Unlocking The Power Of Your Connections With Mehdi Tehranchi [Episode 160]

Unlocking The Power Of Your Connections With Mehdi Tehranchi

I’ve got Mr. Mehdi Tehranchi coming on. He is with the company KnowledgeNet.ai, and we are going to talk about the power of connections within your network. Within your connections, as important as the power of the connections within your whole team of the sphere of influence, you need to know how you can utilize that information in order to bridge better quality customer conversations and how you can get better clients with easier marketing.

You don’t have to work as hard as you are now, and you can get introductions to people that you didn’t even think you could because of the power of the connections within your network. In other words, how do you sell better, how do you do it more effectively, and how do you do it more efficiently?

Speaking of that, if you’re interested, we have a sales university that we have or if you’re interested in having your people understand how to sell better, please reach out to us at YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. Also, we’re going to talk about these connections and how they lead you to your ideal buyers. You understand your ideal buyers and your ideal influencers in a much deeper way so you can have connected communication that spawns business return on investment and personal return on investment just through the conversation.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to create your ideal buyer fit, in other words, understand their wants, needs, desires, and everything that they’re looking for, we run a program called CORE. You can check it out at www.CEOSalesStrategies.com/core. At this time, let’s go bring Mehdi into the room. Here we go.

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Mehdi, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

It’s great to be here. I’m excited to be here.

Now that you’re a fellow New Englander, a Bostonite, if you will, I love it because we get to talk about common things up in this area. You were originally in Virginia.

That’s correct. I went to the University of Maryland and then lived there ever since for 40-odd some years in the Virginia, Maryland, DC area. Also, because of family, I unplugged and ended up getting plugged back into the Boston area.

Looking Back

I love this place. Why don’t you tell everybody what the company is and what its background is? Let’s set the frame for this.

Everybody has heard about AI and how it has taken off. We were two years into it before ChatGPT came and blew this thing right out of the water. What we focused on is how conversations create knowledge. That’s where we started. We focused on how you understand and connect different entities within conversations and create a map out of it.

Long story short, that became how you convert conversations and data into knowledge and then serve the knowledge. ChatGPT gave us all the tools we needed in order to tap into a knowledge network and convert it into understandable human terms, questions, answers, and conversations now, an AI engine has become possible through the large language models.

We started out with just conversations and creating knowledge, if I understand correctly, and then how do we take this convergence of these conversations and put them into knowledge that will convert for people and convert in maybe a sale or convert in a relationship of some sort? Is that accurate?

That’s exactly what it is.

Artificial Intelligence

The company is called KnowledgeNet.ai. Folks, I perk up on this one. I love this product. I was searching around for it. We’re going to talk about it because everybody is like, “AI, it’s revolutionary,” and it is. We all know it’s changing things, but how do we use AI to improve sales without losing that personal touch? That’s so important for keeping deals, relationships, and customers happy. You’ve got this cool background, and I think you’re probably the best person I’ve ever had here to answer this. What is AI? A lot of people still don’t understand what it is, but what is AI?

Coming from an engineering background, I’m an electrical engineer, so I would take a look at things at this core level if I were going to describe that. It’s about pattern recognition. You recognize a pattern and then you can then amplify the pattern. If, for example, taking it to the sales world, every time I talk to a VP of production for my product, the sales cycle is reduced by five days. That’s a pattern.

That pattern was ignored before because we were getting this mountain of data and we were all lost trying to look for that needle in a haystack. Now, AI is running 24/7, looking for patterns, surfacing them, and then making them accessible, which is the key. Making it easy is the key. I want my AI where I am. I don’t want to go to yet another application to get my AI dose. I want it right at my fingertip in the browser. Don’t give me another app. That’s the side that we focused on.

Is it taking these patterns and then we’re optimizing the patterns for their effectiveness and efficiencies, and what are we trying to get done?

Exactly. AI engine is constantly looking for example, who has a relationship with who. How strong is the relationship? Are there other layers of data that can be added on? Is there a LinkedIn connection between these individuals? Are they visiting our website? Can I use this set of layers of data and triangulate it in order to surface a better set of people to talk to, optimizing your process?

