Episode 81: Revolutionising Digital Communication with Richard White

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader, and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Today we are talking to a man who has just taught me something that I never knew about the west coast of America, and that is that the water is really, really cold and even in the middle of summer. And who would have thought, Richard White, who we're talking to, who I'll introduce in a moment, living in San Francisco, who would have thought, living there, that your water is only 13, 14 degrees Celsius in the middle of summer? It's something that just blew my mind from a water boy as I am myself. But it's amazing the little things you learn as you have small talk when you start these podcasts. But would like to welcome Richard White today. He is founder and CEO of Fathom, or Fathom Video. So, people, that's a free app that records, transcribes, highlights all your calls, so you can focus on basically the conversation, everything that's happening in front of you, rather than worrying about tap, tap, tap, tap, taking notes or writing them down. So really cool pieces of tech that we're starting to see flow into the market pretty heavily. But Fathom, I think, is a great story because it was part of the Y Combinator W21 batch. Now, for those who don't know Y Combinator, they are essentially, and I'm going to really paraphrase here, they are a fund that backs entrepreneurs and businesses and has essentially, they have had some unbelievable success stories come out of there. They've had Dropbox, we had Airbnb, we've had Peloton, like some really cool brands have come out of Y Combinator. Fathom is one who's received some funding, if you like, from that group. So they're also one of only 50 who are part of the Zoom app launch program. So Zoom are investing in them through their own fund, which is pretty cool also. So we've got a couple of pieces of really nice social proof here for Fathom, but Richard himself has got a fair bit of experience in the SaaS and kind of tech startup world. He was. He founded UserVoice, which was a platform that mostly tech companies, I think, used from startups sort of bigger Fortune 500, or for us here, ASX style listed companies that they use for managing customer feedback and making lots of great product decisions. It was a serious company, that one, I think. User voice, I should say. But when we think feedback tabs down the side of websites, I think that's something that we can talk about being a part of that. And then on top of that, Richard's got lots of experience in a whole lot of other areas, but I think those two, on its own, really, really relevant. And I think you'll hear today Richard's got a real passion about designing tools that help user experiences. So there you go. Richard, an introduction for you. Welcome to our podcast. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say today.

Well, thanks for having me. That was an amazing intro.

My pleasure. Well, before we get into today, I've spoken a little bit about Fathom, but perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about yourself and what Fathom do, and then we'll rock and roll into today's content.

Sure. Yeah. So I'm originally a software engineer by trade. I'm kind of product designer, so that was kind of where I started. But at User Voice, my last company, I had opportunity to, you know, we were about a $10 million business or so. And so, you know, we had sales teams, marketing teams, you name it. I ran every team for a period of time. And one team I ran for the longest, actually was the sales team and some other podcasts. I'll tell you all the hilarious, the bad things that an engineer trying to run a sales team tries to do. But it gave me kind of a real appreciation for some of the challenges sales managers have around, you know, trying to understand what's happening on these meetings with, you know, my team is having with customers and prospects, especially in the middle of a pandemic or when we're in a remote work situation where I can't ambiently overhear, you know, people saying things. Right. Sometimes I think as a, you know, running a sales team, I kind of got used to, like, oh, if I hear half the conversation, I have, like, some ambient awareness of, like, how well they've been trained up how well they're running my methodology, that sort of thing. Really hard to do in a remote environment. Really hard to do especially when people are working from home. So sort of had them actually about four years ago. And it's funny because it's an AI product. It's an AI note taker, as you mentioned it, it's a free product. It'll join your meetings, take really good notes. Basically it records and transcribes the entire thing and then we use AI to take. Honestly, at this point, the AI is so good it takes better notes than I ever could. Automatically will fill out your CRM, et cetera, et cetera. But we started this four years ago before the AI was actually any good. Right. And so it's kind of been fun to, you know, get a little ahead of the curve and now see kind of the groundswell of AI stuff. Catch up to our aspirations, if you will, originally.

