, it's, it's you, you have to begin to learn, uh they're going to lose.

Moe Abbas:

They're going to lose market share. They're going to lose to the people that are leveraging these technologies. It's the same thing that happened with the internet the companies like the Barnes and Nobles who disregarded Amazon. They lost right Because they missed the internet. They missed social media right, and it took them a very long time. They could have owned the whole world, but they missed the internet. They missed social media right, and it took them a very long time. They could have owned the whole world, but they missed on that.

Moe Abbas:

So, what's going to happen here is the companies that are going to pick this technology up and implement it okay, to solve the specific business problems. They're going to get 10 times leverage. And what is 10 times leverage? It doesn't look like anything in three months, but it looks like a lot in three years. Right, like you could imagine if you could do 10 times more in three months, like, oh, yeah, sure, whatever this company, yeah, yeah, they got like one sale from us. It's not a big deal. But then in in three years, it's just like oh my god, they get they. They like quadrupled their size. They're like you know, they're making all this revenue, they've got all these, like they're. Just we're losing to them when they weren't even. They were like a fly on the wall to us, you know, years ago. So, you must adapt to the latest technology. It's just, it's never. You can't name me a single company that has not adapted and succeeded. It just doesn't exist, right yeah, we're.

Shed Geek:

we're at this place where creating the digital storefront doesn't have anything to do with our convictions as much as it does to do with where the shopper is choosing to go. And I like to say quite often that, like the shopper does not create a concession for the shed industry as much as we want them to, they do not create any concessions. They. They go online for market research. They prefer to talk to people less in most situations because they want to understand how to buy it, and they will pull the trigger on even a larger ticket item, um unseen, if you can manage to walk them through the entire sales process. Uh now, with that being said, what we seem to experience with most of our brick and mortar locations, in my opinion, is they start out with learning about who you are by just doing some simple market research. Maybe they find you through your website, maybe they find you through Shed Hub, maybe they find you through a review, through friends or neighbors or whatever it is, but one thing's for sure they're going to use particular keywords to put into Google and search you right, like whether they know the name of your company or I don't know, shed's near me. Maybe they're going to take a look at something like that and they're going to find someone that's going to be ranking, that's going to be indexed, or they're going to find someone who's sponsored, who's running ads. They're going to find someone who's using some kind of particular app or technology, but they're there, and then they're going to find out all that they can because they're going to start making judgment calls based off of that.

Shed Geek:

How Google sees you is often how they see you. So that's why everybody's searching for the answers to SEO right, you know, and search into V index. That way they can. They can be the suggested uh retail location, uh, in their profession, and then a lot of times, if they don't buy there, they've at least they know you already. That's why video is so important, Moe. We push video constantly. Video content's great because there's nothing friendlier than you having good fun recognizable.

Shed Geek:

You know what's happening with video, eh.

Moe Abbas:

You know what's going on with that right now. I'm super excited. I don't like being in front of a camera personally, I mean, I don't mind it, but I don't want to be trapped. Look, building a brand is very important and you need. You see this all the time. Guys will just blow up because they create all this video content, but I don't want to be, uh, an actor. It's just not what I want to do. But I do know the importance of this. So, there's some new AIs right now that will take your image and you can now create video content in your image. So that means you can just write a script and the AI, which is you it's going to look exactly like you, if that's what you want, or another person will's going to look exactly like you if that's what you want, or another person will be able to create video content indistinguishable from what you can create with just you typing Uh-huh.

Shed Geek:

Crazy, it's amazing, and to me, the reason that's so important is because if that consumer decides I'm old school, I want to show up on the lot, I want to talk to somebody. They've already probably spent a certain amount of time, depending on how much you've been able to captivate them on knowing you. They, they show up and they feel like I mean, that's a warm lead as opposed to them just showing up on your lot. They, they've watched Moe. They know that he wears his sales ask hat. You know what I mean. They, they know that you know he's got a beard. They know that he's a fun guy. He's got a, you know, cool personality. They're going to feel to some extent like they know you or even if it's just the most minute, I think I saw you on some of the videos I looked up. I think you're the sales guy, even if it's that it's created rapport that you can't create exactly without that. So, yeah, I mean, whether it's done, you know, organically or through ai, uh, it's just so important to have the, the folks who are putting in that work and creating that digital storefront and creating that brand. They are going to be the leaders tomorrow. They are going to be the ones who are, like you said, taking market share, and that's because it's the consumer driving that model. It doesn't even mean you have to want to do it. The consumer is driving that model and in a post-COVID era, it's just, you know, that moved our technology ahead I don't know how many years in advance, because we had to be at home and we had to be seeking out resolution and ways to communicate. Wouldn't it have been good to have stock in Zoom or something like that during the time where we had to all be home?

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Shed Geek:

Moe, how do people find out more about you? You're getting around to the shed industry, but we want to do our part to get people to pick up the phone. It's not good enough for them to just listen to the podcast and say seems like a nice guy, sounds like a cool program. How do they get ahold of you? Where do we? Where do we get them to go to the phone?

