Are sales roles becoming obsolete in the age of AI? Find out in this thrilling episode of “73 and Sunny,” where we’re joined by the extraordinary Steve Frost. With a career that has spanned the revolutionary changes in tech over the past 25 years, Steve, a former researcher at TSIA and now a consultant specializing in B2B SaaS models and outcome-driven engagement, brings a wealth of knowledge from his time at iconic companies like Netscape and Google. Dive into an insightful discussionn on the seismic shifts in tech, the transformative power of AI in sales strategies, and how to navigate the competitive landscape without losing sight of collaboration and trust. Whether you’re intrigued by the strategic moves in tech, fascinated by AI’s potential, or seeking a balanced approach to competition, this episode offers a masterclass in adapting and thriving amidst the industry’s rapid evolution.

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Damien: Hello and welcome to 73 and Sunny, the podcast about the journey of getting things just right. We talk to tech sales and marketing leaders about how they’re growing, dialing in best practices and getting closer to that sweet spot. Today, we’re happy to have Steve Frost join us. Steve, a Stanford grad has been at the heart of tech changes over the past quarter century.

He’s a researcher who’s been with TSIA for seven years. And now he’s branching off to do his own consulting around B2B SaaS models and outcome driven engagement. Steve has provided advisory to top executives at Fortune 100 tech companies. And with experience at Netscape, Google, and TSIA among them, he has probably seen more than most have in the digital transformation age.

So Steve, thank you very much for joining us. 

Steve: Damien, it is my absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. And and ironically here in Dallas, Texas, I was telling you, it actually is 73 and sunny. We don’t get many of those, right? This is not San Diego, but we try. So it’s 

Damien: a perfect day for this podcast.

This 

Steve: is fantastic. I think any day is a perfect day for this podcast, but this is better than others. So I guess we’ll take it where we have it. 

Damien: Absolutely. And so let’s get topical about it, today or in the last week. It’s March Madness. I have several pools. Who do you have winning winning the tournament this year?

Steve: I wussed out and took UConn. Just, they’re just, they’re probably that much better than anybody. But I’ll tell ya I’ve made a lot more money in my life on March Madness pools than, certainly than on Fantasy Football. There’s a methodology there where if you can take like a two seed that nobody else is taking, in this case Iowa State, maybe Houston, somebody like that.

That, realistically, if you’re the only one in your pool, that’s taking that two seed, you’re getting like 40 to 50 to one odds. Where in Vegas you’d get maybe, 10 to one or 15 to one. So it can go there. And thus, of course, UConn or Purdue is just so good. They win the whole thing.

Damien: And I also to that point, my daughter goes to Gonzaga. So in one of my pools, I have Gonzaga. It’s just a shot in the dark but who knows, but it’s all good competition. And speaking of competition, Steve. It seems like you, you have competition running through your veins and have for your entire life.

You played football at Stanford, you were on, you were a three day champion in jeopardy. You’ve chosen to be in a very highly competitive field. Speaking of that sweet spot, that 73 and sunny it, is there a, one is there a place where you aren’t competitive in your daily life?

Steve: Oh that’s a great with my family and I come from a very athletic family too. My mom was an Olympic athlete, my brother played in the NFL. And so when we would compete internally, and I read about the Harbaugh brothers Michigan and Baltimore, and so they would be knocked down, drag out.

And that was their competition, even if they’re playing ping pong or monopoly, with us, when we played basketball in the driveway that we always thought of it as anything we were doing internally as a family. That was practice because what we were doing, yeah, it was competitive and yeah, I wanted to win, but there was that 90 to 95 percent where you didn’t cross the line because we’re not training to beat each other here.

We’re training to beat. The other guy out there. And so I, that, that’s me when you’re a sales leader or revenue leader is the biggest thing to remember. You want to have some measure of healthy competition and you want to have people going against each other. But I’ve also seen that backfire to where, you, there’s too much internal pressure.

