Surviving the “Tab Apocalypse” | Patrick Monnot

Ken Babcock (00:00.735)

Alright everyone, welcome to the Change Enablers podcast. I am pumped about today's episode. I have an old friend here joining us, Patrick Minow, founder and CEO of Pod. You know, Patrick, I've had so many people sort of pitch me back my own company and do it wrong. You know, with Tango, I've had someone be like, the company that adds squares to screenshots. And I'm like, oh god, it's so much more than that. So I'll give you a chance to talk about Pod.

But a little bit more on Patrick, before founding pod director of product and business operations at Zinnier and spent a good chunk of his career at McKinsey, the global consulting firm advising tech startups. Now, now he's running one. So Patrick, welcome to the show and you want to let the audience know a little bit more about pod.

Patrick Monnot (00:47.19)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (00:52.938)

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Thank you for having me. Super, super excited about the conversation.

A bit about pod in a nutshell, so we're an AI workspace for B2B salespeople. The biggest problem that we're solving is that we see a lot of salespeople losing deals because they lack the information and the guidance to know how to push deals forward. So we're ultimately trying to help them be more efficient and effective in managing their pipeline and ultimately helping them close more deals. So it's all about enablement at the end of the day. So pretty close to that topic in the world of salespeople and excited about talking about it.

generally with you, Ken.

Ken Babcock (01:28.711)

Yeah, it should be fun. I mean, there's so many angles we can go with this, but we'll try to keep it somewhat brief for everyone. So why don't we just jump right in? I think in prepping for this episode, we shared a lot of our viewpoints and agree that there's room for improvement in the world of enablement. But maybe as you've spent so much time thinking about that space.

Patrick Monnot (01:32.022)

Yeah, for sure.

Ken Babcock (01:55.719)

What's one sort of sales rev ops enablement hill that you're willing to die on? Your hottest take. What is it?

Patrick Monnot (02:05.094)

That's interesting. I think the one that was a bit of the genesis for Pod as well, and it's one that I truly, truly believe in, and it's at the intersection of sales ops, sales, you know, sales tech, generally speaking, is that I honestly believe that most sales tools today aren't really built with the individual sales person in mind. They're rather built for the ops team or for the manager, for the sales leader. So I think this is why there's a huge problem of adoption, I think, among salespeople and a lot of them, you know, hate some of the use, the

tools that is being used in the day to day. So kind of a motor or a concept that I consistently bring back is let's bring the bar, the power back to the reps, right? Let's bring the power back to the ICs with an organization and start there. So I think it's something that I'll definitely a Hill I'll die on. And, uh, that is a bit counterintuitive to how I think a lot of software is being sold or being positioned today.

Ken Babcock (02:59.023)

Yeah, this is almost the tension of like selling to the buyer, but then sort of forgetting the end user. And, you know, the product that the sales leader or the enablement team may be like, oh my gosh, this is going to do it. If it doesn't land with the end user, you know, what are we doing here? So I totally hear you on that. Let's maybe talk a little bit.

Patrick Monnot (03:05.822)

Yeah, exactly.

Patrick Monnot (03:21.066)

And listen, nothing wrong with tools for sales leaders and ops teams and et cetera. I think you need those because everyone has to be able to work, but I think the biggest issue in my mind is portraying a tool as a tool for the individual contributor, but in reality, it's a bit more as a way for management to control the team rather than truly empower the ICs.

Ken Babcock (03:27.804)

Sure.

Ken Babcock (03:43.023)

Yeah, I think Gong has done a really good job of bridging this gap, right? Where I think they started probably more catered to the sales leader, but over time built in the insights and functionality where a rep can say, you know what? Like I'm going to self pace my own improvement because I have all the information here that I need about, about the calls that I'm taking. So, um, but it is, it is a, it is a tough tension when we think about

Patrick Monnot (04:05.811)

Agreed. That's a good example, for sure.

Ken Babcock (04:11.095)

sales enablement as a function. And now, we could get into what companies are calling sales enablement, whether it's sales and operations, rev ops, yeah, inconsistent definitions. But let's just use sales enablement for now. What would you assess as kind of the state of sales enablement today?

Patrick Monnot (04:19.146)

be thrown around left and right a bit much these days. Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (04:34.322)

I think that sales enablement today, and I'm going to make a generalization, but generally speaking it is, it is centered around the concept of programmatic structured enablement, right? So whether it is documentation or...

learning journey or onboarding, having courses every couple weeks to get your team quote unquote up to date. I think it is very structured around those one and done type of exercise around learning and enablement. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, right? Don't get me wrong.

I think it's about, I think complimenting and I think I want to touch about this a bit later on, but I think it's more about complimenting the enablement journey between, you know, between programmatic and then real time enablement. And I think it's not either or it's not let's kill a programmatic for the benefit of real time enablement. But you know, after that one week onboarding session of a salesperson when they jump a company or one week or a month, right.

Enablement shouldn't stop, right? It should be something that is built in and embedded into their day-to-day work. So I think today it's a lot, it's very structured, very programmatic. I think that's logical. It's a way for, you know, ops team and enablement team to roll out something that makes sense, but.

Ken Babcock (05:43.891)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (05:47.202)

When you actually look at whether or not it's working, I think it misses the mark in many cases. I'll share an example. Early on when I was thinking about pod, I think about the problem, I had some exposure to it, I was talking to a former colleague of mine who was an account executive and I told him, hey, how do you think about enablement? How do you think about onboarding? Do you have the information that you need? And what that person told me really stuck with me.

I know that there exists a lot of cool case studies and documentation and learning courses that my manager and my sales ops team asked me to read through. But in the day to day, out of sight is out of mind.

