About Usman Sheikh: Usman Sheikh is the visionary founder and CEO of xiQ, an award-winning B2B sales and marketing platform. With the fusion of generative AI (x GPT), behavioral science, and a curated up-to-the-minute business corpus, xiQ is revolutionizing the industry with its groundbreaking personality-driven sales approach. As a futurist and design thinker, Usman aims to humanize B2B sales and marketing by harnessing the power of generative AI and psychology. Through xiQ, sellers gain the ability to understand the mindset of prospective buyers, facilitating hyper-personalized engagement throughout the sales cycle. Usman strongly believes in achieving excellence through disciplined and relentless execution. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Usman.
In this episode, Nancy and Usman discuss the following:
- The transformative power of AI in B2B sales and marketing
- xiQ’s use of generative AI, behavioral science, and chat GPT to personalize sales approaches
- The evolution from pre-internet to the internet era and now to the AI era
- How AI simplifies tasks, saves time, and enhances productivity
- The importance of understanding personality-driven sales
Key Takeaways:
- AI made it so much simpler, gives one that information in seconds, and saves hours that would have been spent.
- What used to take me six hours out of my day has now been reduced to 30 minutes.
- We need to master AI. We need to make it work for us.
“And we use AI to help you formulate these kinds of capabilities, bringing them into sales to personalize the sales engagement. Nobody wants to talk to somebody who doesn’t know who you are, doesn’t understand your problems, and cannot empathize with or relate to your actions. They’re just in there to sell, and nobody’s interested in that, especially in high-ticket sales. So, it becomes increasingly important to be able to find the sweet spots of the person within their personality and cater to them so you can have a better chance of winning.” – USMAN
“We’re not a plug-in to LinkedIn, although I think we get a lot of data from LinkedIn. Think of our platform as an independent search engine; we throw a very wide net out there to collect information. So, you type in the name of a person in their company and start looking for them. You find the person by clicking on them if there is more than one. And it goes, fetches information, analyzes it, and makes a prediction call. All of it, less than three seconds.” – USMAN
“So, we were living in the pre-internet era. Would that be correct? I was. I saw the internet come. You did, right? And everything was paper-based. If you needed to look up a person or do some research, you had to use Encyclopedia Britannica or one of those, right? There was no Google. It was a different world. And the big brands that were there were those serving Yellow Pages and all that stuff. Those were the brands. But then came the internet age, Google and Yahoo, and now ZoomInfo and Salesforce, and all of these became tools that people used, right? And the old Yellow Pages and so on didn’t translate into becoming the ZoomInfo of the business world. It was like the Yellow Pages of the business world in the pre-internet days, right? And so, two things happened. The way we did business changed. Secondly, the players that provided the technology changed as well, and the solutions changed as well. Now, we’re entering the AI era. It’s a big leap. So, if the internet was a thousand to the paper-based era, then AI is a hundred million to the thousand. That’s the big leap, okay? Because it can crunch out this big data and make sense of it in microseconds, right? And so, it can crunch a lot of data to do that, right? Pretty much the whole internet, right? And then some. So, but you know, we as humans need to be able to access that data, that much data in a consumable manner to be interesting.” – USMAN
“I think not to be afraid of AI. AI provides a lot of new opportunities. So, if the audience is in sales or any business, use AI to discover new opportunities. Everybody who’s going to use AI will realize that it can create a lot of new worlds. As a matter of fact, what McKinsey is quoting in terms of generative AI creating net new value for sales is $1.4 trillion a year in sales productivity. That’s a lot, right? That’s a huge amount. So, that’s the opportunity. And as a result of that, Nancy, the way we used to sell, traditional sellers used to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And here we have a chance to move away from that selling into more selling hope and opportunity because there’s a lot of hope and opportunity with what we can do with AI.” – USMAN
Connect with Usman Sheikh:
- LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/usmanmsheikh/
- xiQ, Inc: https://xiqinc.com/
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
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Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today. And it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Usman Sheikh, the visionary founder and CEO of XIQ, an award -winning B2B sales and marketing platform. Through the fusion of generative AI, behavioral science, and chat GPT, XIQ is revolutionizing the industry with its personality -driven sales approach. As a futurist and design thinker, Ustman aims to humanize B2B sales and marketing by leveraging generative AI and psychology. And with XIQ, selle rs can understand the mindset of prospective buyers and hyper -personalize engagement at every stage of the sales cycle. Well, AI is the buzzword of the year this year, and I’m sure for many years. Welcome to the show, Ousmane.
