The AI Committee Is Step Two Now, Not the Last Gate

00:11 Warren Kucker: Hey there and welcome to an episode of Selling AI. Today I've got Jean-Marc Chanoine on the show. He's the Chief Sales Officer and GM of the Americas at Templify, which is a document generation platform who's been trying to kill off manual document work really since 2014, long before anything got called AI. Jean-Marc started out with a really cool background. He was Navy Jack, Defense Attorney, he ran procurement transportations, transformations at Accenture, and joined Templify really as a strategic AE in 2019. worked himself up to chief sales officer. So I'm super pumped to dive into that career arc. here's what makes it interesting. His argument is that selling AI into the enterprise is really no longer a technical problem. It's a political one. How do you become this safe bet that wins? So today he has a phrase calls cover your assets, the economy and really talks about how buyers sell out because they think they can build it themselves and take less risk. so let's dive in. Jean Marc, thanks so much for being on the show today.

01:07 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Well, thank you very much for having me. I heard a lot about you. I'm really excited to be here today and I'm to have this conversation.

01:17 Warren Kucker: That's great. Really looking forward to dive in. So always like to start with your background and you have a great career arc. Tell us, how'd you go from Navy Jag through procurement at Accenture into a sales role at like a high growth startup?

01:30 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Wow, let's call it serendipity. I always want to be a lawyer since I was 12 years old. you know, they say don't let 12 year olds make career decisions for you. So I ended up in the nuclear Navy had a wonderful time there. And I kind of looked in the mirror and said, you know what, do you want to keep practicing? And I made the decision ended up at Berkeley got my MBA. And as you know, about Berkeley, it's tech, tech, tech, it's tech consulting, tech finance, tech, tech, everything. So I still didn't know what I wanted to do. So I ended up at Accenture Strategy. I was working this project and I was doing procurement strategy, but the technology around it. And we ended up doing this large scale project. We were trying to do document automation with one of the hyperscalers. I'll leave them unnamed for the purposes of this conversation. And it didn't work out at all. Like we spent probably four or $5 million, long-term implementation, all types of issues and it didn't work. So. I literally was sent off to go find software to essentially compile contracts. So typed it on Google, saw a Templify and I was like, oh, this is interesting. Clicked on, clicked the link. We ended up doing a project with them. And so what ends up happening is I emailed the CEO if I could come work there. He asked me, Hey, can you sell? And sold a single thing before then. But I said, yeah, came in, started our strategic accounts function with a deep focus on the big four and Accenture, so think Deloitte, KPMG, Y, PWC, and that took off. And that really led to this long journey of think seven and a half years now at Templify, where what we do is we help four million users eliminate manual document work. In essence, what we do is prompt the presentation for content that has to be correct. So when you think about audit reports, when you think about contracts, when you think about go-to-market content, it's things that quality matters tends to be external facing and there tends to be repercussions when it isn't necessarily correct. So we're in essence prompt a presentation for professionals and we help the enterprise save time, make more money, lower costs, you know, all that jazz.

03:44 Warren Kucker: I love that. I love that background. There's some similarities there. So I wanted to be an attorney when I was a kid. I had an uncle who was a state judge

03:49 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Nice.

03:50 Warren Kucker: who when I was eleven told me there was more lawyers in law school than there were lawyers walking on the earth. So immediately dipped that that dream.

03:55 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Ha ha ha, facts.

03:57 Warren Kucker: Don't know if it was true, so I'm sure it was at the time, but got rid of that really quick. and I've I've also tried to tackle the this document workflows mm nearly as successfully as Temple Fi, but saw a similar similar problem actually right around email. So I built some machine learning tech to help drive documents out of email, specifically in shipping. So really cool. I'm gonna come back to your career arc there later on because I want to talk about emailing the CEO getting a job because that's always what you should do. And I haven't done well in the past, so we'll dive into that later. But let's talk a little bit more about Templify.

04:24 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Yeah, let's do it.

04:25 Warren Kucker: so it started in 2014. I like the story. A lot of companies seem like overnight hits, especially more so are with so with this AI pivot, right? It seems like you're an AI company you started two years ago, you couldn't have started four years ago and you just took off. But most companies are actually in the weeds for years on end and then like LLMs became a launching point for something new and spurred growth on. In your scenario, like what's been drastically different since LLMs came into play and what's kind of been the same since then?