So I think that's something that really stuck with me because, you know, I think they, the human as the normal tendency to, I think, build a habit over 21 days or something like that. Uh, so out of the a hundred percent of the content that is shared during the onboarding, maybe what will really stick to the person is 20% of it at most. This is about how do you always reinforce it? So I don't know. I think there's something interesting with what's currently in place, but I think it, we're not a hundred percent there in terms of ultimately being able to help people.

Ken Babcock (06:33.189)

Hmm.

Ken Babcock (06:43.133)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (07:02.311)

Yeah, I think out of sight, out of mind is absolutely, and that's exacerbated by, we had a previous guest come on who was like, yeah, you know, everything we document and everything we tell our teams that they should learn, we just kind of throw it in a bucket. And it's up to everybody else to kind of sift through the bucket and figure out what's relevant. You talked about something in an article I read similar to this, which was like,

Patrick Monnot (07:21.63)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (07:28.935)

the tab apocalypse, which I freaking love that term. For the audience, what's the tab apocalypse and how does it play into kind of what you're saying with like out of sight, out of mind, and almost like the overwhelming nature of everything that a team has to access.

Patrick Monnot (07:30.666)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (07:44.522)

Yeah. I think the key word here is overwhelming, right? I think Tabakop apocalypse is the concept that knowledge workers are overwhelmed with using too many applications, right? Tabakop apocalypse is that we, you know, the interesting analogy is that we probably all know a colleague that has 50 or 75 tabs open on their browser at any given point, they know that there were around, at least that's what they said exactly. Um, but I think what's kind of interesting is that it leads to a lot of.

Ken Babcock (08:06.939)

My counting mind, yeah.

Patrick Monnot (08:14.769)

you know.

inefficiencies, lack of productivity, overwhelming, a lot of cognitive overload, so to speak. There was an interesting study on that matter from a HBR Harvard Business Review. I think they surveyed 150 different workers and I think they realized over time that on an average, on a given day, a person would switch tabs or toggle between tabs 1200 times, which added up over a week to like four hours of just toggling, context switching, right? Which is crazy.

Ken Babcock (08:41.896)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (08:45.04)

it, that's 10% of your week actually doing nothing good. So I think what it comes down to enablement is, I think there's a lot from an enablement perspective.

Ken Babcock (08:47.906)

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Monnot (08:54.058)

I think it comes down to having the information that you need to be productive when and where it's most helpful and by having all these different tools. It's a big problem in sales right now. The tech stack on a given week is 15 to 20 different tools they have to navigate between. In addition to create a lot of unnecessary admin work, I think a lot of salespeople and digital workers generally speaking ask themselves consistently, where is that information? What is the latest information? How can I actually use it?

having that information to some extent delivered on a kind of a silver plate for you in the moment where you need that help. I think that's where Tab Apocalypse has, you know, it's funny when you think about it, when you think about the tabs and it's like, that person is kind of organized but disorganized, but it has rippled down in fact to people's ability to leverage helpful information to make smart choices or if anything, just be more productive.

Ken Babcock (09:49.691)

Yeah, here's, I'm gonna share something embarrassing because I literally started counting my own tabs. I went to a tab, this is my tab apocalypse. I went to a tab where I was like, I actually don't even recognize what that is. I opened it up and it was an article that was what to expect in SaaS selling in Q4 of 2023. Guess what's not relevant? Guess what's not relevant anymore?

Patrick Monnot (09:55.042)

Hahaha

Patrick Monnot (09:59.563)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (10:11.446)

Hahaha! Slightly outdated, perhaps. Hahaha!

Ken Babcock (10:15.247)

Yeah. So I, but I think that's interesting because like, what was my behavior there? I probably was like, Oh, that's interesting. I'll come back to it. Let me open it up. I didn't come back to it until you reminded me of the tab apocalypse. And so I, you know, I'm sure a ton of people can empathize with that where it's like this virtue of like, yes, I will read that. I will apply that. Let me park it away in a tab. And then all of a sudden you're like, Oh, I missed that for actually a full quarter.

Patrick Monnot (10:21.932)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (10:37.217)

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. To the point where it's actually irrelevant at this point, because we're a path Q4. But I think, I mean, you can do the same type of analogy between the tabs and applications as well. I think there's this growing discussion about like the tech stack, the Frankenstack, so to speak, like bolting a bunch of different tools to your tech stack. And I think that at the end of the day, hurts more than it helps at scale for an organization.

Ken Babcock (10:44.679)

Yeah, yeah, we're past it.

Ken Babcock (10:51.399)

Yep, that's fluid.

Ken Babcock (10:56.093)

Hmm.

Ken Babcock (10:59.833)

Mm-hmm.

Ken Babcock (11:07.535)

Absolutely. And so let's, let's go back a little bit. You know, you talked, you talked about kind of this programmatic nature of, of enablement. Um, you know, I, when I think about that, sometimes I think about, you know, these enablement teams kind of measuring their progress and impact on number of sessions, number of new, you know, modules, number of new artifacts, you know, so it's, it's volume based, right? And it's not actually, um, sometimes it's not perfectly tied.

Patrick Monnot (11:31.519)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (11:36.187)

to what they're trying to drive with the business. And so maybe sort of reframed, like, as a result of this, as a result of this over-indexing on programmatic enablement, where do you see enterprise sales teams missing the mark as a result?

Patrick Monnot (11:39.104)

Yeah, agreed.

Patrick Monnot (11:54.042)

That's a good question. I think it's a good question. I think a concept that is too often overlooked.

