Futureproof by Xano
Futureproof by Xano is a podcast for technical builders, entrepreneurs, and engineering leaders who want to stay ahead of what’s next.
Hosted by Xano’s CEO & Co-Founder Prakash Chandran, each episode features conversations with innovators and industry experts who are shaping the future of technology, business, and product development.
Futureproof by Xano
The Role of AI in GTM — Derek Evjenth, Adobe
If AI can find the lead and write the email… what still separates the best GTM teams from everyone else?
In this episode of Futureproof, Xano CEO Prakash Chandran talks with Derek Evjenth, longtime go-to-market leader and current enterprise sales lead at Adobe, about what it really takes to build a successful GTM strategy in the age of AI. Derek draws on his journey from bootstrapped founder at Second Media to Salesforce enterprise rep, startup advisor, and now Adobe leader to explain why mastering fundamentals still beats chasing shortcuts. Together, they dig into how AI changes research and outreach, where human connection still wins, how to manage change inside sales orgs, and why maybe, just maybe, AI isn’t the secret to the last mile of selling.
Topics covered include:
- Fundamentals over shortcuts: Why a clear sales process, ICP definition, and stage discipline matter more than any single AI tool.
- AI as a force multiplier, not a closer: How AI can collapse hours of research into minutes — but can’t replace real conversations, trust, and in-person connection.
- The new AI-literate seller: Why BDRs, SDRs, and AEs need prompt engineering, call recording, and data hygiene as part of their core skill set.
- Beyond the sale: How post-sale partnership, call insights, and customer success alignment turn wins into long-term, referenceable relationships.
Episode ID: 18298698-the-role-of-ai-in-gtm-derek-evjenth-adobe
Subscribe to Futureproof wherever you get your podcasts.
From Xano - The fastest way to create a production-ready backend for any app or agent. Xano unifies AI speed, code control, and visual clarity, so you never trade reliability for velocity. Sign up for free today.
What is a bold prediction about AI's role in go to market in the next five years?
SPEAKER_00:It's not going to be nearly as important as we think it's going to be.
SPEAKER_02:Today, in his role at Adobe, he continues to bring a unique perspective on how enterprises adopt new technologies. With multiple head of sales roles under his belt, Derek has built a reputation for helping organizations drive growth, embrace AI, and build resilient, high-performing sales cultures. Derek, welcome, man.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, Pakosh. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'm also happy to say that I you're someone that I um I've known for years at this point. I respect uh a great deal, and uh I'm just very excited for this conversation. So thank you so much for making the time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, likewise. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. So I thought we would maybe start with like your founding story for the audience that doesn't know who you are. Maybe talk a little bit about your background leading up to the role that you hold today.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I think it's probably important to call out that I mean, I've been in competitive sports my entire life. I played ice hockey, grew up at a young age, had a real passion for it. It drove me to go and play high school hockey in Massachusetts, and then I was recruited to college. I honestly think that played a huge foundation of just my overall just competitiveness, team effort, everything that you need to be able to compete in sales. So upon graduating, went to San Francisco, uh, joined a media company that owned and operated about 10 to 15 different websites, all within public safety. So I got my first, let's call it, account executive job for two years there. This is 2008 to 10. Um, some incredible companies were being founded at that time. You know, Facebook was not even a household name at that point, really. Um and San Francisco was contagious. Lived in the city, was around a bunch of other, you know, great people. It's still an amazing city for starting companies. And so I always wanted to be a founder. I wanted it really bad. Um, I was in my mid-20s and you know, kind of stumbled upon from the first company I was out of being in a publishing space and selling advertising, that there was a huge opportunity to build an ad network in spaces that Google and Yahoo and other niche players didn't exist. And so we went after outdoors, so camping, hunting, hiking. I think of just like the outdoors person. Um, and we did this research. We found out that there were there was not an ad network that existed. And we thought about raising money, we talked to a couple of folks, and we ultimately just looked in the mirror and we're like, we could do this. Like, we can bootstrap this company. I went with two other co-founders, two of my best friends, and we honestly started with nothing. I mean, I think I had$5,000 to my name, pretty, you know, pretty inexpensive apartment at the time. And we just we just grinded and it was crazy. We were profitable after six months. And um, you know, revenue solves a lot of problems. When you, you know, the quicker you can get to revenue, the quicker you can get away from a lot of the problems that you have. Um, and you know, a lot of companies we were in the right place at the right time when I think about it. Of we were uh in a space that was digital. A lot of the budgets were moving from print and radio and in-person into more of a digitally native environment. And we kind of just hit the wave. Um, I know I'm going long on this, but I think it's important. Of we made the