Yeah. Okay, well I think that is a good segue into what we're going to talk about today, which is all around how we're revolutionizing. I think digital comms or digital communication is the key piece here. I think today we're going to focus less on the AI piece and more on how we're really changing the ways that we communicate in our non verbal ways. I think AI is really important. It's a terrific support to what we do. But look, in my opinion, it doesn't replace some of the key aspects around selling. However, digital communication is still really important and that exists both within the AI landscape and also outside of that. So we're going to spend a bit of time looking into that. But before we do, look, I think we focused a little bit around what inspired you to develop Note Taker. Right. Which sounds like it was hybrid working environments and engineering and a sales environment. I mean, feel free to expand on that. But at the same time, how do you see something like a note taker app or similar starting to revolutionize digital communication?

Yeah, I mean, I think the other real inspiration for me is like I hate taking notes and I don't think I've met anyone that likes taking notes. And I think more than disliking it, I actually think I was pretty good at it. But I found that I'm either talking to someone on a Zoom or Google Meet or I was writing my notes and maybe I was rapidly switching between them, maybe they didn't notice I was doing that, but I wasn't fully present and I can't remember the number of times I missed Something I said. Oh, crap. I don't remember exactly what was said there. So I think there's a big part of this, which is these tools, like, fathom free us up to just honestly be human again. Because we're not obsessed with, like, oh, I need to artifact this for someone else or for a future version of myself. And, you know, I don't take notes anymore. And even though the app kind of generates notes for me, it's actually, I use them differently than I did my historical notes. Historically. I would, like, talk to someone, type at the same time, block out time after every meeting to clean up those notes, put them in my CRM, go read them two weeks later, not remember what half of it was, try to muddle through that conversation until I jogged my memory. And now it's like, I have the meeting, you know, talk to someone, and then after meeting ends, I just go. The next meeting, the thing takes notes for me. It sends me the, you know, stuff. But what happens is, next time I meet with you two weeks later, I now just go back and watch part of that recording, watch the last minute of that recording, I read the summary, and all of a sudden my brain is like, oh, it's like, I just got off the phone with you from the previous call. Right. And so I think there's a lot here where people talk a lot about AI trying to replace, you know, jobs and stuff like this. I actually think a lot of cases, it's taking out the stuff that was kind of the inhumane parts of the job, Right? And just allowing us to focus on being present, reading each other's body language, communicating, asking you questions, all the sort of stuff you want all your best salespeople to be doing. And so I think for that reason, it's, like, pretty freeing.

Okay, great. So what I'm hearing, I think, in essence, is that it's allowing us as salespeople to listen more. It doesn't actually mean talk less. In fact, it possibly allows us to talk more as well. But we've always been taught two ears, one mouth. But I think what gets lost in that is that we also have two hands. And if your hands are typing or writing, then that can also overrun your ears. So we can very easily get distracted. And look, I'll be really open here. I am someone that loves having a conversation. I'll pause. I'll be open with the people I'm talking with, say, I'm going to write these notes down. We'll write them together. Just confirm this is what we're talking about bang. I've got that. Right, Right. So there's a piece of that that I really love. But I can certainly, certainly relate to the piece around not remembering everything that happened in a conversation. When you go back to looking at it, let's step forward, say 6 months, 12 months and note taker's taken off and digital communication gets to the point where it is supplementing our verbal with some non verbal. Right. It's supplementing it so well that we're able to have better and deeper conversations with our customers. What else could you see it ticking into from there?

