The Human Story in AI-Driven Sales with Gaurav Bhattacharya

AI is advancing rapidly, making our lives as storytellers easier in numerous ways.

But at what cost?  Are we losing our human touch?

Gaurav Bhattacharya, CEO and co-founder of Jeeva.ai, shares how sales teams can harness the speed and scale of AI while preserving the essence of their storytelling.

You’ll discover how intelligent agents are freeing salespeople from tedious tasks so they can focus on what AI still can’t do: build trust through authentic human connection.

Gaurav shows you how agentic AI—tools with autonomy and awareness can help your team qualify leads, personalize outreach, and 10X your performance without losing your humanity.

He also explains why the most successful sellers still master timeless skills like empathy, reflective listening, and human-centric stories to build their businesses.

Gaurav has built companies that turn chaos into clarity — and ideas into revenue.

He’s scaled B2B SaaS startups from zero to millions in ARR, led outbound teams that created pipeline from scratch, and raised venture capital along the way.

As co-founder and CEO of involve.ai, he grows customer intelligence platforms for over 500 companies and 1.1 million users worldwide.

Now, he’s building Jeeva.ai, an AI-powered SDR platform that automates lead research, enrichment, and multi-channel outreach, helping B2B teams 2x their pipeline at a fraction of the cost.

Gaurav has been deep in the trenches writing cold emails, closing deals, managing burn, and building outbound playbooks that work. His approach is simple: test fast, stay scrappy, and scale what works.

Whether it’s helping founders avoid the most painful GTM mistakes or talking shop about AI, sales, or the psychology of buying, Gaurav enjoys conversations that get real about what it takes to build something great.

What’s In It For You:

• How AI tools can streamline content creation processes.
• Vanity metrics do not equate to meaningful engagement.
• Authenticity is key in the age of AI.
• The line between creativity and morality is thin.
• Human connection will be the most valuable asset in the future.
• AI can assist but should not replace authentic voices.

Chapters:

Links:

• Jeeva.ai
• https://x.com/gauravbhattac16
• Gaurav on X
• Three months FREE Jeeva AI Enterprise Plan. Add “Podcast” in the signup note
• StoryCycle Genie

Popular Related Episodes You’ll Love:

• How a Brand Story of “Turning AI Into Actual Intelligence” is Driving Growth With Aaron Godby 
• How to Ignite Business Growth With AI-Driven Personalized Storytelling With David Edelman
• Where to Find The Right Audiences for Your Brand Stories With Rand Fishkin

Your Storytelling Resources:

 

 

Connect with me:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parkhowell/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BusinessOfStory

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0ssjBuBiQjG9PHRgq4Fu6A

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ParkHowell

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parkhowell/

Website: https://businessofstory.com/abt/

Transcript of Show:

Park Howell (00:01.013)
Gara, welcome to the show.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (00:03.48)
Park, it’s a pleasure. I’m excited to be here.

Park Howell (00:06.259)
Yeah, AI. my God. I’m wondering, are people getting AI fatigue? Because it sure seems like I’m seeing that all over the place.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (00:17.44)
yeah, it truly feels like that Park. feel for every legitimate AI company, there are three AI influencers out there. Like I wake up and there’s someone trying to teach me about AI who has no idea what AI is, which is really funny.

Park Howell (00:34.283)
But isn’t that true with any industry or anything new, any new development, the influencers pounce, the gurus jump, you know, climb on board and they start spewing a bunch of stuff that may or may not make sense?

Gaurav Bhattacharya (00:47.554)
Yeah, I think so. Although although park with AI, feels like everyone’s on the bandwagon, right? There’s so many more people jumping on this trend, which is really interesting. I don’t know. I don’t know how the kind of the puck will land in a few years from now, but there’s definitely going to be winners and losers. I, for instance, I have a investor. His name is Jack Altman. He’s Sam’s brother. Sam is the CEO of OpenAI.

And Jack has a saying which I really love, which is saying that if you want to be ultra successful in this coming decade and it not just moderately successful, ultra successful, he says either you are in AI every day and you are as close to it as possible, or you are as far away from it as possible, right? Like there’s no middle, like either you’re an electrician and you’re farming or doing something or you’re in it every day, which is so interesting, right?

Park Howell (01:38.977)
Yeah, when I was thinking about that too, you know, I’ve been in the advertising, branding, marketing world for over four decades now, been doing it a long, long, long time. And I laugh because the first technology that was ever introduced into our world beyond the telephone was the fax machine. So, you know, things have changed a lot, but the what strikes me about AI is it is advancing so quickly. It is the fastest advancing trend with its capabilities.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (01:54.892)
Wow.

Park Howell (02:08.257)
that I’ve ever witnessed in my life. And I’m wondering with this AI fatigue, if people are just like, oh my God, it’s steamrolling me. I can’t stay up on it. I can do the prompts. can kind of get some good stuff out of it. A lot of crap still comes out of it, quite honestly. What can I trust? What can I not trust? And today we’re gonna be talking about AI and sales and storytelling. And I loved when you sent me a note, said, man, I am ready to jam on AI that sells like a human.

I’m not so sure that that is still possible yet. Maybe it is, but here’s the thing. I got an email last week and it was from some guy that was trying to sell me kind of the same thing that you got AI and sales and whatever. And it was about a, I don’t know, it might’ve been a 50 to 60 word email. It was short and sweet to the point. But I also picked up on the fact that used a couple, three of my phrases that I use all the time. One of them.

is, you know, clarify your story, amplify your impact and simplify your life. In fact, it led with that. And my first take on it was now, granted, I didn’t copyright that, but it’s something I said for the past 20 years, basically. And the first thing I got from it is like, man, did this guy just lift my stuff or what? You know what I mean? It just sounded inauthentic to me. And I sent him a note. I never responded to those ever. But I said kind of a thanks, but no thanks.

