Welcome back to Lending Leadership: Your trusted source for insight on all things lending, sales, and, this week, the transformative power of AI.

This episode, we’re thrilled to pull up a seat at the AI sales table with Ben Treadway of ConsenSys. Ben Treadway is not only an industry innovator with deep experience in mortgage technology, but also a champion of buyer enablement and smarter sales enablement in an era where information and decision-making are happening faster than ever.

We dive headfirst into the future of lending where AI-driven agents and conversational automation aren’t just buzzy tech tools, but real solutions to information overload, repetitive inefficiencies, and shifting buyer expectations. We break down what AI can (and can’t) do for both buyers and loan officers, explore the different “buying love languages” borrowers bring to the table, and tackle the big question: Is AI here to help loan officers, or replace them?

You’ll hear practical stories about how ConsenSys was built on the idea that while selling is hard, buying is even harder and how empowering the buyer (both externally and internally) has real, measurable business impact. We also talk about website conversions, onboarding, compliance, and why the old methods are rapidly losing ground to tech-forward, customer-centric experiences.

Key takeaways:

1. AI as a Multiplication Tool, Not a Replacement: Ben Treadway is clear: AI isn’t here to put loan officers out of a job. Instead, it’s about freeing up time by automating repetitive FAQs, allowing sales teams to focus on more qualified, meaningful conversations. The technology is designed to support and scale the work of professionals not erase the need for them. (21:06)
2. Meeting Buyers Where They Are On Their Terms: We discuss how every borrower (or internal stakeholder) consumes information differently some want videos, others want to read, some prefer hands-on demos, and others want to talk. Giving prospects options and catering to these “buying love languages” increases comfort, trust, and ultimately conversion. (04:06)
3. The Era of Self-Education Has Arrived: Research shows that five years ago, buyers spent about 50% of their time self-educating before reaching out to a salesperson. Today, that number has soared to 90%. Mortgage and sales pros must recognize that buyers are coming to the table with more information and greater expectations for both speed and transparency. (23:12)
4. Closed-Model AI Safeguards Brand and Compliance: Unlike public-facing tools like ChatGPT, ConsenSys uses a “closed” AI model. This means it only dispenses the information you want it to share ensuring brand consistency, up-to-date messaging, and, crucially in mortgage, regulatory compliance around things like quoting rates. (14:11)
5. Transforming Onboarding, Recruiting, and Website Conversions: Conversational AI agents are versatile. They make onboarding new loan officers easier by offering instant answers and resources on company knowledge. Externally, they can engage website visitors proactively, boost conversion rates, and even streamline recruiter-candidate interactions by providing instant, detailed information making for smarter, faster follow-ups and a stronger employer brand. (17:06), (33:05)

At the end of the day, as Rach reminds us: Stop making people buy the way you want to sell—give them options, let them explore, and be there (as a person) when they’re ready. That’s how real lending leadership is done in the age of AI.

Tune in and let’s reimagine the buying journey, together.

The buyer is really shortening the, the whole selling experience for the seller. So, in turn, they're making it easier for them. So, now it's our job as salespeople to recognize that, harness that, and, and yes, provide the experience to get them wherever they want to go. Welcome to Lending Leadership. I'll be your host. I'm Rach. This is Ben Treadway with Consensus, and, uh, Ben and I go way back, and I'm just, I'm obviously very excited about what we already started talking about today. So thanks for pulling up a seat to the AI sales table, but we're going to jump into some really cool things that we have already jumped into.

Yeah.

And yeah, so let's tell me a little bit about this, like, tell me a story about how ConsenSys came to be and really what What you guys are doing, because I think it's so freaking cool.

