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Chandler Bolt: I run an eight-figure-a-year company, and we just added half a million dollars in sales to selfpublishing.com last month, and it’s all because of this tool that I’m about to show you. Look at this. You can actually see individual salespeople getting better. This is live. Literally, as we speak, there’s calls coming in here.
We can see the team as a whole. It’s pretty crazy. We’re replacing managers at the company with AI, starting with sales management. People watch this video, they’re gonna add a bunch of revenue to, to their business. Presented by
Andrew Warner: Zapier, the AI automation company. Chandler, this hub is what you all built using Lovable.
What am I looking at over here? So this is pretty
Chandler Bolt: crazy. So this is… If you think about what does a sales manager do? They give good feedback to sales reps based on individual calls. What’s the problem with that, though? They can only review a couple calls per week, maybe per rep. Well, now we have every sales call that happens in the business being automatically graded based on this rubric.
We, we got quoted, I wanna say it was 12 grand to build it and six grand a month to maintain it. We built this in less than a month ourselves using the prompts I’m about to show.
Andrew Warner: On Lovable, and Lovable is such an easy tool. I mean, we’re gonna show the screen. It’s so babyish that I hadn’t even shown it.
Let’s click in one of them. On tab number two, you’ve got us clicking into, like, one person. So,
Chandler Bolt: so this is actually Matt on our team. Oh, Matt. The prospect’s name is here. We’ve got… You know, this was an 83 out of 100. This is a great call. Okay. And so if you think about what makes a good sales call, this might be different for your business.
We’ve got the whole skill and rubric and everything on how you can actually create this for yourself. But for us, this is kinda what it looks like. So do you have a good first two minutes? Well, Matt had a nine out of 10. Framing and expectation setting for the call, this was a six out of 10. Incitement and enthusiasm, nine out of 10.
And it keeps going. You can see throughout the whole call, ’cause it’s easy to just say, “Did you make the sale or not?” And so if you made the sale, it was a good call. If you didn’t, it was a bad call. No. Everybody who’s in sales know that that’s not s- how it works. You need the full kinda sandwich here. So this grades everything.
What’s this down here? Here’s the… So this is the summary. He, he opened with a, a beautiful morning here in Nashville, sh- it riffed on Colorado, blah, blah, blah. Uh, it was fun and personal, not transactional.
Andrew Warner: Do you know what they could’ve done better based on this? And we’re gonna talk about how people can build it, but- Oh, yeah.
Chandler Bolt: Oh, yeah … what? And so it says right here at the end, and so, so it says, “Hey, to reach an eight, Matthew would add a phrase like, ‘And if all that makes sense, we can go ahead and get you started and scheduled with a coach at the end of our call today,’ directly into the opening frame.”
Andrew Warner: Dude, this is way better than a sales manager.
It’s crazy. Yeah. I mean, the detail’s
Chandler Bolt: less personal. All of this is actually in HubSpot, in our CRM. Okay. But it’s just pulling it in in a way that’s far more helpful for our team.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Chandler Bolt: So it’s kind of becoming more and more of a hub for sales success. It started as, “Oh, how do we just give them feedback on calls?”
Now we’re saying, “Oh, if we can get them living in this, well, then what’s all the things that they need to do th- to do their job well? Well, obviously, they need to process orders, so we’ve got everything linked up in here for them. They, you know, they probably wanna know what the script is so that they can then go look at, uh, y- you know, the actual script itself.
Okay, perfect. They can click into this, use it, follow along with it. So this becomes, uh, really, really helpful for them.
Andrew Warner: Okay. And speaking of, this is something that wasn’t there last time you and I talked, which was, we’re recording on Monday. Right. It was Friday that we talked- Yeah … so this wasn’t there on Friday.
It’s in Lovable. Can we see that last tab that you have open in Lovable to just show how you asked it? This is Lovable for people who aren’t familiar with it. On the left is what you asked for, on the right is the finished product. And there’s the- Yes … there’s a prompt. I’ll read it. Yep. “Add a new page to the hub at slash,” and then it has a URL, “that lets the team view scripts and rubrics for every call type, and lets owners and scope managers edit them with a draft,” et cetera.
Okay, so that’s all you did, and then you ended up- Yeah … you ended up with this page. Beautiful. This is the beauty- And- … by the way, of Lovable.
Chandler Bolt: Mm-hmm. It really is. And literally, just this morning, uh, you know, my ops manager who’s building all this, he shipped this and he said to the team, “Hey,” everybody was DM-ing him like, “Hey, how am I being graded?
