AI-Powered Sales Leadership ft. Alex McNaughten | Revenue Reimagined Ep. 035

Alex McNaughten

Frontline sales managers are the linchpin of a company's revenue engine, yet they are notoriously under-supported. Alex McNaughten, Co-CEO of Grow AI, highlights a staggering reality: 95% of sales managers receive zero formal management training. Promoted simply for being top-performing reps, they are thrown into leadership roles where they face overwhelmed schedules, lack coaching skills, and ultimately suffer from burnout. This systemic failure contributes heavily to dismal numbers, like a 39% average quota attainment across the industry. To solve this, Alex and his co-founders built Grow AI, an AI-powered co-pilot named "Taylor" designed to assist both reps and leaders. By having coaching conversations directly with sales people, the AI acts as a dedicated coach, offering leverage to stretched-thin managers. The platform not only provides reps with an engaging, human-like coaching experience but also surfaces powerful insights to leadership and enablement teams about product knowledge gaps, process bottlenecks, and team morale issues. Interestingly, Grow AI discovered that reps are often more honest with an AI than their human managers due to the complete lack of judgment from a machine. This level of transparency has allowed leaders to uncover massive blind spots—such as hidden resentments over lead distribution—before they result in costly churn. Ultimately, AI isn't replacing sales leaders; it's giving them the data and bandwidth they need to actually lead.

Discussed in this episode

  • The systemic failure of promoting top sales reps to management without leadership training.
  • How the growth-at-all-costs era masked horrific retention rates among frontline sales teams.
  • The mandate for managers to simply hit the number instead of standardizing coaching and operations.
  • Building a startup through tight co-design partnerships rather than listening to generalized industry advice.
  • The initial failure of the AI coaching bot and the pivot to make it highly engaging for reps.
  • Overcoming the micromanagement objection by framing AI as essential leverage for both manager and rep.
  • The psychological phenomenon of sales reps being more honest with an AI than human leaders.
  • Uncovering hidden team dynamics, such as resentment over lead allocation, through AI conversation analysis.

Episode highlights

  1. 0:00 — The frontline manager experience
  2. 1:45 — Grow AI's origin story
  3. 3:30 — Why bad sales management persists
  4. 6:15 — Ignoring bad startup advice
  5. 8:00 — Reps hating the first AI version
  6. 10:20 — Overcoming the micromanagement objection
  7. 13:40 — Why reps are honest with AI
  8. 15:10 — Uncovering hidden team resentments
  9. 18:30 — Balancing speed and product quality
  10. 20:00 — Rapid fire personal questions

Key takeaways

  • 95% of sales managers receive zero formal management training.
  • AI gives stretched managers the leverage to be in ten places at once.
  • Reps are more honest with AI coaches because machines lack human judgment.
  • Uncover hidden team dynamic issues before they turn into major retention risks.
  • Build your product alongside design partners to ensure absolute customer alignment.

Transcript

The the stat is 70% of the employee experience is someone's direct frontline manager. And if we're not setting up those frontline managers to be as successful as possible, then fundamentally we're setting up their teams to not be as successful as they'd be. Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagined podcast. We are stoked.

We have Will us, Will us. Man, I'm talking fast today. With us, Alec McDonan, who's coming to us from New Zealand. Alex is the Alex is the founder, co-founder and co-CEO of Grow AI, which is a team management co-pilot that helps up level sales leaders.

Prior to that, Alex was a top performing seller, revenue leader, and a two-time founder who's supported 150 companies building high-performing sales teams across APAC. Alex, thanks for joining us, man. Thanks for having me on, Dalan Adam. It's uh it's awesome to be here.

Oh, he said Dalan first. I I don't know how to. I'm glad I'm glad he said Dalan first. He he understands.

He knows where he is. Oh, no, I've started a I've started a competition here inadvertently. There's no competition. He's talking so fast.

