Sales Management Podcast
63. Conversational Intelligence with Avoma CEO Aditya Kothadiya
We've all heard of conversational intelligence software. It's very powerful, and in this episode, I go deep into the present and future with the CEO of one of the most innovative companies in the space.
We've all heard of conversational intelligence software. It's very powerful, and in this episode, I go deep into the present and future with the CEO of one of the most innovative companies in the space.
Welcome to the sales management podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. I've got a fun conversation today. We're going to dig into a hot topic and to do that with me, I welcome Aditya Kapadia, the CEO of Avolma, over where they're doing conversational intelligence. They've got meeting life cycle assistance and it might be a little different than what we've all come to learn from the marketing that's been out there around this topic. So hang on, buckle in and let's see what Aditya is working on over there with this team. Hey, nice to meet you.
Speaker 2:Very nice to meet you, Corey. Thank you for inviting and honored to be here.
Speaker 1:This is great. So I think we've all heard a lot of buzz around conversational intelligence and, as in any new category, there's always this rush to define well, what is it, when do we need to go from marketing perspective? And so these big VC dollars can cobble up a bunch of customers. I was looking at your company's webpage yesterday and I didn't see the feature set that I usually see when I'm looking at other conversational intelligence tools. So maybe to start, just what's your perspective around who you're building Avolma for and how that might differentiate from some things that our listeners have heard from other folks in the past?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's start with a fun fact. You mentioned the company name Avolma. Many people probably don't know Avolma stands for it's an acronym stands for a very organized meeting assistant.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's cool. Wait, so you found an acronym that just rolls off the tongue nicely and sounds like a word, exactly.
Speaker 2:And it's not a well-known word. So you have your brand, you get a filer to dot com domain name for $2,000. So that was all the hack when you were starting a company. That's how I thought about it, but the genesis was that I was looking for something a comprehensive assistant. When you think about assistant, executive assistant, executives have those and my view was that why only C-level executives have this their personal assistant? How can we democratize that experience for every knowledge corporate knowledge, professional? So when you think about Corey, what we were building at Avolma was this personalized knowledge assistant looks at all the conversations, including meetings, emails, over the period and it looks at the life cycle of different tasks that you're trying to do. Every knowledge professional has a job that they're trying to do, but you don't want one assistant only does coaching advice. One assistant only does scheduling, one assistant does your booking. That's not how you're an executive assistant. You have one executive assistant. They know the context of everything. They do everything for you, end to end.
Speaker 2:So when it was a very ambitious idea back six years ago when we started and the generative AI buzz that you hear right now, we have been doing that for the last five years, and so the whole idea was that how do we generate this task that people do? Automate the task. Or sometimes, if you don't want to fully automate, can you augment that? Whatever, there are certain tasks that humans are the best to do. Let them do those high value tasks, but help them. Help them do more efficiently. So augment the high value task and then automate the low value task so that they don't have to waste their time.
Speaker 2:So when we think about it, that's really when we started all the knowledge professionals, people like you and me doing meetings. That became the when we started researching. That was the area where it was the most fragmented way. How people do they have scheduling in calendar, note taking in some other app? Then the recordings were somewhere else. Then that was very collaborative, very inefficient way of doing things. So we started that as a problem in the beginning. Then, within that, we realized that which person, which people have this problem the highest? Who experiences on a day to day basis? They depend on it and, naturally, customer facing teams, including salespeople, customer success people these people we realized that they depend on this kind of workflows. Their job is dependent on it, their revenues attached to it, and so we decided to primarily focus on that market as our initial customer profile. Over the period, the product has now evolved to a lever. Other functions in the company also use it. But that's what we really do. We build this AI powered meeting assistant for corporate knowledge professionals.
Speaker 1:That's really interesting when I think of some of the things you're talking about. There's two buckets that these tasks fall into. There are either things that would take me a lot of time and be annoying, or there are things that I just wouldn't do and I'd say, yeah, it'd be nice if I did that task, but I'm just gonna not do it. Maybe I won't take complete notes, or I won't pre-meeting prep, or I won't get my calendar link synced up so it's easy to send out to lots of people and I'll just be like I'll send this to one person and let them add. I don't know if that's the best example, but what do you feel like? You're capturing more of the efficiency piece or the doing better work that's getting ignored in the first part of Easter is a combination of the two.
Speaker 2:It's actually a combination of two the efficiency and the effectiveness. So I'll give you an example. Efficiency means that you mentioned the productivity gain things that they should not be doing, doing back and forth in the scheduling. Calendly had started with that offering, but it's very limited. Only with that we realized that that's just one piece of how I run my meetings. Initially I need to do scheduling but then meeting.
