AI Is Making Your Sales Team Worse (And You Don’t Know It Yet)

In this episode of Predictable B2B Growth, Javier sits down with sales leader and advisor Michael Muhlfelder to unpack what’s really breaking modern revenue teams.

They dive into why AI and automation are accelerating bad sales processes instead of fixing them, and why most teams are still missing the fundamentals—especially when it comes to qualification, signal detection, and true buyer understanding.

Michael shares hard-earned lessons from decades in sales leadership, including the concept of moving from “pain” to “untenable” moments in buying decisions, why experience still matters in an AI-driven world, and how companies are unknowingly creating churn by ignoring customer signals.

This is a straight talk conversation about getting back to what actually drives revenue: strong process, human connection, and disciplined execution—before layering in technology.

Key Topics

• The evolution of sales from manual to automated processes
• The importance of experience over age in leadership
• Distinguishing between speed and process problems in AI adoption
• The role of signals in customer retention and churn
• The significance of human-to-human connection in sales

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Sales Methodology
03:34 Michael's Sales Journey
06:45 The Concept of Sales as a Service
09:30 Navigating the Chaos of Sales
12:36 AI's Impact on Sales Processes
15:34 The Importance of Qualification in Sales
18:33 Reconnecting with the Human Element in Sales
21:37 Understanding Pain Points and Financial Implications
24:35 The Role of Senior Executives in Sales
27:37 Closing Thoughts on Sales and Marketing Alignment
27:56 Aligning Marketing and Sales for Revenue Success
30:41 The Importance of Focus in Business
32:39 The Role of AI in Customer Experience
39:29 Understanding Customer Signals to Prevent Churn
42:40 The Value of Experience in Business Leadership
52:33 The Human Element in AI and Business

Resources

Three Takes on AI Podcast - https://www.threetakesonai.com/podcast
Calm Oceans Sales - https://calmoceansales.com
Michael Muhlfelder on LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/michaelmuhlfelder

Thanks for listening to Predictable B2B Growth.

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Connect with Javier:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/javierlozanojr/
•  Website: https://boldermediasolutions.com

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Transcript

Javier Lozano, Jr. (00:01.858)
Hey Mike, so I just wanted to say thanks again for jumping on our podcast. And you know, we had a pre conversation about a week ago, just to kind of see if this was going to, you know, see what kind of topics we can talk about. And, and you know, what I really loved about, you know, what you were sharing and is just kind of your, your methodology and your thought process about just sales. And so, before we hit record, we literally were talking about the end of the quarter. and so we'll dive into that in a second, but.

I'd to have the audience just kind of know a little bit more about who you are and just really what you focus on, how you got to where you were. So can you just kind of share a little bit more about your background?

Michael Muhlfelder (00:37.567)
Sure. So I'm a career sales guy. I started in B2B sales long before we had any technology. We worked off of index cards, Manila folders, landline at the office. We had zip code territories, driving territories. You knew where the pay phones were next to the men's room so you could hop out of the car and make a couple of calls.

And then we got automated. And I was one of the first salespeople to be automated. I moved into tech sales in the mid 1990s during the evolution mainframe client server. And I was selling ERP and I hated it. That was just not a good job for me. was really boring.

And I'm kind of fortuitous that at the same time, this market started to form around what was called technology enabled selling, which became Salesforce Automation, which became CRM. I said, that's interesting. Selling software to sales guys, that seems easy. It wasn't. But we learned a lot and it was a ton of fun. And so I went through kind of the cycle as an individual contributor and then moved into sales leadership roles.

just after the dot com bust. And yeah, so I've been through kind of all these cycles.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (01:53.059)
wow, okay.

I was just gonna say, you've seen the whole spectrum.

Michael Muhlfelder (01:59.125)
yeah, I graduated from college in a recession. I was working in selling payroll when all of the banks failed in 1990-91 because of the real estate crisis, the real estate flips. So yeah, it's been quite historic.

And all along the way, I've learned and earned and have fun, right? So through the sales leadership rules, I finished in CRM, I spent a bunch of time in the integration space, and I led teams in North America, CRO, RVP, all the levels.

And I built one of the first BDR teams back in 2013 in Boston when our leadership was like, you're going to spend how much to do what? Don't you have salespeople to do that? And now here we are. So I was working for an integration firm as their VP of sales. got acquired by PrivateX.

in the private equity firm said yeah we don't need these executives and they started to cut people I was first out the door and did fine and I decided at that point that was three years ago that I would see if I could actually run my own business after years of thinking I could so I started my consultancy and when I started it was called a fractional CRO and I evolved that to what's now called VP sales as a service meaning

and you can acquire me as a point solution or as a platform. So I do point solution work, meaning, we just have this one project, this one go to market issue we need to solve. And I do that. Those projects can be 60, 90 days. And then I have others where I am the head of sales. And those projects tend to be more in the six to nine month range.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (03:36.278)
Interesting.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (03:43.928)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (03:54.423)
Okay. I was going to ask you about that because like when I saw that I was like VP of, you know, service as a VP of sales as a service is like, that's an interesting way of how you're kind of phrasing that and positioning. I love how you added some context behind that to understand because it's a different way of positioning yourself. I've not seen that, you know, from a VP of sales CRO kind of stuff.

Michael Muhlfelder (04:16.607)
Yeah, so this is, you know, it's part of the learning. So I've been through now a month, I would say my third evolution of the business in three years. And a little over a year ago, I was I was in between contracts and I was trying to figure out what now what. And the challenge in this space is that there are now a lot of people, as you know, calling themselves fractional. And I don't mean in a derogatory way, however, lot of

Javier Lozano, Jr. (04:23.16)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Muhlfelder (04:43.679)
that are fractional CROs and CMOs and CFOs have actually never held the title. They haven't built anything. So two things were happening. One was was diluting the message and people like, another fractional CRO. And the other thing was it has a built-in objection, at least for the CRO, because I would talk to founders or even the VCs and PE guys, the investors, and they would say, well, we have a CRO. Or, well, we're not there yet.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (04:48.398)
Correct. Yep.

