Garth Fasano: How Raynmaker Is Revolutionizing Full-Cycle Sales Automation with AI

Business. Business. Business. Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market is sponsored by Fulcast and Silicon Slopes. My name is Amy Cook, and I'm so excited to introduce Garth Fossano, president and co-founder of RainMaker. Garth, how are you? Doing great.

Thanks so much for having me on, Amy.

Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really excited to chat with you. You know, backstage we had a little chat, and I'm so excited to delve into the topic that we're all talking about, AI. But first, tell me a little bit about your background. How did you get started?

Yeah, I ended up in call center work early on in my career, worked at some big companies like Deloitte and BCG doing transformation projects for some of the biggest companies in the US and in the world. Sort of notable project was integrating 4,000 agents working for one business and 4,000 working for another post-M&A. And so have a lot of experience seeing sales and service at scale. I got involved with Rainmaker about 3 years ago. Where we were running a call center for small businesses. And pretty shortly after I got involved with that, AI started transforming everything in sales and service. And so it's been a really exciting ride. And I think we have a pretty fun perspective on how to help small business owners with AI and sales in the future.

You know, I love, I love what you're talking about because number one, AI is on everybody's mind from the large enterprise down to the small business. And oftentimes a small business is more agile, and willing and able to adopt a technology more quickly. And I feel like sometimes we need it the most, right? Absolutely.

I mean, here's— you're dead on and right that in small business, in many ways it's much easier to implement. One of the recent studies showed that many AI transformation projects are actually not succeeding in enterprises. And one of the takeaways was that you know, the ones that are succeeding are replacing an end-to-end process, not just augmenting a legacy workflow. And so what the takeaway isn't that AI doesn't work. The takeaway is that it needs to be implemented carefully and in the right way and really replace an end-to-end system versus layering on top of it. That's hard for enterprises to do. There's a lot of people running these systems, there's a lot of integrations, but for a small business it's much easier. And so I think that that's actually a really interesting way that, you we're going to see a lot of changes happening more quickly.

I absolutely believe that. What has been your experience coming up in the, you know, call centers and the SDRs, and how is that changing today? I hear all the time that SDRs are dead. There's no— it's not worth people even being in that profession anymore. What's your thought about that?

Okay, I have a lot of thoughts, but the big one is like, I watch— somehow I'm targeted by all of the ads for AI SDRs and AI sales, because that's obviously the space that we're involved in.

Right.

I watch a lot of demos and what I consistently see is that it's actually just lead qualification and then handing over to someone else to close the deal. And, you know, that might be a little bit more on the B2B enterprise side, but that doesn't actually feel like it's solving the whole problem. Like, why are we handing this off now? I did see a new one recently that actually has an avatar that joins Zoom calls, presents PowerPoint slides or decks, and shows the right slide. But again, it still hands it off to a sales rep. For us, we think again that that's another one of those places where we're just augmenting or layering on top of an existing workflow instead of really replacing it. And so the opportunity we see is for small businesses to actually complete the end-to-end sales process. So we have an AI voice solution, and we think that this is the direction more and more are going to go, but maybe are a little bit nervous to push this far. That will actually close the deal, book an appointment for the small business operator on the calendar and their end consumer's calendar and take a payment. So we want to take it all the way from a lead to cash for a small business. And if we're able to do this in the small business space, there's no reason that this isn't going to happen at the enterprise level either.

Let's talk about this and let's also talk about price points because— and then I also want to talk about, you know, kind of like the traditional flow is, you know, there's, there's an inbound lead that comes in and then there's also a lot of outbound from the SDRs, right? They talk to somebody, either inbound or outbound, they qualify the lead, they pass it off to an outside sales representative, and they carry it all the way to the end, right? That's kind of our traditional flow. So what does your solution do? And walk me through each step.

