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Growing Lean
Embracing the AI Revolution: A Conversation with Lonnie Ayers of SAP BW Consulting
Gear up for a fascinating discourse with Lonnie Ayers, the brain behind the sales and marketing strategies of SAP BW Consulting and Co-Founder of Mapartunity. We delve into Lonnie's journey in the industry, unraveling his tactics to embrace the AI revolution that has reshaped the business landscape. This episode promises to give you a detailed understanding of how AI has revolutionized lead generation, sales coaching, and Google advertisements - all the while maintaining the human element that makes it all worthwhile.
Lonnie enlightens us about the evolution of sales and marketing tools. With his extensive experience, he provides a novel perspective on how productizing services and harnessing click-based online purchasing have transformed the business sphere. Focusing primarily on Google tools, Lonnie highlights the vital role of budget and time in leveraging the plethora of tools available to businesses in today's fast-paced digital era.
Lastly, Lonnie throws light on the software development opportunities that abound and the invaluable role of strategic business partnerships. With a 25-year background in ERP sales, Lonnie's insights are a testament to his ability to stay ahead of the game. Listen carefully as he shares his experiences, partnerships, and the incredible role of Hubspot training in the growth of his company. With a wealth of wisdom under his belt, Lonnie leaves us with invaluable advice on staying up-to-date with technological advancements.
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Welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deej. I'm happy to be here with Lonnie Ayos, president and Director of Sales and Marketing at SAP BW Consulting and Co-Founder of Mapartunity. Welcome, lonnie.
Speaker 2:Glad to meet you and thanks for having me on so amazing.
Speaker 1:So let's get us started by can you tell us a little bit of history of yourself, your background and your business?
Speaker 2:Sure, I won't give you my whole LinkedIn profile, but basically 30 years in between the United States Air Force and the Middle East and Airbus a real heavy aerospace and defense been doing SAP Consulting and one form or another for about 25 years and about 15 years ago decided to loan my brother to found a company called SAP BW Consulting, which stands for Business Warehouse, which is SAP speak for a data warehouse, a big fancy analytics system in the sky. We so we've been at this for about 15 years and about we chose only advice of SAP the company to use HubSpot. The inbound marketing platform is our initial marketing and sales platform. Can't hear it? No, all good, all good. And so about three to four years into that we had been doing marketing all day, every day, digital marketing, had developed quite the expertise on it and we were like the first or one of the first people that they invited to become a partner. So we became a HubSpot partner and it turned out that there was a lot of demand, of course, for lead generation and sales coaching.
Speaker 2:We came from a high end, large eight figure deal background in enterprise software sales. So our strategy initially had been as a SAP project manager, I constantly faced the problem of being put on projects and then the contracts, saying all these different providers would provide us with resources, but they they're not available, they're just recruiting them as, as a requirement, come in. So I thought, well, we'll try to solve that, you know. But we'll specialize in thing. And we chose to attack it from the analytics in, because we're not in business of selling software per se, or we weren't, and analytics always leads to changes in the business process, configurations in existence. So we thought, well, there's, there's a market opportunity.
Speaker 2:But once we moved into the HubSpot marketing and sales, I went basically back into my old element where I used to be on stage a lot presenting different solutions, talking to the C-level, to the C-suite. So that was our strategy. We've been doing that ever since. We provide SAP consulting to this day. But I have basically a bunch of partners now that when the stuff comes in it goes to them and I and I can do SAP, I can do Salesforce and I can do Oracle via partners. We have our own delivery capability but we get far more in than we can actually, you know, assess no-transcript partners, helping them develop digital market strategies.
Speaker 1:Okay, awesome. Could you walk us through briefly what's your overall business strategy?
Speaker 2:Generate more leads, make more sales and get bought out. That's the bottom line. Several of my clients have went from zero to hero and gotten bought out over the years. We know how to do that. In fact, I've written three books a series of nine of every problem that we have faced, because, although we always get brought in as marketing, we end up solving nine core problems that every business faces across all business areas. That's proven to be quite a useful skill set. We have different teammates that we can bring into it. It starts from strategy and helping people set their strategy and then going from there. Ultimately, that's what we're looking to do is build it big enough and there are people showing up to buy every day. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a nice call to have. How have you adapted to the changes in the industry, more specifically over the last, let's say, two years, with this whole AI revolution? Also there's been so many SaaS companies come up over the last couple of years because of AI. How have you adapted to these changes?