And then he wrote back and he laughed. He goes, well, that was my AI. This is me, the real human being here. And I realized that I basically was just trolled by AI to pick up some common phrases that I say, put into the email, which is smart, but it did not come off as authentic. My human bullshit meter went up immediately.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (03:51.502)
Yeah.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (03:58.124)
Yeah. Yeah. That is so true, Park. I agree. There’s a fine balance between it and there’s a lot happening in this space. What I truly believe in is the human connection part. I don’t think AI can ever do that or should not be doing it. Like us connecting right now, talking, brainstorming, discovery, doing the demo, maybe like carrying out the sales cycle, building the relationship. We don’t think AI is at all good at that right now. It sucks at that actually.

It will get better eventually, but still I think that people buy from people they trust. And as soon as you saw that line, you immediately lost trust from that person, from that company. And now it’s really hard to build that trust back again. So I feel like when you’re connecting with someone, that part shouldn’t be as much AI. What I feel AI can do, Hark, is actually look at, let’s say, everything about you. Can research the right persona, can find the right leads for you, can do, you know…

actually go in and go deeper into some of your podcasts instead of like the things you say every day, can actually find maybe a particular episode, particular tagline and send that to the, to the person who’s drafting it and say, Hey, I found this really good hook that may resonate with Park. should review it. Here’s like a, like all the research about him, his companies, he’s launching a new startup in AI. Here’s where you can position this. Here’s the angle you should pitch it by. And now it’s up to you now go do your job, right? Like what you should be doing in sales.

I think those are the parts in the non-human connection, the repetitive manual labor intensive task. think those should be automated, will be automated with AI. The human part, don’t think, like there’s a lot of AI startups that I compete with. They’re trying to replace the sellers, replace the BDRs. I don’t think that’s happening. I feel the world’s going to need even more SDRs and BDRs, more salespeople, more software engineers than ever. And that’s what I feel.

Park Howell (05:51.819)
Well, let’s go back to that point about AI being able to go in and scrape through your stuff and find some touch points and whatever, and then deliver it to you. That is, you’re right. That’s great. But it also becomes a film of discovery. And I’m wondering if the laziness of the Homo sapien, which we just are naturally lazy, we don’t want to burn a lot of excess energy. If people will just take that and run with it without actually doing their

Gaurav Bhattacharya (06:00.44)
Yeah.

Park Howell (06:20.665)
own human due diligence off of what the research and discovery that AI provided them and dig a little deeper. I’ll give you an example of a guy that didn’t do any research. Obviously this came through LinkedIn yesterday and a guy says, Hey, Park, you’ve had a marvelous journey in advertising. you ever considered writing a book and I’m here to help you make that happen? Well, number one, he didn’t do his research because I’ve written two books. Number two, he was definitely human because there was two major

typos in his notes. And so I just sent him a note back and said, Hey, you you want to publish my third book, but you’ve got two typos in your outreach on LinkedIn. honestly, know, Guruv, I’m not a jerk. I’m really not, but I get so tired of people wasting my time with this kind of drivel. There was, it was definitely human because of the typos, but he obviously didn’t do his research. And why are you bothering me?

Gaurav Bhattacharya (06:51.606)
sure.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (07:18.828)
Yeah, yeah, it’s so hard. Park, I feel like I feel sales is a very hard job. Number one. And I feel people, people are not living up to it. And the challenge is the world we live in and the way that sales is happening now. It’s like, so it’s almost like, you know, someone, right? Like, you know, people who let’s say have a friend, you’re a buddy who you someone like this person who reached out to you.

And they maybe wrote their first book and they got a lot of value with him and they’ll refer you and they’ll be like, Hey, park, I actually had this guy who did this great, great work for me. You should go talk to him. Right. That’s one way of like, you know, doing amazing work and then getting references. Those are always easy, but obviously you can only get as much. Right. So then people go into cold outbound and warm outbound or you can write or inbound management, whatever that is, right. Do ads and stuff like that. The challenge with that stuff park is that.

You have to build now in this world that we live in, you have to build trust so quickly, so efficiently and so fast because there’s hundreds of, I bet every morning you wake up, have probably 500 people pitch you in your inbox. So in order to stand out, it’s almost like it’s a double X forward rate. From the seller perspective, I can empathize with them because in order to hit their quota, they probably have to send out a thousand messages a day in order to just land one. And on the other side, you’re receiving a thousand pitches a day and you’re only going to respond to one.

So it’s getting like harder and harder. The coal selling is getting harder. It still works, right? The door to door sales still works, but the sellers have to be just so smart, so good, so quickly, unfortunately, right? Because in the old days, park like, like, you know, like for example, like all the people I know in sales, they were in sales till they were in the thirties, forties, fifties. But now like the salespeople are in their twenties and early thirties maybe, and then they go and find a different career, right? So the relationship sales is not happening as much.

anymore. So it’s interesting. I don’t know which side to be on, but I can also empathize with the seller. I can empathize with you and I don’t know where the balance is, but I truly agree. Research is so important. Having that right hook. If that person had only just said to you, like, congrats on your two books. I actually am thinking of buying a copy of the second and I really appreciate it. Pay for the third. I know how hard it is to write one book. You’ve already written two. I bet like,

Park Howell (09:13.291)
You

Gaurav Bhattacharya (09:38.434)
you’re probably not thinking of writing another, the third one, but maybe I can help you write like, or I don’t know. I don’t know what the message was, something, right? Yeah.