Yeah. So I think that the, the whole premise behind the company is, you know, the owner of the company, the founder, he wrote a book called Buying Is Hard— or sorry, Selling Is Hard, Buying Is Harder. Right. And the whole premise behind it is, look, selling a product, a salesperson could do it for a year. They could do it for 20 years. But ultimately the decision lays in the hands of the buyer, right? Now, when it comes to B2B sales, right, and even sometimes B2C sales, there's a conversation that has to happen on the buyer side, right? And that conversation typically involves multiple people, right? If you look at the lending side, right? uh, husband and wife have to have a conversation, right? Maybe they have to have a conversation with, um, financial planners, uh, parents, whatever it is. Um, and so there's, there's conversations happening on the buyer's side. And so if, if we're not trying it, so how can we make that process easier? How can we make this, the buying process easier? Because sometimes You have to do— that buyer is actually internally selling, right? They're trying to sell the other person that they're talking to.

We should do this. We should purchase this home. And that person might be like, nah, I'm good, right? Like husband and wife. If I want to go buy a new car or I want to buy a new house, but my wife is happy and she doesn't want to, I have to, as the buyer, sell it. Now you're sitting on the other end going, hey, I got the loan ready for you. Right. But you can't sell to my wife the way I can sell to my wife. But if you're not enabling me to do that by providing me all the information and knowledge I need, then it makes it really hard for me as the buyer to sell it internally to my wife.

Right.

Yeah.

Or, or, or you can take it on the business side. Um, you know, uh, a marketing director sees an awesome product. But now he or she has to take it to 17 other stakeholders at the company to get budget, to get approval, legal procurement, right? That process, I, as a salesperson, I'm sitting here going, hey, let me help you as much as possible. That buyer's sitting there going, I just had, I've had a 30-minute demo of this product. I love it. And now I have to figure out how to sell this product to everyone internally. I have no idea.

Yes.

So Consensus was built. to provide support to the buyers. So it's really a buyer enablement tool to provide a way for that buyer internally to sell it the way that people want to be sold.

Yeah, I really like that. And I think that that's the key term there, right? The way that people want to be sold, because we all have different buying love languages, right? Like some people, like I mentioned in the beginning, some people want to watch a video. Some people are like, don't send me a video. Don't send me a voice memo. I'm the one who's constantly sending voice memos to everyone. Sorry, not sorry.

Yeah.

They don't wanna hear it, they don't wanna watch it, they wanna read it. That's where they retain the information the most. They can do it quickly. Other people want, they wanna read reviews, or, you know, the ideas are endless. So, to package all of that so somebody can have access to all of that. And you're so right, as you're talking through, you know, being on the business side of things, having a 30-minute demo that does not give you the expertise needed to then sell it to leadership. I'm actually going through that a couple of different things that, um, maybe even with Consensus, I'll probably have you, have you send me some things, um, ahead of time. But, but yeah, to make sure that you are, are pitching it and doing it justice, but, but also package— packaging it in a way that that other person wants to receive the information.

Yeah.

That's what really got me, the, the buying love language.

Yeah. So for like you, I know you love personal conversation, right? So us talking here, jumping on a demo, you're more than well, you're more than happy to to take a call, take a demo, take a Zoom call, because yeah, you want to talk to people, right? But there's some people that would rather take 5 minutes and watch a video. And if they can get a good idea, great, right? If someone wants to have an experience internally, and they want to like click through, right, and kind of understand it. Now, let's, let's put it on the lending side. You might have a buyer who's 32 years old, He's got a, he's got a wife and kids. He doesn't have time to jump on a Zoom call. But how is he getting information now? He's jumping on ChatGPT and saying, okay, how do I like buy a home? Right? He's, he's probably not reading, right? Not many, not many of my generation are, are sitting there reading books or, or magazine articles on how to buy a home. Right.

But there's multiple different ways to ingest information. How do I prefer to do it? Right. And that's, that's really where we have to look internally and say, as a company, am I providing enough of the different avenues for people to purchase my product? Right. For people to come to my company and say, hey, I want to purchase your product. Am I providing enough of those avenues? And I'd venture to say, As I look at, you know, I've spent the past 5 years or longer, 7, 8 years in the mortgage space. Look at the websites of mortgage companies. There's 2 options: apply now or speak to a loan officer. There's not enough options for people.