Usman Sheikh: Thank you, Nancy. Great to be here and I love talking about AI and how it’s transforming B2B selling and marketing. [1:30]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, I mean, why is it like, why is it all of us? What makes AI exciting?
Usman Sheikh: Yeah, it’s simplification at the end of the day. It’s made my life a lot easier in being able to access just basic decision support data. And not only just decision support data, but this decision also already crafted for me that I just need to qualify and utilize. And it’s made that very, very simple. So, in the traditional days, and when I say traditional days, that’s the Google internet search. You had to ask Google something, and then it would recommend certain websites. Then you had to go into those websites. You had to check out what’s written in those websites, and then come back and analyze and put your own answer together. And that was very time consuming. What AI has done, and specifically generative AI and tools like XIQ, it’s become conversational. I simply ask, tell me about Nancy. What would be her top motivation? And out comes this is how you know, Nancy functions, these will be her growth opportunities. It’s made it so much simpler and it’s giving me that information in seconds and saving me hours of time that I would have spent. So, at the core of it, it’s the ease of use and the simplicity and the world is still discovering the places where that simplicity can be applied to make things a lot easier. And whereas the data are going to come from that will help support those decisions. Right? So that’s why I think it’s exciting. They’ve made it so easy anybody, a six-year-old can pretty much use charge GPT, for example, right? And get really, good answers out of that. [3:21]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. My daughter was shocked that I even knew about it. I love it. You know, actually it helps me write my blogs and it does make it very simple. But what do you mean by personality driven sales approach?
Usman Sheikh: Yes, so I’ll explain it two ways. So, first of all, all of us have unique personalities, just like unique fingerprints. And for sellers and buyers to meaningfully collect at the human, as you said as well, it’s all about the human connection. So for buyers and sellers to connect at a human level, it’s very, very essential that the seller understand the mental makeup of who they’re talking to. All of us are different, right? Some of us are more dominating. Some of us are more influencing personalities. So behavioral science was created about 100 years ago. And one of the methodologies in Myers -Briggs is very popular. And another methodology is the disk methodology, which is what XAQ uses. And these used to be those personality assessment tests that one had to take. What XAQ has done is we’ve kind of cracked the code where you don’t need to take the test based on your digital footprint in social media and across the internet, we can analyze enough to, with a very high degree of accuracy, predict what kind of personality and mental makeup is of that person. And then we take that, and we can help companies and salespeople craft custom tailored sales and marketing strategies. So, for example, if I’m writing an email to a personality that is more on the dominant side, the same email will sound very different, will have a different subject name, maybe just three bullet points, very short and concise. But if I were to send the same topic, same email to a conscientious person, maybe I need to write a little longer email, provide some additive content, provide some attachments, because they like to do the personality type is alike. This becomes very essential and is the fabric of how human relationships work. And we use AI to help you formulate this kind of capabilities to be able to bring that into the sales and really help personalize that sales engagement because you know nobody wants to talk to somebody who doesn’t know who you are doesn’t know your problem cannot empathize with you cannot relate to what you’re doing and they’re just in there to sell nobody’s interested in that at all especially at the high ticket sale so it becomes increasingly important to be able to find the sweet spots of your the person within the personalities and cater to them so you can have a better chance of winning. [6:06]
Nancy Calabrese: Now, is your platform a plugin to LinkedIn? Is that how they you can assess the personalities?
Usman Sheikh: So no, we are not a plug -in. We’re not a plug -in to LinkedIn, although I think we do get a lot of data out of LinkedIn. Think of our platform like an independent search engine, and we throw a very wide net out there, collect information. So, you type in the name of a person, their company, start looking for them. If there are more than one, you find the person by clicking on them. And it goes, fetches information, analyzes it, and makes a prediction call. All of it, less than three seconds. [6:45]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow, that’s amazing. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, there’s a commercial on TV about AI and how it’s pretty much taking over the world. And there’s a woman that’s being interviewed. And what she says, she loves AI because AI makes her feel loved. And I thought, isn’t that weird? How can AI make you feel loved?