And having a lot of conversation with sales leaders, the first thing that they talk about is always about quantity or like efficiency, right? Oh, I want, I don't want my team to spend as much time on updating their Salesforce or I don't want to them spend time, you know, duplicating data entry across different platforms. But I think that the balance between quantity and quality, and in this case, it's, you know,

The amount of time that you can spend doing quality work versus the quality of the decision, so to speak, is too often. The quality part, so to speak, is too often overlooked. Where at the end of the day, you could have the best sales process and the best tools in the world where you're reduced by, I don't know, five to 10 hours every single week, the amount of admin work, low value work that you have to do as a salesperson. If a salesperson takes those extra five to 10 hours...

and uses it either not to work, which is an example, but also to do the wrong things, like you're not actually helping the organization or driving business results. Right?

Whether Mr. Mark is too much focus on quantity, not enough focus on quality, quality of decision-making, quality of, uh, of the processes and so on and so forth. So I think it goes back to the point about learning. And when you think about enablement and programmatic, I think there's a lot, a bit too much focus on these workshops every few weeks and creating the documentation about industries and your product and sales methodology and not enough focus about, well, how do you continuously enable users in the day to day?

Ken Babcock (13:28.767)

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Monnot (13:34.86)

not just once in a while, because when you take the time to talk to yourself people, well they have a bunch of problems that programmatic enablement doesn't solve.

Ken Babcock (13:40.571)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (13:44.283)

Totally, I mean this reminds me a lot of what we talk about at Tango where when people are valuing their tools, their tech stack, what they're looking at a lot of times is logins, views, like these metrics that don't have a quality.

counterbalance. We talk a lot about, you want to measure process adoption. Are you driving the processes that you need in those tools? Not, is someone logging in and are they getting lost? Okay, we'll call that worth their spend. Yeah

Patrick Monnot (14:15.71)

Exactly. I mean, it is an indicator, don't get me wrong, right? You have to understand if people are actually adhering to the process, et cetera, but only basing it on that specifically misses, to your point, misses the mark.

Ken Babcock (14:29.692)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, you mentioned five to 10 hours, and I'm sort of curious, when you think about the amount of time that people are spending not selling, that admin work load, what does that look like today, the split between selling and admin, and then in your ideal world, what does that split eventually look like?

Patrick Monnot (14:40.579)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (14:46.018)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (14:51.65)

Good question. I think I'll share a statistic, something I read recently in the latest data sales report by Salesforce. They put that every year. The percentage of sales reps day-to-day work spent on non-selling activity was 72%.

That number is crazy. And then that number in and of itself is shocking to say the least, but the fact that it's actually been increasing over the past five years, if you look at the state of sales report, I think five years ago or so it was at 64%. So it's getting worse and worse. But I think diving into like, what do they actually spend their time on? And what is that 72%?

Ken Babcock (15:13.951)

Wow, yeah.

Patrick Monnot (15:31.87)

Yeah, spent on so to speak. I think that's where it's interesting. It's not like if you were going to take that time and ultimately delete it through automation. I'm not a believer in like replacing a lot of things. Exactly ever. But I think some of these activities are things like doing research on your accounts or contacts ahead of the meeting, right? Prepping and planning an upcoming demo or an upcoming qualification call. Uh, prioritizing your deal. I think.

Ken Babcock (15:38.651)

Yeah, you're not getting to zero. Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (15:54.606)

I hear often from salespeople the concept of the Monday morning syndrome, which had a great weekend, 8 a.m. on a Monday, you get in front of your pipeline and you're like, what do I do now? I have 30, 40 deals in my pipeline, where do I spend my time? So prioritizing is another part of it. There's obviously the traditional manual work or admin work, which is manual data entry, admin work, then navigating the organization for approval. I think that there's...

clear an opportunity in my mind to reduce that number by 50%. So if we could get to rather than be 75% of their day or their week, it could be 30, 40%. I think that's, first of all, I think that's definitely possible. It's not crazy considering that a lot of the processes or the approach of salespeople today are a bit antiquated or a bit manual or a bit, they're kind of peppered with tab apocalypse.

Ken Babcock (16:25.862)

Hmm.

Patrick Monnot (16:50.064)

of sand, scattered, fragmented information. But I think that's exactly, I think we can definitely get it to 30% of their day. And just the sheer impact of that, of thinking about rather than spending, what, out of the 40 hour weeks, spending 25 hours on admin work, you can spend five to 10 hours on admin work, and the rest is on selling. That has, first of all, that has...

Ken Babcock (16:53.378)

Manual data entry, yeah.

Patrick Monnot (17:13.482)

ripple down effect both for the individual contributor, right? I think no one likes admin work, right? Sellers sell because they like selling, right? They like the human context, they can do more of that. And that leads obviously from a business perspective that you can manage more deals or you can close deals faster or you minimize the amount of balls you drop on deals. So I think that has like positive impact both from a cultural and emotional, but also a business.

expect for business angle for the business.

Ken Babcock (17:46.895)

Just momentum too in general, right? It's like you're slowing yourself down for those 72, I mean 72%, I can't get over that, 72% of hours that you're spending admin work. So for rev ops teams, enablement teams, what role should they be playing in fixing this problem? If I'm a rev ops team and I'm looking at that state of sales report, I'm saying whoa, 72% in admin, like.

Patrick Monnot (17:49.431)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (17:54.218)

Yeah. That's crazy.

Patrick Monnot (18:10.69)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (18:15.428)

I gotta do something about that. Like, what do you see as those teams roll?

‍

Patrick Monnot (18:16.086)

Do something, yeah.