Speaker 2:Note taking is a lot of the times me having a conversation, not getting distracted and taking notes and forgetting. I wanna enjoy the conversation with you. I wanna actively listen to what you're saying and why. I rather get bogged down into trying to type something and give bad experience to my customers or my prospects. So we automate that part of the story as well. But then this is just improving, saving time for me of not taking, but because now I'm actively listening, I'm improving the quality of the conversation, because the avuma tells me later on that here you were talking too fast, you use all these filler words and you did not cover these topics that you should have covered. Even that grading happens automatically for me after the conversation is done, which helps me over the period to get better. So it does help me save time, but at the same time it helps me to get better in every single conversation.
Speaker 1:I love that. And then what's your take on the manager? So that's I feel like what you're describing is from the perspective of the individual contributor. What are the managers missing out on by not having something like this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me step back a little bit and tell you how we think about this pace. You mentioned the conversation, intelligence. There have been a lot of other tools who have educated the world that the leaders this is for a sales leadership and what they get is this visibility and monitoring and it has this negative connotation that is it a big brother effect my manager going to watch me, my leaders are going to watch me and we felt that that's actually the wrong positioning in the market. So some of the other leaders started with that. Fair enough, leaders bought the tool, but when we looked at the reps and the managers they had different problems. So essentially it's a triangle, so three personas. Typically we think about, obviously, the salesperson, who is on the frontline doing all these conversations, of doing these meetings. Then they're managers who are managing these teams sales manager or could be manager of customer success team and lastly, you have the leadership team the VP of sales or CRO or CEO. So you felt how can we build a solution where each individual finds value? Some of the tools that are in the market gives tremendous value to leadership only, but they don't give enough value to the reps, they don't give enough value to managers. So we started thinking about it. How can we have a solution that is giving value to all the three parties involved and, as I mentioned earlier on, for the reps, we automate the note taking.
Speaker 2:But one of the biggest problems we learned the existing conversation intelligence tool had managers don't have time to go back and listen to these calls. They expect to do the call scoring and all of that stuff. It takes a lot of time to do that. You're giving them more work to that. So we started realizing that. First of all, how can you simplify the call listening and conversation coaching that's one piece of it. So we save their time with a lot of insights that we proactively provide to them. But then recently we also realized that this is still not enough. Because they don't have time, how can we focus on automatically grading these conversations with the set of questions that are customizable things that they have? You can have different frameworks like medic methodology, in-selling methodology, and you can say, hey, these are the things that my manager is expecting me to do, and managers does not have a time. They don't have, they don't want to go back and listen to every single call. Obviously, it's humanly impossible. So the idea was that. How can we score these calls automatically through AI and then surface the bad calls to managers? We are still not saying that don't listen to the any calls. We still want managers to go and focus their attention. But rather than cherry picking the random calls, we surface the bad calls for them and now that way managers are able to focus their attention and we also show them.
Speaker 2:Hey, for this particular rep, they're actually good in next steps. Scheduling the next steps every time. Don't focus on you don't have to have the generic coaching program for everyone. Yeah, that insights is what we're bringing. This particular rep is struggling. They don't always uncover the pain points. Held this particular rep to do a better discovery, but this particular rep is missing. Scheduling next step in 70% of the calls that you're having. You want to have a personalized focus coaching there. So that's how we started helping managers to do their job, where call coaching is happening with 100% coverage but at the same time, they're able to spend time on things that matter and for the leaders. Eventually we do all the forecasting and the pipeline management. So we felt leaders get that value too. But let's not ignore the rep and let's not ignore the manager as well.
Speaker 1:And, given that that take that you have with focus on the rep in a way that I think others don't necessarily, what's, what's that done to user engagement? What do you see in terms of people getting into the product? I know it joins your meeting, so your user engagement stats probably look amazing from that perspective. But getting into the web app and doing things with, like, what are reps coming and do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so this is exactly the one of the reasons. Early on, we were one of the only company who actually even have a monthly subscription, because the whole thing, what happens with this is brave.
Speaker 1:I love the bravery of the monthly subscription.
Speaker 2:Because we don't want you to lock down. In one year contract you bought 1020 licenses and only three or four people are using it and everybody stopped using it. Yes, the calls are being recorded, but nobody is going back and actually listening or nobody's actually doing coaching and training. Yeah, so there are a couple of things we did in the product and our goal was that if you provide monthly subscription, we have to believe in our own product that it will provide an ongoing utility. Not at the beginning.
Speaker 2:What happens most of the time when any company installs these conversation intelligence tools? You had never seen these data points like what's your talk time, what's the listen time. So you get really excited. It's a new, shiny tool. First two months, three months, everybody loves these tools and after three months the engagement dies down Because once you know what your typical talk time has been and you do a little bit of changes in behavior, what's the value of these tools? So you don't. You only use it then as an insurance policy, but then you're paying so much. These are expensive tools and you're locked for the whole year.
