demandDrive’s VP of Sales, Nimit Bhatt, joins the Ambition Operator Series podcast to share how to use AI in sales for smarter research, meaningful discovery conversations, and building stronger customer relationships, all while staying ahead of the automation curve. Hear why ‘going AI’ isn’t about replacing reps, but empowering them to focus on what truly matters: understanding customer needs deeper and closing smarter.

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Transcript

Introduction

[0:05] Brian Trautschold: Hey everyone, this is Brian Trautschold. I’m the co-founder of Ambition and I am pleased to be joined today with Nimit. We’ve been friends for at least 10 years — I think we were trying to track down the email archive. I’m excited to have you back on a rebranded, different feel that we’re calling the Sales Operator Series, because I think at this point everyone has to be executing. Operating really changed the game from, you know, leaders and influencers. But Nimit, please introduce yourself.

[0:34] Nimit Bhatt: Yeah, absolutely Brian, it’s great to connect with you again. Nimit Bhatt, head of sales at Demand Drive.

How to use AI in sales for smarter research

[0:40] Brian: It’s great to have you back. Since we last spoke, you were running a whole SDR team at memoryBlue — you kind of built that from the ground up — and now you’re on the enterprise services side and scaling that up. You know, if you’re jumping in and you’ve got a person early in their career, coming from an early stage AE, BDR, or SDR role, and they say, “How do I grow my career? How do I advance in the chaos that is sales and revenue orgs right now?” — what are you telling them? What’s the playbook or the tactics that have worked for you that you think are still applicable today?

[1:23] Nimit: Yeah, for sure. I think first it has to come down to your individual performance — you can never lose sight of that. You should always be looking for ways to advance and develop, looking for paths internally within your org of what realistically is the next step for you. One, you have to focus on your daily craft and make sure you are constantly evolving, because in the world of sales, if you even rewind three months ago, it’s a completely different world. We joke about it here internally — we had our SKO in January and none of the stuff we talked about at SKO is still relevant today. It’s completely passed us by.

So for someone in a sales role right now looking to develop and go to the next step: one, make sure you are doing everything in your power with the control you have over your pipeline, your numbers, your close rates. But then it’s, how do I enable myself even further by leveraging AI? How can I make AI my friend to make me a better seller? Not to the point where it’s replacing me, but it’s making my conversations more powerful, my follow-up better, providing me with better research going into calls.

What I unfortunately see a lot of reps using it for now is sending out mass emails — “personalization at scale” — but that game just doesn’t work anymore. There’s an over-reliance on it. You have to separate yourself, show that you are evolving with the way the sales world is headed, because that’s what it’s going to take to move into a leadership position. At that point you’re responsible for a team of sellers, responsible for coaching and developing.

Things that worked for you when you were in that role don’t work anymore. I personally run into that all the time. If you gave an SDR team to me today, I would have no idea what I’m doing — because you and I come from the days of wired headsets, actually punching in each number individually, building scripts on the fly. So: control the controllables, but look for ways to advance and enable yourself even better, because that’s what you’re going to have to teach to a new crop of SDRs.

How to use AI in sales for building stronger customer relationships

[4:04] Brian: There’s a ton of things anyone could say that’s 100% right. One thing you said specifically — about doing the things AI doesn’t replace — I think is really interesting from a seller standpoint all the way up to leadership. There are so many of these “in the weeds” parts of the process that we were doing because they’d always been done that way. When you say that, I’m curious: what is a seller supposed to think about when asking, “What is AI not going to replace?” or “What is AI going to enhance?” Give me an example of that.

[4:52] Nimit: So for me, the majority of my selling experience has been selling services. I had a brief stint selling straight software, but for about 85% of my sales career, I’ve been selling a service — something you can’t pull up and show in a demo. A lot of times you’re selling hopes and dreams, because you don’t know until you actually begin the work.

[5:23] Brian: (laughing) We disagree — the software people disagree.

[5:27] Nimit: Yeah, come on! But so with that, it requires an extra level of truly understanding the problem you’re solving for a prospect. Especially here at Demand Drive, we have so many different kinds of services we can position in front of a prospect, helping them build the most optimal go-to-market strategy for where they are at that stage.

So AI for my sales team has just become an extra set of ears to listen for all these things, so they can focus their time on having really intentional, deep discovery conversations with prospects — because they don’t have to worry about writing everything down. They can go back and recollect things from the conversation, and that ultimately leads to a better relationship with the prospect. It makes you sound more genuine. They feel like you’re rowing the boat with them, especially in a very crowded or competitive space.

Those are the little things that help guide the process along a little bit faster and build confidence with prospects. It all comes down to the professionalism in the follow-up — the value you can actually provide to them, going back to those conversations and leveraging AI to build better collateral, having a database to refer back to that’s very specific to their exact challenge. It just creates better follow-up material.