Absolutely. So we, our solution starts at when the lead is created. So either a, and let's, let's pick, like we work with a lot of home services companies, think like home cleaning, pest control, lawn care. So something like that. You fill out a lead form online or you do an outbound phone call as a consumer to one of these businesses. That's where our solution starts. So it either immediately pick up the inbound phone call, 100% answer rate, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, which no small business can really implement effectively in any other way. If it's a web form, it'll generate an outbound call and then we will ask questions as a consumer, just like a really good discovery process that someone would do, like uncover pain points, understand their real reasons for you know, filling out a lead form or calling, like what do they really need and what are the underlying issues that they're calling this business to resolve? It'll identify the right product or service to offer them, give them a quote, a bid, and handle talk-offs. So things like, oh, you know, that seems a little expensive. I need to talk it over with my spouse. We know how businesses want to handle this. We've done millions of B2C interactions. So we've used that dataset to, you know, basically train our own LLM. And so that's what we'll be using to, in the sort of communication back and forth, and then it will be able to take a payment through a payment processor integrations and put the appointment directly on the business's calendar.

Hmm. Wow. So, okay. So when you say, so is this all done through live chat or is it done through like a person talking?

Voice and talking.

Wow. That's crazy. So, I mean, obviously it's not a person, it's a bot, but there's a lot of blur that way, right? Yeah.

Yeah, they're almost indistinguishable at this point. We actually did have a client that got upset with us and after sort of talking with her for a bit about it, she was like, you know, I was just upset because it tricked me. Like, I couldn't tell that it was not a human. And some of the leaders in the AI voice space have said that by Q1 next year, it is really going to be indistinguishable. So, you know, for brands that are in like New England, for example, we've got one with a great Boston accent. We've got one with a New York accent, you know, so it's customized for each of these small businesses.

Businesses.

I also sort of anticipate at some point next year it's going to be trained on each individual small business owner's voice too, and it's going to sound very similar to them.

Wow, that's very interesting. So what kind of a price point do you think this works for? You know, like, you think about enterprises, and a lot of times the solutions that people want to sell them are big-ticket items, sometimes 6 figures, sometimes 7 figures. What is the base price point that you think people will need to talk to a human about?

I don't— that's a really good question. What is the base price point that we're going to have to talk to a human? To make sure I'm answering that carefully, I think it's going to be a lot higher than what people think. And the answer is like, the data point that supports that is, you know, people are now buying $100,000 cars without talking to a human.

So, that was my question.

I don't think that there is actually a limit on that, but here's the caveat. Like, if you're buying— I live in Colorado, Rivians are incredibly popular here. That's a $100,000 car. You don't talk to anyone to buy it. But the reason people are willing to do that is because it is a fantastic brand. They understand what they're getting. And so there aren't that many other questions to be asked or uncovered. Now, for a small business or let's say an enterprise company, there probably are some more questions that need to be answered. And so I think that what revenue ops leaders need to think about is like, how are they going to pass this information to the end consumer? Are they going to provide more help articles, more information publicly available to help them answer this, or potentially free trials and easier on-ramps? Or are you going to deploy a Salesforce to educate customers on that. Now, I did say Salesforce, so I didn't sort of make the distinction if it's going to be a human or agentic. I think that more and more agentic will be able to resolve those questions, but maybe if you have a really complex product or it's a very custom implementation or integration, that then that would need to go to more of a technical support human. Although I do know that there are also companies targeting that with agentic tools as well.

Well, I think I find it fascinating because like as a consumer myself, I would love to be able to ask a robot all the questions I want. Nobody's going to bug me and, and try to pressure me. Like, I think that that pressure is one of the things that keeps people from wanting to talk to a person, right? They want their questions answered, but they don't want to have anyone pushing them. Yep. So in a lot of ways, like the traditional sales methodology and the sales techniques, don't work. People just want the inbound and they just want to be informed and they want to be empowered to make their own decisions. Right. Would you agree with that?

