When Your Buyers Are Ready to Engage You’re Dropping the Ball

Brandi Starr [00:00:35]:
Welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandi Starr. And we have another amazing episode for you today. We talk a lot about the dark funnel, that messy sort of invisible buyer layer happening before prospects ever truly land on your radar. And this is the space we call the middle of the funnel. And it's where buyers are self educating, exploring, navigating entirely on their own in many cases. And. But here's the one part of the dark funnel that I don't think gets talked about enough.

Brandi Starr [00:01:10]:
And it is, it truly is your biggest problem. And it is that moment that matters most, when the buyer is finally ready to engage. And that's where so many organizations are failing. You've been invisible to them for months then, or they've been invisible to you for months and then suddenly they raise their hand, they step into the light and they signal that they're ready to talk. But do you have the right processes, the right infrastructure, the right technology, etc. To meet them? So today we will challenge the belief that the dark funnel is the main obstacle. Because the real risk isn't what you can't see, it's what you fail to act on when the buyer finally makes themselves known. So let's unpack how to be ready for that moment and why if you're not, you're leaving revenue on the table.

Brandi Starr [00:02:04]:
And to have this conversation with me, I am joined by Maddie Bell. Maddie is the CEO and co founder of Scheduler AI where she built patented AI agents driving millions in go to market pipeline value. With deep expertise in scaling high impact workflows, Maddie helps B2B teams boost speed, personalization and efficiency. Before scheduler AI, she led billion dollar brands at Proctor and Gamble and now channels that strategic muscle into transforming sales and marketing engagement. Maddie, welcome to Revenue Rehab. Your session begins now.

Maddie Bell [00:02:48]:
This is awesome. No, this is great. I both feel comfortable on the couch. Right? Because what a, what a warm, cool vibe to be brought into but then also ready to go. I feel like you guys, you're right where it needs to be. It's going to be an exciting talk.

Brandi Starr [00:03:04]:
Yes. I am so excited to talk to you today. I had the pleasure of hearing you speak multiple times a while back at Atlanta Week and so excited to be able to continue that conversation. But before we jump in, our industry loves its fancy jargon. And let's be real, so many of the buzzwords are just fluff and can hold us back more than they help. And so for buzzword banishment, we get to banish and overuse buzzword. So tell me, which would you like to get rid of?

Maddie Bell [00:03:40]:
All right. I wanted to create some controversy.

Brandi Starr [00:03:43]:
Okay.

Maddie Bell [00:03:46]:
So I actually want to get rid of the buzzword speed to lead.

Brandi Starr [00:03:52]:
Oh, that one's gonna be a challenge for me.

Maddie Bell [00:03:57]:
So, yeah.

Brandi Starr [00:03:58]:
Why you want to get rid of speed to lead?

Maddie Bell [00:04:00]:
Right. And why do I? Because half of the day I'm talking about what a lot of people think that means. The reason that I want to get rid of speed to lead is because I think we've started to define action off that differently than what the buyer wants. So I would like to kill the phrase speed to lead because I would like to have us introduce and maybe focus more on the phrase speed to first conversation. Because I think a lot of people today have started to see speed speed to lead as a KPI or an email sequence or a routing path where the lead gets assigned to a rep as quickly as possible. And I think what's happened is our automations have started to define that term more than our connection with our buyers. Because at the end of the day, what a buyer does not want is the fastest email sequence possible to show up in their inbox. Right.

Maddie Bell [00:05:05]:
What they want is, is a meaningful conversation that moves them to the next step in the buying journey. And for those of us that are trying to win, quote, speed to lead with things like forms and sequences and automations, a lot of times what we're doing is we're not solving what the buyer wants. We're just kicking it the can down the road. Right. Oh, I got them because they got my email sequence. Well, great. What happens when they resp bond? Right. You still have not actually gotten to that first conversation.

Maddie Bell [00:05:37]:
And that's where we see a ton of pain. So I do want to kill a buzzword. I want to kill speed to lead, but that's because I want to replace it with this idea of speed to first conversation.

Brandi Starr [00:05:49]:
Okay, I can support that. And it is a perfect segue into our topic today. Because, you know, whether you're fire journey is happening in the dark, in the light, like there's all, you know, we talk about that from. They know. From the point they know you exist to the point where they are ready to engage. That's what we call the middle of the funnel, some of it's in the dark, some of it, we may know who they are, and there's a lot of emphasis put there and as it should be. Like, you need to make sure you're getting the right information to the buyer, you know, so that you're in the consideration set and all of those things. But the place where people are dropping the ball most is in that moment of, you know, where the buyer is actually ready to engage.

