Enterprise selling 101

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom Bot. We have Yash Gad with us today. He's a PhD, he's a founder at and CEO at Ringer Science in Austin, Texas. Yash was previously, I would say, like in the academics world, in the research world at least, and then Simvivo in 2007. It was computational modeling consulting services. was employed after that and launched Ringer Science, which is a data science and data strategy consulting service firm in 2018. So Yash, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you've been up to.

Nice to meet you, Charles, and yeah, thanks for having me on. So yeah, as you said, my background is actually as a biophysicist and computational neuroscientist. So was, you know, doing a lot of AI research and kind of neuroscience research for many years. was in the academic space and then took a hard pivot in 2013 and entered agency world, which I found to be really rewarding and really building a lot of interesting tools and models for marketing communications. But then when I started Ringer in 2018, it was really to take a lot of that outside of agency world and really rethink these things, not just as better AI and better models, but maybe as products. And so that's really the hard pivot that we've made over the last couple of years is into more products that stemmed from doing these services at such a high level for many years.

Why did you take that pivot? Like, walk me through the day-to-day process of like, I'm starting my data science consulting firm.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's really interesting because like when I, when I left Real Chemistry in 2018, it was really just to do a little bit of like consulting. see what was kind of out there, what people were hungry for. And what I immediately saw was there was a need for the same kind of analysis again and again and again. And one of the rules that we've always had at Ringer, and even when I was at Real Chemistry, was like, we don't build something unless we hear the same ask 3 times from 3 different people. And so I started building tools like, you know, like I'd always done. But then a couple of years ago, what we started getting asked more and more was, You guys do these great analyses. You clearly have a lot of proprietary tech internally. Can we have access to it? And I think that's when we really started thinking, maybe we should be packaging these up as products and not just our own secret sauce that we keep internally.

And you had started a company before that, like SimVivo. So did you have entrepreneurial blood in you? Because most academics, most researchers would never go and start a company. And he is like, they're happy sort of following orders, staying in their lanes, right? But visibly you weren't.

Yeah, you know, I can really attribute that to my dad, you know, who really, he started, he took, he was, you know, working in an architectural firm for many years and really just took a gamble and started his own. And, you know, we saw that, you know, at the very beginning he struggled with that and, Then he really found his footing, found out how to meet new clients, court clients, get consistent work, and just really grow out his business. And it was just amazing to watch it. And I think it gave me and my 2 brothers the bug for kind of really starting our own thing. So as soon as I left grad school, I was like, let me take a swing.

Interesting. And the niche of ringer is quite specific, right? Like there's not a lot of competition in there. Can you explain what you guys do?

Yeah, it's, you know, it really stemmed out of really providing tools for marketing and communications, but where we really started carving out our niche was really going outside of healthcare. You know, we, you know, because of our background and a lot of my employees came from real chemistry as well, we had a healthcare bent. You know, we were working pharma and med device for many years, but what we started seeing was there was a lot of traction outside of that in industries that really hadn't seen the level of you know, analytics, data science, AI that pharma and some of these other areas had. And so it was wide open territory. And like Whole Foods is one of our, one of our biggest clients, Southern Methodist University, one of our newest clients. They're all really hungry for this kind of intelligence, trends forecasting, you know, AI-based tools that really help accelerate everything they're doing. And What we saw was a lot of the off-the-shelf things just don't cut it, and there really are not a lot of people building tools specifically for these underserved industries.

Don't they do this internally? Um, isn't like they're very business about, uh, data? It's like in— if you think of pharma and biotech, like that's, that's their goal, right? That's how they get their R&D and insights. So tell me a bit more.

You know, it's really, it's interesting that you say that, and we've heard this many times, even when we're talking with pharma and biotech, you know, like, hey, we have a giant analytics team, we have a giant data science team, we're building these things, and then we'll back off, we'll, you know, wait, and we're like, okay, great, you know, let your team build that. When we come back in 3 months, 6 months, and we ask them, hey, how did those, you know, builds go, how do those things go, they always shake their head, and they're— we've never met a client that was like, Yes, we, all our problems were solved internally, we figured it out. They never are happy with what they've been building. You know, we heard last year when we were at South by demoing one of our early products that a big pharma that I'm not gonna name had spent about $10 million internally building basically what we demoed at South by, but it wasn't anywhere close. And our demo that we showed at South by last year, we put together in, I would say, under a month. They had spent a couple of years and, you know, $10 million on, and it didn't do anything close to what we were showing. And so we realized that we were really onto something, you know, coming at it from first principles and the way that we approach these kind of builds, very different than how teams would do it internally.

But your piece is more marketing and content, right? So using some Or is it also like operational, the data you analyze?

