Battle Scars of a Sales Leader
Understanding the stories of resilience, strategy, and leadership is essential for success in the competitive sales world.
James will uncover the raw and unfiltered real-life experiences of sales Leaders, exploring the ups and downs and lessons learned in the high-pressure sales world.
Battle Scars of a Sales Leader
From Engineer to CEO: How Brian Swift CRACKED the Code to Success!
Brian Swift is a dynamic tech leader who transitioned from hardware engineering at Samsung to influential product and go-to-market roles at major tech companies including Twitter, Atlassian, Safetyculture and Dovetail.
He is now the CEO and co-founder of Twine, a SaaS business that connects the dots across customer calls, CRM, and roadmap to deliver crucial information to the right people when they need it most.
In this insightful conversation, Brian shares his evolution from engineering to product management and entrepreneurship, offering valuable perspectives on building successful tech products and teams.
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You know you can tell that the product isn't meeting the needs. You can see the eyes of the person live on the moment just becoming disenchanted with your product. When someone's making an economic decision on behalf of their company, they will give you the answers much more directly, and so they will say does the product do this? If it does not, then I think we can end this conversation.
Speaker 2:Brian Swift former head of product and head of go-to market at companies like Twitter, atlassian.
Speaker 1:Safety Culture, dovetail and now co-founder of Twine. For us and for any starting company, you just need to find product market fit. If you don't have that, nothing else really matters. And the way I think about product market fit is you look for the three stages you want.
Speaker 2:Hey, brian, thank you so much for joining us here today on Battle Skies of a Sales Leader. When we look at your profile and your LinkedIn and what you've achieved in your career, I think it's nothing short of remarkable. When you look at some of the brands that you've been a senior leader and instrumental in helping to build and construct so there's Twitter, there is Atlassian, there's safety culture and, most recently, before going out and setting your own business up, a company called Dovetail as well I'm incredibly excited. I've got a whole bunch of questions, particularly around your drive and lead into entrepreneurship. But firstly, we'd just love to hear, I guess in your own words, a little bit about your journey. What have been your core roles and how have you operated?
Speaker 2:and thought, as a senior executive, some of these big brands.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it's great to be here. My career has been a bit of a winding road. I studied engineering and actually worked as a hardware engineer originally, so before some of those brands you mentioned, I worked at Samsung making semiconductors, really learned how businesses operate, a lot of math, statistics, but found that I really wanted to be more involved in strategic decisions and ultimately that few year journey led me to product management. I didn't know what that was at the time, I don't think a lot of people did, but rode this software wave of startups and worked at a few big companies, obviously that you mentioned.
Speaker 1:Most of my career has been in B2B software, selling to other businesses and trying to build products that you can sell to an enterprise but then also often have a product-led growth approach. So almost a consumer grade design to software but being sold to businesses, and I've jumped around a bunch of different types of products, sizes of companies, and then I think the one nuance of the most recent part of my career is I switched to run go-to-market at Dovetail. So after spending years being on the receiving end of a lot of feedback from sales and customer success and support people out in the field, I was now on the other side of the equation. So I think that caused me to a few light bulb moments and realizing having a lot of empathy for the counterparts I'd worked with over the years and that ultimately led to me wanting to become an entrepreneur and solve a problem that I saw while I was in that role.
Speaker 2:Yeah, incredible, and yeah, I certainly, in my time as a sales leader and watching different leaders at global organizations kind of come and go one of the things that I've noticed is that if non-sales people or leaders often get their chance to come into go-to-market because I think that, in order to elevate within an organization, having that 360 perspective of the front office and the back office is incredibly important and I actually think it would be great for sales guys to go behind the scenes and do some of that as well, to understand what really goes on. But let's even take a step back. You know you're here in Sydney, in Australia. You don't have an Australian accent. Tell us a little bit about where you grew up and how you ended up here in Australia as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I grew up in Detroit, michigan. My father worked in the auto industry, most of the time at Ford Motor Company, so that's what brought us to Detroit. When I was a kid Grew up there, australia was obviously never on my radar. It was just a thing that you saw in movies, basically and jumped around the US for various roles.
Speaker 1:I was in Austin, texas, for a while, on the East Coast, in Boston, obviously, spent a lot of time in San Francisco as I worked for more and more big tech companies, especially Twitter, or it was formerly known as Twitter, and I, from a personal level, wanted the life experience of living overseas. I like warm weather. I only speak English, so that limits my options quite a bit. I had been to Sydney on a holiday and loved it. At the time there was only one software company I really knew of, which was Atlassian, and they happened to reach out about a role on one of their big products, and so I took a bit of a leap of faith and moved down here without really knowing anyone and just joining a company that built products that I knew of, I had used, and with working with a leader that I really got to know during the interview process and trusted. So that kind of is what brought me down here originally.