Park Howell (09:43.893)
Yeah. No, I think you’re exactly right. I would love, I would have loved that approach. And the guy did respond back and said, well, that’s what I get for typing this on my iPhone. And that was his, you know, two typos, but it also means he was just mailed, know, mailing it in, wasting his time, wasting my time. So let’s jump ahead and talk a little bit about Jiva.ai. But before we do that, can you help with just two definitions? We have general AI, AI agents, and then we have agentic AI.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (09:57.944)
Thanks a lot.

Park Howell (10:14.091)
What’s the difference?

Gaurav Bhattacharya (10:14.262)
Yeah. Yeah. So, so really interesting. So let’s just talk about general AI versus agentic AI. So what the simplest way to describing it would be that general AI is AI built to do a zero shot prompting, which means that it can auto complete. That’s kind of how AI was built, which can, it can auto complete sentences or it can auto complete and predict the next word. And then it has a big vocabulary or learnings from the internet. So it can give you a really quick answer to whatever question you may have.

Chat GPT would be a great example of a general AI.

Park Howell (10:47.785)
And did you say a zero shot prompt? Well, I’ve never heard that term before. What does that mean exactly?

Gaurav Bhattacharya (10:51.104)
Yeah, that is correct. Sure. Sure. So maybe what that means is that when you do a zero-shot prompting, you’re basically sending just the prompt or the question without any data or any tools or any access to tools. So that’s like zero-shot prompting. Now there’s one-shot, two-shot, which means now you’re adding more more complexities and variables. The easiest example would be…

Now the new chat GPT, if you’ve played around with it or Grok or Gemini 2.5 Pro that came out recently, now they have internet search as an example. They have deep research. They have different models. you can, so what I can do is I can now put an image in the prompt. I’m taking like another variable. I can have a question with the image and then I can say that look at this image and try to tell me that is there another movie poster that looks similar to this poster that I put?

go do your research online. So AI will take that poster, try to find other images on Google, come back and say, you know what? Actually, Silence of the Lambs was exactly like this. So this movie poster is now copied from the 70s movie or 80s movie, right? I’m just making something up, but that’s like, really like, now that’s like one or two or three shot prompting, you’re giving it examples, you’re giving it an image, you’re giving it different tools. That’s how an agent works. So that would be a really good example of general AI, AI agent. Now, agentic AI,

Park Howell (11:59.179)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (12:14.198)
would be the next step to that, where the AI already has different tools. Like let’s say it has access to your CRM system, it has access to your email, and now you can give it some general task you want it to run every day. So as an example, the agent that I have, what I want it to do is I wake up in the morning, it should clean up my inbox, auto-label the emails, it should draft emails for me, it should look at my CRM and say like, what are the deals that are in my pipeline, which ones I haven’t followed up on, and it already has some drafts written, like, hey, park just to…

a quick nudge, you know, like, hey, it’s end of the quarter for me. Can you please get this deal signed? Or did you hear back from Leo? I’m making something up here, but literally like it would have all those tasks and it would be ready for me. So it would have access to the internet. It would have access to Salesforce. It would have access to my CRM system. And it can almost run at a general cadence without you nudging anything. Obviously there’s human in the loop, which basically means part, I can come in, the AI can be like, I’m conflicted. I’m confused. I don’t know what to do, which is a better way instead of just keep going. It can say,

Park Howell (12:50.635)
Mm-hmm.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (13:13.528)
Park, let me ask you this question before I keep going. There’s two options, pick A or B for me and help me decide which path to go on. But in generally, you’re not stopping it, you’re not telling it what to do. it has some, like obviously it’s not super intelligence where it’s doing everything autonomously, but it’s doing some part of the workflow autonomously. Like for example, and then we’ll go into GYA really quickly, but one of the use cases, Park, is we have this one customer where they have like a CRM,

data of about 500 million records. And all they want us to do is every day clean thousand of them. So go find the right email, go find the right cell phone, don’t bother anyone, don’t talk to the humans every day, pick a thousand leads in the CRM, go clean it, go find the research and just clean it for me. Now, obviously that has 50 different tasks alongside it, but that’s what like agentic AI would mean. AI has some agency.

Park Howell (14:05.055)
Okay, so I’m going to make a very rudimentary comparison to this. Say I’ve got a well outside my house and I’ve got a tap on that well and I go out and I fill a bucket up with water every day and I bring it into my house and I wash with it and I clean with it and I drink it and so forth. And that’s AI. That’s an AI agent that waters. And one day I go, hey, maybe I’m going to run a bunch of

into my house and make this way easier, that is agentic AI.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (14:36.174)
I think that would be a really really cool description. I like it

Park Howell (14:42.097)
Okay, okay. So how were you using it then with Jiva.ai? And of course, my really big question for you, Gaurav, is how do you make it human or be somewhat human? Because they are bots, are, you know, on and off switches.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (15:00.886)
I totally agree. So, Park, like, there’s parts of AI that, let’s say if I was doing data entry every day, as a human, I would probably make more mistakes than what AI would do. But if I was talking to people every day, I think as a human, I would do much better. So we try to pick the lanes that we want to play in with JivaAI. So in short, what JivaAI does, Park, it’s basically an agentic for sellers, for salespeople.

and for go-to-market teams to automate a bunch of them manual repetitive tasks, like finding the right emails for people, doing lead research, doing building good lists, doing interesting deep research, like we were talking about, about people, about companies and giving a report to the sellers, maybe even cleaning up the data and enriching the data in your CRM so you always have the right contacts to reach out to. Those are the lanes that we are picking. We are not picking the lanes for trying to replace the seller. Like there’s a lot of AI companies that have…