This is what wasn’t possible before. It’s not like looking for conversations and patterns within conversation. Layers and layers of data can help us identify and optimize your current process. I like to call AI augmented intelligence. The ability to augment very smart people to spend time and focus on what matters, increasing their efficiency.

Mehdi, if I get this right, this almost sounds to me like an automated optimized Match.com that happens instantly for business relationships.

I have never used Match.com, but absolutely. I get the parallels between how hard it is to find a particular partner as opposed to having a mountain of data and finding a particular filter that allows you to reach, but it goes beyond that because it helps you by having better conversations. Imagine, you go to Match.com to find a date. Now, you have one of these earpieces in your ear that’s going to tell you this is the time and how you say hello. That’s the AI engine giving you all the tips and tricks you need in order to take that match to the next level.

If I understand correctly, let’s say I was prospecting your company. I looked up your profile and I utilized your engine. It would tell me matches and relationships of data that I could utilize for our conversation that would help bring us closer in personal human-to-human communication as well as a business return on investment. We get the business and personal ROI in one wrapped-up package.

You got it. I always like to use examples, especially with AI. It seems like everybody uses a couple of hot words and throws them in there. I like to use real case examples. Think you’re trying to go through that process of prospecting this individual. Wouldn’t you love to know that your next-door colleague that you meet with every day has a connection to that company’s CEO? That would be fantastic.

Wouldn’t you love to have an email generated for you so you can get that guy to forward that email to this guy saying, “We met with your company yesterday?” Now, I’m beginning to get value out of it, which brings me to the second AI. Artificial intelligence, augmented intelligence, the third AI, I should say, is actionable intelligence. How do you implement artificial intelligence? Make sure it augments all my good smart people and make sure they are actionable intelligence. It’s the three AIs that we focus on.

Network Effect

This is out of curiosity. How did you come up with this idea? I was in the military for twelve years and we used to talk about triangulation of targets. We would go out and we’d send people out in the field. I’d be one of those guys crawling around the woods and looking at the targets. We would triangulate those targets to have an accurate target to go after if we chose to do so. What I’m hearing is we have the three, As of the AI, the Artificial, the Augmented, and the Actionable. We’re triangulating all of these together. This is resulting in not only the ability to have the relationship.

As you said, “What if you had a connection that could introduce you to that and you didn’t even know it because a lot of times we wouldn’t? If we can optimize these whole processes to first get relationships and appointments, but now we have the data intelligence that’s triangulated so that we can optimize our conversations with these people, and therefore that old statement of “Birds of the same feather flock together,” or something like that.

Now, rapport has got to go off the charts. The feeling of sameness and we’re talking about relevant information, so trust levels are going to go up. Maybe positioning of expertise because I know certain things about you or your company that I was able to get through this intelligence gathering. Now, our conversations are much higher and more productive. Do I get this right?

You’re spot on. We came from after my previous startup, which grew tremendously. We had about 30,000 customers worldwide. We had seventeen languages that we ran. Nuance Communications bought us, the voice of Siri. It became part of that engine and it grew from there. The team started focusing on how to create a network effect this time.

The network effect started this interesting story. The team came out and said, “The social networks are suffering from trust and parents are the primary target of that social network to collect information from them.” We applied the graph theory, which is a segment of artificial intelligence, to find ways of saying, “Parents, you can use your own network. You don’t have to go and find Facebook to tap into and give all your information up in order to get information.”

We started by using that graph theory and saying, “We are all connected together.” We don’t need to give up your information. You’ve just got to tap into a network. Soon enough, the private equity firm spotted us and said, “Why don’t you do that for businesses? This is going to be tremendous if you can do it for businesses.” We took the parent network and we said, “Just study it.” The more we studied, we said, “These guys are smart. They came out of the graph theory on top of email, on top of LinkedIn, and on top of 280 million connection records that you can get from people, which blows this whole thing out of the water.

