Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Mastering Sales Growth: AI, Private Equity, and Scaling Success with Sean Carson of Sales Empowerment Group (SEG)
Thu, 20 Mar 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker sits down with Sean Carson, Executive Vice President at Sales Empowerment Group (SEG). Sean shares expert insights on scaling sales teams, leveraging AI for growth, and helping private equity-backed businesses execute go-to-market strategies in an evolving economic landscape. Register for the April 9th “Growing Revenues Fast in a Changing Economy– […]
Chapter 1: What is Sales Empowerment Group and what do they do?
Yeah, thanks so much, Scott. So Sales Empowerment Group is a growth services firm. We are private equity held by an investment partner called RFE. And one of the things that we do here is to work with other private equity-backed businesses on their value creation and execution projects.
Chapter 2: How does Sales Empowerment Group support private equity-backed businesses?
Once a private equity sponsor buys a business, they have grand plans for that organization, implement capital to help fund growth. And so we typically work alongside operating executive teams and deal team members to support management in that journey. And we have a unique approach to that, which hopefully we'll spend a little bit more time today talking about.
Thank you. Talk about, is it sort of working side by side with the team, helping them hire reps, helping them think entirely about the whole growth cycle and revenue cycle? Talk a little bit about where you specifically work with companies. Give us just a deeper sense of that, if you don't mind.
Yeah, for sure. We tend to get involved with companies at all different stages of the investment lifecycle. So some of our partners we work very closely with prior to them closing a transaction to help get a better sense of the commercial opportunity, what's working well and what the potential areas of improvements are.
Chapter 3: At what stage do companies typically engage with Sales Empowerment Group?
And then others we're working with that are already affiliated with our partners and may look to really ramp growth. And the way we can do that takes on multiple different forms, right?
It may be helping to augment some sales talent, maybe sourcing sales talent, helping on demand generation strategies and tactical execution work streams, working with the existing sales professionals and marketing team members to help better enable them and help them perform at a higher level and really everything in between. And that's why I use that term intentionally as growth services.
There's a lot of really reputable and very smart sales and marketing and commercial resources that are out in the market, we like to think we're a bit unique in that we not only help it in the advisement, but then we also help with co-execution to really drive those outcomes as efficiently as possible.
Thank you.
And Sean, when you come into a company, give us a sense of the range of what that looks like in terms of the depth and sophistication of the sales teams from sort of really totally built out, but just need some help on the demand generation side or something versus those that are really building a sales team from almost ground zero where the founders really driven a lot of the sales before.
Talk to us about the different breadth of what you see out there.
Yeah, it's a good question, Scott. And it's a, you know, our firm really focuses on the latter. We tend to spend a lot of time with first or second institutional round capital financing relationships. And you hit the nail on the head. It's generally a founder or a small team that have been responsible for carrying the workload. And as a function of this
capital infusion, how do they take what those individuals and those teams have done so well and make it repeatable and scalable? And that's ultimately where we tend to spend a lot of time. So it's not uncommon for us to get involved with a founder-led business and to work with them on replicating the types of things that they do just
innately because they own the business and they're deeply involved in it and they exude confidence with their customer base. When you start to scale commercial aspects of a business, you need to help translate that confidence and also that intellectual information throughout the rest of the team members.
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Chapter 4: What are go-to-market strategies and how are they evolving?
And if they haven't been oriented to that type of environment, they could tend to try to do everything all at once. And that can be certainly problematic. So when you have a right type of framework and the right type of approach, you can take the risk out of that journey and help to provide a better path for you, your employees, and most importantly, your customers, right?
Because if you start trying to grow too quickly without taking into account customer resources to manage your clients appropriately, you can create your own internal problems. And so How do that balance is going to be really, really important as you start to execute against the plan?
Yes, 100%. And Sean, I couldn't agree with you more. We've seen situations where people get their sales and marketing gets ahead of their ability to deliver. And then you've got a one and done problem with customers. And it's a horrendous repeat cycle versus a virtuous cycle. So constantly making sure you could grow and deliver side by side. I think that's right on.