Speaker 2:So how did you get into to product management? And what does product management mean to someone that's not from product management? And and you go oh, product management, I'm going to step into that world.
Speaker 1:I definitely stumbled into it. The first startup I joined I was hired as. A director of strategic analytics was my title, which doesn't really mean anything. I had worked in strategy consulting and they wanted someone who could come in and understand the numbers of the business. They were trying to pivot to build a consumer app and understand the numbers of the business. They were trying to pivot to build a consumer app. Basically, it was a voiceover IP for a gaming company that wanted to build WhatsApp before we knew what WhatsApp was. Obviously it was a good idea.
Speaker 1:It didn't quite execute well enough, but I happened to report to the VP of product and that is how I learned what product management was and the way I would describe it is. You're working with a cross-functional team, typically including engineers and designers, to build, quote-unquote, the right product for the right customer as quickly and efficiently as possible to solve their problem and grow your business. So that involves a lot of things, many of which include go-to-market, which often, I think as companies get bigger, becomes further and further separated from the actual day to day role of a product manager. I'm understanding who these customers are, what their buying processes are, and that was definitely a journey I've gone on as I've tried to work in more B2B companies. But yeah, most of the day to day of product management boots on the ground. New in the role is working with engineers and designers to build a product and really understand your customer and solve a key problem for them.
Speaker 2:And in the companies that you worked for Twitter, atlassian would you say that the product management is a push or a pull in terms of who is driving the innovation and actually building that product? Is it coming from more of the engineering side? Is it coming from more of the engineering side? Is it coming from more of the sales side? Is it reliant on the sort of CEO that you've got at the top, whether they're GTM or product-focused?
Speaker 1:I think most tech companies take on the personality of their founder or founders. So Safety Culture, as an example, lucanier the founder, serial entrepreneur, very product-minded, and so a lot of the strategy and innovation came from him through me into the product org, but a lot of it really came from him. He knew the space very well. He was someone who had big ideas, won't say no to anything just like. We have to figure this out and solve this problem, no matter how big it is, and I think that through the product became where a lot of the innovation happened.
Speaker 1:As companies grow, often the shift moves more and more into go-to-market, where you have a product that's found product-market fit. Maybe it has reached some level of product-led growth, but inevitably, if you want to sell the product to bigger companies, you need to really have go-to-market leaders and people thinking more strategically about how you sell the product, who the buyers are, how you navigate complex buying processes. And while a lot of that initially often doesn't impact the product development process, over time it does, and so you need people in the product side who kind of understand the nuances of that. So you need people in the product side who kind of understand the nuances of that, and I think, while I haven't worked at Atlassian for a while, you can see a lot of their products and the reason they're continuing to do so well is because they're beginning to nail this enterprise go-to-market motion and having a product that can back that up.
Speaker 2:Which has been a lot of work and quite a journey for them. But yeah, I think that's typically how it works and from a product side because I think it's an awesome jump that you've done from product to GTM what is the general consensus of go-to-market and sales from the product side? What do product managers and product people typically think of the other side of the fence?
Speaker 1:It varies by company and at the stage, but there are a lot of reasons that there is dysfunction or misalignment between those orgs. Despite people wanting, it's never on purpose. People want to work together, obviously, but you typically have salespeople who have, they think, in months and quarters they're talking to customers. They're out on the front line hearing all the deficiencies of the product, reasons they're not going to hit their quota often, which is determined by what the product team is building, and so they try to pass this information on. But the challenge is that go-to-market, usually globally distributed if you're a big enough company product usually all sits together. They have to balance not just the enterprise or sales-led customer base, but usually there's a product-led growth aspect to it, at least in the companies I've worked for, where their needs and requirements are quite different Not completely at odds, but somewhat different in how you think about building a product and having a product strategy that's going to ultimately win in the long run. And balancing that with bets and innovative things you need to do is quite challenging.
Speaker 1:And there is this translation gap I often have found in my experiences where a salesperson might hear an objection on a call that is related to the product. It's like playing the game of telephone. There's all these failure points of they didn't quite. Because they're not researchers, they're not product managers, they will interpret it in a slightly different way than a product manager, would they try to pass it along? They don't do it for all of their calls necessarily, maybe just the ones that matter most.