And so where are they going? They're going to ChatGPT or they're going to go to the company that provides them the information, provides them the avenue to get that information. Especially in this space when everything is pretty much apples to apples, loan products, you know, loan offers, like ultimately loan products are the same, rates are typically the same, right? Who's going to give me the easiest route to closing? That's who I'm going to go with.

Yeah. Or the education.

Yeah.

To, to the closing. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that, that's so true. I mean, how many people— and we've all done this before— you put in your information, but then all of a sudden you're getting bombarded with calls and you're like, hold on, I just wanted information. I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't ready yet. And now I'm getting all these calls and it can, it can turn sour really quick.

Yeah.

But to provide the information. Now, talk to me a little bit about just chatbots, because everybody has a chatbot in their embedded in their website now. That's not what you're talking about here.

No. So, I mean, how many different routes are there to get information, right? I can talk to someone, I can watch a video, I can search on AI, I can search on Google, I can ask other people who had an interaction with you, right? One thing that's starting to come up is agentic information. So actually speaking with an AI bot, an agent to, to get information right. Now we all have experiences with chatbots, right? It's sitting there in the, in the bottom right corner of most websites. Maybe you don't have one, but most websites sitting there and it goes, how can I help you? And you have to like type with it. And most of the time it doesn't, either it can't provide the information, right? 'Cause it's like, oh, I, I don't know, you know, and it's not providing enough information.

Yeah.

And most of the time within the first 2 questions, it's like, speak with someone. Okay. Well, I don't wanna put my phone number in cuz now I'm gonna have a conversation. Like I'm gonna have to speak with someone. I don't have time to speak with anyone and I don't wanna speak with anyone. Um, and then they're just gonna pressure me to buy. And like, there's a whole reason, a lot of reasons why if I'm not ready to talk with someone, a chatbot isn't providing the information. Now, what we're doing here at Consensus is actually providing what I would call like a chatbot 2.0.

It's that conversational AI that's sitting on top of your website where instead of that chat box popping up and you're going, how can I help? It's an actual voice. It says, hey, how can I help you today? And you can have a full-on conversation with this conversational agent that's sitting there and it knows your website. You can upload all the information about loan products. You can upload information about your own company. You can do whatever you want. Load up all the loan officers' information and where they're located, because that might actually help. You know, you can train the agent to say, hey, where are you at? How can we help you? Where are you located? This might be a person for you, right? It becomes a full conversation that I can have on the website, which is keeping me on your website even longer. Right.

Important.

Yeah. And as you know, like if someone stays on your website longer, the conversion rate goes up. Right. And if, and if I'm able to sit down with zero pressure to buy and basically have a conversation with this agent that knows my product back and forth, right. And knows the website, it can actually navigate to certain parts of your website. It can click on tabs. It can actually take you to the right answer, right? If that agent is sitting there and I can sit there and have a conversation with it, Number one, that's how I like to learn. I like to have conversations, but maybe not with people all the time.

Yeah.

The other thing that's happening is it's capturing and transcribing the entire conversation and providing insights so that when that person goes, you know what, I am ready to talk with someone, they book it with your loan officer. And then what your loan officer gets is the entire debrief of the 15-minute conversation that that person just had with your AI. So when they jump on a call, with that loan officer, the first question is, so how can I help you? No, the first question is, hey, I looked through the conversation you just had, and you had 2 questions that I'd like to help answer. That first call starts to feel like your second or third call, right? And it becomes a more productive conversation if you can take away that kind of first, like, hey, welcome discovery demo, we'll call it the discovery call.

Yeah.

You can actually get that taken care of earlier on, so that your loan officers are actually spending all their time talking to qualified buyers that have already figured out and kind of hashed out their questions with an agent sitting on your website.