Uh, you know, how, how can I change this?” Yeah. “I think the grading needs to be improved,” whatever else. Now they can just go in directly and see it and update it. So now, which I think this is the problem that a lot of people probably watching this video or listening to this have, is you’ve got one builder in your organization, and maybe zero builders.
Mm-hmm. Uh, but one, if you’re lucky, in a lot of companies, and maybe that one person’s you. So then there’s just continuously a bottleneck. So we’re saying, “Hey, how do we get people in the game making this better?” And that’s why it’s starting to iterate, uh, and, and get better so quickly.
Andrew Warner: Okay. We’re not going to have you scroll through it because there’s some personal data in, but you will show, uh, this doc and the, uh, prompt that we’ll give people if they want to study their best sales calls and compare them to your selfpublishing.com sales calls to figure out how they can improve.
But this is the prompt, and you guys made it look nicer here. So where do managers fit in the future of, of companies now that we all have AI?
Chandler Bolt: Yeah. So we, we’ve all seen the headlines, you know, whether it’s Jack Dorsey or whoever else, that management is gonna be eliminated- W- using AI. And I think you hear that and you think, wow, yeah, in some distant massive company land where they have thousands of employees, that probably makes sense for me, but that doesn’t really doesn’t make sense to me as a small business guy.
But I started thinking about this, and I truly believe this is gonna happen at any size company, and it’s gonna be great for the business, it’s gonna be great for your customers, and it’s gonna be great for people at the end of the day. And so we’re replacing all of our managers. And so if you think about what is management, well, management is sameness.
Can you just hold people accountable to a standard- Mm … or in this case, the rubric, the script, give them feedback, it’s quality control. Leadership is uniqueness. So if we think about man- uh, about automating management, then what, basically what you do, and I did this with AI as well, is you list out all your leaders and managers in your organization.
You get clear on what they do that drives value. Maybe you have job scorecards, maybe you prompt this with AI. Then you order those things based on revenue, and then you start using AI to get quick wins. And so what you just saw is an example of that, where we said, “Okay, a sales manager, what do they do?
They review calls. They recruit great reps. You know, it’s, it’s, it… They coach people.” So then will sales… Call review, and let’s just stop right there for a second and say call review. If you are in a call-heavy business, which a lot of people, if you’re in the service business, you are, you’ve got sales calls, you’ve got customer calls, you’ve got business development call.
I mean, you’ve got calls, calls, calls happening all over the place. And for us, coaching calls, as we coach authors through the process. So if you build it once, you can now all of a sudden knock out all of this management layer. And I’m talking about, for us, it’s five-plus people doing five to 20 hours a week of, of call reviews and quality control, which might sound insane to people, but now our people are getting better.
We’re building this out, and we’re replacing this component by component. And I mean, I can go into more of what this looks like, but that’s kind of the end thesis of we’re gonna be able to do that, and it’s gonna provide better results for our customers, better coaching for our employees, uh, and better outcomes for the business.
Andrew Warner: Okay, I can see how it works in sales a little bit, but I have a question about it. I can see how it works with y- working with your authors, right? You don’t need a manager who’s going to listen to the sale, to the conversations with, with, uh, your authors. You can just have software watch what’s going on and improve them, just like you did for the sales calls.
What I don’t understand, though, is the component that you mentioned earlier. Um, a salesperson struggles with telling a story. Shouldn’t a manager then be the person who goes and talks to them and says, “Look, I know you’re looking at the same stats I am. You’re clearly not doing as well with storytelling.
Let’s work on it together”? Isn’t that still what a manager does, or how do you replace that?
Chandler Bolt: I think yes and no. I think man- the, the management is the sameness. So, I mean, that’s the cool thing about this hub, right, is you saw that, where it said, “Hey, you’re doing a not a great job selling with stories.” Yeah.
“Well, here’s what you can do.” Uh, and, uh, it, like, it, it’ll literally coach this, which by the way, we built this out as well, um, which was, we call it the librarian. Mm-hmm. So, you know, we’ve published over 7,000 books over the last decade, so a- an issue that we started… kept running into is the salesperson would be on a call, and they would say, “Oh, I need a good story that re- resonates specifically to this person.”
And then we had a, you know, a handful of them cataloged, and if they could look ’em up real quick, you know, maybe they could find it, or if they had a memory of it, but it was really just this handful of stories. It… And, and what they would do is they’d say, “Hey, coaches, can you tell me about this?” Nobody would get back, right?
Like, it just… You’re live- Right … on the call. You need it right away. And so now what we just built into it is in Slack, they just say, “@librarian,” and they name the category, and it will sh- literally in the thread link the top five to 10 books that we’ve published in that category. I see. How many reviews do they have?