Speaker 1:Some salespeople are quite good at this, they are very charismatic and so they carry a lot of weight in organizations where others often I found in customer success typically are more grounded in they want to wait until they see a pattern and then they present it over to the product org. And so as a product manager, you're getting all these different inputs from sales, from CS, but then also typically from your founder and customers that you want to go acquire that maybe aren't in your ideal customer profile yet, that you need to go innovate and build a new product for which the sales team probably doesn't care as much about.
Speaker 2:So it's this very messy situation, especially as you scale and I guess that's going to lead us nicely into part of this conversation in terms of you setting up Twine and the problems that that's solving for both the product and GTM sides. But before we get there, I want to understand your transition from product to GTM. What was that leap like, going from product into more of the business development sales revenue side of the business?
Speaker 1:well. It was challenging for sure. It's like learning a whole new skill. Um, I had the a few advantages. I guess I I understood the product very well and, and I think, understood the customer quite well because I managed the product. I had a leadership team and founders that really and founders that really and board that backed me kind of stepping into this. So there was a lot of framework and support around that transition. But it was quite eyeopening when you see the challenges of being on a sales call or a CS call or just in a pipeline review meeting and understanding all the nuances that go into selling software and the things that often have nothing to do with the nuances that go into selling software and the things that often have nothing to do with the product, that are quite challenging.
Speaker 1:But then even how you demo it and frame it.
Speaker 1:So one takeaway I had from this is I wanted all the product managers to have to demo the product live to a customer at least every month, because I think the way you walk through a demo makes your brain get out of the. What features are we building? How are we designing them to? How are we going to tell a story around this to a customer. In order to do that, you need to know who the customer is, what they're responsible for, what is the pain point that has triggered this conversation, and I think that gives a product management team a much more well-rounded viewpoint and, similarly, with sales and CS, understanding how to get feedback from the customer in a way that is useful and a bit more structured, and then talk through and really dig into some of these moments of feedback where maybe the product isn't landing well, and teasing out not just a feature request but really understanding the pain that they have in a way that's going to be useful for them in managing the relationship but also working with their product team.
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Speaker 1:I don't know if there was one moment. I think it just takes being on a couple calls and just. I don't know if there was one moment. I think it just takes being on a couple calls and just.
Speaker 1:Not that they're train wrecks, but you can tell that the product just isn't meeting the needs. And the customer will go through all the things they need the product to do, and each answer maybe isn't completely off, but it's slightly off and you can see the eyes of the person live on the moment, just becoming disenchanted with your product, whereas often in product conversations you're talking about what the product could be and you're doing generative research or you're showing them new designs, and it's a very different conversation than when someone's making an economic decision on behalf of their company. They will give you the answers much more directly and so they will say does the product do this? If it does not, then I think we can end this conversation or come back when you actually fix that. And so the tone of the conversation is quite different, but equally important and eye-opening and relevant. For our product team, I think that was the most eye-opening thing for me.
Speaker 2:So, for SaaS companies that are in their early stage startup and I guess that this is almost you at this moment in time as well but for those that are in the process of still defining their ideal customer profile and defining what their go-to-market strategy is, what would your typical recommendation be for having a symbiotic relationship between product and GTM, and how do you bring them together so that you can accelerate and optimize that product market fit?
Speaker 1:It's a great question. I think we often talk about these things as separate concepts, like your go-to-market motion or go-to-market strategy and your product strategy, and one of the biggest issues I see with companies it's easier when you're smaller, much harder when you're larger is that these things become not necessarily at odds, but they aren't planned and discussed as a group. And so the actual, a few tactical things that I've seen work well are have your product team sit down with your sales and CS team on some recurring basis and just go through what the customers are saying, both good and bad. Often the product team just hears all the bad stuff. It's good to hear what is working well, because then you can double down on that and it often helps with how you position the product from a product marketing perspective.
Speaker 1:So I think just having a recurring time to sit down and go through actual voice of customer whether that's like a clip of a customer or just going through verbatim comments that the customers have made and understanding the themes and biggest opportunities and then I think, conversely, on the product side, when you're defining a feature, usually it's here's the things that must do, here's how we're going to solve those problems, but doing the go-to-market stuff up front. So writing the press release or blog post with your product team and with the sales and CS team of this is how we want to describe what we're about to embark on as a product team, and do that before you write a single line of code. I think if that forces everyone to think like a go-to-market person like who is this for? What are the key value props that we're trying to position? How is it differentiated from their other products? What are those other products that they're comparing? And if you get all the counterparts in a room, this can be quite a powerful way to align everyone and talk about it.
Speaker 2:The way you describe that, it almost seems obvious that you bring those two together.