It is. It's, it's, it, it kind of has moved outside of just pure marketing communications. We're bringing in, you know, sales data, you know, to help optimize like, you know, broad operations and sales as well. We've built models for financial teams to track kind of incoming sales, conversion, things like that. You know, we've built pricing models to help kind of price internal products. So we really have touched everything, not just directly like content and marketing. And it's really because we're sitting on all of this data and it's, we're really always just trying to find better ways to action on that data. Sometimes it is, you know, can we generate better content for our audiences? But sometimes it is more tactical and operational and we don't try to stay in any one lane. You know, we'll get in there and we'll, you know, just try to solve whatever problems need solving with that data.

And what's your beachhead normally? How do you get inside a new enterprise, a new client? What's the pilot?

It's a great question. You know, we have a term that we use a lot, which is pitch candy. And, you know, it's not a traditional pitch. We don't go in with a McKinsey-style deck or something like that. Sometimes, and this is actually how we won Whole Foods, We just go in with the full analysis that we've just done for free for spec. And we kind of have, you know, some idea of what they're getting internally. And we're like, we can blow that outta the water. We know what they're getting from other agencies, other vendors. Let's just do it our way and just show them what it would look like. 9 times outta 10, people see that and they're just like, holy cow, we are not getting that. Tell us more. And it immediately starts a conversation. Now they may not buy everything they saw in that, you know, pitch candy, but it definitely gets their mind going on like what is possible. And so they already see us as this innovative partner they can work with.

And how do you get in touch with them? What's the first touch? Is it content? Is it AEO, the stuff you do yourself? How do you get them in?

Yeah, it's, you know, it's some of it is AEO, some of it is direct, you know, just content that we're putting out there. Some of it is direct outreach on LinkedIn. You know, we, We always recommend like for our clients that are doing like ABM programs or sales programs, different tactics like this. We employ the same tactics ourselves. You know, this is why we recommend them and we see a lot of success there. I think LinkedIn direct messaging and kind of LinkedIn content has been to date some of our most successful. We've seen a lot of traction there and it's more personalized. It feels more direct. It, you know, we can hunt out the right folks to kind of contact and we have ways of looking at some of that LinkedIn data and finding what those buying committees would look like, if it's a marketing in, if it's a comms in, if it's a brand team, if it's an operations team, we'll figure out who those right folks are and start kind of, you know, just showing them the content that we think will really matter for them.

And you've unlocked gigantic clients. I see Mars, I see, yeah, a whole bunch of very prominent brands, Whole Foods, right? Very prominent pharma brands, Pfizer. How did you unlock these guys? Novartis? Was it like your relationships? Was it like from scratch? How and how long is the sales cycle? Basically, how do you sell to these big corporations? I believe is a question most founders have.

Yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, for a lot of the pharma, at least initially, it was really based on our network. You know, from working in that space for many years, we really developed a lot of great contacts that have moved around to different pharma companies, but we've always stayed in touch with them and You know, we've always kind of reached out to those folks first, the ones that we know. And if they're not the direct buying committee, they can always put us in touch with who those folks are. So we try to walk that relationship web as, you know, first. If it's somebody cold though, you know, we will try to find, you know, some commonality, some, you know, content that, you know, that will resonate with them or some event that we've, you know, seen them at and, but just haven't talked to them directly. We'll try to find some connection points to them and show them things, not just a cold pitch that just feels impersonal, but really some way of connecting with them. Once we're in there, once we're starting those conversations with them, you call it the right thing, you know, it's one thing to get that first meeting, it's another thing to go through procurement, and procurement for pharma is brutal, I will say. The buying cycle sometimes can take 6 to 9 months. We've gone through some really rigorous AI due diligence and kind of vendor onboarding from pharma especially that has taken months and months and months and a lot of back and forth with IT and lawyers and things like that. So it's, it's a little hard. I will say on the consumer side, it's a lot quicker sometimes. Whole Foods, I think, and Amazon in general has been phenomenal in terms of their speed. I think we were onboarded and brought in less than a month. And so, which is great. So it's why we've kind of, you know, had a mix of clients and prospects. You know, we don't want to just stay in one industry just because we know pharma doesn't mean we want to stay there just because the sales cycles are so long.

Right. And the touch bases, right? Like, how do you follow up with these clients once you had the meetings, you sent a quote, right? Like, how do you make sure that they have all the information they need to make a decision?

