Episode 42: Relationship-led selling with Centralize founders Rachit and William

As a solo host, Peter tries his best to fill Alex's shoes :) 

He sits down with YC W24 founders of Centralize, Rachit Kataria and William Wang, to discuss their founder-led sales journey and approach. They discuss:

• Their approach to relationship-based selling
• The challenges and opportunities of selling to GTM leaders
• Creative outbound strategies they've leveraged
• How they think about hiring their first seller

Visit Centralize's website to learn more about Rachit and William's vision. They've built an AI-powered deal collaboration platform that focuses on mapping key stakeholders, understanding them, and how to leverage each to get strategic deals done. 

Special shout out to Will Thoni (Sales at Langchain) for making this connection! 

Transcript

Centralize podcast with Rachit & Will

[00:00:00]

Peter Ahn: Welcome to decoding sales, a podcast where an engineer that's usually Alex Allain, but he's not on the show today. And a salesperson that's me, Peter talk about the art and science of sales as it relates to modern methodology and founders who are figuring things out the new and more authentic way. So today, as I mentioned, I don't have my cohost Alex with me, but I have two very esteemed guests with me on the line.

I have Rachit Kataria and william wang who are co founders of Centralize And I I love what they're doing They're bringing the r back into crm, which is what they're going to go into in a little bit But I haven't really seen a product that dives deep into the relationship sales aspect, because that's super critical.

In my opinion, can be the difference between winning and losing a deal. And so they're focusing on that space in the Centralize platform and very excited to have them both on. [00:01:00] Before I turn it over to them, I'll give you all a sense for who Rachit and Will are. Both have very impressive engineering backgrounds.

Rachit was actually one of the founding engineers for Facebook shops and helped scale that too. Over 250 million monthly active users in a year. So over a really quick period of time and then will was over at slack actually, , , where I used to work and he built one of the fastest growing products in slack history.

Actually, the fastest growing product, right? I think it reached over a million weekly active users, . In the fastest amount of time out of any Slack product that's out there. , , and that specific product was huddles, which we all use today. And it's very ubiquitous. So it's cool that you were at the forefront of that William.

, so with that introduction, I'll turn it over to Rachit first and then William to, to give their background, how they met as founders, and then we'll get into the show. So Rachit, take it away. 

Rachit: Yeah. Thanks for having us, man. , I've been looking forward to this one. ,appreciate the intro too. .

, it's been a fun journey. Yeah. Super quick background. I'm Rachit. , everyone, thanks for tuning in or [00:02:00] watching, , where to start. Yeah. Engineer by trade. Well, and I actually met first week of college. I'm at USC at our entrepreneurship club. So I've been friends for almost a decade at this point.

, best buds roommates. It's, it's been a long time coming, , full circle from there to now founding a company and doing Y Combinator together. , but yeah, engineer and product engine by trade on my end. , I've always wanted to be customer facing. And so I kind of taken the leap as a, been a two time return intern from Meta and just like love their culture was on stories and then internal design tool and took that to join them full time.

I very much lucked out right when COVID hit, I was on the team that became Facebook shops. I was part of the alpha experience that, , shipped May, 2020 stock jumped 5%. It was an exciting day. No billions went to me all to Zuck, but it was a good time. , and then hopefully some millions 

Peter Ahn: or hundreds of thousands, at least 

Rachit: it was a very, it was a, it was a very well, well paid in experience journey.

It was a good time. , and, , Yeah, it is. It's a lot of fun. , scaled, scaled pretty [00:03:00] quickly kind of build the chops as a product engineer there. And then went to a YC company called A to B, which was fuel cards for trucking. , it's a summer 20 company also spent up during COVID. And it was literally a visa card to buy gas for fleets and their owners and drivers.

And I would go on the field with the A's and CSMs, literally. Two truck stops to HQ is giving out the cards, trying to figure out as their technical counterpart. What do we need to succeed here? , who cares about what, like, what has to happen? That's going to get the owner excited versus the end users driving the car and where all their different priorities, , which has actually inspired a lot of what got Will and I excited to, to found Centralize.

But yeah, it's been in the journey before getting here. 

Peter Ahn: Amazing. Appreciate that. William, how about you tell us a little bit about your background? 

Will Wong: Yeah, , I just said a lot of the early background. , you know, we went to college together 1st week of freshman year, , did 1 too many things to count together.

Roommates took classes, like, all all the things both side projects. Started entrepreneurship clubs, organizations, a lot of different things together. , and [00:04:00] yeah, after school, I was a slack for 4 years. Like you mentioned earlier, , also joined pre COVID ended up seeing the shift to remote work. And when, you know, every company was trying to figure out how to.