A virtual salesperson looks like me with like robotic voice and will be trained on some of my data. So what they expect is a human, like you would jump on and you talk to the, to the agent instead of like talking to the real person. We’re not picking the communication lanes. And that’s kind of what your pain point this morning was, which is like a really shitty LinkedIn message or a really bad email you got. So for us, what we are trying to pick on is what are the tasks that AI can be really good at, which would be data entry, cleaning up the inbox.

finding the next best action, finding the next best lead, maybe drafting the best possible response on your behalf so that you can be ready in a draft and not trying to like go on autopilot. So that’s the lanes we are picking in is like, how do we make go-to-market teams like 10X teams? Like how can 10 salespeople in a team be as good as a hundred people? And I think that’s kind of how we make it human without trying to replace the humans. I was just talking to a colleague this morning, Park, and…

And they were asking me this question. We were just like, you know, chatting because after the weekend, we were just getting back to work and we were just talking and somehow we were talking about a book and the book talks about like, what motivates you, what drives you and what’s my vision is, Park, I grew up in a very blue collar family. lost my dad to cancer when I was two, mom washed utensils door to door. So one of the things for me was my mother never had a stable job. She always had two, three different jobs. She was going, trying different things just to make ends meet and support her kids.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (17:22.198)
What I truly believe in is that I don’t think AI should be trying to cut costs. What AI should be doing is trying to increase the GDP of the world. You for me personally, I would love if Jeeva can become the next Microsoft where we can hire a million people in the world and create a bunch of jobs in the community instead of trying to say, let’s cut a million jobs and let’s increase profitability. so that’s kind of, I think, you know, missionary versus mercenary, we’re picking like on the, on the path of like AI is not there to cut humans. AI shouldn’t be cutting humans.

but can we make humans 10x better so we can do 10 more things and maybe increase the pie, right? The size of the pie instead of like cutting into it. That’s kind of where I’m going with it.

Park Howell (18:01.833)
You’re probably too young to remember the TV series, The Bionic Man and Lee majors. And he comes up, you know, he blown up or something and they had to build him, rebuild his body. And he’s part robot part Bionic Man. And then they came out with a Bionic woman and all that. It was pretty campy stuff, but pretty entertaining back in the day. But essentially what you’re saying is AI is making us Bionic in our own way, because we’re, we are able to take the technology and

Gaurav Bhattacharya (18:06.518)
Not having.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (18:13.326)
Yeah.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (18:17.954)
Yeah.

Park Howell (18:29.835)
bring tremendous efficiencies to operations that used to suck our time and suck our energy, we let that do it now and then we can bring 100 % of our human creativity and outreach.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (18:36.622)
That’s great.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (18:43.182)
I absolutely agree. And also like in the call, right? Let’s say when you do have a call with a salesperson, when they show up with all the research and they come in and ask, like you said, asking you those discovery questions, not being lazy, trying to dive into, you know, what would inspire you to write that third book? What topics are interesting? How, what was your biggest pain points when you wrote the first two? Was it publishing? Was it the, you know, the hours of back and forth on

strategy, was it actually like filling the pages once you have the, you know, I’m making something up, but like, if they would have done a great deep dive discovery, that is irreplaceable, right? That’s very hard.

Park Howell (19:21.537)
Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve got an algorithm for that. It’s called the Anne Butt Therefore, and it’s a narrative framework that is unbelievably powerful. And it basically has you ask five questions of yourself about the research you were talking about, you know, to about the person. So, for instance, question number one is who is this person? Who is this audience? Question number two is what do they want relative to my offering? Question number three is why is that?

Gaurav Bhattacharya (19:34.648)
Nice.

Park Howell (19:51.069)
important to them. That’s what we call a statement of agreement. Then you get into what you just talked about right there, the problem. But why don’t they have it? Because of what problem that is a major gap that is sticking them, you know, right in the side, it’s frustrating them, it’s annoying them. Therefore, what will success, what will a win look like to them?

And then you answer the question, do I have the right product? Now, I don’t know if AI could ever do that. You can do that on a phone call. I’m not sure if you create that algorithm and feed it into a product like Jiva.ai. It may well, that it could go in and parse out and give you that initial discovery based off of those five questions that are the foundation of which is the and, but therefore, and then give you a starting point.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (20:46.356)
Absolutely. That’s a great framework, by the way, Park. I love that.

Park Howell (20:51.137)
Thank you. It’s something I learned back in 2013 from my good friend, Dr. Randy Olson, evolutionary biologist, turned USC film grad. And now he talks about narrative selection and how our brains select for the and but therefore, in fact, he just came out with a new book and it’s like a chapter long. You can read it in about 30 to 40 minutes called Lincoln, but Trump.

and how both of these leaders, which I like to say one is righteous and one is riotous, how they connect with people and move their own particular audience or have moved their own particular audiences to action using this basic framework of statement of agreement of and, but is the statement of contradiction that triggers that pattern seeking problem solving, decision making, limbic buying brain to say, how do we close this story loop?

Gaurav Bhattacharya (21:21.879)
Sure.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (21:33.484)
Yeah.

Park Howell (21:44.437)
Therefore, as a statement of consequence, here’s the way forward.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (21:47.958)
Yeah, that is so interesting park. And you know, the other day there’s this one of my mentors in sales is this guy called Aaron Ross. I don’t know if you, if you’ve heard of this guy, he wrote this book called predictable revenue.