You're, you're totally right. And you're hitting on something that I think is going to be really interesting in the future. So in the sort of legacy call center business selling B2C, the most common objection, guess what it is? It is, I need to talk to my spouse or my partner or the other person in the household about that. What is really underneath that is price. This is too expensive. I can't afford it. And I'm embarrassed to say that, and I don't want to admit it to someone else. So the easiest way to get off the phone is to just say, I got to go talk to somebody else and sort of defer the ability to make that decision to a third party that's not available. Interesting. Great technique. But now if we have an AI on the phone, sort of all bets are off. Imagine if the AI says, hey, Amy, I'm just an AI. You can tell me anything you want. It doesn't matter. I'm just an AI. Like, we don't know what the sales tactics are that are going to be used in the future. And that's— I don't think that that is something that is like underhanded or a sleazy sales tactic. It's actually like really helping a customer say, well, I don't like the price, this doesn't work for me. And so now we can really get to the root cause and maybe even have that negotiation versus not truly understanding what the customer's objection is.

I totally agree with that. And I find it interesting that by talking with an AI and by being like transparent that way, that would alleviate the emotion behind it and make people a little bit more willing to engage, I think. I think you can also find like in your call recordings as you go back and analyze them, people will be a little bit more forthcoming when they're just talking to an AI, even if they know later on that their stuff's gonna be analyzed, at least they're not being pressured on the phone right then, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it's, it's going to be—

that's really—

yeah, it's, it's exciting to see where this goes.

Yeah, it absolutely is. So what do you think in terms of like, what are— what kinds of businesses— like, we've talked a lot about B2C. Is B2B able to do this? Can you pull this off on B2B?

Absolutely. There's, there's no reason that it can't work there. We have initially targeted B2C because we just have so much sales data there. And to be honest, we think it's actually a larger pain point than in the B2B market. Now, obviously there's a lot of businesses targeting the B2B space. We think it's a little bit more fun to bring maybe a full solution and target a less competed space. Um, part of the reason we think it's so important, the value proposition is massive for small business owners, is today that they really only have a couple of options. They either chain their phone to them and they never have a moment of freedom. And one of the stories we got from a customer that, you know, launched recently, he said, you know, this is the best thing. I got to go to a baseball game. I got to take my wife to Vegas. I got to go enjoy life for the first time in 7 years, and I and you guys were selling for me. I didn't even have to look at my phone. Like, that is the unlock that it gives a small business owner that has been sort of trapped in that day-to-day fight running a small business. The other alternative is that you might get a virtual assistant or you nearshore outsource this. And, you know, that's still only 40 hours a week. It doesn't cover holidays, it doesn't cover evenings. And, you know, generally if you're outsourcing it, you have to manage that person, you have to train that person. And you're generally only going to be able to get to lead qualification or appointment setting, not a full sale as well. That's just what we've seen. And so small business owners really don't have good options today. None of them are attractive. And so this is a really compelling value proposition to them. It's affordable, it's a significantly lower cost than hiring somebody to do it, and you sort of get to create a lot more freedom and time and flexibility in your life.

That sounds like you have an incredible solution that's going to really help a lot of people. And congratulations. That's very exciting. Yeah. How long has your product been live?

We've launched a beta version of the product earlier this year, and we're launching the next release on November 1st.

That's very cool. Congratulations. Thank you. Well, clearly at the top of your game in AI, it's fun to see how it's being applied in real business settings and to real people. What do you do to stay at the top of your game, Garth?

That's a great question. Really easy answer for me. It's surrounding yourself with the right mentors and the right team. The things I've talked about are not just my ideas, but, you know, we have an amazing team at Rainmaker from the CEO all the way down. And, you know, these are the ideas we talk about and we think about what is the future going to look like. And so we develop these and this informs our product direction, our strategy, our marketing materials, and how we're thinking about the future with AI. There are a lot of questions that I think businesses are going to need to answer and have their own protocols for what's the right way to do sales. Like we talked about consultative sales and educational versus using really some of the tactics that we could to our advantage, which we think might be a little unfair. So we have a code of conduct on how we're going to do those kinds of things.

Yeah, I absolutely believe that. And that is one of my main strategies for trying to stay in the game. Maybe I'm not at the top of my game, but I'm in the game. And so being close to other leaders is really exciting. So anyway, well, thank you so much for joining us, Gareth. It was such a pleasure. I'm so excited. I'm gonna go check out your Rainmaker right now. And thank you again.

Thanks so much for having me, Amy. This was amazing.

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