Manage their workforce, , in this like kind of new, totally different way of working and ended up prototyping the very first version of huddles, , led the team that launched the first version. , and , then the other like two, three versions after that, that you kind of now see today, , then went off to kind of kickstart the prototyping team, , , with a bunch of the executives at Slack.

So like, you know, Noah Weiss fuzzy. They've all gone off to do really great things. , and then ended up building things like clips saved for later, even early Slack, AI, , canvas, like a lot of these foundational virtual headquarters things there. And then ended up. Wanting to go smaller because I knew that I wanted to start a company at some point.

So, , became the founding engineer at another YC company called capture, which is. In the B2C space, personal [00:05:00] productivity space, , ended up almost being like a customer success manager, founding engineer, doing all the things really. And then started talking to a lot of people from Slack because when I was there, I ended up working a lot with sales and customer success, , go to market, understanding how to bring something completely new that the world has basically never seen besides in discord audio channels over to, , B2B SaaS.

And I realized that we had very similar experiences where he was a meta A to B, obviously going out and giving fuel cards out to truckers at the truck stops. And then me talking to sales folks at slack and then, , seeing a lot of the problems that ended up coming together into what is Centralize today.

But yeah, really, really great. , and. You know, always think back on how awesome it is to build a company with your best friends. So 

Peter Ahn: it's been awesome for cool. Yeah. It seems like you guys are still best friends. So it means that something's going well, hopefully, right? Not always the case. So hang on 

Rachit: to that.

Peter Ahn: Well, let's [00:06:00] dive into centralize a little bit. You both did a good job kind of teeing it up, but what did you see missing, you know, across the different. , sales conversations that you were having, why dive into go to market tech? There's a lot of go to market tech solutions out there, right? We're almost like hit on the head with it every hour.

Rachit: It seems like, , so why jump into it? And what is unique about what you all are trying to do compared to some of the other platforms out there already? 

Yeah. I can share some initial insights. I think what's been interesting in our careers with Will and I is that, you mentioned this earlier, we're both product engineers by trade, very customer facing, want to build the right thing for the right end user.

Rachit: And we've been the technical counterpart as part of go to market teams, figuring out, Like what is go to market if not understanding someone's problems, having the technical solution to solve it, and then profit. Like everyone's happy. It's a win win and being one piece of that puzzle and always being very close to what is a good go to market.

Experience look like where the customers heard, they're understood their pains are [00:07:00] actually real pains. We can solve and build the right things that tackle those things. And then ultimately, , , , it's a no brainer to buy the tool or to use the use the product. And so with that in mind, when we started.

Kind of exploring the ideas when we were reflecting, I mean, I'll just speak from the A to B experience. I saw very clearly firsthand what a good focus of, Hey, I know what the CFO of the company versus the manager versus the fuel card user actually individually care about. And when you show those things are properly addressed, then everyone's happy.

And , it's so fluid. And I've also seen, and actually been part of retros that are, you know, upwards of like multi, , high six figure deals that just disappeared. Somehow in the blue when a champion left and you forgot what actually mattered to them because the person that was involved in the beginning is no longer there or the person that coming in new didn't have the context and no one internally could wrangle the data to know what actually was important during the initial phase of getting the customer on board or the initial buyer committee creation and there's so much [00:08:00] of that that just keeps flying around back and forth and a variety of slack channels emails calendars call recordings crm that It's just so difficult to get that relationship story correct, but it ends up being the make or break in many cases to keep a customer happy.

, and so I'd seen that very firsthand at A to B, and it was very transparent, but tooling today is pretty silo'ed. Data is all over the place. They're great internally as maybe potential point solutions, but. Where do you wake up and say, I know what's happening on the ground for the customer. I know who we've talked to, what they care about, who's missing, what to do next.

And that's not Salesforce. I mean, Salesforce is an amazing database, but it's not there. It's not necessarily all these other tools, ,teasing kind of later on. It's, it's, it should be a Centralized view of all of that context and a place for teams to wake up in team sell. , I'll, I'll pause on that. I know.

Will, anything, anything to add there? 

Will Wong: I talk a little bit to, , on some of the personal experience and personal passion that I've had and [00:09:00] kind of goes back to college as well. I mean, I, I mentioned this a little bit in like a little earlier, but in college, you ended up focusing a lot, almost on relationships in every single thing that we ended up doing.

, so that was, you know, building communities, helping folks, maybe find jobs, , starting almost like startup career fairs, but really bringing people together. , to get something done and I think a lot of that sort of passion that we like built up underlying has driven us also to build Centralize, , even outside of all the actual, you know, work experiences that we've had in order to come to this realization.