Patrick Monnot (18:22.418)

I mean, let me start by saying I don't think there's a silver bullet, right? What's very interesting about enablement, generally speaking, is it's not a binary type of high tech solution where it either works or it doesn't work. There's an inherent human aspect to it. It's all about how people adopt.

new technology, change their approach, learn, et cetera, et cetera. So I think for me, uh, the way, when I have conversation with relapse team or relapse leader or ops leader or sales leader, whoever that might be that have an impact on processes, tech tools, et cetera, is I think the first step is always taking a step back and understanding what your team actually needs to be successful. I think it starts and it has to end there, right? It's understanding the information that they need. There are gaps in knowledge.

Ken Babcock (19:06.974)

Yep.

Patrick Monnot (19:13.776)

How you know what where does a sales funnel typically gets you know where do deals get stuck throughout the sales funnel? I think it's all these understand, you know under Little I can repeat that question. So I think it comes down to the fact that from a rev ops perspective it has to start and end with the fact that

Ken Babcock (19:26.412)

Yeah, I agree.

Patrick Monnot (19:33.294)

Uh, you need to understand what your team needs to be successful, right? Whether it's the information they need, the knowledge gaps, understanding where sales deals get stuck throughout the funnel. I think understanding that is the first thing, right? Not making assumption, actually talking to yourself, people understanding the, what they experienced on the field. What are their frustration? Right. And I think that's number one.

Then you can design the process and the tool and the tech stack you need in order to support it. Not the other way around. I think too often, and not just in sales, I think that's a problem around technology generally speaking. You start with the tech and you try to look for the problem, right? And then that leads to like I mentioned earlier, like Frankenstacks, like, oh, this is a great tool. Maybe it'll be useful. Let me throw it on my sales team and see if they adopt it. And they don't. But I think if you flip it around, think about the problem that they have and whatever the tools that you need to fill in the gaps. I think that's where you can get to much.

Ken Babcock (20:08.112)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (20:11.475)

Yep.

Ken Babcock (20:16.665)

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Monnot (20:23.632)

much simpler tech stack, a much simpler process, but also a lot more adoption. Right. And I think that that's something that I'm very, very sensitive to, so to speak, is there's probably read that book, start with why.

Ken Babcock (20:25.981)

Yep.

Patrick Monnot (20:39.726)

Right. I think people are inherently driven by the why in everything, not necessarily the how at first. And I think a big problem with digital adoption, I think that's something that you guys do great is, you know, understanding why am I changing my process? Why am I adopting this new tool? How is it helping me before understanding how to use it? Right. And people too often kind of flip that around and people are like, Hey, this is a great tool. Yes, it's sexy, but it was sexy as cool as, you know, sounds nice, great UI, but.

Ken Babcock (20:40.845)

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Ken Babcock (20:57.02)

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Patrick Monnot (21:08.558)

Why would I use this? How does it fit into my day-to-day work? Why is it not, you know, is it a net positive versus a net negative? So I think that's kind of important.

Ken Babcock (21:08.584)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (21:17.551)

And that's some of that detachment you see from the buyer to the end user, right? We have this concept we talk about a lot, and I'm curious to get your take on where you feel like sales teams fall on the spectrum. But we have this concept called ambivalent adopters, and it is a generalization. But it's sort of just acknowledging that a lot of times, especially when it comes to

Patrick Monnot (21:36.27)

Mm.

Ken Babcock (21:46.003)

are exactly like what you said. They're kind of questioning, okay, why do I need another tool? Like, how much time am I actually gonna put into this? So it's so critical to just be like, hey, you know what? These people that wanna execute really well at their job, wanna keep doing what they're good at, are still ambivalent adopters, and you should go into it with that mindset and make things just dead simple. Like, that's something we embrace.

Patrick Monnot (22:09.486)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (22:11.803)

I'm curious where you think sales teams kind of fall. Like are they part of that ambivalent adopters? Are they the worst?

Patrick Monnot (22:15.726)

Let me flip it around. What is your hypothesis? I feel like you're leading with this by, do you think that they're on the worst side of the offenders or on the good adopters? I think there's that preconception that sells people the worst. I think...

Ken Babcock (22:20.716)

Yeah, that's right.

Ken Babcock (22:26.159)

Yeah, I think they're the worst. I think they're the worst, right? Maybe not even the worst. I think maybe they embrace, because I don't want to make ambivalent adoption seem like it's a negative thing. It's really just like people that want to get their job done and they want to do it, but if you keep throwing curve balls at them, hey, here's this new process, here's this new thing, here's this new...

Patrick Monnot (22:35.086)

It's death.

Patrick Monnot (22:39.118)

Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Monnot (22:45.326)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (22:47.439)

you know, pathway, like that gets really frustrating. And so I think in the ambivalent adopter world, I tend to think of sales teams because like you said, I do this for selling, I wanna keep selling, I wanna keep the momentum, but I'm curious to hear your take on that.

Patrick Monnot (23:04.622)

I think tactically, I agree with you. I don't necessarily see them as being the worst offenders in negative way to your point, but I think you have to understand the persona first and foremost. Right?

There's this quote that, you know, life is all about incentives. And I think salespeople with an organization have a unique incentive structure that no other, you know, other function have, right? You have to put yourself in the shoes of a salesperson, right? 50% of their compensation is driven by their performance, right? It's a compensation structure that is significantly different from anything else. Imagine if you're an HR person and that 50% of your comp is driven by the quality of the hires or whether they stick around. If you're a financial analyst, so to speak.

you get, you know, 50% of your compensation is driven by the accuracy of your forecast, right? These concepts feel crazy when you think about it, but for a sales person, it's obvious. Like if you don't bring in business, you don't get paid, right? So I think there's, the reason why I'm sharing that is I think there's an inherent skepticism or inertia to change for salespeople because of how much it can have an impact on, I don't want to say their livelihood, but if anything, their compensation, right? Their financial health or their wage, right? So I think...

