Battle Scars of a SaaS 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 SaaS Leader
The Revolution in Sales: Are You Ready for the AI Workforce?
James Bergl is join by Rosh Singh from Relevance AI, revealing how their "AI workforce" is empowring sales teams . Discover insights on building adaptable, resilient, and curious sales talent.
A must-watch for leaders aiming to redefine growth through intelligent automation, scaling with the quality of ideas, not just headcount.
What we are is the home of AI workforce, creating AI agents that autonomously are able to perform human dependent tasks.
Speaker 2:Leveraging this technology for replacing SDIs.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't say it's necessarily for replacing SDRs, but it's more for eliminating manual work that people do.
Speaker 2:From revolutionizing cloud sales to driving growth at one of the most exciting AI companies in the world, Meet Rosh Singh, the powerhouse head of sales at Relevance AI.
Speaker 1:He's not just selling the future he's helping build it one AI workforce at a time. The agent would go out book tons of meetings for me. I would be doing 20 plus first meetings a week, like very consistently, like, if you think of an SDR, a lot of what they do, like you really want them to be on the phone all day, right, they can make a hundred calls and not know a single thing about any of the clients they're reaching out to or the prospects. There's so many things that manual effort is being spent on, but with an ai agent, what you're essentially doing have you ever done business in malaysia?
Speaker 2:yes, and how do you find the difference in um cultures, like doing business in asia? Oh man, it's.
Speaker 1:It's so different and, honestly like, because I ran um sales and marketing for a cyber security startup in uh and they were primarily based in malaysia. So, um, I used to go over to kl. At that time I was going to kill a lot, um, but man doing like like for log me in. I did a lot of APAC stuff in Singapore, uh, malaysia, thailand, indonesia, whatever but when actually going and being like, hey, let's go and close deals with Malaysians in Malaysia, not from an international context, oh man, it was. It was pretty different and, to be honest, I did not enjoy it at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny you say that because when I was in the MSP land at Enable and then Datto and, to be honest, pax8 as well, we had Asian branches and we always struggled, and I struggled, to get the team humming over there, and part of it was culture, but part of it was also just the business models of how the ASEAN market do business when it comes to IT support and services, and the recurring revenue model is something that they're not acclimatized to. But yeah, I didn't overly enjoy it. It was hard work. What do they say? The juice isn't worth the squeeze.
Speaker 1:A lot of the time, yeah, time, yeah, I think, like you know when, when doing apac work from sydney, uh, and you're, you're targeting. I mean, your core of your business is always going to be australia, um, for for the most part. But then singapore is a great market, right, very like mature, like more like a western market. But when you look in into the other markets in southeast asia, you've either got to have like a very, very defined ICP that you can go after the cream of the crop or you just have to only take what comes to you, like, yeah, juice is not worth the squeeze a lot of time.
Speaker 1:And I don't know, like in Malaysia there was there's this one occasion where I went over there and with my COO he was like, hey, come to a meeting. So I was like, great, um, we'll go to this meeting, we'll do this, this pitch and stuff. And we got to the meeting at like 10 am and no one was at the office and the guy was like I'm downstairs having breakfast. I was like, okay, so we go to the cafe downstairs and then he's there and he's with his wife and I'm like, so we're gonna go up.
Speaker 1:He's like, oh no, I'm just, I'm just ordering, like you know, I'm just waiting for a drink. I was like, oh, okay, cool, let's have a coffee, whatever. It's more of a relationship. So and then, like 20 minutes later, their food arrives and they're just like eating breakfast and I'm like, dude, our meeting started half an hour ago. Like what is going on? And um, eventually we got up to the office at like 1115. He's there with a bunch of people. They're all on just on their phones the whole time. They're like, yeah, just go ahead and present, and you know we'll be kind of listening, I guess.
Speaker 2:There's nothing harder than a salesperson presenting to a room full of people on their phones yeah, and they just feel like packing up and saying all right guys.
Speaker 1:I know it's just like. What am I doing here? Are you getting any value out of this? So it's very different. I'm totally. I love the Asian culture and all that, but I think you've, you know, you've got to understand where.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I want to, I guess, firstly thank you for coming along today, incredibly excited to hear your story, and, rather than me, do an introduction, I thought, tell me a little bit about who you are and particularly Relevance AI, in terms of who they are, what they're doing in the market.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cool man. I'm super honored to be here as well. Thank you so much for having me on. So I'm Rosh Rosh Singh.
Speaker 1:I'm the head of sales at Relevance AI, and what we are is the home of the AI workforce, right? So we are a platform designed for domain experts to be able to create AI agents in a low-code sort of way, so that they can start automating tasks that were previously very dependent on humans and, by doing that, really enabling companies to scale with the quality of their ideas rather than just with raw headcount, which is what companies have really been limited to in the I don't know for the last few hundred years. Right, there's been a very linear relationship between business growth and headcount, and that's really what we're trying to decouple those two metrics and really by doing that, by creating AI agents that autonomously are able to perform human-dependent tasks and be able to scale those up infinitely. So that's what we're doing. Yeah, we've been doing it, for this whole idea of the AI workforce came about two years ago. Back then, nobody knew what an AI agent was, right? And obviously now the whole world's being painted with agents, so it's been a super exciting journey.