B2B is a way to go rather than B2C where we were originally. In this story, the idea came from a team saying, “There is something there. Let’s figure it out.” Then we worked on it. We ended up, at least as I said two years earlier, into artificial intelligence and figuring out how B2B sales, recruiting, and how individuals in various business functions can benefit from business information, not personal information, and connect it all together. As I said, ChatGPT gave us all the tools to explode that knowledge right into everyday use. That’s where we are.

Data Intelligence

It’s using it though on what I love about your story, and by the way, we’re speaking to Mr. Mehdi Tehranchi, who is at KnowledgeNet.ai. I highly recommend you check that out. What I heard was your company started as a socially responsible thing that was like, “Hey, parent,” because I’m a parent. All of us who are parents, we have kids, grandkids, or whatever, the little ones. I just read a stat the other day that blew my mind Mehdi that people in their early twenties are getting the majority of their news from TikTok.

The majority of their purchases are now coming from TikTok. They stated that TikTok is playing this out because they feel obligated and guilty not to buy off of TikTok. From a business perspective, I’m like, “They did a really good marketing job,” but from a social perspective, I’m like, “That’s awful.” That’s what I felt personally.

I hear my children in their twenties talk about how they won’t use Facebook anymore because of all of the issues with it and all of this other stuff. You’ve all taken this socially conscious perspective and built it, and then this investment firm said, “What about the business audience?” You took the same socially conscious and own network process and now we’re applying it to the business market. Also, we have all these interconnections that can happen with us so that we can see what potential clients prefer.

To me, this is the ultimate persuasion without having to use formalized marketing because we already understand what our clientele thinks and feels from understanding the repetitive patterns that are popping up, giving us that data intelligence. We can now use that data intelligence to build solid relationships, which I saw in other statistics.

I think it was 82% or 87% of CEOs now say that their intro sales meeting with a representative was a waste of time because they didn’t understand them or their company’s needs. What I’m hearing you say is that you took and resolved this challenge for people if they used the intelligence that you and your company have put forth.

That’s exactly right. The angle that we took was that the privacy of individuals is important, so let’s make sure that their connections drive their lives forward. In that sense, we gained the momentum of understanding how knowledge can be used for a family unit without selling the data to advertisers. That gave us the engineering strength that we needed when we applied it to B2B. We said, “Salespeople have a ton of knowledge. Now, let’s layer that data and be able to map it out for them.”

Be the best sales assistant that this salesperson can ever have. They work 24/7, so when they wake up in the morning, they get that 100 lead, warm introductions, and personality analysis all ready for them or for their marketing team with a message and a sequence. Start putting all the dots together. Connect them together, and then present it so the salesperson can say, “I can gain 20% to 30% right by using that connected data to drive my message, to fine-tune it, and to take my actions.”

That’s where the difference comes in. The difference comes with the strength of the network. The more data we have, one thing we found early, the better we get. KnowledgeNet has a whole SOC 2 compliance, SOC 2 Type-2. We have constantly hired intruders from outside to test our security and make sure our walls are high and impenetrable.

However, one of the things that we provide our AI package with is that we tap into your mail server and get inboxes. We go through connection records and start developing that knowledge network that is yours that’s not shared outside the wall. We try to bring it to you in a nice easy format. How long does it take to set up KnowledgeNet? Less than ten minutes. What does it take? Even at the server level, we are an enterprise AI.

If you are 100-man company, you don’t want the 100 people to sit down. We had a 600-employee company with one administrator bringing all their network on KnowledgeNet. The AI engine started working. Now, they can map things out and find connections that they never knew before. Part of it, I want to make sure if you guys are looking outside for sales tools and AI ease of use, simple and at your fingertips.

That’s how AI should be and I think one of the challenges with AI is that a lot of people are afraid of it. They fear AI because it’s not simple in a lot of ways that we don’t understand. I think ChatGPT, Gemini, and things like that have made it a little easier to use, but I remember using it and then putting it out and going, “It’s coming back with stuff.” It’s not irrelevant. Information’s coming back then I had to learn how to train it on exactly what I was doing.