Speaker 2:Honestly, I use AI in everything I do these days. I didn't set out to be a prompt engineer. I just started doing it and now I realize I can make a living doing that if I wanted to. But when chat GPT hit, it was like an atomic explosion. Like what can I do with it? If before it might take me a week to develop a topical subject map for business, I can now do it in minutes and it'll be 80% solution. You still need to put the human resource, the human element, behind it, but HubSpot has AI built into it, so there's places all through it.
Speaker 2:I handle a lot of Google advertising. I'm a hands-on guy. I still do that and Google has implemented AI in their tool all up and down it and it's been quite dramatic the effect. In one case, just following so much recommendations, we increased lead gen for one client. I think 23x was the overall impact of it. That's amazing. It's hard to compete against that. I have to be frank. It's eliminated a few positions that we were actually outsourcing. It is what it is, but those people, they'll be back and we will teach them how to use that. But almost every tool that we use, when we use a variety of tools. Ai is there and I don't foresee that and it's getting better. It was terrible to start with, but as you work with it, as you get better with it, the output has really improved and I think there will be more of that.
Speaker 1:So yeah, 100% I agree, and AI has been a common topic on the podcast just because people are scared of it. But what they don't understand is, like you said, it's a tool that makes your life quicker and it still needs a human touch to make it actually effective. Otherwise you can kind of tell it's being generated by a robot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's kind of wordy, but I use one tool that will produce a 2,500 word blog that's perfectly formatted in three minutes, and then I'll put another hour or two on it to make it look crisp, you know, but I used to spend anywhere from six to 18 hours writing a blog in-depth based on my knowledge, and I've written 600 of those over the years. How many do you gotta do when this thing can do good enough? But the fact that it's now embedded in all these systems I use every day is pretty impressive. In fact, we did a project for a company that teaches AI and machine learning last I don't see two years ago, and it was pretty amazing that some of the work the students were doing there it was just you know they'd grab us on the stuff they were coming up with.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. So I've just thought of this now, like do you think this is gonna impact the future generations on their creative abilities? Because they don't really need to be creative anymore, because they just need to know how to prompt a? Absolutely, I mean.
Speaker 2:I look at me, I could.
Speaker 2:I can't draw a straight line between two dots without ruler that is how bad it is, but I, I was just doing something for a nephew, basically using mid journey, and I had it draw me a pirate alligator and it's incredible. I wrote a story behind it and all that kind of stuff. I couldn't do that in a million years. And I gave it to my actual paid graphics artist guy and I said you know, dress this up for me. I got another use for it and they were able to take it and go from there and ask me how it is. I wrote this sentence. You know, boom, there it goes. So the cool thing about it is, you know, if you didn't really have artistic talent for it I think we all have some Now you can. If you can write you, this thing can make incredible, incredible artwork for you. You can spend a lot of time. It's not necessarily faster, it's instantaneous the output. You can spend a lot of time iterating and iterating to get what you like kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:But it's 100% or no question. 100%, and what are the main tools that you use that have been particularly effective for growing your business?
Speaker 2:Well, hubspot number one, especially the CRM site of it because the sales was. It came out initially just as a marketing tool, so you had a habit of generating leads and then it get lost in your system. So once it became an easily implemented combination sales and marketing tool, then that made those little losses much less likely to happen. Like I said, I have a pretty deep sales background and so one of the things that I know for sure help me, because I did it right before here is using a tool called PandaDoc. I use it to produce all my proposals. I have templates for everything. I can make them unique to you in seconds.
Speaker 2:And when I used to run a sales team in SAP, it wasn't unusual to see a salesperson when you were going home at night working on a proposal even though we were a vast company and they'd still be there in the morning trying to pull it all together because no one had sat down and done the productization of our offers. So PandaDoc and those kind of tools if you don't have them, you're fighting the wind man. You need to get that right now.
Speaker 1:I agree, we use HubSpot and PandaDocs as well. I bet it's amazing Actually at my previous jobs as well, we used HubSpot. It's been hugely adopted now by the sales.
Speaker 2:Everybody, and I've done Salesforce and I know Salesforce is very good. Of course I've done SAP. I'm real HubSpot centric. Honestly, it's just so simple Sounds like they're sponsoring this podcast.
Speaker 2:Exactly. I didn't come on to do that but you asked. That's the answer 100%. But they have to be used in the right environment. You're not going to run General Motors with it, you're going to have an SAP system, but you might do some part of it in there. You'd be surprised at the size of the companies that do use it and the sales volume and the marketing lead generation volume that you can handle with it. So other, but those really are my two big tools. You know, of course, the normal stuff, office and that sort of stuff. In terms of Google, I use all their tools to do the job with. There's no issue there. But those three right there, are the foundation of our system.
