Welcome to the Insiders by durhamlane, an industry podcast that connects the world of marketing and sales one guest at a time. I’m your host Richard Lane, I’m co-founder and chief commercial officer of durhamlane and today I’m thrilled to be joined by James Donaldson, founder at Stakki. James, absolutely fantastic to have you on the show today, thanks for being with us.

Before we dive in, perhaps you can tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Stakki. Yeah, happy to, happy to Richard, thanks for having me. Great to be on the show and always good to talk to you.

Yeah, I guess sort of what we do at Stakki is we look to help people make sense of sort of the tech landscape at the moment. Sales tech’s become sort of a bit of a beast, very chaotic market and confuses a lot of reps. We seek to help make sense of that and work with companies to find that revenue predictability that they want to and we do that through tech and process enablement.

So often that means making sense of their CRM, cutting out and simplifying more of the tools, helping them consolidate, you know, and swapping five tools for one tool that actually does the trick. Yeah and that’s typically our process. Awesome, awesome and you got to Stakki in terms of founding Stakki from a life in sales prior to that, right? Yeah, exactly.

So I spent sort of eight years at an SDR agency, probably competing with durhamlane at some times, but through that process, you know, we were a phone first, all we did was cold call. I built eight or nine different SDR teams whilst I was there, opened the office in the States, built the SDR teams and outbound sales teams there and in EMEA and then I built the partnership program. So we partnered with all of these sales tech vendors and what became clear as through that process of partnering with all these tools was that they’re all very good of course in like different ways, but they are typically point sellers and they are trying to obviously position their solution to help the customer and having built the SDR teams and then partnering for these tools, I kind of realized all my SDRs were constantly seeing all these tools that were spoken about on LinkedIn and then asking us for it, asking us for it.

Sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re not, but you’re booking 20-25 meetings a month with like an 85% attendance rate by just cold calling. So stop getting distracted, focus on this and we’ll slowly look to pull some tools in that give you more capacity and remove some more admin so you can do more and more calling and that’s kind of what led to the idea behind Stakki. If we can help be that voice of reason from people who have actually done eight, nine, now 10 years of cold hard outbound, we can help people maybe just make sense of that tech space rather than scrolling through G2 and all the noise.

Awesome, yeah awesome, well clearly in need and we could talk about that a little bit today I think, can’t we? So I mentioned at the top of the opener that we’ve thought maybe see this as our predictions episode, so we’re going to spend quite a bit of time clearly as you’d expect around sales and AI and some of the impact that that’s having and in our sort of prep call for today’s episode we talked a lot about sort of getting back to the basics of selling as well and how technology can help but it can definitely hinder, so I think we’ll go from there. Let’s start then with maybe the journey we’ve been on, so I think you came up nicely with the sort of the changes of where I guess AI has been starting to affect the sales process, should we start with that first? Yeah of course, I think it probably started four or five years ago, AI I think the basic or like and people still do this, we still see this in companies and I imagine you probably see it with some of the people in your team and stuff, you know AI you can use, anyone can open chat GPT for example and start using it for a bit of copy, a bit of email writing and so that was where it kind of started and then I think the pandemic and you know COVID also had an effect on then tying that in with sequences and more cadencing, so people started to churn out more cadences and copywriting and that’s where we first saw it used a lot, then it kind of started to get to used in more sophisticated, slightly more sophisticated ways and sort of doing the research on the accounts, doing research into things like signals and intent, you can probably come on to intent as another thing, maybe my own opinions and I think where it’s currently sort of fighting to get, maybe fighting to get to now, some companies have done it quite well, some tools are doing it quite well, already starting it, is it is sort of more maybe like the revenue kind of orchestration piece, maybe it’s whether that be it’s sitting more inside your CRM, that’s where I see it going and I see that’s where what companies are starting to realize that’s what it should do, should help orchestrate the right data, the right accounts, right contacts, right information, to reps but then the reps are doing the human piece, doing the outreach piece which I know you’re big on. Yeah absolutely and I think that’s like, I mean unfortunately I’m old enough to remember the internet coming in and then also Google, have you heard of this thing called Google and now you do a Google search and you get an AI response you know because they’ve built it into their platform as well and I think the people out there using it in a smart way will be will be using it to speed up their research ability to find relevant information that allows them to have a constructive meaningful conversation with a prospect but it still for me comes back to business fit, business value, probably more so than ever and I guess the bar is becoming higher in terms of what the minimum standard is, that’s no bad thing but I think with the email automation that you talked about prior, there is so much noise in the marketplace, prospects are harder and harder to reach so you have to stand out and I wonder sometimes whether that might, you know I take a lot of cold calls and sometimes it’s just tone of voice you know that maybe just gets me willing to give someone a bit longer or whatever it might be so yeah it’s just that interesting sort of point at the moment I think we’re at where if you’re using technology for tech sake then you’re probably not going to succeed but if you’re using it in a smart way then to to amplify your skills and awareness then you think you’ve got more chance.