Yeah, I think, you know, the really exciting piece in the like for last year was the AI got good enough to take really good notes for you. Before it was like we were mostly just giving you a transcript and a recording and maybe some like, you know, allowing you to highlight some moments. But now it legitimately can just write all the notes for you again, fill in your CRM, that sort of thing. What's exciting for this year is, I mean, and so that's obviously great for the rep that's on the phone. Right. That's on the meeting and whatnot. And so like I think AI was really good last year at like getting you help for a single meeting. Now we're starting to push in a thing where it's like AI can actually look at multiple meetings and provide some sort of insight or intelligence. And this is where it looked more like an assistant sales manager. It's your own personal assistant sales manager if you're running a sales team and it can start doing things for you like, oh, you're doing pipeline review, great. I can look through all these deals. I can actually ask the AI questions without having to go ask the rep. It can create a summary across all the deals. It's actually a feature we just actually launched today where I can look at all the meetings I had with the customer and I can give me a summary across all of them. Here's where the pain points, here's the rejections. All this stuff again normally like this like meta note taking that I might want to jump into when I'm, you know, doing a pipeline review. What it also can do that we're starting to experiment with I think is cool. It's almost like a lot of the coaching stuff. A lot of, you know, I think every sales manager I ever talked to is like we never have enough time for coaching and training. Right. We never listen to as many call. Even if we do Google record calls in our team, we never listen to them as much as we want to, or we, you know, know, maybe I listen to one on my way to work and on the way home sort of thing. But like, it's a lot of work. We had a lot of other things going on and we're now getting this point where AI and we've been beta testing this and it's been really successful. You know, if you've got some sort of sales methodology and you've got certain things you want your reps to do on every call and make sure they hit, you know, you want them to diagnose in between, but you want them to run a process. The AI can actually watch that call and have almost, you know, hey, look, they did great at points A, B and C, but they kind of missed F. Oh, looks like Tim on your team is consistently missing asking the impact question sort of thing. And I think that's really cool, this idea that we can get to the point where, oh great, we can identify opportunities for improvement without having to put in the hours and hours of legwork you have to do historically to go listen to a bunch of calls and let's be clear, like, listen to what your sales team calls. It's like, you know, probably not anyone's favorite part of the job. Right. But it's like super important. And that's another great thing to like, let's offload the bulk of that to the AI. The AI can point you to the moments, then you can just watch. Oh, okay, let me go in and see. Tim struggled with this objection. Oh, oh, okay, let me go in and watch that. Oh, okay, Now I'm watching two minute clips, not 30 minute clips. And I'm smarter and also I'm a little less stressed than I was before.

Yeah, yeah, I think there's a piece in there around time management. And look, I'm a huge believer that in today's world we have more to do than we possibly can. So we simply can't get through our list of tasks that we could. When I'm 41, I started in the workplace 21 years ago and I remember distinctly that when I would go and leave, I'd get my emails down to zero. I'd have an out of office voice message on. And that was about all I had to worry about. There was no social media, there was no project management tools, no slack, nothing along those lines. And it was a much simpler existence. And if you go back 20 years before that, people will say, well, gee, we just had five. There were no computers, no emails, and it was simply done via phone. And because now we have just so many channels of communication, our focus and our time management become more and more important. In fact, I did a session yesterday with a brilliant team and we focused purely on ease and impact around how they could get things done. And what comes out of that is that some of the nice to haves that don't give immediate impact to a business that is coaching. Coaching doesn't always translate to immediate results. Reviewing pipelines and taking a synthesis around why your customers choose you, why they don't choose you, don't always lead to immediate results. What's happening is that they're being replaced by some of the urgent tasks where, you know, the early bird gets the whim or the urgent bird, as Sam McKenna says, gets the whim. I love that one lineup. So I really like what you're saying there, that if we can use some of the tools available to us to give us that summary. Right. To take that approach that says our customers are choosing us or aren't choosing us because of this. And here's the summary from all these notes.

Right.

Ace. The other piece that I really like is if we can use it for that coaching piece. But I think what's really important on top of that is that as leaders, we actually have to set up the coaching program first. We actually have to set up the ability to synthesize logical arguments or why customers choose us or don't choose us first. So if sales leaders, if we can get that done, we can then take advantage of these tools. So there's that little bit of baseline work to do that will give you so much joy down the track if you get it right. So I think that's a really good perspective. Richard. Thank you. What about from a note taking point of view? I just really specifically talk about using automated note software. How does it handle the nuances in human voices? Right. I have a big. A strong Australian accent with dulcet tones. And sometimes these systems don't quite line up beautifully for me. How are we working through that as a challenge?

Two things on that. I think one of the first things we built was kind of like transcription. Right. And I think I always said to our team, no one wants a transcript, but the transcript is kind of the foundational artifact to build everything else. Right. You can't build good notes without a good transcript. And if you go back five years, this is one place where we had big strides. You could get decent transcription, but only if someone spoke very. From an American perspective, they would call it unaccented English, which basically mean if you don't speak American English like eh, it's going to kind of screw it up.