Inc. 5000 three times. We had a successful exit in 2015 to a larger ad network that bought us. Um, I stayed on five years post-acquisition. So 10 years of my life were dedicated to Second Media, chosen 10 to 20. Um, and then I wanted to I wanted to cut my teeth at a at a large company. So, where else better than Salesforce? Uh, went to their enterprise sales team, was there for about a year and a half, and then coincidentally had a really good opportunity to go back into startups and spent about five years advising, building companies from seed to series E, working with founders, CROs, just side by side. And a lot of the experience I pulled from doing it myself for 10 years all the way to having incredible architecture and help from you know a giant like Salesforce. Um did that for five years, had a great, you know, great run, met great people like you, got into the weeds, and then most recently, about four months ago, had a had an insanely great opportunity to join Adobe and a bunch of people that I know over there. And that's that's the origin story.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I love that. And I think like it's it's unique to talk to someone that has kind of like spread the entire life cycle of like entrepreneurship. Like you've operated yourself, you've gone through a sale, uh, you've worked at a big company like Salesforce, you've led sales over there, you've gone back to consulting and played that game for a while, and now are at kind of like a very prestigious, like really notable brand doing the same thing over there. So, like in all of that experience and the wealth of experience that you have, the first thing that I wanted to ask you before hopping into AI stuff is like, what do you feel like the common threads are around like building kind of go-to-market teams across like startups and like the advice that you've kind of given in your consulting days to now your role at Adobe?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It is so like this goes for large companies, this goes for small companies, this goes for everything. If you've got to master the fundamentals, like it's hard. Like what we do is hard. And if you don't have a really good base of fundamentals, it's it's just an extreme, there is no shortcut in what we do. It doesn't matter if you're selling the hottest AI product or if you're selling a legacy tool, you have to understand and be really good at the fundamentals. And that also goes for if you're a sales rep or a sales leader and things aren't going your way, go back to the fundamentals. Like everything starts there. And that's I've been, I've had a really unique career. I've been at early stage companies, I've been at large, and that is the common theme of for all the best folks that I look up to and those that ask for advice, gotta be really good at fundamentals.
SPEAKER_02:So when you say fundamentals, what do you mean by that? Like I think I know what you mean, but like for those listening, like what are those fundamentals that even in a world with AI where AI is seemingly doing everyone's job, which I'm sure we'll get into, what are the fundamentals that are the most important?
SPEAKER_00:Fundamentals are as simple as what's your process? If you most companies, if you're if you're buying into a medic or a band, you know, depending on who you are, figure out what are our fundamentals? What do we sell to? How do they behave? What are their tendencies? What are the key characteristics of my product that I'm selling that can solve the problems of the people I'm selling it to? Like really basic fundamental understanding of your own sales process. And there are lots of little steps and nuances in each one. Most companies will let's call it six stages, right? Like from qualification to sold. Got to be really good at each one of those details. And some sales cycles are a month if you're really transactional. You're in a larger company, six to twelve months, and you cannot miss steps. You want to land really large, chunky eight-figure deals, it it takes time, it takes focus, and like you have to be really good on each process and then the steps and the fundamentals of each one of those.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think that uh oftentimes we forget, and I I would even include myself in the equation, how important those fundamentals are just to get right before we can try all of the growth hacking and trickery that that seems to be out there. And I think a company that doesn't understand oneself uh and those fundamentals is just in a world of hurt before they start kind of putting their foot on the gas. So, you know, uh speaking of those kind of tools, um, especially kind of in the world that of AI that we live in, I think you have a unique perspective because the context in which I met you was consulting with a customer that was ahead of its time, like trying to put together, you know, basically an AI knowledge base to consolidate a lot of different inputs from across the organization and make them useful to a lot of people in the company. So you have been exposed to and working uh with companies that have been thinking about AI for a long time. And from that time, there's been even like a hype cycle that's uh maybe some would argue is still happening right now, uh, to kind of a sobering that is starting to happen in terms of like tool adoption, what AI is really good for, and how it applies to go to market. So I'd love to hear your experience and your thoughts from that initial customer that we were working with and maybe like take us back two years ago to kind of the patterns and themes that you're seeing roll out or unfold today.