, I mean, for me, you know, slack, like I mentioned a little earlier, too, I was there was working very early on these new products, , ended up needing to ask sales and customer success about what the state of. Their deals were how the customers are doing, how they were going to, , receive huddles, how we're going to pilot it, what were the good customers that we can use to, to pilot up this new thing.

And like, I just couldn't [00:10:00] get a straight answer out of basically anyone, right? Because, you know, sales would have a perspective on the customer from the deal side of things, like the net new business side of things. , customer success would be like, okay, how's the customer doing now? , what issues are they facing?

Marketing would have a totally different answer. And there wasn't really one place that I could go to, to understand, , you know, for me being an engineer. What, what exactly do I need to know about the customer? , what is our penetration of this customer? Who's been engaged? I'm about to hop on a call with four people.

Are these people happy with the product? Like what were they, where are they currently part of any open ops that I need to worry about, et cetera, et cetera. , which kind of goes back to what Racha was saying about wanting one Centralize place where you can see all this information instantly, no matter if you're sales, customer success, marketing, anyone to go to market team, anyone in the business for that matter.

And we saw that as it was like a really big gap in the industry that now, obviously, with the advent of AI, , you can do a [00:11:00] lot of that stuff, like, really, really easily. , and we spent a lot of time was being, , engineers figuring out how to build a stellar product around that 

Peter Ahn: makes sense. Makes sense.

Yeah. And I, I love all the integrations you have. Obviously, you work with salesforce. I saw gong, but I like what you're saying to about conversations. It's not just about the quantitative data. It's also like, who's spoken to who. Right. And that could be so, , impacted by like recency bias or like whether you're talking to marketing or sales, et cetera, et cetera.

So I love that like consolidated view. , tell me a little bit about where you are in the sales journey, right? Because, , Centralize launched, I think about a year ago. Is that correct? Or maybe before that? 

Rachit: Yeah, we incorporated, , just actually last November, a little over a year now since the incorporation date.

I know time flies, 

Peter Ahn: right? It probably feels like five years in a lot of ways. So where are you in the founder led sales journey? I think it's mostly you both who are really representing the brand in front of prospects. So tell us a little bit about that and then we could go into a little bit of the tactical kind of how you're actually executing on [00:12:00] sales too.

Rachit: Yeah. It's been quite an evolution. I mean, when Will and I first started, we were both all the above, right? Like the engineers, customer success, sales, trying to figure out what sticks, what's valuable, where's the implied pain, like what's, what's the problem that we're solving for. And so that was a lot of what we did together during YC, , up through like even the middle of this year.

And now I think we're, we're actually really. It's, it's a really exciting point. There's a really interesting inflection point now, I think, where people jump on calls, they see the product and anyone from like series a to public companies are like, aha, like, oh shit, this is, this is gonna be relevant across my entire go to market stack.

, that's a really exciting culmination of. Engineering of rooting all this context of what we picked up from discovery calls, initial sales conversations, trying to make that into product, turning it back around and saying, Hey, is this something that it would actually solve those problems? Or is it not?

Not also getting biased towards just what's the. You know, [00:13:00] personally, we've just talked to you so far, but what are the reps think? What does the rest of the team think? How do these all coincide? We're all good at market can see value. And it's not just a lot of what you'll hear today is people get concerned about point solutions.

You don't want to just be a point solution. It's like this little thing, the grand scheme of value we can offer. , so, you know, we can get into it later, but we, we, we think we cover a lot of surface area for that reason. Where all go to market should see value, not just how we got here in the first place, which is just a tool for success or a tool for marketing or a tool for sales.

, but yeah, that's, that's kind of the journey where we are now. 

Peter Ahn: Yeah. I can imagine Centralize being helpful for that, right. Cause it can help you map those discussions across multiple go to market functions. Right. So yeah, we, we use it every day. 

Will Wong: Um, 

Peter Ahn: yeah, every 

Will Wong: day. 

Peter Ahn: Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Not the case for a lot of go to market platforms out there.

Right. But I could, I could see you both really, , being passionate about it. Cause you're, you're also users of it too. , So I know like you're trying to not be a point solution, but there must be an ICP that you like going into first. Is that right? So who is that typically? [00:14:00] Is it like VP of sales, , rev ops leader?

Like who is it that you like to outbound to initially or get an intro to? 

Rachit: . Oftentimes a lot of folks that see the value will start off being VPs of sales, CROs, , even rev ops, , customer success is an amazing champion as well. , marketing sees a bunch of value, but I think The starting point is almost, if you think about where your relationships begin.