Speaker 1:From your experiences, is that not common, that you see, yeah, yeah, yeah, I think great companies do this regularly, but it's very normal to fall in the trap of the product team builds the product, the go-to-market team, tells the world about it and sells it and supports the customer Almost in two parallels. Exactly.
Speaker 1:And while that sounds silly, it's just very natural in your day-to-day to lose sight of this, and so I think usually it comes down to the leaders in that org figuring out these ways to get everyone to just talk to one another.
Speaker 1:But often when you're in the ideation phase of product development, making sure that go-to-market is heard, and when go-to-market is planning out a quarter or the next six months, what does the product team need to do to support them and serve their customer? And who is that customer? And do we all agree on that? Because often the product team will be talking to an end user, at an existing customer that you're serving. Well, but the go-to-market team is now pushing the horizon of the product and they're going after a new market or a new region, or they're moving up market and the requirements are shifting slightly, and so making sure that everyone's aware that that is one is occurring and that, two, the go-to-market team is aware of what deficiencies the product has that's holding them back, and the product team acknowledges those and makes a decision about whether or not which of those they're going to address in a way that allows them to continue to scale and deliver a product that works.
Speaker 2:How often would you recommend those teams collaborating and having those tactical or strategy sessions?
Speaker 1:I think there should be collaboration happening every day, like not necessarily sitting down as a big group in a meeting, but there are little ways of. This was an interesting moment on a customer call just having a mechanism to share that. Or, if the product team has an idea and they want to validate it, having a mechanism or a way for them to reach out, to go to market and ask for their opinion. Or just say hey over the next few weeks on all of your calls and ask for their opinion, or just say hey over the next few weeks on all of your calls. If you could ask this one question and let me know what the customer has said, that'd be really powerful.
Speaker 1:So you actually bring them into the research process and ideation phase of product development. But in terms of sitting down and defining strategy, certainly quarterly to ask are we still aligned? Are we marching in the same direction? Do we still have the same vision of where we want to be in six, 12 months? Or has something changed? Has the market shifted? Have customers started to say something different about our product? Has the competitor popped up in a region that the product team isn't aware of? And just question do we still believe this is the path that we should be going down from a product perspective, from a go-to-market perspective, At least once a quarter? I think if you're smaller, you should definitely do it once a month, because the ship tends to be a bit easier to steer and you should be steering it more quickly. At a bigger company, if you have thousands of employees, trying to change the direction of the ship every month can be quite jarring.
Speaker 1:So, you probably want to do it once a quarter and do a much more rigorous process to make sure you're aligned and avoid unnecessary shifts in the strategy. Yeah, to make sure you're aligned, and avoid unnecessary shifts in the strategy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, also, what I've taken away from that is to be super intentional as well. So, actually build that out as part of your planning. Is that incorporation and collaboration and synergy between the two teams? And, yeah, I know that from a marketing and sales there's always some constructive tension between the two, and I'm going to I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm going to suggest that perhaps there often is with with product and sales as well, or product and gtm is. Would that be fair?
Speaker 1:yeah, I think there is a lot of tension and I think naturally it's just built into the way that those functions tend to operate. Yeah, it's kind of. They're on different cadences. Yeah, different horizons. Their, their goals are aligned, but not often 100% aligned. So, for example, a product team might have 10% of their roadmap is on trying an innovative new thing that might not work or ever be able to be sold. Or 20% of their roadmap might be for the bottom, like the SMB market, which your sales team doesn't speak to, but it's still an important growth labor for the overall company.
Speaker 1:And so I think, being intentional, one very specific thing I would suggest for both go-to-market and product that can be a common language, is your ideal customer and your customer segmentation.
Speaker 1:So, having that clear like at Dovetail, we actually had animals that we would use we came up with a catchy word that would describe a big enterprise company that has a massive research team, or a innovative tech company who might have a small research team, but they believe that more people should be doing research, and so when you're having a conversation of should we build this feature or this customer we lost this deal because of this, if you know what kind of customer it is and what segment they fall in, or you have a word for it. In this case, we used animals. It gives everyone a common language. That, I think, is often at the root of the disagreement. There is the time horizon difference, but then you are selling to someone that I am not building a product for, or we are prioritizing this customer segment over that one and we haven't been explicit about that. And so there's all these underlying things that are beneath the surface, and then if you can just tease them out, it helps.
Speaker 2:And when you talk, you know your animals, ideal customer profiles, segments that you're talking about. Does the decision anchor back on total value that can be driven out of each segment? Is that where can we solve the biggest problem or generate the greatest revenue? Is that the main anchor point?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's an overall company strategy discussion at that point, who is our ideal customer, which is a function of what is their needs, and can our product, in a differentiated way, solve those needs?
