Natalie Bulger (00:01)

Have you ever found yourself talking with a vendor and the solution they're pitching to you just sounds a little too good to be true? Well, that might be because they don't actually understand your problem and you're simply focused on what that dream outcome could look like. So before you buy the next tool, the next platform, the next fix, Dr. Shannon Gregg, President of Cloud Adoption Solutions wants to break down with us what you as a buyer are responsible for bringing to that conversation and why your voice is the most powerful one in the room. Stay tuned.

 

Natalie Bulger (00:36)

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Motivation N'at. I'm Natalie, your host, and this is where we take hot mess to high potential. And I am super, super excited. I know I say that every single episode, but I really am, because my guest today and I just got done recording my episode on her podcast, and now she's coming on mine. And so it's like, we're already riled up and we're ready to go, and this is going to be fantastic.

 

But without further ado, the smiling face on your camera if you are watching this podcast, but if you're listening, the voice you will hear is Dr. Shannon Gregg. She is an aficionado of all things, sales, technology, and productivity. She's also the president of Cloud Adoption Solutions, a sales process and salesforce.com consulting practice. And she also provides keynote talks, consulting, and workshops on sales and productivity. But Shannon and I have known each other for like 20 years, which makes me feel a little bit old somehow. I don't know how this happened because she was my boss when I was like early 20s and hired me to do tumbling coaching at an all-star gym for cheer. So if anyone gets really sucked into those Netflix series with all the cheer stuff and everything, Shannon has lived it for her life.

 

and I got a just taste of it and loved every moment of it. if you hear us get really, I don't know, I think we vocalize really well because of that, right? You know, see our expressions, but very different worlds that we've come from and we're in now, but really just thrilled for this. And for those that are wondering what the podcast was that we just recorded,

 

It's Life Sciences Sales Lab. You'll get all the information in the notes today and just buckle up for a really good discussion about a different spin on sales, implementation, strategic thinking, and how without even realizing it, I think we may try to over control it on a regular basis. But for all that Shannon, tell us a little bit about you. Like, how did you end up here? Because if I had met someone that owned a cheer gym, the last place that I would think is that, like, that career leads to Salesforce consulting and sales management and all these things. How did that happen?

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (02:59)

Natalie, I think I can best explain it by telling you that my undergraduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh was in English literature, you know, it turned out nobody wanted to pay me to read. Nobody wanted to do that. I would have had to produce something in order to get paid. And so really I started working in proposal management. So I was doing proposals, which is very sales adjacent.

 

Natalie Bulger (03:09)

Okay. you

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (03:27)

and super tied to sales. And at that same time, me and my sister and our friend Regina owned an all-star cheer gym that had a dance program and tumbling classes. And that's where I was fortunate enough to meet you. And life just kept on life-in. And it's funny, Natalie, how our lives continue to be very similar. We were working in regulated industries on software, not just development, but implementation and looking at the way change management impacts different organizations. And, you know, for both of us, I think we got super focused on adoption. So who cares is the user at the end of the day. And frankly, that's how I ended up doing my PhD research on CRM user adoption, because I care so much about the people who are using the software and when you think about tying your brain and your brawn together in one place, you and I just happen to do it on the same two roads that never did diverge in that yellow.

 

Natalie Bulger (04:31)

It really didn't. you know, I'll give a shout out. LinkedIn gets a bad rap sometimes, but it is the most amazing way to stay connected with folks and watch from a distance. I remember when you got your PhD. I remember when your first book released and just thinking the whole time like, my gosh. And now you're doing some virtual sessions and talking about things. And it was a great opportunity to really dig in and reconnect because you've been an awesome resource. I sent people to you that loved Salesforce and I was like, I have someone you might want to talk to and pick their brain about how the heck they got there because this is a really fast paced world to be in, especially right now. What has it been like going from something, and now that I know about it, English lit, right? And moving from that world where you're reading and you're digesting into this, like, all of a sudden it's on steroids and it's moving at a mile a minute and changing every time you blink your eyes.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (05:25)

You know, really at Pitt English Lit was tied to literary criticism. So different universities look at it in different ways, but I would look at the portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce and see how many times he mentioned yellow and what it meant every time he did that. And really that's no different when we're looking at the people process technology golden triangle in the workplace, because we're looking for patterns. We're trying to reroute them when they're headed in the wrong direction. Or we're trying to use them to the advantage of our team and our users to say, okay, we know that X equals Y in this scenario. So as you're rebalancing the way that you are approaching these things, here's something to consider. I've seen it before. I'm here to help.