04:59 Jean-Marc Chanoine: think it's very similar and that's a great point you call out that, you know, there are very few overnight successes. There are some, but what it takes now in the market is deep expertise in an area. And if you go back to 2014, Templify has always been, let's call us the content slash document experts. Like we understood how content was made, especially when it got complex, especially once you started touching systems of record, especially when you're trying to create a proposal from data from, let's say, Salesforce plus a desktop plus a SQL database and how that marries together in order to get something, I would say, beautiful, right? Because I think oftentimes people, when they think about documents, think, it's a document. But if you really think about it, when you're in a sales cycle, right, this might seem a little bit off, but the quality of the content that you put out really matters. And so during that time, what we were doing was assembling content based on rules-based automation. It means that you had an individual within your organization make a decision that these are the mandatory components of a document, and then you'd inject data into a specific place, right? And that resulted in essentially 100 % accuracy because there was a determination by a human that this is the right process. So it did require a little bit of there being... let's say a repeatable process, right? Because let's say your sales team, you're doing thousands of, or if not hundreds of thousands of proposals, there's similarities between each of those proposals. The product sets tend to be similar and we compiled them. Once LLMs got introduced, I think what really happened is this idea of magical assembly showed up. It's like, hey, I'm gonna give brief instructions to this magic button and it's gonna give me something that works. And I think that... For us, LLMs are a tool, right? What they do is they reduce the amount of implementation you have to do. They give more, essentially, variety. It allows us to deploy significantly faster. It's assisting us in the journey that we're taking. So I would say that since LLMs popped up, it's really helped our business because it's allowing for faster creation of content. And so for us, it's just an accelerant. But I think what has really changed is the minds of people that are purchasing it. is this expectation of a magic button where there isn't any implementation burden. They don't necessarily have to put people or FTEs to determine what the quality of the content should be. So I think it's more of a, it's like you called that early on, more of a political issue now with LLMs. That's what's really changed, not necessarily from a technology perspective.

07:46 Warren Kucker: Interesting. And we'll get into the buying cycle there. That'll be super fascinating. But let's talk about like almost go-to-market team construction and this kind of shift that you talk about, right? I think there was a I have a hypothesis that like 2015 to like 2022 was almost like the age of the generalist, right? Everyone was looking for people with sales skills that were industry agnostic, right? And what's ironic is that LLMs kind of democratize building product and a couple of other processes as well. So like then there's like whole bunch of new entrants into the market that can do things that they couldn't do before, right? So now there's more people, but now it's almost focused. We've come back to industry expertise is like paramount in this space, especially in driving go to market. Like I don't know, I was heavy on sales skill first. You could teach someone the industry. I've swung like 180 degrees here. Have you felt the same? Have you started to think about the go to market process and kind of the same shift that industry knowledge process knowledge is just key in this space.

08:46 Jean-Marc Chanoine: I think it's become more important because pretty much any company can come out with a bad version of a solution. Like they can come out with something. Right. And I think the barrier to entry before was significantly higher. When it comes to specific skills, I think it's always been additive, like in my case, right? What I've seen is that I was a consultant, I was a lawyer, and I studied finance and business school, and our buyers at Templify were those people. So one of the reasons I was able to climb up quickly was because I had that specific industry knowledge, especially within the organizations I've been selling to. I don't think that has changed. I think being an expert in the arena has always been important because people want to buy from people that they feel are experts or learning something, they're picking up something. And I think the big shift now because of the ability to vibe code and I won't say enterprises are vibe coding. What they're doing is they're putting engineering teams to use the frontier models to build something with those tools. Let's give them a little bit more credit.

09:51 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

09:53 Jean-Marc Chanoine: that

09:54 Warren Kucker: Agreed.

09:54 Jean-Marc Chanoine: in light of that, part of their engagement with you has to do with your expertise. Because if you're not an expert, they feel that they may be better off just doing it themselves. So I do agree with you, actually. I do think it's become more important. I don't think it's the end all be all that you have some expertise

10:13 Warren Kucker: No, I just could.

10:14 Jean-Marc Chanoine: that they don't have internally.

10:17 Warren Kucker: It's a it's a good point. In a scenario, I I someone a CFO told me recently the way they look at LLMs is that the cost of engineering inputs has dropped. And this is a common theme over the economics for four hundred years, right? That's all we've done is dropped the cost of inputs, right? But like it doesn't mean that the company you're selling to, one of the big fours or a large enterprise, has expertise in actually how their teams are constructing presentations and documents in a way that makes any more sense. So they could build that like high level tool that like anyone can build internally, but their expertise is somewhere else, right? So like having

10:48 Jean-Marc Chanoine: you you

10:54 Warren Kucker: the sales and CS person that you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis not be blind to how that process works and having like some level of like good knowledge I think has become more important. than it was maybe than it was a couple of years back. You have to you have to show that you are the option beyond build.

