AI and Innovation for the B2B Technology market to find new customers, find your niche Alex Garcia

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue strategies and their 10x ROI B2B growth guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. As you know, on this show we talk with leaders, founders at SaaS, tech, and B2B services, professional services firms to talk about how they've used systems and processes to grow their business, and they can share some of those insights for you, our audience. And today I'm very excited to welcome the CEO and founder of InnuBase Solutions, Alex Garcia. He's an enterprise sales consultant with over 10 years of experience helping enterprises and startup companies to implement sales technologies of all kinds. to supercharge business processes for growth. So Alex, welcome so much to the show.

Thanks for having me, Mark. It's a pleasure.

Yeah, so that was a quick little one-liner about what you do there at Anuvate. Why don't you tell us a little more about, you know, what you actually do and what the company does?

Yeah, you know, over the last 10 years, we've been helping companies implement really best-in-class sales technologies, anything from helping people get better data into their CRMs to implementing the CRM itself. And we've had the opportunity of working with a really diverse set of clients in a number of different industries, really pushing the envelope on everything from sales automation to artificial intelligence.

Well, that's, that's really interesting. And obviously, I can't run past the topic of AI without double-clicking in there since that's You know, dominating a lot of conversations today. Tell us about what you're doing with AI.

Great.

Yeah.

And I'm glad you asked that because part of what we're doing with AI is helping people realize their own potential by implementing AI assistance within their daily workflow. Anything from Einstein to Gemini to GPT has specific implementations that can be used by companies Really, like you're saying, to supercharge their operations, their sales process, their customer service. And what we're doing is not just implementing the AI, but helping people learn how to use it and how to integrate it into their daily lives.

Interesting. So what's the biggest challenge that you see companies that, you know, want to implement AI? So, you know, let's say someone's out there listening right now and they're like, I can go get a license to ChatGPT and then just start using it. What, what, what, what are they missing that you can sort of help them uncover?

We're in the early stages of LLMs like ChatGPT and really advanced AI, but it's happening really quickly in terms of the progress that's being made. But some of the concerns that I'm hearing from our clients are really around accuracy of the results. and implementation of knowledge for these smart copilots. And so your customers are really worried about how and what data the LLMs will have access to, whether or not that data feeds back other models that, that may or may not be under the control of the company. And other is whether or not it's hallucinating, which has been a challenge historically from some of the LLMs and There's even a famous court case that a lawyer submitted a brief that was written by GPT, and GPT had hallucinated precedent. Yeah. And so that's a huge challenge for organizations, especially if you're in regulated industry. You can get fined and worse, have increased regulatory scrutiny in specific industries if you make those kinds of mistakes. And unfortunate for the gentleman, he was disbarred. So, so that's one of the largest challenges is ensuring that these AIs have access to the company's information, which is huge, and that they are contextually aware of what's going on in the situation providing the recommendation. Another is, is that, that they're being accurate, right? And that they're not making up information. And so both of those challenges are, are still challenges that some of the best minds in AI are resolving. And definitely real challenges that our company helps in with companies both by helping make the data contextual, but also helping users kind of understand how to talk to the AI better so that it provides accurate results.

Interesting. Interesting. Great topic and we could spend a lot of time. In fact, we'll probably come back to some of the generative AI and and some of the ways that you're using that later. But for the, you know, one of the things that we often talk about on the show is, you know, we're generally the audience is, you know, leaders at early stage SaaS tech, B2B services, professional services firms that are really battling sort of long sales cycles and complex buying committees with lots of different stakeholders trying to close large contracts. And they have a lot of the same challenges and challenges that I'm sure you've encountered both with growing Anubay as well as working with clients that you've worked with as you're implementing, you know, sort of technology solutions to empower their growth. So I'd love to get your perspective on some of these sort of common challenges that we see. And one of the really, you know, pervasive ones is, you know, as a founder sort of builds a company and they've got a Rolodex because they've probably worked in the industry where they're building that company and then they kind of get to the end of that Rolodex, and they're now trying to figure out, now where do I get, where do I get leads from? And where do I get good leads from where you've got a good, you know, either 3 to 1 ratio of lifetime value to the cost to acquire, or you can sort of see it pay itself back within a year. Those are some common metrics that people use to judge the quality of leads and opportunities that they're getting, and they're trying to find different channels to do this. When you were growing Anubay, or as you've seen your clients do, how have you seen people or yourself successfully scale from initial channels like, you know, your network or referrals from existing customers and things like that in order to, you know, sort of extend and expand your penetration into the market? And did you use any sort of specific tools or systems and like, you know, a customer journey map is a common tool that people use to frame their thinking around that or, you know, other things. Tell us a little bit about your journey there and how you achieved that.