Park Howell (22:00.565)
Predictable revenue. Yeah, I’ve heard I’ve heard of the book. I’ve never read it

Gaurav Bhattacharya (22:02.158)
Yeah. Have you heard of it? Okay. You haven’t heard of this. So, so, so really funny. I’ll give you like a really quick story about this guy. So he joined Salesforce when they were about a million in revenue and he built all the systems to go get them to a billion in revenue. He wrote this book that became really famous. Um, long story short, I reached out to him and had a conversation with him. You know, some, some friend connected as we talked on LinkedIn, we got on a quick call.

And was kind of like for me, meaning like my Kobe Bryant, cause he was the sales leader in the time when I was coming up in my career. So when I talked to him and I was like, you know, Aaron, what would be awesome is let’s do a book called predictable revenue. Gen AI, you know, like that would be amazing. I would be like freaking wild, you know, because everyone’s wanting these AI playbooks, you know, let’s do it and I’ll write it for you. And maybe I’ll give you all the pointers, you know, you just give me like some credits somewhere and that’ll be like an honor for me. He was like, he was like, you know what?

What would be even better is talking about a book that says, instead of like what all is changing, what all is not going to change in the next 10 years. And what you said right now is exactly what’s not going to change, right? The framework you talked about will still apply 10 years from now, 20 years from now, still applied a hundred years later, like earlier will apply a hundred years later, which is amazing. I feel like that is a book worth reading for sellers instead of trying to find hacks using AI. You know, it’s beneficial for me.

Park Howell (23:24.577)
That’s very interesting,

Gaurav Bhattacharya (23:27.736)
to say that, AI is going to change everything and you should buy my product. I almost feel like it’s better to say that, you know, the psychology of influence and how people take action and how you get them to convince them to take action is still going to be relevant a hundred years later, which is, which is mind blowing, which is amazing.

Park Howell (23:31.893)
Yeah.

Park Howell (23:44.075)
Yeah. Well, I like to argue that stories and story frameworks, algorithms like the and but therefore, or the five primal elements of a short story for big impact or even our 10 step story cycle system. They literally are algorithms that you use that drives the software of storytelling that feeds the hardware of our meaning making limbic brain.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (24:09.74)
Yeah.

Park Howell (24:09.965)
And so that to your point, that will never go away because I didn’t invent any of those algorithms. They have literally been around since the beginning of time. You know, well, so some of the notes that you sent over to me, and I’m curious about this one, you said from cold to close the top three AI powered outbound plays that are converting cold leads into book meetings in seven days. Can you explain that for us?

Gaurav Bhattacharya (24:19.406)
Okay, hold on.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (24:39.096)
Sure, yeah, yeah, absolutely, Park. So the premise for this is we’re really trying to figure out what is the hardest part of sales. And I feel it is cold outreach, right? And we’re trying to like, there’s nobody wants to do that. Exactly, no one wants to do that. No one’s good at it. People are spamming people on the internet, right? So we’ve been working a lot on what are some plays that can really drive conversion from like a cold outreach

Park Howell (24:52.021)
Yeah, because nobody wants to do that.

Park Howell (24:58.859)
Mm-hmm.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (25:08.078)
to making them a warm lead and then connecting with them. So we have a few things that have worked and from the top of my mind, I wanna talk about, maybe I can talk about three plays, would that be beneficial for the audience or what we… Okay, cool. Okay, so let me start with play number one that we are seeing. So we have this in our tool, which is a website tracker. So when you use Jiva AI, and there’s other tools like that that you can use, there’s some free ones and cheap ones.

Park Howell (25:20.997)
I think so, yeah.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (25:37.838)
And we actually provide this for free. So if you sign up, you can get a website pixel. You can put it on your website and we will try to see who’s coming and try to reverse engineer the web traffic for you. And what we have seen is that if you reach out to those people and with a simple message saying something like, Hey John, saw someone from, instead of saying, Hey John, I saw you on the website. We’ll basically reverse engineer their email. And the way that AI can do that for you Park is we can identify.

the IP address, we can get the company from it. can sometimes in the data, we get like a first name or last name or a job title. So we can reverse engineer and say, if it matches this person on LinkedIn, who’s in Salt Lake City, who’s in Microsoft and his first name was John, then we know it’s John Howell, who’s the VP of sales at Microsoft, making something up. And that’s kind how you can find that person. So now if you write a simple email to John saying, John.

Park Howell (26:25.995)
Mm-hmm.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (26:30.964)
I saw someone from your team was on our website and I just want to introduce myself. My name is Gaurav. I’m the CEO and founder of Jeeva. We’d love to show you how we help other companies like Microsoft. We have seen that that has like a 70 % response rate. It’s wild how crazy it is and you get a response pretty quickly. So you’re almost using like warm signals and doing like an outreach from there. So that’s one play that has worked really well for us.