Speaker 2:Yeah, incredible. And you've been with the business for two and a half years yeah, almost three years, almost three years. And I guess pre that was almost pre chat GPT and we're living in a post chat GPT world today and I think that was revolutionized, revolutionary for how everyone engages with AI as a, as a generic topic. But I want to go back to, you know, pre chat gpt and the concept of ai, and this was a concept where, you know, everyone was beginning to think about it, talk about it, but never really seen anything come to fruition. How did you make the decision to go from a stable career, stable, um, stable life, um, you know, in a non-ai world, to thinking that this is a, this is a cool, exciting opportunity? And how did you assess whether this was the right career move for you way back then?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we sort of intersected in the, I guess, rmm sort of remote support service desk world and back then I've been doing sort of enterprise sales for close to 15 years prior to, or about 12, 13 years prior to relevance ai. Um, at that time I was working for a company called solo wins. So solo wins um, you know, network and infrastructure monitoring company, very enterprisey, very, you know, stable and that sort of thing. Um, and basically I was kind of gearing up to get engaged and, you know, kind of move into very much like next chapter of life. And I thought to myself you know, the reason I got into the tech industry in the first place was to build a company. I actually did computer science at uni, so I was actually a developer and then I kind of fell into sales and I fell in love with it.
Speaker 1:But I always wanted to build a company from the ground up and really get very involved in the tech side of things while still remaining in the customer facing side. I thought, man, this is my last chance to do something crazy, you know. So let's do it, let's get involved in a smaller company. So I went looking for jobs and basically got two great offers and one tiny company with these two co-founders sort of went hey, we'll give you like half of what you're getting elsewhere. Um, and I thought, am I crazy for even entertaining this? But anyway, got in discussions with them and what they were doing was really exciting. They were really inspirational with what they wanted to do and their vision and, um, yeah, I just thought, man, one last shot at doing this before I've got a lot more responsibility in my life.
Speaker 2:So let's give it a, let's give it a crack, you know yeah, and was the value proposition in the solution three years ago the same as what it is today? Or is that evolved? Oh man, it's completely different completely.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's complete. Like back then it was very much um, companies have. 80 of all data in companies is unstructured and we were using vectors and clustering vectorized data in order for them to get value out of their unstructured data. There was some LLM magic in there and actually vectors are underlying tech of AI as we know it today. So a vector, in very simplified terms, is basically taking unstructured data and turning it into something that can be more structured and compared with other unstructured data so that you can essentially analyze it and draw similarities, and you do what's called clustering of vectors, so you can take unstructured data, group them into bits that are more similar to each other and then essentially get more insights out of that unstructured data.
Speaker 2:And AI. It was AI back then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it was like that. I mean, that is a form of machine learning and AI LLMs, like generative AI. What we know of today was being applied on that platform More to take that, look at that data and turn it into something insightful. But yeah, that was pre-chat GPT, like you said. And then all of a sudden we were using GPT-3 at that time to do stuff Wasn't that great, you know. And then chat GPT comes out. You know, openai goes, here's GPT 3.5 and here's a way that you can converse with it. And all of a sudden people were like, oh, we don't need to necessarily be exposed to vectors and clusters and that sort of stuff anymore, we can just communicate with these generative models. And that completely flipped it on its head. That was about six months after I joined.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, when you joined, how big was the team?
Speaker 1:So we were about 20 to 22 people when I joined. Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, and you came in as a sales rep or sales leader. I actually came in as a sales rep, yeah, so I got hired under a sales rep or sales leader actually came as a sales rep, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I got hired under a sales leader at that time, uh, who had a very traditional enterprise sales background, and he was like, hey, let's like you've got an enterprise sales background, let's take this thing and let's crack into the, the sort of um, you know, the, uh, the big boys you know of australia. And I thought, okay, let's, let's do it. You know, and I mean that time there wasn't like the product was barely figured out and we ended up selling to like insights departments, like consumer insights and market research departments and agencies and stuff that wanted to make sense of all that unstructured data that they have. But, yeah, after about six months I transitioned into the leader role.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what was that journey like, going from individual contributor to sales leadership, and what was the change in the team through that process?
Speaker 1:So the team shrunk right. So we actually in those six months we went from 22 people to about, like I want to say, about 11 or so, and from there we actually raised our first, our series A, pretty soon after that and then we started just exploding right. But, yeah, so in that change over to leadership, it was basically just me and one or two people on the team and we were basically just trying to figure out, like, what's the go-to-market, how do we actually take this product that we have, morph it into something that's actually very useful? And then the idea of creating AI tools like mini automations using LLMs came about, and then agents to orchestrate those automations and then an AI workforce to orchestrate those agents. And that's where we are today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, incredible. And when we talk about AI agents and workforce, what are some of the typical use cases that you're seeing today?