That's really cool. I feel like having— well, they always say the person who asks the best questions is the one who holds the keys, right? So for somebody who is A brand new prospect, you have to take that time to relationship build, to get to know them, to get to know the right questions, and obviously be listening intensely for just that, that keyword or key phrase that somebody uses that you can kind of steer them down a path. But to have this kind of information that's already guiding the conversation, guiding the relationship, I mean, I feel like that would put people much further ahead than just a typical cold call. Um, I really— what I was really impressed by also is the fact that, um, like, I could— I can just see so many different use cases for this, whether it's forward-facing on a website for, for first-time homebuyers or whoever's going to come to your website to check it out. But then also internally, um, there's so much information at our fingertips, but there's only so many hours in a day. And so as a loan officer or fill in the blank, whatever kind of a salesperson you are, um, if you could be able to just instantly download into your brain all of the information that your company has ever created, that would make you like an all-powerful genie that you could just harness all the information at once.

Yeah.

So, so talk to me a little bit about that too, because again, AI is just so incredible that If you can feed the machine, right, feed the brain. And I've been having so many AI conversations lately. I feel like the last few podcasts have really just been all AI-driven, which is just— it's so cool because there's so many different ways to build this thing.

Right.

But so, you know, talk to me about internally how you can use this to strengthen the talking points of your— we'll use loan officers because that's I'm in the mortgage space, but to strengthen your sales team and just to help equip them when they're talking live with somebody. I was blown away by this. Get a load of this one, people. This is good.

Yeah. So the cool thing about this agent is it's a closed model, right? So whatever you upload into the system is what it has knowledge on.

Okay, well, let's back up. So, so a closed model, for someone who doesn't understand that, what is— break that down a little bit.

So a closed model is not going to pull from the web. It's not going to pull from the World Wide Web. Right. And so it's, it's basically a model that only will have the knowledge and information that you provide it. Right.

Okay.

So this is really nice for the mortgage space and why I think it fits really well is ChatGPT, Claude, these are all open models where if I ask, hey, what are the rates today? Right. Let's, let's talk about mortgage, right? Hey, what are the rates today? It's just going to like searching, searching, searching, and then it like quotes a rate, right? Or it'll pull up some sort of rate and it might give a little disclaimer, hey, like your rate is, you know, sometimes subject to change and based on, you know, like it might give a little bit of that. But when we talk about compliance, you guys should not be quoting rates to someone that's just on your website, right?

Yeah.

And so So yeah, it's like a nightmare, right? And so, and we talk about marketing as well. You know, spent a lot of time in the marketing space. A loan officer just saying, hey, we can get you the best rate in town. It's currently 4.5% or like whatever. It's not 4.5%, but yeah, it's a lot higher than that right now. A girl can dream. But when it comes to a closed model, if I don't give any rate information to this agent, If someone asks, hey, can I, can I know what I would get rate-wise? The agent, rather than going and scraping the web and like providing information, is going to sit there and go, hey, that's a great question. I don't have that information now.

If you'd like, I can actually get you connected with a loan officer that can give you a better answer on that, right? So you're training it. This closed model is, is for compliance purposes, right? But it's also so it doesn't just go grab like any information on the web. Right. So this closed model is, is controlled fully by the company. That means your brand consistency is perfect, right? It's exactly what you want it to say. The knowledge base can constantly be updated. And so you're able to actually have full control over what the brand is saying, especially on your website.

Yeah.

So that's what the closed model does, right?

Okay.

I think there's actually— there's, there's a lot of different— think about onboarding a new, new loan officer. Right? If that loan officer has experience in the past, they probably know some, you know, loan products, and they're probably less worried about, you know, getting up and running. They've got a business, they've, they've got their own real estate agents, they've got their referral partners, and they can just go to town, right? But a brand new loan officer, let's say someone coming right out of college, they went and got licensed, they heard from their dad it was a good business, and they jump in. Like, how many questions are those loan officers asking? And they're not bad questions. They just don't know. But how often are you having to answer the same question over and over and over and over again? Right. Instead of setting up these like quick Slack calls and, you know, trainers and onboarding and, you know, branch managers or whoever's doing the onboarding, they have plenty of things to do outside of training a new loan officer. But when you have that new loan officer, you want them to have a good experience.