Ken Babcock (24:00.482)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (24:19.027)

Mm-hmm.

Patrick Monnot (24:22.766)

what it means for salespeople, it is that they have to really understand, going back to my initial point, really need to understand how it's actually helping them to reach their goal. And I think in sales, you boil it down to one thing, closing more deals. So they really need to understand how is this helping me to close more deal, right? And I think that it's actually a thought process that more function and companies should actually adopt because they would kind of shave off a lot of waste across the board if you actually

that you take in terms of process or tools like, hey, is this actually moving the needle in the right direction? Is it actually, going back to my point, net positive or net negative? So I think that that's why salespeople, so to speak, are ambivalent adopters because they have a very critical eye to adopting or change altogether. They ultimately change, right? Salespeople like entrepreneurial in nature. They're always looking to find new ways, but there's a burden of proof from whatever, new process or technology on.

Ken Babcock (25:12.644)

And, uh...

Patrick Monnot (25:22.286)

Is it actually having an impact?

Ken Babcock (25:22.575)

Yeah. Right. And look what we're doing to them. 72% of their time and increasing on admin work. So yeah, I mean, basically what you're saying is that 50% of compensation now needs to be achieved in less selling time. Right. And so I, I get the skepticism. I get the, I understand the ambivalence and that's where I think we need to think more deeply about real time enablement.

Patrick Monnot (25:27.374)

That was crazy.

Ken Babcock (25:48.355)

And so I want to transition a little bit to real-time enablement. Uh, you know, a term that, uh, you have sort of coined and used a ton. Talk to us. What is real-time enablement? Well, you know, to, to save, save the audience from hearing real-time enablement a thousand times, we'll refer to it as RTE after this, but what is, what is RTE? Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (25:48.622)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (26:06.542)

A thousand times, yeah. RT, here you go. I like it, another acronym.

Yeah, I think it's the concept of bringing bite size, contextual support or guidance to sellers or knowledge workers throughout their day-to-day work. Right. For me, it was, it was like I mentioned a bit earlier, it was one of them. The fact that I heard a lot of salespeople say out of site, out of line. And I think that highlighted the need for an enablement that was more, I'd say intricately embedded into their workflows. Right. Again, not.

to do the comparison with programmatic enablement. It's, you know, for 90% of my day, you know, I'm not looking at these documents, or I'm preparing for a meeting or whatnot. How can I get these bite-sized pieces of information or, you know, some knowledge nuggets, whatever that might be, when and where I needed most, right? It could be before a meeting, after a meeting, when you're trying a new tool, whatever that might be. That's the interesting thing about RTE is that it could be anywhere and nowhere at the same time, but it's about identifying these points.

Ken Babcock (27:12.018)

Yep.

Patrick Monnot (27:13.008)

bite-size contextual support and guidance to the individual contributors.

Ken Babcock (27:18.843)

Awesome. This is a movement, I would say, where we start with the programmatic. We see a lot of teams that are embracing kind of the programmatic style of enablement and training. This is a movement. Who should care most about this movement? Who should be paying attention to what's happening in real-time enablement? Is it reps, managers, rev ops teams, leaders, everybody?

Patrick Monnot (27:42.83)

I'll answer the question and I'm curious because I have a very sales centric perspective on it. I'm curious for the rest of the organization where it falls and hear what you've seen and what you've heard from other organization leader. But I think for me, it might be very, very cheesy of an answer, but it involves everyone right in different ways obviously. So I think on one end you need the managers to take a hard look at their...

So process or sales methodology and understand how they'd actually need to support reps, right? Most of them are former salespeople. So you need them to do their work upfront. Then you need rev ops to be able to build the relevant content or build the right stack, right? In order to support salespeople. But at the end of the day, like I mentioned, I'll say again and again and again, it starts and end with salespeople, right? We all do this in order to support the individual contributors.

deals are the ones that are, you know, in front of the clients that are the ones that need the most help. So going back to the Hill I'm going to die on it's, you know, bringing the power back to the reps, you know, they're the frontline and everything's is structured around RTE is ultimately structured around them, but involves other stakeholders and support. And I think sales is a bit unique where they have an, a dedicated ops function, but

Going back to my initial point, for the rest of the companies, what does that look like? Is it HR? Is it ops? Is it IT? Is it a mixed bag of everything? I'm curious.

Ken Babcock (29:11.355)

Yeah, I mean, I appreciate your answer. I'm gonna take a slightly different spin, but I think in the most forward-thinking organizations that we've worked with, the training, L&D, whatever you wanna call it, that sort of functional role, I won't even call it like a title. I'll just say that role and responsibility is getting closer and closer to the teams. I think sales has done this relatively well

embracing rev ops, embracing sales enablement, bringing training much, much closer to the reps. But for me, if you are that forward thinking organization, you're thinking more about how can we cultivate an environment of continuous growth and learning that just lives within our team, and it isn't necessarily outsourced, insourced, yeah.

Patrick Monnot (30:05.294)

to like a satellite function that interests it. So it's not like a group that applies L&D programs across the board, but ultimately branched off into, yeah, I don't know, the finance team, the marketing team in terms of what they actually need. Is that?

Ken Babcock (30:17.501)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (30:22.651)

And maybe on the same token, like those L and D teams should be kind of like looking in the rear view mirror and thinking like, Oh, like what's, what's coming for the way that we have traditionally done work because, you know, I do hear just so often teams pointing to like, Oh, here's our LMS, here's all our modules, here are the trainings people have to complete, here's the success in completing that. And I think holding on to a lot of those things as

the way we've done it, the way we're gonna continue to do it, and not, to your point, taking a step back and being like, well, okay, let's start with why. What do the end users of this actually need? And I think another concept of real-time enablement that you touched on is like, a lot of this stuff is gonna have to be very personal. That's where AI comes into play too. And we have so much insight into how people are working across, and then across an organization.

