****Please forgive any and all transcription errors as this was transcribed by Otter.ai.****

Sebastian Jimenez 0:01

Hi, I am Sebastian Jimenez and you are listening to A Shark's Perspective.

(Music - shark theme)

Kenneth Kinney 0:21

Welcome back and thank you for joining A Shark's Perspective. I'm Kenneth Kinney, but friends call me "Shark". I am a keynote speaker, a strategist, a shark diver, host of this show, and your Chief Shark Officer.

Kenneth Kinney 0:34

We can measure and analyze a lot of sales conversations through all kinds of great technologies. Call Centers have been doing this well for some time. But improving a salespersons performance, especially one in Field Sales often involves ride alongs, with sales managers having to sit with a sales rep while they're in conversations with customers. However, sales managers are limited on time and simply can't go everywhere all the time. You could have a rep record a conversation maybe on their phone, but you need a lot more data than just a recording. Any rep can improve if you just knew the data you needed on what to tweak. Like they're taught time versus listening time, the type of questions they ask how they respond, their cadence even, and how all of those metrics measure against top performers. With all of the advances in technology, machine learning and AI, how would you go about improving a salespersons performance? How can we use AI and analytics to improve sales performance and outside sales?

Kenneth Kinney 1:29

Sebastian Jimenez is the founder of Rillavoice, a technology company building speech analytic software for the billions of conversations between salespeople and customers in physical commerce.

Kenneth Kinney 1:40

And on this episode we will discuss technology to make feel sales better, stand up comedy to entrepreneurship, trends in artificial intelligence, chatGPT, speed of voice, measuring top performers in sales, what industry verticals work, the art of selling versus the science, Brad and Jonah and Moneyball, Terminator movies Millennials should watch, the Elon vs Zuckerberg fight, La Repubblica Dominica, Dominican Lou, pineapples, and a lot, lot more.

Kenneth Kinney 2:06

So let's tune into the voice of Rilla with the voice of sharks on this episode of A Shark's Perspective.

[music]

Kenneth Kinney 2:16

Sebastian, Bienvenido a A Shark's Perspective. But digame a little bit about your background and your career to date.

Sebastian Jimenez 2:23

Yeah, thank you for having me on, man. So I'm Sebastian Jimenez. I am the founder and CEO of Rillavoice. We are the leading and defending speech analytics software for the home improvement industry, speech analytics for the home improvement industry. What that means is when salespeople go out and talk to homeowners in their home, we use AI to automatically transcribe, analyze, and give them feedback to help them improve their their sales, and to help their managers do what we call virtual ride alongs that are like 100 times faster, better and cheaper than traditional ride alongs. Yeah, and so that's what really is. A little bit about my background, I'm from the Dominican Republic, I came to I came to college in America. And I went to NYU, where I was supposed to be studying data science, but I basically, when you go to NYU, there's always like a pressing existential question every day, which is, should I go to class? Or should I go to urban outfitters to piss off my parents, I decided to throw it off. And I decided to go to stand up comedy in shitty bars in New York City. And so I basically got my, my, my actual, like, a degree wasn't stand up comedy. That's what I all I did for years, I did stand up, I figured that doing stand up was very similar to running tech companies made complete sense to me at the time. And so I started my first tech company out of college in 2018. make good money with that with my first startup. And first getting started, we made good money with that. And then I put all my money back into into now doing Rayleigh, which is at the moment. I think we're like, one of the things like top three or like top one like, like, fastest growing startup in the world. Right now. We're like one of the top fastest growing startups in the world by historical standards as well. It's just like growing insanely fast. And yeah, I've taken over the world, man. So happy to be here.

Kenneth Kinney 4:17

Well, we'll dig into more about your companies, specifically in just a bit but I'm curious. Because this is so prevalent in conversation with AI, what are some of the things that excites you about AI especially with audio today? Chad GPT, you know, consumed so much of the conversation, but there's so much going on, you know, when you think about your technology, but everything else, especially machine learning, that's moving things forward so quickly.