And so you kind of are at their bidding, right? But what if you took all the information, all the FAQs, all the information about the product, and you said, hey, if you have a question, just log on to this talkable experience, this agent, and ask your questions here, right? And if they don't have an answer, then reach out to me, right? This allows and frees up a lot of time internally for that training. When I made my career change and came over to ConsenSys, part of my onboarding was having a conversation with an AI agent that gave me all the answers I needed because it was completely trained on the product, the company, the ICPs, everything that I needed to know. It was fully trained on it. So my manager, who was also managing 10 other people, and, you know, he's managing up, he's managing down, we're going through multiple acquisitions right now, he's got a lot on his plate. So the new guy having to ask questions over and over and over again. All I have to do is pop open that talkable experience, that, that agent, and say, hey, I got a real quick question about this, this, and this. And it goes, oh, here, let me pull up the PDF for you. Here it is.

Here's the answer. And then it navigates over to a quick video that explains this. And, and it gave me basically the ability for me on my own time to ask questions. I did a lot of onboarding at like 9 o'clock at night after my kids were dead. Or not dead, in bed. I heard dead asleep. Dead asleep. There you go.

But I would put them down. I was, I was ready for bed, but I go, you know what, I had this quick question and I'm not going to call my manager at the time. Yeah, pop open this agent. Hey, I got a quick question. Can you help me figure this out? And then boom. Here's the other thing, though. If we want to look at an application for lending leadership that's sitting here, right, how many of those questions, how many, how many hours are your loan officers spending answering the exact same question they've answered with 20 other people this week?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That's something we hear a lot.

What about, what about loan estimates and explaining that over and over and over again? Right. What if you were able to just upload the loan estimate into this conversational AI? Send the the bot over to your your buyer and say, "Hey, here's your their loan estimate. Here's all the details. Go ahead and ask any question you want to this, and it's fully trained on your product, your rate, everything, and it can answer all those questions." So now you're you're allowing your loan your loan officers to actually multiply their time simply by providing them an agent that they can use to answer questions that are FAQs, explain. every part of the loan process. You can, you can do loan estimates, you can do all that within the agent itself.

Yeah, that's really smart, man. Every day my mind explodes and just like, hold on a minute, just a little bit more. All right. So here's my question. Do you think— we hear this a lot— do you feel like AI and something like this, this agent, Is replacing the salesperson in the equation?

No. And I'll tell you how.

So because I don't, I don't think that, but I'm just, I know that a lot of people here, there's a lot of people that are worried about it.

Sure. Yeah. So here's, here's what our message is. So 5 years ago, Gartner did a study and they wanted to know how long Or how much time was spent in research before someone ever called a salesperson. Right.

Ooh, this is good.

Yeah. So what they found—

I want to guess. Hold on, hold on. So wait, so 5 years ago. Okay. How much time? Say the question again, or say what they did.

Percentage-wise, how much time was spent in research and study and trying to figure out website research before they ever called a salesperson?

Okay. And this is just across the board for any sale?

Just across the board, yeah.

Any sale. Okay. I'm going to say—

So this is Gartner's research.

I'm going to say 2 hours.

Okay. Percentage-wise.

Percentage-wise. Oh, right. Oh, bad. I'm bad at this.

2 hours percentage.

2 hours percentage. I don't know what that percentage would be. Let's say, I don't know, 2%. I think very, very low.

Okay.

So am I wrong?

I'm totally wrong. Yeah, you are pretty, pretty wrong. So Gartner found when you, when you talk about just like B2B sales, right? So just across the board, most buyers are spending about 50% of their time in the buying process doing their own research.

50% of their time.

50%. Yeah.

Wow.

Okay. And they would be—

business to business. All right. Let's scrap this part because I've just made myself look dumb.

Yes.