He's got to get to the airport, but uh but cool. So, um when we when we when we talk with a lot of our founders, one of the big things that we find when you're building out the company that isn't as well articulated is your origin story. So, I'm curious a bit about where Grow AI started, how you got started. So, just tell us like from the from your heart where Grow AI started.

Yeah, look, I think it it really started for me when I was 19 and fell into the sales profession. Uh the classic thing of not choosing sales, just somehow ending up there. Um and then not choosing sales leadership and then suddenly having a team. And and you know, it's it's the classic story of rep to to leader uh never shown how to sell really, had to kind of figure that out, had some great mentors along the way.

Then running a team, not having no no one told me how to run a team. Um and then I moved and then I built two, two, um service companies. A sales and go-to-market focused consultancy business and then I also built a sales training and sales recruitment company. Um and then through that journey worked across so many different sales orgs from, you know, startups, growth companies right the way up to corporates and everything in between.

And I just kept seeing the same challenges and the same patterns again and again and again, which is this common story of we promote the best sales rep, give them a pat on the back. Suddenly they have seven, 10, 15, I've seen up to 30, but you might have seen more direct reports. And no one has ever showed them how to lead a team. And what does it lead to?

Well, it leads to Were you leading our emails? Overwhelmed schedules. Well, look, I I you know, I I don't think I what I'm saying is particularly new. Like I was talking to Kevin Dorsey about this recently and he was exactly the same reaction as you, Adam, just then.

He's like, yes. Um um and you know, but you know, what what it's led to, unfortunately, is we have particularly if we look at like frontline sales management, is we have a massive group of people who haven't really been given the tools to be that successful. So they end up overwhelmed, under coaching their teams because no one's ever showed them how to coach. They're not making optimal decisions all the time.

Ultimately, they end up often burning out and, you know, I think the the stat is 70% of the employee experience is someone's direct frontline manager. And if we're not setting up those frontline managers to be as successful as possible, then fundamentally we're setting up their teams to not be as successful as they'd be. And that that was really the um inspiration for Grow AI is I teamed up with my two co-founders. They're both hyper like super smart, super technical.

Alister had just finished his masters in machine learning from Cambridge. Um Dan's a data scientist, full-stack engineer, just like a 10x engineer at building things. And I was telling them about these problems and we were just like, the time is now. Technology is in a place where we can actually solve it in a scalable way.

And that's how Grow AI started. Love it. So, you you said so many things that like hit home for me. It's a long story.

A multitude of reasons. Number one, I think certainly I, but I think Dalan and I have both been that manager who was the top rep and we're told, great, now you're a leader, go have fun. Um, figure the fuck out. Yeah.

Um, to the point that we actually like wrote a guide on how to lead versus manage. Um, but a lot of what you said is true, right? There's so many companies out there that do just that. You're the best rep, so what else?

Let's make you a manager. But I feel like what you've said and the conversation that we're having has been had over and over and over. Like you mentioned KD who he's a good friend of mine. I literally just texted him and told him that we're talking to you.

Um, but we all say the same thing. Like the shit's got to stop. Why doesn't it stop? And how when you look at like your your go-to-market plan of Grow AI, how are we going to change the paradigm so that we're not continuously creating these leaders that are going to get burnt out and aren't going to be good leaders to those on their team because they don't know how to lead.

Yeah, it's Yeah, it's a really interesting question. It's a super good point. Sorry, Dalan, too. Yeah, it's a super good point because I was thinking about my journey in the leadership and it was more like I got into sales, I'm a as some people know, I'm a recovering coder.

So I actually did a bunch of coding early in my career and then I saw sales was broken. So I went in the sales, but then you realize it's not really sales that's broken, it's really the leadership that are telling sales people that is broken. So like I had this this calling. I had I was like, I got to fix how people are actually training the sales people and then training the leaders.

Like there's there's a huge gap. So it's I I can appreciate what you built out. Yeah, well, the the stat that I was able to find is that 95% of sales managers have never had any sales management training whatsoever. Um That's Which is so if you think about it, um I think Adam to your question, like why is this happened?