 

Natalie Bulger (06:14)

I love it. And I just we're just going to get into it because I can't help it. Like I said, we're I'm tuned into this discussion now and getting to hear your insights and your thoughts on this, I think are really going to be eye opening to folks who are used to my style of thinking, which is probably a little different. But one of the opening elements I want to touch on is this idea of innovation and growth as always having to be a build.

 

So if you've been in the world and you've touched any what we call off the shelf products, right? It's built or bolt on. And so it's this idea of growing. And I remember being on the episode with Carmelo and he said, I think what we need to do is strip and simplify. Like if we simplify, we may actually get to where we need to go. So how can you, especially as someone who works with an actual system and something you implement, use this to both build and at the same time potentially simplify the work that someone is struggling with because there are ways that you can only focus in one direction but that balance is really what we're aiming to strike at. Talk to us a little bit about that.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (07:24)

So I always like to start with the analogy of a house because everybody understands them. Everybody's been inside of one and many people may have purchased one or made changes to it. So I start with house and say, if you're thinking about your platform, whatever your platform is, it might be Salesforce, it might be NetSuite, it might be Excel documents because those certainly work depending on the size of your organization. But you've got to have a foundation, you've got to have walls. You don't have to have paint and pictures that are hanging there. And what you certainly don't want to do, if anybody's ever been to the Winchester house in California, this is one of my favorite examples to think of when people over-customize just because they can. So the Winchester house for those that don't know it, the concept is that Sarah Winchester was driven mad by the idea that their guns killed people and those people were haunting her.

 

and she consulted psychics who told her, if you continue to build stairways to nowhere, doors that don't open, these spirits, they will be so confused they won't be able to haunt you. So if you go to visit the house, you can't walk up a set of stairs without having to walk back down them. It's really confusing. And I think a lot of people got very excited when on-prem software really moved to the cloud and they were able to customize it by bolting additional applications on. So they started customizing it to the here, the now, the people and the process that currently existed. And so we saw platforms become overcompensated with point solutions.

 

And then people realized, well, that doesn't feel so good because the staff will turn over the process, change. Regulations have shifted. And they started skinning that back to the platform. Well, Natalie, I don't have to tell you or anybody that's listening. A couple of years ago, AI came about and people started picking up different point solutions again because of the promise of what that could do for them. And so people have started once again to over-complicated their tech stack.

 

And I think the best thing people can do is stand back and say, who are the people that are involved? What is the process that has to be done? And does that need to change before we place it on technology? And so I completely agree with the concept of saying, should we simplify? And while it's decidedly unsexy, the Iso concept of doing a Gemba walk, walking through and saying, where's the time? Where's the waste? How can we remove the things that are not adding to the overall process approach. It's not fun, but once you do it, you can see where the technology actually needs to augment the work that needs to be done.

 

Natalie Bulger (10:16)

Yeah, because so often we don't even realize all the workarounds we've created, all the extra clicks that we put into something or the word document up on the side that you do copy paste because you can't put it over here. And so we may be frustrated that now we have to change the behaviors we've trained ourselves on previously. But in the long run, over time, it could lead to that simplification effort that we're striving to. And I love the example of the Winchester house overall.

 

If no one's looked that up, it's just fascinating to look at it and to think even in your own home, when you buy a new home, it doesn't function necessarily as if it was only made for you because maybe it was from a builder plan or the past owners customized it to something they need. And you might have to undo that in order to make it efficient and effective for you as well. So great examples there. yes, we are all living in that AI world right now. is. something. So you mentioned earlier CRM, is customer bring us up to date because I'm in that acronym world, but CRM for those that don't know it stands for

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (11:28)

Client relationship management, customer relationship management, it's just a tool where you can track your people, your customers, your opportunities. And again, Excel, Google Sheets, those are a form of CRM. You don't have to use a very expensive tool that is online. Even if you're using Post-it notes on your wall, that's a form of CRM.

 

Natalie Bulger (11:52)

I was just going to say that. it's the component of we've labeled things a certain way for ease of understanding and grouping. But as we see a lot of times, labels can misconstrue the power of what they're meant to imply. And I am obsessed with buzzwords right now.

 

There are so many things that have been over managed and over utilized. And so I think now we often will talk in passing about things like agile change management, resilience, psychological safety, Scrum, which I would love to understand what that sends more. And so people nod their head and they go, uh-huh, uh-huh, But if you ask them, what does it mean to be agile in technology implementation? What does change management look like with this? I don't know if people can pinpoint it.