However, what I love about what you folks do is you’re training it with a knowledge base. It’s taking out the whole complexity of that process. Folks, for those of you who have read this for years, you know I don’t usually get this excited about a product or service, but when I saw this one, I was like, “This is brilliant.” I haven’t told you this in the past, but over the last years, I’ve been doing research on a regular basis on what people who are selling want in order of priority. What do business owners want on either small, medium, or enterprise-size businesses?”

They always come back to the top five categories. What I saw you do is you hit four of these categories. The categories are always, “I want new clients. I want better quality clients. I want easier marketing. I want to work smarter and not harder and then I want to hire better quality people.” Those are always the five major things that come back out of these surveys that we do. Now, we’ve done these surveys with literally tens of thousands of companies. We aggregate the data because I’m just like this. I like to look at these things.

What I’m hearing is A) We all want new clients. This helps us get new clients. B) We all want better quality clients. How do we get better-quality clients? It’s with a better understanding of who they are in the first place. I think we might want to apply this to marriages. I think the divorce rate would drop. The third thing is better marketing. What’s better marketing than connected conversations?

Also, to work smarter, not harder. Everything you’re telling me. We used to do focus groups years ago. It would take us weeks or months to start to try to gather information out of a network. It was expensive to do it back then. Now, with tools like what you built, you could do this in ten minutes. It’s like, “We’re up and running in ten minutes.”

Hiring Qualified People

Now, the fifth one is hiring better quality people. I have an idea. I wanted to throw that out here. If we understand and can aggregate knowledge from our candidates who are applying or people we’re looking to hire, we can target better-qualified people with the same type of thought process. I would think, and I’ve never asked you this, so I’m curious.

This is an interesting question because I go back to your Match.com reference. I have never used Match, but if you were going to try to find a partner, I would put money down saying that the best ones are the ones that your friends are introducing to you. Your friends know you. They have done the match process, and this lady, this man, or vice versa is a great match.

In the case you are hiring, the matches are out there, right there within your network. You are finding companies you are looking at, because remember KnowledgeNet also hooks into your team’s LinkedIn and does the AI analysis around LinkedIn’s ability for us to understand the personality and the social network of the candidates. It then allows you to say, “You don’t know Joe, but Joe is connected to Jill here, who has worked for you for two years.”

If you’re a recruiter in that company, who do you go to start talking to Joe? “Jill, I’ve seen Joe. What do you know about Joe?” “He’s a great guy. I worked with him. He has always been there for me. He is an expert in this.” “Can I get an interview with him?” That’s a match that comes through people you know rather than, “Here is a post. By the way, I’m going to put it on 10,000 sites. I’m going to put 30 questions in front of them.” Then I’m going to come back and say, “More than likely,” and then how long does it take for you to have a process or understanding? If that guy doesn’t work out well, you set back six months.

Also, a whole lot of money.

This method of matching using an AI, which is where our core is when you think about recruiting is another sales. You’re trying to find quiet candidates who don’t necessarily put out their resume and say, “I’m out there for a job.” You’re trying to get a warm introduction to them. Grab their ear and say, “Do you see what’s exciting here? We use AI. Do you want to learn AI? Come on over.” That’s how the companies create that excitement in recruiting in order to bring in individuals. You are spot on. The fifth one is finding another smart set of team members. As you are growing your team, KnowledgeNet is already doing that for many companies.

As I’ve said, I don’t know how many times in my life, hundreds or thousands of times when owners are looking for top performers, the 1% earners, they say, “Where do I find them?” I say, “They’re in the other people’s database that you’re already talking to who are 1% earners because it requires a different level of thought to be at that level.” Top people or top earners network with other top earners. It’s just the way it works.