It is generally at the front of the house. It's on the sales side and then how you those could cultivate that handoff to success for a, , natural progression, but, , generally it's, it's a big piece of sales and zeros. 

Peter Ahn: Makes 

Rachit: sense. 

Peter Ahn: And, and as you're going after those folks, , what was the hardest thing when trying to.

Sell to career sales leaders. Cause I'm sure, you know, even when I sell to sales leaders, I get in my own head, you know, being like, Oh, they must know like BANT MEDD PICC, they're probably judging me on my pitch too. You know, in reality, yes, yes. That is a case. I judge people on their pitch all the time, but like, what was that evolution for you?

, what was the [00:15:00] hardest thing you had to do as you were now, . Selling to these folks every single day. And how did you overcome that? I think a lot of it, 

Will Wong: , maybe for us to coming from engineers turned sellers. , there's a lot of stuff that we kind of had to learn from the ground up on, not just like, Oh, you know, we used to be salespeople selling to a different industry and now we're selling to sales, but it was like, we haven't done sales ever before, so 

we're 

Will Wong: trying to figure out like.

Okay, what is it? What is the best way to ask discovery questions? How do we make sure that we don't ask any like leading questions? How do we make sure that we, you know, do demos to not, , and like, not get happy years about what they say? , and there's like a lot of maybe like learnings that we could share from that.

I don't know if we have time in 30 minutes. , but yeah, yeah. I think, I think a lot of those we ended up doing, making those mistakes very early, , and almost like spinning our wheels for, , I don't know, like maybe like weeks, maybe sometimes months on building and iterating towards directions that, , were actually maybe quote unquote, like fake, I should [00:16:00] say.

, but through that learning and then iterating to where we are now, 

Rachit: , I think the biggest learnings, so selling to sales, like you can tell when you're in a cadence, you're in a sequence, when you're getting pitch slapped or what, all the things, right.

Like it's very obvious, but I think leaning in just being an engineer that's seeing their problems and wanting to solve for them, , kind of puts a, just a reset, like I'm not trying to sell you. Our whole thesis is that we want to build a relationship, understand what the pains are, what the problems are, so that we can build something here.

If it's not a good fit, it's not a good fit. Like it should be a win win for both of us. Our success every day and why Will and I wake up getting pumped is like hearing when an end user says something positive and gets excited or does something cool in the platform that we didn't realize. Not like, Oh yeah, we signed a deal and you're going to churn it in a year because we didn't understand the relationship.

, , we want to really have that, that like depth of, knowing the person on the other side. So that's, that's really what we index on during the calls to like, [00:17:00] we're just trying to make sure . We understand your pain. We can solve for it. 

Will Wong: Yeah. A lot of it is kind of just doing, putting in the repetitions also, right?

Like doing as many calls as you possibly can. , , you're not going to learn how to do sales or some like reading blog posts. You kind of have to just do it yourself, , and then be in the moment. And so maybe, maybe this is just like general advice for, , other people like learning how to do sales, You just kind of have to get out of your comfort zone and then just do it as many times as possible.

, and then just iterate really quickly. , obviously, there's an engineering corollary to this, right? Of like, iterating very quickly, building product and then changing direction. It's the same thing for. When you're, when you're learning sales. 

Peter Ahn: Yeah. I like what you said, Rachit about just trying to solve a problem because then you change the sales call and it's not a sales call.

It's more of like a support call. Actually Tido from Koala. He was on a couple episodes ago. He mentioned that, right. He mentioned 

Rachit: once 

Peter Ahn: he 

Rachit: said, 

Peter Ahn: Oh, good. I love it. I love it. Love Tido. He's he's amazing. Yeah. We've had a lot of [00:18:00] work stories together and a lot of personal stories hanging out in K town in New York.

So you'll have to ask him about that at some point. , But yeah, he reframed it to be like, I'm just helping these people. Right. And so I love that. And then I think the other thing you both said was, it's okay if it's not a fit too right, because by virtue of being at a startup, I think you're selling three to five years ahead of your time.

And most people aren't going to get it because they're not innovators, like they can't really. Connect the dots in the way that you have to, if you're trailblazing in this space. And so that's something I say a lot of to founders. And I think you both kind of alluded to it, but it's also extremely hard to execute on.

Because when you're getting on a call with like Nike or NBC, the first instinct is to be super excited, right? So I wonder if there's any like tips and tricks there you could share with founders, because no matter how many times I say, Hey, not everybody's going to be a good fit. Even my clients who have worked with me for a couple months, they come back and they're like, guess what, Peter, I just got a meeting with Nike, you know?