People don’t always enjoy that. They don’t always enjoy having everyone know. They don’t always enjoy having their failures exposed. Or when they struggled for that. And it may be for a lot of reasons. So competitive, yes. But I tell you what you’re a revenue leader too. I think that you gotta be real careful internally on how you draw that line between what’s competition and remembering that, that what happens internally is it’s still practice and the real game is out there.

So that’s it’s a fine balance, but one that I think is worth trying to figure out how to get right. 

Damien: And I completely agree with you. A lot of people I think have used the term co opetition, which I think turns too quickly into cutthroat. Hey, sharks, eat or be eaten.

Type of competition internally, which I think is tough. So as sales leaders how would you recommend compartmentalizing that? While still driving that, that sense of. Competition or drive, like internal drive without destroying things in your path, because I’ve been in very large organizations.

And it was a, eat or be eaten type of environment, which what did not make for really good team environment did not make for Collaboration and became very political. So how, what is that, what have you seen in terms of being able to compartmentalize in the workplace, the competition to be able to make sure, Hey, listen, we’re harnessing and we’re focusing it in the right direction without destroying a good culture that you might have.

Steve: No I’d say there’s two or three things that just popped to the top of my head that I’ve seen in work. One, obviously, first of all, is trust. Good leaders are servant leaders always. And so those leaders are trying to, set the vision and then, set the terms and conditions for success.

The processes, which I’m a boring guy, likes to talk about process. What a fun night out. I must be, you’re talking about process. You’re talking about putting those things in place. That help your people succeed. And so you can have a level of competition.

If you don’t believe that, this is, Aztec basketball, where if you lose, you’re going to get your head chopped off. there has to be a level of trust and a level of really feeling like the organization is helping you understand why you’re doing this. What’s the purpose? What are we trying to do for the customer?

And if you can pull those things off, then you can have that competition. But where, you’re right. When you see that dog eat dog mentality and it’s an internal whatever you want to call it, blood, fight to the death. that doesn’t foster trust. And yet I do think you can see some short term gains from that.

But over the long term organizationally, it can just eat your life. 

Damien: I 100 percent agree. And when you just said trust in the process from a business standpoint, I also then thought of how that’s bleeding into the sports world as well. I think was it the 76 errs who were saying trust the process? 

Steve: And it is Nick Saban always talked about trusting the process, right? Now, if you come here and you do the work and you show up we have a plan to get you to where you need to go. And Nick Saban, not only had a plan, he had the best athletes that helps as it turns out when your players are bigger, faster, and stronger than everyone else’s, you do win games, other people have athletes that were as good as Alabama’s, but they don’t have, 19 national championships or whatever Saban has that you forget.

But that’s the difference, right? Do you, do the people in your organization believe that what they’re doing has a purpose? Do they think that they can be successful if they execute on your plan? And certainly then there’s internal competition for playing time and resources, but everybody’s on the same team and everybody knows that they’re not fighting against each other.

They’re fighting against LSU and Auburn. 

Damien: And to your point, what you just said about, do they trust in your plan? And I believe you will. You played at Stanford for Bill Walsh and famously Bill Walsh would script out the first 10 or 15 offensive plays. I know at least for the 49ers, I don’t know if he also carried that into his days at Stanford, but after that 10 or 15 plays to be able to see, okay, here’s where we are.

Have we done well? Are we seeing different defenses and now we need to adjust. And I’m looking at that from. Perspective in terms of looking at the longer game, looking at the need to adjust and looking at your own experience, Steve, in terms of where you started at Netscape and things have shifted so dramatically.

In the past 25 years that you need a new plan and you need to actually think about, okay, what worked way back when is not going to, is not going to work now. What’s the biggest or most dramatic shift that you’ve seen in the tech industry in the last 25 years that people need to shift to?