Sebastian Jimenez 4:44

I mean, AI is like, I mean, you mentioned Chad GPT like I would say like if few like go forward a few 100 years in history, I think they they there will be especially when it's it's like there was there was a time before and after personal computer Computers existed right before personal computers before Steve Jobs came into Xerox PARC and stole their, the the Alto and made the Macintosh right. You know, like the computer that we know with like, you know, the the screen and the keyboard and the mouse, right? There's like people computers were not a popularizer massively adopted before right before the Macintosh came out. And then after the Macintosh computers took over the world, right, I think the same is going to happen or it's already happening with with the chat GPT. As somebody I mean our technology, right, so we when sales reps go out and talk to homeowners record their conversations, we use AI to transcribe, analyze and give them feedback, right, these three things that we do with AI, transcribe, analyze and give feedback. Typically, it would have taken companies, millions of years of billions of dollars in an in funding, and 1000s of human hours to develop each and every one of those components, you know, to a point where, where the human eye and the human ear can can can see that this is like, you know, accurate enough for me to not be pissed off at the lack of accuracy with the models, right? When, when open AI weren't before before chat GPT open AI came out with this model called Whisper, whisper AI is deep best transcription model ever in history, it's actually better than a human being of transcribing audio. That's what we're using on Rayleigh now. It's like open source, you can literally go in and look up whisper online right now. And we're using that model. Our The number one complaint of our product before whisper was the transcription accuracy. Once we launched whisper and put it into our products and made sure that it's deployed in our cloud. It's like, no one transcription complaints like done, like soft, like in a matter of weeks, right? So we're talking like, you know, millions of dollars in funding, and 1000s of human hours condensed into a matter of weeks. That's how fast it's now GPT four, which is the next model that that you know, that the chat GPT has based on now, if you could, people can go and try it online on the on the virtual app. It it's, it's like what our users use our product for is doing virtual ride alongs. Right. So what that means is like, they essentially want this little AI bot to take notes about them. It's like almost like if a sales manager was sitting down in that physical right along and taking notes about what happened and giving feedback to the rep. To the reps before we used to use our own models, which was like AI, you know, old school AI before GPT. Now we're actually putting GPT for to analyze the conversations. And it's better than a human being and understanding what the hell is going on in that appointment. It's able to tell you like, like, we had an example with one of our customers, where the AI said, like, Oh, were there any competitors, like the customer said there was no company reviewed the conversation. And the customer said all there was no competitors that showed up in this conversation. But the AI picked up a convert of competitors, like a window dealer, a competitor that they had never heard of where the salesman told the customers like, well, I've never heard of them. And the customer is like, Oh, they're huge. So like something that the customer wasn't even aware of that existed, the AI picked up, because it understands human language and understand something in context like better than a human being right. And so we have to be like, what, what am I excited about? It's like, you know, anybody who's building in this space, this is like the most exciting time to be building because you can build so much so fast so quickly. Because what would have taken it just accelerating the development of technology, so much would have taken years is not taking weeks, right? I mean, think about when the iPhone came out, like when the iPhone came out, it was like some crappy little phone and it took like two years to get the app store. Right? So first year, there was like a camera, right? Two years to get on camera. And now it's like GPT, Chad came out. And then a few months later, GPT four comes out, which is even more powerful. Right? And so it's just insane the events and we're and we're using utilizing in our company to the best of our ability. So it's extremely exciting.

Kenneth Kinney 8:55

Well, I love the fact that you know, somebody that's passionate about their product, somehow weaves the whole conversation back to Rilla. So it's good to see, you combine the two. But you know, sitting there thinking, you talked about whisper, which I love. You imagine if you had found this because I transcribe a lot of my own shows, if you'd use like an otter, or some of these other technologies, where you get about 40 to 50 to 60%, right. If you'd done that your company could have gone a much different direction. It's so dependent on having great technology. And those advances are coming so quickly now with audio, to get better transcriptions to really drive this.

Sebastian Jimenez 9:36

So yeah, man like that what you're talking about is one of the is one of the fundamental problems of startups, right? People think that the first mover advantage is real. It's not the first mover advantage, like you mentioned otter. Otter, you know, was in the markets. It's like suicide, like early 2010, or something like that. And they developed their own in house transcription technology, but they're kind of like and they grew and they're a consumer app that people use, but they didn't really hit mass adoption. because of a lot of these problems, now you get a new technology. It's easier for a startup like ours to like build on top of that new technology, and then just like really take over much faster than like that an incumbent. And so, yeah, it's not first mover, it's first scaling. It's like the same thing when the internet came out. And people were trying to do like, versions of Instacart and versions of Uber. But it didn't work. Because we didn't have the mobile technology wasn't there, access to wireless internet wasn't there yet, GPS technology wasn't there. So you needed these fundamental technologies to be developed before you could actually make these things work. And so any AI company, anybody who bought AI technology, or speech analytics technology, before, they had to be kind of, they had to be content with the fact that the AI wasn't as good, right? It was kind of clunky. It's kind of manuals better than but now it's like, holy crap, we got something real here, you know,

Kenneth Kinney 10:52

walk us through then what real app, you touched on it earlier, but how somebody uses real a real voice, how they enact it with the app, turn it on, you know, whether it's home services, or retail, or, or whatever, they basically turn the app on. And then you fill in the rest of the details.