Michael Muhlfelder (05:13.087)
So I was, and that's hard to overcome. Like, oh, I know you have a CRO, you need another. No, you don't. So I was listening to a podcast, great guy named Jacob Wurwick. And I was like, yeah, we was talking about value and repositioning and his own evolution. And it just clicked. I was like, I need to really differentiate myself. And that's where it came from. So I was on a drive. By the time I finished the drive, I had kind of recooked the business.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (05:19.33)
Yeah, yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (05:24.718)
Okay.

Michael Muhlfelder (05:42.591)
I walked into my girlfriend's house and no, hold on, hold on, I gotta sit down, I gotta do this.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (05:47.725)
Yeah, yeah. that's awesome. I love that. And so, you know, the what I also found kind of interesting is, is how you've named your company as well too. Can you kind of you? Is there a story behind that? Because, know, calm motion sales like, because I feel as though I've been on the ocean before, it can be calm, it can be very soothing. And then other times it's chaotic and just a mess.

Michael Muhlfelder (06:12.199)
can and it can go from one to the next instantaneously. So I live near the ocean. I've spent my whole life on near the ocean or under the ocean whenever I can. That's my that's my preferred places underneath.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (06:16.302)
Correct.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (06:26.562)
Love it.

Michael Muhlfelder (06:29.599)
So part of it is the play on words, S-A-L-E-S versus S-A-I-L-S. But what we really desire when we're running a business is calm, right? There's a book written years ago, Blue Ocean Strategy, one of my favorites. that's, from a marketing standpoint, that's what we're trying to find is our blue oceans. So when I came up with the name of the business, part of it was my affinity for the water and for the ocean.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (06:35.0)
Yep.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (06:56.547)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (06:56.913)
And part of it is that, you know, that thing that we are, elusive dream that we're always chasing as leaders is just to get to a calm ocean. And especially today, know, today, end of quarter for a lot of folks, it is a frothing red sea. And all we want to do is like we're just treading water. I just want to survive and get to tomorrow. We're thinking it's going to be calm and it's not going to be calm tomorrow. But so that's the goal of my business is to bring my clients to a place where it's calm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (07:11.15)
It totally is.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (07:17.592)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (07:24.887)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (07:25.279)
is when it's calm, can think, you can plan. You can't do that when you're fighting for your life. You just can't. So that's where it came from.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (07:32.783)
Yeah, that's awesome. I think that I love how some companies or even consultants play with words a little bit on what they describe. For my company, instance, Boulder Media Co., I graduated from the University of Colorado. Boulder is my alma mater. Love that town, but I spelled my company without the U. And so I believe in doing bold marketing. However, I also kind of wanted to pull out

pay a little tribute to my university. And so people are like, did you go to school there? I'm like, yeah, there's a story behind that. So it's just an interesting way how some folks have different ways in how they position their brands. So I love it. I love hearing that story in that background. I think it's important.

Michael Muhlfelder (08:18.111)
That's great by the way. using like your university or your hometown are great because people have an affinity for those two things. You should have an affinity for your alma mater, hopefully. And then there's all the allegiances and the rivalries. Thanks, that's a word. I'm from Boston. You would think I would know rivalry for sports would come from a hotel.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (08:27.021)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (08:41.59)
rivalries and

Javier Lozano, Jr. (08:45.943)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (08:47.839)
So you like there's an almost an automatic conversation starter there. So I love that. I hadn't realized that's where the name came from. So good.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (08:57.708)
Yeah, mean, it's funny because I graduated from the Lee School of Business. It was great. I enjoyed my time there. When I was going to school there, we had a great football team. And then for the past 20 plus years, it's been horrendous. And then we got Coach Prime and things got a little chaotic. so last year we got, I think, got struck by reality. But it's still kind of one of those just neat little moments, if you will, of...

of like seeing those things and enjoying what you see at your university. But then also whenever you're able to start a consultancy, if you will, and kind of play a little words with it, you know, it's just, when people hear the story, like, that makes a lot of sense, that's really cool. So it's fun.

Michael Muhlfelder (09:41.951)
Yeah, and by the way, there was obviously, some people use their name. I can't use my name for a business. think, seriously? I mean, I'm the only Michael Mollfelder in the world from a professional standpoint. There's like one guy in Germany with the boom lot over the U, but other than that, I'm it. But still, people are gonna be like, hey, how do I find that Mollfelder sales guy?

Javier Lozano, Jr. (09:46.231)
huh. Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (09:57.981)
huh.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (10:02.892)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm the same way too, because it's like, you know, I'll get the last name like Lorenzo, Lozano. I'm like, it's Lozano. And so it's like, you know what, I'm not going to do anything with my name. I'll try to just like, you know, put that off to the side, take a little pride out of this thing. So that makes complete sense. I love that. You know, I want to dive into kind of like one of our questions that we were talking about prior, and just kind of like this whole hyper speed trap, you know, like, you know, and I think this is a grid transition because of

where we are, we're at the end of the quarter. Everyone's going a little crazy, but then there's also these moments where as you're kind of, where we are today. And I know that this is not gonna probably age very well because how AI is just kind of shifting a lot. But you've said before that, if you automate a bad process, you get worse faster. And in the age of AI, how do leaders distinguish between a speed problem and a process problem? What are your thoughts there?

Michael Muhlfelder (10:58.557)
Yeah, so there's a wonderful place to jump off. By the way, it's not my quote. Back when I was selling ERP, was early days of workflow and there was an analyst who wrote it. And I was like, yeah, that makes sense. Automate a bad process, get worse faster. AI allows us to get worse at hyper speed, which is super dangerous. One of my other favorite quotes is from Richard Petty. And his quote was, win the race as slow as you can.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (11:05.931)
Okay, okay.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (11:11.202)
Okay.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (11:18.947)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (11:26.1)
that's interesting. I've never heard of that. I love the guy.