Steve: Obviously, I was a long time ago Damian? I was a foot soldier in the browser wars. And on the front lines of that and you learned a lot very quickly. When you’re trying to sell an a product that’s 50 a head against an equivalent one, that’s been given away for free.

There’s, you have to learn some basic fundamentals, but yeah, there have been in, in the 20 something years I’ve been in tech, there’ve really been two times I can remember being blown away. One of them was at Netscape and one of my friends there had a brother who was an early investor in Google.

And they pulled up Google for the first time, right? And it was still in the old font with the exclamation point. And we tried doing a search on something and it was like, Whoa, what just happened there? And people thought the search problem was solved, right? They thought AltaVista, they thought, why do we need to solve this problem?

But it was just that much better. And it opened up an entire ecosystem. It literally changed the way we have our lives. My kids don’t understand that the answer to every question is They’ve grown up in a world where the answer to every question they possibly have is in their pocket. And that’s Google.

The only other time I’ve been blown away like that in my entire life is the first time I saw a chat GPT and I’m like, okay, what is this? And so there have been two lightning bolts and so it’s been interesting and I talked, I’d probably talk about Netscape and Google and Bill Walsh all day.

That was a master class, by the way, organizational theory and running a, running an organization and leadership and preparation and all those other things. But when you see that lightning bolt. You have to deal with it. And I, when working at TSIA and on my own with some of the companies I’ve worked with, nobody really knows what to do with this AI thing yet.

They just don’t. I, you guys are obviously doing some great things with that. But I see sales leaders, especially dabbling around the edges, right? So maybe they’ll use something for forecasting, or maybe they’ll use something to write a little better email. Or maybe they’ll even, they use a gong or something to listen in on a call and use it for some training and enablement or kind of just these little fringy products fringy efforts and the holy grail of this is really going to be, can I look at the patterns and can I see trends and can I see places that I can?

The best thing about AI, in my opinion, is that. It can see patterns. It can see data. It can see the big picture in a way that humans can’t. And even traditional data and analytics can’t. And when you can start to see that, you don’t just have these sales and marketing interactions, you have services interactions, you have digital interactions, you have all these other places.

Whereas a sales leader, you’re not even thinking about it. You don’t have access to the data. You don’t even know it’s there. AI has the potential to present a unified view and a unified plan for customers from the earliest prospect stage to your biggest, to your biggest to your biggest enterprise customer, but these are things and patterns that can’t exist if you don’t have a real plan for it and a way to deal with it.

And people are struggling with that right now from a compliance standpoint, from a technology standpoint, resource standpoint, all of the above. 

Damien: Your your last point about the resource standpoint. I totally agree with that. And this is something that we see with a lot of our customers using verse to augment their own internal resources.

I was listening to another podcast that shall remain nameless. And we’re talking about. Not only if ChachiBT or AI didn’t know everything about everything, which it does, it knows everything about everything, but even if it knew everything, Steve, that you knew, even if it knew just that limited amount of the vast world knowledge that, that Steve Frost knows, there is a huge advantage in the speed and processing to be able to say, Hey, Steve Frost could figure out this problem in an hour or in two hours.

Whereas. AI, even with the same knowledge that seed knows could do it in a second or a millisecond. And then to be able to compound that throughout a day, a week, a month to be able to have this resource, which is even if it knows only as much as a salesperson or any employee knows the speed in which it can work.

Is so vastly different that I think you’re right. We have no idea what we’re going to do. How what is your best guess in terms of resources or employees in, especially in sales and marketing going forward, knowing that. Even if it’s a little bit of knowledge that they can do this so much faster, like what is the workforce going to look like?

Steve: I don’t know. Anybody who tells you they do, I think is probably making it up. So just let’s stand there. And I, one of the things that I try to do whenever I work with one of, one of my clients is I don’t make stuff up. So I don’t know, but I got asked recently, I was at a speaking engagement and I got asked, is AI going to come take all of our sales jobs?