Speaker 1:And is there enough economic value that we can extract relative to the competition that the business can grow? Which sounds simple, but it can be quite challenging, especially in today's world where products and technologies and markets are shifting so quickly. So, having a conversation with your entire leadership team about who is the customer or customer bases that we're going after and why and how much effort do we want to put in them and often it can be that the product team is. The majority of the investments are on a new segment that the sales team isn't quite ready to sell to because the product needs to get to a standard where they can sell it. But the sales team is now selling the product that you've been building for the last two years and it's their job to extract as much value of that product investment as possible. And it might be more in maintenance mode or just we're going to fix issues as they come up. But our innovation is now shifting to this new market, our new segment, and I think that needs to be a holistic company conversation.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So I want to fast forward a little bit into entrepreneurship and your decision to leave the safety of these incredible brands and VP of product and driving their meaningful impact and value across these organizations. What drove you to go off and co-found Twine and effectively set your own venture up?
Speaker 1:I think some people just inherently they're like oh, I just want to be an entrepreneur. That's not necessarily me. I'm a very competitive person. I played sport my whole life. It's something that's kind of built into how I operate. So I think I have that aspect of pure entrepreneurship in me. The thing that struck me is I've been very fortunate to work with a lot of really great founders and seeing how they operate and seeing the challenges they go through, and so I'm going into this now eyes wide open. I know the challenges and the struggles that they've gone through and I've been very fortunate to have a firsthand experience with some really great founders and very different in how they approach problems and people. Great founders and very different in how they approach problems and people.
Speaker 1:And I think the very consistent thing that I've observed and heard from them is it is a grind and you need to be ready for it and you should assume it's going to take at least 10 years to get to the outcome you want, and if you're not willing to sign up for that, it's probably not worth it. And then a problem that you'll just feel so motivated and excited to solve every day, even on your bad days. It's something that is innately motivates you, even when, if it's not going well, you still are like, well, I need to solve this, this problem for this customer base. And if you have the the drive to solve that problem and the passion behind it and are willing to do that for 10 years in your head and understand that company building isn't just about you sitting and having these great ideas. It's you have to do all these, all this little tasks and stuff that you never even think of, and be someone that can build a team of people.
Speaker 1:Because I think the one thing that I've learned over the years is the surprising thing is that even tech companies, it all comes down to the people. It's not actually the technology, it's the people that you have around you. And how can you rally them around a problem? And obviously they need to be able to solve that problem, and you've got that through the interview process. But how you rally a group of individuals and have the ability to do that problem and that's you've got that through the interview process. But, um, how you rally a group of individuals and have the ability to to do that every day and show up and be the person that they can uh, believe in and want to follow. I think that is, uh, another key thing, that I've been very fortunate to see some people who are quite good at that, so I try to imbue that into my daily routine.
Speaker 2:It's funny. Your talk of this is going to be a grind in a 10 year sort of path. A very good friend of mine, adam, went through a venture capital startup incubator called Antler and he was successful in getting on board. But one of the things that they talked about is that they said, kind of semi jokingly, they, they said, be prepared to eat pot noodles for the next seven years. It looks very glamorous from the outside, you've got your sass, your startup, your ceo, founder, etc. So, but it is a grind and you're not going to be making money for a very long time.
Speaker 2:I think it's a good realization that you need to have that passion, that drive, and I guess I want to go back to that question. You say you weren't innately an entrepreneur. What was it that drove you to build the business? Was it an entrepreneurship? I want to build something myself, or was it? I see a big gaping hole with my experience of product with GTM. This is a massive problem that could be meaningful across the entire world. I want to help to solve that meaningful across the entire world.
Speaker 1:I want to help to solve that. What I meant by that was I'm not someone who wants to be an entrepreneur, just to say.
Speaker 2:I'm an entrepreneur. I know some people are from high school and I'm going to go start LinkedIn entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly, I think, on a personal level, I just want to push myself to solve problems that I think are important, and when I was early in my career I had said I want to be the VP of product of a fast growing software startup, for whatever reason, that was the goal I set for myself and then, once I got there, I was like, well, what's my next challenge? And that ultimately led to running GoToMarket for another software company a whole new problem that I can just throw myself into and, from first principles, figure out how to do it and lean on people and I'm someone who likes the challenge and to learn and I got to a point where I to your second point of there was a problem that a big gaping hole in the market that I felt compelled to solve, and I'd reached a point in my career where that going jumping out and trying to solve a problem like that was probably the next big challenge for me where I was going to push myself out of my comfort zone. I think advice I always give people is, when you're looking at a role, you should feel comfortable doing about 50% of it, maybe a little bit more, and there should be about 30 that you feel like I sort of done this before, I've seen someone do it. And then there's 20% where I have no idea how to do this and that, for me at least, has been the right balance, where I'm constantly pushing myself.