Why is it kind of persisted? Um I think low interest rates over the last decade has probably um exacerbated it because because money was cheap, it was cheap to throw just more people at the problem. It didn't really matter if our churn across the team was completely ridiculous. You know, if we lost a sales person every 14 months, oh well.

If we lost a sales manager every 17 months, oh well. Um I think now the economics have changed where it's actually not sustainable to keep operating in that way. Um so I think I think that's part of it. I think part of it's also it's just been this kind of cultural thing in sales that the numbers is the thing and the only thing that matters and, you know, the brief to the to the sales I was I was interesting.

I was talking to someone um an old leader uh who I used to work with, a senior leader at HPE yesterday, and he's been at Dell, HP, like all the big vendors. And I I was and the same challenges there. And I said to him, why do you think it hasn't ever changed? And he said, well, because the brief to the sales leader is hit the number.

And the organization doesn't really care how you hit the number. Um so there's no standardization in terms of how the team's run. There's no standardization how you have a one-on-one, how often should you coach, what should you coach to? There's no real standardization about any of that.

Um but the problem is it's just not like what we're doing isn't working. 39% average quote attainment. Like that's not good enough. You can't build a business off that.

Nope. 100%. It it's it it it blows my mind that even with that and what you just said is key, the only coaching a sales leader gets is go hit the number. Not this is how you develop your people.

Not, hey, let's figure out if the number's even the number. I was just having that conversation like, is is this number even really the number? Or is this just um we want to hit this number? Um and no one knows or has been able to figure out how to change it.

So I love that this is something that you're you're taking on. Um and certainly want to hear more about that. But switching gears a little bit. So you've worked with a lot of sales leaders and a lot of companies.

And building a company is um certainly as a leader, um more so as a founder. And I feel like every founder that we talk to has been given like this shitty advice of like how to build their startup, right? Go do this, don't do that. You have to do this, don't ever do that.

Um from everyone who thinks they know something. PS, normally the people giving the advice are the people who have not had successful exits, but I digress. Um, when you look at Grow AI, what's some of the like commonly held advice or like industry bests that you said, you know, fuck it. We're not going to follow that.

We're going to do our thing. Um, it's really interesting. I'm trying to think of a really specific example. I'll tell you what we have done and and we've been really deliberate about is we've ignored so we we've have been we've been we were told things like right when we started this journey like um you're crazy.

There's all these big players in the space. You know, like Sure. There's not room for for for for something, right? And we were just like, whatever.

And we just carried on with it because and what we did is we just got obsessed with the customer and we just built this in effectively in a design partner relationship with a number of organizations. Um, you know, one of one of whom became our first paying customer is a Nasdaq-listed mid-cap veterinary technology company. Um and then and then the rest were various growth companies at different stages. And we co-designed it with them and we just spent all of our time on product and customer.

Like that's all we did. And everything we built has come from customers telling us that would help. Have you thought about this? And then also just about um you know, and before we even started building anything, we interviewed about 100 sales leaders uh around the world.

So, I think that's really been what we've done. And there's a lot of noise, I think, that during that process of that's not going to work, or there's too many competitors or blah, blah, blah. But, um I think like you said, a lot of the people who give that advice have not done what you're trying to do. Yeah.

So we try and um what's the word? Um contextualize every bit of advice we get given. It's interesting. We're working with founders and we talked about this before we got on from Australia and they're doing the same thing.

They they built their product with a design partner in mind. It was not like, we're going to build this in a vacuum and then we're going to go find a market for it. Like they had the idea conceptually. They were building the product and then they brought in a uh a design partner to go through that design process with them.

And on the back of that became a product that could revolutionize a particular industry. So it's it's very interesting because so many people will go build a product and so it's like, I have a hammer, let me go try to find a nail versus let's let's build what customers are looking for and then it'll it'll be able to sell through on its own. Now, you have to be careful because you'll you may get like siloed into a particular place or like I can hear and like see feedback and comments like, no, you then you'll silo yourself, but if you're strategic enough and think through it, um really interesting perspective on it. Um I I really like that.

