How Two Veterans Are Solving Business Development with TractionBD | Yates & Bedol, Ep 43
Episode Summary
John Yates, a tech attorney with 44 years of experience, and Greg Bedol, a serial entrepreneur and consultant, discuss their AI-powered business development platform Traction BD. They explain how AI is transforming professional services business development from a centuries-old mentor-based model into an automated system that helps lawyers, accountants, and consultants maintain relationships and convert prospects into clients through persistent, personalized outreach.
Pull Quotes
On the fundamental equation of professional services business development
“Prospects plus actions equals clients. That sounds real easy. And the thing that AI has done is sort of put brackets around it and multiplied it by a thousand.”
“It generally takes from our perspective seven to ten actions to convert that prospect to a client. Well, guess what? Most professionals give up after two or three, if you can even get to two or three, and then they move on to something else.”
“Business development is not an automated process. It's a human-to-human process, and we keep that in mind in everything that we're doing. It's human to human. So how do you leverage technology? How do you accelerate processes? How do you make it easier to do things without losing that human connection?”
“I think one of the things that's a big challenge for professionals is people give up after two or three actions. Why do they give up? Because they can't think of anything else. I can only invite this person to play golf so many times.”
On age advantage in the AI era
“It's easier for the more mature entrepreneur now to grow a new business. What AI has done is accelerate the ability to build a new business. Social media has allowed that to happen. And one of the benefits for those of us that may be a little bit older is that especially if we've been using social media for a long time we got a lot of connections.”
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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