Michael Muhlfelder (11:28.979)
Yeah, which I mean, if you think about it, the faster you go, whatever you're doing, the more likely that you're going to have an accident. Well, even if it's like spilling your coffee because you moving too fast to the house. So like just that the notion of of just slowing down a little bit. Allows you to see things and operate differently. So this idea of using a item move faster.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (11:36.856)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (11:46.862)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Muhlfelder (11:56.159)
creates a whole set of underlying issues. by the way, the caveat here is I am a huge AI enthusiast. I my own podcast on AI that I do with two other guys. It's called Three Takes on AI. And it's two old guys like me. One's a marketing guy. I'm in sales, and one's more implementation and services. So we are not technologists. But we see 80 plus years of experience.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (12:03.789)
Yeah, yeah.

What's it? What's your podcast called? Okay.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (12:22.413)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (12:25.119)
You know, if you implement an AI solution or you get your team trained on an AI solution and you don't see an appreciable difference in the outcome, then the problem is not in the technology. It's in the process. And kind of the hill that I'm standing on top of right now is

implementing all of this technology, AI technology, changes and improvements to the sales and marketing stack and we're not seeing more people making quota.

And that says to me, that's not a technology issue, that's a process issue. And as I work with founders and I talk to sales peers and all the things that I read online and I read a lot, there is a significant gap.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (13:07.565)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (13:22.351)
in knowledge and process. it's, and I'm fanatical about this. I write about it. I talk about it every day. It starts a qualification and we have not taught salespeople how to qualify an opportunity. And if you don't qualify the opportunity, you end up downstream with no decision, deal delay, customer prospect ghosting you. and that's not fixed by AI.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (13:49.26)
Yeah, I'm glad you're bringing that up because it's something I've kind of said as well too that AI is an amazing tool, but it exposes your weaknesses. And as you kind of said, it exposes it at hyper speed really. And it's actually bad, it's demoralizing. It's gonna be where you're at the end of the quarter and you're like, crap, we didn't, we're not even close to our numbers.

Michael Muhlfelder (14:09.247)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (14:17.793)
We thought that with these automations, we'd be able to do X, Y, and Z, and we should have been able to hit our forecast, and how the hell are gonna go to our board in two weeks to explain this? Those are real tough conversations. Again, I'm a huge enthusiast of AI. I think it's amazing. I feel like I'm getting injected with steroids half the time because it's making me do things at a hyper fast pace, but sometimes like...

like your quote with Richard Petty just like slowing down, it's probably the smarter thing to do. And then finding where you have gaps in your process and leveraging AI to help you with.

Michael Muhlfelder (15:01.683)
It's simple. So by the way, another caveat, and I'm not self-deprecating about this, I'm not that smart. I'm actually a really simple guy, and for that reason I need to kind of make things simple for myself. So I do tend to break things down in that way. There was a co-founder, I worked for Siebel Systems, one of the co-founders was guy named David Schmeier. Schmeier had a great comment.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (15:15.799)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (15:26.047)
and our sales onboarding and I've carried it for almost 30 years and it was write it in crayon. Write it in crayon. So that's like that's how I operate. It's how I like to have things explained to me a lot of times and it's how I like to explain things so that there's no miscommunication. You know exactly what I mean and what I'm asking for. And in some ways AI does allow us to write things in crayon for people to make it really really simple and to do it quickly.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (15:32.588)
Hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (15:38.177)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (15:54.178)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (15:55.615)
But we're not training people to do that. And when you're a busy executive, an economic buyer, and you're trying to process a whole bunch of things all at the same time, you want someone to say, hey, I got something. Here's an easy one for you, Like, good. you're like, push away all this. Give me the easy one. That could feel like I got something. Check that off by the SDA. So let's make it easy on people.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (16:23.82)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (16:25.543)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (16:27.328)
And you know, it's, I think this is a great segue to like the, I guess a follow-up question to what you're kind of saying, I'm making it easy is that it's almost as though we've gone through this phase of like the fat, dumb and happy phase, if you will, or fat, dumb and lazy. And you know, we talk about how easy inbound leads have made sales teams to be like, I guess soft, if you will. And AI starts to kind of generate more just noise in the inbox and how to retrain sellers and.

and so how to actually prospect correctly and really build that human connection again. What are your thoughts about that? Because I see where you're coming from. There is a moment of where you're running around going to the pay phones and really hustling and being creative. There's actually something to be said about that. And now we're kind of like, we wanna be fed.

Michael Muhlfelder (17:21.951)
Yeah, and listen, I always wanted every now and then you'd get what we call the call-in lead and it would be somebody like one of your bankers or, hey, Mike, I just did a loan for somebody opening a business or gonna need people. Or it's somebody where you would foot canvass through a cold call and they actually called you back, could be months, years later. we're like,

Javier Lozano, Jr. (17:35.043)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (17:43.199)
But we're not teaching properly how to handle the inbound. And it's not so much that I think it's making people lazy. It's that it's dumbing down the sales skill. So like back in the day when we were driving around our territories, zip code territories, you knew every business in your territory. So when a new business showed up, you're like, that's a new business.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (18:00.174)
Hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (18:07.906)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (18:12.767)
And if you in but you also had some come back to the thing before about hometown. You had commonality with every single person you spoke to. Like if it was raining, you could talk about the fact that it was raining or snowing or the hometown team, whatever it was. And we're not teaching that. And so we can be local anywhere from wherever we are. As long as I know where you are, I can figure out some intersection of commonality.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (18:21.229)
Yep.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (18:26.06)
Yeah, yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (18:39.79)
Okay.

Michael Muhlfelder (18:41.119)
And we don't train that. But then on the inbound, and this was something that I got kind of dialed into, was really accidental back in 2017 when I was a CRO. And we got a lot of inbound. And I had a BDR team, and I was listening to a call. I was actually on a plane, listening to a call, and the prospect said, I've told this story so many times, by the way. Prospect said to my BDR, are you banting me?