Sebastian Jimenez 11:12

Yeah, so I mean, I can show people but I can go into the Zoom meeting here. I'm just going to share my screen on my phone. And there you go. So yeah, so like, let me see no audio. So basically, what happens is, and I'm gonna tell you what, what's in there now. And what's coming in soon. If I can share screen if you can allow me share screen. Yeah. Oh, it says only host can share meeting. There you go. Okay, perfect. So basically the with when reps go out and talk to customers, they record the conversations, they do everything. You know, they usually do they talk to people normally, let me just fix this thing right here. Perfect. And so what happens is, they go into the real app, and after every single appointment that they have the real app, basically, like I'll show you one of my salespeople, I'll put him on blast here for the world to see how he's doing. Let's see Matt felicito here. So we've been training Matt fleetville for about two months. And so here, what happens is real analyzes how the salesperson talks, how the salesperson talks is your talk ratio, how much are you talking versus the customer? It's your talk speed, your patience, your longest monologue, right? How much are you talking without interruption versus the customer? The customer story? How long is the customer talking without interruption. And as you can see, what Rilla does is it basically tells you if you're green or yellow if you're healthy, or if you need to work on some things based on how you compare to the top performers of your team, and how you compare to the people that are closing the most amount of deals. And so here Byfleet is doing great with his talk ratio, but he needs to work on his long as monologue, he needs to work on his talk speed. And when he clicks on any one of these things, you can see how Matt Ferlito kind of like tries to stay under this red bar. It's kind of like an Apple Health Metrics, but for your voices, right. And the same thing really it does for what you're saying, right. And measures like for instance, we do our pitch, we do our you know, we talked about the mobile app. And it shows you right here how long you should be spending on each topic when you should be talking about certain topics. And for anybody who's used the app, one of the favorite features for sales reps is that they can go in here. And let me show you they could just we have this thing we call TikTok for sales, where Rilla will automatically understand what objections or what things you need to work on, right. And then I don't automatically recommend you clips of the top performers overcoming those objections, so that you can kind of improve just by swiping just like a personalized TikTok feed for you. And so and so that's the app. That's what's there. Now, one of the things that I'm most excited about that we're building now, it's like I was saying, we're building literally, and we're going to be launching this in the next few weeks. Because we're building our technology on TPT. For now, imagine you're a sales manager, and you have a team of salespeople. Let's say you have a team of 10 salespeople. And you just go into Rayleigh and Rilla has access to all your conversational data and it has access to all your CRM data. You as a sales manager can just go in and ask a chat interface like chat up saying, Why are my numbers down this month. And the chat responds back to you like your numbers are down this month, because half of your reps conversion rates are dropping, and the conversion rates are dropping because a new competitor showed up that hadn't shown up before. Here's some examples of when the competitors showing up in your market. Your your, your, your your your numbers are down this month, because your conversion rates are the same, but your average ticket is down and it's because your reps are discounting too much. Because customers are not able to get their financing approved and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And here's some examples of commerce. Like literally you just ask a question, it spits back an answer train on your data. That's what we're building now. So

Kenneth Kinney 14:36

well, something you just showed, and you talked about this a little bit earlier. But you showed that speed speed voice if somebody was if you were talking about top performers talking about where you set the bar, because if there if I'm going to use the example of the speed of voice, if somebody was on your team was comparing him to you, the guy you know, one of the co founders, this thing gets excited, everybody is gonna fall short. So that's a silly example. But it does show that the top performer, it creates some bias. And maybe that's not always the right or best measuring stick and or, or is it I guess, kind of an open ended question. But you know, when you think about who's setting the bar? It may be that there something that's I don't know, not as measurable as just the conversation.