And then my [00:19:00] response is like, well, like, is Nike going to pay you? Like, do they actually like, are they, are they going to like waste your time? Right. Are you going to spin your wheels and you're going to find out actually that this relationship selling is nowhere near what they think about. Right. So how do you both, have you gone through that?

Like between you two, too as co founders, I'm trying to like coach each other on that. Like, how do you. Embody that mentality of like, Hey, it's okay. If some folks don't like our pitch, it's not personal. Right. I guess I should first ask you if you agree with my, my approach first and then you guys get to answer how you've handled that.

Will Wong: Yeah. I mean, we've, yeah, we've definitely, , seen that quite a lot. , I mean, especially in the early days when, , you know, being, being more naive, I think about sales and just being like, all right, we're just going to get like anyone through the door. Like. Anyone who even listen to us, we're going to, , we're going to try to, like, get them as customers, which, which I think, you know, for us worked for a little bit because we were.

Basically, it's trying to get the product out there and we [00:20:00] were like, you know, as part of narrowing down the ICP, just making sure like the baseline is like having people use it. So we can figure out if when they use it is their value, you know, 

Peter Ahn: make sense. 

Will Wong: , but I think as money wasn't 

Peter Ahn: necessarily like the goal, right?

Yeah. Yeah. The goal. Yeah. 

Will Wong: Yeah, exactly. , but I think, you know, the farther we go along on this journey, the more we realized. Yeah. How critical it is to have quality ARR. So instead of like quality, not quantity, , so that people who come on really see value that they're going to retain, that we can kind of mutually deliver value for them so that , at the end of the day, like it doesn't, you know, feel like a sales thing or like they're in a cycle, it's just.

Hey, you guys have this problem before, and we have the solution we can help you and then it's just mutually beneficial. , but I think a lot of it is just narrowing down and ruthlessly prioritizing on what your is. And it's hard to answer that question, though, because, , if you don't have. Like a very, very specific ICP, it gets like [00:21:00] tough to stay within the bounds and like happy ears happen all the time.

You're like, well, we're talking to Netflix, Netflix, like large company, good name. We can get a logo, but it's maybe it's like not within the like left and right of where that ICP is. , and I think a lot of it is just needing to be true to yourself and, , constantly reflecting on what that actually is.

Rachit: , maybe the thing I'll just add to that is I think at this phase in the game for any founder for ourselves right now, it's, it's repeatability it's, can you find the 30, 50, 100, 200, however many customers that all feel the same pain and you solve the same problems, like solve for repeatable use cases and do it really well, do not become a consulting company and just like make one off solutions and try to patch work.

What that looks like, because that's, that's not going to be the foundation you want to build a company on. And that's something that , we. Definitely did not do very well on during the batch in the early days of selling and have since refined substantially on like, what is an ideal [00:22:00] customer person that we talked to the makeup of their tech stack, how big their team is, the tooling that they use for their CRM, all of these different criteria that even before entering that call or continuing from a discovery, we know this is.

We would feel good if they signed on and we know they're not going to turn a year from now if we just deliver. 

Peter Ahn: Yeah, I love looking at that kind of year two mark too, right? Because that's how I think a lot of people start understanding why you need to qualify because you don't want to have 10 different contracts where you said 10 different things.

Right. That's going to be a nightmare. , especially as your product roadmap starts to have more clarity around it. So I appreciate , both your thoughts on that. So I'm talking a little bit about kind of first call to qualifying. Let's take a step back before that, just in terms of like pipeline gen.

Cause you all have, I'm sure tried everything under the sun. It's a question I get a ton of, like when I talk to funders, how do you get meetings? Right. Our product's great. I just need like five to 10 calls on the calendar. So what have you found to work well? And maybe some [00:23:00] things also where you thought they would work well that just kind of flopped , or didn't really come to fruition.

, what is your advice in terms of pipeline gen and demand gen in the early days? I 

Rachit: mean, maybe this is, , not a surprise, but relationships is a great starting point, being able to lean on your investors, your advisors, all these friends and folks that we've cultivated over our careers that are one degree away from an AE that can give us amazing feedback, a director that's looking on the market, , a CRO that our investors have a really close relationship to or a portfolio company, , starting.

Kind of like sales, like starting warm, , because it's like the fastest point in and showing that value up front. , that's been huge. I think that's actually really, really helped quite a bit. And it's funny because that's literally part of the product that we offer as well. I know I was going to 

Peter Ahn: say, maybe you guys need to get into the prospecting game too, right?