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, we started Second Media, you know, we we we go and we buy a simple CRM. You need a database, you need somewhere as a repository to keep your information and and to keep to keep organized, understand that. And we didn't at that time, and I look at it now, I'm like, this is crazy. Like we've gone through all these cycles of every email was one-to-one. I remember going, and I think Salesforce bought it, it was like database.com, and it was a crowdsourcing. So to get precautions email, I had to give away somebody else's email. And in return, I get a token, I get your email. And it was a very one-to-one. And then you you come into the mid-2015s to like 20s, and all of a sudden sales off comes out, and Zoom info is coming in at that point, and I can now grab thousands of emails and I can just blast away. Then Google gets in the mix and they're like, hey, hey, like you can't send 10. A human cannot possibly send 10,000 emails in two minutes. So we we've sales is somewhat, you know, we splashed the pot. We made the sales experience bad. It used to be this one-to-one, and then it goes to this mass email. And think about our emails now. Just like we have this blindness that an email comes in, like delete, immediately delete. Um, and I feel like there's a contraction now happening where the days of growth marketing and sales of sending out all these emails, we hope that we send 10,000, we get 10%. Well, that went down to like 5%, now to 1%. And it's even worse than that now because nobody's buying like that. These tools, you know, especially AI, can help a lot. And it goes back to the fundamentals again. It's for example, like Xano, who do you sell to? Okay, that's our ICP. This is our ideal customer profile. This is their title. This is typically who reports to them. We're getting all this information. The AI is incredible about taking away hours of my day that would normally be dedicated to finding that person on LinkedIn, finding them in the company, what have they done? What do their company financials look like? Like I can compile all of that by building prompt engineering into what I'm doing to build these profiles, and then I can send an email. But there's so much work that used to go into that hours a day of research, um, that now AI is great at streamlining. But like I can tell you, AI will never replace one-to-one human contact. People buy from people they like, people buy from people that have commonality, common, you know, common friends within the industry as we all get older, we have a lot of connections. Like there is so much AI cannot replace.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. What do you feel? What do you think about like people that talk about like the SDR role and AI just completely, you know, handling that from, you know, just uh, you know, emulating kind of an agent with like noise in the background to make it seem like the people are speaking to a human? Have you kind of heard of that? And do you have thoughts around like, you know, kind of the uh agentic SDR or the AI SDR?
SPEAKER_00:I think it's completely situational to the company that the agent or the SDR is working for. If it's very transactional and you're buying a widget that I can buy right now and I can just sign up for and I can use it, maybe it's like email automation or very something really like low-level simple. You could scale a company with some AI SDRs, they can do a lot of the work for you. As you get to mid-market, get into the enterprise and really complex buying cycles, like it does, it's not gonna work. A decision maker at a very large company that's a couple hundred million in revenue, like they're a sophisticated buyer, they know what they're looking for, and they need someone who has done a ton of research on them, is pulling LinkedIn connections and say, hey, I know Prakash at Xano, saw you guys went to college together, would love to have a chat. Here's what I want to talk about. Like AI, maybe someday could do that. But at the same time, they're not gonna be, and if you put your LinkedIn there, you Prakash aren't gonna go talk to someone who doesn't exist. Like it just breaks when you get into the larger complex cycles. I do believe, though, in general, if you're new in your career, you're taking your first job in sales and you're a BDR and SDR, you've got to have a prompt engineering background. Like you go learn it, go to YouTube, go play with products, start playing around with prompts, use Chat GPT. Like all of these things are going to be required of your job, and it's gonna make you faster. Like it will get you to the point. Because if you know who you're going after, you can get all this information about them, you can write a really personalized email.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I definitely think that there is like an emerging theme around AI literacy. And in some ways, like people that are kind of more set in their ways in industry that kind of maybe uh boo-hoo some of these like AI tools are really getting left behind because we're kind of coming uh into an age where like the new graduates and uh the new generation is like AI native. They're leveraging all of these tools and they can be so much more productive. Um yeah, like speaking about like uh the go-to-market side of things, you know, it sounds like where you have seen the value is kind of in the research step, right? Like taking away those hours of like, hey, I like get the fundamentals right, but once you're opinionated on your ICP, that profile, you can leverage AI to help you do the research, but you still have to do the work. Um, outside of research, have there been any kind of AI implementations that you've seen that have like moved the needle, whether it be in sales or marketing or otherwise?