 

What are some of the words that are so critical to understand that maybe people have missed the true explanation of? Like set us straight on that a little bit.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (12:51)

Sure, there used to be this concept that was very popular called waterfall and waterfall software development said, I'm going to stand behind the green curtain like I am Oz and I'm going to develop all of this beautiful software for you and then I'm going to rip the curtain open. I'm going to show it to you with jazz hands and say, there it is. And you're going to love it and you're going to pay me and we're going to be all done with our relationship.

 

Natalie Bulger (13:14)

you

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (13:21)

That is a way that many developers like because oftentimes the people who are excellent at coding do not want to interface with people very often. But what it does is it doesn't allow you to take one step forward and two steps back in case you've erroneously started moving away from the customer's requirements or their requirements weren't clear enough for you to develop something that actually is fit for purpose.

 

So the agile method really said we're gonna work in sprints and oftentimes those are two or three week ways to move forward in your software development or customization and I'm gonna do a little bit and I'm gonna show it to you and I'm do a little bit I'm gonna show it to you and that allows you to have your input and make sure that nobody's ripping open curtains at the end and finding out that Oz is this teeny tiny guy that is nowhere near as powerful as you once thought and so

 

Really, when people are using those terms and they're mixing them together now, some people say wadgel, which is mixing waterfall and agile together. I know, Natalie, it's crazy. the approach, I think, is saying, do we have such a clear set of requirements that we know we can build it and there will not be any friction at the end? Then waterfall's perfect. Otherwise, just like the rest of life, we need to be agile. We have to be able to pivot. We have to really listen to our users and make sure that what we're doing makes sense for them.

 

Natalie Bulger (14:51)

And it's interesting with the sprints because I think it has challenged a lot of people who like to jump around in the work they do, right? So they develop the framework or the mock-up of what the final report looks like before they've talked about how do you even get the inputs in place. And sprints often force you to kind of take that step by step by step. And I'm wondering if you've seen anywhere or if there is a practice, and maybe this is the wadjole in a way, that blends the two. So it allows people that are more focused on that end state to make sure it's what they want so that those earlier builds can be more effective. Or should we be thinking in chronological terms? Like, is there a magic sauce to get from that kind of current state to post state that blends some of these ideas in a way that anyone might be able to wrap their head around you, know, no matter what your style of thinking is.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (15:45)

You know, many decades ago, there was an approach that was labeled human centered design that has evolved a little bit. Different people call it different things, but the principle remains the same. And that is thinking about the jobs to be done, which is conceptually a framework. What does our user want? And so you and I have talked before about user stories and developing good user stories and I can give you a very simple example for anybody who human-centered design or jobs to be done is a new concept, and that is if I am a salesperson, even if I'm selling shoes at Nordstrom, I have a quota. I need to sell $1,000 today. And if I need to enter all that information into a CRM system, and I have to click 17 times,

 

to save Natalie's phone number, email address, shoe size, preferred brands, that's going to get in my way. And very often technologists, they love technology, developers love to develop. They wanna see what's capable and what they can do inside of it. And they have never once had a quota on their back. Where if I don't sell $1,000 in shoes today, Nordstrom's gonna fire me. And so being able to take that user input, but think about the human who's actually going to use what's being developed, keeping that human in the center of the design is critical. And that's, think, what separates good products from products that technically are very sound, but have no real usefulness, and therefore will never be accepted.

 

Natalie Bulger (17:23)

And you were making me think of like now a lot of times the customer is the one entering that information on the front end, right? So it's not collected at the point of sale or at those different engagement points. It's part of our intake that we trigger and we submit, but there's still someone that then has to make sense of that in a way that it works for them. And maybe what works for Jane doesn't work for Joe when they look at that, production report. So keeping the is.

 

Ironic as we all say, know, that humans are being replaced by different things. We're not in the way of our thinking and the way that we actually take those actions to get to those, those end steps. So we've talked mostly at this point about some of the product components and saying, okay, we're working with a product, but in reality, those products are the tangible outcomes of ideas. Someone had an idea of we can do this differently, or we, if we had this type of system, it would work.