Patrick Monnot (30:52.942)

Dead weight.

Ken Babcock (31:20.295)

you know, what might be the best practice or best pathway? I already talked about Gong, like Gong's been doing that for the audio file for years, but we're gonna be able to soon do that for the log file of all the software that you're using, all the actions that you're taking, and so that's getting closer and closer to those teams actually doing the work, which leads me kind of in.

Patrick Monnot (31:31.47)

Yeah

Patrick Monnot (31:39.566)

That's interesting, like boiling it down, not just on what does the team behavior look like, but on an individual basis, like what is that person's habit? What are their are they not opening this type of software? And they should. That's actually I mean, that's where that's where it has to go. Right. You start with kind of the peanut butter spread approach and then you make it a bit more personal to every function and then you have to make it personal to every individual. That's awesome. Yeah.

Ken Babcock (32:03.183)

Yeah, that's gonna be super powerful. And it kind of leads me to my next question too, like organizations that embrace RTE, how does that sort of spark empathy for sales reps or really any end user?

Patrick Monnot (32:21.582)

I don't think that it's, well, I think just something that might spark empathy in a specific way, going back to your point, which is it pushes people to better, to take a step back and better understanding the needs and the struggles of their team members. I think that's one form of empathy where, again, you don't think about the technology first, you think about the problem. So that pushes you to...

talk to people, you know, grab a coffee, understand their worries, you know, that foreign concept of face to face conversation. So I think that's one thing. I think beyond that.

Ken Babcock (32:50.163)

Sure.

Patrick Monnot (32:59.342)

In the context of salespeople specifically, I think it creates a more humane approach to sales enablement, which isn't as much structured around unidirectional sharing of information, but rather collaboration, knowledge sharing, best practice sharing. In sales, it's a very nuanced function. As much as you can think that there's theory and playbooks, the reality is oftentimes different.

real time enablement doesn't have to come in as, you know, a, you know, a knowledge nugget or objection handling card. It could actually be just providing a platform for people to share what they've learned from a previous deal and how it could be helpful to others or sharing best practices or et cetera. So I think, I think about empathy more in that, in that way of like, let people who are thinking about

you know, their sales work day in, day out, share and learn from one another. And I think that's where there's a lot of, there's a lot of power, but it stems from the fact that you have to first push people to better understand what are the needs. If you don't do that, then it's a non-starter.

Ken Babcock (34:08.387)

Yeah. And getting over the hurdle of, you know, sales team members kind of sharing their best practices. I mean, that's also a behavioral change in and of itself for some sales organizations where what I do, what my recipe for success is tightly held. Cause like, yeah. Yeah. So.

Patrick Monnot (34:20.813)

for some sales organization.

Patrick Monnot (34:25.934)

I don't want to share it. I think another blunt perspective on it. I think that's stupid. And I think it's a dumb approach. I think it's an old approach as well. I think more and more organizations are leaning more and more around sharing. I think going back to my point, I think it comes down to incentives, right? A lot of...

Ken Babcock (34:38.216)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (34:50.766)

sales leaders are creating these environments where if you're not performing on this deal, I will take it and move it over to your colleague and he's going to make the money. When you start talking about money, people get a bit more sensitive, so to speak. But I think that more and more organizations are moving towards, hey, you have your territory, you have your accounts. That other AE is working on other territories, so how does it work on your end? How does it work in the Northwest? I'm working on the Southeast territory.

anything you can share was the presentation that you use for that company in the telecom space. I have another meeting coming up. I think that's just, you know, the competitive environment I think is shifting more and more. You still have many organizations doing that and that's quite honestly a bit of a boomer mentality to say the least.

Ken Babcock (35:42.396)

I want to get a little tactical. So real-time enablement, I think for folks that are listening, can kind of feel a little, let's call it like pie in the sky ideal case, pipe dream, two founders chatting, talking about the future, right? But maybe like, what does it look like in practice? Let's take like a, let's take an example for a sales rep.

Patrick Monnot (35:44.11)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (35:54.35)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (35:58.382)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (36:08.078)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (36:08.271)

on an average day, what does real-time enablement look like in that moment in your view?

Patrick Monnot (36:15.086)

Yeah, I'll do the good old dillo, dame the life of an A.E. And I think what's interesting about...

RT is that it's again embedded into micro actions left and right, and it will take a number of different shapes. So it's not again, one big thing, one big use case. It's a hundred different use cases. So the way I like to think about it is, well, let's go back to the Monday morning at AM, right? You're an AE, RT is basically helping AEs to better prioritize which deal require their attention for that given day for a number of different reasons. It's about highlighting maybe urgent tasks that they have to tackle that day.

for deals that are stuck that you highlight, you know, what are the, what are potential actions that you should take or playbook that you should apply in order to unblock that deal. Um, you know, let's say further in today, you have a meeting with a prospect, right? Head of the call, synthesizing research information about a contact or a company in order to, if anything, have a great conversation starter, if not be able to tailor your messaging and your approach to the prospect after the call, automatically identifying next steps or. You know, there's all these kind of.

small things that can fit in throughout their day-to-day task. And I think it could also be, if you think of it more in a disruptive way, it could, and that's something that we're doing at pod is maybe creating a conversational interface, not a chat bot, but a sidekick, right? Create a sidekick for the salesperson where they can ask questions about best practice, about, you know, query their data or question their data, sorry, their pipeline, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's.

what enablement looks like. It's a number of different shape and form, and it's not just AI. Sometimes it's just bringing the information when they, when and where they need it.