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, when I started consulting for about three years, the whole point was to come in and try to remove some of the older process that had been sitting there for a while. And you're 100% right. You gotta be AI native at this point. These tools are awesome. They're so good. And if you take a little bit of time, I've learned people don't like disruption workflows. It's really hard. Like if you're used to a certain system, even if it's completely broken fundamentally and you know it, you still gotta get your job done every day. And so tactically, people are looking at their day-to-day, they're just like, I gotta get, I gotta do this, I gotta do this. But if they're a little bit more strategic in how their thinking is to say, okay, if I can kind of offload some of this old workflow, for example, I'm going one-to-one on emails, I'm I'm doing all this research manually online, like playing around. There's amazing tools out there where we could prompt all of those little attributes and those little data points that you're looking for to have a great, meaningful conversation, you can prompt that into what you're doing and serve it right up. And we did that at a lot of different companies. We I worked with 12 companies for about three years, series, seed all the way to Series E. And the change management is not fun. People don't like that. But as soon as you're like, hey, the incremental gains here, 10% of your day back, 20% of your week back, your numbers start to look a little bit better. You're having more meaningful conversations. Then all of a sudden, at the end of the day, for especially for a salesperson, it's numbers. It is, did I sell more? And this rolls up to a sales leader and to a CRO of is my is my team performing better? And when you inflict a little bit of that AI into their life, really helpful. And then it's easier to expand into like way more complex AI workflows uh that are coming in. So it does take a little bit of force management.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I will, I was just gonna uh talk to you about this because I think that there's a narrative out there being like, you know, overnight uh all companies are going to adopt AI and the landscape will completely shift. But I think what we see is more of what you're talking about. I think there's a change uh management consideration and uh, you know, mid-market enterprise organizations being a little bit slower to adopt. Um, I guess I have two questions. One is why do you, why do you think that is? And number two, like in the hype cycle that like AI is gonna change everything, what are you seeing as like, hey, like let's pump the brakes? That's not necessarily true and not what you're seeing in the market.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, look, uh, think about it like a mountain, right? When you look at the bottom of the mountain, that's where your startups are. Like they're the early adopters, they're willing to test things, they're willing to inflict whatever they can do to make a little bit of an incremental gain. And as you go up that mountain, you get up closer to like the laggards. Think about large companies that have really complex data governance and security compliance, they're not gonna use some of these young tools because they're not brand safe, they don't have the integrity that a larger enterprise tool would have. And so, like, you really got to pick where you are on that spectrum of who's gonna be able to use what. Um, you know, in terms of you know, your second question, it's you know, it's it's these are like these are really hard problems. But I go back to like I think about, I don't know if you read anything from Tomas Tungas at Theory Ventures, but you wrote this really interesting article about the 10x engineer. And if you think about these really cool coding tools that are out here, they can write like 94% of the code really, really fast within like hours. And then the engineer who's extremely experienced comes in and kind of is that last mile delivery. I look at the same exact theory as, and I want to be a 10x salesperson. I want my teams and people I work around me to be 10x. And it's like, how do you take these tools and do 95% of the work automated for you, the way you like to work? And then at the end of the day, what we get paid for is all of the art. It's that last 5% is so hard. Do you have endemic industry experience? Do you understand the things that are going on? Can you take this offline? Can we go to dinner and can we have the same conversation when you don't have your computer in front of you? And that's where the best salespeople that I look up to are insanely good in real life. They can present really well. AI will never replace that. It won't replace the dinners, it won't replace the in-person events, the amount of pressure you have on you when you have six C-suite people staring at you and you're presenting. You're just trying to get to that point. So that 10X sales is really, I think, what we're all trying to achieve.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. It it almost seems like AI is really a tool to like help for those that use it, like help people find each other a little bit better. And there's obviously a lot of nuance around how that's done, but certainly in sales, that's the case. And then that, like you said, the last mile, the last little bit, nothing can replace that human connection. Um, I'm wondering, like, you know, both in on the consulting side and even at the organizations that you've worked at, uh, whether it be Adobe or otherwise, how are you considering these AI tools and which ones to implement the change management around them and the real use cases to go after? Because you're obviously talking about like, you know, how can you be a 10x salesperson? I'm sure you're thinking about that for your teams. Um, but in practice, how do you see that actually implemented?