Speaker 2:Then, of course, just the sales expertise that comes from doing well over 200 sales presentations to large customers. Can't actually learn that in college, there's not. But they, they send a lot, send us to a lot of sales training. Some of it was good, some of it was bad, but you get better at it. You know practice makes perfect kind of thing. Yeah, 100%. The, the sales strategy that that I spent a lot of time on, is productizing my service, and I know some guys totally disagree with that. But if you can find a narrow piece of what you do and productize it, then you can generally leverage that out into a much wider service offering. But that narrow piece, if you can get that done, where they can buy from you click online, amazon, it it will pay, pay many dividends to you. It's not easy to do, especially for complex services, but it is possible.
Speaker 2:So we've got that kind of down you know, we can go pretty quick now from we talked to you. Here's a proposal here. It's closed, all online and we can collect money too. Right, so that used to be very complicated, and many companies, especially large companies, try to break your sales process. Nope, get back in my sales process. This is what I sell. This is how you do it. Do not deviate or walk away from them, because they're they're trying to figure it out on their side as well.
Speaker 1:Amazing how long is your typical cycle sales cycle.
Speaker 2:Honestly a few days no that's amazing.
Speaker 2:Never, it used to be a lot longer than that. It's either going to happen faster, it's not going to happen at all. That said, it's not unusual for me to talk to somebody and not hear from them again for two years, and then they'll circle back and they'll show up and when it's when it's when it's time to do that proposal and close. Of course, I've got it templated, got the pricing templates, got the product documentation. There's a lot of background work that I've done to get to that stage. But if you do that background and you keep it, keep it straight, then you kind of you reach a business efficiency level that really makes a difference to you. And then, like I said, on the marketing side, especially the, the chat, gpt, jasper, surfer, seo and who else content and scale those guys really speed up things for me quite a bit. So, but that's my stack. There's probably a bunch of other stuff, but that's my main stack.
Speaker 1:Okay, awesome, that's great. Yeah, we also use some of those. We're looking into a bunch now. We've got a couple of demos coming up this week Just to see what they can do for us. How can they improve our, our flows and lead gen basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everybody's always trying to generate more leads, right? I just recently trialed a what's called score app. It's very, very nice. Didn't quite pay off I'll go back to it but it has AI to write your whole quiz for you. That's pretty amazing. Wasn't as good as what I think I come up with, but I actually got it out the door and live a few hours, kind of stuff. So yeah, the tools keep advancing.
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:There's others.
Speaker 1:So there's so many coming up and I'm excited to see where it goes, because I feel like we just at the like we at the start of this we haven't seen what's what's to come, it's coming.
Speaker 2:You just need budget to play with it and people to buy from it. And that's probably the biggest challenge is a lot of customers. They're not that deep into it. They're, you know, show me how to make more money. That's what they want to know. But the the tools are just. They're on lightning speed acceleration right now.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I'm a bit scared and I'm excited to see what's happening in the next five, ten years.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be a rollercoaster and I'm here for it.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be amazing honestly, even in the last year there's been so much evolution in the space.
Speaker 2:But it takes a lot of time. I do have to admit it takes a lot of time to focus on that and come up with a strategy and how to use them because, like I said, there's many, many tools. There's one other tool that's kind of a under the coverage tool that I use a lot more than I used to, which is the schemaorg tag of pages. This is deep in the weeds kind of stuff. I have really found that that makes Google eventually pay a lot more attention because, keep in mind, it's blind as a bat. It can't read and doesn't understand a thing. So you got to help it, exactly.
Speaker 1:And they'll tell you that.
Speaker 2:That was. That was a word to you, so I've been spending a lot of time and effort tagging up every page. There's probably better ways to do it, but you can see that after about a month or so, all sudden traffic shows up and you can monitor it. So okay, there are tools out there to do that for you too.
Speaker 1:So yeah, exactly. And while we're on the topic of AI, where do you see your industry heading in the next, let's say, five to ten years, and do you think it's going to be impacted by AI in a negative way, or do you think it's only going to be able to help you?
Speaker 2:Oh I, you know it'll be a mixed bag. There'll be some people who don't stay up with it and that'll be negative for them, but they'll be able to keep penetrating into every aspect of every tool in my business and again I have like three, four different parts of it. I wouldn't want to be hanging my, I wouldn't want to be a junior computer programmer because I can now write code that works by talking to chat GPT. You know, my last coding education was 40 years ago and I literally had it write me something the other day, just with prompts to compare, to compare two web pages to find all possible links. There's many other tools do it, but I wrote code or it wrote code based on that, and it took me no more than 10 minutes.