Speaker 2:So we said what are the daily workflow that people do from a rep spot of you entering data into CRM Number. One thing that they hate doing is data entry and updating the CRM records. But all of you know it's an important, it's a necessary level to have the deals done, pipeline done properly, done you forecasting done properly. So we help reps to automate the note taking. The notes are extracted automatically based on different topics. Those are saved into CRM so they come back to share those insights to make sure that the notes are accurately edited if they want to update pipeline. So we really understood the reps workflow. That's why they come back on a day to day basis On a manager's basis.
Speaker 2:We realized the coaching was another workflow. So one of the things that we do have a very deep Slack integration so you can set up some Slack alerts to say that any time a rep said certain these phrases, or a manager or a prospect talks about these specific phrases, send me alerts to Slack. So what happens is now we have these very targeted alerts that you can create and then managers don't get all the noise. They get noise or get signal only when those phrases are mentioned. Then they from Slack, they come to Obama, listen to that specific point where those negative things or things that they were concerned about were mentioned, and now they start giving coaching feedback based on that as well.
Speaker 2:So, because of these, people work in Slack. So we said, okay, how can we have deeper integration in Slack and bring people back where they work as well? So those are the some of the things that we did in the product that started driving a lot more engagement. People give coaching feedback in the Voma. They score calls in the Voma. Obviously, automated scores has been a big hit where a lot of people started realizing that I didn't even know these things were happening and just because I did it automatically, they started learning because I used to ask people do you know what percent of your reps do schedule next steps at the end of the call?
Speaker 1:We have it in playbook, but I don't know how often they can't tell you, and they can't tell you if there's a trend, if that's changing at all, recently Exactly.
Speaker 2:And so then we, we build those programs, we build that dashboard and charts, analytics where you can see hey, here's, the rep was missing. You gave them coaching feedback. Now see if their behavior is changing week or week and you will see the trend is going up or down. The moment it's going down, you're being like, hey, you forgot again. You forget it because, look, the life is busy, even though the manager has written all the playbook, who remembers to follow the entire playbook step by step, when, that's when the rubber hits the road and you realize that while we define it, it's documented but nobody's following it? How do you ensure that whatever new training or new thing that you're doing, people are actually doing and doing it on the calls?
Speaker 1:Well, that's the problem. The culture isn't the same as it is in sports. So I played. I didn't play pro basketball, I played high school basketball at 3,500 kids. I started on varsity, so pretty decent, decent level. During the season. We would practice four days a week. We would play two days a week, so we would practice on Monday, play Tuesday, practice Wednesday, thursday, play Friday, practice Saturday, and I think if we were really really bad, we had to practice Sunday sometimes, but we usually got Sunday off. Well, a lot of salespeople aren't practicing frequently in between their meetings and I think that's one of the challenges maybe a gap that this this helps fill is that there's not that constant practice, and so the only reason we were good at the game on Friday night is because we practice for the game on Tuesday, play the game on Tuesday, played two more practices, watch some film and then play to get on Friday. We practice to heck a lot more than we played. Salespeople play a heck of a lot more than they practice, and some of them exclusively play. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're 100% right. Great analogy, I mean. I think that's exactly what's happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's not how it works. I mean, even look at things like medicine and law and accounting You've got. You don't have that as much. But what's funny, they call it practice. Right, you're in the law library, you're the doctors are using their industrial grade web, nbd, and they're doing continuing education credits.
Speaker 2:That is so true.
Speaker 1:Salespeople are not doing any of these things.
Speaker 2:I know, I know.
Speaker 1:What's a feature of I love talking about your product? I hope everybody listening recognizes so I never talk about your company's products. You're like the first person ever. I'm just fascinated by this. Here's my question. I think the managers are going to love is what's a feature of conversational intelligence that folks don't use? That they should use way more, or they use it a little bit. They should use this thing way more. You're sitting there, CEO, saying I don't understand why you people aren't just in love with this thing.
Speaker 2:If I have to pick one, there are many of my favorite, if you want, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think one of the things people look at the dashboards in a way to just say, oh, this is the talk time and listen time ratio and all of that stuff. So while that's true a lot of the times it's, my favorite thing is try to understand the why behind it. So I'll give an example. Let's say we have a feature right now but it shows that at what time typically reps start the demo and we compare across so we automatically detect that over the calls. So let's say you have five reps, you can see the trend like this particular rep starts his or her demo at 20th minute.
Speaker 1:So this is where they show their screens in the conversation.