11:13 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Absolutely. I think you're completely right there. I think one thing that organizations are overestimating is their internal knowledge of their processes. And I think it's what I've seen in the market is that like we deal with hundreds of consulting firms and accounting firms and we've seen a variety of different processes. Oftentimes when we're talking to a company, They may only know themselves and the other component of it, they haven't even captured the processes. Because a lot of processes are informal. They're completely informal. So we've gone into organizations with 400,000 users, right? And we're trying to, let's say, automate audit reports that are required by the SEC and other governing bodies. And then when you actually get in and start having the conversation, they themselves don't necessarily know the exact process of how work. exactly gets done. And so by default, what happens is, you know, they give access to the chatbot, they run rag, they, in essence, great, they can do the research on that component. But when it comes to the actual compilation of the content, we do come in with a specialized knowledge in that case. And if you're, if you don't, you're doomed. Because the problem is, it's kind of the blind leading the blind oftentimes into scenarios like They're unsure of what the process is. So if you're completely reliant on the organization you're working with, and this goes for banks, this goes for consulting, this goes for audit, this goes for a lot of professional services firms, and even companies that are, let's say, in consumer goods, same thing. These processes weren't designed with LLMs in mind, nor were they captured because the actual knowledge was within the user base and you're getting top-down decisions. So I think it's absolutely right that once you become a trusted advisor, it becomes significantly easier to sell software. So you've convinced me that, yeah, you're right. It's been a big shift.

13:07 Warren Kucker: You know, it's not new, right? Like I every time I have this conversation, almost like every single time, it's like what's n old is new again, right? So like the human-to-human relationship,

13:15 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Correct.

13:16 Warren Kucker: what you know versus what is commoditized, has really been elevated in a way that maybe it was de-emphasized five years ago. And I think that takes me into our our next question. You have like a big hypothesis around the political aspect of buying, let's say, a big piece of software or a service, right? Or like making a safe bet rather than the maybe the best w potential outcome bet. Tell me a little bit more about this. Where do you see this shift in how execs are buying software and some of the core reasons why they may make one decision over another?

13:47 Jean-Marc Chanoine: I think the observation I've had, well, I know I've been through this a lot the past two years is in 2024, if you go back then, everybody was like, what are you doing with AI? Right? There were at least at that time two possible bets and this is before Anthropic truly fully took off before Claw became like a household name. You're either buying open AI through Microsoft or you were buying directly from open AI. That was it. And then with Anthropic really kind of bumping up quickly, what you saw were massive investments early on and also CFOs and CEOs not quite understanding what they were buying. And to be fair, how could they? Right? Like really it became in the public conscience at the earliest, let's say end of 22. That was probably the earliest time that people just started deeply brewing, at least within the enterprise. And so big investments were made, but then gears started to pass, right? So balance sheets started to, people started looking at it. And the facts simply are that the style and type of ROI that was promised and the performance that was promised isn't there. Now on top of it, they're higher big teams, right? Or at least reposition folks to be the AI committee or the AI engineering team. Again, folks with very little experience if you think about it, right? It's Imagine only having two years of experience or like, okay, great, we're gonna throw 100 million or 50 million or 20 million or $10 million at problems that haven't been identified. So now what's happened, okay, big budgets are being spent. I think the the layoffs you've seen recently in tech have nothing to do with AI. It mostly has to do with over hiring in 2021. And

15:25 Warren Kucker: Yeah, great.

15:27 Jean-Marc Chanoine: also the AI budgets are up and it's like an easy scapegoat for it is oh, our AI spin, we're replacing this with AI. That's not it.

15:33 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

15:35 Jean-Marc Chanoine: So now, let's say you're trying to sell a solution to them, right? Let's take Templify Document Automation that's fit for purpose, right? It's a solution that is extremely fine-tuned to create great proposals, great content that's visually appealing. Great. When you go to speak to these executives, what you end up with is that they've been burnt, right? They've been burnt in the past because some of the early bets with, let's say, startups and other companies, it didn't work out well. So... you know, once you've been burnt once in those scenarios, you start increasing the bar for, let's say, other parties to come in and sell those solutions, and in which case the only way is to solve the unsolvable, right? Like, you really gotta come in there and show them that you are experts, as you called out earlier, that the ROI is clearly there, and also that you have history of some performance in solving the use case. And so what I mean by the politics of it is that the barrier to entry is just significantly higher than it was back in the day. And also you have companies that are reducing their spend for SaaS solutions, classic software. So you put all those

16:42 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

16:42 Jean-Marc Chanoine: things together, people would rather make a bet that, hey, if I buy from one of the large hyperscalers or I buy from one of Frontier models and it doesn't work, it's not my fault, I bought the best. And that's always been the, hey, if you buy IBM, you're not gonna get fired.

16:55 Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah. At the end, yeah. Right at the end.

17:00 Jean-Marc Chanoine: scenario that's just creeping up again as you called out. What's old is new.

17:05 Warren Kucker: Yeah. What's interesting, I think what you're distilling there too, is there's also this motion. I've been talking to a lot of C S leaders who are at the front line of this where enterprises kind of gotten tired of buying software, just p even pre L L So ignore that for a second, right?

17:19 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Yeah.