Speaker 1:And one actual thing I took away from the founder of Safety Culture is at the end of every year and we would do this for my role I would write out a JD for my job for the following year, so actually write out what I'd be responsible for, what are the key things I would spend my time doing, and essentially reapply for the job and mentally sign up for it. And while my title didn't change during each year there, the company drastically changed and grew and so it became a very meaningful delta. So that's something I've continued to do. Each year is like what is the JD, what am I going to try to push myself to grow into over the next year?
Speaker 1:And that's something I'm doing now as a founder, where now I just have to push myself to do it and I'm working with some advisors on how to structure that, and people have gone on the entrepreneurship journey.
Speaker 2:But I think it's about setting a big goal, recognizing that you don't really know how to do a bunch of it, but just diving in and just trying to figure it out. So I guess it's the concept of affirmations and writing down your goals in a different, different way, in a corporate setting. Um, I love that. That's a. That's a great tip I think I'm going to. I'm going to take that on board as well. So you've founded the business earlier this year and you've got a founding team with yourself. From a capabilities perspective, what was that founding team? What did that look like? Or, more so, another way, what was the most critical skill sets that you felt you needed to have in order to poise yourself for the best success at launch?
Speaker 1:I think. Obviously, in engineering, we're building an AI software product, so someone who has experience doing that is a must have, and so that was obviously the first hire we made.
Speaker 1:My co-founder has experience in go-to-market various roles sales, customer success, sales, engineering at much larger companies, so he understands the problem we're solving as a subject matter expert and is driving a lot of our early deals. I'm doing some of that, but learning from him along the way, and then the other hire that we made is a designer. So I think now there's all these new products popping up every day, especially in the AI space, and some of them are real. Some of them maybe not so much, but it becomes hard to stand out and be a brand. I think brand becomes even more important in the design of your product and how it makes people feel when they use it. See your website, see every little bit of content that you put out that matters and helps you stand out more than ever. And so I found someone who I had worked with in the past who I think is immensely talented at thinking about how do you design an AI product.
Speaker 1:AI first product that resonates with people but doesn't feel gimmicky. And then how do you build a brand that stands out and doesn't just look like another B2B SaaS product, whether it's the website, the actual user interface in the product, the tone of voice we use in all of our marketing content, even in our help center? How do you describe the problem in a way that is interesting and different? And so this is something I took away from my Dovetail experience from those founders who are every little detail, every word matters and is an opportunity to showcase your brand and who you are and define your personality of your company and what you stand for, and so having a designer on board as our second hire was very critical for us the, the businesses you've you've been at talk like.
Speaker 2:I think you've mentioned that they're product-led growth strategies where you're going out and and and really that that image and that first impression I think is incredibly important. And then the buying process off the back of that. Do you think that the concept of design at the beginning is critical for all sorts of sales or GTM strategies, or is it more important for product-led growth? What about if you're more of a sales-led growth where you've got a sales rep out there just discussing a value proposition?
Speaker 1:It's probably more important for the product-led aspect of it, where you have to rely on this content you've put out there, whether that's your website or the product or just a marketing content strategy that is kind of trying to sell for you.
Speaker 1:And so how you craft that, I think, really matters.
Speaker 1:But even in a purely like sales led function, I do think how you express your product on a call, how you write emails, what you link people to from those emails whether it's a case study or, um, some some content that helps them understand how that your product can solve them I I think all these touch points, your brand and what your company stands for, really matters, and whether maybe we're a little lucky that our designer has a little bit of marketing, a little bit of brand strategy in her DNA and so she's able to kind of flex into all these things. But I do think, even for a sales-led motion at a company that's starting up, people are buying, not necessarily what your product is today that's obviously part of it but they're also buying for what you stand for and this unique insight you have. That needs to spark a little bit of oh, like aha, moment in them, and certainly that can be done through a sales process. But I think you need some accompanying content or some way of explaining it to them.
Speaker 1:that opens their minds a bit, and I think having a unique style and design can really help with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, amazing. You mentioned AI and you guys are an AI first solution. I want to hear a little bit about the product and how that fits into the solution that you've developed, the problem that you're solving, but also, in parallel to that, ai as a whole. I'm finding it incredibly noisy. Already, every single day there's a new AI app in my face on LinkedIn. How are you finding AI is influencing and impacting startups like yourself, but also the broader business world?