Javier Lozano, Jr. (19:06.766)
Okay.

Michael Muhlfelder (19:11.493)
and that the tone of the conversation changed immediately. And it was on the budget question. So I was like, this is interesting. So I started listening to different calls, different BDRs. And roughly the same point in the call, even though it wasn't an actual script, it was a process. At the same point in the call, the calls were going cold. I was like, this is a problem. And what we ended up morphing to, and I have it on my

Javier Lozano, Jr. (19:15.425)
Oof.

Michael Muhlfelder (19:38.511)
site and I again I talked about this endlessly is the first call the first question we ask a prospect is what happened if you're coming to me there's a reason for it this is something that we haven't taught salespeople and B2B there is a trigger event on a qualified operator

Javier Lozano, Jr. (19:51.778)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (20:03.205)
the outbound it works it still works but it's what happened when we called you when might be dr calls or whatever that process is that you set time aside in your calendar because i know it's packed to

Javier Lozano, Jr. (20:18.38)
Yep.

Michael Muhlfelder (20:19.743)
And the answer to what happened, which is not the business problem, but it's the, oh, Mike was in a meeting with Javi. Javi said, if you don't get this integration fixed between Salesforce and NetSuite so I can close the books on time, I'm going to go and find a new head of RevOps. Like, oh, so that problem that's existed, the pain.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (20:40.643)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (20:46.235)
has been there for a long time but there was no reason to do anything until Micah told you fix it or you're done or the business got in trouble or they can't go into a new market but whatever it is we want to know is what was the thing that moved you from pain to untenable?

Javier Lozano, Jr. (20:52.546)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (21:04.927)
And that has not changed in the 35 plus years I've been selling is that nobody buys because they're in pain. They buy because they cannot do something that they need to be able to do.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (21:16.982)
Yeah. You know, something I've always said to just, you know, different leaders at different points is that selling is an emotional thing. Like you're trying to create an emotion by your talking, you know, verbally, but marketing is the same thing, but you're doing it with words. You're doing it on a screen. You're doing it in other ways to create an emotion, to create a trigger. They're both trying to do the same thing. They're trying to sell you in a way to buy a solution to your problem.

because you can't solve it. so, I guess where I'm trying to get to with this is like, what do you do to help, I guess to make people understand that if they can't do something, if they have this pain, but if they can't do something that they should be doing, what is it that you do to kind of like agitate that? Because at the end of the day, I feel like as though when something gets agitated is whenever you and I make a transaction and our buyers make a transaction, whether it's on a screen from a marketing perspective or whether it's on the phone, like you and I.

Michael Muhlfelder (22:15.039)
So very important point from what you just said. Sales is a transfer of emotion and that emotion is happening from one human to another human. Obviously it doesn't count if you're buying something on Amazon or Tmoo or whatever. So we're really talking B2B which is still a human to human interface.

such there is an emotional component to this and even like I've worked in quantum computing with quantum engineers that are supposedly not very emotional it's still a transfer of emotion

Javier Lozano, Jr. (22:47.896)
Yep.

Michael Muhlfelder (22:50.215)
And AI can help you learn that and help you with your talk track, but it can't replace the human to human connection. So what we want to understand in the first two steps of the process, qualification discovery, one is what happened? What was the trigger event that made you want to talk to me? Second thing is the actual business problem. Okay, so you can't, use the integration thing. Okay, so you can't close your books on time.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (23:09.58)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (23:18.623)
So what? does that mean? Is there a financial impact to that? Does it mean like can you not... Are your receivables off as a result? Can you not report to the street on time? What is it? What does it cost? And there needs to be a financial cost to it. Because if there's no financial cost, they're probably not going to spend any money on it, especially now. The third thing we want to know is who owns the project?

Javier Lozano, Jr. (23:35.352)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (23:39.54)
Exactly.

Michael Muhlfelder (23:48.233)
I can have personal pain, and I can even ascribe a business problem to that personal pain, but unless a senior executive has said, go fix it, you're gonna land in no decision. Because no senior executive, CEO, CFO, and again, especially now, have.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (23:55.042)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (24:02.828)
Yep.

Michael Muhlfelder (24:12.079)
bandwidth. So they're not going to say, know Mike it would be really great if you went out and gathered nine proposals for a forecast management solution bring it to me and then we'll decide if you want to do that in 2027. Absolutely not. So by understanding what the trigger event was, is there a severity and level of pain and financial implication?

Javier Lozano, Jr. (24:24.258)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (24:34.081)
Uh-huh.

Michael Muhlfelder (24:34.655)
drive the process and a senior executive is saying you need to fix it by this date and the date that we want to know is what's the date you want to be input you need to be in production because we ask we've been trained to ask close date and then close date moves the in production date generally doesn't move very much if your executive has a mandate to get something done it needs to get done you can't go back and be like oh we're gonna delay for six months or a year

Javier Lozano, Jr. (24:54.381)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Muhlfelder (25:03.071)
Really, your CEO said it's okay to delay that? So those are the things we want to understand. And then in the discovery process, we get more into the nuts and bolts of the problem itself. What's the magnitude of the problem? Where does it exist? How long has it existed for? What's the benefit to fixing it? And can I fix it or not?