50% of the time. That's what I was going to say.

And you can, I mean, the beautiful thing about statistics is you can kind of Apply it to different populations if you, if you want. Right. But I mean, we could even take, let's take homebuyers, right? They probably spent, you know, people that want to buy a home are starting to think about it way before they even call a loan officer. Right. So let's just say it is 50%, right?

Okay.

They're doing their own research. 5 years ago, how prevalent was AI? Not at all.

Not at all.

Right. So they were doing, you know, hey, I'll go to a website, I'll ask some friends, I'll go to Google and see like what I need to learn. But the information that was available at their fingertips was a lot lower. So 50% of their time, and then the rest of the time was involved with that, that, Yeah. salesperson learning a little bit more, figuring out. They, Gartner did the same study last year, and now that number has changed from 50% to now 90% of the time that a buyer is researching a product company is done On their own. Wow. Yeah.

So it's completely changed. Buyers have changed, right? Yeah. Have the sellers changed with them? And that's, that really comes down to the company. Um, the answer to that is most salespeople have not changed. We, we all know the different sales methodologies. And when you come into an organization, that organization says, hey, this is how we do it. This is how we've always done it. This is how the top reps do it.

And this is how you'll do it, right? You know, tech, mortgage, whatever it is. This is the process. And what we're trying to do is fit those people into this mold of, hey, this is how you should sell, right? This is how our product is sold. Well, every single person now is spending way more time doing their research. So what do they want when they, when they sit down with a loan officer? I want to know what it looks like. You know, in the tech world, they want, they want a demo, they want to know price, and they want to figure out legal and then buy. Right. Gone are the days where you have to sit down and do a discovery and teach and do all these different things.

Right. The same thing goes for mortgage. How many people are coming to a loan officer going, hey, I already know I can get a 6.9% rate. This is my credit score. I'm ready to buy a home. In fact, I already found it. I've done some due diligence on it. Like my realtors helped me out and now I just need a mortgage.

And loan officers are going, oh my gosh, like, you've done so much. Did you do the right information? And then they're trying to pull back and pull them back and they're saying, but did you do it the right way? Right. Well, the right way for that buyer is, hey, I've already done all this information. Can you just help me get the loan? And if you want to put me back at the beginning, I'm just going to go find someone else who's ready to give me the loan.

Yeah.

Right. That's why they go to the big box mortgage shops, right? They just— I can just put my information on the website, get my rate, and then get approved. Like, cool. That's really easy. So the reason why these companies are winning is they're just providing the experience that buyers want, right?

That is, that's amazing. So 90%, they've done 90% of the research. So they're just walking in and they're like, I'm ready to go. I don't, don't, don't put me back at go. Don't put me back at the start of trying to, trying to tell me things I already know. Um, or, or I think I already know.

Yeah. I mean, you may, they may have not have done the best research, but in their mind, hey, I'm at, I'm at my buying decision. I'm at my, I'm at my decision. I've already, I've already made the decision. I've done all my research. ChatGPT just gave me all the information I needed and I've checked the boxes. And now you're telling me I gotta go back to the start? Nah.

Yeah. I'm sure people are seeing that across the board and maybe they just didn't realize in those percentages, cuz I certainly didn't realize that percentage was that high. Um, but where they— the buyer is really shortening the, the whole selling experience for the seller. So in turn, they're making it easier for them. So now it's our job as salespeople to recognize that, harness that, and, and yes, provide the experience to get them wherever they want to go. Yeah, faster.

Yeah. How can I— how can I get my buyer to a deal faster. And the companies that are providing the information that helps them do the research and do that 90% of their time, those are the ones that are going to win.

Right?

Yeah. So the, the thing that pains everyone is when the information is sitting on your website, but it's gated, right? It's gated. Oh, I have to put my phone number, my email address just to grab this PDF that tells me how to buy a home. Nah, I don't wanna do that because you're just gonna call me, right? So I'll ra— I'd rather go to an AI and just have that conversation. Well, you know, now you've lost that person who was only on your website for a minute trying to find information, trying to be educated. So how do you do that? Well, you provide an experience where they can get that information without it being gated. And maybe that AI agent who's sitting there ready to talk to them at any time of the day. can get that information for you and have that conversation and, and really educate that person for you.