Speaker 2:Correct and they started showing the screen and they actually talk about their product and the discovery is done or something like that. So this is assuming discordant demo in just one call. And so when people are the initial rapper building and everything is done and they really start showing the demo and you can see the trend. That and it used to be people used to get really excited to see the trends between the reps and I used to say don't just look at the the trend, but understand this particular rep is always starting her demo sooner, which means that she's not doing deep enough discovery and so understand the why she's starting sooner. Once you get those insights, then you can have very personalized coaching for that person and you can go and listen to the calls only her calls rather than randomly again cherry picking certain calls. Yeah, so those are the kind of signals I used to love in in any conversation intelligence platform, for that matter. Lastly, as I mentioned, the thing I'm loving the most, that the fully automated coaching.
Speaker 2:I even in a woman we had conversation intelligence for so long but we did not know what personal time we build the playbook, how often reps are falling, like simple thing, like agenda setting. Yeah, we talk about it. That and you, when you start a call, have an agenda ahead of time. You be proactive, that, hey, here's how we are going to read the call, here's why we are here and here are the next steps. Talk about the next steps in the first two minutes or three minutes. So we give the coaching. How often I used to ask managers that do they follow that advice? And they would be like, well, I don't know. Yes, I listened to a few calls and maybe they're doing it, but across your calls you wouldn't know it. That if it's happening consistently or not. And that's when those are the things that we started learning insights that completely were unaware and it's humanly impossible for a manager to expect that they can know it. So that's, those are the things I would highlight.
Speaker 1:I love that and I love the piece that you talked about. We have a framework, so I created sales methodology called triangle selling and look, everything's created, everything exists. We made triangle selling for three reasons to make it easy to learn, easy to do and easy to coach and, with with the plan framework at the top, pivot into the conversation. Do logistics, get the agendas out, their agenda first year agenda and then talk about what next steps could be. If you get that out of the meeting, it's great, but here's the let me. I want to do a demo. Here's what some people do when they hear that. So they see that in the playbook and they go and say, hey, did you, let's get started.
Speaker 1:We've got 30 minutes and I know our agenda was for me to ask you some questions, show you the product and then, coming out of this meeting, we can see if there's some other folks on your team to look in. Does that sound good? Yeah, people do that and it's so bad. It's terrible because they're not getting any information from the prospect. Whereas, are we still good for 30 minutes? Process says yes, what are you hoping to? Cover some things, anything else? No, that's good, cool, make it relevant. Can I ask you some new questions, some questions as well. Sure, and then you know, no big decisions coming out of this. We either realize it's not a good fit, or we can book a 45 minute deeper dive in the product and we pause with five minutes left to make that decision. There you go.
Speaker 2:That's rocket social contract. Yeah, you're building that contract right away. That, hey, this is I'm here, I'm valuing my time. You're also here. It's not like I'm begging you to close this deal, and that's where that confidence has to be, there, that I'm also important I'm. And here's how I want to run this conversation and that's why. So we talk about these things, we have this playbook, but so often reps don't follow that Right. They are also busy back to back. Things happen and that's why we wanted to figure out a way that how can we automatically detect these things, that if these things are being followed or not and you try to grade them, that on one hand, you just detect how the agenda set or not. But then how well was it done? Yeah, the way you set the social contract, the way exactly, that's really a five star grade ratings agenda setting. And so how can we get somebody who is really doing basic agenda setting to them to this five star grading? So that's really how we try to do these things at a lower question for you.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you can do this yet. If not, feature request Sure, can you tell me the talk time when the screen is shared versus the talk time when the screen is not shared?
Speaker 2:No, we don't have that feature, but a good feature request. I can see where you're going with it. I can understand that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I see these people all the time when I'm coaching salespeople and they go into presentation, though it's almost like they're doing discovery.
Speaker 1:If you're at a conference and you're sitting there in the big room and you're having lunch, you're eating the salmon with the iced tea and you're asking some questions, you're learning a lot, and then all of a sudden they come with the ding ding, ding bell and you say, oh, I've got to go on stage. And then they go to the demo and they walk up on the stage and they just give a model and it's like it's a completely different person. Yeah, yeah, it's nuts. So, yeah, I think that would be a fun one to say so technically I mean we have.
Speaker 2:so let me correct my answer. We do track that so you can see the demo part and you can see the talk and listen ratio, but we don't explicitly show that only for the demo screen time. This has been the talk and listen ratio. So I would say we do have that feature but and you can clearly see here's the demo happening and within the demo what person the time they talk, what person you talk, but we don't show it somewhere else separately, like only for the screen time, how it happened. But you're absolutely right. I mean, even there we talk about it like the break the demo. You can see that. So I love, that's what I said. I understood where you're asking that question, because you don't want that monologue in the demo, right? So you break features, what you're showing, and ask questions that how, what I showed you, would it be impactful? How would it would change your current workflow that, based on what you have seen, other than saying is it useful? So yeah, I think those are the things elements we get to learn also from the platform.