Just like if I were an avid golf fan or a golfer, I would try to network with other people who are good at golf. I’m not probably going to hang out like I do at the Boston Bruins hockey place to find golfers. There might be a few there, but it’s generally a different audience. Top performers are the top of the top. The 1% of earners are networking with one another because they’re smart enough to know that if they get into an opportunity that isn’t working out, there are 5 or 10 other opportunities they can immediately get into. It’s because they’re highly sought-after candidates. That’s why I brought this up, Mehdi. When you were talking, my brain was like, “This is off the charts.

I’ll give you a story, which is interesting. In my previous company, we were looking for a head of sales and we found this guy, Dick Bosworth. He is an absolute ace. He ran the first company from $7 million to $100 million. The second company started at $8 million or $9 million. He was at $150 million. How am I going to pull this guy out? I am at a small little $7 million company back then. What am I going to do?

Luck or persuasion, the next thing I know is Dick loves our product. The reason I’m saying this is that as soon as we had that attachment with Dick, fourteen other top salespeople got attracted to us. That set the company way ahead. We took the next five years at a 37 CAGR growth year after year nonstop. Initially, we were at 60%, 70%, and then 30%, but we had a three-year CAGR of 37%. It’s a huge growth because you find the right person, they are in the same circle and they attract similar types of individuals with them.

You get a multiplier. It’s not just your audience. You get the first hill, so to speak. You are right there in the big league now, where you pull in additional. That is an absolute side effect of it that I think the salespeople can understand. They live there. Once they have big wins, other people in the same orbit start getting attracted to it.

I want to back this up again. What you’re saying is people who are in certain places understand and have relationships with people in similar or other places that are equal to or better than they are presently involved in. I want to give my daughters a plug here. When they were little, my daughter, Jacqueline, and her sister Rebecca, Jacqueline said, “Dad, I think I want to be the first female general manager of the National Hockey League.”

I was like, “That is a really good goal.” I’m like, “You got to reach out to these general managers and use the fact that you’re 7 or 8 years old to your advantage in this situation.” She said, “How do I do it?” I said, “This is how you probably gather the research based on what I know and this is what you would do. You would reach out to them by email and then follow up with a phone call.” We’re talking many years ago. She and her sister go and take my advice. They cold-called every general manager of the NHL, and they ended up talking with the general manager of the Boston Bruins. I think it was Don Sweeney, if I remember correctly, the Philadelphia Flyers and a man named Brad Treliving [Ma4] of the Calgary Flames.

They were name-dropping like, “I’m talking to Mr. Sweeney. I’m talking to Mr. Treliving.” They were getting through the door and they were just calling and saying, “I’m eight years old. I’m thinking of becoming the first general manager. I’m looking for a mentor or at least somebody to talk to me about how it can be done. I was speaking with Mr. Treliving from the Calgary Flames and I thought maybe I could speak to your general manager.” They got through to six of them if I remember correctly. Brad Treliving ended up mentoring her for a period of time and Don Sweeney, I believe, was the other one in Boston for a period of time, but they knew one another.

It was like carte blanche when they got there, Mehdi, because it was like, “I want you to go to my personal executive assistant, schedule this and do this.” They talked to the assistant. “That’s so cute. That’s amazing.” “Do you know anybody else in the General Managers league?” “You should talk to this assistant.” They would go to that assistant and that’s how they got into the other ones.

I wanted to back this up with a real-life story. I think it’s great prospecting that they did, but to your point, people have connections to other people and if we can access those in a respectful way, we can get introductions and there’s nothing on this planet that is stronger than a referral when it comes to sales close rates.

It gives you credibility. You have to be honest and straightforward and make their mission your mission. Be that transparent about how I’m trying to help you, especially with new technology like KnowledgeNet. My team is looking at and saying, “This is not about using AI. This is about how I understand my customer better.” It’s because if I understand where they want to go, then I can help them better. Good salespeople know that right off the hand. This is not selling the next license of a product. This is about understanding where you want to go. What’s your strategy? How could I help you get you to where you want to be? That’s where knowledge is essential to that kind of sales motion.