Usman Sheikh: That’s very interesting, but you know, there are multiple ways that could have happened. So, one way is that it has helped freed her up from doing whatever she was doing at her job, which was taking her 40 minutes, now can take four seconds, right? And it can come back with better answers, better calibration, better research than any human or team of humans would be able to do, right? So that in turn starts reducing my stress significantly. Look, I got to get my emails out and I want to personalize emails to everybody. At best, you know, if you really, good people who can write emails, take them 50 to 20 to 30 minutes to custom craft an email. Imagine if I must do custom crafting emails to five customers, six people per customer, that’s a heavy load. But then you take a platform like ours and the AI we provide, and it helps you write very well research, thought through, clearly articulated emails in seconds. Right? And so, what used to now take me six hours out of my day has now been reduced to 30 minutes. And I can go home, I can get my rest, I can, you know, and the quality of the email is better, I’m going to get a better response rate. My stress is significantly reduced, so I have more time to get lunch. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s one way of why she probably feels how AI is making you feel loved. [8:58]
Nancy Calabrese: I don’t know. Now I’ve read somewhere when you were at SAP, you asked yourself, why do only 3 % of sales reps achieve platinum status? What was failing in the sales process? Can you expand on that?
Usman Sheikh: Yeah, absolutely. So, if you look at the top 5%, top 1 % of the performers, what they have is they have very well-established networks, information networks, right? People that they talk to, integrators if they’re selling software, change management companies that are putting in the platforms and training people, etc. They have very good vast networks and they’re constant and then they know the customer, they know the industry, they’ve been around there. So, they can actually serve as a conduit of great information to their clients and that makes them stand out, right? I know who you are, Nancy, this is somebody that can help you, let me connect the dots, let me introduce you somewhere over there. Then you start trusting me, right? And that’s really the, you know the table stakes, right, these days. You need to be able to help your clients in large ticket sales. And SAP was large ticket sales, right? So therefore, that’s what’s hindering them. The less experienced and the rest of the 95 % struggle to get information on companies, what’s happening within those companies, who are the decision makers, how to write to them, to appeal to them, what to talk to them about and about the industry in general. So, there’s a lot of workload placed on these people to onboard into a new company and then you have the dilemma of these 12 different solutions they have to you know from CRM to the contact information to marketing automation to analytics to social media applications on average the sales person today needs to go through 12 to 16 different user experiences in their sales journey right that’s a lot. [11:12]
Nancy Calabrese: Really? What do you mean 12 to 16? So, give me some examples.
Usman Sheikh: So I’ll start off by prospecting and I’ll probably go to somebody like ZoomInfo or RocketReach to find out or LinkedIn to find out, you know, who are the people that have the jobs that would be my ideal company profile. From there, I’ll extract their emails. Then I’ll have to build a list and go to my marketing email marketing automation and write my emails. Then I’ll have to send those emails out from there and then calibrate that, calibrate them into some analytical database. And that could be yet another user interface. Then I have to go put this information in CRM, yet another solution. From the CRM, I need to be able to go into my Outlook and write that yet another, you know, then I have collaborative rooms where I must talk to my colleagues, then there’s some research information coming. So, by the time you are all said and done in the different tasks you need to perform, you’ve consumed 12 to 15 different solutions. That’s what’s open on a salesperson’s screen these days. Right? And then I must do my research, which means now I must go out to Google, I must go to the corporate website, I have to go to the finance website, I have to go somewhere out there to connect more information about that. So, I’m lost in the sauce. I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not formulating a sales strategy. I’m not formulating a way to better engage somebody. What I’m doing is researching and running around like a chicken with a head cut off trying to find out, you know, which side is up. [12:43]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah.
Usman Sheikh: And that’s what was happening with the 95%, right? They were spending a lot of time doing things that did not add into the sales process, didn’t add value to their selling process. And so, what we’ve done is we’ve reduced it, we brought all this information under one roof. You don’t get ads, you don’t get sidetracked, you go look up a company, everything is there. It alerts you about the companies you subscribe to. It alerts you about the people that you’re following. It gives you the emotional resonance on how to write to those people, right? So, it totally changes the game. It brings down those capabilities that the best practices of the 1%, the elite 1%, it basically democratizes those practices and codifies them with the AI engine to help the rest of the 95%. I hope that helps and this explain. [13:38]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, it’s very strategic. Yeah, but you know what, in listening to you, it’s very strategic what’s going on with AI, right? I mean, it’s giving you access to information that was very difficult to find in the past. So, shouldn’t salespeople be closing more deals with the use of, like say your platform?
Usman Sheikh: Absolutely, and they are, and we’ve been calibrating that those people that are using our platform are closing four times more deals than those sales reps that are not using these cracks. So that’s a pretty big, big affirmation to this. There is still a lot about four times more, right? But in the entire Nancy, we’re in the like the baby stage, the pre -crawl stage of AI. [14:30]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow. How many times? I didn’t hear.