It’s kind of using some AI signals. The other thing that has worked and again, like this one kind of backfired on you this morning on LinkedIn, but on LinkedIn, we are seeing that if AI is able to pull out a snippet of a press release or an earnings report. So what we have been using is has been working really well is if you get an earnings report signal and because there’s some influence happening, people in the company, unless you’re reaching out to the founder, CEO or president, they really care about

The top, Like one of the skillsets I learned when I was a salesperson in Parco is a mentor told me the best salespeople are the people who are able to close the biggest deals the fastest. Now, how are they able to do both at the same time? They’re able to create a, whatever they’re doing, they’re able to tie it back to the strategic vision and the goal of the company and of the CEO, of the leadership. And so they would ask a lot of discovery questions on what does your CEO care about? Why is this important? Why is this…

and then create a critical event or an urgency. So in short, what I was saying is what has worked for one play that is working really well is trying to find out if you’re reaching out to a public company, then you try to find the earnings report and say, if I’m reaching out to like Airbnb and someone at Airbnb, I would say, hey, I just saw Brian’s podcast or I just saw the earnings report. And they critically mentioned that Airbnb’s number one initiative is to introduce AI in customer support.

so that they can reduce the first time to value for their new customers and existing customers. So I wanna show you how Jiva AI can help you with that and can we get on a quick call and walk you through it. The response rates and it’s crazy. I think we get about 50 % response rates. That’s like the biggest way to close deals faster because you’re directly tying to some initiative at the top, no matter what you’re doing, if you’re able to tie it back somehow.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (28:54.614)
and show that this is kind of where we’re going. So that’s like one play that works really, really well. And there’s like tons of other plays like that at Park, but that’s kind of what we’ve been experimenting with and trying to figure out like how can we reduce the sales cycle time and then also like increase the deal size and how can we use AI. Obviously there’s a lot of human elements that go with it. Actually 90 % are human elements, but can AI short circuit some of those and help you expand the deal size and reduce that.

Park Howell (29:03.471)
Mm-hmm

Yeah.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (29:23.224)
kind of like the close times. And that’s kind of what we do a lot of experiments on.

Park Howell (29:26.709)
So give us a few examples, if you will, of the human element that will never change, that AI can never replace in sales.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (29:38.669)
Wow.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (29:43.992)
So this is like a bit, like this is a contradictory statement, Park, because I feel salespeople suck at this and they’re not doing this enough. So this is something that used to happen. Okay, so let me tell you. So Park, in the earlier days, let’s say if you were an accountant or you had a business and a lot of your business was word of mouth because you’re just so good at what you’re doing, right? You’re so good at what you’re doing and you would get a lot of business that way because…

everybody would refer you and we still do that, right? Like where I live in my community, I have like a group and I post for everything and everyone does like, here’s a great cleaner, here’s a great electrician, here’s a great HVAC person. And we rely on that. I never go and yell, to figure it out. I ask my neighbor like, hey Adam, like, dude, what are you, who are you using for your landscaping? Right? And that’s kind of how a lot of our business and for childcare, for everything, I think that’s like the word of mouth play.

Now those are people who are founders and owners, right? Like you, right? Like you’re so good at this and you know how to drive your business. Now you can create the best AI. But what’s going to eventually happen, Park, is with this new world of scaling, we now hire tons of sellers and salespeople. And now there’s like micro specializations, which is, I think, a bad thing for humans because…

Because what happens is now you have the SDR and the BDR and the MDR. You’re just going to qualify the lead and going to pass it to an account executive, senior account executive. We have a solutions engineer. We have an implementation specialist, customer success manager, then an account manager. So just going back to your question, know I’m delaying this. But long story short of what I feel is because of hyper specialization and personalization, we have lost the ability to be an expert in our field.

ask really good discovery questions and do work like this. What I feel is the human desire to be heard will never change. so the two things that I always think about if I have a salesperson that I’m coaching and I’m training, or if I’m learning new skills, I would say like reflective listening and be able to A, like come off as like highly empathetic, but not just empathy.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (31:57.39)
to just empathize, maybe like strategic empathy where you are reflective listening, under, the person should go and be like, wow, I know this person completely understands what the pain points I have or what I’m going through, right? That should be the reaction at the end of the meeting. And also the second reaction should be, I trust this person to be able to solve my pain points for me. So it’s a challenger sale, right? No matter what you call the framework for this, but.

I think those two elements would never change. It’s like strategic empathy, like just like reflective listening, being able to be very strategic and understanding the pain points, asking the right questions so that the person comes off and comes off and says, wow, this person is like the best listener, understands my pain points, understands my environment I’m in. And I trust this person enough, him or her enough to be able to come in and solve the pain that I have, right? Those two elements.

are really important, they’ll never change. And I feel like those two are like the ones that as salespeople or as business owners, we don’t do enough, right? so that’s my hypothesis.

Park Howell (33:04.865)
No, I love that. I actually love that the human desire to be heard. think you’re so dead on about that. And as I mentioned earlier with the ABT, you know, it has those three forces of story, the algorithm of agreement, contradiction and consequence. You’ll like this when you use it for discovery, when you use it for story listening, and when you use it as a narrative device to then speak to your audience, placing that

prospect at the center of the story you demonstrate what I call the three forces of trust building and that is number one what you said Look at you’re demonstrating that you Understand this person you’re talking to because you’re placing them at the center of the story You’ve done your discovery and research with the aid of AI But not just solely AI because it can make mistakes too And you got to dig deeper to find that human element to where they want to be heard. So number one understanding number two

appreciation, which I think is huge. And I think it goes unprovoked, if you will. I don’t think people talk enough about appreciation and sales marketing and branding. And that is demonstrated when you appreciate what they want and why that’s important to them. So you’ve got the first two understanding and appreciation. then that but statement of contradiction reveals your empathy.

but you’re frustrated, you’re annoyed, you’re concerned, you’re bummed out, you’re whatever because of this problem. So now you’re empathizing with the problem they have. And then in that third statement of consequence, the therefore, that third force of story is where your call to action comes in. That’s where the trust has been built. And it is an algorithm, like I say, but it’s something that still takes what you.

talk about that human interaction so that you can demonstrate to your audience that they are actually being heard and not being manipulated by AI.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (35:04.952)
I love it. Park, what do you think is not going to change? I’m interested to hear your opinion. what do, maybe what’s the number one thing that you feel will not ever get changed with AI, how sales is done.