Yeah absolutely and I actually spoke to Ashley early last week and she put it really well is that the tech isn’t there to start replacing your sales reps or start replacing parts of their job, it’s there to just help them spend more time speaking to people and another version of that I heard from, who was I talking to, I was talking to one of the guys at TitanX yesterday and he put it it’s kind of crazy to pay sales reps not to talk to people and that’s kind of what happened I think with like all this AI and just focusing around sequences and cadences, I don’t want to be paying my SDRs to sit there and write a nice sequence and write another nice sequence and go and find something and put it in I want them speaking to as many people as possible so I can then coach them and upskill them and they can get better at speaking to my customers so you have like you say best fit and best value. And as sort of thinking of the year ahead and beyond then sort of prediction wise do you do you believe we’re going to see a a reduction or a shift in in the people that are employed to sell? Yeah I think I think we are I think and maybe it’s not that we’ll hire slightly different people I think just that initial starting point of and that ramp period the expectation is going to be much higher so where AI and what I mean by that is if AI can be set up and the tools can be set up to better facilitate your sales team so they can spend more time speaking to your customers your top performers are going to have more capacity so they’re going to start to pull away even further from your mid and your low performers and your low performers will probably fall away because maybe they just never had the right skills and your mid performers some of them will be revealed as not being able to keep up and some of the others will be challenged and they’ll get up to that that top performer level so I think the bar is just gonna raise a little bit so it’s not that we might look for new people and we might hire slightly different people into the roles I just think the ramp that if you’re not suited to it you’ll be filtered out way faster. Yeah I mean it’s interesting one phrase that I’m hearing a lot is the sort of GTM engineer or the go-to-market engineer or sales operations engineer whatever it might be so I can see as and some of these technologies are not simple are they so actually you know it would be wrong to expect for example an SDR just to sit down and sort clay out for themselves that’s not gonna happen but I can imagine it sort of become more back room operations and then your sellers are being served up the right person at the right I mean it’s sort of beautiful really isn’t it imagine it imagine if we’re sitting here in five ten years time and someone’s going what you’re telling me you had to go and find people to the right people to speak to it’s sort of yeah you know we’ve already shifted along that path and I’ve got a story I can share with you around some of the experimenting I’ve been doing with AI SDRs and yeah for it we uh I mean this is not a great story for me really but we built we’ve built what I think is a really good AI SDR but I was so obsessed with the AI SDR that I didn’t think enough about the program and the way I’ve sort of reflected on it is that we’ve sort of trained someone up and then given them a data list with absolutely no context of anyone they’re calling and said just go and call these people yeah which is what used to happen right you used to be given these big long lists and dial, dial, dial you’re just sort of trying to find someone that maybe one picks up and two is the right person or interested perhaps we’re moving to a place hopefully where every time you get into a conversation it’s the right person they’re in the right company and they’ve possibly got a need or an interest yeah imagine if imagine if that is your the world that you’re living as a sales professional that would be a hell of a place yeah exactly and I think that’s the direction people need to be going in because I think one of the drivers for putting more AI in um using tools like clay looking at software is is because I think as most people will agree or will feel is that markets are harder margins are now tighter it’s harder to win business because there are so many options out there buyers are more informed because of all of that people are looking at tools because oh well that might be the silver bullet that helps us get all the right data to people or helps us do this or helps us do that but at a certain point you need to be wary of or actually need to map out our process and understand how our team work and speak to customers and then find the AI to support that rather than finding the AI and just sort of or tools and throwing out the team and saying you’ve got this this can help now and then your sales reps are people are creatures of habit you know it’s well I do it this way and they log into something three or four times in that first month and then it slowly gets forgotten about and it’s just sitting there dormant or it’s filling in more fields on the CRM and they’re not really used and slowly things become a bit of a mess and I think just going back to that go-to-market engineering sort of role that’s sort of becoming more prominent in a lot of a lot of companies I think that’s in part because RevOps maybe didn’t do a good enough job at supporting the final piece yeah they’re very good uh sort of looking at the big picture and the operations and sort of the opportunity creation and the and then beyond and it kind of forgot about that top of funnel piece which is finding the right accounts finding the right contacts surfacing the right information so that people can do fresh outreach and I feel like maybe that’s where you know people started throwing tools at SDRs then then that didn’t quite work so then that’s maybe I think that gap that go-to-market engineers is starting to fill right I do I do feel we it does feel a little bit like the record spins round around doesn’t it and you know tech because actually every technology vendor is trying to introduce their technology and there’s not some overriding god or goddess of sales that is saying this