 

And I will admit, I'm that person that goes to conferences and when I walk into the exhibit hall that the continental breakfast is at the other end, like my blinders go on and I'm like, I'm heading to the donuts, coffee and donuts. I'm not gonna engage with anyone. I don't wanna be sold something. Like it's just gonna be them telling me how wonderful their product is. And I think we've shut down a lot of ways this conversation of the cell. and what it means to sell an idea or that I can solution that, what it means to sell an actual thing I see, a click that I see, and what the role of the buyer is in that. So, you know, when you walk up to those exhibit tables or you have someone come in for the pitch, you know, is it a give and take? Is it more one side than the other? And how do we make that a successful, balanced interaction so that it's more valuable for everyone?

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (19:15)

I love your question because it is rooted in reality. Even I, who love salespeople and work with them all day long, will do the same thing at a conference. I will research the booths ahead of time and I will only visit the five I'm interested in. And it's kind of like walking past one of those kiosks at the mall where they're trying to straighten your hair. No, I don't want to have to tell you, no, we don't like to give rejection. And I think one of the things that is really responsible now on the sales side is thinking about that buyer's journey. In fact, it's one of the very earliest things that we have our students do in the professional selling class at Point Park. We have them design a buyer's journey before we ever talk about how the seller reacts to that. So if you're a salesperson rooted in some of the older sales methodologies, which are like,

 

First, you overcome objections, then you deliver the proposal. Well, nobody's ever going to want to buy from you, and people should be able to view that interaction as the buyer being in the hot seat. Now, it's the seller's responsibility to say, here are the limitations of the system, these are the things you'll have to consider before you take this on. And if you were thinking about moving from a two-bedroom house, to a studio apartment, you're going to have to slim down some of the things that you own. And it's very often the same with process. Whenever we're looking at the way that buyers are saying, I think this is my silver bullet, it's going to work, the seller has to say, sure. But here are the three things you have to think about before you do that. And to me, Natalie, anybody who is a good, responsible, ethical, professional salesperson is going to say, I have to always be thinking about the buyer.

 

Natalie Bulger (21:10)

You know, you mentioned rejection and I was laughing because I'm that person that I don't want to tell someone I'm not interested, especially if you spend any amount of time like in your energy, because I don't like getting rejected. I don't want to be the one that's given that to you. But sometimes there's still an element of curiosity. And so I think, you know, we chatted about seeing a bigger picture and the elements to it. And what harm is there in some cases, especially at stuff like conferences and going up and learning about things?

 

so that if your life changes two years from now, maybe that will be something that you need to engage in or you do need to know more about. And I know the number of times I've had to remind myself that nine times out of 10, someone's getting a no. But if that yes that they get is the yes that they need, then awesome. It's OK if you're one of the nos that's a part of it. What have you found? And you touched on it a little bit. how can, because I've been on the buyer side for a long time, right? The person with the problem. coming from the organization, trying to find what's that kind solution going to look like? How can I be a responsible buyer and set myself up to come to those discussions with the right questions and the right initial kind of information available so that that conversation is beneficial and I actually get what I need from it?

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (22:33)

So many times we find that buyers are doing a lot of research for themselves. there are statistics out there that say, you know, buyers have 68 % of the buyer's journey complete before you ever hear from them. And I think oftentimes buyers are describing their problem to generative AI, to Google, to their friends and saying, this is an issue that I have. And they're coming away thinking that they have a solution. And so I will tell you a very short story. We had a client who asked ChatGPT, how do I solve this particular solution? They came to us and said, this is what we want to do with this particular custom object in Salesforce. We advised them against it. They said, we want it anyway, we're paying you, you do it. So we did it. And it broke in a way that neither of us could have predicted, but we knew.

 

that it was not the most elegant solution because ChatGPT doesn't know everything about the metadata in their organization. So we had to hurry up and undo it while all of the data still remained in the backend. And it was one of those times where we learned if we think it's a bad idea, we have to just say no and not say you're the customer, you're paying for it, so we'll do it. But also I think it's critical for buyers to think there may be a different, better way to do this than the way I have settled on, based on what I've experienced or what I've researched or what I've asked my friends for, because this is your one problem in your daily job. We are seeing hundreds of organizations that have had similar problems or made similar errors, and we can help prevent that if you enter with an open mind.

 

Natalie Bulger (24:21)

Yeah, I think we miss sometimes that the seller is an expert in their general area, right? You can't sell something if you're not an expert in it. And if we're coming in with a problem, we're clearly not the expert. We might be the expert in what the ideal end solution ultimately should look like, but how we get there isn't necessarily our wheelhouse. And you bring up a great point about AI. I laughed because I just had this discussion with my husband the other night.