Yeah.

One of the things that the advent, this rise of AI has done is like the new transcription models are so much better, there's so much more because they're trained on, you know, everyone around the world. They're not just trained on Americans anymore. And so it's really good at picking up any accent from anywhere. So that's one part. The other part is, you know, it's kind of funny. We started this company four years ago. I remember I put AI in our company name and all our investors yelled. All my investors yelled at me. They're like, no one likes AI I was like, no one likes this AI from four years ago though. I'm like, they're going to like what's coming right? Sort of thing. And I say that because like one of the first things I asked for was can the system start figuring out like sentiment can understand, you know, for example, just pull out. I want to know when there's a really positive moment from a sales call or really frustrating moment from the sales call. And the original way everyone tried to do this is they'd generate a transcript which again, five years ago, not that like quasi accurate again, if any, if you weren't American English, even less accurate. And then based on that text they tried to do sentiment analysis. But as you and I know, tone is everything in sales. Right. And so I can say, yeah, we're definitely going to buy in a couple different ways. Some of which definitely mean I'm going to buy and some of which mean I'm never going to buy your product. Right. And so this is the other thing, only recently now really in the last two months, we're now working on stuff where we've got AI models that can understand tone. We tried to do this four years ago and the only like data set out there you could train on to try to figure out tone was based on the American sitcom Friends. And so you can imagine if you try to apply like that over the top kind of bombacity to a sales call, it like doesn't get it because everything's a little more subtle. But now it truly can do it. And so I think it's a really cool advent that the systems now will understand tone and inflection and like what these things mean.

Yeah, well you're four years ago with Friends it would have just been all around sarcasm.

Wouldn't was. Yeah, yeah, it didn't understand anything.

That would have been some funny summaries to look at. That would have been cool. Okay, great. So, okay, so that's coming along. What about. And I'll ask you about privacy first. I'll just share an insight. For me is at the moment I don't record my coaching calls. And now these are calls where I'm working on sales strategy with a larger business or a mid sized business or even individual business owners. And the reason I don't record the training calls is because I feel that I'm more likely to get an open audience on the other side. Because there's a little part that says this is being recorded. We always used to say if you email it, it's forever. Right? If it gets recorded, it's forever as well. So how do you handle concerns around privacy or perhaps calls being leaked or hacked into?

I mean, one is if you're building a company like ours, we did all the security stuff you usually do way later in the company Lifecycle on day one. So you have to. Because if you have one breach ever, it's over kind of thing, right? So one is you got to take security privacy super seriously. I think you bring up one of the things that I think we kind of figured out before the market, which is that people actually are far more okay with being recorded than I think most people think. And it actually changes a bit if they also get access to the recording themselves. Right. If you say I'm going to record you and you know, maybe you made a weird face or you said something you regret that it like I feel less comfortable. But if you say I'm going to record you because I got this AI that takes notes from me. And by the way, do you want a copy of it afterwards? They're going to go from like neutral to enthusiastic. Yes. And oh, by the way, like you said this to me at the beginning of the podcast, like we give you the same tools. It's like, hey, if you say anything you don't like to be on the corner, let me know. We can redact any part of the conversation. And that was something else we built into our app that most of these tools that a lot of sales teams used, some bot would join the meeting and it wouldn't leave till the meeting ended and you had no control over it. We actually have the follow you into the meeting. You can any point tell it to leave, come back in. We also want to make sure everyone on the call felt in control of like, hey, occasionally there are things we really want to go off the record on. Great, take it out, let's have that chat, let's bring back in afterwards. But I think the bulk of what we've seen is that when you give people the option to get the access recording, they really like it. And I think the other thing we've seen is, I think, I don't know if you all have this in Australia, but in the states, like every 1-800-number I've ever called for customer support has this line of like this call will be recorded for quality assurance. And I think it's done something where we just kind of like, I like hear that and I don't think anything about it ever.

Right.