[7:04] Brian: There’s an irony there. I agree with all of that — especially the idea that you can turn off that voice in your head saying “what am I going to say next?” and instead actually pay attention, knowing the AI is going to remind you of things later or make sure you cover them in your action plan. Before a lot of these tools existed — before everything moved to Zoom and scripted cadences — salespeople of that era just had to be really good in those situations. Really good at connecting, thinking about what the prospect cares about. I think we lost some of that muscle memory. But it’s coming back, I think, to your point.

[8:02] Nimit: Yeah, I think so. Having Zoom as the standard also changed things. Back in the day, you could be in a conference room on a speakerphone — just you and the prospect — but you could have your manager in the room with you, the technical expert in the room. The prospect doesn’t know. You could go on mute, ask a quick question, unmute. Those kinds of things. It just requires you to be more intentional now.

How to use AI in sales for meaningful discovery conversations

I still, whenever I take sales calls for technology I’m interested in, see a lot of salespeople fall into the old traps. But that’s one way to truly separate yourself — know that there are a lot of folks you’re competing against who are not leveraging this powerful technology and are running every call the same. You have the opportunity, as long as you have the right tools, to have a very intentional conversation with a prospect about their challenges and what they’re trying to solve — but also to understand all the other steps of the buying process.

I look at AI to figure out: what am I missing? Because when you’re in calls, it’s very easy to forget — oh, I forgot to ask about the paper process, or how long it takes to go through legal. So I’ve built prompts out of the transcripts we get from calls. One of the pieces it asks for is, “Tell me what I’m missing. What did I not get from this call? Look at this through the lens of a veteran salesperson following these types of sales methodologies.” And if you have multiple conversations, we connect it into Claude and have it go through all the conversations — “Hey, you’re still missing these key pieces of information.”

[9:55] Brian: I think that’s great. And it brings up a symptom of what I think we fell into. Everyone has the playbook, the process, the things they want to make sure they know — what does the procurement process look like, who needs to be involved from legal, whose budget is it, whatever acronym methodology you’re using. But what happened at some point is we turned those into fields in Salesforce, then turned those fields into steps in the qualification call. So it became: “Nimit, who at the company is going to decide the budget? Also, what’s the email address for procurement?”

[10:37] Nimit: You’re just filling in the fields — it’s unnatural. There’s no human element to it. For a while, every single conversation I had had a version of that — just filling out fields in the opportunity object.

[10:53] Nimit: Well, that comes down to coaching — how you get those answers without specifically asking. To that point about understanding who the decision maker or economic buyer is: that can be as simple as doing a little research before the call. Understanding who this person is, what their title is, who their boss potentially could be. Then going into the call and saying, “Hey Brian, I did a little bit of research — can you just tell me the org you’re part of? Who do you ultimately roll up to? Do you roll into marketing, do you roll into sales?” And then they start talking: “Oh yeah, I roll up to the CRO.” And then you say, “Okay cool, so does this typically come out of a sales budget for a program like this, or would marketing have a piece of it?” You get to the same answers without going through a checklist.

[11:44] Brian: That’s a great example that any rep — certainly newer reps or people newer to sales — could really benefit from. But it also shifts the perspective from being on the opposite side of the table to being on the prospect’s side: “Tell me how this works and how I can help you get through the maze.” I love that.

Story time: closing deals with confidence

All we’re talking is sales and we have a couple minutes left. Part of this new series we’re doing, I just love hearing sales stories — good, bad, otherwise. I call it sales lore. If you’re at a conference for any amount of time, you start hearing people’s sales lore. Nimit — it could be a win we pulled from the jaws of death, or a disaster where we thought we’d crossed the finish line and we didn’t. Hit me with a sales war story.

[12:40] Nimit: There’s one that always jumps out to me whenever I get this question. I’ll say I can’t take credit for this — this was actually a call that one of the sales managers who reported to me was running. Even though I wasn’t on the call, I felt like I was, because of just how amazing and beautiful a moment this was. Shout out Brandon Irene — I hope he sees this and recalls it.

So there was a deal we were running. It was a fairly large deal for the organization with a large TCV tied to it. We had had multiple conversations with a gentleman in procurement — our favorite person to speak with, as part of any sales process. He was just a very procurement-minded person, not really budging on a lot of things, asking for things that were somewhat unreasonable. We gave in on some of those, we compromised. But there was one specific clause we just could not change. It was one of those, “We’re not going to budge on this, or we don’t have a deal” situations. Really tough to be in as a seller.

[13:48] Brian: Very hard.

[13:49] Nimit: I basically told Brandon, “You have full reign on this — however you want to play it, but we can’t budge on this.” So he shares the recording with me after the call. The procurement person says, “So about this specific clause — we want this changed.” And Brandon goes, “No, we’re not going to do that.” He says, “So you’re telling me you’re not going to change this to get this deal in?” And Brandon says, “That’s correct. I’m not going to.”

And then — complete silence. The most awkward 45 seconds of complete silence. And then Brandon grabs his Starbucks cup, takes a sip, you hear the whole sip and the cup being put back down. Another 20 seconds of silence. And he just goes, “Are you still there?” And the guy says, “Yeah, no, I’m listening.” And the deal ended up closing.