17:20 Warren Kucker: There's a seven year venture capital spurned like disruptor SaaS economy where everyone was finding solutions to solve problems that they were expecting would they'd overcommit and underdelivered, but it underdelivered too much. And then price increases were starting to come into play at the same time, right? Like so like now things are getting more costly and you see the results of it and it's not what you expected. It's almost like the investment in early AI that was driven really at the board level, out of fear, was like the final straw, right? Where it's like, all right, you know what? Like, pull it back. Like, this is official. Like, you don't have to solve every problem with a piece of software. I think this is what kind of what you're describing here, right? Like it's now it's like everyone's kind of pulling back and reassessing, I mean, how do you deploy software? And I think the result is entrenched bigger players that have less risk associated with the logo. we'll actually end up with a moat that we didn't think we'd have compared to incumbents or not incumbents, the opposite of incumbents, you know, disruptors, right? Great, there's this

18:23 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Entrance. Yeah.

18:25 Warren Kucker: piece of software, it's cheaper, it's better, but you know what? Like I'm

18:27 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Thanks.

18:29 Warren Kucker: gonna go to the board, I said we did this, and then when I my people are mad, I'll just say, everyone uses it, figure it out, right? So like it's that's kind of what you're describing here, right?

18:37 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Yeah, and there's another interesting little nugget underneath it. What you're noticing is that if you take the Frontier models right now, they're giving away the software for free, right? They charge for tokens. And so what they're doing is they're allowing you to build software that consumes tokens. They're giving away software that consumes tokens. It's almost like the electricity company selling you your air conditioning for free. Right, and as a buyer, you're like, hey, do I wanna pay whatever value for that software or do I get it for free, build it myself, essentially try to deploy it? And at the end of the day, what we're seeing is a lot of failure on the maintenance side. So, and what's not thought of is like, hey, if you build it, you gotta maintain it, you gotta update it. Technology changes over the course of a year and a half. And I think what you're gonna see, and at least what I'm seeing from some of our customers and what I'm hearing out in the market is that like, yeah, they're starting to discover that it isn't necessarily financially better to do that. But I totally agree with you that there has been this software fatigue thing that kicked in, I think, 22, 23. And also, look, you buy from a startup, it's about growth. You're gonna get price increases along the way. And oftentimes the entry price may not even be profitable for some companies. not to call out Anthropic or OpenAI, them either, right? Like the cost of tokens is less than that a company pays for is less than it is to produce it. And so it's a market that's moving all over the place. And if you're a CIO or a CEO, your job is to last longer than three years. So you're gonna make the short term decision, right? To potentially make a larger investment in a safer name, that if it goes wrong, that you're less likely to be fired if we're just gonna be straight up.

20:32 Warren Kucker: So how are you to talking to your team, how is your team talking internally about how to steer into this shift with your economic buyers, your champions on on big deals? are you changing tactics at all? What are you focused on when you're doing deal inspection? What are you focused on to try to solve for this problem?

20:51 Jean-Marc Chanoine: I think one of the biggest practical things to do is making sure that the AI committee at the organization is engaged extremely early in the cycle. It's a new step in the process and it's a new mandatory step in the process. So back in the day, you had a champion, you had IT, some mid-level IT person inspecting it to make sure that you weren't going to introduce risk into the system. What they were doing were security evaluations. and a little bit of making sure that it wasn't duplicitous, right? That's how it was functioning. Now it's flipped. So IT is taking a much larger role, and by IT I mean the AI teams and the AI focus component, and also the budgets have gone in that direction. So I think one of the biggest conversations we have is to have that conversation early in assuring that what we're trying to sell within the organization isn't in conflict with what the AI strategy of that organization is. Some companies have a strategy which is like, we buy from a frontier model, we try to build everything ourselves, we let it ride, if it fails, we get another third party solution. We're perfectly

22:00 Warren Kucker: Thank you.

22:01 Jean-Marc Chanoine: fine with that. We've seen companies bounce back six months later. Usually what it causes is delays, not purchasing. And so they'll try

22:09 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right.

22:10 Jean-Marc Chanoine: for six months and then land at the conclusion that, okay, this isn't worth doing. I think the difference is now that if you don't have that early engagement with the folks that run the AI strategy, you're going to end up getting shot at the end of the sale cycle. So I think it's changed the way that you do MedPic. It's changed the way that you run a cycle. That's now way ahead. It's not the last step. It's almost the second step once you've found the exact issue in those cases. That's

22:36 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

22:36 Jean-Marc Chanoine: the biggest change I would say.

22:38 Warren Kucker: Interesting. That's that's an that's a really interesting perspective and you guys are at the forefront of knowing this. It's almost like the shift w what happened, it's easy to forget these things are relatively recent, but it was like the operator who had the problem drove the decision and procurement was the gate that said, This doesn't fit for a various different reasons, right? It doesn't fit our contractual ethos, our long-term strategy, whatever that will be, right? And they were the gate. It actually sounds like now because Almost every process is a data play at its core, right? Like we have this data that we're generating. How do you turn it into a workflow that like is optimal? That's almost like an IT first discussion in a lot of cases, right? Like how you manage documents at a large organization is an IT strategy piece. And then the operators follow suit, right? It's an interesting shift that you're describing there in the buying cycle.