Brandi Starr [00:06:39]:
And so my first. My first question is, what's the most damaging myth about the dark funnel or buyer readiness that's really holding companies back?

Maddie Bell [00:06:51]:
I think the most damaging myth is that, you know, the moment they raise their hand visibly is. Is the start of the process. Right. I think for many go to market teams, when you think about your meeting funnel, your go to market pipeline for you, that moment that you finally get that contact into your system, that is, quote, the starting gate. But the reality is buyers start the process, like you mentioned, much earlier than their signal and. Or at least when they're. When they're willing to, quote, give you their information. So I think our myth is really that the start of a hand raiser starts when they fill out a form because there's so much there that's just not accurate in the way that buyers are actually buying.

Maddie Bell [00:07:43]:
A lot of people, they kind of know this, but I don't know that we've really internalized it. On average, only 3% of buyers fill out forms like to book a demo or book a call. 3%, right. If I knew that there was a 3% of rain tomorrow, I would not pack an umbrella.

Brandi Starr [00:08:05]:
Right.

Maddie Bell [00:08:06]:
There's a 97% chance that rain will not occur. Right. So we are not actually in the place where we're starting to think, okay, how can we start more conversations with the 97% of people that aren't willing to fill out a form and give you all their personal information before they've done their research. And that really, to me, is one of the most interesting spaces, because not only are people saying, hey, I don't want to fill out the form. I'm going to do tons of work before I do that. I'm literally going to almost do as much as possible because I know what happens if I fill out your form. Right. My grandkids are going to be put on a nurture.

Maddie Bell [00:08:46]:
But the other piece there is the what's happening before that form bill has really changed. And we really need to take a minute and understand that, because it used to be right, that the reason the form, the gate, the friction worked was because buyers needed information on the other side of that gate. Right. If I want to know how to get to the next step in this process, as annoying as it is, I need to go in, I need to fill out the form, I need to wait for somebody to call me. They're gonna have some questions, then we're gonna have a call. Then eventually I'll see the product three days, four days, five days, six meetings later. Right. And.

Maddie Bell [00:09:25]:
But. But they did that because they needed to understand how to solve their problems. And I think what's really changed is the barrier to information has fundamentally fallen through the floor. Right now, buyers can access information with a click, a prompt, a conversation about your business with an LLM. And so I think the time is extremely ripe for us to try to say, hey, if you can talk with my business, like, about my business with an LLM, why can't you talk about my business with me on my site, with my AI, with my conversations? Right. And so I think before, this was always a problem. Right. It's not like people were filling out forms in the 90th percentile five years ago.

Maddie Bell [00:10:20]:
But I think the stakes have just gone so far up, and people need to realize these conversations are happening whether you want to be a part of them or not. Yeah.

Brandi Starr [00:10:30]:
And I think that's a really great point, because the evolution of access to information is really what has changed things. Like, I can think about being a kid, if I wanted to do research, I'd go to the library. Or you had encyclopedias and the information was outdated. And, you know, people came to your door to sell you vacuum cleaners because information was not readily available. You fast forward, we get the Internet, more is available, but it was all protected. And now it's like gating. Almost anything is fairly pointless unless you, you know, unless the information has some impact because they can get the same information about you without you being a part of the conversation. And I think, you know, that, like that holisticness of how the journey has changed.

Brandi Starr [00:11:27]:
I see marketers adapting to slowly, and we see less people gating things and less people following the old playbooks, but kind of fast forwarding back to that moment of engagement where, you know, some statistics say they're 95% through the journey by the time they reach out. You know, that that percentage varies. But it's like, based on where we are now, what I'm getting at is how should we be thinking about that engagement differently in terms of how we are trying to orchestrate things So I.