Yeah, it is really, you know, it's a, it's a very delicate game. You know, we don't wanna be annoying. We don't wanna keep following up with them in terms of, you know, just content and things that just is gonna feel spammy. After we send those original proposals, it really is then trying to dissect, you know, what questions do they come back with, either in email or just at the end of the call? You know, can we schedule follow-on calls? If they don't wanna follow on call, are there threads we can start pulling? Is it You know, are there holdups maybe budgetary or are they, you know, oh, we don't really see the value of this. You know, it all, it helps us really dial in like if we need to send a revised deck, if we need to send them more information, if we need to hop on a call to talk about pricing, like we try to feel them out without really being annoying and really try to get them to a place where they can sign off, whether it is a short engagement first and then kind of leading to a bigger engagement. If they're ready to jump all in, you know, both feet, okay, let's go that way. You know, we try to listen for those buying signals in the meetings and those first calls and in the follow-ups, really try to hear what the client's saying, not try to just push the services on them. You know, I think that's the wrong approach. I mean, it's a numbers game then. Really try to build that relationship and try to understand what they need and how much they're willing to pay for that thing they need.

Pricing, how do you go with that? I'm guessing it's like all custom pricing, right? Do you sometimes give discount to have them buy quicker? How do you create urgency and scarcity in them?

We do offer discounts if they're willing to sign on quicker, if they're willing to sign up for larger engagements, like 12 or 18-month engagements, we will give pretty sizable discounts when they're willing to do that. If they're just not able to kind of pull the trigger on that right away, then we do try to offer them kind of You know, here's a cheaper pilot you can start with, but then you may pay the full price for the full engagement. And we try to, you know, customize it a little bit there, but we do have our price sheets that we try to stick with just because it's taken our team a lot to kind of determine, okay, it's gonna cost us this much, our margin's gonna be this much, it's gonna take this much time, it's gonna be this specific for this industry. Okay, let's stay in this vein here for the pricing.

Got it. How did you get to that high ticket? Did you start it sort of low ticket and you just realized that this wasn't appealing or scalable?

Yeah, it's very funny that you asked that. So our very first AI implementation at an enterprise level, you know, we hadn't really done like a big build like this custom for somebody else. It was always just, you know, as I said, building internally. We pitched this, we, the client immediately signed off on like, yes, this is great. Found out afterwards we were pitching against Google, and Google's proposal was 10x what ours was. And we were like, shoot, we really underpriced this. We thought it was an aggressive price that nobody would sign on for, but apparently we were underpriced. And so this kind of led to us slowly increasing our prices. I would say we're definitely not cheap, but we're not the most expensive either, and we've tried to find that sweet spot where People see the value, they know why they're paying a premium, but it's not such an insurmountable price. And so we've, we've really tried to, you know, feel out clients over the years and really try to make sure that we're landing in that right place. So it's very market-driven.

And on the upside, once you have a client, uh, how do you make sure to serve them well? When I work with, um, corporation, one of my main pain is that there's so many people involved, so many useless people on calls, you know, it's like You should not be here, you know, we would be faster if you're not here. So how do you actually deal with that? How do you stay efficient and how do you make sure that ultimately the client doesn't churn?

Yeah, it's a great question because we actually don't see a lot of client churn at all. And the reason is that we made a decision early on that if a particular team is going to be pitching a client or it's going to be really actively, you know, talking with this client, that's the team that's gonna serve that account long-term. It's— we're not gonna like pass 'em off to some junior person. We're not gonna kind of have a lot of, you know, you know, folks coming in and out of that account. We're really gonna kind of dedicate some resources to making sure that account stays there. We, you know, they see that same person, they see someone that knows their business really well. And we heard this from a lot of clients that, you know, when they were pitched by bigger agencies, it'd be all the senior people would show up for the pitch and they'd never see them again. We don't wanna operate that way. And so we wanna make sure that if it's senior folks that are touching an account, they stay with that account. And, you know, it's, I think it's built out a really good muscle across our team that, you know, people really own these relationships. They really own kind of understanding what makes a client tick, what they need day to day, and just making sure they're always getting that. And so I think our clients have been generally very happy with, with staying with our team long-term.

And it's yearly contracts, right?

Yeah, we're pushing more and more of our clients to either 12-month or 18-month contracts.

Huh, interesting. Why not 24?

You know, for some of the folks, it's really hard to kind of plan out that long. Like they can kind of finish out usually like, for example, like the summer we've been signing a lot of, you know, 18-month contracts because it's easy for folks to plan out the rest of this year. They have budget left over, they kind of know what they can do with it. And they can start slotting this in for next year's budget. A lot of times, like pharma or others, they're not able to kind of plan like 2 years out, so they can't put this into a 2028 budget. You can absolutely slot this into 2027 budgets. And, you know, anybody that's watching this right now, this is the time to be pitching 2027 budgets, not in a month or 2, because folks are already starting to lock that in. But they're also seeing a lot of surplus in their budgets for 2026. Let's get the program in now. So we try to really Make it efficient for them to slot it in for the rest of this year and for next year.

I love it. When it comes to renewing their contract, do you do that a couple of months in advance or when you're like at the peak of their satisfaction? You have a process for that?