Park Howell (35:19.457)
Spidey sense. And what I mean by that is I think people can spot AI a mile away for the most part. think there’s something about even the best produced stuff feels off. There’s just something about it. And you definitely see it in sales like that email I got last week where they were just picking and choosing some of my phrases and putting it in there.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (35:22.062)
I love it.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (35:30.572)
and so.

Mm-hmm.

Park Howell (35:47.209)
And I was first offended because I thought, this guy’s just ripping me off. And then I thought, well, I don’t really own those. So he can’t be ripping me off. But that was my first reaction. And then when I sent a note back to him, which I readily do, and he writes back and he’s, ha ha, that was my AI. Here’s the real me. And I’m like, okay, so now you’re manipulating me with AI. I just think that’s bullshit. And I think AI is great to help you with your initial discovery and do like you’re talking about where it can call through.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (35:53.634)
Yeah.

Park Howell (36:14.955)
thousands upon thousands of leads and let’s find the hundred that you really need to focus on this week so you’re not wasting your time and you’re not wasting their time. And then here’s some scripts that are starting points. We like to think with our Storycycle Genie, we replace the blank page and the blank stare with a script that you can now build on from a human standpoint. Now we also know a lot of laziness will come in and say, hey, that’s good enough, just shoot it out.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (36:24.758)
Exactly.

Park Howell (36:44.447)
And then I hit my quota of how many outreaches I’ve done, but nothing is going to replace, believe, that human, spidey sense of knowing when it is and when it isn’t robotic AI.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (36:50.766)
Hmm.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (36:55.565)
Yeah.

Wow. That’s awesome. I love that. That’s so cool. I almost feel like there’s also like the same spidey sense. Also salespeople have that, right? Good salespeople have like a spidey sense of knowing which client is BSing with them and which client will buy. And they will focus on their entire energy on the person who they feel can buy, not necessarily what they’re telling them. Right. That’s also really interesting. It’s like, do you know, does your gut tell you that

Park Howell (37:09.939)
They do.

Park Howell (37:23.648)
Yeah.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (37:27.746)
This is a good lead and you keep chasing that lead no matter how much work they give you. Once you someone you feel like happy years, right? Sellers always get happy years. They’re always like, yeah, this person know me, they’ll sign by Tuesday. Right? Never happens. And Tuesday never comes. And yeah, so that’s so interesting. I love.

Park Howell (37:32.48)
Yeah.

Park Howell (37:40.619)
Ha ha.

Park Howell (37:46.325)
Yeah. And what we’ve tried to build into this story cycle, Genie and you, we put your brand through it. Cause I do that with all of our guests now and just have a better understanding of who you are. the ABT is, you know, stands at a very prominent algorithm foundation of the Genie and it is a Gentic in that it is just simply tapping into the force of the AI universe. And it becomes the Yoda to be able to focus it specifically.

on your core brand story elements. And we’ve had a lot of people say, wow, this gets me like 90 % there. So I can spend 100 % of my energy on that last 10%, which gives you, I think a 200 % return, doesn’t it? If I do my math right. But in yours, we ran through it. It said your number one audience are sales.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (38:22.382)
Hands off.

Park Howell (38:37.675)
team leaders. And again, all I did, because I knew nothing really about you all, is just put your website through it. So this is the way you’re showing up with the world. Is that your number one audience, sales team leaders? Yeah.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (38:48.278)
Yeah. Yeah. Sales leaders would be the perfect one. Like a head of sales, head of BD, chief revenue officer, VP of sales is like our target ICP. That’s spot on. That’s amazing.

Park Howell (38:55.371)
Yeah.

And so then it wrote an ABT for you now that you realize that and it reads. And this is just a foundational statement that then you and your marketing and sales team can run with. And by the way, you know what it does also, Guruv, is it bridges the gap between sales and marketing because you’re like, here’s the core and but therefore. As a sales team leader, you want to consistently hit your revenue targets and power your team to focus

Gaurav Bhattacharya (39:03.916)
I’m excited.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (39:15.256)
I love

Gaurav Bhattacharya (39:18.967)
Yeah.

Park Howell (39:26.983)
on high value selling activities. Would you agree with that statement?

Gaurav Bhattacharya (39:29.826)
Wow. That’s amazing. And we should use that. We don’t use that right now. It’s amazing.

Park Howell (39:35.627)
So we call that the statement of agreement. We’ve set the stage. That’s act one. Now we are going to put in the problem. But you feel overwhelmed because manual lead qualification and follow up consume the time your team should spend closing deals. And then the statement of consequence. Therefore, you can now achieve predictable revenue growth with Jiva AI’s intelligence sales agents.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (39:38.018)
Yeah.

Park Howell (40:04.821)
that handle qualification and nurturing automatically.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (40:11.448)
I love that. I’m taking notes as you were saying. This is awesome. Yeah, it’s very, very well.

Park Howell (40:14.113)
Well, and you’ve got set you the printout so you’ve got it right there you can go through.

Park Howell (40:21.953)
And it even wrote you a position statement. And let’s see how accurate you think this is. For sales teams, small businesses and revenue operations who need intelligent sales automation that enhances human performance rather than replacing it. Jiva AI provides AI powered sales agents that seamlessly integrate into existing workflows to qualify leads, nurture prospects and optimize sales processes.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (40:26.936)
Yeah.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (40:37.731)
Mm.

Park Howell (40:51.231)
while maintaining the personal touch that drives conversions.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (40:56.024)
Wow. This was awesome park. I love it. Yeah. It’s spot on.