23:32 Jean-Marc Chanoine: It's basically an area where can you solve the problem with the Frontier model? and essentially using cloud code or using cursor using codecs and can you build something that is now there isn't even a pause to ask that question and it gets even more complicated because what you have is various pockets within the organization are trying to randomly build things like it is the amount of the number of agents that are

24:02 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

24:02 Jean-Marc Chanoine: being built within an organization is wild sometimes and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing And so as you're going through the organization, think one of the keys is

24:12 Warren Kucker: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

24:13 Jean-Marc Chanoine: to find the sensors of power and be like, look, like here's a use case, here's why it's valuable, here's mathematically why it's important. These 15 customers have also done it. And so the amount of evidence that you need to present very early on is just simply higher now because there is probably some human, like we solve a major problem. I think like 43 % of work within a large like knowledge-based organization talking about corporates, right? So if you take a Walmart, yeah, they have 2 million employees, but there's maybe like 40,000 folks like doing

24:42 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

24:44 Jean-Marc Chanoine: true corporate work, that is document work, right? And we're talking about even drafting emails, we're talking about proposals, we're talking about contracts, and those are the things that we automate, right? And so I think my observation has been that it's such a huge problem that we're solving, that invariably every organization that we run into, someone's trying to do something. And so I think at least for us and

25:07 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

25:07 Jean-Marc Chanoine: pretty much every company like ours with some specialized expertise, it's coming in and being like, look, we're gonna do it better. We do it better than the frontier models. We do it better than you. And on top of that,

25:19 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

25:19 Jean-Marc Chanoine: we're almost gonna guarantee that you're gonna get an ROI for it. And so the quality of

25:25 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

25:25 Jean-Marc Chanoine: your product just needs to be so high right now in order to overcome, I think, the politics of it all. And also the fact that like anybody

25:34 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

25:35 Jean-Marc Chanoine: who has some skills can build something that works 60%.

25:42 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Right, right, right. that's interesting too. And the document piece, it's helpful to be that core process, right? Like why you don't have expertise, don't touch a core process, right? Like you could probably vibe code Zoom, right? And then not pay for Zoom anymore, right? But the

25:57 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Absolutely.

25:58 Warren Kucker: moment Zoom goes down, nobody can get on a meeting, that's an organizational problem. Just pay for Zoom, man. And so like and be mad at Zoom when Zoom goes down, right? so these core

26:06 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Yeah.

26:06 Warren Kucker: processes Here's a build. Let me ask during the sales process. This I always get a little bit out myself. So how I've steered into this when I've gotten this great, we're gonna build it scenario. And most people were actually pretty self-aware that building it, there's a chance it doesn't work. Right? Like no one's coming to like, we'll build it, it'll be done in a month and it'll implement, right? But like they might as well. I've taken a consultative approach during that. I'm like, cool, let me help you build it. Right. So like here's I've already built it. Let me s show you some problems you're gonna come across the way and try to be a consultant along the way. And there's two outcomes. One, they build it well, and then they don't need me, but perhaps there's something else along the way. Or two, they don't, and I'm right at the doorstep and I've actually laid the the the groundwork to like great you have all this data where I need it now. Like onboarding is gonna be a cinch, right? on this here. Have you found, like how are your reps in this like, I'm gonna build it scenario nurturing those? Are they nurturing them any different? Do you find them like staying on top of it in a way that they didn't before be in this buy versus build cycle?

27:05 Jean-Marc Chanoine: I will say that it is time dependent. I'm gonna give you a real honest answer here. It just depends on whether or not there is adequate time to be doing that. Like, let's, we run a relatively slim team here, so we're pretty high ARR. Per person as an organization and that's been one of the shifts with AI right? there's an expectation that you're you have few employees and lots of revenue and So in

27:28 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

27:29 Jean-Marc Chanoine: light of that It's just it's almost a new expectation remember even five years ago the size of your organization was almost like a badge of honor It's like hey, we're really big look at us. We

27:39 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

27:40 Jean-Marc Chanoine: have so many employees today It's look how few we are and look how much revenue we generate is the new I think the bragging rights here, so I think what we try to do is make sure we stay engaged with the customer, right? And that requires maybe quarterly or monthly communication with the core team. But remember, there's two players here. Usually when we discover this, it's because the business wanted it and IT stopped it. If I'm giving you the full background here. And IT's the one saying like, hey, pause,

28:10 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right.

28:10 Jean-Marc Chanoine: because we wouldn't have gotten there if there wasn't a need. And I've even been on conversations, if you want to hear some interesting bits. where literally the business is telling the IT folks and the AI folks that, I know you're not gonna build this, are you? But they have to go through the process.