is the this is the suite that we use um so you’re you always have this conflict and then like you say there’s behaviour and changing behaviour is probably the hardest thing about implementing any new technology or process into a business you then end up with lots and lots of tools perhaps one of the challenges and we see this all the time is that because there has been this focus on automation salespeople have actually forgotten the basics about picking up the phone and building rapport which you know the cold is dead so they say I would argue it definitely isn’t yeah um but it comes back to that point around how do we make this more how do we make this a better experience for the seller in serving up the right people at the right time in in the right companies and I was I was talking to a very large enterprise customer of ours um just yesterday morning and they were saying you can have all the tech you like but the data is just not where it needs to be and that’s I think that’s prediction for me is that’s a hugely interesting piece for the year ahead and beyond is before we implement these technologies how do we sort the data out 100 percent and it’s why most of what we end up doing with our work at Stakki when people come and they say we’re looking for a tool to do this we’re looking for an engagement tool to do that we’re looking for a dialer to do this or we’re looking we need we need uh our connection rates are down so we need a better data source for amia or wherever they are and okay well let me just let me just look at look at the CRM first actually got hundreds sometimes thousands um of contacts just sat there now why all these in the system in the first place and you know you do some digging and I’ve done this with at least three customers which we work with on an ongoing basis before they bought anything it’s been a year now I just exploited everything from the CRM categorized it make sure made sure uh what was in the ICP and they had well based on all your metrics you actually got more than enough data here it’s just not structured in the right way and then we just need to enrich a few a few of the pieces and the and what you’re paying for already gives you enough credits for that so actually it’s just about focus and making sense you’re right it’s the data quality the data quality isn’t there it doesn’t really matter what tools you put in on top of that um so i think a lot more where what we’re seeing and this I think is starting that move and one of my i guess one of my predictions that I mentioned to you was that ai is going to start and the best tools in the next sort of six months that people are shifting towards a focus on are the ones that sit inside your CRM and help with data cleansing enrichment and surfacing that to the reps so that I can have I know my list of target accounts i make my notes I follow up but there’s always going to be like loads of data and different parts that’s missed maybe companies visit websites job changes someone else in my own business spoke to this person three months ago or connected with them and it’s what tools can we use that pull all that together so that whenever i look at that account I’ve got it all in one view and i can just pick up the phone and refer and I’ve got it all on screen i can see it all i can refer to it obviously me and you both pretty cold call focus and champions so yeah we that’s how i would structure everything but I appreciate you i think that if you are dead set on using cadences and sequences the same principle applies the best you need to be looking at tools that sort out your data first and get you the right data get it clean get it enriched and continue to keep it like that before you worry about what tools that’s for outreach we’re going to give us the most outreach which is which I think is where it gets interesting because most of the sales tech companies don’t really want to get into a conversation with you about your data because if they do their sale has just pushed back a long way right so actually everybody is maybe just uh being a bit blind um being a bit blind to the challenge let’s be let’s be kind about it everyone’s just sort of ignoring the challenge because actually it’s not maybe in their pipeline in their own pipelines interest to sort it out yeah hundred percent and i think like you’re right that’s I think that’s why we end up in a lot of those conversations about data because maybe people have already looked at uh sales after an outreach or something and they get it but they’re like no one’s sure about if their data is correct and so they come to us and ask us which is best and we say well look at that it doesn’t matter if you’re gonna put you put good in you get good out so if you know if you haven’t got any good data what are we talking about um and it goes back to i think what kind of created this chaotic market is that you know sales tech vendors a lot of them are point sellers it’s in their interest to they need to sell their solution they’re not necessarily as concerned about the entire picture and in the entire stack and how much data you’ve got in your CRM is that being used efficiently that’s created kind of a lot of the mess we get these days yeah yeah and I think just back to the point you were you mentioned before where where I’m seeing i think the best use cases of AI and inside some of the sales tech is where it’s augmenting my use of of a platform of system so we use hub spot here at durhamlane for our own our own outreach and marketing sales efforts and now in the reporting you can click a button that will build you a summary of uh what’s happening in the chart or you can ask it to dig and do a bit more of a deeper dive so that’s really valuable it’s got research capability in there and they’re adding these all the time um sales loft are adding their own suite of agents so that we were sales loft house as well but they’re adding their own suite of agents so that you can you know get better data enriched and right contact right company right time etc so that’s where it’s that’s where it’s i think there are some real wins being made um i do i do also though feel like every time i sit in any sort of a session I’m being