Not just on the, 

Rachit: there's a natural, it's funny, like prospecting, it's kind of like a fine line between [00:24:00] what is prospecting like outbound and what is like. , in account prospecting or sure. Yeah, it's 

Peter Ahn: very similar, right? In a lot of cases, especially the larger up you go in terms of a company size. 

Rachit: Yeah, but, but one of the biggest things that we talk about, and this is true for us too, is every sales leader needs to make sure their team is getting to power.

It's like one of the biggest criteria, right? A deal is not going to close if the function you're going after that VP or exec is not, has never been talked to. It's not even on the call. If you see the, , You can better believe the forecast is not accurate if they're saying it's closing next week, right?

You need to have someone who's your, your economic buyer, your champion, whatever framework you're going off of. But, , similarly that if you realize that your CEO or your advisors or your friends are actually. In a position to get you at least that first conversation and the product sells itself, you know, that, that can go a really long way.

So that's been huge for us and shout out to all of our, all the people supporting us again from [00:25:00] past companies, investors, , coworkers that have, , yeah, a lot of folks we've talked to have really helped us get where we are. . , one other one I'll call out is actually conferences.

That's, that's been pretty huge. , I think it's interesting, especially if there's folks listening or, That are earlier stage. I like to think of, customers at our stage. And Will let me know if you agree with this, like they're basically buying futures on us as a team, as founders of like, we're believing in you because you understand us so deeply, you're giving us a degree of white glove experience we will not get from any bigger name and.

We can move fast enough that in two years, the product is almost directly shaped by the feedback we give you. And that's what we're buying. We're not necessarily buying what we're looking at right now, but if you can't convey that necessarily in these cold channels, like emails, which is just like sea of AISDR, who knows what it's like, there's a bunch of stuff flying in.

They're going to bet on hopefully what you bring as an individual when they talk to you in person, like who you are as people. How do you come to the [00:26:00] table? Do you feel like you're a partner? Can you understand what they need and then translate that to what they're going to see in a year? That is just so much more powerful, hopefully, in person when they have that conversation than any like low fidelity email call that you're going to have otherwise.

Will Wong: Yeah, I want to plus on the in person because There's only so much you can say over an email and people get emails all the time. I know when I get emails Most of the time they're going straight straight to the trash or like 

yeah, you 

Will Wong: know if it's not Yeah, like something doesn't hook me like really quickly.

It's just it's going away in person for sure, I think even in person too, , you know, , we like to do anything we can really to stand out also, I mean, in conferences, building that personal brand or that company brand is so important. And so for us, I remember for, , I think, you know, we went to maybe 4 or 5 conferences like this year over the past couple of months and for.

One of them, like we started dressing up as [00:27:00] gardeners. Like we got, 

they got aprons, 

Will Wong: we got boots, we got gloves, , and we're giving out vegetable seeds at these conferences, , to, to, to really hit home the brand of the brand of like, Hey. We're Centralize, we're helping you cultivate your customer relationships.

And I will say, yeah, that turned a lot of heads. I would 

Peter Ahn: have had the brave, , you know, I would have been brave enough to do that, to be honest. But that's awesome that you did that. Yeah, 

Will Wong: I mean, you know, for us, like the early days, it's really just trying to make sure that people can associate something with us.

, something good with us. , and even at these conferences, I read this kind of like a funny story. It's just. I remember in Austin, for the Pavilion GTM conference. , we, we had one house plant that we kind of took from the hotel room. , but then we wanted to make one mobile, like, have someone hold a house plant and then be even stand out even more walking around the conference floor with the plant.

, so we just asked for a plant, like, from the hotel. , and then took it out [00:28:00] with us and then I, I think I was just walking around the floor, just like with seeds as a gardener, almost carrying a plant, like a football, like going up to people like, Hey, how's it going? You know, do you want vegetable seeds?

, and it was. It's a great conversation starter. I think a lot of those things you can only do in person too. Right. So it kind of goes back to a lot of the in person experiences. I love 

Peter Ahn: that. You both mentioned that because I talk about that all the time, , wherever the watering holes are, and typically there are conferences where people are already talking about the problem.

You should be there, but not in a way where you're investing in a booth, like all the other vendors, you should activate an experience. . And so that's one way to do it. Another way to do it is to have a really fancy dinner where you have really. You know, curated VIP lists of people who are there, right?

Or there was one conference where a prospect came up to me and was like, Hey, Peter, I can't stay for more than five minutes. Cause I'm going to an event. And I was like, what event is it? And he was like, Oh, I'm doing a whiskey tasting with like 10 people at the penthouse of this really fancy hotel. [00:29:00] So, you know, that's like a curated intentional activation.