Speaker 1:No one's going to tell you to your face that it's not useful. They'll just say yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, this is so true.
Speaker 1:And then when you follow up with them in two weeks, say, hey, at 3.32pm on Friday August 11th, you told me yes when I asked if that feature was useful. I'm curious why you're not talking to me anymore.
Speaker 2:That doesn't work. I'm requesting yeah.
Speaker 1:I thought you said my product was beautiful. What?
Speaker 2:is wrong with you.
Speaker 1:Oh man, that's great. Well, tell me a little bit about generative AI. So you've been working on it for five years. I think most people listening to this have only known about it for five months.
Speaker 2:Where's it?
Speaker 1:been, and why was it so bad that no one was productizing it? But why was it so good that folks like you were working on it in the background, in the labs?
Speaker 2:So obviously we have been working on this. So the Obama's value proposition was take these or generate the notes, like human rights, and that was the problem we have been solving for the last five years pretty much. And so, again, as I mentioned, we wanted to take notes how the reps would write the notes, and reps don't just say give the chance.
Speaker 1:Do you have really bad handwriting as a future?
Speaker 2:I love that. No, this is slightly better than the reps. Exactly.
Speaker 1:The same quality of the English and with good handwriting instead of bad.
Speaker 2:So have a very detailed notes, not just the action items, but tell me what were the customer's problems, who are they evaluating, what is the current workflow, what are the timelines, all those things, and organize it in different topics rather than just one blob thing, and then have those different topics also go to the different CRM fields as soon as the call is done, because that's where my manager wants me to do the data entry. And we started with action items. They were doing better, but there were all the other things were still a lot of complex work and it was. The quality we had was decent. It was not super great. I mean we couldn't replace the full human note taking.
Speaker 2:But thanks to the other bigger companies in this space, the platform providers who had trained the data, trained the models, this large language models with lots of data we were able to leverage that, our proprietary models, along with their language models. We were able to get higher accuracy for sale specific conversation, customer specific conversations. We even take now better notes for your interviews, your one-on-one meetings. So we are able to expand our initial set of things that we had done only for sales Now expand into all kinds of meeting, because you, as a CEO, you do few calls as a sales calls, external calls, but then you're also interviewing, you're also having internal meeting, your one-on-ones, your but in storming meetings, all back to back, all back to back.
Speaker 2:So do you want one sales coaching tool to take only sales notes, another tool to take notes for one-on-ones, another tool to take notes for your interview? No, you would rather have one tool which expands into these different use cases, as an individual, as a corporate professional. So initially we were focusing on only sales, but with these large language models, we were able to expand our offering to these other use cases as well. So now Avoma does not only work for only sales calls, it actually is your personal assistant across all the meetings. And so that was the shift that we were able to do because of the investment, that's on, the larger companies have done in this space.
Speaker 1:That's great. And then I see you guys do other things like lead routing. That's not even a thing that you would associate with conversational intelligence. Why did you choose to do that as well?
Speaker 2:So what happened was that, when I said we started looking at and my co-founder was behind me for this and I kept telling him that that's not something what we want to do there that space is overcrowded. But we realized that customers also started asking for us, because what happens is that it's a meeting, is a life cycle before the meeting, during the meeting and after the meeting. Scheduling happens before the meeting. Now, what kind of meeting it is, we wanted to know is it a demo meeting? Is it an interview that got booked on your calendar? Now, based on the type of the meeting, you're also able to take different notes. So we figured out this is a demo meeting, so the notes quality will be different, the topics that we will extract in the notes.
Speaker 1:That process helps the computer understand what am I doing in this meeting Exactly.
Speaker 2:So we understand and we realized that people don't want. They don't want Gong for call recording, another note-taking app for manual note-taking, seven-day rein tree or Callen Leaf for scheduler. And so we said why bother in jumping between three different tools? And you are also sharing Callen Leaf with your prospect. Then after the meeting you're sharing Gong recording with your prospect. They are also looking at how many different links I have to click on it. So we said why not provide a consistent experience when you're dealing with your prospect? They deal through the whole Avoma process, so you use Avoma link to schedule meeting. After the meeting is done, you send Avoma recording to watch the recording if they want to watch it. So the experience is consistent for your buyer also, Even as a seller, you're only juggling in one tool rather than five different tools.