Ken Babcock (37:59.011)

Yeah, I think that's great. And it's similar to the way we think about it too, where how do you sort of remove that shoulder tap or remove that question where you're like, I don't even necessarily know what I'm looking for, but I'm gonna guess at what this article might be called or I'm gonna guess who's the subject matter expert and maybe I'm interrupting them.

So, you know, I think we share a similar view, but to avoid making this podcast sound like, you know, we're selling Tango and Pod here, maybe let's talk about what some of our audience can do. Let's say they don't have the budget for a tool, they don't want to make a purchase like Pod or Tango. That's fine, you can still listen. But like, yeah, everyone's welcome. What can those people start doing?

Patrick Monnot (38:32.206)

Ever.

Patrick Monnot (38:44.654)

It's okay, everyone's welcome, it's all love.

Ken Babcock (38:52.039)

today to head down this movement, this path of real-time enablement.

Patrick Monnot (38:58.958)

I think it comes down to, and I don't want to sound like a broken record, two things. And I'll start with the latter, which I think is simplify. It's not always about adding new stuff to your process. It's not always about bringing that new cool tech. Sometimes it's about looking at what you have and realizing that, oh, no one's using A, B, C, and D software. Or...

is not behaving in the way that's actually helpful. So I think simplifying, it's actually, you should actually save money out of this, not actually spend more money. That's number one. But again.

I think it comes down to the fact you need to do the work upfront of understanding what good looks like, what is actually helpful versus unhelpful. And then you can look at your tech stack. I think this is kind of an easy first step, right? At times it can get political in different organizations, right? Some people brought in a given tool and they don't want to let it go. But the more that we can have a transparent, open conversation across all different stakeholders, right? You bring in IT, you bring in ops, bring in HR, you bring in, I don't know, business

Whatever that might be, you bring it all together, you highlight a problem. If people disagree, then I think that's a bigger problem, so to speak. But once you agree that there's a problem, that's the first step afterwards to finding the solution. And I think first step for me is simplify before adding anything else. In sales tech, there's that concept of consolidation, right? Why have 20 different tools and five of them have overlapping functionalities? Why don't you find a tool that can do multiple things?

not to promote pod here for any reason, but now we're thinking about ourselves as a workspace, first and foremost, right? You don't have to jump between Google Docs, Trello, your Salesforce, et cetera. You have a system of action, a place where you can get your work done that basically allows you as a user to not have to go to these five, 10 other different tools. So Simplify is the name of the game to start with.

Ken Babcock (40:55.803)

Yeah. Simplify. Love it. You know, I'd say something similar. We talk about this concept within documentation of minimum viable context. Fancy way to say simplify, but you know, I think you were talking about it from the perspective of like, you're probably overloaded with tools. Like, you know, you're going to get a holiday.

Patrick Monnot (41:06.734)

Oh, interesting. Never heard that.

Ken Babcock (41:19.075)

I think for us, you know, when you talk about those knowledge nuggets, when you talk about those things that people are going to employ into their process and follow along, you know, we did a survey where we basically said, like, what do you hate today about existing documentation? Or what's the reason why, you know, you either can't trust it or you can't use it. And top two responses, too much information, not enough information. And so it was a little bit, for a second, it was a little bit like, well, what do we do with that?

Patrick Monnot (41:43.214)

I just had a couple of...

Patrick Monnot (41:47.982)

What are we doing with this? How do you take action on this?

Ken Babcock (41:50.215)

But yeah, but we actually thought about it more deeply and we're like, okay, so there's probably like a Goldilocks zone where it's like, people are given the information that they need in their moment of need, to your point, but it's not overwhelming. It's not requiring a wall of text to be sifted through. It's what is the minimum amount of information I need to be successful? I think that is a key pillar of real-time enablement. And then similar to your point around tooling,

you know, consolidation is one aspect, but if you're adding more tools, like make sure the integrations are there. Make sure that like the new tool that you add is kind of meeting people where they already are. You know, if they already have the knowledge base, make sure it integrates with the knowledge base. And you know, and just try to, you know, not give people the tab apocalypse, like meet people where they already are. So that, those would be my two pieces of advice.

Patrick Monnot (42:26.638)

That's a good point.

Patrick Monnot (42:35.438)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (42:44.878)

I like that. I like the minimal viable content. I think it, especially with content, the Pareto laws, the 80-20 type of lies definitely you.

applicable right out of a hundred different articles that you have or how-to guides etc. There's probably like 20 of them that people are actually using and that make a difference So I think I think that actually probably leads to the fact that there's too much information and not enough information I think there's too much information in an absolute basis, but they don't have access to the The information they need easily so they feel like they don't have the information that they need interesting. I love that I think that's definitely it's not just applicable to digital adoption, but just generally speaking

Ken Babcock (43:05.035)

Oh yeah.

Ken Babcock (43:22.14)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (43:25.424)

to help people think about their workflows and the tools that they need, the information they need and so on. That's awesome.

Ken Babcock (43:31.667)

Yeah, and somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that being more comprehensive, being more exhaustive, being more thorough was gonna be the best way to write anything down. And admittedly, I'm kinda coming back on that, but awesome. Well, I think that is gonna be super helpful to everyone listening, thinking about RTE. Appreciate that perspective, Patrick. I wanna wrap up with a couple closers.

Patrick Monnot (43:52.814)

Hopefully.

it.

fire.

Ken Babcock (43:59.419)

you know, things that maybe we didn't touch on that I just selfishly want to touch on. So with pod, you talk a lot about, you know, AI, you know, you're the sort of the AI sidekick for sales teams.