Sebastian Jimenez 15:27

Yeah, so totally. So what you're talking about there, it's like the art of selling versus the science of selling, right. And what we tell people they said, this is very similar to Moneyball the concept of like bringing data science to like, win more games in sports, right? And the concept of Moneyball is you try to understand what are the inputs behind the outputs of trying to win more games, right? And if you guys saw a movie, there's a scene where Brad Pitt the character, you know, a Billy Beane, and he's playing this guy, as a general manager of the Oakland A's. He's talking to all the coaching staff. And they had a problem, which is that the Oakland A's they dropped like Jason Giambi and Matt Damon, they left the team and they were trying to replace them. And the whole point of the movie Moneyball is how they try to replicate the top performers in the aggregate. What is it that Jason Giambi and Matt Damon were doing is particularly different than everybody else, such that they weren't greater players such that they could help us win more games. And what they did is they looked at the inputs behind Jason Giambi, the inputs behind Matt Damon, like how much they got on base, how much did they follow the ball? How much did they walk, like all these things, to try to replicate the top performers in the aggregate. And so what Rila allows you to do is it allows you to discover the science behind selling, not the art, the art is still gonna be there, right? I'm gonna have a different personality than my reps, they're gonna have a different personality than mine. But if you have hundreds and even 1000s of conversations, and there's a clear pattern versus the conversation, that one versus the conversations that didn't, then the science, you have to look at the science as well, right? So so it's not replacing the art, but it's giving you like, you know, the other 50% of the selling, which is the science.

Kenneth Kinney 16:59

So this perfect example. So one of the things I'm curious about because you have so much data that comes in to you and I know you obviously you don't share it. But you know, in the Moneyball example, Brad Pitt's only working on the Oakland A's, trying to get them better the Billy Beane example, or are you as a company starting to look at? I don't know if it's verticals or not necessarily company versus company. But I'm thinking also about what is the top former and I give an example, maybe in today's economy, people are worried about financing versus whether or not the product or services shiny or newer or better, you know, it'd be like those things that are across different companies. Are they all are you starting to see any data at all? That shows what's lifting? What's What's the rising tide across all boats?

Sebastian Jimenez 17:51

Oh, yeah, we actually ran an analysis recently, where we analyzed 500,000 sales conversations across different verticals, to understand what was it that the top performers in the home improvement industry? What is it that they're doing specifically different differently than everybody else? So they can close like, three, five $7 million of sales every single year for them? Well, that's

Kenneth Kinney 18:10

a conversation that comes up all the time. They everybody wants to know, they want to know what their what's going to make their team better. But they want to know what else is going on in the industry, especially with small to medium sized businesses. I think what that data that you're pulling can be very powerful to help them move forward.

Sebastian Jimenez 18:26

I mean, I can share some of that data if you want right here. Sure. Yeah, let me see. Let me see if I can get some data here. Or, let's see. So I mean, like this, this is one of the that our customers have seen a lot. So let me show you this one, right. So this is, you know, we call it Moneyball for sales, right? Because we basically crunched down all the numbers trying to figure out what is it that the top performers are doing differently? And the first thing that we analyzed was the top performers who closed more than $5 million in sales every single year, compared to the average rep close to maybe like a million, maybe like, you know, million to two, right? The average rep, they talked 20% less than those reps compared to the customer. So one of the things that we measure with realize the talk ratio, how much is the rep talking versus the customer in the home. And one of the things we found is that the top performers, they talked between 45 and 65% of the time compared to the homeowner, and then the average reps are talking 75 to 85% of the time. So it's a 20. It's not that big of a difference, like 75 to 65. That's not big, but that 20% difference could be a major indicators for you to be a top closer versus just an average salesperson. And so talk ratios one, the we found other data like the top reps asked five times more open ended questions and the average reps because they keep asking open ended questions throughout the entire conversation. Right. You know, like this. This is one of the things that we found that was really interesting. Talk about topspeed top performers This is a talk speed of the top performers, the green and there's the tuxedo for the average performers. As you can see the talk speed starts kind of similar between 160 170 words per minute, right? But then what happens is when the average reps get into the nitty gritty of the conversation when they're dealing with objections, heart rate picks up, you know, they start talking a bunch of crap. They get nervous it gets they start dealing with objections, like, whoa, and they start responding back to objections like, well, the price is not high. What are you talking about? The price is high, the price is super low. I mean, price price bots, were the best company in the world. The top performers when they deal with evictions, they actually slow down a little bit. They pause. He said, What do you mean, the price is too high? What does that mean for you? Well, I have somebody who's coming into my house that, you know, they said that they could do it for like, $2,000. You're telling me like, it's 10 times that? Oh, interesting. So tell me a little bit more about this person who's this contractor that you're working with? Okay, so that's your brother, your sister. Okay. Interesting. So you're, you're working with your contractor? Do you have any insurance? Okay, interesting. They started asking more questions during this part of this critical part. That's why they slow down their talk speed, it puts the homeowner at ease. And yeah, there's a bunch of things that I can tell you. But like, you know, it's great. Yeah.