Speaker 1:It's certainly a huge shift. A huge shift right. It's probably the biggest shift technological shift we've had since cloud and maybe mobile, I guess 10, 15 years ago. So it is a real shift. It's not gimmicky, but I think there's so much noise that it often feels gimmicky, and a lot of the ways people talk about it and the way they use it can be, and so it's hard to find the signal and the noise of all this stuff.
Speaker 1:I think the way I advise people and the way we've approached Twine is AI and large language models are just another tool in your tool belt to solve a problem. You can't start with the AI and work backward. The first principles still apply who is the customer? What is the problem you're apply? What is a? Who is a customer? What is a problem you're solving? What is the best way you can solve it relative to your competition or any substitute products, and often for certain problem types, ai offers a new way to approach that, and so if you apply it, in that sense, I think you can.
Speaker 1:Actually you don't need to say you're an AI-first product. You just solve the problem in a magical way and you can see it in users' eyes. We don't actually use the word AI really on our website anywhere we want to solve a problem, and once they use our product and they can see the way we're solving it with the power of an AI-first approach, it can do things that feel somewhat magical, even if it's not like a chat bot, like any of these other products that pop up, and so we selectively deploy it for the problems that we have, and this is, I think, how all the great AI first companies are popping up. It's not just wrap in a large language model around an existing experience that you have. It's how can we, in a novel way, knowing what we know now about large language models and where they're going, how can we solve an existing problem that we see in a way that is novel and different and unique?
Speaker 1:And we'll save it. All comes. You know, you got to save your customer time. You got to allow them to do their job faster. You got to help them grow revenue, cut costs. All that stuff is the same.
Speaker 2:It's just. How can you deploy this technology to do that? Yeah, amazing. So I want to transition on to growth customer acquisition, getting your first revenue through the door and then planning to build out your team what is the sequence of events there? How do you think about each of those in terms of customer acquisition growth levers that you need to hit in order to reinvest into, you know, continued growth and is growth into product? Is it into sales or marketing?
Speaker 1:I think all that for us and for any starting company. You just need to find product market fit, and if you don't have that, nothing else really matters and you're just investing in things that are probably not going to generate a return for yourself or your investors that you really want. And so that has been our journey so far. And the way I think about product market fit is you look for the three stages. You want someone to react emotionally, like in a positive, like wow, say that on a sales call, or even if it's a product led, they'll send something in support like this is amazing or thank you so much, and they actually elicit an emotion in solving a problem in a way. For them, the second thing is that they'll actually start telling other people about it, and so you'll get these people reaching out like I heard about your product from so-and-so. That is a sign that not only were they amazed, like excited about it, but they're willing to tell a colleague about it or a friend or whoever it is in the industry. And then the third is that if both those things are happening, all of a sudden you'll just get signups coming out of nowhere and or requests for demos that you're just like I don't even know where these came from.
Speaker 1:And I think that those are the three stages of product market fit. So we're really on that journey and, as it relates to growth, as we try to figure that out, which we've been working with a few partners where they basically said the product's going to be a little rough, it's going to change a lot. Here's what we're trying to solve. We'd love for your input in helping us solve that. And if they care enough about the problem and often their existing relationships from someone's network in the company, they'll be willing to do that. And then, if you can offer them discounts or whatever once they actually the product gets to a point where it's ready to.
Speaker 2:How important is it to get those I call them friendlies on board in the early stage to actually help to be invested in the growth, but also in product development.
Speaker 1:I think having the friendlies involved and invested in the growth is super important. I do think there is also that can't be your only myopic focus, because often there is this weird dynamic where they've seen the product in its rough phases and so they almost their first impression whether it's explicit or not is oh, that thing was a little rough.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure if that really even when it gets to a point they can be biased by that, and so you can't just have your only goal be let's convert these first customers into paying customers and then run to the next phase. It's learn what's working and what's not. Have an iteration on your product vision. Go, solve that and try to slowly open it up to more people and see if their initial reaction is different from the previous cohort. And that's at least the way we've been solving it. And to go back to your other question about growth, I think we try. I would advise not to like.
Speaker 1:Product-led growth is a highly efficient way to grow a business, but it's not always the right strategy. It's very dependent on the type of solution you're building and the market and who your buyer is. And that's the market, who your buyer is, who your ideal customer is. That ultimately determines the way in which combination of motions you deploy. And I've often seen product-led growth means a really slick consumer-grade product and sales-led growth is enterprise products and the design doesn't matter as much.