Also, when we build those relationships in the SaaS world, the next login will come naturally because I suspect many companies you mentioned have 600 logins. There are probably not a lot of companies that just go, “Mehdi, thanks for talking to me. Here’s a blank check for 600 logins.” They probably started with 10, 20, or 30 logins or whatever, and from there, they go, “This is amazing,” and then they upgrade to the next level or possibly to the 600 right away.

In most cases, people who are selling on that level, I used to sell Enterprise Wireless, and I think the biggest first order I ever got out of the gate was 105 lines, but then those eventually turned into thousands. Sometimes, this is the way it works, but the relationship I built with a hundred lines is what led me to the next. When I got Enterprise Rent-A-Car, for example, in my telecommunications business, I started with one local branch that introduced me to a local branch who introduced me to a local general manager.

The general manager introduced me to another general manager, who introduced me to the regional vice president, who introduced me to St. Louis. That’s how I got most of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. What I love about what you’re doing is that it’s such high integrity and utilizing people’s own information that they’ve gathered over the years anyway just to enhance the current and future relationships going forward.

Also, being able to give you access to all the information, I go back to this at your fingertips. Let me give you an example. We all use browsers day by day and hour by hour. Everything is in the browser. When we started looking at this, we said, “We don’t want another application in the browser where you have to go to KnowledgeNet.ai and log in and then figure out what the relationships are.”

We want wherever you are browsing, if you’re going to Caterpillar, we want to be able to be a button that says, “Who do I know at Caterpillar?” It should be able to tell you right then and there, “Five people in your company know Caterpillar. There were two meetings yesterday. You have 250 people.” Then you can say, “I’m looking for the Chief Operating Officer of Caterpillar. In this region, they have 3 and in this particular segment of their business, they have 2,” right there in the browser. You haven’t left the Caterpillar site yet.

Also, you can say, “I want to write an email to that COO. This is real. This is at your fingertips. You say, “Give me the personality analysis for that COO. Here’s the personality analysis. How does it know?” It’s because it has looked at LinkedIn, social networks, the posts, the likes, this and that. You then say, “Write an email for an introduction to that COO using that analysis and talk about my product.” This is a matter of minutes now.

Relationship Capital

I remember the old days when we used to try to do that, firstly, you couldn’t get all that information quickly and sometimes it would take years literally to pull that information. You’re talking minutes. I want to further back this up about some people reducing or minimizing, I should say, the relationship capital that they currently have because they don’t realize the power in the relationship capital that comes along not only with what they have but then collectively a company has.

When I was president of the Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes companies, I had a gentleman who worked for me. I tried to stay in touch with everybody as best I could over the years, but we lost track of one another, as most people do over the years. He had a family, I had a family, and that type of thing. In 2023, I reached out to him. I saw him on my LinkedIn contact, and I’m like, “I didn’t realize it.” I reached out with, “How are you doing?” He replies back and he says, “I’m doing great. It’s great to hear from you. I’m sorry we lost touch over the years, etc.” I said, “Yeah, sure.” I said, “What are you up to?” He says, “I am now a high-level manager for Audible.” I’m like, “I have a podcast.”

I use the same app and I love the app. I tell you, this story is about someone that I worked with in Bell Communication Research back in my engineering days, and one of the colleagues in my team is their VP of Product Development. I found that out maybe a few years ago and I sent them an email saying, “I use your app. I love your app. Audible is my source for books, podcasts, and so on.” He goes, “Yeah, it’s great to talk to you again. We lost touch.” We were doing a lot of communication research for Bell Labs and now he is one of the smartest guys I know. He’s got executive-level connection right there in Audible that I used every day and I didn’t know.

Between your relationship and my relationship, we have it on the sales and development sides, but we didn’t realize these things. For me, I asked him a question. I said, “How do I get featured in Audible? How do I do this? How do I do the within,” because it’s a very strong platform, as we both know. He is like, “Let me introduce you to the executive vice president of…” and I’m like, “What an idiot I am really.” That’s what I was thinking in my head.