SPEAKER_00:I I think, you know, in consulting, you're working with companies that are really nimble. Like they can make, they can make a move in a second. You start looking at larger companies. You know, when I spent time at Salesforce, like that is a giant, giant container ship, and they don't, you know, you can't move that quickly. So, like when you're looking from the consulting side, you know, I kind of just look at the architecture of the tech sec. What are these workflows? Okay. Do we have a CRM? Do we have an email tool? Do we have an outreach tool? Do we have a database tool to go and get emails? You know, you got to have like a sure, tried and true set um that you can use every single day and you can move with speed. Startups have to move with speed. You raise money, you typically a normal startup's raising what, 18 months of runway? Like you're 18 months away from death. And you have to run at that as fast as you possibly can. If something's broken, fix it to fix it now. And everybody in the org has to act like that. And sales, you know, we we live and die by the sword. Like we're judged on one thing and it's revenue. So the quicker we can drive revenue is all that matters. You know, larger companies, like I said, like the hard the hardest part of inflicting change is security, where there's a lot of companies that get hacked. And if you don't have a really secure architecture within your tech stack, nobody wants, nobody wants that. And so they got to be really cautious. And larger companies typically buy larger, mature tools that are tried and true. Maybe they'll sprinkle a little bit of of that in. Like, you know, I see copilot is everywhere, but copilot wasn't first to market. There were plenty of other tools, but co-pilot is brand safe, it's secure, it's backed by Microsoft. Like, you're not going to get fired for buying that tool. But if you buy a younger tool and it doesn't work or it doesn't perform or it doesn't scale with 10,000 salespeople, it's a problem.
SPEAKER_02:One of the things that I've noticed, and I'm wondering what your take is here, is that there is kind of a new breed of like application development leader who might have traditionally been like trusted tool only, maybe top right of a Gartner quadrant, that has become a lot more open-minded because of AI and how fast the market is moving. It almost feels like they're like, look, we obviously security, that top-of-the-mountain governance, we need this. However, we need to also figure out a way to start capitalizing on all of the efficiency gains that we're seeing further down market. So what results is like an openness and a willingness to like consider maybe tools that they wouldn't have considered before. Are you seeing this as well?
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:This this comes down to being really tight. And from a sales perspective, if I understand this persona, I have to know their environment. I need to know where they come from, how many other companies are they at that they used, what tools did they use, what is their architecture now, and then build an insanely good business value assessment on how my tool can increase their efficiency, decrease costs, um, go through all the value metrics. But like that comes from really good deep discovery. And I think that starts day one. If you can build the relationship, if you're lucky enough to get that person on the phone call, do not waste a second, which is where AI comes in, right? Of like, if I could know as much as I possibly can from the open web about this person before I have the conversation, and then when I'm in, when I get 30 minutes of that valuable time, my questions aren't watered down questions around, where'd you come from? Tell me your origin story, what school did you go to? Like, I know that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I want to know what's your pain? What are your key metrics for fiscal year 26? What are you personally trying to get out of this? What is your company going through? Like, tell me all the intricacies that you're I'm not gonna find on the open web. And then I can I can pair that business value assessment to make a really good case that you should work with us. And here's why. And I'm your partner on this together.