Yeah, it's funny. We try to do it way ahead of their planning for the next year. But if we are really seeing some great wins, it doesn't hurt to start teeing some of that up now, especially if there's gonna be like a scope expansion. Like we're seeing that for some of our clients, like they've been super happy. They've been hearing about the new things that we've been developing. They're like, can, can we also get that? Um, okay, let's, let's start talking about it even though we're way far from renewal. Let's start talking about that now.

So can you upsell them on the spot or do you keep that for their next year?

We can upsell them sometimes on the spot, you know, sometimes if they have budget and they, you know, we can kind of slide it in somewhere, we can, we can try to get them to sign on Onto it like right away. You know, I think some of our accounts like Whole Foods have been really, you know, keen on some of the like trend forecasting and things like that that we do. And so they've loved it and they want it right away. They don't want to wait till next year or anything like that. So yeah, we look for those opportunities. And in organic growth, you know, what we call land and expand, just get our foot in the door first and then just find those opportunities to organically grow it out.

Um, when you renew their contract, is it just them signing a contract or do they commit money as well before their— the next year actually starts?

Usually, like, most of our clients are paying kind of, you know, every month, um, you know, even though the contract is signed for 12 or 18 months. And so, um, as long as they have the paperwork signed and have budget committed, then, then we're good. So they usually just will keep that money flowing as it has been before for the renewals. So Usually we're not asking clients for big upfronts or anything, you know, sometimes some setup fees, but that's, that's really it.

Okay. Huh. But did you say it's monthly, the yearly contract?

Okay. Interesting. Yeah.

Why don't they pay in one go? I mean, they signed a contract, so they're obligated to, but why not in one go?

I, you know, we've seen this time and time again for pharma and even just for some of the consumer brands. Like, even though they budget it out, they don't like actually just paying until services are you know, in this case, like technology and reporting has been delivered. And so they end up paying monthly. We've never had an issue where, you know, they signed a month, you know, a year-long contract, especially for these enterprise brands, and then they stop paying or say, you know, do something shady. Like, and we have things built into our contracts, like if they stop paying, you know, for a particular month or, or 2, we just turn it off. It's very easy.

Yeah, that, it's, it's very interesting to say the lease your model. Hmm. You expanding in this, you expanding this, that new niche with Whole Foods, right? Some time ago, I think you said like even 50% of your clients nowadays are not like life sciences. How did you manage that? Isn't that, I don't know, extinguish your brand a little bit because you're like fully science focused and then you expand outside of that? What was the Thinking behind that? And, uh, yeah, tell me a bit more.

Yeah, it's, you know, we thought that this would be a distraction or that these would be like fun clients but not really like our core business. But what we really started seeing over time was a lot of commonality in the kinds of things that, you know, a pharma client might want to see about patients or healthcare providers. You know, these audiences they really cared about, really cared about moving behavior on. tracking marketing around, tracking sales around. It's very similar to how a consumer brand might think of their audiences, how they think about influence, how they think about sales pipelines, how they think about margins and kind of customer satisfaction. All of these, there's a lot of analogous things in healthcare. And so we saw that a lot of our tools and things that we had built for healthcare just transferred over very naturally. Now, I would say some industries it's not really one for one, you know, when we've done like financial services clients and things, of course a little different, but we saw a lot of commonalities. So like grocery was a really easy one for us to jump into. Higher education, same thing, was a very easy one for us to jump into. Technology, I think, has also been, you know, really good for us. Like it's again very similar, very similar kind of very technical, you know, technical, very scientific in terms of like the kinds of things you know, they need in terms of data. I think the only one that's been a bit of a stretch has been, I think, financial services. You know, Discover, when we were working with them, was really, you know, it was different. It was— and then we've worked with some other financial services investing kind of clients that, you know, really the language is different, you know, the audiences are different, the way they need things are different. It's a stretch. It's a stretch for the team, but we've built a really good muscle in trying to expand into these areas that we Do you have a tool to calculate their ROI directly and show them these reports on a weekly basis?

How does that work?

Yeah, it's built right into everything that we do really. ROI now we're seeing is a very big thing. It used to be like you could show somebody a really cool AI product and they'd be like, great. Now everybody asks questions and everybody wants to see that they're actually getting some real value out of it. So we've now built this into every part of our products that where You're seeing real value from this. And we even have that as part of our pitch. This is not just going to be AI tools for AI's sake or analytics for analytics' sake. You're going to see real value and we're going to measure it and we're going to keep showing this to you, you know, in every report, you know, it's weekly, monthly, whatever. We're going to show you what needle you're moving and how this translates to your bottom line.

I love that. Yash, where can people find out more about the business?

You can go to ringersciences.com. You know, we have a lot of our case studies, a lot of our information about our tools there. We're also putting out a lot of content on LinkedIn, as I mentioned, you know, to, you know, for sales, but also just to kind of make people aware of the kind of things that we're doing.

Love it. So that was Yash and Charles.