CSP S3 E 15 - Mike Sabat Twilio - Meta Prompt for Success

In this thought-provoking episode, Mike Sabat, Enterprise Account Executive at Twilio, unveils practical strategies for leveraging AI in customer success and account management. He shares groundbreaking approaches to AI implementation, including using it as a virtual coworker and harnessing tools like Google Gemini for comprehensive account research. The discussion reveals how AI can dramatically reduce research time while improving the quality and depth of account planning.

Detailed Analysis

The episode delves deep into the practical application of AI in customer success, highlighting several transformative approaches:

The conversation begins with Mike's innovative perspective on overcoming "AI writer's block" by treating AI as a collaborative coworker rather than just a search tool. This approach helps professionals move past the initial hesitation of not knowing how to integrate AI into their workflow.

A significant portion focuses on Mike's revolutionary approach to account planning using AI. He introduces the concept of "meta prompting" - using AI to create comprehensive prompts for deeper research. This method, particularly when combined with Google Gemini's advanced research capabilities, transforms what was previously a days-long research process into a matter of minutes.

The discussion highlights the importance of responsible AI usage, with Mike emphasizing the need to be cautious with proprietary information. He provides practical guidelines for maintaining confidentiality while maximizing AI's research capabilities.

The episode concludes with insights into how AI can serve as a preparation tool for client meetings, allowing professionals to practice handling potential objections and scenarios before actual client interactions.

The transformative impact on time management is particularly noteworthy, with tasks that previously took days now being completed in minutes, allowing for deeper, more comprehensive account research and planning.

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Transcript

Roman Trebon: 0:10

Welcome back to the customer success playbook podcast. I'm your host, Roman Trebon here with me always is my cohost, Kevin Metzger. It's Friday. The weekend is here. And we're wrapping up our three part series with Twilio's enterprise account executive, a friend of mine, Mike Sabat. Mike, welcome back. I'm glad you joined us all week. Kev, why don't you set the

Kevin Metzger: 0:33

stage for today's topic? So all week we've been discussing about how. To integrate upsells into account reviews and exploring the future of customer success roles. Today we'll focus on AI. It's one of the hottest topics in our industry and how it can transform the way we approach account management. I'm excited to talk about AI with you and Mike and let's, let's get into it.

Roman Trebon: 0:57

All right, Mike, you mentioned, uh, two, you've mentioned to us offline, a few key ideas for leveraging AI. So one of those is treating AI like a coworker or a personal assistant and using advanced tools like Google Gemini for deeper account research. Can you walk us through how you see these, like these tools being applied, like in a practical sense that our audience can start to use in their day to day?

MIke Sabat: 1:23

Yeah. So I kind of had two thoughts. And the first one was. I think for a lot of people, you understand how to use Google, people feel that AI is sort of an extension of a better version of that, but they don't really know what to do with it. Right? Like searching and asking questions. Yes. But I got stuck a few times being thinking like, what would a CSM? What would a salesperson use AI for? And you know, What I started just doing is just talking to it and bouncing ideas off it as if it was a co work. And when you start doing that, it gets answers back. It just increases the velocity of things you're trying with AI. So you don't get that like proverbial writer's block when it comes to AI, staring at a blank page and wondering, what should I do? If right now you're thinking, well, I don't really know how to use it with my job. Just open it up and start talking. See what it says. You'll think of ideas. Right? That's kind of the beauty of it. So that was idea number one, to kind of get over that first hump of writer's block. The second thing that I just did a week ago, which is really, really powerful. Is started using AI for account planning, and you have to be careful depending where you work. You don't want to put any proprietary information into it quite simply. You can just take a customer and I used AI to help me write the prompt that I put into the AI. So I said, Hey, I'm an account. You know, executive here. This is my customer. This is what we do at my company, and you can research it here. Prompt. Would you give to get an account plan for this customer specifically focused on, um, you know, a company overview their priorities over the next year? People that should be involved. And then when you find people that should be involved in the account plan, please do a little research on right. And Google Gemini is the one I've chosen to use for this case. Asked that it gave me the prompt and it's a long like two page prompt that says insert your customer name here, right? And so you actually have a prompt, which is almost like, you know, it's a document really insert the customer name I want to do and then put that prompt into Google's product that costs money, which is advanced research plus Gemini, something like that. And it takes five or 10 minutes. You just leave the page. You come back and it gives you a very thorough and sourced account plan for for the customer. Some of them better than others. There's no excuse for not like having all the research on a customer and being able to talk about five or 10 things. And then the last thing I'll say is, I'm You can go, you read the plan and you're like, wait, you didn't go deep enough on these roles. Why didn't you research John Smith? Who's the, you know, CIO of this organization. Why didn't you research more? And it'll say, you're right. Let me do that. Now come back and just give you more stuff. So it is really like. Deep and getting better and you can put a lot of information in there and ask for a lot of Information out of it, especially this this gemini advanced research plus or something

Roman Trebon: 4:40

and kev before you jump in real quick Mike just give us give our audience. Uh, uh a taste of what would that take? Before AI for you to do all that research, build it out the account plan, research, the people on your own, give it the timeframe of like the time you would have taken to do that pre AI to now, yeah,

MIke Sabat: 5:00

I don't know. Like hours, maybe days, but with sales, you know, you always do the, like not the minimum required, but you'd always want to get like something and investigate. And you'd probably have an extra. 30 minutes. And so you'd take the time to do that, maybe 30 minutes and see what you could get. This is just much better quality, much more information. And, you know, a fraction of the time. So, so you sort of would never have the time to do this, unless you only had one or two accounts. That's how, how thorough.