I I bet a lot of the stuff, you've dealt with setbacks already. You guys are nine months in, but I'm sure as you were evolving, setting this up, you've dealt with some some setbacks. And a lot of the founders that listen to the podcast are dealing with some of these these setbacks. So, um take a moment and just provide one setback that you had, one one uh place, what the key lesson was and how you adapted on it.

Yeah, that I think that one of the first early setbacks we had was when we first put Taylor AI in the hands of sales reps. Um and just for context, our platform is like two-fold. We've got a um our AI Taylor who runs one-on-one conversations, coaching style conversations and various conversations with the sales people. And then we analyze all those conversations uh and surface really interesting insights to the sales leadership, sales enablement and senior leadership.

And that helps them make better decisions and and so on and so forth. We first put Taylor in front of um these sales reps and they hated it. The very first version. They were like, this sucks.

This feels like I'm just like a it's like almost like it's just like an automated survey. It wasn't engaging. They weren't getting any value from the experience. And we really quickly learned that um although we are serving sales leaders and that's our mission is to help sales leaders, you know, effectively give sales leaders leverage.

Um and and be in, you know, be in 10 places at once um across their team. Um in order to do that, this the experience for the seller has to be engaging and they have to get value from every interaction with Taylor. Um so we then uh you know, focused for the next three months just purely on that. Just like, how do we build Taylor into a really useful, engaging, human-like conversational experience for sales people.

Um so that was one of the biggest setbacks. It was quite disheartening at the time when we put this thing that we'd been working on in front of people and they were like, nope. Um so yeah, that was probably the first the first big road block. People buy from people.

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Like no one wants to feel like they're being micromanaged. We were talking to a sales leader the other day and I think it was yesterday, Dalan and I I brought up like, so how are you guys recording your calls? Um and the answer I got was like, we could never record our calls. We have senior reps.

Like we record calls. Like what are you talking about? Like it's this perception of like micromanaging and it's it's not. It's how do you get better?

Like I I listen, I've been selling for 20 years. I record every single one of my calls. You could still get better. Right.

I I I mean, you say it joking, but I'm saying it dead seriously. Like I record every single one of my calls for that reason. Like no matter how long you've been doing this, you could still get better. Yeah.

Adam, he needs Taylor. I I Adam Adam's willing to use Taylor to coach Dalan. Um so You just love throwing me off uh off off my tangent here. When you look at, you know, talking to sales leaders and and sales reps, Alex, how do you get over what's the talk track of like, look, this isn't Big Brother, right?

This isn't we're not trying to replace anyone. We're not trying to micromanage you. We're truly trying to make sales leaders better. Walk me through that paradigm shift a little bit.

Yeah, I think it's it's it's the like leverage is kind of the word here. Um and it's just tapping into the common challenges. Like if I start with the sales leader first, you know, front line sales manager, got a team of 10. They're just overwhelmed, most of them.

They just have too much to do. They wish they were coaching their team. Like they wish they were being better coaches. They wish they were having time to diligently prepare for every one-on-one and come in and be impactful.

But the reality is that they're squished between 10 people here and a VP here. And they're trying to be, you know, they're just getting pulled in a million directions. So we just tap into that. And we just say, well, look, this will help with that.

This will give you that leverage across your team. And then your team are going to feel supported. They're going to when you're in a meeting with your VP, your team will have Taylor to go ask a question of and Taylor will know all the stuff that you know. Um so it's you know, really that's kind of what we tap into is is that um I think the eternal frustration in sales management that's been around certainly as long as I've been in sales uh and uh probably a lot longer than that.

It's super interesting. How do you uh how do you come up with the name Taylor? Uh Well, um at first it when we first set out, um we were we were actually uh cuz just because it just so happened that um we had the domain Emily.ai lying around.