I'm really curious, Ben, for people that, 'cause I know everyone has metrics on their website and on their, their socials, you know, for, I'm curious if you've seen people that are visiting websites and, but then not doing anything versus using an agent like this, you know, if that conversion has also changed. To—

I mean, you tell me how many, how many agents or how many visits to your website are you getting? Do you know?

I don't know that actually.

Okay. So I was working with a company, they were getting about 10,000 visits on their website a month, right? Their conversion was about 1%.

1% for 10,000 visits? Yeah.

The conversion was about 1%.

I need to look into that now. I need to ask our tech team what the, what the metrics are on that. Because I really—

I'm gonna take a wild guess that in mortgage, it's a lot lower. Because what are the 2 options? Right? What's the conversion options in mortgage? Yeah, put your Social Security number and get pre-approved. Or give me my— give me your phone number so I can call you until you're— until you get mad at me. Right? Those are the 2 options on mortgage websites. Right? I've seen it for the past 10 years. There's no third option that actually provides value.

Yeah.

The hope is, hey, I have like 5 tabs that explain loan products. Well, no one outside of mortgage, no one understands loan products, right? You say you have 5 different loan products on your website as a, as an uneducated buyer, all I'm doing is looking and going, I have no idea what I would have qualify for? And we just put this in ChatGPT and figure it out. And then they forgot what website they went to to figure that out. Right?

I know, that's so true. They're already 5 steps down the rabbit trail and forgot where they started.

But if that agent can pop up, you know, 15 seconds after they're on the website and it goes, hey, nice to see you here. How can I help you today? Do you want to know about our loan products? Are you trying to figure out if you're pre-approved? And it can actually engage with that person. The time that they stay on the website goes up. And up and up. And maybe the conversation's 5 minutes long, 10 minutes long, maybe it's 45 minutes long, and they're doing all their research right there. And then they go, man, HMA, they provided me a really good experience on their website. And then the agent asked me if I'm ready to talk to a loan officer. The answer is yes.

And I'm going to use HMA.

Yeah, you should use HMA.

You should.

You should. This is, this is wild. I really, I, again, we've been doing a lot of different AI episodes because the use cases just keep, keep kind of compounding and snowballing. And I just think it's so fascinating and a great tool. If you have all the information there anyway, why not use it to your benefit to actually serve the people who are coming to your websites or serve the people that are, that are internally working with your company to give them the information faster, make the onboarding experience better. You know, I can, I can see this for recruiting also. You know, I've been in the recruiting seat and, oh, that's a hard one. But people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy and they want to do it on their terms and they want to do it when they're ready.

And I feel like this could just shorten the sales process for all of those things across the board.

Yeah, I think What I found, having spent some time there in mortgage, is a lot of the AI is created for people that are already in the process of purchasing a home, right? Pulling credit, running reports, like AI, the POC, the LOS, like those are all there. AI is being built all over the place for people that are already there. They're already ready to buy a home. And now AI is just helping to, you know, Do everything after the fact. There's not much at the beginning, right? There's not much AI options at the beginning to help get people to the point where they are on the other side, right? They've kind of crossed that threshold.

Yeah.

You— when you think about recruiting, right, um, everyone's getting recruited, right? Every loan officer has received a call in the last week like, hey, do you want to come over here, right?

Yes.

Um, and, and most of the time the, the LinkedIn message goes unanswered. The phone call or the text message, it's unanswered. Or the question is, how much are you gonna pay me? Right? There's so much more that goes into making that decision. And until they jump on a call with a recruiter, they don't hear it. What if you, instead of just saying, hey, do you wanna jump on a call? Hey, take a couple minutes and, and talk to this agent here. It'll give you all the information you need to know about my company. You can do it on your own time, and then let's talk. And that person jumps on and says, okay, hey, I want to know about the loan products that are offered.