Because what you don't want is you don't want to try to be the proverbial round peg. Because you kicked out of the deal. You're better off saying, you know what, after discovery, you know what, we've been through a lot. I understand better. We can handle this, this, and this, but we can't handle the other stuff. Now, maybe another vendor can. That's up to the other vendor. I'm not going to sell for or against them.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (25:34.562)
Yeah. Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (25:48.75)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Muhlfelder (25:52.777)
But I also know that in many of those deals, the prospect will come back after talking to the other vendors who claim they can do everything and they can't. And they go, you you were actually, you were actually straight with me. You told me what you could and couldn't do. You taught me a few things. And now we're in the deal. So when you get to things like proposals and negotiation, it should be pretty anticlimactic if you've done the front end of the process right. But that's not what we're teaching people.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (26:18.851)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (26:19.709)
And implementing an AI solution, by the way, doesn't solve that problem.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (26:24.269)
Yep, and I'm glad you're kind of bringing that up as well too because I mean it's almost, it's getting back to the basics and fundamentals. It's understanding that you still gotta do your blocking and tackling. You still gotta do those little things and so I think that's huge.

Michael Muhlfelder (26:42.775)
kind of, I'm sorry to interrupt, but like the other thing that's really important here, and it's great that, you know, with our two respective roles,

Javier Lozano, Jr. (26:44.857)
Now go for it.

Michael Muhlfelder (26:53.119)
And it popped up again today on LinkedIn. I'm always surprised when it does. It's 2026 for crying out loud. The lack of linearity and partnership between sales and marketing. There should be no daylight between sales and marketing. And there needs to be closed loop feedback at every step in the stage so that marketing can't say, we've been given sales great leads and they just can't close them. And sales is saying marketing doesn't even begin to understand what the prospect wants.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (27:05.077)
my gosh, don't get me started with that.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (27:11.171)
Yes.

Michael Muhlfelder (27:23.517)
No, take that away. Marketing should be on the sales forecast calls. If you have a CRO and CMO, they should be meeting every single week and going through the deals. And if you're not doing that, you don't get to be surprised at the end of the quarter when you miss or when your CFO cuts your marketing budget because sales isn't making their number.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (27:27.876)
Yes.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (27:51.616)
I'm glad you bring that up because that is something that I pride myself. I I came through sales, so I have an understanding of hitting quotas and hitting numbers, and I get that. like, is, there should never be any kind of like, you know, tossing things over the fence, if you will, and then just be like, that's your problem, not my problem. I mean, as a marketing leader, as a sales leader, you should respectively both own the same revenue number.

because you're impacting it. You can influence it as a marketing leader. You may not impact it as in like, I brought in this deal all the time, but what I'm saying is that you should own that number together. if you miss quota for the quarter, it's not because of sales. It's because both your go-to-market and your marketing and your motions that you're creating and sales didn't figure it out. And there's nothing wrong with that, but just own it and then just pivot for the next quarter.

Michael Muhlfelder (28:51.743)
So I love the title of Chief Revenue Officer and it's rarely used properly. Those Chief Revenue Officers should own everything that's dollars. You have a CFO, a CEO, a CRO. The CRO owns all of it so that marketing can't say it's sales and sales can't say it's marketing. Customer success can't say, we're doing our job. One person has to ultimately be accountable for it.

Otherwise you're building conflict into the model. I like tension in the model. A little push and pull between the sales teams. Maybe between sales and marketing. That's fine. But when it's conflict, things aren't getting done.

And one of the best things I learned working for a PE firm was focus. Focus, focus, focus, focus. And I hammer that into people all the time, into my clients. I get that you have this product that does all these amazing things. You have three different products. What's the one product that has a move? And just stay with that until you've completely nailed it.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (30:08.889)
Yes. Yes.

Michael Muhlfelder (30:09.277)
and then go and do other things. it's, again, we're so enamored with AI, but we forget that there are immutable laws of business. Henry Ford, you can have any color you want as long as it's black. He made one car, one car only, it was two doors, until he really understood assembly and distribution. Amazon sold books. That was how they sold.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (30:33.795)
Yep. Yep.

Michael Muhlfelder (30:36.223)
until they understood search, distribution, supply chain, and then they started to branch out to other things. Oracle sold database. It doesn't pick the industry. Nike, I just wrote about this, Nike sold one queue. Nike Cortez. There's no big brand behind it that people know today. And that's in every business, sorry, every business starts that way.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (30:51.469)
I saw that, yeah, yeah. Yep.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (30:58.723)
Yeah, I love it. No, go ahead. Yeah. I love that you're saying that because I feel as though whenever as leaders we tend to lose focus, it's whenever there's, there could be opportunities for churn from the leadership side because you're chasing that shiny object. And I know that you've mentioned that you can kind of predict a company's churn by kind of looking at their AI implementation.

Michael Muhlfelder (31:14.185)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (31:26.887)
And so what are some of the red flags for like sales or success, like their tech stacks that signals a company is about to lose human touch and maybe it's customers.

Michael Muhlfelder (31:38.047)
It's simple, it's when AI or automation replaces the human. And we see it, especially in large companies, in companies with very high volumes of customers. And I can understand that, by the way. If you have 50,000, 100,000, 500,000 customers, you have to have automation. I get that. But with that automation, you also should have AI looking for signals.

good and bad in your customer base. And we're not seeing that. I would hazard a guess that you feel this and everybody who's gonna listen to this is as well. We desire service. We're spending money, we want help. It is so frustrating when you call or go to a business and you just want your problem solved and you can't get to a human.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (32:09.369)
Yes. Yes.

Michael Muhlfelder (32:33.663)
And what ends up happening is like, screw it, I'm going to go somewhere else. And what's missed is that, in part thanks to AI and just the advent of technology, it is much easier now to churn as a customer to defect than it ever has been. SaaS makes it worse. When I've got an annual contract, the end of the contract, or monthly contract, at the end of it, I'm not getting value, I'm gone. But if you're not.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (32:51.983)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (33:00.462)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (33:03.111)
If the AI that you've deployed isn't tuned for the signal, you will lose. going back, remember we did NPS scoring.