How long would it take you if you knocked at the door of Audible and said, “Do you know what? I need to be in your platform off of their website.” It would take years for you to do this five-minute conversation and get the connection. That’s what I’m talking about, but I want to highlight something because you mentioned something. I want to make sure that before I forget it, I mentioned it. It’s all about your team’s connection because you can use KnowledgeNet and run it around your inbox. You can keep it as your secret weapon, but it’s much more powerful when you invite your team into your knowledge space and then the exponential multiplication of connections happens. We go to the second and third levels. If you connect it to your website traffic, you layer that. A lot of people say, “What are you going to do? Ford Motor Company just visited my website. There are 40,000 people.”

I said, “Probably about five of them are talking to you over there in manufacturing and supply chain that you didn’t know.” Not that they are your target. Those four are not your target, but they are a warm connection to the five others in Ford Motor Company you can get to. Right there, the team is like, “I can now connect things and get at the speed of light in front of my target audience with a warm, trusted connection, which is gold.” That’s the team’s connection and the team’s knowledge network.

Also, that is such an invaluable piece of information that people must know. You are using the power of the Mastermind, which Napoleon Hill brought forth, but you are using it in a different way. We’re utilizing our team’s connections to other connections to bring forth minds together to solve a challenge or a solution. What I want people to understand out of that, Mehdi, is how powerful it is but one never knows the connections that other team members might have.

I’m going to give this insane example, but it’s a true example. A friend of mine, who I’ve known for years, we were sitting. I was having a Coca-Cola and he’s having a glass of wine. I said to him, “Do you know anybody up in the New York area that might have connections here?” He goes, “Do you want this guy’s number?” He pulled up and showed me the number on his cell phone, which was Donald Trump’s personal cell phone number.

I was like, “How?” This was when he was back running for president. I’m like, “I don’t want the Secret Service taking me.” He’s like, “Settle down. I’ll make a phone call for you if you want.” My point is that I didn’t know he had that number, and we don’t know what our team members have for information that’s locked up in their own connections. It’s because we know people through our lives, and then we might even have a casual relationship that’s a friendship with somebody, and then all of a sudden, that friendship gets connected with something else. We just don’t know.

Get In Touch

I was friends with the band Boston for a period of time. Sib, the drummer, his daughter married The Rock. Imagine the connection that could come so you could maybe possibly talk to The Rock. What you said – without the connection, it would take you years to potentially get an appointment. I want people to understand the power of what you’re talking about because it is so powerful. Speaking of that, Mehdi, I know you have a free trial on your website, but how do people know more about KnowledgeNet.ai or you as a person? How do they connect with you?

The best way, first of all, if you want to learn more about KnowledgeNet. There are plenty of videos and content that you can go through YouTube and other sources. We oftentimes have our partners create additional webinars around the same thing, in which they go through a lengthy description of how things are working for them with examples. You have plenty of success stories of customers who have used it and how they used it.

One of the success stories was with CDI Engineering. A gentleman there used us and landed a $300,000 deal. It turned around and in a matter of months, it turned out to be a $14 million deal. That kind of success story gives you the flavor of what you can do. I think one of the best ways to start is to sign up for a demo and that’s a free demo. You can then get set up and have a free trial period. We set you up. We assign AI experts to you to understand what exactly you need.

You get AI experts to sit down and say, “How do you find a lead? How do you engage a lead? How do you sequence stuff?” Those types of things take the fear away. As you mentioned and said at the beginning, everybody’s like, “What is this AI? It’s complicated.” We give you all the steps you need in order to on ramp.

The second, and I think is as important as the AI being at your fingertips is that we are connected to twenty different CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Claritysoft. Those are all our partners. We have tight integration that you go to that app, just like a browser, where you can get detailed information of every contact inside CRM, and we push information into the CRR so your HubSpot marketing lead can all of a sudden be enriched.

You don’t have to say, “Marketing, could you please add Doug here to my marketing list?” No. Doug is in there. Doug is getting some messages. Tomorrow, I’m going to call Doug and say, “Hey, Doug.” “I saw that email you sent me.” It’s both sides. Being at your fingertips makes it easier for your existing investments to be smarter, actionable, and augment you. It’s really important to realize both sides of this equation.