SPEAKER_02:You know, there's gonna be like CIOs and application development leaders listening to this and making considerations uh across or for their organization. And especially on the go-to-market side, what I'm hearing from you is there's two things that are important. The first is obviously mastering the fundamentals and making sure there's alignment uh around your processes, your people, how you go about things with or without AI. The second thing is leveraging AI to help accelerate that. Like to your point, when you're talking to someone, you can have a more in-depth and valuable conversation because you've leveraged AI to do that. So I think for like, you know, someone that's considering the software that they should be implementing, something that can help that first part of it. Are there other any other tools or practices that you would encourage like these organizational leaders to think about when it comes to go to market or sales that you've seen work well?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I work, I've worked with the C-suite my entire career, CMOs, CIOs, you name it. I respect their time so much that, and to me, it's table stakes. Like if you're asking for their time, come with as much point of view as you possibly can in an email so that if you get that call, like think about all the emails people get and say, Can I have 30 minutes of your time? Can I have 30 minutes of your time? If they actually took, if a CIO took everybody's time, they would have no time. Yeah. They right. And if and if they and I I laugh too, because if if they actually accepted everybody and said, hey, we'll cut it down by 50%, or we're gonna cut this by 95%, at some point, do they like not even have to do anything? Like it's just that's not the way products work. And CIOs should take a lot of pride in protecting their time. Every C-suite person should. And when they see these emails come in, if it's super personalized and this person looks like they did a lot of their homework, and the other one that's out of a salesperson's control, is is it the right time for that CIO to be considering this? And right now, they should AI initiatives at every company are top-down. CEOs are saying, go out, do not come back to me with a business, you know, run the business plan for next year unless it has some type of AI that can show me some efficiency gains. Like three years ago, when all the money was all out there, it was growth at all costs, right? Like, here's a hundred million dollars, grow as fast as you can. Now the money's a little tighter. Like the markets are are are harder. And when you get this, these funds, it is efficiency at all costs. How can you build a really great company, keep headcount low, keep your tech stack really, really tight? And of course, like you're gonna have gaps. Okay. Find the products that fill those gaps.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think that's it. I I think at the end of the day, like the theme of this conversation and also what I see in the market is like there's a lot of hype around all these tools solving all of these different problems and a lot of magic trick type demos. But at the end of the day, you really have to look uniquely at your own organization, what the processes are and the efficiencies that you can uh curtail or make more efficient or optimize leveraging some of these AI tools. Um, you know, I think as a sales leader and kind of uh a bar that you kind of hold your team to, you know, it's clear that obviously there's a lot of front-loaded research that's done so you can get to that last 5% that you're talking about. Let's say you get to that last 5%, you close the deal. Do you have any thoughts around like the customer success and the continued relationship afterwards? And if AI plays a role there at all. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I take a ton of pride in this, in myself not being transactional. This isn't like, hey, sell the deal, see you later. I'm gonna go get my paycheck and then take off. Like, I hate that. I want them to be able to call me. I want them to be able to text me. And I partner with customer success, with our teams that we offload. And this one's a really critical one of all the work that you did, pre-sales, mid-sales, all the way to that post-sale should be in a really nice type area that I can hand off to my customer success. So that when that CIO or whoever I'm selling to is then handed off, they don't have to restart the relationship. I think it's like a really critical part, especially in complex tools that are going to take a little bit of implementation, are going to take some time to set up. Like that sale point is almost midpoint. If you want them to be a referral customer, be happy, do some collaborative marketing after, it's got to go all the way until value realization. It's got to be all the way to the end so that they can come back and sit on stage and be like, hey, Pracosh, hey, Derek, like I actually really enjoyed our sales cycle. You got me, you understood the pain points. We did architecture. You showed me exactly where this product fits. It accomplished it. It was a pretty good, you know, run in terms of implementation, value realization. I'm sitting here now saying, this works. And here are the efficiency gains. It saved my job. I got a promotion, all those things. Like sales is everything from soup to nuts.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. It also seems like there's um, you know, like you said, there's a lot of pre-work that AI can help in terms of informing the type of conversation that you should have on the front end. But also, even afterwards, when you have, for example, a number of customers where you're solving real problems, um, you know, you have key insights, you have touch points in your QBRs, um, leveraging AI to, you know, collate or aggregate some data and around like the shared insights that they may uh share or the opportunities that it highlights. Do you find that or are there any tools that you use like internally with your teams to say, hey, like here's what we're hearing from our customers, here are the problems that we're solving. How can that lead to either you know feature development or other opportunity for us?