 

I caught, AI cleans all my transcripts for the podcast, right? I drop the transcript in, I say, make sure the names are spelled right, remove the yes from it, know, put the timestamps in the right place. And I was looking at it the other day and I said, literally no one ever said that in this conversation. And what I found is AI had decided that when I said clean the transcript, they thought, man, make it sound nice. And was actually changing. the language that the speaker was being quoted as using. And I'm like, my gosh, like talk about a moment of awareness of, you know, not prompting it the exact way of saying retain all specific language. But your example of I told AI my problem, here's the solution it gave me. AI at this point is the only group that I think always will say the customer is always right.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (25:27)

Yikes.

 

Natalie Bulger (25:46)

It's the whole hallucination point of, tell me the case that this happened and it hallucinates something so that you are happy and it is right. So it's a great chance to delineate back to those experts of, no, great option here, but let me hand you two others. I think it's gonna create a really huge, and especially in the world of healthcare, problem of. A patient comes in, says, AI told me I have cancer. And the doc goes, yeah, no, no, you don't. And ethically, I can't treat you for cancer because a system said that that is what you have. And we're going to get in those same ethical conversations probably too with all of these contractual things of, you do what I tell you to do, not if we know it's really going to break something. So I love that you shared that example. And I think we'll see so much more of

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (26:42)

It's scary when people are putting their whole stock into a system that is not sentient, it is not thinking. While it has been trained, it doesn't have the whole story and the whole picture. And I think oftentimes we have to tell people, here's where you should and should not be using AI to assist you. That makes sense.

 

for us to set a sort of rules, rule book on how we're using AI. And I've been seeing a lot of organizations we work with that are now setting acceptable use policies for AI who are rolling those acceptable use policies out with a bit of time for people to pull back if they're using it in ways that they shouldn't be. So they're establishing timelines and they're also communicating it. This is new policy. This is why this is our new policy. And I appreciate it because it's a little less of that sort gold rush feel where everybody's just getting in their covered wagon and driving to California as fast as they can.

 

Natalie Bulger (27:52)

Yeah. Well, it's also, and you mentioned kind of the training piece. And so we're all using an AI system that is being trained overall in so many ways by the free users and then being trained by us when we're paying for specific use cases. And I don't know, I'm sure people listening to this have probably noticed what it's producing for you. You can quickly see in other people now in their social media posts, in their different components. I have laughed and I mentioned this in our prep talk of

 

The pit colors of gold and navy blue have been just everywhere and it's like my business colors. Now I look everywhere and I'm like, my gosh, you know, and sure I used AI to help me with some things, but not to build an entire, you know, website. And so it just makes me laugh. I'm like, yeah, ChatGPT made that for you or Claude made that one for you. Cause those are the favorite colors, partly because someone along the way, those were the most commonly used corporate colors that then got implemented. But so we've created this weird standardization, right? So now we're seeing commonalities from folks that are using this as a quick fix. we've seen that systems kind of want us to get us to a standard place. But you mentioned earlier, we've seen it. The desire to customize it, so get that off the shelf product. And now if we're thinking about the house, right?

 

every detail of that bathroom has to be a very specific way or we deem it a failure. And the issue is, well, does the toilet still flush? Can I still get a shower? Do the pipes work and they're not leaking? What is the sweet spot in your experience between that customization and standardization? And how do we have a reality check that we can actually accept?

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (29:39)

It, I think, is allowing your brain to continue to function in the unique way that it does. And then using AI to reference check, to smooth, to reduce tone, to augment. And that is one of the things I do. I teach a class that's innovation and technology in sales and marketing. So you bet we're using AI. But one of the things that I'm having students do now in response to the way that I've been seeing AI used, and we have an acceptable use policy, is to say, I want you to think it through. I want you to put that down on paper. I want you to have the words come from your brain through your fingers and then use that as your springboard when you're bringing AI in. And so when you are putting together, for example, an itinerary for your family vacation,

 

You've already said, you know, where we really want to go is the Outer Banks of North Carolina. And we love stopping in Virginia on the way. And this is our favorite restaurant. And so you're giving it the inputs based on your own requirements, but it's going to organize it up for you. And so to me, it makes sense to say, I'm going to start. I'll let AI poke holes in it, augment it, fix it, finish it, put it into one printable itinerary. But I'm definitely going to read it before I send it out into the world because it may have given me a sixth finger or it may have told me that I need to drive past Boulder, come back to Denver and then spend another day in Boulder. So, really focusing on that sort of thing because Natalie, the worst thing is when we're seeing so many posts that sound the same across LinkedIn.