Episode Wrap-up

Mehdi, thanks so much for being here on the show. I’m so grateful you’re here. I know the message that we’re bringing is so important to people. Once again, thank you.

My pleasure. It was so much fun to talk about experiences and stories. Wherever you’re going, I think this is an exciting environment and exciting area, and I’m enjoying working with everybody in the sales teams and their CEOs.

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That was an awesome conversation. If you loved it, please give it a review. I would be so grateful if you go up and do so. Understanding that the aggregation of knowledge that you can do within minutes now when you are utilizing the power of AI, and as Mehdi said, the three AIs. The artificial, the augmented, and the actionable AI to get things going for you. It is so simple to use.

Once you understand how to use it in the power of using it, you will likely never want to not use it again because you can utilize the power of networks now on its own network without compromising security, as he was telling us. Also, it brings back actionable data. In other words, if you can have actionable intelligent data that you can deploy, you’ll have a much better conversation.

If you think about any situation ever, we’ve all had this scenario on a personal level. You find somebody who’s very attractive and you see them and you go, “I want to go talk to them.” Back in the old days, it was like, “What’s going to be your opening line? What’s going to get you in so you can have a deeper conversation?” What if you knew that right up front?

In other words, what if you knew what motivated this person? What if you knew what this person was interested in? What if you knew what this person valued? What if you knew all this intelligence ahead of time? Couldn’t you craft a message that was very straightforward, and that person would say, “I want to hear more about that. Have a seat. Let’s talk.” Of course, you could. The challenge was you didn’t have the ability to get the information.

You didn’t know this person, but imagine you had a warm introduction or you had the ability, even if you were going into a cold market, to have the intelligence to have that conversation and that relationship with that person. That’s what we’re talking about here. The power is enormous, bridging rapport and creating instantaneous trust. That’s what you want to do when you want to sell more, sell higher quality clients, and sell for more money.

Mehdi mentioned something about the gentleman who sold a $300,000 deal and who sold a $14 million deal. That is a huge jump and that all comes from that high rapport, high trust, understanding the right target buyers, understanding the right target influences, knowing what influences both of them or all of them, and being able to communicate on that level.

If you love this, please give it a review. I would be forever grateful. If you want someone to help you with your company, we work with people just like you to help them double up on their sales and get forward and understand all of the things we were talking about on this show, as well as much deeper levels on the sales process as well understanding the right fit buyer.

If you want to understand the right fit buyer, go to www.CEOSalesStrategies.com/core. That is a program we run specifically on that. If you want to reach out to us directly, please do. You matter because you do matter to us. YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. We don’t just work with big giant accounts, even though we bring a lot of big, giant accounts here. We work with companies of all sizes, from enterprise all the way to people who don’t have enterprise-level accounts and that’s okay because someday, if you truly want it, you can be an enterprise-level account. We all start somewhere.

Sony started as an individual or a group of people, and Sony is a huge company now. You can look at any company that started out that way. Apple started in a garage with a bunch of friends. They are certainly not in a garage now. Wherever you are, if you need help, reach out to us. If we can’t help you directly, we’ll know someone who can. Go out and sell something. Help somebody make their day.

Remember, when we’re selling, we’re helping people either resolve a challenge or a problem they have, uncover something they didn’t know they had a challenge, which they will be forever grateful if you know how to solve it, and giving them an opportunity to get something in a better future. That is our job as sellers and as business owners. Go out and do that. Watch your discounting. You don’t have to discount down if you know what the value is to yourself, to them, and how to convey that value. Discounting doesn’t have to happen, but go sell a lot of it and make someone happy. To your success.

 

 Important Links:

• KnowledgeNet.ai
• YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com  
• www.CEOSalesStrategies.com/core
• Mehdi Tehranchi
• https://twitter.com/Mehdi_Tehranchi