Kenneth Kinney 21:06

And that's why I consider this to be a top performing podcast is I ask a question, then shut up, get out of the way and just you bring the expertise. But let's talk about use cases as well. I know we mentioned a little bit of home service when you started this during the retail and then I'm with COVID. Changing you pivoted and found that home services industry worked? Are you Is that what you're continuing to see is there is basically anywhere that you can have a conversation with a customer this can work or is there certain industries, you see, this is not a good fit?

Sebastian Jimenez 21:42

Yeah, great question. So that's funny that like when we started Raela, one of our operating principles is we try to operate really like a high speed reinforcement learner or reinforcement learners, a machine learning algorithm that just learns how to play a game, or like do a task by just failing really fast, because it's very stupid. And it doesn't know anything, it just fails. It's like, do you see a while playing a video game, he just like walks a little bit and it dies because it doesn't know what it's doing. And then it goes back. And then it basically learns what not to do over millions and millions and millions of iterations. So we try to do human reinforcement learn because we think it's the best way to learn. Addison agrees 1000 times 1000 1001 tries to get the light bulb, right, right. And so when we started Rayleigh, we started as a speech analytics for physical retail. And we started in January 2020. And we were growing really fast for all of like, six weeks, until, like, all of our customers were like, going out of business, we were going out of business. I was like, Oh, my God, I should have listened to my mom, I should have taken that job. I should have gone back to stand up comedy. We're gonna go out a bit. And then it was like, I would say, like two years of like, hardcore suffering and misery, trying to get this crap to work. And, you know, and it was a, it was a fun time, it was like it was it was actually a great time, even though it was a lot of suffering. And, yeah, and then we kind of tried many different industries, we saw that home services was the first industry that we found, like intense product market fit, intense product market fit, where like, people just like they couldn't get enough of this product, we were getting so much more demand for this product that we could we could satisfy. And so right now, most of our customers are in home improvement, we work continue to grow in home improvement. We don't intend to get out of home improvement anytime soon. And so yeah, so we're here to say, Yeah,

Kenneth Kinney 23:28

it's amazing. The end, if you can take that offline part of when somebody when, when a sales rep, and a family are sitting at a table, having a conversation, what you can take from that, to help build build your sales is amazing. One of the things I was thinking about, though, in my experience working at axiom in particular, where we did a lot of data and advertising and we worked with sales data and impression data and targeted customer data. And you know, you could work with I'm making this up a company like Rolex, and think that you see where the ads are working. And then somebody sees somebody wearing a cool watch Walking down the street, and they tell a friend, and it's that part of audio, that that conversation that that's normally not recorded, is is there any capabilities of triggering the app with something like an apple watch today?

Sebastian Jimenez 24:26

That's something that we've actually done surveys on for our customers, because some of them have requested it. A small percentage of our users have Apple watches. And so that's something that we might be actually doing soon. So yeah,

Kenneth Kinney 24:39

well, so who who gets most excited about this? Is it the CEOs of companies who want their reps to do better or the sales managers who need their reps to do better?

Sebastian Jimenez 24:51

Yeah, that sales managers get like, well, the sales managers get insanely excited because I mean, you think of a typical sales manager, they're spending like two 30 hours a month 30 to 40 hours a month doing physical ride alongs if they're doing their job well. And so when they get really, it's like, oh my god, I can do 10 times the number of ride alongs in like 10 times less time, right? So it's like I'm like, I'm 30 to 100 times more efficient with this tool, they like beg, there's a please buy this tool for me. And then the sales reps usually hate it at the beginning, which is okay. Because nobody, obviously, they don't want to, like the recording aspect, they don't want to their fear that they might be doing something wrong. What that what we've seen is that sales reps had to be like the most absolute power users over time, because they do get better at selling because of all this feedback that they're getting from the supercomputer, essentially. And so they ended up loving it, like in about a month or so they ended up like turning into like our biggest champions. So

Kenneth Kinney 25:49

we'll talk a little bit briefly about what kind of numbers companies that you work with are starting to see because anybody that I'm a big proponent of anybody that actually stares in studies, their actual data will do better.