The VP of customer success was like telling me, you don't understand, you don't understand. It's like, no, you don't understand because you're asking a question and the question isn't telling you if the customer's gonna churn or not because you're asking the customer if they're happy. And happy customers churn all the time.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (33:34.276)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (33:38.995)
They churn because their boss has been turned on to another solution and they're gone. Or you do one thing and you take them from happy to unhappy and they're gone. And that's the end of it.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (33:44.079)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (33:52.144)
I love that you're kind of like double clicking into that signal piece because that's something I talk a lot about with, when I'm talking to prospects and CEOs and leaders is that when they say like, hey, how do you define an ICP? How do you grow a new product or whatever? Well, you gotta look at signals. The market will give you signals. And when customers are already in and you've closed it,

there are signals within that relationship. Whether it's you making quarterly outreaches to check in to see how things are going. Whether it's how they reply back on certain emails. Whether it's the phone conversations. There are signals that customers are always giving out. It's that some of us are either inept to want to, inept to understand the signals or we don't want to get it and we're like, hopefully they'll just sign the contract again at the end of the year or whatever the case is. We all give signals but,

Who's taking action on those signals?

Michael Muhlfelder (34:52.457)
So I'm going give you two examples, kind of extremes, of no signal. My family's own seven Honda vehicles. It's not out of loyalty to the brand. It's just they're really good vehicles. And I happen to like their trucks. My truck came out of warranty, whatever, five months ago. Do you think I've heard from Honda at all, from the dealer that was servicing that truck?

from Honda itself saying, well, we know that you're driving a five-year-old truck and it's out of warranty. Would you be interested in a new truck? No, nothing, crickets. So Honda doesn't, and I'm sorry to pick on Honda, Honda doesn't get to be surprised when my next vehicle is in a Honda. And we're not talking about $10,000 or $5,000 consumer purchases. These are big money purchases. And the other was, and I wrote about this and I won't mention the brand name, I just changed cell phone carriers.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (35:35.108)
Yeah, yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (35:41.401)
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (35:49.951)
And this is like the ultimate in miss signals. I was with my cell phone carrier for over 20 years. Lifetime value of my account was in excess of $50,000. It had four lines. Two of the lines disconnected, atritted, like two years ago. Nothing, not a word from the vendor. Third line left a year ago, not a word.

And in the meantime, I was having service issues. Nothing, not a word. So now I'm down, my spend has dropped by 65, 68%. Nothing.

I moved, I moved three tenths of a mile and I moved to a well known dead zone. So now I've been in pain for a while, but it wasn't untenable. Well we had a big storm here like a month ago, knocked out.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (36:36.335)
Okay.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (36:40.302)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (36:49.759)
So now I couldn't use Wi-Fi calling. So I couldn't get on the hotspot. I could get sporadic texts. By the way, my son and daughter-in-law were expecting a baby at the same time. they're like, I'm cut off from the world. So now I've moved from pain to an untenable situation. I've contacted my cell phone carrier, got cut off on an automated call. No call back, no check, no nothing.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:02.132)
man.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:08.42)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:17.22)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (37:17.543)
And two weeks later, I was gone to another vendor who made it stupid easy. Download a free trial onto my phone so I had a line from them and a line from my current carrier so I could check signal everywhere I went. And then when I was ready to make a move, they had a 30 day trial. I was gone in 12 days.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:30.893)
Hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:36.887)
Wow, and they made it easy to transition.

Michael Muhlfelder (37:40.553)
Like, I could have done it on the phone. I went into the store and I'm glad I did because they couldn't figure out the back end with the email. So it took an hour. But I ended up, so I changed. It was painless. I ended up with more features and I'm spending less money. And that's happening right now. And I use that because it's happening in tech right now. And it's happening because of AI. AI is allowing me to build new solutions, build them faster, build them for less money.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:47.406)
Yeah.

Okay.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (37:56.76)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (38:09.055)
more feature rich, I can add more features, and I can run circles around my competition. And I can go back to the customers or the prospects that I lost a year ago and say, hey, guess what I got now? And if you're not using a solution to test your signals, you don't get to be surprised when your customer turns.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (38:22.948)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (38:28.591)
Mm-hmm.

I love that you're bringing that up because I mean, it's, like I said, I think that we just need to be more customer-centric and I don't wanna use that terminology because it's overused, but we just gotta focus on these signals and just understand that the client, the customer is giving us these opportunities to save the deal all the time.

And it's a matter for like, are we willing to do it? And at that point it's just like, is it worth it? Is it worth this headache? Is it worth, you and sometimes it's like, you know, screw it. Like this other company is giving me the opportunity to make things like, you know, easy to transition, headache free and what's, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'd rather have that kind of service. And I feel like as a consumer, you know, as we're buying just like regular consumer goods,

Michael Muhlfelder (39:15.679)
They want my business. They actually want my business.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (39:26.618)
Like we all act like that, but at the end of the day, like businesses are the same thing because the buyers are humans. The buyers are wanting that same service.

Michael Muhlfelder (39:35.679)
Yeah, so here's another really fun point to get into. So going back to that time when I was building my BDR team, first one, we started, it's more than 10 years ago, we were talking about something called the Amazon Effect. And we knew at some point it was going to bleed into business, and it has. And the Amazon Effect is if I make it really, really easy on the buyer,

I have a better chance of winning. It's like, why do we, we cannot like Amazon, but why do we go to Amazon? Because the search works. It knows who I am. It knows my buying history. Some stuff I can just buy with one click. And if you're priming, you don't like it, you could just send it back. It doesn't get any easier than that. And that mentality has bled into B2B buying. Why are you making it so hard on me? Why are you making me search for things? Why are you fighting with me when I have a

Javier Lozano, Jr. (40:14.595)
Exactly. Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (40:29.983)
question or making it hard for me to get service and support. And that attrition or churn problem...