 

where people are using the same cadence, the same interrupting sentence, the same dash, the same ellipsis. And that reduction of personality, it felt professional two years ago, it now feels sterile.

 

Natalie Bulger (31:50)

Mm hmm. So and so named the feeling I'm sitting with this. This one hit me hard. Those are all and I draft a lot of my podcast, you know, promotional content off of those systems and they're all things that I have to be very, you know, sensitive to. They're not my voice. And I think it's a beautiful way for people to also rediscover themselves, right? To be like, would I ever say that out?

 

in the answer being no. And you know, if we bring this back to a little bit of the conversation on the tech piece and putting these things into play, it is a way because this is ultimately your product when it's all said and you're implementing it, you have to work with it. And if it doesn't feel like you, and it feels so detached, it may be hard for that buy in. But if it's only you, and no one else can figure out how to use it without 15 hours of training, it's not going to work either because there is change and there are different people involved. Is there an actual number that says this is kind of how much customization is acceptable when you're putting in something that comes as customizable, but at this point you're actually making it harder on yourself? Like if you get past 50%, you've lost the plot of the story.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (33:08)

We often, and I work mostly on salessource.com, although I work on other applications, we often refer back to the releases that that product puts out. So Salesforce puts out three releases a year. And so we pay attention to customization requests and say, you you're paying so much for your license every month. We can do this customization for you, but then you're going to lose out on anything that happens in those three releases because you've customized away what are standard fields and objects, which, you know, for anybody who hasn't worked with Salesforce, a field is really just like a cell in Excel. And so I don't think there's a particular number, but when somebody's looking at this is the way this is intended to work, you're thinking about a car, you're supposed to put the key in or press the button to start. And if you ask me to come and recustomize it so that instead of push to start,

 

You know, I yell, I breathe, I punch the hood two times and then the car starts. That's okay. But now I've rewired it so far that anytime I take it to be looked at or something happens else internally, I now will have to redo that piece as well. So we try to stay focused on this is, these are the core capabilities and this is what this comes with. Assuming that you're following this sort of standard process. And you know, that, that stands for any piece of customizable software. You want to stay true to the core.

 

Natalie Bulger (34:37)

When you bring up a great point to even keeping that thing working, the more standard it is, the easier it probably becomes. So even if you're thinking about the support staff and what the IT crew might need to learn or your super users be aware of, if they can go back to the manual more than trying to find the internal decision points, great. Because, I mean, go into the car piece.

 

Very different trying to get just a Honda fixed versus a customized Mercedes-Benz that was shipped from Germany to get here, and now you have to order all the special parts. So really, really good element. I do want to call out the acceptable use policies that you mentioned. And I think that you were, a lot of times, also considering how secured is the system, the privacy elements that go with it.

 

People have forgotten that a little bit with AI, but it's a good, and if we tie even together, the buyer-seller piece. If you're not looking at your contracts for AI use clauses, might be something to call out, right? Are you seeing that as something that is becoming an ask? So when buyers are coming to table, they're saying, how much of this is being informed by AI type products, or is that something we should anticipate we're gonna start getting grilled on a little bit more in the future? I know I have. a one page document about here's how I use, here's what you can expect, here's the system, no one's training off of your data, know, that kind of thing. But what have you seen as those early conversation pieces?

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (36:07)

I see a lot of marketers who are coming with their brand standards books that will say, do not use AI. We will not generate with AI. This content will not enter AI. see a lot of sales teams that are being given regulatory compliance documents that say you cannot enter anything that you wouldn't want to leak out of the system. Any PHI, any patients that, know, anything that is intellectual property. And so these big ones people are covering, right? We can't put in our exact sales scenario into chat GPT because we're learning confidential information during the sales process. And so I think companies still have a very long way to go when it comes to first establishing and then enforcing regulation inside of their own organization and then thinking about how to push it out to vendors. Now, I primarily work in the life sciences. So this is a heavily regulated industry, one you're very familiar with. And so whenever you're filling out your vendor questionnaires, they will ask you, how is AI used? What AI are you using? Is it a closed circuit? Is it on your server? Who has access? Those sorts of things. And I think the one thing I would encourage everybody to take away from this is who needs the information and making sure that information is kept to a minimum and then also saying,

 

how much information can be leaked out. And we're using that same principle here, Natalie, of how would we feel if this were the headlines on the news tomorrow?