And my answer is no, but all so what is AI good at? Okay. If it’s very good at writing emails and very good at doing follow up and very good at doing some of those basic kind of fundamental things, if that’s what you’re doing as a salesperson, then yeah, you need to be prepared to have AI swallow you whole right now.

This also presents some real opportunity though for people in sales and sales leadership to start adding some actual value to the process, because if you can get the basics done through automation. Then, and if you can understand, man, what are we really trying to do? Can I guide the customer through the steps through this incredible maze of complexity that we keep throwing at them from a technology standpoint?

From an ecosystem standpoint, that’s where there’s value. I get asked all the time, how do I become more strategic? And I’m sure you, like everybody else has told your people, you got to sell high. You got to move up the stack. Okay. You got it. And people say we don’t just want to be a vendor.

We want to be a strategic partner. Great. Awesome. How, and the answer to how, in my opinion, is by aligning what you do With the strategic KPIs of the company and the buyer that you’re talking about. If you can understand how your customer and that buyer persona actually is measured on their success and you can link what you do to what they need and what they’re trying to be measured on.

That is how you become a strategic supplier. Anything else is playing golf. Sorry to interrupt. Go ahead. 

Damien: No, please. You must have. I don’t know. Maybe you did or didn’t listen to my last podcast where I said exactly that. It was some of the best sales training that I ever got. Was executive conversations with the CFO and it is first is understanding what that company or that person, because a personal value is much more valuable than what they might be doing at the company.

But what are they trying to change? just seek to understand what they’re trying to change, whether it’s for good or for bad, avoid pain or get to something better. But then how can you, this is your point, how can you affect that change in a way that no one else can? 

Steve: How you’re spot on.

That’s exactly right. And here’s another thing I’ll add to that, to, to build on your point, Damien, when I first started out at Netscape in 99, here’s a fun little story. So I was in sales. I Netscape was one of the first people who really did inside sales effectively. Like I was smiling and dialing one year out of school trying to sell software to people in Miami and Northern Virginia.

So while sitting in Mountain View, California, there’s a lot of early mornings, but we had, and I’ll never forget this. We had a fight between our sales team and our marketing team. Because if you went back and I’ve got one of the slides that I show when I give this talk, I’ll show like an early picture of Netscape.

com and there’s a tab that says products and services. And so we were actually the first company to ever put everything you would want to know about that product on our website, publicly available. And so you go back to pre 98, pre 99, if you wanted to learn about This is a product that some of the software companies, software product, hardware product, whatever.

Maybe you could get some material at a marketing a trade show or they’d send it out to you or in a magazine. But we were taught as salespeople, we control the information and therefore we shouldn’t get any, give up anything without getting anything. That is, that’s garbage now. They can find out anything they want.

A customer tell me before I even talk to a sales person, I’ve already gone 95% of the way down the path, right? I can find references, I can find, what’s good, what’s bad. I know what you’re, there, there’s nothing that a sales person has where it’s like, Hey no. Let you know. Let’s trade.

There’s no trade. There’s no like I’ll get you something to give something and I get so tired. I, I rail on this concept of solution selling. I hate it. Where we are sitting here trying to dig for the pain, find the pain. And so we’re in endlessly asking all these qualifying questions to somebody that does not have the time to answer 20 questions from a salesperson to get the piece of information they know.

So when I show up now I’ll tell people, these are the outcomes that I have seen people in your position are trying to achieve. Did these line up? And we just cut to the chase because they don’t have time. We’re all stressed. We’re all busy. We’re, and to think that you’re going to sit on there with a salesperson and help them find the pain, which they can use against you later.

I just don’t think they’ll do that. I think, in this world of AI and in this world of freely flowing information, you better show up and you better add value from the first time you have that conversation. And you better show them immediately that you understand their world and you understand what they care about.

And if you don’t, I don’t think you get that. I don’t think you get first. 