showed these amazing things that we can now do with ai and i think every tech company has to say they’ve got ai otherwise their valuation goes down by x x multiple but i don’t know if it’s always solving a problem and ultimately they’re trying to keep you in their platform yep absolutely yeah and it’s that fine line i suppose like on are they just trying to keep me in their platform or is this actually going to help me consolidate and like gong for example just announced that they’ve acquired right bound which kongaway does conversation intelligence uh forecasting risk assessments on deals um and they’ve got going engage right bound now gives them a lot of some of the stuff we just mentioned about um looking for the right accounts looking for the right data surfacing all that to your reps so that they have a consistent supply of right fit contacts and then they’ve got all the tools within gong to outreach to them and they’ve got the intelligence from any conversations they have fed back to them as well so that’s becoming quite a good like all-in-one platform um and I think that’s like another prediction that’s the direction for most tools and i think you’re going to see maybe hope like i think companies probably want to commit to if you want to use sequencing and stuff like that you should be looking at sort of these all-in-one tools that can do can do that but also give good conversation intelligence um which you know supports good coaching and stuff like that or if you’re going to stick with really good cold calling get something that sits inside your CRM pulls all the right data to the right list and just get a really good reliable dialer um and then just in both those scenarios you’re not buying you’re not buying 15 different tools and then distracting reps which is what’s actually affecting your pipeline um i think my hope is that that’s people commit to one of those two paths and they stick to it and you know eventually if they need to ramp up a little bit you uh you fade that in over time and you speak to someone who can help you do it over time rather than just throwing everything at the reps yeah absolutely so coordinated um coordinated and structured implementation of of tools and yeah keep it simple and you know and i think also don’t forget the human in this so i think really it’s how do we put the human at the centre of the conversation with the customer um and what are the tools that we can wrap around to facilitate that and have our people speaking to more of the right people more of the time yeah ideally with the need so yeah some great advice there if uh you know just to maybe um we’ll have some sales and some RevOps leaders listening into us on I’m sure um some great advice there in terms of things to look out for 2026 I badged this as a predictions uh episode we’ve done a little bit of that sort of I would say probably we’ve skirted around it but what would you uh what would you be sort of putting on people’s radar particularly from your view of the world and yeah the work you do with your customers so just some kind of links to that previous point i think if people are people are looking to consolidate so they’re picking they should be looking at which is the best route for us and I’ll go to market and how are we going to do this are we going to commit to good data orchestration and revenue orchestration across our CRM which should be happening anyway but in a sense of I’m going to commit to that that’s where we’re going to focus all of our ai and feed good reps cold call them support them train them jerry hill talks about high challenge high support i think that’s an excellent way to put it if you’re building a cold calling team and then the other side of you know maybe you’re going to take a more uh multi-channel approach you’re going to go with the gone example more consolidated tool but you can still sequence and stuff in both those scenarios I think what people should be looking at and RevOps team should really be considering is how do I give managers and leaders all the right insights before they turn up to their one-to-one with their reps before they turn up to coaching sessions with their reps how do i give them one clean dashboard with all the relevant metrics because through all the stuff we’ve just kind of spoken about it’s the managers and staff who end up just not really knowing what they should be helping their teams with and if we can get back to that that creates a better a better performing team across the board so yeah I would be looking at where can ai help and support uh coaching upskilling better performance so my team get better using athletes as a as the example they’re doing way more practice before they actually get into the human conversation I then look at where can we use the right tools maybe tools like uh user gems really good for this i think rev intel is onto something close what they’re doing is a lot of the ai orchestration across all that data set to feed reps the best things and then i would look to make changes across like a sixth or twelfth six or twelve month window and have a plan for it don’t get multiple tools in at once distract everybody yes awesome James that was fantastic thank you for that i think that was some solid advice there as always and uh you sprinkled in a few names of companies for people to go and check out as well whilst we’re at it so that’s great um look it’s been an absolute pleasure having you uh on the on the insiders James thank you for joining me and for uh sharing your experience and wisdom with our listeners um and thanks everyone for listening I really appreciate you uh tuning into the insiders podcast uh for another episode I’m Richard Lane i’ve been your host if you’d like to hear more from us then please find us on your favourite podcast sites such as Spotify, Apple and all the and if you’d like to know more about durhamlane our services our stories and how we’re much more than SDR outsourcing check out durhamlane.com and as you’d expect we’re doing a lot of stuff in the world of ai as well there so until next time see you then James really appreciate it thanks again thanks Richard pleasure to speak to you see you all next time thank you.