Speaker 1:So a really good agentic use case, and we're not talking about, first of all, just sort of separate what a co-pilot is and what an autopilot is right. A co-pilot is very much like chat, gpt, right, use it. It's like humans with a bit of ai in the loop. Right, you're conversing with it, it's helping you do something, but you're constantly kind of going back and forth with it. An autopilot is much more like hiring an ai worker that is trained up on a process and then you delegate work to it. It's got an objective, it's got capabilities, it's got a process and it does stuff on autopilot right. So when we talk about a really good agentic autopilot agentic process, it's something that's traditionally very high volume, something that's very repetitive and something that, most importantly, is not able to be traditionally automated with just rules-based automation.
Speaker 1:We see a lot of that happening in go-to-market and in sales. Yeah, okay, right, sales is. I mean, you would know this. There's so much manual work that happens and that manual work cannot be automated right, like very effectively. You can automate it. It's not going to be as good as a person. So that's why you have junior sales reps who will do lead qualification and research and like general SDR kind of work. That is where most of our conversations are, because it's a really good agentic use case, but also because a lot of businesses want to invest in that because it's directly linked to revenue. So I would say more than 80% of the conversations we have are in the go-to-market space, like sales space specific.
Speaker 2:So we're talking about leveraging this technology for replacing SDRs or some of the maybe onboarding experiences of bringing a new client on board or engaging with them in a pre-sales engagement, just eliminating the need for a person in the first place, and it's working well I.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't say it's necessarily for replacing sdrs, but it's more for, uh, eliminating manual work that people do and kind of reinventing that role.
Speaker 1:Like, if you think of anDR, a lot of what they do, like you really want them to be on the phone all day, right, but they could. They could make a hundred calls and not know a single thing about any of the clients they're reaching out to or the prospects, right. Or they could do research before every single call and end up making 25 calls in a day, right. How do you, like most sales leaders, want to hit a balance between those and they do things like three by three research, right, only do three bits of research for three minutes and then make your call? Right. But with an AI agent, what you're essentially doing is you're abstracting away that part of their job that takes so much time. You're creating a new role in your company of like an SDR agent or like a researcher agent, and that agent is completely taking that away so that the SDR can focus purely on what only they can do and what they do best, which a lot of the time, is making calls, building relationships, booking meetings.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is really progressive technology and I met with you probably six months ago and I followed the success and the growth of the team and it looks like you're going global and having tremendous growth. Um, I also think on the on the flip side, whilst there's massive growth, there's potentially and correct me if I'm wrong here like a certain type of buyer that is going to invest in this as a, as a, I guess, first mover. Um, are you seeing that in terms of the persona or the type of buyer that's engaging in this sort of technology?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's generally. We find that, like, high growth companies are the ones who, like they, they invest so much in growth and, to them, exponential growth anything they can do to accelerate that is going to be really worthwhile. Yeah, with a lot of these agentic use cases, the only way to really scale them up is by hiring more people, and that's what they're doing, right, but how do you actually shortcut that? How do you do that more intelligently? You can't just do it through rules-based automation or deterministic stuff. You have to do it a bit more intelligently. And they're the ones who are going. So much of this manual work is holding us back. Like this is a this is a real obstacle to our scaling. So let's solve this problem.
Speaker 2:So we're really finding that high growth companies, like traditionally, tech has been a pretty good one for us, um, and we understand that space, obviously, yeah, yeah and when you're you're looking at building out a go-to-market strategy, a plan and a process, people that you need to go out and represent your business as well. But how do you think about that? Um, because, yeah, it sounds like when you started there was 20, then at half. Then you've grown up again. What was the reason? Was that a people problem that you had to change? Was it products?
Speaker 1:I think that on the product and engineering side, I probably can't really speak too much to that, but it was definitely on the go-to-market side. It was probably growing the team before we really had a a real concrete plan of like this is what we want to go after, right, and this is exactly what our icp is and how much we can actually get from this. Um, once we actually landed on something that was like the time that we really started exploding was when we went, okay, well, here's the idea of an AI agent. Nobody really knows what this AI agent is, or an AI agent builder. You can't go up to someone and be like, hey, build AI agents. I'll be like, what even is that? I don't even know what it is. How am I supposed to build something?
Speaker 1:So we sort of came up with what's a good use case, what's a good application of this. Let's build that on our platform and sell that as almost like a pre-packaged product. And that's when we said what's the first vertical we want to go after? And it was well, sales. Right, we understand it. We know it's a problem. That's when one of the world's first AI BDRs came into play and then forming a go-to-market strategy around. That was really around who's trying to grow fast, who's hiring lots of people to grow. Can we actually give them a better way to do that? And that's how we had our first 10x quarter 10x quarter wow.