because the differentiator for most businesses now and I do mean most is service and support. It's not feature function, it's not the UI. In fact, the really like some of the best solutions I've seen now have a like a such a stripped down clean UI. I don't even have to train people anymore which is great. So but if that's where we are then my differentiator maybe it's price.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (41:10.371)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (41:10.911)
It's what happens when there's a problem and there will be a problem and the problem is probably going to occur at the worst possible time. Three o'clock on a Friday afternoon in the middle of a snowstorm when you're expecting a baby like that's when this stuff happens and you do not want to call your vendor and have your vendor either not answer the phone or make it very difficult or impossible to get help because when that happens I promise you with the next renewal your customer is going to leave.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (41:40.686)
Yeah, no, I love that. I'm glad you're bringing that up. Not that I want customers to be leaving businesses, but I'm glad that you're bringing this up and bringing awareness to it. I want to shift to something that you brought up that was interesting and I want to give us enough time to dive into this is the Altman gap. I've got to get into this. You recently went after San Altman a little bit regarding the-

the volume of human experience. And this is a great transition because we're talking about human experience right now. And so, you know, for a founder, 25 year old founder, for us building an AI sales tool, what's the number one boring business fundamental that they could, they're likely probably like ignoring.

Michael Muhlfelder (42:26.833)
fundamental is that there are lots of experienced people out there that can teach you things and you should be talking to them. Right? We love sports analogies and sales, right? And every athlete has not a coach, multiple coaches. Right? We have, you know, if you're playing golf, you have swing coaches and putting coaches and your caddy, like all these people. But business founders that I meet.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (42:37.028)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (42:53.471)
like their mentors if you will are generally their advisors on that board. It's a very closed closed circuit. Instead of saying who else has kind of has walked this ground before who can tell me what to do and what not to do. And the reason I after Sam Alton and I laughed because it's like yeah if you're going to pick a fight with somebody pick a fight with somebody who you know can probably kick your ass right.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (43:00.985)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (43:07.652)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (43:17.551)
Right, right?

Michael Muhlfelder (43:21.001)
That's the Boston in me, can't help myself.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (43:23.573)
I love it. still like it. mean, sometimes you just got to pick a fight with someone a little bit bigger than you. I'll punch them a little bit maybe, you know. I like it.

Michael Muhlfelder (43:32.361)
So the point that I made about Sam Altman in particular is around experience. I appreciate what he and others have built, obviously. He's done amazing things at a much younger age than I have. I get it. But what he doesn't have and you can't get without actually doing it is experience.

you know he's I think 45 years old 40 years old excuse me. He was born in 1985. Great I get it but that means that in the dot-com crash he was 15 years old. So and by the way that people forget how massive that was on a global scale. Yeah and then we go seven years forward eight years forward and we get to the banking crash.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (44:05.391)
Yeah, yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (44:20.814)
It blew everything up, literally.

Michael Muhlfelder (44:29.043)
Which, by the way, another cataclysmic event in business. People don't realize, especially in the United States, how close we were to the brink of disaster. Like, who were the hours? Unless you were in the middle of that and you had to save a business, that's an experience. You can't learn that on AI. You can't learn it from somebody else. And the reason I picked up on that and picked on Sam was...

Javier Lozano, Jr. (44:37.881)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Muhlfelder (44:57.855)
He had been asked what his biggest failure was and he said his biggest failure was his business that he founded called Looped. I had never heard of it. He founded it and he sold it in 2008 for $43 million. Poor Sam. Yay! But it was his biggest failure because it didn't get traction. I was like, if that's your biggest failure, you have not learned the things that I've learned because I've got failures written all over me.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (45:10.212)
Wow. Okay.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (45:16.388)
Whoa.

Michael Muhlfelder (45:23.487)
And AI for as great as it is, AI doesn't have experience. can't give you experience. It can't interpret. Most of it is still not context sensitive. And the absence of that, I need somebody to be able to say to me, I know that's what you're thinking, but, and this brings us back to the human in sales.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (45:31.45)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (45:50.879)
The best salespeople that you will see now and in the future are the ones who can sit down with an executive in a human-to-human setting on Zoom, whatever, and be able to say, tell me what you know about my business, tell me about your problem, and then be able to say, well, that's really interesting. Let me tell you what I've learned just in the last three months of talking to customers.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (46:17.38)
Hmm.

Michael Muhlfelder (46:18.719)
in a polite way be able to tell the CEO of the company you're wrong. Because what they want is they want somebody to make it simple and tell me something I didn't know that I didn't know. Because if you're just going to come in and tell me the same stuff that I read on your website and that I got through AI, I don't need you.

So that's where, kind of where I went after Sam Altman and just others. It's reverse ageism and I know it is before somebody jumps on me. But there's a reason why you want somebody who's had the experience. Like you don't see a baseball team go on, like Ted Lasso's great, I just started watching it, it's wonderful. But in real life, no football team in the UK is gonna say, we should go hire an American football coach.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (46:49.53)
For sure, yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (46:55.78)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (47:02.554)
Yes.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (47:08.72)
No.

Michael Muhlfelder (47:11.071)
not like any more than the you know if you want you know the Boston Red Sox you're not going to go and hire a hockey coach there's a reason for that even though the hockey coach may fully understand baseball maybe even played it

Javier Lozano, Jr. (47:26.768)
Let me ask you this because this is the part that I get sometimes where some people say that experience is important, but they want experience within say a certain vertical or a niche or industry and it's only that versus like I've seen the landscape, you know, and I've kind of like played in this and this and they all have kind of the same kind of issues and challenges. Experience, let's say it's the same amount of time, okay? It's just that.

And one is just, you know, I'm not gonna say hyper-focused, but it's just been in one, you know, industry and another has been like probably two or three. Where do you kind of see that?

Michael Muhlfelder (48:04.063)
I think that industry experience is going to become a lot more important. So I've been pretty vocal about this too. I'm vocal about a lot of stuff. But very vocal about job hopping. And I understand there's a reason for it. I understand the economy the last five years has been difficult. It's hard to hold jobs. People get laid off. know...

Javier Lozano, Jr. (48:07.825)
You think so?