28:27 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

28:28 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Like they know what's gonna happen. We know what's gonna happen. So we tend to, you know, become close allies to the business unit and we sit there and wait, right? For them to do what they need to do. If the business need is important enough, eventually that overcomes the delay. But I can't tell you how many times in the past year and a half, We've run into a build versus buy. send over the document. We've actually built out documentation saying this is why this is hard to build. Literally like we, we, and

28:57 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Yeah, right.

28:58 Jean-Marc Chanoine: we hand it to them. We're like, here's the feature sets. Here's all the things it does. This is what you're trying to build. And the reason we send that over is because oftentimes IT, they see a two minute demo of templifying or like, we could do this. We're like, all right, good luck. I don't even try to challenge it anymore. I tell them that it'll be complicated to build. They're not gonna get to the quality that they need. And then I think the best approach I've seen convert the most is to actually take a step back and say, look, we're the experts here. We get it. You gotta try to build your shed. And then one storm comes in and then it falls apart. You're like, okay, great. Let me go buy a shed. It's unfortunately, I think that's a lot of it for, I'd say the non household names. Cause like we're not at the scale yet where say yet. that everybody knows who we are and they know what we do. And so it's easier to take a flyer on, know, co-pilot or something else and be like, well, let's try it with this. We already have a big contract. We already have like spend that we need to make with the Microsoft. Let's go ahead and try to do it with this software. Yeah, so I think it's having the swagger in the market to be like, we are the best at this. Check, do what you need to do. Hey business, are you still having this problem? And 95 % of the time the answer is yeah, they have not solved it. We're like, great, okay, is

30:18 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right.

30:19 Jean-Marc Chanoine: it time?

30:23 Warren Kucker: That's a really good call out. Let's combine these two topics into like something sales

30:27 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Yeah.

30:28 Warren Kucker: futures focused here. So you have document management, you have a new sh paradigm and how people are compiling, presenting, managing documentation. how does that change? How's that affecting a sales cycle or your internal account executive work, right? Like what should they be doing now or in the future using something like Templify or Templefy to help streamline their day? And then what other areas of like the selling cycle do you think are gonna change over the next couple years.

30:58 Jean-Marc Chanoine: I think the biggest shift has been on research, right? It's the ability to be well-informed is incredible now. And if I have to say anything about from 2022 to 2026 is that you should never be going into a conversation blind about what's happening on an active account because at least for us, what we've done is connected. We use a open AI chat GPT instance where the organization's data is connected to it. And so it's the ability to ask questions against the account, it's the ability to get notices about things that are happening. And so I think that one of the big keys today is that you have to be extremely well informed and the data also helps in the sales cycle because for example, Templify, we might do a hundred different use cases within an organization, right? We might be automating your proposals. We might then be automating your, let's take a large commercial real estate firm in this case. We might be automating the pamphlets that you show when you're walking to the building. At the same time, we're doing the contracts. And the reason I bring that up is that when you're working with one of our customers, you can actually see the data and ask the questions against essentially the AI output to understand like, hey, they're building X versus they're not building Y and therefore you should talk to this part of the organization. there tends to be really good information in the market or, and that's for any order. Right? that's any org you should be leveraging data and AI in order to make better pursuit decisions in that case. And so you can have individual reps be more powerful in those cases. In addition to that, communications. Like, there's no more bad written emails. There's hollow emails. I mean, look, AI written emails, they're hollow, but they're good. Right? And so that's illuminating. You don't need to be a great orator. But I think one of the biggest observations I've had is, and you called it out a little bit earlier, is that your top 1 % rep is still your top 1 % rep. The difference is now that your bottom rep could appear to be significantly better, but the same traits that made you good, right? The qualities that AI doesn't necessarily change, which is like how engaged are you with the customer? Do they like meeting with you? You know, when you put the when you put the meeting on a calendar like shit like this is the conversation I want to be having today. So I think it's the human element of it is still extremely important, but I would say is just making sure that you're tight on your data. And that from the pursuit perspective, especially with like AI SDR is now that you're leveraging your technology to do all the low risk activity. I would say.

33:41 Warren Kucker: Yeah. That's a great perspective. all right. Well I say last second last question because I want to make sure we come back to what we talked about earlier. So I loved you.

33:49 Jean-Marc Chanoine: You're good.

33:49 Warren Kucker: Email the CEO of Temple Fi, got a job as a strategic accounting executive. You never really, let's say, had a pure sales role before. So that's that that's awesome. it's something I never did well. I always give advice to younger folks now that I'm in my 40s that

34:01 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Yeah.

34:01 Warren Kucker: don't just back into your next role. Try to pick where you want to work, right? So I I kind of backed in, I backed into some great roles, but sometimes I would have wish I was more strategic about where I was working in particular. It's it's a little bit tight out there. you mentioned like your efficiency

34:14 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Yeah.