Speaker 2:So I want to double click on this because this is really important. In a piece I see so many startup scale-up businesses struggling with. Is that chasm and crossing that from? I need to grow. Do I just hire people that are going to solve my problems? Yeah, what was the the main problem? I mean, you talked about icp. Maybe product market fit a little bit as well. Was there something that stands out that you look back and say this is this is what we would do differently if we had our time again?
Speaker 1:um, sort of like right, would you say, like right now or back then, yeah, okay, yeah, um, what would we have done differently if we were to start again? Um, yeah, that's an interesting one, I think. Um, to be honest, I think that we should have scaled up the sales team a little earlier than we are, okay, um, so we were probably a little bit too conservative with like hey, we've got a great idea here and it's working really well. Um, rather than just go hey, let's, let's see if we can, like, keep this repetitive motion up or this um, repeatability up a bit more and when you say scale the sales team up, what was the point where you say we should have scaled?
Speaker 2:was that when you had a product, market fit and you actually getting traction? Definitely yeah. And and the the piece before that would. I think you mentioned that you may be hard too early.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, yeah, so it's a balance right like yeah so I think, like um, in some ways, it was like trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past, right, um, but also, yeah, but also like recognizing that the situation was very different. You know, um, like we were, um, we had an absolute gangbusters quarter and I brought on a sales rep to be like, hey, I'm, I'm doing a lot of this myself Like let's actually start to scale this up. But at that point, I think, like really knowing that it's going to take a while to ramp people up, especially into a concept that's extremely new. Yeah, and you've got to have a very specific kind of person that wants to take on that challenge, that's going to be resilient, adaptable and curious enough to take on that challenge. It's not something that happens overnight, right. So, probably, if I were to do it again, I think getting like really being on the lookout for the right people, being able to take our time, look for the right people, very slowly and deliberately, is what I would have given myself the time for.
Speaker 2:Yeah, completely agree, and and the people and I like what you said is the, the adaptability and, um, the, the sort of the drive to go out there and stick with it as well. Yeah, that journey. When you look back at some of the mishires or those that maybe weren't a fit for the business, was there anything that stands out for I know why we hired that person, but actually in hindsight, that that profile or those characteristics don't fit well in our type of business, I think, to look at it from a different lens, it's more when hiring right now, what are some of the things that traditionally the sales leader may look for and go?
Speaker 1:that's a complete slam dunk. But maybe wouldn't work in this situation, right, um? And so I typically look for three things, right, as I was saying before. The first is adaptability, because, man, this is the fastest growing space in tech, right, and you're at a company that was basically talking about the thing that everybody is talking about right now. We were talking about before that happened, right, um, it's, it's evolving every day. Um, there are new competitors, there's new technology coming out. This, it's just this huge gold rush, um, and the moment that we stop innovating is the moment that we our results start slowing down, and you feel that in real time. Oh yeah, absolutely. And so any salesperson that comes into this has to be able to adapt very quickly, especially when they're not given a playbook that is like this is what works and this is what will continue working. So they need to be able to. And how do you test for?
Speaker 2:adaptability.
Speaker 1:It's tough.
Speaker 1:I would say that that's like you know, as far as I'm sure you want to know about hiring challenges like that's probably one of the ones that's the hardest. But looking out for someone like you know, someone who may have worked at Salesforce and Microsoft and Oracle all their life and being extremely successful, is potentially not the kind of person that will be successful in this kind of environment. For sure, you know and I I think that that's not necessarily rocket science, but, um, there are a lot of people who think they they might be um and maybe won't, won't be successful. So, yeah, just talking about trying to understand how, uh, let's see at a previous company that we're at trying to understand if there was like some kind of crazy pivot moment in that company or if there was like a um, if there was like some real negative event that happened, you know how did they actually deal with that um, and seeing how they sort of reacted in situations like that is kind of one of the things that you can do to test adaptability yeah, I completely agree.
Speaker 2:And, uh, what? Some of the things that we talk about and we use the same example. If you come from a big corporate Salesforce and SAP and Microsoft you typically are going in selling something that everyone has heard of. They know who you are, they probably got a need, you've got a team and an army of resources, you've got pre-sales, you've got customer success, you've got sales process, you've got an effective comp plan. Those people often struggle when you put them in great and you put them in an environment that they for sure, um, that they haven't been in before, and they they're not able to, you know, create a bit of demand in a situation, um, where the person doesn't know who you're talking about, um yeah, 100 so, um yeah, adaptability, um, and I like that about, um yeah, someone that's had an adverse event in their career and how they've dealt with it.
Speaker 2:That's a great tip. Right there, we also talk about an entrepreneurial mindset and that's someone that continually builds on the fly build the plane as they're flying it and we will often be looking for similar sort of sort of scale up businesses people that have have worked in a scale up before as well Like that's potentially an indicator.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, definitely, you know it's our, our team definitely look for people who have been at companies that have scaled like, ideally, from you know, somewhere around the 10 million to a hundred million mark. That's. That's a really good indicator. You indicator, you know that because companies change so much between those revenue ranges, um, and if they're able to continue consistently being successful as things change so rapidly, then that's a great indicator as well when you look at motivating a sales rep at this sort of business where the future is unknown, like you're off piste, yeah, and you're carving this out for the first time.