Maddie Bell [00:12:08]:
Think the cool thing about all this, right, is our tech landscape has 100% changed, but luckily humans haven't changed one iota, right? Like in general, in eons, right. We're still irrational, we're still emotional, we're still relatable. Like we relate, right? And I don't know that that has really changed as much. And so I think the, the best way to think about that is I think we had the right ideas, right? So we do see companies starting to track these signals more aggressively, right? Signaled intent, right? Things that I'm doing that indicate I have indeed entered the dark funnel and we've seen a lot of robust platforms to track that, right? It could be a content download, right? Fine, I'll give you my fake information to read your content. Or maybe it could be, you know, attending an event or you know, mapping out different networks where you have people that are connected to different people. So I actually think our signals have improved. And then I think we almost got there with this idea of for each of these signals, we indeed need a different sequence, right? Like we need to have different conversations based on that, that little tiny signal, that hand raise. And I think, you know, we got close there, right, to say, okay, we're going to map out our signals, we're going to start lining up these different sequences based on those signals.

Maddie Bell [00:13:36]:
I think where it fell flat was a few things. Number one, just the sheer volume of those signals and, and the amount of use. Case level personalization. It's just really hard to personalize for a person without asking them about themselves again, without starting a two way conversation. You're just creating permutations and permutations and you're guessing. And I always laugh, right, because I heard someone say this once. You know the best way to figure out where someone is in the buyer journey?

Brandi Starr [00:14:07]:
Ask them.

Maddie Bell [00:14:08]:
Ask them. And so, but we didn't have that capability before, right? We really couldn't ask a question and create dynamic answers based on what the buyer said. I think that is where AI is coming into the go to market world in a uniquely valuable way. And in a way where, you know, a lot of people I see trying to replace human to human connection in the selling journey. I actually think that's not the first place to win. I think filling gaps between meaningful buyer seller connections is where AI can absolutely shine because it can take triggers at the infinitesimal level. It can have objective based conversations, say, hey, why'd you download that? Hey, what you get out of the event? Hey, are you still trying to Solve this problem and it can use that information to, to get to those next steps to cross that bridge, right through nurture, discovery, qualification and then saying, okay, yes, now we need to get this person to routed to the right person inside my organization. And for me, that's where I am most excited is using AI to go from signal to scheduled and using it to bridge the gap, not by spraying and praying, but making it easier for the right buyers and the right sellers to connect for the right reasons to move the whole process forward faster.

Maddie Bell [00:15:37]:
Because that is actually a way where companies beat the LLMs. Because the problem with those LLMs and asking them all the questions is they don't do the last step, right. I can answer you every single question about this business, but I cannot book a meeting with them. Right? And so for me, this is an opportunity to close that gap and take control of the conversations and actually galvanize the best playbooks and allow them to happen at scale. So for me, this is the unique area where, yes, our ability to have AI agents as part of our go to market pipelines is now changing our ability to match true buyer signals with true conversations that actually get the right people in front of, in front of your sellers.

Brandi Starr [00:16:26]:
And I definitely agree. I, you know, you hit on a couple points that I want to dig into. Before I dig into those, I actually want you to give an example because I think the thing that really impressed me most when I heard your talk is I've heard the message that you just said before in terms of like, this is where AI can thrive and in helping to capitalize on that moment where someone is ready to talk. And I had sort of mentally, you know, come up with what that could look like. But the way that you were able to kind of run down a real world example really was like it blew my mind a little bit because it expanded my thinking way beyond where I had landed. And I feel like I am, you know, at least a moderate adopter of AI at this point. And I know everybody's not there. So at first like to have you give a good example of what that looks like.

Maddie Bell [00:17:27]:
Yeah. So for those wondering, like, I'm going to give a few examples, the one cheat code that I like to give people is if you're looking to find an example in your business, don't forget to follow your own pipeline math. So a lot of times, right, people will listen to these conversations. I saw AI do a cool thing, we should do cool things too, then it will be cool. And the problem right, with that is if you don't go into it saying, hey, here's the buyer seller gap today, and I'm gonna go solve that. You end up with a lot of questions and uncertainty in terms of how to go execute and how to go roll it out in your company. So I'll give you maybe three examples, but I want to start each of those examples with, you know, how you would actually calculate it to know, like, if this is a problem. Right.

Maddie Bell [00:18:19]:
For your buyers that you need to go solve. So one of them we kind of talk tangentially is AI web chat. So the way we kind of quantify, does your business have a problem with that? Is to look at how many people are coming to your website every day. Is that 10,000? Is that 20,000? And what percent of them are filling out your forms and booking a call? Right? Because if it's the 3%, then now we have 19,000 people that are not even. No one's even trying to start a conversation with them. So, okay, okay. So we have 20,000 people no one is talking to. I call that an opportunity.