Talk for a second, if you don't mind. Really, I'm going to ask you two questions. First is artificial intelligence. Everybody's talking about artificial intelligence. How is that impacting go-to-market strategies? And then second, you work a lot with your private equity-sponsored companies. What industries is Sales Empowerment Group?
Are there industries that you folks particularly focus on or verticals you particularly focus on? So two questions. Artificial intelligence impacting growth and growth strategies, go-to-market strategies, and then what industries that you focus on?
Yeah, sure. Happy to. So on the AI front, we see it as a catalyst. I think there's a lot of noise out there right now with emerging technologies and the capabilities that come along with them. The first thing that is natural from a human response is a little bit of fear, a little bit of uncertainty. What does this mean for my job? How is this going to upset how we're operating the business today?
We have the benefit of working with hundreds of companies across multiple industries. So SEG or Sales Empowerment Group, We primarily work with industries in the B2B sectors across all verticals. We're not really oriented for consumer-based businesses.
And as a result of that, we get a lot of visualization in terms of how customers that we're engaged with are already using AI, what the gaps potentially are in terms of where we can pull forward those capabilities for those businesses. And one of our core values is we're going to be our best customer.
When we make recommendations to our clients and our partners, they're likely deep-rooted into strategies and tactical execution of things that we're doing every single day ourselves. That also gives us an advantage in the market in that we operate very, very lean for the size and the scale of our business, but we also have proficiency across all of our internal teams.
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Chapter 5: How is AI impacting growth strategies in sales?
and key personnel and review what we've learned. And there's generally about three to five questions that the board and the CEO or CRO and our partners want to have answered. So we'll answer them and then we'll come up with if there are opportunities that we see that could accelerate what their objectives are or accomplishing their objectives, then we talk about those as well.
And that's really where our services come into play, which is very unique with respect to co-execution.
Chapter 6: What industries does Sales Empowerment Group primarily focus on?
Let me ask you another question. And again, I apologize, Sean, for going longer and deeper than I teed you up for, so I apologize. But bear with me if you're okay for a couple more questions. Yeah, please. Okay, great, great, great. So here's a question for you.
So many businesses, or let me ask you if you see this, some businesses, for example, constantly sold and developed business through trade shows, and a lot still do. Or they originally developed business almost hand-to-hand combat, and a lot still do, meaning hand-to-hand, one-on-one sales.
How has the world changed, and do you periodically see something where a company, like we had talked recently, a financial printer, and the world has just changed so much, so we're trying to find new ways to touch the market.
How often do you see in the changing world that we're in that the way in which people go to market has just changed a lot over the years, and how much is it sort of thought so, but you really just have to go back to basics? and I know that's a multi-piece question, but it really gets to, how much has the world of how people go to market changed over the last several years?
And how much do they need to go back to basics or do they need to do something different?
Yeah, it's a really good question. I wish I had the answer or silver bullet, because if I did, we'd probably be oversubscribed on this session. But I think there's a couple of things at play. One, I think that you got to meet your customers where they're at. And with technology today, I mean, look at how we're having this conversation, it's via Zoom and digital, right?
So 10 years ago, I'd probably be sitting in a studio or you'd be in my office and we'd be having the discussion live. That's much different. What's important is to take the same approach and provide the same type of experience. and elicit the same type of emotional response, be it a partner, a customer, a colleague, whatever that looks like, no matter how you're engaging or interacting with them.
And many times, you know, when we're working with clients and partners, you know, we talk a lot about the selling environment and how dynamic it is today and how much it's changing.
how much it will continue to change i think the most important thing to do is anchor in on the experience when you have a meeting with a potential customer when you leave when they leave that meeting are they leaving better informed um feeling good about their business and and what they discussed and with clear and concise next steps on on what it is that they should be focused on you should also if you're a sales professional or a sales leader or a ceo
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