I want to know what marketing opportunities are there for me. How much am I getting paid? And you can fill that agent with all that information.

Mm-hmm.

And then when, when that person leaves that agent conversation, you as the recruiter receive that conversation, and then you can follow up with a, hey, I saw you had a good conversation with our bot. You asked these 3 questions. Did you get your answers? I'd love to sit down and talk. That conversation is way more valuable than, hey, let's talk, or let's go to coffee and let me tell you why you should come work with me.

Yeah.

Let the agent tell them why they should come work with you. And the agent itself is a really cool way to say, hey, we're, we're on the up and up. We're using AI. You need to use AI. Every company is being told by investors that they should be using AI.

Everyone.

Yeah, right.

Yeah. So I just haven't seen it quite in this way, which is really smart. Yeah. Um, so, so where's this, where's this thing going, you think? We haven't even heard the tip of the iceberg.

Yeah. So, um, really kind of interesting, um, for us is I, I came to ConsenSys, I saw the product, and as a salesperson, I was like, I would love to use this product because it gives me so much information about my buyer before I ever talked to them. Right. It allows them, and you kind of went through the experience. I sent it to you so you could check it out.

Yeah.

It allows you to kind of choose what is most interesting to you, somewhat interesting or not interesting at all. So I can tailor my conversation to you, right. Instead of that first call being a, hi, nice to meet you. What are you interested in? Like, Do you wanna know about this, this, and this? And they go, no, no, no. I actually really wanna focus in. It provides me that information beforehand. Right? So when it comes to like where we're going, uh, to the moon, I feel like, I feel like, yeah, AI, the conversational AI is just, it, it's here and it's gonna continue getting better and better. Um, we're not trying to replace salespeople.

We're trying to multiply their efforts, allow loan officers, allow salespeople across tech, across SaaS, to be able to scale their efforts without having to put in extra hours or add headcount, right? How can we scale the efforts in a way that is efficacious for the company, for myself, for my pipeline, and helps the buyer Buy correctly or the way that they want, right? Which is the correct way. Whatever way that buyer wants to purchase is the the way that I want to sell to them, right? Yeah. And we've seen companies, we've seen companies utilizing consensus that have actually sold deals without a single live demo, right? All the conversations are done with AI. They have those questions. You know, the the salesperson is definitely involved in providing better context, but they never sit down and have a 45 minute. demo of the product, right? They're, they're going in and they're saying, hey, I got everything prerecorded, video sent to me. The, the agent provided me all the information I needed. The salesperson helped to provide all the legal stuff, procurement, everything.

And then we purchased, right? We're seeing sales cycles decrease significantly, right? We're seeing sales, um, like the size of deals. Now this is on the tech side, but the size of deals are going up pretty significantly as well. Because of the value is there, right?

Yeah.

So yeah, that's really the goal is let's just make buying as easy as possible.

Yeah. I love that. Well guys, if you're interested, reach out to Ben, connect with him on all the platforms, check out ConsenSys. I mean, I think the big takeaway is pretty simple. It's stop making people buy the way you want to sell, give them options, let them learn, let them explore. Um, let them ask the stupid question at 1 in the morning without calling them right away or calling them the next, the next day. And when they're ready, they'll let you know. And, and when they do, just remember to be human, because that's your job.

Be human.

There you go.

There you go.

Couldn't say it any better. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited to dive further into this. Into all of this. My wheels are turning big time. Good.

Yeah, no, thanks for having me on as always. Love, love talking with you, Rachel, and, and I love the company. Love HMA. Go, go check them out. You know, I'll give you a quick plug, but, uh, yeah, no, thanks so much for having me on.

Absolutely. All right, everybody, we'll catch you next time on Lending Leadership. Until then, like and subscribe, do all the things, you know what to do. See you later.