Speaker 2:How do you create a compensation plan that does drive behavior, that is going to put them in a position that they can earn but also not bankrupt the business at the same time?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great question, I mean. I think the first thing is just really reasonable targets. I'm very much a believer of. I want everyone to overperform. I don't know how long I'm going to be able to keep that up, right, but as far as I can, I just want everyone's targets to be very reasonable so that they can overperform and when you're not hitting your target, it's unacceptable, right, because they are reasonable.
Speaker 1:There's lots of businesses that will just go, yeah, you're getting some crazy OT and like the target is just, it's just not achievable at all. Right, I want the company that you know, if you're, if you're going to work at a company that's early stage, like series A, series B or even sooner, um, you really want that ability to be able to 200, 300, 400% your annual or your quarterly numbers, um, and creating an environment where they can do that is definitely you, is definitely one of the core pillars of that, because you won't be able to do that at a Salesforce. Or I mean, maybe on your best year you might get close to 200 or whatever, but you'll never be able to go past that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those teams have got experience and data on their side and they know exactly what your maximum potential can be and they know exactly what's just maximum potential can be, and it's very exactly what's just a little bit out of reach, and that's where you're going to be right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'd say that's one thing keeping targets reasonable and having good accelerators so that, like people really do feel incentivized to go past that um. Another is just equity as well. Being motivated by that is it is the hallmark of someone who is potentially going to be really successful in an environment like this, because you need to feel ownership over the company's entire success. Salesperson who works at a company that's early stage does not just need to log in, do their sales and then log out at 5 pm. Right, the best ones. Get involved in the product conversations, really feed stuff back to the product team, get involved in the marketing, even in the product conversations, really feed stuff back to the product team, get involved in the marketing, even in the hiring efforts, and really feel like they own the overall results of the company. And that comes from equity. So I'm very much a believer of give generous equity and always make it known that you can get more and more ownership of a company if you do consistently well.
Speaker 2:When you look at lead flow and bringing on a new sales rep, have you got a philosophy or strategy around the amount of inbound leads versus self-generated? Is there a magic number that you try to get to make sure everyone's well-fed?
Speaker 1:Yeah, actually that's a really good question. Um, when, when I was kind of like doing this very solo, you know the the table was overflowing with inbound right and it was very much like talk to everyone very much biased for numbers right, even if someone's not super qualified let's go for it.
Speaker 2:you know, let's talk. And I mean, when you say overflowing with leads, how I mean it sounds like everyone's dream, I know Actually it's a utopic environment man, I mean.
Speaker 1:So our agent would go out and do outbound as well for us. Like I've never had SDRs at this company. Right, we did sort of in the early days, but when we started doing agents we never had BDRs or SDRs and the agent would go out, book tons of meetings for me. I would be doing 20 plus first meetings a week like very consistently, and that would be a combination All agent driven. Yeah, all agent driven. So not all outbound driven, but like they would come to us and the agent would pick them up straight away, negotiate a time, qualify them whatever and then book it in my calendar. That's very, very, very real.
Speaker 2:Like it it was happening and, from a marketing perspective, how were they learning about the brands initially? Was that digital marketing spend? Was it reddit?
Speaker 1:yeah, no, it's um, we have a really strong growth guy um you know our, our head of marketing.
Speaker 1:he's he's excellent at that um, so brought a lot of the right people in and and I mean it was also like a lot of tailwinds at that time, right, so a lot of like there wasn't a lot of people doing AI BDR, right, it was a very, very hot topic, so we're getting the right people for sure. Like, the market eventually got flooded with a lot of vertical players who are like we only do AI, bdr and it's easier to set up and all that sort of stuff and very much a flash in the pan. Now the conversation is a lot wider, like what manual tasks can we actually automate? And we very much dominate that space. But coming back to your original question, what's a magic number?
Speaker 1:I think that a sales rep should ideally have somewhere in between 25 and 50% of their top of funnel coming from inbound 25 and 50% of their top of funnel coming from inbound.
Speaker 1:But it's really like I think that someone having a hundred percent of stuff coming from inbound is not necessarily the best thing, cause it indicates one of, maybe even both of these two things. One is that the quality that you're getting is too varied and you're not speaking to, you're not like speaking to the ideal people with all your meetings, right, um? Or if you are, then you should be having another rep in there, right, and you should be spreading this out across a few reps because you ideally want to. Let's say, you know, we, we try and balance around 10 first meetings a week, which is it's pretty high, honestly, like it's quite high. But, as in, you want each of your reps to be doing 10 first meetings, yeah, that's right, that's how we balance. Like, um, that's a good sort of metric, like an indicator of good top of funnel and you know your metrics in terms of close.