 

Natalie Bulger (37:46)

And I know I see it lot in healthcare right now for building policies. And what I have found really interesting is that it's a chance to work on, and Jim Jordan said this, your delegation, right, efforts in saying, I only want you to look at Pennsylvania code that can be found on a state.gov website in order to inform this component because otherwise you don't. really know what you're getting, especially if it's not being sourced or provided. And so as we look at a very regulated industry, even as something as benign as a policy, if it's looking at California law and it's a state, you know, requirement, you can't guarantee you've got it right. And again, I go back to who are your experts. And so I think that there's been this false security of I know the answer is I don't need that consultant anymore. But odds are you probably do. And even if they're using the same systems, they're using it in a differently informed way, for sure.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (38:50)

We are doing, Natalie, so many fixes where people try to use AI to avoid working with a consultant, and it now costs them more money and more time because we have to go back and dissolve what had been done by this fix in a vacuum that didn't know how to ask the right questions, dig into integrations or dependencies. and just designed something that was not intended for the holistic use of the program. So it's sad when I see something where I think, you know, we could have fixed this for a third of the price that it's gonna cost now because we have to clean the house before we can paint the walls.

 

Natalie Bulger (39:39)

And I know that technically consulting and coaching in the professional world are two different kind of wheelhouses. There's different certifications, but it does make me think and we get to pull in some cheer talk here. The idea of you, when you are a coach, you can always tell someone that has started learning on their own, right? The heart's in it. They're really doing their best. They've learned how to do that cartwheel or that handstand or throw that ball.

 

But the mechanics, there hasn't been anyone who knows and understands those body movements because you can't get that from just watching a video or trying to mirror it because your body is not exactly the same or that setup's not the same. So what have you kind of taken from that past life and current still being involved in the cheer world and everything from being a judge, being a coach, to understanding the value that that brings to someone and encouraging, I guess, in a lot of ways. it might be time for that expert because I was the one that threw my first back handspring on my own and then landed on my head for the first two years before someone taught me proper lockout form and it took a coach to do that. So what are those parallels? What are those intersection points that sometimes you feel like, yeah, I've done this before, I did this.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (40:56)

tell you, nothing has prepared me for working with people and their technology systems, like working with coaches who are mad about their scores at a cheer or dance competition. And the humanity that has to be there. I think being able to say, let's take this situation and look at it with some impasse. We have to be able to say, know you're coming from here, I'm coming from here, but I want to make sure that we're coming out with the best final product, whether it's comfortable for us to get there or not. I think having been a coach allowed me to understand people's motivations and the way that people will respond when you deliver news that they weren't necessarily expecting or don't like. And

 

One of the ways that I think I have brought that experience into consulting is being able to say, you may get to a point where this happens. I've seen this happen before. I have this level of experience that I want to inform you of, warn you about, and just being able to help people understand how the decisions they make today may or may not scale three, five years from now, and trying to help them not fall into that pit. And I think everybody should consider coaching, whether it is in a volunteer or larger volunteering, know, anything that you can do where you can experience humanity in a way that is not tied to paying your mortgage, because it allows you to gather skills that you can apply all over the place. And you know what, Natalie, I don't think AI has feelings, but humans certainly do. And the way that we deliver news is just as important as the news we're delivering.

 

Natalie Bulger (42:51)

Well, and it also made me think it's funny because I know you're a cheer mom now, you know, so now you're on the other side of things. But Dance Moms filmed right in Pittsburgh for many years. A lot of people that like reality have tapped into that. But that same dynamic can be seen at work. Your dance mom is the manager that's like really pumped to know this can work and comes in and starts micromanaging, you know, the people trying to make that thing happen. So I think it also gives you a really great opportunity to pull some people out and back in. Again, the beauty of that coach and that consultant being on the outside and not embedded in that dynamic relationship in the same sense. we tend to not think that something so different from each other informs so wonderfully the skills that we use, but it does. It really does.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (43:42)

It really does.

 

Natalie Bulger (43:44)

So the last one is the, I want to touch on and then we'll wrap up. We'll tell people how to get a hold of you, what they might want to look into with the different offerings that you have is the element of, should we ever just be okay being comfortable? You know, a lot of things that we've looked at are about being better and doing more, but sometimes it's just, hey, I'm good. Status quo is good right now.

 

because of all of the chaos that might be happening? Like, what does that look, how can we get okay with not progressing at the speed that everything else around us might be progressing? And ties back to cheer and tumbling too, right? Like, I'm good, I threw my tuck, I don't need to do a layout. I know I won't get hurt doing my tuck, I don't need to be better. Do we see that same thing in the world of systems, know, life sciences, all of those pieces?