That's a great question and definitely top of mind for a lot of founders is how do I break out of my own network, right? Always are also known as the climb out of obscurity to where others can find me, others can learn about our services and engage us as their customers. Very early on, we did grow a lot with customer referrals and that's because we went out of our way, made sure that we were customer obsessed in our delivery and our implementations. And so customers couldn't help but recommend us. whenever a customer, another person had a question or also when they left other companies as in tech, it generally tends to have a high turnover rate. And so we'd get people we'd work with at a number of different companies who would just come back to us because they were very satisfied with the work that we did. Besides that, we needed to invest in what was a growth engine and a revenue generating engine and The first step is, you think you hit the nail right on the head, is understanding who your customer is and how they come to the decision of purchasing your product. And if you don't know that, it's gonna be quite hard when you're looking out into a LinkedIn, or you've got access to ZoomInfo or some other kind of data source that gives you a bunch of leads essentially for you to look out for and prospect. If you don't know how your customers come to a decision in how they purchase your services, you're gonna have a harder time in identifying the individuals who are ready to buy than not. And so it's a great place to start by doing some of that customer journey mapping, some customer profiling as well. Looking at your existing customers is always kind of a great place to start, but I would also caution against that. Right? I would look at what your competitors' customers are. If there's something to be said about a lot of industries is that people like to climb to the top of the mountain and shout in loudspeakers of who they work with because it gives people credibility, right? If you've got, you know, really nice logo, you want to put that on your website. You want to put a PR release out there, right? So that people can find out, right? They climb out of obscurity. You want to climb your way out of it. and do anything you can for people to notice you, but your competitors should also be noticing that. And you shouldn't only just look at the customers that you have. You should look at the customers that your competitors are saying they have to help build that profile. Now, I don't mean to be cutthroat and go after everybody that is posted on your competitor's website, but really more data points gives us a better customer profile so that we understand where those purchasing decisions are likely to come for our software or our services. And once you have that, then there are a number of different channels that you can utilize to go and find these individuals, events being also one that we tend to kind of overlook, or it tends to be a large investment for some of the smaller organizations. But finding ways to where you can maybe do a side event or do a co-sponsor of an event just to kind of get there and be able to invite people to your event is a really huge opportunity for finding new prospects as well, because it's gonna just be— it helps you kind of as a small partner or a small vendor get your foot in the door with larger organizations who are there at these massive tech conferences, anything from like CES, right, to Salesforce's conference in San Francisco. So, you know, any of those kinds of events, Sometimes can be a huge leap for us, but it's also about finding your partners and leveraging your network to where you can get more bang out of your marketing dollars. And that's kind of one example by like a person style of expanding of your network, but also being able to do pieces online like this is a huge help for all entrepreneurs. So, you know, I'm just grateful to be here and be able to share some of that because someone else is going to hear my story that might want to work with us in the future.

D. That's right. Lots of great ideas there and a lot of great things you threw out. And I'll sort of summarize some of them that really stood out to me. I love the idea of looking at your competitors, not necessarily to go steal their clients, but to think about, and particularly for early stage companies that don't yet know what their best customers will look like, that gives them a signal of what types of companies should they be looking for. As they're building out that ideal customer profile and thinking about them. One of the things that, that we always encourage companies to do too is to not only sort of describe that ideal customer in terms of sort of firmographics, like, you know, they're of a certain size or operate in these areas or in these industries, but also to think about sort of the— what was the trigger that sent them to market? And a lot of times, whether you're looking at your customers or reading the case studies of your competitors, you can start to see a common sort of context that those businesses are operating in. And then when you understand that context, it allows you to craft sort of the messaging that will really resonate with decision makers in that particular context, which will then attract more of those right decision makers. I also love the thing that you talked about of you know, sort of looking at events, but not necessarily sponsoring the whole event, maybe building your own event within the event. And one of the things that we've seen be really successful is, you know, once you've built out kind of a customer journey to know that, well, your ideal, you know, customers are at this event and these are the sort of personas of the buyers that you want to engage with, that gives you a lot of insight to come up with kind of guerrilla marketing ways connect with them so that if you know that they're all into, you know, golf, it's easy to organize a round of golf before the day's activities start at the conference and invite them out to a local club. You can get a lot more mileage from that than 2 or 3 conference passes and probably the same cost for some of these really big expensive conferences. Likewise, I've seen, you know, companies that they'll sort of get an understanding of, you know, what their persona looks like. They know they're big fans of steak. Get a reservation at the best steakhouse in town, invite all the, you know, the people that they want to talk to there. It can go a lot further than, you know, sort of walking the floor at the conference to get those kind of one-on-one engagements with those, you know, ideal customers while they're all aggregated together at those conferences.