Damien: I agree with that. Although I’m, I might be struggling a little bit with how you differentiate. Solutions from outcomes. Can you give me a little bit more? Because if you hate, you said that you hate solution selling. 

Steve: Yeah.

I couldn’t be more nineties if it was, wearing the flannel shirt and listen to Pearl Jam CDs, but that they 

Damien: just came out. I think they’re coming out with a new one. 

Steve: There’s nothing evil to be said about Pearl Jam. All right. Solution selling is showing up and saying, how can we help you?

Outcome selling is showing up and saying, this is how we can help you. And there’s a very subtle difference there, but it’s real. And what I’ve seen is companies that go into that really, that how can we help you? I’d like a, I’d like a shrimp po boy and an orange Fanta. And you get the most random stuff.

And one thing that I learned during my time at TSIA is that customization is the bitter arch enemy of scale. And so as you show up and say, how can I help you? You don’t know what kind of outcome you’re going to get. If you know what you can do with them, or at least you’ve got an 80 to 90 percent chance of success.

idea of what you can do for somebody. By the time you show up on that first call you’re going to have a lot more credibility. And what I’ve seen is that people have actually executed on this and to help some people get there is, we see shortened sales times. We see shortened deal velocity and that’s great, but where the rubber really meets the road is after the contract’s executed.

Because you’ve had you’ve you understand what they’re trying to do. You’ve got a stationary target for your post sales people. to actually execute on. I used to run a poll all the time. I did it in several different ways. And I’d say, okay, when your customer success team is handed a new deal with a new customer, do they know why the customer bought or do they have to ask?

And every time I asked it was between 70 to 80 percent of customer success leaders said, no, we have to ask. And then I said, okay do you have sales or do you ask the customer? And that’s about 50, 50. Okay. And this idea that we don’t capture what the customer really wants. Cause at that point, and Damian, I’ve listened to some of your stuff and watched it, and I think it’s awesome because what you’ve realized is it’s never about you.

It’s about them. And so if you understand what they’re trying to do, if you understand what they consider success to be, what outcomes they’re trying to achieve you’ve got a lot better chance of getting there. Otherwise for all the window dressing and fluff that you might put on the presale, it’s just, you The same old product feature sale to get about as giving as much money and extracting as much as you can.

Damien: So maybe that’s great. I think maybe it’s a continuum and what has changed in order to get it, get things to that sweet spot that we’re always talking about is it started out with the features and functions with what you said with. Having Netscape or having all the features online.

Boom. Hey, look at all this feature, that’s feature function. And then it moves to solution to be able to ask people, Hey what’s your problem? You’re what, how can I help you? And then moving to, Hey, we already know what your problem and here’s the outcome. Here’s what we can save you from, or here’s what we can do.

For you. And I think that’s also in line with the Gartner idea of commercial insights to be able to say, no one really cares. Or if you come into a a real estate brokerage, say, Hey, listen, times are tough. Everyone’s going to be like, yeah, I know that this is not the best time, but if you come in there and say, Hey, listen, there’s a better way to communicate, or there’s something else that, that there is a problem that you didn’t even know about, right?

And here’s the outcome that, that we will help drive towards. We’re not talking about the problem anymore. We’re not talking about the solution. We’re saying, Hey, listen, we already know this. You, we know this, you might not know this. And here’s how we can help. 

Steve: Let me tell you a little story about an engagement that I had a couple of years ago.

I was working with a company that does patient monitoring arrays. So if you ever, you’ve been in the hospital or your wife was in the hospital having a baby, whatever that may have been, Yeah, there’s that patient monitoring array right next to you that’s monitoring your vitals, right? So the company that I was working with at the time was selling those as a managed service.

Okay, so the company didn’t have to, the hospital didn’t have to buy those. All right, they just paid a monthly fee and they showed up and they worked. And they were doing okay. Yeah, they’re doing okay. And so we set down an outcome selling workshop and we’re trying to figure out how can we really find some new buyers and find, crack open some new budgets and make people comfortable with this because they were coming in with a very financial based sale, right?