Maddie Bell [00:19:04]:
Right? So that's the first piece is we want to figure that out. If you don't have site traffic, if you're running exclusively in ABM motion, maybe this isn't for you, but if you have traffic, you have buyers. Okay, We. We. There's value in a conversation. Cool. The next step to handle that then, is saying, okay, how does AI play here? Uniquely. So, again, we're seeing two problems in the AI web chat space today.

Maddie Bell [00:19:27]:
One is we put up a web chat, and we're very sneaky. We hide a form in it right here. Do you want to chat? Great. Fill out this form. Right? And to be clear, they already rejected that route. They're not like, oh, now this form is prettier, so I'm going to do it right? So that is not really going to work. And then the second thing we do is we say, no problem. We'll have the rep jump in as soon as they start a conversation.

Maddie Bell [00:19:54]:
Because nothing feels better than just sitting around waiting for a buyer to ping you out of nowhere and then feeling like your tail's on fire trying to get to it. Now, maybe you don't think your tail needs to be on fire, but the average bounce rate on a website is 1 minute and 43 seconds. So if I go to a chat and you tell me a rep is coming, you have about a minute and 43 seconds before. I'm already tired of this. Right? Because you said chat. You didn't say waiting Room.

Brandi Starr [00:20:25]:
Right, right.

Maddie Bell [00:20:28]:
So the third way, the example of how does AI solve that tension is the reason you put the forms, the reason you need the reps, is you want some intelligence there. Right? It's not an if then thing. There's actual need for intelligence. And so, you know, we build AI agents that are able to say, can you tell me more about your use case? And we build AI agents that have qualification objectives, figure out who they are, what their time is to implement, whether or not they're a decision maker, and then based on that conversation, you can prompt your AI agent to either move them into a meeting with maybe a closer, move them into a meeting with a different rep if you feel like it's still unclear, or even have the AI send them some self serve, maybe a demo on demand if they're a small client. And so again, you start with this problem, there's thousands of people that no one's talking to. You look at the gaps in the ways people are trying to solve it today. Forms disguised as chats and things that reps can't handle. And then you say, what if I could put AI in there to kind of run this flow for me? And lo and behold, you know, we have companies that have delivered millions just by doing that.

Maddie Bell [00:21:43]:
So that's, that's one example. I'm, I'm happy to share two more. Or we can, you know, keep dialoguing into other fun areas of the GTM world.

Brandi Starr [00:21:51]:
Yeah, I wanted, I want to dig into that a little bit and then we'll come back to some more examples because one of the things you hit on, and I forgot how you phrased it, but talking about, you have to really understand your sales process, where the friction is, where the problem is to solve. And this is a big gap that I see for a lot of people when we talk about AI readiness and opportunities. I know even just from chatting with some people after your session that there were multiple people that were like, oh, we got to do this, this is the cool thing, this is amazing. But even just kind of picking their brain a bit and you know, they could have been a wrong person, but they weren't really clear of all of those. You know, what signals are we looking for? What are our objectives and next steps? What's going to be most effective? Like, it's really obvious when it's SaaS, like SaaS technology, you know, the process is pretty defined, but we see so many organizations that don't have that real understanding of not only the buyer's journey, but even clear process and handoff. Like the example you gave of this scenario, it goes to this closer type salesperson. This scenario, it goes here. Like there's so many companies that would get the tech, but they would, they, they don't have the process, the, you know, the rigor, we call it path to revenue or lead management.

Brandi Starr [00:23:22]:
Like they don't have any of that in place. And so I'm really curious if you've seen that as well and if you've got thoughts around how people overcome that before they just try to jump into, let me get this new cool thing.

Maddie Bell [00:23:42]:
No, I, you know, not only do we do. Do I recognize it, it actually, believe it or not, in our earlier days was one of our top business challenges. You know, we naively so came into the game thinking, you know, what the team needs is the AI agent that's capable of doing all the right things to book a meeting. All it has to be able to do is, you know, engage them across text message, email, chat, you know, hit the qualification objectives, use that to sync to the calendars, run the routing. That's cool. Prop, not links. Awesome. Do the reminders and the rescheduling, even better.

Maddie Bell [00:24:16]:
Record the meeting. Right. We thought we were hot stuff because we could just give you that thing. Right? And what we found was exactly what you said. Doing this right is both art and science. It really is. And you can throw all the science at it you want. If you don't have the artistic buyer seller journey mapped out in a way that, that feels like a good experience, the whole thing falls apart.