Yeah. And, you know, always keep in mind, right, you'll need your hunters in the conference looking for people you want to invite to your side events. And you need your gatherers at that side event being able to receive those people, walk them through your product in a way that feels welcoming and they're able to really make those relationship-based connections that are really important when it comes to decision-making for purchasing managers or anybody in decision-making roles.

That's right. Well, and I mean, in the B2B space, it's all about credibility and trust. And so you build that credibility and trust through, you know, lots of engagements with folks where you're adding value to those conversations. So that's a great way to build that. One of the things that we've seen in working with customers, and I'm sure you've probably seen this as well, is, you know, now that you know some places to reach them, it's really important to say the right things and to have that really powerful story. And so a lot of, you know, companies sometimes struggle to sort of match their story about who they are with, you know, who their customer is and the context that the customer's in. You talked about, you know, researching competitors, and I've seen that be a really powerful way to help refine a story and, you know, sort of thinking about, you know, sort of who your customers are and who you want to serve, not only from your existing customer base, but also sort of your aspirational customers. How have you seen either your company or others sort of refine their kind of go-to-market story and messaging and to really sort of validate that they've got that product market fit of they're telling the right story to the right people?

That's a great question because, you know, and I've learned that way by failing miserably, right? I think those are the best lessons that they come, right? And developing a product that had or maybe had product market fit, but maybe it wasn't the right size of market either, because you could be— that's the crazy thing about product market fit is you could have the right product for the right people, but the size of the market may not be large enough to sustain your organization. And so you really have to— that market part is really key in the product part as well, and kind of understanding the dev, the TAM, which is often used in slide deck presentations, the total addressable market.

Right.

Where you can understand the size of the scope of the market for your product, but also whether or not it's a real need as well. And that is one, often in software, it's just build it and then they will come kind of mentality or build it and then change it as you get feedback for those initial customers.

Right.

But there's nothing to be said about finding that first customer who's opening their feedback mechanisms to you and really providing you with incredible insights that sometimes you have to pay for by organizing, uh, kind of like feedback sessions or industry leadership coming in and, and as in consulting, right, for product market fit, finding that first customer who believes in the product and is willing to help you give and knows where you are also, right? If you're very early on in that development of the product, it could give you feedback for what would be valuable to them. It can be a huge, huge move for somebody who's just developing their product. It can, on the flip side, it can also pigeonhole you into the requirements of one customer. So it's a double-edged sword in terms of you can get comfortable just working for that same customer, And there may not be that many other customers. You may have a solid product, but then you've developed it far, so far that it's, you know, no longer has a large enough market for you to go after. So, you know, I hate to say it, it's a lot of different data points and then kind of understanding, you know, whether or not customers have a real pain, whether or not your product resolves that pain. Because the other problem is your product might resolve that pain, But it might cause other pains to the customer. And so it's how you resolve that, that pain for the customer that is just as important as whether or not you're resolving the pain for the customer.

Yeah.

And so it's kind of understanding what's easy in the life of the customer for resolving the problem that you're resolving and trying to emulate that as best as possible. And that's where you find your product market fit, right? The market is large enough, the product resolves the problem, and the customer is happy about how the product is resolving the problem. We live in the world now of really advanced software. Used to be able to get away with things kind of being clunky and not working and having somebody like myself fixing things in between to make sure that everything works. Now, now customers are being less forgiving about software not working at the very beginning. And so it's almost as if we're moving— you have these 2 dichotomies within product development, right? You have hardware and you have software. And software always has been release and then fix as you're releasing, because we have that flexibility. And I love that about software. Hardware, if you release something and it's buggy, consumers are less likely to forgive you than they were with software. It's been this kind of this proven thing in product management, right, in terms of the types of product that you're releasing. So know what it takes to have product market fit for your product, whether that's a software product, a hardware product. Or software, hardware, services product because I have some customers who are all 3 and kind of understanding what it means to have that fit your customer's needs because at the end of the day, your customer is purchasing your product because it resolves a problem for them.