SPEAKER_00:100%. Record calls as long as both parties are okay with it. I think recording calls across the board, you can drop that into a chat GPT, you can drop that into a copilot. And AI does a really good job of digesting and then giving you snackable bites. And this comes down to really good questions. Ask really pointed questions, nothing open-ended, and start cataloging that, looking at it. I and I'm somewhat surprised sometimes with how really good when you take a call transcript and you put it into AI and then it spits you out a business plan, a next step, an action plan. That right there just saved me 30 minutes, right? Of I could go and write it, or it's right in front of me, and then I just manipulate it a little bit to make sure it's in my voice, in my tone, and is directionally sound. But like, please record calls. It's I think it's also uh it's just courtesy too. Because I don't want to have to come back to someone and say, hey, I think you said this.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_00:That's a fun in my mind, that's a fundamental. Like, that is a fundamental right now that I still see people not doing, which is why really yeah. I mean, in consultant, they're they're not call recording. Yeah, and they're not pulling the transcripts. That's that is really valuable data that you can put into your CRM that you can put into customer books. That I'm not always going to be on this account. And as you grow your company cross and you have a hundred salespeople and you're asking for feedback to say across the board, across our customers, what are they saying? And you could literally pull on an AI lever to be like, this is the top five percent of the of the problems, or these are the top five things we solve across thousands of sales calls or customer service calls, like fundamental.
SPEAKER_02:I wanna, there's like kind of a segment that we like to do called like what's in your toolbox or your AI toolbox. And I always find whatever like I'd meet up uh with you for like coffee or lunch, you'd always have a new tool. You'd always say something like Prakash, are you using this or are you using that? And I was just like, where do you where do you find these things? So um I'd just be interested to hear, are there tools that you either currently use like day-to-day, uh, especially in the AI world that have helped you, or even if they're not necessarily like AI specific, just like that have like really increased your productivity in the areas that we're talking about?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, where I am now, we're Microsoft driven, so co-pilot is our is our uh choice of where we're going. But like the last couple of years with consulting, like I really like Sybil. Sybil is a really good tool, and it's it's it's like a multi-tool, right? Of A, call recording, B, transcription. And then the best part is it it has an integrator into your Salesforce or your HubSpot. Another fundamental, people just don't put those into their source of truth. Wherever the source of truth is, if if you're getting questioned as a salesperson or if you're questioning on a QBR and you're a sales leader, if it's all in one place, it's neat, it's tight, your notes are updated. Sybil is great. Um there's a lot of good tools that do that. I think I mentioned that one to you. Um, you know, that and again, if you're a really good salesperson, you're asking the right questions, it's filling out the fields and objects within your CRM. So what's your architecture? Person says all those things. You know, what is your fiscal year? Fills that out for you. Like if you can get really good at vocally prompting your own call transcriber, it's filling it out for you. That just saved you a ton of work on the back end. So I love that tool. There's one that's out there now. Fixer is really awesome for email. They're like one of the hottest companies out of Europe right now. I know the guys spent a ton of time in um spent a lot of time in San Francisco. That one's really hot right now. Again, not something I can use, but if I'm at a if I'm at a startup, I'm definitely looking at tools like that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I've heard about that.
SPEAKER_00:Um yeah, they're they're on a ripper right now. And that one's like very PLG. That is pretty easy. You can I can you and I could sign up right now. It's and I think that having that frictionless, depending on the product, like having a very frictionless sign-up, time to values really quick, like that's an easy uh you know, AI SDR range. If you're getting really into the weeds, super technical, you're someone like a Wiz, you're someone like Sierra, these really deep tech companies, that's as that's you know, sales cycles are four to eight months, really deep technical architecture. Like that's not not a lot of AI is gonna save you. And that that is complete um industry expertise and understanding what you're doing. So yeah, I'd say Sybil is really great for call recording, fixer's great for email. Um good old LinkedIn, you know?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Where did Prakash go to college? That one always works for me. It's like, hey, you know, go Mustangs, or you know, if you're at a big school like Notre Dame, go Irish. Yeah. Just little tiny things like that. Like I look at LinkedIn all the time. Just I I love knowing where people's backgrounds are from and and where is my commonality with them?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Couldn't agree more. That's awesome. Um, it just led me to ask like one more question, just I guess, around um leads these days. And you talked about Fixer and you know the PLG motion. You know, I noticed that it feels like how sales are past leads is also changing. Like I think that it feels like a lot of people are uh, like, for example, you mentioned Fixer. I saw, I found out about them through an Instagram story. Um, I feel like the way we're finding out about these tools are just like fundamentally different now. Like we're looking at social media, we're looking at uh LinkedIn, we're looking at the communities. Um, I'm curious, like in your consulting and even kind of working at a larger organization, do you find that the nature of leads and how you're passed them uh has changed?