What’s the average number of reviews? I see. So all of this is repetitive. Now, to get back to your question though, Andrew, what I think what you’re saying is leadership, which is the soft skills. I don’t think AI’s gonna c- uh, uh… I put this down at the bottom. The punchline is that AI will eliminate all layers or, sorry, all, all managers, but not leaders or individual contributors for now because the leader is gonna give the encouragement.
The leader is gonna show up to the one-on-one, and yeah, has… is armed with the facts and the data and whatever else, but can personalize it to the human.
Andrew Warner: So are you just renaming the manager job as leader, and you’re- … giving them more responsibility?
Chandler Bolt: Uh, I don’t think so, uh, b- because I think, uh, you know, I, I’ve always…
Like, uh, this shows up in my company. I don’t, I don’t know about yours or other people’s, but s- in some places, I have really good managers that don’t know how to lead, and so their teams flounder. And in other cases, I have really good leaders that don’t… aren’t good at the management piece, and so th- their, the potential of their teams is capped.
I see. So this allows me to say, “Hey, good leader, here’s an AI manager alongside you. Now go be personable. Go encourage people. Go recruit. Go do all the things that are really important that’s way harder, if not impossible at this point, for AI to do. And then we’re gonna automate all the rote, annoying stuff that just ends up slipping.”
And, and… or, you know, some people, it’s just gonna eliminate that manager altogether, and we’ll just say, “All right. Well, do you wanna go back to being an individual contributor?” And- Doing the thing for the client, and then that’s better for the client, and that’s better for the business, and it’s better for them because it, it, it, it cuts out all of this…
It’s- at the end of the day, it’s waste. So
Andrew Warner: how much time would you say that a sales manager spent listening to calls, checking in on why a call didn’t work, that kind of a thing in the past? What percentage?
Chandler Bolt: Yeah, I’d say it’s pro- roughly 5 to 15 hours a week. Uh- Okay … and I, I’ve got two of those sales managers in the organization, so this is automatically saving, you know, 10 to 30 hours a week.
Okay. But even more importantly than that, it’s doing it, it’s doing 40-plus hou- like, you couldn’t even do this in 40 hours a week. It’s doing the job of, like, if you just had a dedicated call reviewer. Right. It’s doing that job and giving better feedback to the rep. So that’s what I- gets me so excited, ’cause it’s just better for our people and it’s better for our customers.
Andrew Warner: Okay. So now it’s on the manager to say, “I’m gonna look at the same data as the salesperson and see if I could level them up. If I could level them up by helping them tell better stories, by hanging out with them so that I could find the stories that they might wanna share, by giving them a little bit more motivation, push, whatever,” that person then will continue to lead g- a group of people.
If they can’t do that, if what they were really good at is looking at a chart of requirements and seeing who’s fulfilling each one of these requirements, those people are either gonna leave the company or go to being individual con- uh, contributors, meaning they’re gonna start to make sales calls in this case.
That’s where- Yeah … you see the company going.
Chandler Bolt: That, that is, and, and so that’s kinda where I put down here, like basically once this is complete, ’cause we’re still- Mm-hmm … very much early days of building out the whole AI management layer. Mm-hmm. But we’re going one step at a time. Once that’s complete, well then obviously you need someone to maintain and improve the systems, and then you can eliminate or repurpose your managers.
Now, in a lot of cases, you’ll most likely be eliminating that layer altogether- Mm-hmm … and only repurpose if they can do one of these three things which adds value to the company. So if they can build more AI stuff to grow the company faster, if they can drive high-level strategy that improves results, or if they can pivot back into being an individual contributor.
So if they can’t do one of those three things, that v- their role is gonna be completely eliminated, but if they can, then great, that adds more value to the company and to our customers.
Andrew Warner: It sounded scary when you first brought it up and I kept telling you- Chandler, there’s gotta be a way for you to just not come across as a jerk as we, as we talk about getting rid of managers.
That’s really hard, Andrew. And you said, “No, that’s not the issue.” I, I s- but you kept saying, “No, Andrew, that’s not the issue. This is actually good.” I get it now. It’s really giving more power to people to, to do their work better and to not spend time in that annoying stuff like going through scales called transcripts and so on.
All right, you saw how a founder is replacing managers with AI. Let me show you another founder who’s merging both AI agents and employees so tightly that it’s almost difficult to tell, it is difficult to tell who’s an agent, who’s an employee, but it makes the company so effective. Watch that story next