Speaker 2:If I have this many meetings, I'm going to be getting this many opportunities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah I mean you have to be metrics driven. Yeah for sure. Yeah, um, but 10 first meetings a week, biasing towards like just having more conversations, because you never know when there's going to be something outside of ICP. That turns out to be a really good use case, especially when you've got a horizontal product. But if I'm serving up 10 ideal personas via inbound, then they're not driven to do any sort of outbound generation to the ideal people that they should be speaking to, and that just means that I've got to get more people to spread that inbound out so that there is actually capacity to reach out to the ideal people. So I definitely think that 50% of pipelines should be self-generated in an ideal world and then the rest of it should come inbound.
Speaker 2:That's the number I typically say as well 50%. I think that's the right balance and for those that are, I've seen hiring teams say, yeah, bring a sales rep on and it's a hundred percent self-generated. We've got marketing. It doesn't really deliver, so you've got a really expensive SDR or BDR. Yeah, yeah, for sure. If you're going to just get them to cold call all day, just hire a resource at a quarter of the price.
Speaker 1:Right source at a quarter of the price, right, exactly. So I think it is important because you know, like, out of all the people you want, like, if you've got a rock solid ICP, let's say I want to talk to sales VPs of you know high growth tech companies If I just filter down, if I'm getting so much inbound of that exact person, right, I want my reps to to. I want to spread that out between like a few different reps, right, um, if I'm, uh, if I'm getting a lot of inbound but like, let's say, only 20 of that person, then I want, like the rest of the activity to go be, like, go find that person. Right, not every single one of them is going to come to us, so there should be effort dedicated into going to find them as well, right, um, and if there isn't, then you know that something's kind of off balance in the team. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And going back to your, your indexing on reps that you're hiring for. You talked about adaptability. What are the other things that you score when you're trying to decide if you bring someone on?
Speaker 1:So there's, there's three main like there's a lot of them, right, but the three main ones that I always talk about are adaptability. The second one is resilience. So in a space that's so quickly changing, there's going to be real triumphant moments and then there's going to be times where things kind of shift in a way that makes it harder for you, and that's just the way it goes, right. If you can't be resilient during the times where you've got a bit of headwinds, then you're not going to have the right space for when the times that things have gone well for you, right. So anyone in this environment does need to be resilient. If one bad quarter gets you down, you're not going to stick around, you're not going to be in the right space for the good quarters. You know, and it's really important that you are. So resilience is definitely one thing, because not everything's always going to go your way. And the third thing is curiosity, and this is probably one that I index on.
Speaker 1:Like a great deal, a product like ours can do kind of anything. It's crazy to say, I think, like a lot of people feel as if their product is worthy of a CEO's attention, but the reality of it is that very few products are because they cater to a particular persona and they solve a particular problem. And really, like you may be, like take, for example, an RMM solution, right, like very familiar with that. Like, should a ceo really care about that? Of course, maybe, but like it's mostly the cios realm, um, something that really can do anything, like our, our ai workforce solution. You can create agents that do, um, you know, top of funnel sales stuff, marketing stuff, talent acquisition, h like any other stuff in hr, customer support, general operations, finance.
Speaker 1:There's so many things that manual effort is being spent on that can be tackled with this. And a good rep really cannot be narrow-minded enough to be like here's one use case that I'm talking to this person about. This is where I'm going to steer the conversation. The rep truly has to be like here's one use case that I'm talking to this person about. This is where I'm going to steer the conversation. The rep truly has to be curious enough during a discovery to be able to discover use cases that maybe even the buyer didn't even think about at the start of the call and really get to the root of what is the underlying problem that we're trying to solve and what are the multiple ways in which we can get there, and that's really how you differentiate a horizontal solution from a vertical one.
Speaker 2:Do you look at the sales motion so, whether it's been an enterprise or complex or platform or point solution like, is that important for you? Does that demonstrate the skills? Are you looking for someone that's sold that complex, multi-stakeholder solution? Yeah, definitely yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's interesting, though, because a lot of the time you get the really senior guys who have sold these complex solutions to huge companies and stuff, but they really rely on a lot of support to do it Right. Yes, like, if you've got a top level enterprise guy, like you're throwing enterprise resources at them. There's someone to fill out RFPs, there's someone to do demos, there's product experts, overlays, all sorts of stuff and you don't get that in a smaller company. So the balance really is to find somebody who can navigate complex multi-stakeholder processes but also be agile enough and resourceful enough to do a lot of stuff on their own.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, that's the balance you've got to strike and have you deployed a sales methodology like a medic or spin or challenger type sales?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we have started doing MedPick. I'm a fan of MedPick because it's not necessarily something that you kind of tell your people to do. It's more something that you can look back and be like what am I missing here? And you can very easily identify gaps or things that you need to focus on with that deal. It's very obvious sore thumbs in your pipeline. Should this deal be here? Why is this deal here when we don't understand this? So that's kind of why I like Medpick a lot. As far as sales methodologies go, my early days were at LogMeIn and LogMeIn was very big on Sandler. Now Sandler you can see it as a very kind of insurance salesman sort of methodology. But I think a lot of the roots of Sandler are very solid in terms of that consultative reverse kind of selling very much. You know sort of not pushing and more pulling. Yeah, I really like that. But yeah, in terms of sales methodologies that I'm putting in place, like MedPick is probably the one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Another question, just to reflect on where you are today from a go-to-market build the world that we're living in today, versus, say, five I was going to say 10, but even maybe five years ago have you seen any shifts? And, whether it's within relevance or the industry which you're potentially even driving in go-to-market motion, are there any new roles that you're seeing that are starting to pop up? Going oh, that's a new role. I've heard of a go-to-market motion. Are there any new roles that you're seeing that are starting to pop up? Going oh, that's a new role. I've heard of a go-to-market engineer.