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, like you gotta understand where your personas live, where they live. Like what what channels are they on? When we're in second media and we have banner ads on a CNN.com, that is so hard because I'm not in the mindset to go to CNN to look for email security or for a tool. Like I am mentally not there. And there's a lot of banners and there's blindness. Okay, you're scrolling now in LinkedIn. Their ads are pretty cool. They do like uh, you probably saw the cartoon one. I think it was a guy sleeping or something, and they had their logo. Like, I've seen it. They're doing a good job. Like they're doing a really good job. And it's also such a simple product, yeah. Very simple in nature, that yeah, do I want email automation? Do I want someone to write it while I'm sleeping? All of that. Yeah, that's like super helpful. Um, leads are tough. Marketing's job is really hard. Every every persona is somewhere different. When you go up market, you have you could have 30 people that weigh in on decision.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And you have different influencers, challengers, decision makers, all of that. Like that's really challenging, but you got to build the brand. And the more that you build the brand, like I don't find that wasted. The brand marketing is so important. Yeah. From your logo to the colors. Like, because when I'm in the mindset now that I'm like, oh, I need something for email, I'm like, I've seen Fixer a couple times. I've seen the logo. Like, I have a brand affiliation to that, and I feel more comfortable to go take a look.
SPEAKER_02:Totally. Um, okay, so just into wrapping up lightning around here. So starting with what is one belief about enterprise software or go-to-market strategy that most people wouldn't necessarily agree with?
SPEAKER_00:In-person connections are not that valuable. They're they are they are everything. Like every connection you make is gonna lead you into something good and think about the tree that that builds.
SPEAKER_02:You're saying, yeah, so in-person, the most valuable thing that you can do. Um totally makes sense. What is a common misconception about uh enterprise sales leaders or teams that you want to debunk?
SPEAKER_00:That more salespeople equals more revenue. That is not that is not true.
SPEAKER_02:I like it. Um what is a bold prediction about AI's role in go to market in the next five years?
SPEAKER_00:It's not gonna be nearly as important as we think it's gonna be.
SPEAKER_02:And then finally, um, if you had like a one-sentence piece of advice to go to market leaders navigating this world of AI hype, what what might you say?
SPEAKER_00:You know, one part of me is like shoot or shoot. So get out there and make mistakes as fast as you can. And the other part of me says, you gotta see the forest through the trees. Yeah. You know, it's a very difficult landscape to navigate right now. So I think there's part of me is like all gas, no breaks, keep going, go as hard as you can and and go and break things and and like move as fast. But then you gotta have a little bit of caution as well.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think it's like that the importance of finding signal in all of this is um is critical. And I think the only way you can find signal is understanding like where the noise is to find the signal. And you just have to be experimenting, you have to be using the tools, you have to be seeing is there something there? And then most importantly, which you articulated earlier, is mapping that directly to your business, to your persona, to how your business processes work. Um, so I think just like this conversation has been a lesson, at least for me, in fundamentals and making sure that, you know, uh we focus on them and really using tools only as leverage to uh enhance certain parts of those processes. So um really appreciate your time and energy. Is there anything else you want to leave our audience with before we sign off?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I mean, look, I appreciate your time. All this stuff is hard. Like building companies, working in established companies, like it's it's all really complex and it's really tough. And leverage the tools that are in front of you. If you see areas of improvement, go and make that. Um, but like don't take your eyes off the prize. Really understand who you're selling to, how they behave, what they like, where where they interact, and and really what's important to them. Because it, if you can't get that connect, you're not you're gonna miss a lot of signals. Signals are everything. You're looking for it out there. And like that's where the best companies are right now. They found the pain and they're twisting the knife, and their product is really good, and they're just dumping everything into it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:We are in a time right now where companies are getting to 20 million bucks in revenue in three or four months,$100 million in a year, which is just insane. Like the velocity right now, and to me, that's really good AI, it's really good product solving, uh, solving a really good problem. And people that just have really good domain expertise of understanding what they're doing, and they're just completely fixed on that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah, totally. Um, well, thank you again, man. Really appreciate the time and uh look forward to the next time I see you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, let's go. Coffee in Palo Alto next time.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'll learn about a new tool. Thanks.
SPEAKER_00:Sounds good.