Look, total cost of ownership. Look, you don’t have to pay for equipment that you don’t use. Look, you can add capacity. And it’s, it’s a very operational, type value proposition and one of their best salespeople stood up, raised her hand, virtually because it was a zoom meeting, but she raised her hand and said I have found a tremendous advocate with the chief nursing officer.

And I’m like, okay, we’ll say more. So to play it out, what, in, at least in the U. S., I don’t know how many international listeners you have, but at least in the U. S. There’s a nursing shortage and we’re hiring nurses. The turnover is high. They’re bringing in temp nurses all the time.

One of the really big benefits that they hadn’t thought of to this managed patient monitoring was that every interface in every hospital room was the same. And so for that chief nursing officer, her time to productivity for her new nurses was cut dramatically and they could prove it because you don’t have to train on five different interfaces.

You train on one, right? And, okay. Now there is an outcome that can be measured. It’s tangible. It can be delivered upon. And it’s real. And and that makes a big difference between buying this as, a semi managed service or a contract, same thing. Another salesperson raised his hand and said I found a real advocate in the head of compliance.

Because for the head of compliance, they can’t control. You can make that look, you can cut your time to having a nurse in the, in the room after a patient alert by half the monitoring, it doesn’t have any effect on that. It works or it doesn’t. But that person in compliance has to produce a report to the department of health.

And when they can see, wow, wait a minute, I can prove that we were able to get in there and 90 seconds after an alert or 120 seconds, whatever that may be. And I have that report and I have that documentation that’s worth it. So you start thinking about these key buyer personas. You start thinking about what they really care about and what they’re really measured on.

And all of a sudden you can really find some new advocates. I think it’s totally. Applicable when you’ve got to sell at that higher up person. Everybody tells us as salespeople, you got to sell high and great. But I’ve still have this relationship with this person down here and I have for 20 years or 10 years, whatever that may be.

So in order to do that is how do you impact the actual metrics and KPIs of the person who you’ve got to talk to? And it’s a different sale, but I’ve seen people do it. And I think in this world of AI, I think in this world where information flows freely. Adding that level of value is going to be more and more important to salespeople and to the operations people that, that help them.

Damien: I think that’s a great example. Thanks for sharing that. And it reminds me of the Southwest model where they just have one plane, they all have seven 37. So you don’t need to train up all these other pilots or wait for the pilots that are specifically trained on this other. Puddle jumper or whatever it might be that there’s just one, there’s one plane and you can switch any and all pilots at, for any of these flights, which is obviously proven to be a good model for them.

Speaking of training, you just recently went through some AI training for Microsoft for generative AI. There’s a ton of information about AI right now. Do you have any advice in terms of. If people are looking to get trained up on AI, where to go, where should they start in terms of trying to learn about all this?

Because as you said, if they don’t, they are going to be left behind. 

Steve: I, so first thing I tell people is that you have to be AI and data literate and as a sales leader, I know you are, but just across the board, I did this survey not that a couple of years, a year and a half ago, where I asked the question, basically.

Is your, when you hire new salespeople or you train them, is data literacy one of your can they read a tableau? Can they can they look at a pivot table and figure it out? Can they go to, can they go to Tableau and read that report? And the answer was very few of them could.

Now the ones that did really well, but I couldn’t publish those results because there was such a small sample set that it would be like, it would have been irresponsible. But first things first, if you’re in sales and you’re in technology now, Damian, I think you owe it to yourself to really understand, can I do the basic things from a technology and data standpoint that I need to do to be able to, there’s no there’s no data illiteracy that’s going to, that’s going to survive.

And same thing with AI. I don’t think that we in sales have to be able to code it necessarily, but one, we have to know what’s coming to, we have to be literate in it. And so whether that’s on LinkedIn or Microsoft or Salesforce other trail the trailhead on Salesforce got some great free resources and I’ve taken a bunch of them.