So that's where we started. But then Dandan didn't want to use that cuz that's the name of his sister. Uh so so we changed the company uh to grow.ai.

Um and then we were at one point we had we were looking for sort of like a gender neutral name was basically was the original brief and I think it was Alister was like, well let's just call it Alex and kind of the idea. And I I was like, not really that comfortable with that, but I was like, all right, whatever. So it was Alex to start with. But then within like a week of doing that, all the customers we were working with were just getting confused.

They were like, you mean Alex or Alex? So we just that's how we ended up with Taylor. I like it. Very cool.

Um but like in the future, like where we see this going is um it doesn't have to be Taylor. It can be there can be an Adam version or a Dale version or an Alex version. Not a Dalan. Yeah, we don't want an Adam version.

Ever created Dalan. The Adam version has to have fully caffeinated from Starbucks. As much caffeine as you can get from Starbucks. I'll give you the avatar later.

Um Cool. So one of the big things that ends up happening as you grow the company and I've heard a little bit about this, but your leadership evolves as you go through a lot of these growing uh evolutions. So talk to us a little bit about the evolution of your leadership style. Maybe it hasn't completely evolved yet, but where where did you start from and how are you actually executing it potentially differently from a leadership perspective?

And maybe as you grow the the team more, what will that look like? For me? Yeah, for you. Um, yeah, look, I I my my first leadership experience was my first job in a tech startup.

My first sales hire and then suddenly I had 12 direct reports in about an 18-month period. So that was my first experience of leadership and I was probably a rubbish leader back then. I I'm I'm guarantee I would have been a rubbish leader. I didn't know what I was doing.

Um, so, you know, I've learned probably the hard way through my very first job and then, you know, later on in my career actually working with leaders to help them. Um, I think regular cadences really help. Like having like a like a having a structure, having like a regular cadence, uh that's something with with my two co-founders that we've gotten quite good at is getting those kind of like rhythms in place for the business. And I think that's really important and as the organization grows as well, is make sure that you have the right rhythms.

Um because if you don't, it's very very easy and I've seen it happen before where just communication breakdowns, inefficiencies start cropping up everywhere, et cetera, et cetera. So that's probably something we're really, really big on. When you um when you're building Taylor, and when you're looking at, you know, all the data that you see from sales reps and sales leaders. There's got to be some trends that you're picking up on and I'm sure there's some back-end analytics that maybe I could see as a customer, maybe I can't, but certainly that I'd hope you would see.

What are some of the like the biggest coaching gaps that you're seeing that Taylor's picking up on right now? Like what what what what's the industry the industry saying like, we need to change this cuz this this is we're seeing this over and over and over again and it's like a secondary use for Taylor that I could see of like, hey, like, this is great for you individually, but there's 58 other managers this week that Taylor's identified this exact same thing. Yeah. Um so, the things that we're seeing, a couple of interesting points actually.

Um one is sales people are more honest with Taylor than they are with their manager. Even though they know that the insights from conversations go to their manager. So that's been a really interesting So it's not anonymous, I guess is what I'm saying there. But people are more honest with Taylor.

So that's been really interesting. Um I think there's something to do with lack of judgment from a machine is kind of one of the fundamental drivers behind that. Um in terms of like the the trends that we're seeing, I think we're seeing a mixture of um if I look at it in buckets, like sales gaps, as in maybe like product knowledge gaps, they're super common. Like product knowledge gaps or um specific sales um parts of the sales process or you know, folks getting stuck on or struggling with objections, that sort of thing.

Um so we're seeing that. We then also seeing more of I guess the team dynamics, team motivation side of things too around um you know, like like a I won't name the company, but a specific example recently was about half of a half of the team felt lead allocation was unfair across across their team. And the leader had no idea about that. When Taylor surfaced this, it was a really easy fix.