Maddie Bell [00:24:44]:
And what we called that at the time was white paper syndrome, right? Like we get customers in there and be like, okay, how do you want to qualify your leads? And they would be like, oh yeah, so will we just find out, you know, are they like more than 100 employees? Right. Or you know, do they live in Iowa? Right. Versus like, but don't you want to know things like what, what their challenges when they're trying to implement and they're like, oh yeah, that, yeah, I think I actually, I actually do want to know that. Right. And so we realized, wait a minute, they don't know. So there's a few ways that we have solved that problem. And the interesting one, this is going to get a little meta. We use AI.

Maddie Bell [00:25:28]:
So what we've started to do is we've been able to look at the thousands of, of AI conversations and booking workflows and start to allow the AI to actually research your company to put together a draft of best practices based on these Workflows, like, this is what works, and then actually allow you to become editors of that and that. I think, you know, regardless of how you get to that state, whether you use a platform like ours that helps you get there or. Or whether you use an agency or an expert or you just get your team in a room, I think starting with that first draft is always the biggest lift, right? Because from then you can go into optimization. You can say, oh, you know what, some customers came in, they answered that discovery question. I think we're asking it wrong. Let's just tweak that, right? You get into a great space of optimization after that fact. But it is, it is really getting in there, getting the commercial leadership right. This is not a technical challenge, right? So I see a lot of people being like, rev Ops will fix this, right? You need marketing and sales in the room.

Maddie Bell [00:26:37]:
And then like I said, using an intelligent platform to say, hey, based on what I know about you and your business, here's what I think you might want to go with. And then allow, like, again, you want a platform like ours that allows you to iterate on that and quickly change it and say, you know what? That's actually not what I exactly want. So, yeah, so we actually use AI to build AI so that we can deploy AI, like I said.

Brandi Starr [00:27:05]:
But no, I mean, it is one of those things because ultimately Rev Ops is the team that will deploy and make sure all the systems are set up and all of that to support it. But you are right in that they are generally not the ones definitely defining it. And the other thing that made me think about talk, like listening to you talk about this is getting this right also changes your team structure how you hire. Because even in that example that you gave, like, I would want to have salespeople who are like the closer, like, we know when we've teed up somebody who is like ready to go, right? Icp, like, you know, they're that home run hitter. That's a different skill set than the person that you know where there's still some questions, it's still unsure. You've got to do a bit more discovery to really understand there may be a little bit more selling in there. And it's like to me, like managing that friction point of when a buyer is ready to engage opens up so much in terms of how we structure our sales teams and what marketing is developing to support the process, getting them to that point. Like, it just, it feels like a much bigger change holistically across revenue, being able to tap into AI in this.

Maddie Bell [00:28:38]:
Way, you know, it, it is. And I think there's a few things that, that, that make that true. So one thing is, you know, if you look at our SaaS, it actually mirrors our functions, right? So you can probably look at a martech stack. We even have names for it, right? We have martech, we have revted or the sales tech stack, right? And then you have the customer success tech stack. We've actually built stacks at the functional level and we do that, right? Because organizations have buying structures and they have bosses that can make decisions. And going across them is a violation of business everything, right? Because now we got 10 people in the room. Anybody who's been in an organization is like feeling the pain as I'm talking this. The problem that I think AI is going to disrupt here is for a long time the one plus one equals three.

Maddie Bell [00:29:35]:
The lateral value across the tech stack was only marginally more helpful, right? Like, okay, like it's cool that these guys have this widget digit and they have this widget digit and they have this one. So I only have one provider like that's, that's fiscally responsible and helpful in terms of just mind spent on SaaS. So I'm not saying that platform consolidation wasn't valuable. It was. But it was more so valuable for the simplification for the team. What's different here, what's fundamentally different here is AI can take knowledge from the top of the funnel and apply it throughout. Right? That, that an agent that's capable of having that first conversation with a customer is also capable of being the one to reschedule the call when somebody gets sick. Is also the one to be able to record the meeting notes and understand where it needs to go next.