Speaker 2:And to be honest, now in this economy, it turned out to be a good idea because people don't want to spend so much money, they want to consolidate tools, they want to have data into one tool, have less operation headache, and it kind of turned out to be a good bet that we did last year. And so then we said, okay, you know what. There are certain tools. I will not name name. We have a lot of customers that told us that we hate those tools. Can you help us replace those tools? And we initially resisted and then we realized that you know what Makes sense. It's an extended offering of what we try to do. It's a meeting's life cycle, so let's do it and we were able to do it. Very sleek and intuitive experience that customers started liking and then we didn't have to charge them so much because they're already a customer. It's not easy for us to also upsell, increase the lifetime value with them and they also get to stay longer with us and the workflows are more set up with us so they don't churn that quickly.
Speaker 1:I've got to guess at what one of those companies is. I'm not going to say it now, I'll tell you when we pause the recording. But there's one company I'll tell you. We use them as our anti-product internally as we're building, because it's impossible to do anything in the product. It's like they just raised a bunch of money and hired a bunch of people to just build a bunch of stuff and it's kind of strung together in some way and I don't understand that. So question for you then Sure, you're competing in a space. You guys publicly, according to Crunchbase, have raised $15 million in venture capital. Gong has raised $583 million in venture capital. How do you compete against somebody that has that much more cash or that had that much more cash? I don't know where they're at now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, this has been the thing. Please be邊 with me. Alright, thank you. Both investors and everybody has been asking us right. So I have a very clear framework. I've always thought about this and I call this as a. You have to differentiate in at least two things compared to your competitor. So the three things I care about are your market, then your product and then you go to market motion. So when we thought about it, what is the market going to be? If you look at Gong and Coors, they picked up this very specific sales coaching as a market. And then for both of them, if you look at the product, was very similar built for the leaders, the conversation, intelligence with dashboards and analytics, and the call recording stuff. And then the go to market motion for both these companies were also very similar top down, reaching out to VP of sales and very like you have to book a discovery call, you have to do a demo call and blah, blah, blah and then your typical enterprise cycle. So we felt okay.
Speaker 1:And then sign a 12 plus month contract.
Speaker 2:Try to 12 months plus contract. So all those things were basically consistent. That's why and in that Gong out executed chorus with the brilliant marketing, even the chorus product was better. Only on the technology was better the out executed and both these companies had started at this exact same time with exact same kind of funding situation. So when we came late in the, we were late in the market.
Speaker 2:I just felt this is not how would I like to buy the product. First of all, this is not the only use case that I would like to buy. I mean, I realized that the sales was the strongest use case in the beginning, but I didn't feel that was the only thing I wanted to do. I felt that I do so many other things and a solution should scale. The technology like this should benefit more people. So we looked at it from a market point of view. So we said first of all, the tool, the way they were pricing was also not applicable for most of the SMB and even the mid market. So we felt we wanted to be HubSpot, what HubSpot is for the sales first. So we said let's be a HubSpot like product where you can start growing with us and as you get bigger, you also get enterprise level functionality.
Speaker 2:So we focused on the market. That was the SMB market, and the lower end of the mid market is our sweet spot, and that gap was massive. There are hundreds of thousands, of millions of businesses who can't afford these tools, and so we said, okay, that's one thing. Then, for that market also, we realized that the go-to-market motion has to be product-led, be transparent with our pricing, give them monthly subscription differentiate based on that as well. So we started differentiating purely based on the go-to-market motion. A lot of the times people start trial with us and they already get set up, they start using the product and they're still on the discovery call with another vendor. So they're like and then I asked them who are you evaluating? They said we are evaluating Gong and Corus, but we haven't seen the product yet.
Speaker 1:And they're already implemented with you.
Speaker 2:And they're already implemented with us, and so that whole motion is just how you do. The go-to-market motion with the product-led and kind of experience has been helpful for us. And the third, the product differentiation. As I mentioned, we didn't want to only focus on the sales leaders. I actually wanted to focus on the workflow thing for sales reps and managers to help them to automate and make their life easier. That's another reason why people like our product also better, and so we started. Once you have the clarity of how we are gonna differentiate, then you just keep executing. It's not easy, don't get me wrong, but because of this vision was clear from day one, we were able to execute really fast with very small team. There's still 60 people company right now and but growing well, and so while they are a lot bigger, much bigger, I just felt like we can run, execute faster with that clarity in mind and that has been our kind of the execution concept.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So when do your sales people engage with the prospects? I'm curious because I'm trying to if there's folks out there listening to this that are managing product but teams. Obviously you have a background in product management so you've probably thought about this quite a bit. When do you think a sales person should engage with a user or a team or a company?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'll give you two answers to this. So one is we are not pure PLG play as well. So the way we also this is another thing do things unconventional way.
Speaker 2:When I started the company, a lot of investors were telling me oh, are you a sales lead or are you a product lead? Pick one of these. And I was like, well, neither, because buyers don't think like that. Some buyers SMB buyers want to talk to humans, some late stage company people who have used a tool like this. They don't want to the sales people so, and they just directly want to use the product.