So now when I’m looking at, what’s a large language model, how are large language models getting trained? And then the applicable to the sales model okay, how does that large land, large language model matter to someone who wants to put a chat bot on their support interface? Depending on the large language model has been trained on, what’s their compliance?

Are they able to hold within policies? Were they trained on something that is completely out of left field and you don’t know what they’re going to give? I heard a story recently about a chat bot for an airline giving away a free ticket. It was against, against their policies. But if we in sales don’t understand the basics of it, then we can’t have the conversation and I don’t know that we’re going to be the ones who are really going to be driving the implementation, but I’ll give you two things to think about.

The first one is you have to be involved in the conversation. A very good friend of mine said that if we leave this to the data scientists, we’re going to get a data scientist answer. And they don’t understand what sales clues are. They don’t understand what we’re looking for in sales and marketing to try to drive revenue, buying signals.

They can put two things together, people who buy peanut butter also buy sardines. That may not be much of a correlation for us, but we’re, we’ve got a, from a business standpoint, we’ve got to be able to drive that. And so we’ve got to be in the conversation and we can’t leave it to the nerds.

And I say that with all love I’m a quasi nerd, but. We have to be part of that. We have to have the plan. And then we can’t sit around and just wait for it to happen. Pick a, an initiative, just get started, build the muscles. If you want to try it on the forecasting, if you want to try it on training, you want to try to enable it.

You want to try it on trying on detecting intent in your chat bot to see if there’s sales leads that could come from that. There’s a lot of different ways that you can use this, but I don’t think doing nothing. Is a viable option in this case, Damian, 

Damien: I think it goes back to the old adage of the best decision is the one you make instead of going after analysis, paralysis, and to be able to try and do that.

And as you said there’s a ton of information out there, which can be overwhelming, but to be able to make that decision and to be able to synthesize all of that and say, based on this, because speed is just as. As important as actually acting, right? But Hey, I’ll act in six months. Doesn’t help you.

You need to act now, even if it’s maybe 80 percent the correct answer. 

Steve: And the, it’s hard, especially for sales. Marketing’s a little better, but saw a stat not that long ago that the average tenure of a VP of sales and the SAS company is 19 months. It’s like a world war one artillery officer.

It’s, this is not, so when you talk about major transformational change, nobody’s really on board with that. They just got to try to make the quarter. So if you’re not prioritizing this then it just doesn’t get done and it’s that, the, we’ve all heard of the prisoner’s dilemma.

You’ve heard. So there’s another economic one. The term I love called the joggers dilemma and fewer people have heard of that. So the idea was based on an economist. I wish I could remember the guy’s name, but the idea was guy who runs ultra marathons or runs marathons goes out. He’s jogging. Has a heart attack and die.

So the joggers dilemma is what will, the short term risk that you’re involving, like I could go running and I could have a heart attack versus the long term benefit of running every day. And so how do you balance that? And I think we’re too worried that we’re going to have a heart attack if we go jogging and we’re not seeing the longterm benefits of getting in shape because it’s very hard for somebody in, in, in, in a CRO position or an EBP sale position looking past six months.

And that’s, 

Damien: I’m taking that to mean eat the donut, just eat the donut now and then jog it off later, hopefully. Hopefully there won’t be anything 

Steve: that is one option. 

Damien: And that Steve, that is exactly what we’re talking about here. We’re trying to do that bounce. We’re trying to get to that balance.

That 73 and sunny that, that area of sweet spot, where is competition a good, and where do you have to balance it? Where do you have to balance? Knowing, going from AI, fully or having, the human touch, where do you have the training and the just the research versus acting right now, all of this is the balance.

And I really appreciate your time and expertise and insight today, Steve. everyone, thank you very much for your time and Steve, we’re looking forward to seeing and following you on your new consulting B2B SAS models and outcome driven engagement. Thank you very much for joining us and have a great day.