Speaker 1:I was going to say, yeah, gtm engineer is the one that's popping up all the time right now. Yeah, I think the whole concept of GTM engineer, I don't know. Do you know where it came from by the?
Speaker 2:way Not offhand. I Not offhand. I did read about it when I heard it for the first time.
Speaker 1:One of the first times I ever heard GTM engineers was a company called Clay. You know Clay. They started calling their salespeople GTM engineers because they would be like, jump on a call and come with a very specific enrichment challenge that you've got and they kind of said I'm a GTM engineer, I'm not a salesperson. I don't know if that was just an effort to rebrand an account executive, right. But now you have gcm engineers who, um, they are like gcm engineering agencies and stuff like that. I think it's just about, um, it comes from the fact that sales is so much about your stack, your tech stack. Now, if you're doing stuff with a weak tech stack, then you're wasting time, you're not accelerating as much as you should be and you're not hitting expectations really. So yeah, I think that's probably have you guys got a GTM engineer? I have a RevOps guy. That is like amazing.
Speaker 2:I was going to say. My interpretation is GTM engineer is the new RevOps.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that's another way to put it, I think, somebody who basically orchestrates your stack, I think, and really takes your strategy and goes like, how do we, how do we, you know, create a tech stack that achieves this or aligns with this? Crazy thing is that with, like, we actually work with a lot of RevOps teams and one of the things that we find is that they go in going, oh, I want to automate this thing because I want more pipeline, I want to automate our outbound or our research, but then they realize that what we really want is pipeline productivity revenue. But there's all sorts of other use cases that feed into that.
Speaker 1:Right, it could be people are spending time figuring out who to upsell, or people are spending time figuring out who to upsell, or people are spending time figuring out who has churn potential or whatever, and they go out and they find other products that they add to their stack to do that that never really fit fully their requirements and don't integrate fully and kind of fit within their budget. But now our customers and RevOps are able to just create an agent to do that within hours and does exactly what they want, and it's almost like they hired a role into their company to do that exact task in exactly the way that they were trained them. So that's kind of one of the things that you know shameless plug, you know AI workforce platform, but yeah, that's that's kind of what GTM engineers, revops, people are doing with, like creating agents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, interesting. On the topic of tech stacks, have you got anything, any new tech stack or any technologies that you guys are using internally, that is kind of front of mind, or that you're really enjoying at the moment?
Speaker 1:um, one of the things that we started using one of my guys um kind of just took a free trial of and started using was like a deal room. Have you? Have you heard what a deal room is? Yeah, yeah so I don't know, like am I? Am I really behind on this? Like I, I never really used a deal room in the past.
Speaker 2:When I say, I know what a deal room is. I've worked with some deal room companies and maybe my interpretation is wrong, but it's effectively a safe environment to upload. Exactly that's exactly what it is. It's a secure box.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think uploading stuff securely is definitely one element of it, but it's also just a customized interactive workspace between you and the customer, uploading stuff. That's really relevant to your conversation with them and it allows them to easily circulate around Interesting. So you come into an environment where, okay, speak to the you know, um, whatever sales off manager and you're just like, hey, this is ai agents and this is what you can do and all that sort of stuff. And then they go, oh, I've got a loop in, I gotta loop in this person, I gotta loop in that person, or my cio wants to talk to you about security or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so instead of, oh, here's, you know, can you send me this and can you send me that? And and okay, well, here's a bunch of documents flying around and a million different emails. You just upload it into this deal room and you go, yeah, send them the link to this deal room, or here it is, or you can connect, you can multi-thread someone on LinkedIn and just be like, oh, you're the CIO. Hey, I'm talking to your VP of sales over in Australia. He's a CIO in the US. Like, just in case you want to be kept up to date with the conversation. Here's the deal room Right and they can log in into it. You can see who's been engaged. You can really see how many people have been invited, which resources they're going to. It allows you to monitor the health of the deal really well as a as a sales leader.
Speaker 2:And so you can set it up and customize it as like almost a project management tool. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So what's?