Maddie Bell [00:30:32]:
Is also the one that's updating the CRM and the lead status. You can create intelligent loops that essentially solve the leak across the pipeline. And that is unique and very, very different. So that is one thing that, that I think, again, I never want to propose a technical solution to people without a business rationale. And the rationale is the technology will work harder for you if it is able to work end to end. Therefore, to your point, we now need to see how our groups, marketing, sales, customer success can collaborate when it comes to designing this end to end flow together in a way that optimizes everything. And I think the one encouragement there, because that feels like a lot, right? Everyone's like, you just, you just asked a lot of change for me and nobody likes change, right? Like I get it, is that the, the New tooling is going to be able to help you break down some of those real barriers of the past. So, for example, one of the most famous is the MQL to SQL divide, right? The marketers say they're qualified, the salespeople say that's not qualified.

Maddie Bell [00:31:48]:
Right. And we just go back and forth, forth until eternity. A lot of that comes from a limitation in our stack which people don't really recognize. Which is most of that lead scoring is being done on firmographic data. Oh, you work at a healthcare company and it has 1,000 people and you have a title that means marketing. You are a qualified lead for sales. Right? And then sales has to go and be like, wait a minute, they don't have any intent, they have no timeline, they have no budget. The actual decision maker is in Guam.

Maddie Bell [00:32:27]:
Right. And so they were never able to match that. So I think the rise of things like AI lead qualification and screening, the rise of AI routing, will actually allow marketers and sellers to get in a room, say this is what we're looking for, and have a tech stack that can actually deliver those exact leads to them 24, seven, seven days a week. So again, it's an evolution, but it is real. It is happening now. And, and I honestly think it is just fabulous because now instead of an MQL or an SQL, you have a cql, a conversationally qualified lead and you know, based on a conversation you can see in your CRM and that this person has indicated they are the agreed upon person and that marketing and sales divide suddenly starts to streamline itself out. So is it a lot? Yeah. But am I excited for it? Totally.

Brandi Starr [00:33:23]:
I am definitely with you. And it's one of those things like I have debated, you know, there's all the debates about the term and to me the Q is all that matters. Like whether you call it mql, mqc.

Maddie Bell [00:33:37]:
The Q is all that matters.

Brandi Starr [00:33:39]:
Like it's it. The Q is what I care about. We can just call it a queue. And the, the key there because, you know, some people are like, oh, MQL's dead. And you know this. And it's like none, none of the terms like really matter. It is what you were saying around having the organization agree on what qualified looks like and then using the best technology available to identify that. Yes.

Brandi Starr [00:34:08]:
And you know, where we used to be, that lead scoring that you're describing, you know, I think about when marketing automation first became a thing you first, you know, because at one point all we had was firmographic qualification. Then we got marketing automation and we got some digital body language. So we started to marry the two where it was still dominant, you know, dominated by firmographic, but then we had some digital body language of what they're doing. And now digital body language is being called signals, which, you know, holistically, they're about the same thing. And that created a score which was way better than what we had, but still had a lot of gaps because it was a marketer identifying the things that they cared about and coming up with, you know, the most logical way to weight that and depreciate and all of that. And, and now the best available technology to do that same thing is AI that can look across the journey at all of the things, all of the signals, in addition to the firmographics, in addition to what it collects in the conversation. And I feel like that's really the evolution that's happening is not that things are so much fundamentally changing. Like, we're still aiming for the same things we aimed for 20 years ago, which is how do we best identify someone that's qualified and ready to engage.

Brandi Starr [00:35:35]:
We're just getting so much more sophisticated doing it 100%.

Maddie Bell [00:35:43]:
I just, I don't think the humans have changed. Right. We, we still, we still are, are talking about the same buyer tensions to your point. I just think we have a new way of solving them that, that can benefit sellers and buyers. And I also think it's not the way that is, quote unquote, the most sexy thing on the street that everyone's talking about right now. You know, a lot of times, you know, we see, oh, well, this AI just raised 500 bajillion dollars and it's going to replace CFOs or salespeople. And I think that's fine. Okay, Like, I haven't seen that yet.

Maddie Bell [00:36:21]:
So not, not saying it isn't coming. Obviously I don't have my own fortune telling in, in this podcast, but I think just taking a step back and saying, but we can meaningfully improve buyer seller journeys by doing things that maybe aren't sexy, but indeed operate in service and sell as a service to, to people. And I think what's cool about that is, you know, a lot of people talk about AI as if it's SaaS and it's, it's not right. Like, you know, SaaS is point and click from an operator, AI is, is truly a describe and done workflow and more. So AI agents will be integrated into working teams. And I think, you know, any AI that's coming in and Saying I want to, you know, spam this person's TAM and take this person's job and make this person do something. Because I've suddenly researched this them more. I just don't think that's how humans are going to respond.