34:16 Warren Kucker: per FTE should be going up. We'll keep it sales focused. In particular, how do you think sales, like I say, account executives that want that dream job should be approaching it in a similar vein? how should they be taking that extra step to get the role that they want?

34:30 Jean-Marc Chanoine: I think treat it like a pursuit, right? Treat it like a sales cycle. so, and your book is the companies that you would love to work at, right? So let's say you're a rep and you had a book of 100, right? Do the same thing for pursuit of a role that you're gonna take, right? So it's listing out the organizations that you want to work at. And what's really cool now with Claude and ChachiBT, it's 10 times easier to do the research, right? You don't have to click on each and every website. You don't have to go to an aggregator. You can literally feed it the list. You can pull in the right names. You can get your own license of Lusha. You could send your own emails. And so it's taking the time to actually treat it like you're chasing a deal. Because oftentimes, I think the biggest observation I've had is people will do for others what they won't do for themselves. Like they will, for their job, they will send all those emails. For their job, they will make all these calls. their job, they will have all these interviews. But when it comes to your own career and your own success, there isn't a willingness to put in that type of energy into it. And so I think that's the biggest thing. For me, I wanted out of consulting, I was like, you know, I don't want to be building decks and giving advice that is followed 50 % of the time. for the rest of my career. And also I didn't want to be traveling Monday through Thursday every day. It was a wonderful place to work. But I just made a decision and I saw some really cool software that I connected to and I said, all right, let me go bother people. It wasn't just the CEO. I emailed the CCO at the time. I even applied. There's a funny side story to this one. I applied for this weird marketing role. It was like a mid-level junior marketing role. And I actually got rejected, I think, by the automated system. Anyway, I kept that email

36:19 Warren Kucker: All right.

36:19 Jean-Marc Chanoine: because it was fun. I've been there for so long, and I still have that rejection email because I thought it was hilarious. I'm now

36:24 Warren Kucker: Yeah, yeah.

36:26 Jean-Marc Chanoine: looking back at it. it wasn't just a CEO email. I messaged everybody. And eventually, I got a response. And so seven and half years later, I would say it's been a success. getting to a C-level title, relatively with my health intact. And so, you gotta shoot the shots similar to how you would shoot it for someone else who's demanding it.

36:53 Warren Kucker: It's a good call out. And you know, when I talk to people, they don't they're skeptical. They're like, Well, everyone's doing it. I'm like, No one does it, right? Like the extra mile does not happen

37:00 Jean-Marc Chanoine: No one, very few.

37:01 Warren Kucker: nearly as much as you think. It's easy to stand out in this space. And I think it was illuminating what you talked about that I hadn't thought about before. In sales, like just just because you're Like you should continue these this journey all the time. So you have your top 100, you get a new role, you're not actively looking for a new role all the time, but you should be nurturing those companies so that like whenever it's time to maybe get something new, you it's you're not starting on a cold start, right? Like you would never do that in your pipeline from a sales perspective. You want to work somewhere,

37:29 Jean-Marc Chanoine: True.

37:29 Warren Kucker: it could be seven to ten year journey, right? And you end up building a relationship that works out one way or the other in that space. So shouldn't just stop when you get a new role, just keep the relationships going. On top of it, in sales, it's easy. You have a top 100, maybe you're selling to 10 of those.

37:31 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Okay.

37:41 Warren Kucker: anyway. So you built a relationship in a future role that they become a future buyer.

37:46 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Absolutely, I think you're hitting it on the head there. Especially at the tier 1A companies, you're gonna network your way in. It is incredibly hard to apply for a role and get a shot. Especially now in the market, right now it's about profitable growth. for nearly everyone except for maybe four companies out there, right? I'll leave them a name, but we know who they are, right? Like they can burn as much VC, PE, money as they humanly can, but outside of a select few companies, it's about growing responsibly right now, right? That wasn't the case back in 2021. And what that means is that before hiring a salesperson, right? So back in the day, even we were guilty of this as saying, hey, If we hire these 20 people, here's what the success rate should be, here's how much revenue they should bring in. Let's assume a rent period that may or may not match reality of what has actually happened and this is what the revenue should be. Everybody was doing that. Today, that's not the case. Organizations are hiring differently. And also, there's some interviews I've heard in the past. I think it was like from... Oracle where they're like listen if the product's good enough It'll sell itself. There's also that deep belief at some of the tier 1a's and so Especially at that top tier like you better know somebody to get in or have networked your way in Before you need it to get over there and even at templify if I look at our hiring pattern Referrals are incredibly important especially if it comes

39:30 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

39:30 Jean-Marc Chanoine: from a person that is a great performer like If you're a great performer and you make a referral, the likelihood that person gets hired is actually pretty darn high unless they screw it up. Yeah.