Moe Abbas:

I mean, if anybody wants to learn, look, you know, it makes sense for a lot of businesses to implement something like sales ads and it's super, super affordable to reach us Honestly. Like you can just send me an email, moe@salesask. com. I'll be happy to help you out. You can go to salesask. com as well. You can book a demo with myself or one of our teammates and we'd happy to show you the product, see if it's a fit. Like you know, the demo is not very long and it could completely change the trajectory of your business.

Moe Abbas:

Worst case scenario you're going to learn about AI and, if it's a fit for your business, right. That's kind of your worst case scenario. Best case scenario is you get this game-changing technology that's going to put you ahead of everyone else right and solve the specific problems of why am I losing revenue? Why am I missing targets? How do I hit my growth targets and gain that visibility? Why do my reps have different close rates that you're looking for as an owner or a sales manager? So, website, my personal email either one works and we'll get you know. We're pretty quick. Our service is really important to us, so we provide next level service for anybody that's part of the shed geek community.

Shed Geek:

Well, and we'll make sure to put some links. So, for those of you don't sign up for the newsletter, I'd encourage you to go to our newsletter. We send them out every time there's an episode that comes out live Monday, Wednesday and Friday typically and we'll make sure to put not only the link to today's episode to the website where you can go fill out a lead form and get in contact with them for a demo. But maybe after the end of this call I'll work Moe for some more details and see if we can keep him and his company in front of you more often and, if not, make sure you still sign up anyway. I totally endorse these guys. It sounds like what they're doing is really awesome.

Shed Geek:

Moe, do you have any questions for me? One unique thing that you may not listen to the podcast, but one unique thing I like to do at the end of the call is let you turn the microphone back around and ask questions or a question, whatever it is that you just have on your mind. I always like to try to open it and answer it in full transparency. Whether it's a podcast related, shed related, it really doesn't matter. I spent a lot of time grilling. You are asking you questions about your business. What questions, if any, would you have?

Moe Abbas:

I think we you know we answered a lot of the questions, but I mean, what's interesting to me is also have you seen this new podcast format where you give it a paper or an article that you wrote up, a blog, and it'll create a podcast from that? Have you seen that?

Shed Geek:

Yeah, I have seen some AI stuff. Jason Graber actually put something out, the owner of Shed Suite. He put out like this I don't know, it was maybe like a 12 minute ai generated podcast. Um, you know, and I find that it's interesting, you know what I mean, because I I always wonder where, like artificial intelligence, like the more nuanced questions of it, like it's artificial intelligence but it's basically pulling, the bots are going and pulling the best resources of information basically from some place. So, you know, like we have one of the only podcasts kind of catered specifically to the shed industry. So, I always wonder, if I was to create an ai podcast about my myself, would it kind of glean from the 270 episodes we have out? There? Are the bots calling that information to help?

Moe Abbas:

create some artificial intelligence.

Shed Geek:

Whatever you put in, it can learn from, and then it'll regurgitate that essentially, yeah, it's no, I, I have seen that and, uh, I'm torn between do I begin to go that route? The cool thing about our industry. I like to think whether I'm right or wrong on this. I like to think I understand our market segment and I understand the personality of the industry because I've spent so much time 30 states probably visited 600 shed lots, 300 shed manufacturers. I bet we've really been out there communicating and we spend a lot of time networking through the phone, through video and different things, and there is a level of person-to-person that you get that's really hard to replace. But at the same time, it's really about input with data. This isn't replacing the personal relationship to me with ai as much as it is enhancing what it is that you do and already know.

Shed Geek:

Um, all technology, just like anything else in the world, can be used disruptively and for bad purposes, but typically speaking, I think it's amazing what you can also use technology for good, and I would hate to dismiss all of the good that can be had through it. Uh, because of the, the skepticism and the more conservative circles that you know of industries like ours. Um, I get it, I do, I totally get it, you know. But at the same time, man, when it writes my, my, my bio, and it sounds way better than me, like, even if I spent an hour doing it, I, I, I can't create the combination of words that they can, based off the assessment of the, the, the podcast interview, to be able to come up with a better bio than they can.

Shed Geek:

It's really, really amazing, some of the stuff that it comes up with, and, to the point where most sometimes you even say that's what I wanted to say I. And to the point where most sometimes you even say that's what I wanted to say. I just couldn't get it out. If I could say it, that's what I would want to say, and I can't help but think that's what's going to happen with these, with these AI coaches. It's just going to be times where even your best coach is going to say, wow, that was really good. I didn't think of that.

Moe Abbas:

I agree with you, man.

Shed Geek:

Great stuff. Hey, I'm going to shut the recording off. I thank you for being here. Give me just a few minutes. I'll chat with you after, but I can't say thank you enough. I can't endorse people reaching out to you enough. I sure hope it's a super successful adventure and you're welcome back anytime. I love what you guys are doing.

Moe Abbas:

I appreciate you, man. You take care, you got it. Thanks, Moe.