Um but massive retention risk if you've got half your team kind of building resentment week in, week out. So um we're picking up those kind of more team dynamic um challenges as well across the different orgs we're working in. And then also picking up process uh gaps across orgs too. So picking up um inefficient or ineffective processes.

Super interesting. I I I like the lead like those those the the challenges that you may not you may have blind spots on because you don't know the right question to ask, but because Taylor doesn't have like the emotional pieces too because lead distribution, for example, could be a direct correlation of the leader potentially having favoritism towards one person and the other, but you don't really, you couldn't really articulate that and they probably subconsciously may be doing it, right? So um that's that's very interesting. That that's that's probably the biggest thing is leaders are consistently telling us, this is surfacing things I didn't know was happening, or it's helping me make better and faster decisions about things I might have had a hunch about, like my spidey sense was tingling, but I didn't know what it was and this has given me the data to actually make a call on something.

Got it. Um that's what we just keep hearing again and again and again. Super interesting. So I I I love what you just said how it it surfaced something that, you know, many people were saying because I I look back to like when I led teams and I've led teams of two to I think 300 and like there's things you think you hear.

There's things you know you hear. There's things you forget you hear. Um so to like maybe I hear today that someone thinks leads are unfair and then I hear it again in a week and then I hear it again in another week. Like three people said but but I'm not remembering that.

When you could actually see this like I I'm thinking of all the ways that that this could have helped me back when I was like legit leading sales teams instead of pretending to lead sales teams like I do now. Um super cool. Like really, really cool. Yeah, the common thread is super interesting.

I like that. Yeah, and it's it's definitely a space that I don't want to use the word underserved, um but is needed, right? I think, you know, and Alex, you probably see it like people try to do this with traditional conversation intelligence. Um I'd imagine that's probably the biggest thing you hear is, oh, we have whatever, I'm not going to name any of them.

Um but just from what you're telling me without even like I I can see a difference because my CI tool is great for, you know, having conversations with customers, but it's not going to pick up on any type of sales coaching like this. No, and the other thing that we No, and the other thing with I was just going to say the other thing, I I forgot it a another area that we're seeing a lot of use on is um allocating resource to effectively plug gaps across the team. So, like often a sales enablement challenge is what should we work on? You know, like pipeline is giving us some sort of data, but we're not really sure like what do we actually build training around?

What should we focus on? And we've heard that sales enablement teams are loving getting the data that we're giving them because it's saying, well, actually, it's two-thirds of the team are struggling with this thing that like exactly what you said, they've been talking about this for a long time. They're still struggling. They're still struggling.

And then being able to attribute, hey, we've now put an intervention in place and that's not a problem anymore. The team's not asking questions about that right now. That's good. So it's being able to kind of look at the, yes, we've got the numbers, the sales numbers, but then actually has some qualitative data to um to back up our decision-making.

Yeah. Super cool. Let me um Go ahead. No, please, after you, sir.

He loves that part. So, this is the best part of Adam's day right here. So, at Revenue Reimagined, we believe in giving more than receiving. And so, you've been grateful to uh provide the audience with a special gift.

What would that be, Alex? Um so, happy to give uh a month uh free trial of Grow AI to anyone uh who uh listens to this podcast and wants to give it a go. Awesome. I love that.

Dalan, We're going to be setting up an account for you. Yeah, I'm definitely going to need it. Definitely going to need it. Um I do have a question.

Normally we dive right into rapid fire. Um but one of the things I'm curious, especially because you've been around so many startups, um working with them. So a lot of startups struggle between like this shinn like is really important and we want to ship fast. But, you know, we also want to execute and like where's that balance, right?

How do you prioritize that balance of innovation of Taylor versus the execution? Oh, God, that's a good question. And I think my co-founders would have a better answer than me in all honesty. Um but, look, I think speed is really important.

Um but obviously, you want to maintain a good customer experience and you don't ever want to um you don't ever want to lose that. But we do believe in like we have definitely tested stuff in the field. So, like we've definitely released things. Maybe it was like 85, 90% like a new feature, for example.