39:39 Warren Kucker: Right. You're gonna have to have them. Yeah. No. Absolutely agree. It's it's a it's a good way to look at the process. All right, cool. Well last question. a little bit of a mini hot take or a maxi hot take. where do you see either like the future of work? 'Cause that's the space that you're in in Templify or sales. What's something drastic that might be different two years from now than it is today?

40:04 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Wow, that's such a fantastic question. I do think that you are going to see a major shift in hiring patterns in two years. And here's why. When you try to bolt AI into an existing organization, the biggest challenge tends to be that the organization wasn't designed to be an AI first organization. like the fundamental structures of the company didn't actually make sense, right? You're just popping AI on top of it. I do think the models will get significantly better. I do believe they will get cheaper and I do believe they will perform better in two years. I believe in a J curve there. And I also think that will be enough time for organizations to start restructuring a bit to make it work. And so there's some organizations that were bloated, especially in tech. I think tech, you're gonna see a big shift. So for example, there was a comment out there saying, what has more lines of code, a Ford F-150 or Facebook, right? And it's a Ford F-150. So it has more lines of code, a vehicle's a very complicated object if you start thinking about it, like the amount of

41:29 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right.

41:30 Jean-Marc Chanoine: things that need to work. And the reason I bring up this example is that a lot of tech companies aren't very complex to actually run. They're not. The big challenge for the shift into AI first has been like their actual structure. It's a discovery of processes, right? And so I think that tech is going to get significantly more narrow in the number of people within, I'd say, the successful large scale organizations. and you're gonna end up with a lot of small companies that are popping up because it's so easy to enter. So what you're gonna see is a narrowing of the number of people that work at Big Tech. Like it's gonna get significantly smaller. And what you're gonna get is artisanal software. So you're gonna get like the New York app for restaurant discovery. You're gonna get the Austin tennis. you know, club, blah, application. You're going to see a lot of that and potentially see AI create like a large swath of small businesses where you only need to be at two to three million ARR. You write it out, no VC funding. So I think that's a shift you're going to see probably in two years of small business making a comeback within the software world.

42:54 Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yep. That's a great I know. I'd say without expounding

42:55 Jean-Marc Chanoine: A little weird take, but yeah. think you're gonna see it.

42:59 Warren Kucker: on the point, I I talk about the same shift all the time is that like the again cost of inputs have dropped, so tech should get more narrow and fit the needs of the people they're serving perfectly. And I use the number again, if you're with four, five, six people running a three million dollar business, that's a that's a wonderful, wonderful thing, right? So like, in that scenario, discovery and trust take a different view than it does now, right? So like how do you trust someone that you're working with? How do you discover they exist? That's a completely different shift, right? It's almost like the Shopify model for e-com, right? Where now there's tens of thousands of e-com providers. And so how do you find them and how do you transact with them easily? And how do you trust who you're transacting with? It could be a weird shift and then that software is built for you and it works really well.

43:46 Jean-Marc Chanoine: You know, you just gave me another thought and I think what you'll start seeing is that companies that buy software, especially in B2B SaaS, that space, people are gonna start knowing who builds their software because the scale of the

44:03 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

44:03 Jean-Marc Chanoine: companies, especially for small business buying software, medium sized organizations, I think the biggest revolution is gonna happen not at the enterprise level, but at like mid market down. where you can have very localized software to the extent that the founder of that particular company actually knows the buyer pretty darn well. Because even for us at Templify, our best customers are the customers we know extremely well, we have deep relationships with, and obviously at the enterprise level, it's really hard to do that because there might be 25 people that in some way somehow manage or touch your software. But I think in this world where what you called out, where you have these smaller software companies that are running somewhat locally with very tailored software, especially in line of AI, like that might be this weird small business revolution that if you go back again, and I'll leave with this point, if you go back to the 50s, 60s, 70s before like the big box stores, before like big malls, yeah, America was dominated by a lot of small business. Even today, I think like what some super high 90, 80 % of businesses are small businesses. I think what you might end up having is we go right back to the scenario where a lot of software is built out.

45:24 Warren Kucker: Yeah. Couldn't agree more, and I'll leave it at that. John Mark, last question, where can people find you? Your conferences, you post on LinkedIn, if you're posting stuff out into the world, where where would the people find it?

45:34 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Absolutely, think the first place they can go is to our website. We have our, constantly putting out blog posts on templafy.com, also always posting on LinkedIn, whether it's Forbes Business Development Council articles or different media. And so I would say LinkedIn and templafy.com would be the best places to hear from me.

45:54 Warren Kucker: Great. Well, you're the first person who plugged their company. So good work on that. So TemplePy dot com is the right one. So I appreciate it. John Mark, take care. I appreciate you being on the show.

46:02 Jean-Marc Chanoine: Alright, thank you very much. You have a great one.