Ep43 John Yates and Gregg Bedol—How Two Industry Veterans Are Solving Business Dev with TractionBD
Episode Summary
John Yates, a tech attorney with 44 years of experience, and Greg Bedol, a serial entrepreneur and consultant, discuss their new venture Traction BD—a voice-enabled AI platform that automates business development for professionals. They explore how AI is revolutionizing relationship-based selling by making it easier to maintain consistent, personalized outreach without the emotional fatigue and time constraints that cause most professionals to abandon prospects after just 2-3 touches.
Key Quotes
"The fundamental equation of professional services business development: prospects plus actions equals clients. It typically takes 7-10 actions to convert a prospect, but most professionals give up after 2-3 because they run out of ideas or time."
"AI enables professionals to automate the repetitive, emotionally draining parts of business development while maintaining authentic human relationships—allowing someone to take meaningful business development actions in 90 seconds before getting out of bed."
"Atlanta is positioning itself as an applied AI hub by leveraging Fortune 500 headquarters, Georgia Tech research, and a tech-friendly mayor to differentiate from pure research centers like Silicon Valley."
Transcript
Hi, welcome to Tales from the Sky Lounge. It's a podcast about business, consulting, and venture investing. We get out there in the world, we talk to people who are making it happen, and we get their stories. If you could like and subscribe, it makes producer James very happy. So today's guests in the Sky Lounge are John Yates and Greg Bedall. Hi guys, how are you?
Hey, good morning.
So who are you and what are you working on? John, you want to go first?
Sure. And thanks again for this opportunity. So I'm John Yates. I'm a partner in the law firm of Gunderson Dettmer, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley, but I've lived in Atlanta now for over 44 years and focus almost exclusively during that period of time on representing tech companies of all shapes and sizes, but most particularly companies that are growing from small to scaling up to some of the largest companies in the country. So it's been a great opportunity to really grow a practice in a part of the region of the country in the Southeast that's probably the fastest growing area for tech. I actually got involved here back in 1981, which was a pivotal year for the technology community. The second half of 1981 was when the IBM PC was announced and IBM opened up the architecture to be able to let software companies write into the IBM PC. So you can think of it as a beginning of time, the genesis of the tech community, and then spent a great 44 years since then getting to be involved actively in the community.
Wow. Greg, who are you and what are you working on?
Want to go deeper?
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