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (44:43)

This is such a beautiful question because we're at this interesting place right now where we have five generations in the workforce at the same time and everybody's motivations and pressures generalized are a little bit different. And so the younger generations are pushing back and saying, well, I don't want to work all the time. I don't want to avoid my friends and family because you you want me to work 80 hours a week and work myself sick. And I think people who were in my generation were only one behind when women really started appearing in the workplace. My husband's grandmother, she got fired when she was pregnant because they didn't want a pregnant person working. You know, she's still alive. So when you think about that and you tie it with social psychology that deals with organizational behavior and our good friend Maslow who came up with this hierarchy of needs, you

 

Natalie Bulger (45:27)

Wow, yeah.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (45:41)

First is the id, we have to be fed, we need shelter, we need sleep, and it goes all the way up to self-actualization. I think so many of us got tied up in that, how do I become self-actualized? How do I become the best version of me? And there are so many different versions of you. There's the you and I, Natalie, that love to coach children and say, can help with the skill, you can get better at the skill.

 

There's the you and I who are showing up in regulated environments saying, is this really the way that we want to implement this platform? And it is okay for some of those just to be running on their rails, right? There's only so much time in a day. There's only so much life to live. And you don't always have to push yourself past. If you're feeling great about where you are, I have to remind myself all the time, you know, it's okay if I don't put my clothes away tonight. They can wait until Saturday. I just want to lay here and read a book.

 

Natalie Bulger (46:43)

Yeah, and if you're always on that path of having to do something to move step forward, you know, maybe you're not taking the time to be prepared for the slide back that might happen. I think back to COVID times, and there were groups that had, I'd say, more energy to respond because maybe they hadn't already jumped to something and in the midst of this major change and now just trying to figure out how stuff works, pauses are okay. And I think we very much accept that in personal life sometimes, but in the workforce where it feels like you're getting passed up by every other company or every other new idea, sometimes that can be really tough to sit with and just appreciate in that minute. So I appreciate that insight. So Shannon, as we wrap up today, where can folks find out more about you? Where can they find the Life Sciences Sales Lab? What kind of stuff do you have going on that folks can get in contact or, you know, benefit from this great set of knowledge that you have and that your network has because it's a whole whole network really

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (47:46)

I am an avid lurker on the LinkedIn lunatic subreddit and at the risk of sounding like somebody that may appear on that subreddit someday. I love LinkedIn. I learn a lot on LinkedIn. I share a lot on LinkedIn. It's one of those places where if somebody has shared something great, I want to return the favor. So please, I recommend everybody to find me on LinkedIn, ShannonJ.Greg. I use that. Here's a little tip for you, Natalie and everybody. I have my first name as Shannon J. so that if I get an email that says Dear Shannon J. in my DMs, I know it's AI, I know it's automated, and I don't read it.

 

Natalie Bulger (48:29)

Good tip to take for sure. And I know you just did a little virtual webinar session as a guest speaker. So that's where we can hear if any of those are coming up and all of those things. And you've got a book, right? You were an author on a book, so that's available.

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (48:46)

It is. So I've got a book called It's About Time that is focused on productivity. And there is a whole chapter on saying no, which I think is the one I reread the most. And I just a few months ago put out a book about sales operations and strategies to make sales operations work for your organization. Super excited about that one too. So thanks, Natalie, for bringing those up and you can find that information as well on LinkedIn and the podcast Life Sciences Sales Lab where my next guest is going to be you.

 

Natalie Bulger (49:18)

Well, I appreciate that. And I think if anything today has really pulled back a little of the anxiety and fear that can be around engaging with people that have sales in their title or that's their end goal. Because in the end, we're all people and that perspective of knowing that the experts are the people that in some ways are selling you the product and it gives you a chance to maybe challenge back or learn a little bit more. and to realize that you're still a necessary person in that conversation. There is no sale if there is no buyer. So, you know, take that power, do something with it, and be a part of the solutions that we can have going forward. So Shannon, thank you so much. Any last words for the listeners or any last thoughts as we close up today's episode?

 

Shannon J. Gregg, PhD (49:49)

That's right.

 

Sales is not a dirty word. Thanks for having me, Natalie.

 

Natalie Bulger (50:10)

I appreciate it. Thanks everyone for listening and join us again soon for another discussion where we will take hot mess to high potential. Talk later.