Yeah. So, so many great insights there and I love that you brought up sort of the idea of, you know, a large enough market and the idea of a total addressable market. One of the things that people often forget is that, you know, 95% of your market is not in market at any given time. And so you have to think about that, you know, how many deals are actually being evaluated at any given time? And are you, you know, doing the right things to sort of position yourself so that when they are in market, you have the opportunity to, you know, sort of address them? And also this idea of you know, sort of picking those right customers, the ones that want to grow with you and support your product vision for, you know, building something that the market wants, not just what they want, so that you can really grow together. We've seen it can really create this sort of death spiral for companies where if they, you know, are not attracting the right prospects, prospects that don't align with their kind of product vision or kind of buying vision, Those people, they never believe in the value of the product because they never bought into the vision. So they, you know, negotiate really thin margins or, you know, really low rates. And then they require customization that, you know, sort of pulls you further behind your competitors who are innovating for the marketplace while you're just innovating for one customer. And then they wind up churning without ever providing referrals, testimonials, or, you know, growing with you. So they can really sort of kill your business if you have too many of those customers that are in that area, which has been a really interesting perspective to sort of see. That's great. So thinking of, you know, coming back to AI, and I know we've just got sort of a couple minutes left, but it's such an interesting topic. Is there, you know, sort of a piece of advice around integrating some of these AI tools into businesses today that, that you might give to other founders or entrepreneurs who are thinking about how do I, how do I get started with this? Obviously, you know, they'd love to engage you and, and have you sort of help them think through how to, you know, build it into their systems. What would be sort of one piece of advice you'd give them on just as they think about how to implement AI in their business today?

I would say start at the very top. And have your executive begin working with Copilot. The data in, in the latest versions of the AIs that are available to market is good enough to where it can help guide conversations and help come to decision-making better if provided with the right inputs. And then learn how to write to these individuals. Just like with any kind of new relationship, you gotta kind of figure out how to properly communicate with each other so that you both understand. And executives tend to be pretty good at this because they've navigated their career far enough within the human world, being able to have complex conversations, deal with complex ideas, and could have complex communication to where they are probably the best suited for beginning to make those inroads within your company and your company culture. as to how to navigate and communicate with LLMs to receive the right set of feedback. So that's one place to start. Another place, I think, from a risk factor is sales. We tend to, like, you know, have this idea that it's okay to churn through lists, and sometimes you, you get second chances in sales, and salespeople and people who are sold to tend to have a really short memory. And so if you say something that might not be correct and you wait a few months, and you can— chances are that you can reapproach that conversation with accurate information, and that you ever said anything incorrectly in the past, maybe water under the bridge, because it's a different time at that point, and the customer may be ready for purchase. And, and so sales tends to be one of those places where you have a margin of error that you can allow. And especially if you're doing inside sales, right? I mean, all of us done inside sales know that you— we turn through a number of different lists trying to get to the right people, and sometimes we don't get to those right people, and it gives us opportunities to hone our messaging. So as you're honing your messaging, you can also be honing your skills at having something else write the messaging for you. And so we've had a tremendous amount of success in our organization implementing it within the sales team because it accelerates sales and accelerates your capability to do sales, especially if you're doing international sales or sales in different languages, right? It can be a huge barrier to have to have your emails and your cadences reviewed by somebody for accuracy, whereas you can translate things now. And, you know, most people will tell you that Google Translate is pretty good, but Well, having worked internationally in a number of different languages, I would say it's about 85 or 90% of the way there. And most people don't care at that point because you're able to communicate. And that's really the most important part of it. Now, if you're submitting briefs and you're writing very diplomatic style of work, using Google Translate may not be the right solution because, again, you know, it's about 85 or 95% of the way. And sometimes you want to be 100% of the way in everything you're saying if it's sensitive. But if you're communicating in terms of like trying to book a meeting, for example, right, as an SDR, and you've got to book a meeting and you're doing it in your second language, it is a lot easier to get your voice out if someone else is doing that for you by translating and by putting it into a contextually accurate tone. Because what we lose in translation sometimes is also tone or meaning, especially since in English we have a lot of things that we have a lot of, you know, like water under the bridge, for example.

Idiomatics.

Yeah, yeah, idiomatics. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if you were to do a literal translation, people don't really understand what you're saying because it gets lost, right? So having an AI kind of check that and make things contextual in the language that you're trying to translate to is also a huge help and it saves time. And so There are a few low-risk places that you can start implementing these LLMs immediately. And then the third one is kind of like marketing graphic design, right? With a lot of— and what you're seeing a lot of now is a lot of teams being able to leverage artificial intelligence to create new images or create images and update images. And that's a— that's gonna get your designers 75 to 80% of the way in making your content. And so why not? Honestly, if they can make 4 to 5 times more content per hour by leveraging AI than not, it doesn't make sense to not let them. Yeah.

This has been an awesome conversation, Alex. Thank you so much for taking the time. We could spend probably all day talking about some of these topics, but I want to be respectful of your time. So real quick before we go, how can our listeners get in touch with you if they want to learn more about Anubay?

Yeah, well, you can visit us online at www.anubay.solutions, or we also have anubay.ai. Both point to similar places where you can easily contact us, or I'm always available through sales@anubay.solutions as an email. And so it's a .solutions, there's no .com, so sorry about that. It doesn't Work sometimes, but, you know, there's all kinds of domains now. So that's right.

That's right. Thank you again, Alex. I really appreciate your time and I know that our audience will get a lot out of the conversation.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.