Speaker 1:the one that you guys use. So we use Aligned Aligned, yeah, and their CEOs are super active on LinkedIn. I think they use us as a reference as well. But, yeah, that goes really well. I think that's a part of the tech stack that I hadn't really used before, but it's been super helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, interesting. I'm just as you're talking. I'm thinking that would be super useful for the recruiting side of our business, going back and forth with candidates and CVs and multiple stakeholders, and it's either on Slack or it's an email, exactly, and you can control that conversation.
Speaker 1:Just seize control of all the stuff that is floating around in another company, get value out of it, but also make it really easy for them to share it around. So that's been really good and for me in our sales methodology it's become a very standard, like after you have a first meeting set up in a line room. Here's a template send them the link rather than be, like you know, at the end of every call oh, send me the deck and send me the recording and send me whatever other materials that you've got. It's a pretty typical thing that a prospect is going to say, um, you just send them this, this room, and it's like everything's in there, allows you to move very quickly, allows them to have all the stuff that they want, allows you to be able to see how engaged they are as well.
Speaker 2:Super cool. Yeah, I like that a lot. I'm going to check that out as well. Anything else in the other outreach tools?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what, a lot of what we would do, is just created by agents. To honest, like, if we, if we want a tool, we just create an agent for it. Um, it's just like people you know, if you, if you want, uh, oh, I need something to, I don't know, enrich my database, uh, or enrich my crm, like, or do a bunch of research or qualify, like these 10 000 companies that have come into the very top of funnel, you're not going to hire a person to do it. You'd look for a tool to do it. But now we can essentially have the quality of hiring a person without the cost or the time taken to do it, just like create an agent to do it. You just do that with our platform. So we've actually eliminated a lot of our tech stack just by using agents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow, incredible, incredible. So just forward-looking. Uh, the business is is grown, you guys are um global. The team is substantially larger than it was. What does the next 12 months look like for you?
Speaker 1:um, yeah, we're, we're growing super rapidly. So I think mentioned earlier that yeah, uh, what was it at the about 18 months ago? We were, you know, between sort of 10 and 20 people, 12 and 20 people. Now we're coming up on 80, which is very cool. We're doing all this pr next week for what we call agent drop. Um, so we're releasing, you know, lots of announcements, releasing, uh, new functionality every day on our platform. Um, what's the next 12 months? Look like like I'm I'm going to be growing out the go-to-market team in san francisco. We just opened our office there. We're going to have a truckload, we're going to have a nice small but mighty sales team there, along with CSM solutions engineers, any sort of go-to-market and customer-facing folks there. And, yeah, I mean our whole goal as Relevance is that we want to eventually have a billion agents live for a million users around the world. And yeah, that's kind of the direction that we're trending towards.
Speaker 2:Yeah, incredible and for anyone that is on a similar journey to yourself, is building out a go-to-market team, similar stage SaaS business. Any final tip that you would give them?
Speaker 1:Yeah, wow, I mean there's a lot of lessons that we've kind of learned along the way. Um, yeah, Wow, I mean there's a lot of lessons that we've kind of learned along the way. Um, any tips that I would give someone building like at what stage? Like the similar stage to us, I guess?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, series a probably that sort of stage where you've um, yeah, similar size, maybe 40, 60 people in the business, yep, um, thinking about the future.
Speaker 1:Yep, I would say, um, what's the most important thing they should be thinking about now? Yeah, um, it sort of depends on on the kind of solution that they have. But I would say, definitely really try and understand. Uh, try and do one thing really well um, definitely really try and understand the icp for that one thing that you're doing and really do that extremely well.
Speaker 1:Um, that's you know when, when we had a platform that can build agents and they can kind of do a bit of anything, we went, well, we could just try and get everybody to use this in exactly the way that they want. But really the best approach was to go what's one problem that this solves? That is really like a good problem to solve and people are definitely looking to solve. Get deep into that, really understand your buyer for that. Um, you know, create your materials around that, create your whole presence around that and then build out from there.
Speaker 1:You know, um, that's really what helped us do, like, like I said, that first 10x quarter is really getting deep into what do sales leaders want and where's all that manual work happening? And and let's create something that's actually going to address that. Or you've probably created something already, but how do you frame your entire message around addressing that need? And I guess the other thing would be build your team on very solid foundations. Make sure that you've got very much the right people. Our new head of people is very adamant on this. Get exceptional people that don't settle for very good, settle for exceptional. They're going to end up doing twice the output of a very good person and you really want to build your foundation like that because this stage of the journey it's extremely important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, love that. And if anyone listening wants to get in touch with you or learn more about relevance, how can they do so?
Speaker 1:Oh man, connect with me on LinkedIn. That's the best way to connect with me on LinkedIn. Just jump onto relevance, take a trial, request a demo, mention me. That's totally fine. We are going to be making a lot of noise in the next few days. So, yeah, definitely get involved and see how you can get involved in this crazy world of AI agents right now. Really, really simply, I would say that that's the best way to go.
Speaker 2:Amazing, super, super interesting, valuable conversation. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Thank you so much, james. This is really really good, super honored to be part of it and, yeah, I can't wait to follow the rest of the journey of the company and the great work you guys are doing.
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