Patrick Monnot (44:03.63)

Yeah, yeah. Ha ha.

Ken Babcock (44:14.331)

Obviously what's been at the top of the news for a while is what's been going on with OpenAI, a very short little chapter around what's going on with Sam Altman. You know, but this space and this industry, not even to specifically point out OpenAI, there's a lot that's changing and moving. In your view, as a company that's in the middle of that, you know, what are the implications for...

Patrick Monnot (44:29.742)

Yeah, very quickly.

Ken Babcock (44:40.387)

your end customers, what should people be thinking about with the future of AI and are there any just general sort of watch outs or ground rules that you're sharing with customers?

Patrick Monnot (44:52.686)

I think it's a complicated question to answer. I won't comment on the open AI situation, obviously. I think a lot of people have talked about it already. There's a few concepts to me that are important with AI that, in terms of how we build product from that perspective, are important. But it translates to how people adopt AI, either through a tool like Pod or Tango or elsewhere internally. I think

Ken Babcock (45:00.093)

Okay.

Patrick Monnot (45:20.59)

The one thing that is most important for me to articulate, I think, is that AI is not new. It is not new. It is evolving. It is more accessible. Yes, it is more powerful. I'm originally from Montreal, Canada, which is a hotbed for deep learning.

You know, you have the founding fathers of deep learning, three out of the four are based in Canada, something like that, don't quote me on it. But I think it's not you. People have been working on this for 25 years. I think now it hits the public, so it looks like it's grandiose and new, et cetera. I think it's definitely exciting and it's moving quickly and it'll enable way more use cases and way to leverage it. But it's not you, right? At the end of the day, AI is a technology, it is a tool and means to an end, right? So it's not necessarily about

Ken Babcock (45:49.81)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (46:09.518)

tackling, seeing that shiny object and try to figure out a way to apply it, but starting with a true pain point and leveraging AI to solve it. I think the companies who are going to thrive through AI are the ones that were solving an acute pain point before AI, and now they're just solving it better with AI. I think the ones that are actually going to fail, and I think there was at some point

Patrick Monnot (46:39.472)

of AI startups built in 2023 are going to die, right? And I kind of agree with it because a lot of them were just starting with the technology and like finding a problem to solve, and even if it wasn't an important one or whatnot. So I think from that perspective, that concept, generally speaking, I think, first of all, reduces a bit of the...

Ken Babcock (46:49.725)

Right.

Patrick Monnot (47:00.046)

how to say how scary AI is, right? AI is whatever people want it to be. It could be rule-based logic. It could be fancy model. It could be generative AI model, but.

It's a tool, right? You have the power to use it. You have to think through how to use it best. So I think that's how we think about it. It's, you know, and we're not positioning pod as like a crazy, fancy co-pilot that is not relatable. It's just a sidekick, like you mentioned. So I think people should actually take that same approach to how they adopt AI within their company. It's not a groundbreaking change for the company is, okay, what are the small improvements that we can do here and there?

Ken Babcock (47:27.219)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (47:38.93)

Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (47:39.438)

And I think that the emphasizes or de-escalates the scare around AI and its adoption.

Ken Babcock (47:46.099)

I think it's a really great reminder. We've met with so many AI task forces within companies. And it is this phenomenon that you've mentioned where it's a hammer trying to find a nail where the mandate is just, we need to go find AI tools. But they don't take an inventory of like, okay, well, what do we need to go find AI tools to do? So I think that's a great, great reminder. And then the last question for you, this one should be a layup.

Patrick Monnot (48:07.854)

Four, yeah.

Patrick Monnot (48:12.878)

Yeah.

Ken Babcock (48:16.158)

Who's someone you follow that makes you better at your job?

Patrick Monnot (48:20.942)

You can. I'm messing with you. I agree. So, exactly. Cut this part. Let's reshoot. No, but I think seriously, it would be too easy to point out one specific individual that has had great success and point that out as...

Ken Babcock (48:25.587)

Too embarrassing, we can't go with that.

Ken Babcock (48:30.643)

We can keep it, we can keep it. Keep it.

Patrick Monnot (48:40.366)

inspiration, you and I are both founders. To me, that not the one individual, but the group of people I love following is just fellow entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, like people who are excited about startups, who operate startup, who are thinking about taking the leap or launching their startup or struggling or succeeding, I guess, to build it. I think being a founder is a bit of a unique experience. No one prepares you to that. There's no school for it. So surrounding yourself with other founders, you know, like yourself,

like some of my friends, is the best way to learn to improve, to stay motivated. It can be a lonely road at times, but I think that's the most important thing to stay hyped, to stay motivated and ultimately build great things.

Ken Babcock (49:16.371)

So valuable.

Ken Babcock (49:24.131)

Absolutely. Well, not to mention not, not beating your head against the wall when you're like, okay, I need to file a new business registration in this random state. What did you, you know, I mean, there's so many things, you know, that we all encounter that are, that are, that go under the radar and, um, you know, don't make the headlines, but Patrick is great to catch up, man. Thank you for joining. I think folks are going to love this, this conversation on real time enablement. So, um,

Patrick Monnot (49:31.63)

What did I do? Yeah.

Patrick Monnot (49:44.078)

Can absolutely.

Ken Babcock (49:51.276)

I'll throw it back at you. If you're listening, give Patrick a follow.

Patrick Monnot (49:55.278)

Totally. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I love talking about this. I could go on and on and on, but excited to see other companies thinking about RT and ultimately we're both pushing in the same direction to make life better for folks out there. So thank you so much for the Chapman. Thanks.

Ken Babcock (50:09.631)

Let's do it. Thanks.