Sebastian Jimenez 26:03

Oh, yeah. 1,000%. So we have like customers, like, you know, kitchen saver, Maryland, they started off with us, you know, and I think it was like March and for March, April, their, their numbers, their conversion rate went up by 35%, their average ticket went up by 17%, their financing rate went up by 18%, in just one month of using Rayleigh and it was clearly and this that's the greatest thing about it. It's not that the numbers go up is that our customers tell us that they know that the that the numbers went up because of the the the capabilities that will allow them to implement into their business, right? For kitchen table, Maryland, like their their bottom reps, or their average reps actually started improving their numbers and bridging that gap between the top performer, the top performers and the average. That's what the tool tries to do. We have another company tailored remodeling. They had a bottom performer who was basically getting yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, Taylor remodeling, yeah, the Moors, they had a bomb performer who was like on the verge of like, you know, exiting the company. And they started coaching her on Rilla, virtually every single day, and she became one of the top performers in the company, she she improved her conversion rate by 200%, in six weeks, right. And then she stayed there and became one of the and that's, that's the most beautiful thing about, you know, when people talk about AI people, people think of AI as like replacing human jobs. And it's true, it's going to replace a lot of jobs. And it's also going to massively enhance the innate capabilities of human beings in certain jobs. And that's what we're seeing here with sales managers that can coach faster, better and cheaper. And that's what we're seeing with salespeople that, you know, that that, you know, that that that very, very cool lady at Taylor remodeling, who was her first job in sales, she might not have even had a career in sales, if it wasn't for a tool like this, that when she could get the coaching that she needed. And that's that's, to me, it's like the biggest kind of value add to society here is that we're actually taking people who would be killers at their job, who haven't found their footing yet, because they haven't had enough experience yet. And we accelerate that learning so that they can actually find their footing. So

Kenneth Kinney 28:03

well, I get to two unrelated questions that kind of fit the same narrative here. But are there are you? And I'll put them back on the end? So it makes sense. Are there any compliance or privacy issues that concern you, because when you think of a call center, and somebody who uses invoca, or gong or somewhere like that, then you know, customers often know most of the time know that they're on calls that are recorded on the on the IVR. And it's prompted, and then that data is used to either maybe improve the ad performance, not everybody loves the idea of having their voice recorded, though, you know, a lot of people are silent about turning on the app when they when they go in the home. But not every state is also a one party consent state either. And so in that home, that could be a concern, but at the same time, other than the privacy compliance issues, this has so many applications that could where an Invokana gone, for example, don't necessarily there's there's other technologies outside of just feel sales, where this would work well with a call center. Because well,

Sebastian Jimenez 29:03

yeah, and talk about briefly about the privacy issues. Like that's something that we are like, from the moment that we came up with this idea. It was like the first question that anybody asks us, it comes up in all of our sales calls, we have been more than well equipped to like these questions because of its comes up every single time. We don't even think of it as an objection. It's just like the natural question when you're going to do something like this. So just like you do it in the call center, where you automate a disclaimer where you automate consent for your customers, you can do it the same way for your for your in home presentations. So most of our customers, they're actually scheduling meetings in advance with the homeowner. And you know, whether it's through a website link through a call center, right, or you book through your meetings through the phone, and then what happens is our customers put the disclaimer on their website, like from the very moment that you're gonna schedule the appointment, there's a disclaimer that says, Hey, by clicking here, I understand and agree that my in person appointment will be recorded for quality and training purposes. Consent then you get a call, right and then the call to confirm the appointment. That call already has the pre recorded message that says, Thank you for calling us, this call is going to be recorded for quality and training purposes, right? Our customers through that phone call, they add, thank you for calling us all of our calls and in person appointments will be recorded for quality and training purposes when they booked the appointment that thank you for booking the appointment. That's where be there tomorrow at 5pm. Eastern, just you know, we're going to be recording that meeting for barley and training purposes. Disclaimer, when you send our appointment reminder to your customers, you put a disclaimer there over text and email and any kind of reminder that you said. And then our customers, especially the ones that are in two party consent states, we always recommend that they let the customer know when they get to the home like you've already done all this work to this claim in and to let them know in an automated way. When you get to the home. You say hey, so and so I'm with I'm so and so with my window company, my roofing company, my HR company, and I am here on a recorded conversation today. That's okay with you. I will tell you, I've been on ride alongs myself in person. And I've heard these recordings, less than 2% of homeowners say that they have a problem with the recording. Most of the time, most of the time what happens is

Kenneth Kinney 31:03

Oh, sure, exactly.