Maddie Bell [00:37:22]:
Well, right, like we are going to push back versus, you know, creating AI that creates these invisible bridges and removes friction from human to human connection. I think it's just going to be an agent that you're more willing to hire into your organization. Because at the end of the day, if people don't hire these agents, it does not matter. Right. And if they don't collaborate with them, it does not matter. Because when we as, as business builders do that in the context of teams. And so I think making sure that each AI agent has an authentic and fair role within the team that it serves is just as much a part of the journey as the tech itself. So like I have, I, I'm named an inventor on a US patent for conversational AI meeting scheduling and yet I spend a lot of my day saying, hey, is this the way the AI should be interacting with the humans? Did that give them all a.

Maddie Bell [00:38:18]:
Because the AI was there, was it able to go unnoticed where it should have so that they can focus on what's important to them?

Brandi Starr [00:38:25]:
I was gonna say. And that's a, that's a perfect segue that we've talked about the problem, now let's give some advice to fix it. Welcome to the lightning round. So this is fast answers only. Let's make sure our listeners leave with actions that they can take right now to start making an impact. So four questions finish this sentence. If your company keeps dropping the ball when buyers are ready, the first thing you should do is measure it.

Maddie Bell [00:38:54]:
Find out how many balls are getting dropped. We have calculators. You can grab me on LinkedIn and I will send them over to you for free. But measure it. Once you can quantify the problem, you can actually solve it and measure if your solution was successful.

Brandi Starr [00:39:09]:
What's one red flag that signals a company isn't ready to engage buyers, but they might not sell?

Maddie Bell [00:39:15]:
See it yet again, you are pushing out a ton of one way communication and buyers are either not converting off of that one way communication because you just keep slamming it at them and they're ignoring you, or they finally are responding and you're not there within one to two minutes to handle it. So number one, they're either not, they're either ignoring you because you're just pushing too much at them, or when they finally stop ignoring you, you're too slow.

Brandi Starr [00:39:46]:
What's the most common mistake teams make when trying to fix their buyer engagement process?

Maddie Bell [00:39:53]:
I think they look for solutions to new things rather than solving problems that again, they already have. Right. Because at the end of the day, if we're already making buyers wait hours, days, if we follow up at all, just solving that in the near term is going to get you a measurable pipeline win now without having to re redo and try all this new stuff that you don't really know where it's going to go. So I think the most common mistake is you're trying to solve this possibility of ooh, that was cool. Versus hey, here gaps that I have today. If I can solve them quickly, I create that first win that inspires the rest of the build.

Brandi Starr [00:40:36]:
And lastly, what's the fastest action someone can take today to improve how they capture ready buyers?

Maddie Bell [00:40:43]:
Starrt more conversations and use AI to make them fair, objective based conversations designed to help and serve the buyer. Getting to the next step, which ideally is a meeting with your team. But don't rush it. Give the AI a chance to figure it out, have the conversation and move the buyer in the right direction.

Brandi Starr [00:41:06]:
I love it. Every good session ends with a plan for progress because just talking about our problems won't fix them. Well Maddie, I have truly enjoyed this discussion. And before we go, if people want to connect with you and continue the learning, tell us where they can find you. And definitely do the shameless plug for Scheduler AI.

Maddie Bell [00:41:31]:
Cool. Well you guys can all find me on LinkedIn. My name is Maddie Bell. Like ding dong the bell. So you should find me there. And yeah, I run Scheduler AI. So we build fully autonomous AI agents designed to convert warm leads into qualified meetings at their highest moment of intent. And we'd love to help you get started on your first AI meeting center to help you grow your business.

Brandi Starr [00:41:58]:
And I got a really cool demo of it and I can say the tech is is pretty swank how it works and how intelligent it is. So check the show notes wherever you are listening or watching this podcast. We will both link to Maddie's LinkedIn as well as Scheduler AI. Well Maddie, thanks again for joining me. Like this was such a great conversation and even gave me some extra things to think about in our AI usage.

Maddie Bell [00:42:27]:
Cool. Thanks guys. Appreciate your time.

Brandi Starr [00:42:30]:
Awesome. Thanks everyone for joining me. I hope you have enjoyed my conversation with Maddie. I can't believe we're at the end. Until next time, bye bye.