Speaker 2:It's crude, it's not pretty, but I can take two web pages, I can find every identical word or phrase in it and oh, there's my, there's my potential linking opportunities that will continue to advance and there will be libraries of things that you can go in and say do this. So if you're very junior, down you, but you best be running real fast. If you're very senior, you've got to figure out how to leverage this. I've got a coding background. Otherwise, I you know I see it as greatly beneficial to like helping you structure your, your creativity, to be a little bit more effective. I've done a lot of work with it. Already I've seen results.
Speaker 1:So Okay, great, yeah, amazing. Yeah, I was actually looking into it last year. I was going through a bit of a change and I was thinking to get into software development as a developer and then I just started chatting to people and they were like I don't think that's the right way for you to go, just because it'll take me about four or five years to get qualified. And imagine what's going to be in four or five years, I don't think it'll be necessary.
Speaker 2:No, it's quite a scary thought, just to kind of put a wrapper on this. In the 90s they sent me to school to go learn what's called Oracle Designer 2000, which was a case tool, computer-aided systems engineering tool. You could draw pictures, build a database, write code, and we learned all that. And you could hit a button and it would generate good enough code and a beautiful database design the whole thing. I thought to myself why in the world would I want to spend my time doing this? When I just pressed that button and it was done, yeah, you could run the optimizers on it and it would be better and whatnot. But you could see right then and there that you either better be way up here or down here, able to work cheap. I was in the middle, but you could see it coming way back then. So it's not new. It's had a lot of time to evolve. There's still a need for it. But yeah, it's a tough call you got four or five years.
Speaker 2:That's a lot of money you're giving up, yeah exactly, it's an opportunity cost. It's an opportunity cost and there's others that can do what you do cheaper.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And let's go back to the business side. We've digressed a bit into it. So have there been any partnerships or collaborations that have helped form and grow your business or?
Speaker 2:Sure that get you know, revealing the specific names. Like I said, we've signed, you know, partnerships with several SAP delivery centers so that we could hand that off. In fact I was working on this morning, you know, because you're literally flooded constantly with SAP work and most of that work is, if it can, it has went to India where it's cheaper. But that's not the market that we pursue. Ours is kind of high up there. Hubspot itself is a big partnership of ours. They provide all that training.
Speaker 2:But I partnered up with a guy named John Costigan who's a sales trainer, one of the best that there is, and his was really helpful because the first thing he says you're not charging the, you raise my rates, so we'll do that, and we and we did that. And then we partnered up on several, several deals where it was very, very clear that his expertise was sales, mine was, in this case, marketing, and we helped those businesses grow very, very rapidly, working together, and we couldn't have done it without, without each other and he, you know, was really. I thought that was really helpful. And then I actually have as customers quite a few SAP partners themselves and they bring me in, usually to support on the sales side to help coach them, kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Partnerships like what you're probably thinking, not not so much, but the background that I have in SAP sales means that those guys they turn to you and that's that's been pretty useful. That background, that 25 year background in ERP sales, is still very useful. Out there there's eight or 9,000 sales a year of new ERP and almost every system is constantly being upgraded and you know there's a big market there and that technology keeps growing. So some, if you don't keep up with it, you'll soon be out of date. So these guys, but sales is sales. You have to. That's a skill that doesn't like really depreciate, but if you don't keep it sharp and stay up on your product knowledge, it'll buy.
Speaker 1:So 100%, no, 100%, agree with you. So, lonnie, we are running out of time, but before we go, I just want to thank you for being on the show, and so what would the best way for people to get in touch with you, with Lonnie, is LinkedIn or email, or what's the best way?
Speaker 2:LinkedIn works, you can. You can always find me my emails, lonnie dot errors, at SAP BW consultingcom, or you can call me at 812-340-5581 for those that have that number, which I've had for 30 years. You can do it your best, best. Go to my website, sap BW consultingcom and book a meeting with me, because I'm saying if it's not on my calendar, it probably didn't happen 100%. I don't really have a lot of spare capacity most of the time.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, that's, that's fair enough. Well, thanks again for being on the show. I've really enjoyed this and, yeah, we. I'm looking forward to following your story and see where you go. I'll connect with you on LinkedIn now.
Speaker 2:Okay, appreciate having me on and I'll be looking forward to listening to it. Okay, awesome, thank you. I'll hide all your read by calculator.
Speaker 1:Bye, bye.