It was just one of those “what are we doing here?” kinds of moments. What that really taught me — and what I tell people whenever I share this story — is that at the end of the day, you have to understand how much leverage you actually have in a deal. Sometimes you have to look at a deal and say, “You actually need us more than we need you.” It’s that old-school John Costigan sales mentality — “I don’t need this deal” — having that independence. Once you detach yourself from the outcome, it builds a lot more confidence in you as a seller, and you can have moments like that.

[15:31] Brian: I have some second-order pride in Brandon just for sticking with the silence. That’s such a tough move in the moment.

[15:41] Nimit: Yeah, and he’s only gotten better since then. It was a privilege to work with him. I’m sure he’s done it multiple times since. I hope he kept that Starbucks cup — maybe washed it out but kept it with the TCV written on the side.

[15:59] Brian: Spray painted gold or something.

How to use AI in sales where it matters, without losing sight of your end goal

[16:01] Nimit: Oh man! Okay, last question — and you can make it as short or long as you want. We’re probably both in a world where the noise around what you should be doing, what you shouldn’t be doing, what new tools you should be utilizing, what processes you should follow — it’s constantly being talked about on LinkedIn, everywhere. What piece of new-age conventional wisdom, what’s hot right now, do you think is actually totally wrong or completely misguided?

[16:40] Nimit: There is what I’ve heard referred to as “tool fatigue” — where sales teams just throw a bunch of tools at their team and say, “Use all of this, we’re paying for it.” I think there has to be consolidation happening, looking for more powerful tools — like Clay for data orchestration — that can replace a lot of those. We’re seeing a ton of success there.

But yeah, I think the idea that “more tools means more productivity” is misguided. I call it the Notion example — the tool is so cool, it can do so many things, but it can also complicate things because of all the different things it can do.

I also think there is an over-reliance on bringing AI into a sales motion. Everybody wants to be “AI-forward” and they think that just means going and buying all this technology. We’ve done a pretty full analysis of a lot of tools out there and identified a couple we think are really strong that sales teams should bring on. That’s the big misguidance right now — one extreme is “let’s go full AI, let’s explore AI SDRs for everything.” And then on the other end, there are folks clinging to the traditional outbound motion of 120 activities per day, personalizing messages, sending 100 emails a day. That stuff just doesn’t work anymore either.

Sales cannot operate on an island. You need a holistic approach that brings in marketing, and you need a RevOps or go-to-market engineering function to bridge that gap.

[18:35] Brian: I could not agree more about the RevOps bridge. The companies where those things are still disconnected — it’s not even about being connected, it’s about being truly locked in step. It’s almost like we might end up with this weird artisanal approach to people doing sales “the old way.” But I do think there’s a balance. It’s interesting to hear the tension in the discourse right now — AI everything, AI in every process — and then maybe the other side, which is we could be over-complicating it, over-AI-ing it. I’m not even sure there’s a term for that yet.

[19:27] Nimit: We could ask AI to come up with a term for us.

[19:29] Brian: It would come up with a handful of really good options and I would just put them straight on LinkedIn and claim it as my own.

Why SDRs aren’t always the answer to pipeline problems

[19:36] Nimit: The RevOps piece is really interesting too. That’s sort of what we’re seeing — folks come to us and say, “Hey, I need SDRs.” In the old world, it was “sure, here you go.” But now it’s, “Well, let’s take a step back. Let’s talk about your overall pipeline goals — why are you not reaching those? Maybe you don’t actually need SDRs right now. Maybe you need better marketing, more enablement, a RevOps engine, or better data in your CRM before you can even consider bringing on an SDR.” Those are the types of conversations we’re having now, which is way more exciting to be on the edge of. I think that’s where it’s all headed.

[20:18] Brian: Almost like a holistic medicine mindset versus the old model, where the symptom was “my pipeline’s low” and we’d just hammer it by prescribing SDRs, or ads, or tools. To your point, it’s about looking inward and asking, “What’s the actual problem here?”

And back to the career path for folks — I don’t think that RevOps, go-to-market thinker has to be a certain type of role. Lots of people can take part in that conversation, but you have to have the mindset of really digging in and asking why before reaching for a solution.

[21:10] Nimit: Yeah, well — maybe it’s because your website isn’t fully optimized, or you haven’t generated a new piece of content in six months, or you’re not showing up correctly in AI overviews. That becomes a marketing conversation. Or the reason your SDR team internally didn’t work out is because they were calling on really bad data and the wrong ICP — so that becomes a RevOps conversation and a marketing conversation. As a full go-to-market agency, we’re able to touch on all those functions, propose where you need to start, and then layer an SDR in at a later point if needed.

[21:48] Brian: This was awesome, man. Great to reconnect — where can people find you, Nimit?

[21:53] Nimit: LinkedIn’s probably the best place. Start there.

[21:56] Brian: No one has yet done something really wild on Instagram or TikTok, but maybe one day. It’s so great to see you — congrats on all the success and thrilled to have you on.

[22:09] Nimit: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Let’s do this again in six years.

[22:14] Brian: Six years. All right, man. Thank you.

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