Like maybe it's like 85% good enough. We're like, actually, we'll we'll say to our early customers like, hey, we're just releasing this thing. Like tell us what you think about it. Um and the learnings from doing that maybe a week earlier um has then enabled us to make it 120% instead of just 100.

So, I think um it is a balance, but that's sort of how we've thought about it. I think the bigger you get though, the less you can do that. Like I think, you know, you're a publicly listed company. You're less able to do that sort of thing.

Um because the expectations are different. Yeah. 100%. Love that.

I love that. Rapid fire, baby. All right, Alex, you're not in tech. You're not allowed to be in tech.

You're not allowed to be in any part of tech. What are you going to go do? Oh, God. Um, It's going to sound childish, but I would absolutely love to be like a racing driver.

I'm like such a petrol head. For me that would be a brilliant time. Yeah, why why why don't you tell them what happened to your car, Adam? Your nice electric car.

My nice electric car that I was driving down the road and literally got a black screen and it said critical fault and the car stopped in the middle of the road. Yeah, true story. Oh, no. Well, I had full brake failure at 50 miles an hour on a windy country road.

Yeah, that doesn't sound good either. Which is the worst experience in a car. I Yeah. Controlled crash was how that one ended.

I had a I had that as a in high school going down a hill in a 65 Mustang, complete brake failure with a T at the end of the road. And I ended up going wide and no one was at the end of the road, but same thing, ended up in someone's yard to stop. Yeah. Terrifying.

And you're still here. Terrifying. Yeah. Barely.

Still here. Uh, first app you check when you wake up in the morning? First app I check. Um, email.

Okay. Yeah. Alex, what's your go-to productivity hack? Um, I don't like feeling too busy.

If I start to feel really busy, it means I'm not being very productive. Um, and then I the second thing I'd add to that is always making space for like exercise, stuff that makes me feel good, cuz that ultimately makes me more productive. Love it. Cool.

Um, what's your favorite book related to entrepreneurship? There's so many. Um I really enjoyed Frank Slootman's Amp It Up. Um that I read fairly recently.

Uh yeah, probably that one's coming to mind first. Dalan's on a book kick. He's he's using chat GBT to write a book. I'm kidding.

He's writing a book. He's not using chat GBT to do it. Um but but he's he's he's he's on a book kick. What uh other than your phone, what's the one tech gadget you cannot live without?

Oh, uh other than my phone. AirPods. I didn't know Yeah, I was going to that's what I'm looking at my AirPods on my desk right now. Yeah, like AirPods probably.

Fair enough. Last one. Yeah, AirPods. Yeah, last question.

Dream vacation destination. Honestly, I think I just had one of them. Um took my partner to Santorini last year and that was pretty special. Yep.

Um yeah, I'd never been before and it was amazing. Awesome. Very nice. It's uh on on our on our list.

I can't wait to leave Dalan for three weeks in a couple of weeks. Um but I I cannot recommend it enough. It was beautiful. Like genuinely, jaw-droppingly beautiful.

Ah, can't wait. Not going there, but it's it's definitely on the list. Alex, this was uh super insightful for a lot of reasons. Number one, I know the tool I need to get to um help train Dalan.

Um number two, any time that we get to talk to someone who really understands deeply, um that doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again in the sales space that hasn't worked, isn't going to work and is actively trying to fix it. Um is something that I value tremendously. Where uh where can people find you? Where can people find Grow AI?

Um so best place to find Grow AI is grow.ai, grow.ai. Um best place to find me, probably LinkedIn, Alex McNaughton.

I'm fairly active there. Um post content pretty regularly. I am on Twitter, but that's more of a new thing. Uh so I don't have very many followers on there.

But I am starting to do a bit more tweeting, tweeting. Um, that was a boomer there for a second. Um, But yeah, LinkedIn is the best place. I love it.

Alex, thank you so much for joining us, man. We appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Thanks for having me.

It's been awesome. Really enjoyed it.