Right. , I think you already talked about things that don't work. Cold email. It seems like, you know, not working right. To the extent that it was even like four or five years ago. Let's talk now about like bad advice. , where now that you've been in the game, I'm sure there's advice where you looked at it and it was like, Oh, this sounds really intelligent on paper.

There's so many people like me out there too, who are just. spewing out opinions, being like, I did this. I did that. I took X company to 250 million. So you should listen to all my frameworks. Right? So are there elements of, , those pieces of advice, whether it comes from venture or, , you know, coaches or consultants or former CROs where you look back and you're like, ah, actually it's not like what he or she, or they.

, called out to be, .

Rachit: One that comes to mind, it's more of an iteration than a bad advice trend that we've tried out. I would say that's actually kind of ties into the cold [00:30:00] emails. There's an interesting model of emailing or even just outreach in general. That's very, here's what we're doing.

Breakdown, like what at all it is, are you interested in learning more or like, would this be relevant to your team? It's kind of like a very classic, I've seen that all the time, right? And then you're in the cadence. It's like, well, okay. Like here's other contexts. Why? Like maybe this is relevant to you.

And I think it does work to some degree with volume and like eventually, hopefully someone who's on that cusp of early adopter is like, this is, this is, you know, you're saying the right things. Like I'll jump on, but we've also heard conflicting advice that maybe similar to the relationship building.

It's just more about, Hey, I. I'm building something that I think could be relevant to y'all, could be cool to what you're working on. We'd just love to get your perspective. What are your thoughts? Is this something that actually you would be open to even just a 20 minute chat about, here's your take on the world, I can bring what we've learned from every other CRO and VP we've talked to, let's just have a conversation.

We've actually had a bunch of positive outcomes. That are currently like actively engaging customers, , [00:31:00] because of that, because it started from just a dialogue of, are you seeing the same problems? Let's just like keep riffing about it. And if it does feel like it's valuable, what we're working on, it's not really a pitch so much, it's kind of just this thing on the side that, by the way, we do this, I mean, kind of a no brainer.

You wouldn't want to try it because it, , it is very relevant to what we're talking about. Again, not to say this is like, I think the worst version of that is a pitch slap. Where you intentionally avoid it and then say, by the way, here, here's what we're selling. One thing that we've still experimenting with, honestly, but is conflicting advice from different people is one world is, Hey, just validate your problem works or you're solving the right thing by going straight cell mode.

And if it hits great. There's another version of it, which is just have a dialogue, try to get the conversations and hopefully eventually champions and friends you want to have in the community. And if they like what you're doing and it lands, it should naturally turn into a partnership as opposed to like a direct sell, especially in a world where they're just getting pitched with like 50 emails a day in their inbox.

Anyway, [00:32:00] you might even have better luck. The other app 

Peter Ahn: makes sense. Yep. Yep. How about you? Will, yeah, 

Will Wong: yeah, . Something that we've heard, , here and there also, is, is that multi threading sometimes doesn't work that well. , I think sometimes folks have a,, preconceived notion that if you try to talk to too many people, like, within the company, , it'll just, it'll just kind of like kill your relationship or kill the deal.

And I think that there's like a, there's like asterisks on this. I think it depends on how you, you engage those people on how you talk to people. Because, , for example, I think, you know, some folks who we've talked to are like, okay, well, you don't want to go above, like above your champion too much and to a certain extent, you don't like, you want to make sure your champion is your hero, , that's helping you, you know, push the deal internally, et cetera.

, but that doesn't mean that you can't. , , send a note to like, you know, the, the champions boss or like a couple above and are like, Hey, , just letting you know that we're working, , [00:33:00] with Brayden, for example, on this thing, , I think it'll help the team in this way. , just keep me in the loop.

That's it. , people like knowing and people like knowing that, . Things are moving forward, especially if it helps the team. And so I think, you need to be very careful on how you do things because we, we even seen this in our own deals to, , you know, making sure you don't, , walk around the people who you're working with.

, but I think from our experience, it, it's usually always a good thing to, you know, kind of engage more people and make sure that as much as the organization knows what you're doing. As possible, , especially when it comes to building champions and making sure that, , you got influencers and other parts of the org.

, so, yeah, for us, multi threading is, is kind of the name of the game. , and it's also why we built Centralize here, right? To help people do that more effectively. 

Peter Ahn: Yeah, I completely agree. It's surprising that you would get that thought that like, Hey, don't go over your champion or don't multi thread. I think it's all about how you go about [00:34:00] it.