Speaker 2:So the approach we always had was product lead and sales assisted. That's how we started calling. Now there's a new term. People call it as a product lead sales, but we used to call product lead and sales assisted and the idea was that we give you two options on the website. Do you want to talk to sales rep? Sure, go and book a demo. But we also have an option if you want to start the trial, you can also start our 14 day full experience, unrestricted trial as well.
Speaker 2:And we still see, obviously, majority of the people 80% of the people do prefer trial experience, and then 20% people preferred the demo experience, but within the trial experience also. Then we let people start using the product. Then we have this concept handraisers we also show them during the trial experience. If you have any help, if you need anything for onboarding, schedule time with us so we don't restrict them, not to just because you're self-service, that doesn't mean that you don't get any help, so that handraisers automatically also get booked on our AES calendar. That, hey, I need help. I started the trial, but I'm struggling with this. I have a few more questions. So we also give that experience.
Speaker 1:That's the future of that's how people should be selling. I think that's. Frank Slutman is out pounding the table saying that usage-based pricing is the future, and I think that what you're doing is basically usage-based pricing because you can cancel month to month.
Speaker 2:You can cancel month to month. It's based on see. What happens is that investors and these thought leaders want to categorize you into one way or like, because they are trying to go pattern matching.
Speaker 1:I know I'm the 39 year old guy with a business degree that doesn't read code.
Speaker 2:I'm in a category and they know it and I know it and that's a fun game to play Exactly and it's like oh, you're sales lead and then sales lead has these motions and these unit economics and product lead. That means you have to do this, but we always felt that that's the wrong way of doing it. It doesn't matter what I want to be sales lower product lead, what I care about, what my customers want, what they like to buy, how they like to buy, and so it's my problem to make a unit economics was efficient for them if this model doesn't work. But in then we always wanted to give the best experience to customers during the buying process, based on your preference, because at the end of the day, you're human, doesn't matter, you're working at a bigger company. If you're someone who is geeky, techy, you know in and out you don't want to talk to salespeople. You probably just want to go and play with the product. Then give that preference to them. So those are the things that we felt, and I think there is.
Speaker 2:And then we also track product usage data and in our CRM so we push all the product usage data. We have this process of what are the aha moments in the trial experience. Have they connected basic things? Have they? How many users have they invited. So if you've heard about this product layered companies do this. They call PQL, product Qualified Account, and then PQL means Product Qualified Lead. So we first track the PQL, where we know how often they're using it. So there is the frequency of the usage and also the velocity of the things, like how frequently are you inviting members in your company? So immediately it tells us that within three days they invited 20 people. So that means whoever you started using it is already excited about the product and then our sales rep can reach out to them and we make that data available to our sales rep in the CRM so that they can access the data. They can look at the usage, the product usage, right within the CRM.
Speaker 1:Love it. So as a CEO you have one advantage is that you're pretty much the only person that can push back on the investors. Imagine that there's a sales leader listening to this and they feel like the investors are pushing their company down the wrong path, and their CEO might not have a strong position on it, or they might just not feel like this is the fight that they wanna fight and they're not pushing back and they're letting the investors push them around. If, what advice would you give to a sales leader who wants to manage up to their CEO to help give them some insight that says, hey, look the investors telling us to go down this path, but I don't think it's the right decision. How do you do that politically in a productive way?
Speaker 2:I think there are two, three ways you have to do. There's no one silverware that will solve the answer. I always take a perspective of the market trends. You have to look at what is happening in the market across the board. So the trend of this buyer-led experiences and focusing on the buyers' modern buying experience. So you have to show that, hey, these are the companies which are massively scale companies, they have taken these paths, or show the examples. This is what the journey of their buying experience looks like, and there's a big company who has done this Lot of the times.
Speaker 2:What happens is that people have to unlearn the things that they have learned from the previous journeys. Because they have been successful at building certain companies in a certain way, they think that's the only way, but they don't realize that the world is changing. The shift is happening in the market and there are doubts, there are concerns that can you actually do that? And if somebody has done it, take those examples. That's one way of doing it. So bring the market trends is one example I would always do the second thing I also like to focus a lot more on your own customer's qualitative data. Tools like Avoma will also help you. You can ask those qualitative experience like hey, why did you buy us? Now, the thing that I mentioned to you, that some of our prospects told us that I'm still on a discovery call with this other vendor of competitor of yours and I'm already set up here. And this was not the one time we heard it, it was three or four time different people telling us. So these were not our words, these were our customer's words that we were able to believe that this is why this model is working. This is what our customers are liking it. This is why they're buying faster in our solution compared to our competitor's solution. This is how you're gonna win.