Speaker 1:I don't think that's a false trade-off. I think you always want to build a product that as soon as a customer uses it, it can spread organically and they love it. But the initial purchase decision or any expansion purchases might not be product-led growth. It might be sales-led growth 100%. It might be a combination of like. There's some organic expansion and then you have to bring in a salesperson because the purchase decision requires a personal connection, and so that's what we're trying to navigate and figure out, and we're finding little pockets of customers prefer product-led growth, some prefer a handheld approach from our team, and so I'd say we're still trying to nail that.
Speaker 2:So you're on the product-market-fit definement at the moment and just really trying to establish that. When you look forward, what are the next milestones of achievement? So let's just say we've, we've solved product market fit. What is milestone one, two and three look like. Over what time frame?
Speaker 1:our goal has been, um, find those first few signals of product market fit, like I just defined before, and we've we've gotten to that point. We're now, and then, okay, let's have a pricing and packaging strategy that works. So people will actually put down a credit card. Just them telling you this is so great is one thing, actually paying for it is another. We've passed that milestone now, and so the next phase is how do we scale this product where we don't have to reach out and tell someone what we are, what we stand for, and have them see the value of the product?
Speaker 1:How do we build distribution, brand awareness, even if it's in a small pocket that we think can be repeatable? And that's going to be some combination of content marketing, community building, getting out and talking us as founders about what we stand for, and then just some, probably a little bit of outbound sales and a little bit of outbound marketing to try to test where which pockets are. So I think we're in this experimental phase of what are the distribution channels that we think could be efficiently scalable, and once we find those, we'll double down on them. And then, I think, the following year, looking forward to 2025, how do we grow our team. I think that will be a small investment in the product team, as well as some go-to-market folks in the US and maybe the EU or EMEA region, because most of our customers are there and they're going to require some people in their time zone supporting them.
Speaker 2:Amazing and there's a lot of sales people, reps, leaders listening to this podcast that may be interested in Twine and the problem that you're solving. Can you just give us your elevator pitch on what the problem is you're solving and how people can connect with you if they would like to?
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a lot of. The general problem we're trying to solve is there's a lot of product insights in every sales and CS call that go untracked or unpassed. They're not passed back to the product team in a format that's useful. That's really hard. That's why it's not anyone's fault. We automate that whole process. So we will look at every customer call and find those key moments, whether it's comparing to a competitor, product feedback, deal blockers, churn risk or even those moments where a customer is really positive and they talk about how much time it saved them, which can be quite useful for product managers and product marketers.
Speaker 1:We extract that automatically, attach the CRM data so we can then generate reports on your behalf.
Speaker 1:So you can sit down with a leader every month and say what are the biggest product issues that are blocking revenue, and Twine, like an analyst on your team will just tell you that and generate a report with clips and some summary of the key logos and customers that it impacts and from a product team you can just keep a pulse on what are customers saying out on these calls about our product. And it involves no work, basically from the go-to-market team but generally that's the core thing our product does today. But we're looking at all the ways that product management or product teams and go-to-market teams struggle to communicate or share this information. So things like, if you're doing a product update and you want to close the loop with a customer because our AI knows who asked for this, we can very easily say hey, sales rep, in other region, your customer three months ago asked for this. The product team has this update. You should close the loop with them and here's a clip of them asking for it.
Speaker 2:So we're just starting to chip away at all those things. I've worked with a number of SaaS vendors over my time and I can think this would be incredibly valuable. And the other piece with due respect to past and present people that I've worked with what this is really doing is it's taking ego out of feedback as well, and it means that it's very much a data-driven, analytical approach that's actually taken from the source, as opposed to Chinese whispers or an opinion that someone may not value within the organization.
Speaker 1:For sure, we try to make it a comprehensive, objective, consistent extraction of the information that matters, and it removes some of these biases that you mentioned, but also just removes a lot of time and effort from matters. And it removes some of these biases that you mentioned, but also just removes a lot of time and effort from people. And so if you rely on a manual process today, you might get one or two pieces of feedback a day. Some of our customers now went from a few a month to hundreds a month, because there are these little moments on calls that you don't always recognize.
Speaker 1:So yeah, we're hoping some people found it useful so far, but there's a lot of work.
Speaker 2:We have in front of us Incredible. I'm really, really excited for you and I'm confident that we're going to see a lot more twine in the months and years to come. So, brian, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been an absolute pleasure, loads of nuggets for myself and, I'm sure, a lot for the audience as well. So appreciate your time.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me. It's been great.
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