Usman Sheikh: There’s less than 9 % at this point of people in selling, in large ticket selling, they’re utilizing AI. And they’re using it for really, really, like, tell me something about my pipeline. There’s very, very little usage. And that’s what our company aims to change, is we want to become, so, you know, let me just explain this to you in a slightly different way. There are three eras that I think I can track, you can track. So we were living in the pre -internet era, would that be correct to say? I was. I saw internet come. You did, right? And everything was paper -based. If you must look up a person, you know, you had to go or if you needed to do some research, Encyclopedia Britannica or one of those, right? There was no Google. It’s a different word. And the big brands that were there. Those are the brands serving Yellow Pages and all that kind of stuff. Those are the brands. But then came along the internet age and Google and Yahoo and now ZoomInfo and Salesforce and all of these became tools that people used, right? And the old Yellow Pages and so on didn’t really translate into becoming the ZoomInfo of the business world. Like it was the Yellow Pages of the business world in the pre -internet days, right? And so, two things happened. The way we did business changed. And secondly, the players that provided the technology changed as well, or the solutions, the solutions changed as well. Now we’re entering the AI era, right? It’s a big, so if the internet was a thousand to the paper -based era, then AI is a hundred million to the thousand. That’s the big leap, okay? because it can crunch out this big data and make sense out of that in microseconds, right? And so, and it can crunch out a lot of data to do that, right? Pretty much the whole internet, right? And then some. So, but you know, we as humans need to be able to access that data, that much data in a consumable manner to be interesting, right? [16:50]
Nancy Calabrese: Yep.
Usman Sheikh: I can’t come and keep talking to you about the baseball game all the time or the weather or what kind of car you drive, right? I need to talk to you about work and how to improve your work. That’s the difference between the guy who’s going to win the business and our kind of platform helps you do that. So, the players that were playing in the internet field are not necessarily going to transition to the AI field. And that’s a very, very important thing. There’s going to be businesses that will fall off because they continue. You know, let’s take another good example is the video industry, right? And we don’t have video. Everything is on demand. So, all those video rental agencies or companies are no longer existing, right? But film does exist. Movies still come, right? [17:45]
Nancy Calabrese: That’s true.
Usman Sheikh: So, sales will continue to happen and just move into a different platform. And secondly, the vendors that were big players. I’m forgetting the name, if you can remind me, bad memory, of the video rental company started with the blue. Blockbusters, yeah, blockbusters, right? So, blockbusters could have bought, I think, Netflix for peanuts, right? They had the offer on that they refused to do that, right? and look at Netflix now. Right? And so, technology is irreversible. We’re going to take AI, AI is going to come, and we need to master AI. We need to make it work for us. We need not get intimidated and not spread rumors, negative rumors around. [18:32]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. How long has AI been around?
Usman Sheikh: Yeah, it’s been around for quite some time. It has been around for at least 10 years or maybe even longer. As a matter of fact, if you remember, what was it, 2001, Space Odyssey, hell was AI. So, they were talking in Star Trek, you know, the Starship Enterprise was being run by AI, right? So, if you think about it, the concept has existed. But I think we at XAQ are one of the pioneers of introducing this to B2B. We introduced this in 2018. And then I think the big breakthrough moment where it came out in a big way was November 22 with Chad GPT. [19:23]
Nancy Calabrese: Okay. I can’t believe that we’re up in time. This is such an interesting conversation. What is the one takeaway you’d like to leave the audience with?
Usman Sheikh: Yeah, I think not to be afraid of AI. AI provides a lot of new opportunities. So if the audience is in sales or in any business, use AI to discover new opportunities. Everybody who’s going to use AI will realize that it can create a lot of new words. As a matter of fact, what McKinsey is quoting in terms of generative AI creating net new value for sales is $1 .4 trillion a year in sales productivity. That’s a lot, right? That’s a huge amount. So that’s the opportunity. And as a result of that, Nancy, the way we used to sell, traditional sellers used to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And here we have a chance to move away from that kind of selling into more selling hope and opportunity because there’s a lot of hope and opportunity with what we can do with API, AI. [20:36]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow, amazing, amazing. How can my people find you?
Usman Sheikh: So, I’m on LinkedIn, it’s U -S -A -N, last name is Sheik, S -H -E -I -K -H, and the company can be found as X -I -Q. You can follow us, you can send me a connection request, and I will honor that. [20:58]
Nancy Calabrese: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much for spending some time with us this morning. And it’s morning for you, but afternoon for me. And I highly encourage everyone to reach out to Usman. I think your platform is fascinating. And when we finish this, I want to continue to talk to you about it. Usman again, thank you and for everyone out there, make it an awesome sales day. [21:32]