Kevin Metzger: 5:33

This is pretty incredible. The process of talking to the tool and asking it to provide you a prompt. There's a term for it called meta prompting, which I think is kind of cool. So you're, you're basically talking to it to get it, to create the prompt for you. And it's a very powerful process because you really can get a lot more detail than what you would think to put into the prompt, even as somebody who. Might be educated on how to create all the roles and everything that you need to do in prompting. Well, asking a tool that already knows all the rules and how to do it to do it for you and, and build it out is such a, that's such a powerful tip. Um, so thank you for that. I think that's a good, good tip. You, you took the document that it created for you and have you stored that anywhere so that you're able to just keep reusing it for every company that you. That you need to research. How do you, do you have any tools for basically reusing it or anything like that?

MIke Sabat: 6:37

Yeah, no, it's pretty simple. You know, the, I put it on a Google doc, the prompt, and it's got all the variables you fill in when you want to do a different customer. And as I got the first result back, I said, Hey, dig deeper on this. Like this was good, but dig deeper there. And you can sort of like chat with. The A. I. And do that. And then I'll specify that in the prompt. So one time I did it, for example, for a customer, it just didn't give me any roles or people back. And so you can see that and respond instantly in that case. But as that's a just it's a way to improve it going forward is just understand how to ask a deeper question and then put that in the prompt all the time. Right? So one addition I made was if you find a person That I should be a role that I'm talking to research that person, see if they're on any podcasts, if they, you know, post on LinkedIn, whatever it might be, and just explain it to go like a another level deeper, you know, derivative of the first

Roman Trebon: 7:37

prompting is going to be a course they're going to have to teach in colleges. Like maybe they already are, right? Because it's so important inside. It's that prompting. It's that continuous questioning and This is work that you probably wouldn't have got to before, or maybe you do a fraction of it and now you can just like, you're banging it out. And, and I love it too. Like, I love that assistant where, you know, I've used it where it's like, Hey, I'm talking to a client about this advanced solution, you know, here, I give them some background on the client. Some, some, and I say, Hey, what are some objections or what are some things they may push back on? It's like a practice. It's like practice at bats before I even talk to the client. Right. You know? And it's like, oh, so then when I get that real question, I'm like, oh. I've already answered that because I've had a practice session with, you know, AI Roman and AI Roman can give me that same. It's like you said, ask it questions and see what you get back. It's an easy use case, but it's such a time saver. And it's such a way to really improve how you show up and how you prepare for these client meetings. Yeah, absolutely. That's a good one, right? Just running my calls with it.

MIke Sabat: 8:35

It makes sense as well.

Roman Trebon: 8:37

Can we all see anything else for Mike here on AI before we let him off the hot seat for the week? I think we can let him go. Mike. I appreciate you coming on the show, man. You're in Vegas. You're at sales kickoff. You've carved out time to join us on the show. All week, I mean amazing. So thanks for being on here. Mike Uh, why don't you tell our audience where can our audience find more about you? What you have going on in twilio at large?

MIke Sabat: 9:02

Well, I mean i'm here as michael Not necessarily twilio, but twilio. com. I mean, it's a big company. They have a lot of stuff there. Check that out Um, i'm starting to post on linkedin just post tips about i've been doing Text message marketing for a long, long time, you know, coming up on 18 years, probably. So I'm posting just the basics there videos. So, uh, I think I'm slash Mike Sabat on LinkedIn. Find me there, uh, friend me, especially if you have SMS marketing, mobile marketing questions or anything Twilio does, I'm happy to help.

Roman Trebon: 9:32

Check out Mike on LinkedIn. You can also find Kevin and myself on LinkedIn at Roman Trebon and at Kevin Metzger. We also have our customer success playbook page. You'll get to see a video snippet of Mike here, uh, on the show. And you'll get to see which other guests we have upcoming. Kev, we've got a great lineup. I said, like I said, on last episode, we're already booking into March Madness. You know, we've got tons of great guests lined up. So join us each week. If you missed any of our episodes with Mike. Go back and check them out. That's why you need to subscribe. So when a new show comes out, you get the alert, like, Ooh, new show with Mike. Go check it out. So make sure you subscribe, like it, give us a rating. Uh, and until next time, audience keep on playing.