Sebastian Jimenez 31:07

Because Because what happens is people think of you as a more professional company, because you actually care about the quality of the service and the things that your salespeople are saying to your your homeowners in the home to your customers. And so most homeowners actually appreciate that, because they know that they're working with a reputable company, just like

Kenneth Kinney 31:24

consumers know that if you protect their data and are respectful of it, then they will, they will comply or work with you on it. If you show up and you smell bad and your hair looks bad, and you get a torn shirt with a logo and all that stuff. That's what's gonna gonna set them off. But anyway. So, Sebastian, as we sort of close out, everyone calls me send your T shirt on. So when I asked this to Mr. Shark, but I asked this everyone who appears on the show, you're from the Caribbean, what is your favorite kind of shark and why?

Sebastian Jimenez 31:57

What is my favorite kind of shark and why gotta be the great white man. It's just like as an attack. Yeah, a great white. Great White is my favorite show. Just like I watch anime. It's my favorite show is the Attack on Titan. And the no great white hats. That kind of mentality just like always on the attack and just like on the offensive, so yeah.

Kenneth Kinney 32:20

Great. All right, Sebastian, it's a special time the show. Are you ready for the five most interesting and important questions you're going to be asked today?

Sebastian Jimenez 32:27

Let's let's do it. I'm ready to rock and roll.

Kenneth Kinney 32:29

We've talked a little bit about AI, Terminator one or Terminator two, because we talked about chat GPT and everything else. And as I think about Skynet, curious which movie of the two did you like more? Because I know you've watched both of them probably more than once being being a co founder of a tech company.

Sebastian Jimenez 32:52

Well, Terminator, I think Terminator came out one came out before I was born if I'm not missing, or when I was like two years, when did it come as like 1999 or something like that?

Kenneth Kinney 33:00

I don't know. I'm so young. I don't know. Probably.

Sebastian Jimenez 33:04

I don't know that there's a terminator one and two. I'm not sure which one. I would say a better description of AI. And modern media is Tony Stark. And Jarvis. Okay, better kind of outlook of how AI is shaping up to

Kenneth Kinney 33:23

be very fair, because now I'm looking at it. Terminator one came out in 84. This was this is mainframe and pre DOS. Yeah.

Sebastian Jimenez 33:35

Yeah, I know about it. Right? Because, yeah.

Kenneth Kinney 33:40

Very fair. All right. Number two, because I love the movie. Moneyball as well. Brad Pitt or Jonah Hill?

Sebastian Jimenez 33:49

Oh, wow. Hmm. I find Brad Pitt more inspiring. You know, every man wants to look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club. Right? That's what I think of when like working out. But i my i vibe more with Jonah Hill.

Kenneth Kinney 34:06

Yeah. Jonah Hill's hilarious.

Sebastian Jimenez 34:08

Oh Brad Pitt's who I want to be Jonah Hill's closer to who I am.

Kenneth Kinney 34:12

Alright, number number three. We've been talking about artificial intelligent robots. They've been in the news a lot. So this question will be obvious. Who wins in a fight? Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg. I want to see this fight. Now Elon Musk mom is saying that it's not gonna happen. But

Sebastian Jimenez 34:32

yeah, Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg like practices jujitsu and one championship and jujitsu. And He's young. He's like, what? 15 years younger than you are. But Elon

Kenneth Kinney 34:42

weighs 30 pounds more So Elon says he's gonna do the walrus technique. I think it is.

Sebastian Jimenez 34:50

Not in good shape, man. Like the cold bucket of what? That guy does not have time to do any workouts right in a fight an actual like bass fight. I think soccer for wins. If it's if they make their AI robots represent them I think Elon AI robot wins but but not actually. But yeah, Zuckerberg takes

Kenneth Kinney 35:07

I think when they unplug the cord out of Zuckerberg though, he just stops. What I want to see is their two trainers. Because both of their trainers, you know, if he throws a punch that comes within an inch, the trainers gonna say, oh my gosh, that was amazing punch. I want to see trainer versus trainer, because it's two people that are saying yes to everything for a paycheck. So

Sebastian Jimenez 35:27

yeah, no, but I think it's I remember when Yeah, 1000 was their

Kenneth Kinney 35:31

Number four. All right. This is a question about the Dominican Republic and the cultural significance of these, these. These figures. Big Papi, better known as David Ortiz, or Dominican Lou, which was played by Tracy Morgan on Saturday Night Live?

Sebastian Jimenez 35:50

I don't know Dominican Lou so.

Kenneth Kinney 35:51

Okay then I've got a backup because that was what I was worried Dominican. Loo is hilarious. It's worth it's worth a Google. Alex Rodriguez who is of Dominican descent. But he was born in New York.

Sebastian Jimenez 36:02

Big Papi all the way.

Kenneth Kinney 36:03

Exactly. Big Papi does not look like he ever did roids unless he ate them or something.