Speaker 2:And then, lastly, you have to have a point of view in the market. If you're just another Me Too company, you have to take a stand. This is where your strategy comes in. You have to stand for something. If the rest of the world is digging, you have to zap. So if everybody's doing the same thing, how are you gonna stand up? It's not about how I'm better than my competitors, it's mostly about how are we different than our competitors?
Speaker 2:So the more you say that, as I mentioned, it could be product as a differentiation, go to market is a big differentiation that people don't understand that If the market has a certain need, the types of buyers are different. Just by giving a different buyers a different experience, you can win your. That could be a winning strategy. So you have to pick a stand. Look at your all competitors and we looked at it. Every one of our competitor was this top down sales lead motion competitor, gong Koras, execvision. All of those guys looked exactly the same and then we wanted to be different. So we said let's take a risk here, let's be bold in that market, let's stand out differently, and that's another thing that you. That's the way you have to inspire people, to convince them that this is why we are basically making these kinds of different decisions, and I hope these people are open enough. Find it, then they'll listen to it.
Speaker 1:I love that, and of those four there's only two left. Yeah, you guys made it All right. Well, we're running out of time here. Did you anything? That you want to say is the last word.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of things, but I think the community for the salespeople and the sales managers. I do believe that coaching is an insanely important routine. I would say not even just the. It's a mundane task or things that you need to do. It's a culture that you have to build. It's a habit to build in the organization and one of the. We were also a small seed stage company and then now we are a series of companies, a company with multiple reps, and you don't have to think everything boiled ocean at one point.
Speaker 2:The culture of coaching has its own phases of maturity based on your maturity. We we a lot of the times people talk to us and they're like I'm just only one person, do I need a coaching or I'm just a founder? And should I record the calls? And I always tell them start. Even when you're one person team. Every time that information will be captured, that knowledge will be not lost, and anytime you're hiring the first or second reps again, your stage is a little different.
Speaker 2:Now, listen to the calls, don't expect the conversation. Intelligence tools are automatically solve everything for you. You still have to go and understand the nuances, then scale as you scale even more than have managers, let them do certain things. So think of a coaching as a culture and keep growing that as a phase of the organization and you cannot ignore that and so many companies I still talk to don't have that coaching culture. We even have these different routines that we have defined, like on calendar, playbooks, have defined that these things, the times are allocated to do the coaching. So it's an absolute and I know you guys are also working in that space, so it's. I'm excited to hear that we all collectively are transform, helping our industry to get better in coaching. For the sales trip, the way, the analogy also you gave it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think that the managers need to coach as a hat. I mean, if you brush your teeth every day, you need to coach every day.
Speaker 1:That is so well said, so you're going to get in our whole world is we help people diagnose and prioritize what to coach on and a lot of that information comes from tools like yours. And then there's also other places and people talking to each other calendar, time management, things like that and then execute on coaching If anybody wants to, if anybody doesn't have a coaching framework. You want a free course on our coach framework? Shoot me a note at free stuff at coachsierremcom. Free stuff at coachsierremcom. And then it's all about driving the accountability, how to actually change behavior. You can't just tell us people stuff. You're not going to change behavior. Hey, floss every day. When your dentist tells you to floss every day, do you floss every day? No, you got to do it. And then eventually it becomes habit over time. Yeah, yeah, that's, that's huge man. This is why don't people coach. I'll leave us with that, with that last question.
Speaker 2:They're busy. They're busy, they're thinking that things will take, take and care, and that's why I hope they change it. I hope they make it a routine and it's a part of their daily thing. I actually had a KPI for my leaders that you have to coach every single day these many hours, and sometimes you have to push it, you have to force it and then eventually it becomes a habit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that KPI for behavior. We have KPIs for salespeople, for prospecting. We have KPIs around things like talk time, monologues and trying to quantitative things. Here we want to understand the quantitative piece. Do we set next steps? What percentage of deals have next steps? These are things that we do and they all lead to the quote attainment and the win rates and the deal size and deal velocity. They all lead to those things. Coaching leads to the team impacting those metrics. The only way you can drive an outcome is by doing something, and the only thing you can coach is something the person can control. If you find yourself coaching to outcomes, you're going to be frustrated because that just means that the person has to bridge the gap between what is this outcome and what's the thing that I need to do. There's going to be mutual frustration if that's the case.
Speaker 2:Very well said.
Speaker 1:All right everybody. I'm Corey Bray, co-founder of Coach CRM. This is Sales Management Podcast. Follow us on Apple Spotify If you want to check out what we're doing CoachCRM. That's coachcrmcom. Aditya. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's great Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:This was pleasure talking to you.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Corey. See you everybody next time.