Michael Muhlfelder (48:23.577)
There was a huge layoff again even today or yesterday. I get that. I'm empathetic to it. I'm sympathetic to it. I've been there. I've been laid off. I've been fired. I've been all those things. What I'm talking about is the people who when you look at their LinkedIn profile or their resume, it's a pattern. Every 14 to 18 months they're changing jobs. That's a problem.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (48:47.483)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Muhlfelder (48:49.725)
Now it's one thing if I'm changing jobs in the industry and I just like I'm always like in hospitality or I'm in cyber and I'm just moving company to company, moving up the ranks. I can kind of get that. I have maybe an issue with it, but I want to talk to you about it. But when you go from cyber to education to integration to set like it, and it's like, you're just looking for a job. You're not learning how to sell and you're not learning an industry.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (48:59.505)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (49:11.483)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Muhlfelder (49:14.911)
So I don't know what the value is in that conversation I mentioned before when I sit you down with a C level officer. You can't say to that person, well listen, I've been doing this for five years. Let me tell you, this is what I know. And that carries weight. you, if somebody says to me, what's the first thing I should do when I start a new job? Is you wanna learn two things. You wanna learn the product and the business you're working for and you wanna.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (49:27.878)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (49:46.419)
they are in so that you can converse intelligently about the business problems and challenges they face. Which by the way, AI is great at being able to say you know what are the biggest problems facing higher education today. And I'll give you know and for depending upon the region in the UK and Canada it will tell you wonderful now I can start to formulate a talk track. But if I if I can layer actual experience onto that

Javier Lozano, Jr. (50:14.341)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Muhlfelder (50:16.287)
I'm gonna blow the doors off of my competition.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (50:19.621)
Yeah, I mean that makes sense because I it's and I get, know, I love the angle that you came with it, you know, going after a Sam Altman, you know, for what he's done. But like, I think we all lose sight that the experiences, it plays a big role. I mean, from getting the mentors that have been there to help you kind of, I'm not gonna say fast track your path, but maybe help you make better decisions through your journey is probably a better way of looking at it to where

you've been in the trenches and you know what it's like to get punched in the face, you know, and like, man, this sucks.

Michael Muhlfelder (50:55.455)
Yeah, so the experience and what we're talking about, and I brought this up on my podcast a few weeks ago, AI lacks one big thing. And I don't think you can actually engineer it into AI because it's the same thing that happens as we age, and it's introspection. In order to be introspective, you have to have experienced things.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (51:15.771)
Okay.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (51:21.327)
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (51:22.835)
You need to be able to look at and go like, I know if I say this, I'm going to like to a guy in the bar, I'm going to get punched in the face. You know that that's experience and introspection is what tells you it'll be worth getting punched in the face. I'm going to do and I'm going to do it anyway. Or I don't want to get punched in the face and I'm not going do it. That's the type of thing that we like. We have.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (51:46.021)
Yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (51:51.871)
experience that and that comes with age which is why I kind of poked at Sam. He's like, like I got 20 plus years on you. I have experienced things that you hopefully will never experience. So when you get up and you pontificate and you get somebody who's...

Javier Lozano, Jr. (51:54.779)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (52:01.028)
Mm-hmm.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (52:05.252)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael Muhlfelder (52:11.337)
been through the experiences, who's been through these economic cycles to be able to say, I know what you think is going to happen. I'm telling you right now, it's not going to happen because it's been like this for hundreds to thousands of years. And technology isn't going to change that because I'm going full circle because it's humans. That's it.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (52:32.708)
Yeah, I love this. mean, this is, you know, we can, can talk all day about this. You know, this is, this has been great. Just kind of how you've expressed the different stages of creating, helping a business grow and scale, but you're putting the human element and understanding that you embrace the technology side of it. Like it's those things have to work side by side. And I think those are kind of what you're leading into and how you kind of brought it full circle again.

Michael Muhlfelder (52:40.66)
Thank you.

Michael Muhlfelder (53:01.171)
Thanks. Yeah, it's I'm an empath if such a thing exists. And I'm extremely sensitive to what we're doing to humans in the workplace right now. know, AI is causing a whole series of anxieties with people about am I going to lose my job? And when you do that to people, there is a natural evolutionary response to that. So there's a fight or flight.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (53:07.118)
huh.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (53:30.735)
Yep.

Michael Muhlfelder (53:30.993)
And in that, it destroys my ability to perform. So it almost becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm afraid of AI. That AI is causing me anxiety because I don't know if I'm going to lose my job. That's impacting my ability to perform. And what happens? I get fired because I'm not performing. And I get to the end of that, and I blame it on AI. it wasn't AI.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (53:49.349)
Yeah.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (53:54.448)
So true. Well, Mike, this was great. I really appreciate you taking the time. Where can followers, you know, where can they find you? I know you're active on LinkedIn. I love reading your stuff. Like I saw the Cortez. I was like, I love me a good old Cortez. Like where can they follow you? Where can they find you?

Michael Muhlfelder (54:01.405)
I appreciate it. Thank you.

Michael Muhlfelder (54:06.239)
Thank you.

Michael Muhlfelder (54:14.843)
So you can find me on LinkedIn. Like I said, I'm the only Michael Moelfelder, so you can find me there. You can find me at calmoceansales.com. C-A-L-M-O-T-I-N sales, one word. And yeah, if you reach out to me, you'll get a response. I'm an actual person. I'm not that popular that I can't like, that I won't like, I don't go talk to that. No, I would talk.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (54:39.792)
That's awesome.

Michael Muhlfelder (54:41.023)
I love communicating with people. learn from people all day every day. So please feel free to reach out. And if you do have a go-to-market property...

Michael Muhlfelder (54:51.741)
need somebody on a contract basis to solve a particular problem or is a head of sales, reach out to me. I'd love to have a chat.

Javier Lozano, Jr. (55:01.792)
Awesome. Mike, again, thanks a lot for your time. I appreciate it.

Michael Muhlfelder (55:05.853)
Thank you.