Because if you have a conversation with your champion, you're like, Hey, like I do want to talk to the folks who are making the ultimate decision or who have an impact on the budget. How do I best go about doing that? Of course, your champion is going to say yes. Right. Your champion might get offended if you do it behind their back.

Right. So I completely agree. You at least have to like try and to do it in the right way and to engage your champion in doing so I think is important. And then Rachit, I think what you said about outbound, yeah, there's so many conflicting thoughts. I think we're product of our own experience. And so I think a lot of folks try and give advice based off of things that have worked for them in the past.

But I think what I'm learning is like the way that you do outbound has a direct impact on your personal reputation as a founder too. And a lot of founders aren't going to be excited to be like, Hey, like, do you want to learn more and then put prospects into a cadence? Because the prospects then have this thought that, okay, started through an automated way, not like a genuine way, right?

So I think that's a lot of what you're hitting on. And there's so many different ways you could show [00:35:00] up without it feeling manufactured. So I appreciate you sharing that. Well, let, let's start to wrap up here a little bit, but I do want to ask one more question because you both are in founder led sales.

And another question I get a lot of is when do you hire your first sales rep? So how are you both thinking about that? Are you actively talking to sales reps right now where, you know, if the right one comes up, you'll opportunistically hire or, , what are you thinking there in terms of thinking about who you want to hire and when.

Rachit: Yeah, , it goes back to what I was saying earlier about repeatability until we have that repeatable, you know, The, the ideal customer base. We feel like every single person is excited about an evangelizing Centralize for us because they're using it for the same core use case.

Until that day comes. And I think that's, there's a few different ways that's measured externally. It's a number of customers. It could be 40 to 50, it could be a million dollar error milestone. It could be any number of ways of hitting that. But until that's true, we are the best salespeople for the company.

And [00:36:00] if we don't have that milestone set, how can we expect someone that isn't the founder of the company to do the same thing, , with substantially less years of being deep in the problem and knowing it and expecting a context, which to, to give them that information. So, , at least, , why we get excited about it is the.

In some sense, founder led sales is your roadmap shaping. It is your customer iteration, your customer success all wrapped up into one being as close to the ground of the problem and then solving for it directly versus abstracting that away. , I wouldn't think we'd want to do that until we, we know for a fact that this is repeatable PMF and then it's just about, you know, adding fuel to the engine. 

Will Wong: . , I agree with that. I think, , just one quick thing I'll add to that too, is. You know, when we hire, , sales people also, we want to be able to teach them on, , what has worked well for us, , any pitfalls that we've had. And I think in order for us to be successful with a sales team, we need to be experts ourselves.

, and [00:37:00] frankly, you know, we're still learning, right? Like there's, there's a lot of stuff that we're still learning on like, , okay, what is, what is the. Exact ICP that we're going for, like how to run the most optimal sales cycle with like discovery call, the way to close, , outbound, et cetera. , and I think we, we just want to make sure that we have all of that buttoned up.

, and. Have a repeatable, like a repeatable cycle of customers coming through the door for the exact same problem, because then we can kind of like Rachit said, , add fuel on the fire and then we can hire the sales team and then the floodgates open. 

Peter Ahn: . I love that. Yeah. So many times founders try and hire somebody who can figure out demand gen product, market fit, the sales process, all of that.

And you're just not ready for that unless you know what that looks like. Right. From an iterative perspective. So I appreciate you both saying that. , well, this has been an amazing conversation. I'm so glad I had you both on. Clearly, you both are very humble, empathetic, authentic founders, which is, you know, exactly who I like to work with and who I like that.

, have on the [00:38:00] podcast. So this has been awesome. You've taught me a thing or two as well. For those of you who are listening, definitely give Rachit will a follow on LinkedIn. They're also very active on LinkedIn, which I love, which is very rare for this stage. And I'm sure you're doing that. Cause you're seeing it work, right?

Cause it's like that authentic opinion that you're disseminating and. When people get on a call, they probably feel like they know you already. So, , definitely follow their content, go check out Centralize. And yeah, I just really appreciate you both spending time with me during this busy Monday. 

Rachit: Thanks for having us.

Thanks for that. 

Peter Ahn: Really appreciate it. Yeah. I appreciate you guys. Well, we'll, we'll do round two of this with Alex maybe, and maybe we'll bring on Cailen and Will too. We forgot to give them a shout out, but thank you Cailen and Will for reintroducing me to Rachit. This has been a pleasure. 

Rachit: Likewise.

Shout out Cailen, , amazing guy. And we'll amazing salesperson. Well, both of them. Great, great, great, great. Go to market folks. You should follow them. 

Peter Ahn: Amazing. Thanks guys.

Mhm.