Sebastian Jimenez 36:14

He's like, it's the funniest thing Big Papi with the whole thing is like, I used to have a joke with it when I used to just stand up was like, I was like, oh, Americans, we're not that dissimilar to the Americans. You guys watch baseball. We literally need David Ortiz to keep our economy afloat. Because when he retired, our GDP actually went down by a percentage point. So

Kenneth Kinney 36:38

Speaking stand up to that reminds me I meant to ask you earlier, have you used chat GP to write any jokes because I have and they're bad.

Sebastian Jimenez 36:45

They suck. That's one job who's like chatty, PT is not funny. That's comedians.

Kenneth Kinney 36:53

Their jobs are so yeah.

Sebastian Jimenez 36:56

Wrong. Like their lawyers are gone. Doctors comedians are wait like, dude, that is such a narc, that chat GPT it's so unfunny.

Kenneth Kinney 37:06

Yeah, unless you had a room full of like, Elon and Zuckerberg and maybe Bezos, like those jokes maybe work there but in normal people,

Sebastian Jimenez 37:15

they're so like, clean that like yeah, like like old school like Jay Leno kind of like a late night comedy kind of crap it I don't like.

Kenneth Kinney 37:24

Alright, number five. And the most important question that you're going to be asked today is biscuits or cornbread?

Sebastian Jimenez 37:31

Bass kits or cornbread? I don't. Pineapples.

Kenneth Kinney 37:41

Oh my gosh, this is the question. I asked Guy Kawasaki. He told me the apple earlier like he he had a biscuits or cornbread you you don't have a biscuits or cornbread?

Sebastian Jimenez 37:53

Yeah, I do not.

Kenneth Kinney 37:56

That's good enough. So Sebastian, where can people find out more about you learn more about real voice and much more.

Sebastian Jimenez 38:05

You guys can go to Rillavoice.com. That's R-I-L-L-A voice.com. And you can click on the little link that says to schedule a demo, and one of our amazing salespeople who have been trained with AI oil will be there to talk to you

Kenneth Kinney 38:20

That sounds like a fantastic test. Yeah. Let's do it. Exactly. Sebastian, thank you so much for being with us today on A Shark's Perspective.

Sebastian Jimenez 38:30

Thank you.

[music]

Kenneth Kinney 38:37

So that was my conversation with Sebastian Jimenez, the founder of Rillavoice, a technology company building speech analytics software for the billions of conversations between salespeople and customers in physical commerce. Let's take a look at three key takeaways from our conversation with him.

Kenneth Kinney 38:53

First, he drops some great learnings on what their technology has gleaned that is important for all salespeople and sales managers to consider top reps listen to their customers 20% more and talk less top reps asked five times more open ended questions, top reps or even keel if you will, when they get pushback from customers and the cadence to their speech remains calm. Specific learnings like those aren't always easy to measure, or even have the measurements without something like an app on a phone to do the silo lifting. Putting a sales manager in the room could alter the salespersons performance anyway, if you want to improve sales, it's also just a huge reminder to shut up and listen more to customers instead of trying to over talk them which too many do, but leverage the data where you can.

Kenneth Kinney 39:37

Second, when we were talking about transcription specifically, I brought up the example of a well known service I've used for the podcast that was in early technology, but it's not anywhere near the best anymore in my opinion. Sebastian spoke about first mover advantage and he reminded us that so many people think with startups that you have to have that first mover advantage but now especially with technology companies others can build on top have been scaled so much more quickly. It's something for all businesses to learn, especially SMBs. Better often Trump's first, especially when first doesn't scale quickly enough.

Kenneth Kinney 40:10

Third, we spoke about bettering sales reps and their performance and what AI may be able to do for helping someone's career. Just think about how many more reps a company could keep and make better and improve the experience with a customer the end their job life if only the manager had the real data, and data instead of their gut feelings on how to actually improve sales. Other than more sales revenue and turnover and training being such a pain, there is such a huge cost savings alone. If you can leverage those measurements to help your current employees. You can't save all but you may be able to save a few more.

Kenneth Kinney 40:44

Got a question? Send me an email to Kenneth at a shark's perspective.com.

Kenneth Kinney 40:48

Thank you again for the privilege of your time, and I am so thankful to everyone who listens.

Kenneth Kinney 40:53

Isn't it amazing what you can learn whether you're using AI or not when you just listen?

Kenneth Kinney 40:58

And I hope that you'll join us on the next episode of A Shark's Perspective.

(Music - shark theme)