I think just certain parts we just habituate it and now we're just used to being recorded. And so I think there's a lot of folks who said, oh, more people are going to talk differently unless they're talking about like state secrets and legal things. Especially on sales calls, I find that people are pretty candid regardless.

Yeah, yeah, really good logic. And I suspect if we tie that to, let's say 10 years ago, you sit down and say you're going to be doing most of your sales calls over video or half your sales calls over video or percentage over video, I think people would have said, no, we're never ever going to get out of face to face. And it's funny how the word changes. So there is a change in perception that comes with that. Great, great, excellent, good insight. Thank you. Okay, so question I love to ask everyone that comes on the show and I was telling you beforehand that what are we. This is episode 81. Across the 30 or so times I've asked this across leaders, I've actually never had the same answer. Pressure, no pressure. Right. So you're a sales leader now wanting to turn the growth tap on for the next 12 months. Like, like it's an established business. You really wanted to turn the growth tap on and drive it. It's very much at the front of minds of sales leaders at the moment. What's one thing you're focusing on with your team to get that growth engine humming?

I mean, give me two actually, because I think it's one is efficiency and one is top of funnel. And I think like you said, established business. So an established business, I think about tacking both at the same time. Earlier I would have only thought about, you know, earlier in the business I would think only about top of funnel. And I'm like, yeah, we're not going to worry too much about efficiency. We'll worry about that when we get to 10 million.

Yeah.

Yeah, we, yeah, we already covered the efficiency piece, which I really think is like being maniacal about making sure the salespeople are selling and not being data entry technicians. Right. I think, you know, so much of this is like not only just taking notes, but like all the fields we got to fill in the CRM and all, like, there's. We've overloaded our teams with like a lot of this, like extraneous work that helps give us as managers comfort and visibility, but doesn't necessarily help close the deal. I don't think that stuff can go away, but I think there's now tools like Fathom that can help you automate that. Right. So I think I'm constantly asking my team, what do you find that's just like a low value use of your time. And now with AI, you can like automate things you couldn't before. Not just Fathom, but like there's a whole suite of tools, clay and stuff like that where it's like the AI can make judgment calls. Right. Which is the thing that classic things, you know, classic things had to be like, if it equals this, then do this. So I'd say being like, we're staffing up a whole ops team that is kind of AI native, they all have experience using LLMs and they go airdrop into our sales team, into our support team, and they're sort of asking them, what is the thing you do a lot that feels repetitive or low value. And then can we build out some internal AI automation? On the same note, for Top of Funnel, I think AI outbound has gotten really good. Like the messages you can send, you know, like the. You think about the time an SDR used to spend to like research a prospect and write this like, thing and, you know, read their LinkedIn. Yeah, I can do all of that in 10 seconds and write a way better email than that rep ever could. Right. And so you can feed it a lot of context about who that prospect is and then it can grab even more context from just looking at who they are on the open web. And I've been blown away. Like the results we've gotten recently from AI Powered Outbound with tools like Clay and stuff like that is really, really impressive.

Love it. So we're getting efficient at the front end, making sure customers are spending more time, so salespeople are spending more time with customers or delivery people are getting on with delivering. And look, the top of Funnel one's actually a variation of that is we're making sure that we're using the tools around us to save time but improve the quality of our interactions with customers. Awesome. Love it. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Richard. Lovely to have you around today. So, Richard Wright from Fathom, can you tell people listening, where can they find you if they'd like to get in touch?

Sure, yeah. I'm on LinkedIn. You'll see Richard White on LinkedIn under Fathom. I've got this big kind of bitmap looking like, look like eight bit anime character. That's my avatar. Why? I don't know, but I've stuck with it. So yeah, send me a message in there. Love to hear from you.

Excellent. Great. And if anyone wants to check out Notetaker, they go to Fathom AI. Have I got that right?

Fathom video, actually Fathom video.

I'm glad I asked that to confirm. So Fathom Video, if you'd like to look at a free note taking app to help you save some time when you're dealing with customers and I think they get some better outcomes. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Richard. Lovely to have you today. For everyone listening, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're onger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.