Park Howell (40:57.706)
You

Good, good and they gave you a unique value proposition. Do you already have one for your business, a UVP? Well, maybe this one is it then. Your UVP for Jiva AI, intelligent sales agents that enhance human performance.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (41:06.797)
No.

Okay?

Gaurav Bhattacharya (41:17.654)
Nice. I like that. That sounds awesome. And that kind of goes back to our core philosophy around enhancing performance rather than replacing people.

Park Howell (41:28.575)
Yeah. And then it goes in and it’ll give you your brand personality traits. And we call this the you exercise and who stands for OOO for organization offering and outcomes. And it gives you nine one word descriptors, three descriptors for each. So for instance, organization, it says one of the descriptors is collaborative. The organization works closely with sales teams to understand real world challenges and develop solutions that truly enhance performance.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (41:38.338)
Yeah. Yeah.

Park Howell (41:57.825)
and offering one of them is intuitive. Clients experience seamless integration and easy adoption that doesn’t require extensive training or workflow disruption. And then under outcome, you’ve got one, let’s just grab amplified. Sales teams achieve greater reach and impact without proportional increases in effort or resources. And so then how you would use each of these nine one word descriptors as story themes. So under amplified,

Gaurav Bhattacharya (42:06.158)
Spot on. Yeah.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (42:21.166)
Great.

Park Howell (42:27.797)
Give me an example of a person and their sales team who you amplified through the use of Jiva AI. Another one is optimized under outcomes. Revenue operations become more efficient and effective through data-driven insights and process improvements. So it’s one thing for the brand to say that, just pound its chest, which then it doesn’t land at all. It’s another thing to show me who have you optimized and what has it meant to their business.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (42:52.046)
Mm.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (42:56.024)
Yeah.

Park Howell (42:56.031)
So they become story themes that you use throughout.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (42:59.266)
Wow. That’s spot on. This was awesome. This is great. Your AI is spot on here.

Park Howell (43:01.985)
Yeah, we’re having so much fun with it and it’s based on the IP of my StoryCycle system, which I’ve been running for 20 years. And as Sean Schroeder says, it’s our moat because nobody else has the StoryCycle system. And we’ve just created agentic AI out of it, using that IP to guide people through. now, what used to take three months to do all of this, you can literally do in minutes. Yeah.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (43:12.526)
That’s amazing.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (43:30.488)
That’s crazy. That’s pretty awesome. And this is also like, what makes AI so powerful is the unique data and the unique insights you have. And you combine it with fast analysis, right? And that’s exactly what you guys are doing. So sounds amazing.

Park Howell (43:33.057)
Yeah.

Park Howell (43:42.879)
Yeah. Well, and I imagine it’s probably the same thing you do at Jiva AI. I probably run 70 companies through this now in our beta testing, and I’m hearing three things. That is number one, it validates what I’m already doing well. So that’s right on. We’re nailing that. It reveals the gaps and the missed opportunities and how we’re talking about our brand stories that if we fill in, we’re going to have even more impact. And then it even provides inspiration, new ways to think.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (43:57.134)
Sorry, sorry,

Park Howell (44:10.493)
about your story and like you said, in your case, you guys have not had a unique value proposition, which I think everybody needs to have because it’s so dedicated to what you’re trying to do and yours being intelligent sales agents that enhance human performance. Well, there’s the inspiration for you to work from whether you’re using that exact one or now bring a little bit of a twist to it. That’s all up to you.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (44:34.06)
That’s spot on. love that part. This is awesome. So exciting and wow. Yeah, it was spot on. It was spot on. It’s so good.

Park Howell (44:36.449)
You

Yeah.

Park Howell (44:43.774)
great. Well, where could people learn more about you and what you’re doing? I think you’ve got a free offer for our listeners as well.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (44:52.172)
Yeah, totally. So part, we do a couple of things. by the way, g at G. I so very easy. It’s just a letter G at J E E B a.ai. Super easy to reach out to me. I answer every single email. I’m also on LinkedIn, Gaurav Bhattacharya. Surprisingly, as unique as my name is, I am the ninth Gaurav Bhattacharya on there. So you may have to like try to find my picture and try to add me, but I’m very responsive on LinkedIn. On the free offering part, we do three months free.

for all your listeners so they can go play in with GVAL for any personal plan or a team plan and they won’t get billed. If they wanna pay upfront, they can get 90 % off for year one. So if they have a big sales team, they can get 90 % off either works. And just the only thing you have to do is if you go on the form, just put the business of story, right? Or park howl so we know where this lead’s coming from and our sales team will take care of you. So that’s the offer.

Park Howell (45:48.715)
That’s amazing. Thank you for that. And we will put that link in the show notes, certainly, so people know how to reach you very easily. Well, Gaurav, thank you so much for being here today. Very, very interesting. You’re coming to us out of San Francisco is where your company is. So you’re right in the heart of tech up there.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (45:55.714)
Fabulous.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (46:05.036)
That’s great. Yeah, I’m right there. I’m literally like, right. If I go to a Starbucks, there’s nine AI companies being built right now.

Park Howell (46:11.873)
Yeah. hence the AI fatigue. Well, thank you. Thanks for bringing so much energy and excitement to AI. Really love what you’re doing with Jeeva. We might have to look into that for our own story cycle. Jeannie, once we get it out there, we’re so close. Yeah. All right. Thank you.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (46:19.982)
Thanks Park.

Gaurav Bhattacharya (46:27.84)
Absolutely. So excited for so excited to play with it. Thank you.

Park Howell (46:34.411)
Wait what?

 

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