https://www.listennotes.com/e/1775d4af373243c6968659a459f10f1a
24 Mar 2025 · 44 min
Richard Harris and Scott talk with Anise Benasur, CEO of attention.com, and Jacob Fleischer about AI-powered sales automation. They cover founder-led sales, building early sales teams, and how equity works for founding sales hires in startups.
Foreign sales fans and comes and men and women and all gender types because we don't discriminate against anyone. Thank you for joining us on the Surface Sales podcast. I am Richard Harris, your host. It's been a while since I've co host, since I've done one of the intros, because Scott usually does it. Scott is here today. So Scott is here. We're glad to have you. A couple things first before we introduce our guest, if you're catching, if you haven't noticed, we actually have our stuff up on YouTube, so feel free. If you like to sort of watch videos a little bit, please go check us out. Hit the subscribe button, give us likes and comments. So we're pushing that a little bit. And of course, the event down to five and a half seats left as of yesterday for October surfing sales in Portugal. So, Scott, how are you? And most importantly, I got a question for you, Scott, before we jump in. What's it like to surf in Portugal? Because I haven't done it yet and you have.
Oh, it's. It's amazing. The landscape is absolutely beautiful. The, the water is going to be cold, but, like, you can tolerate it if you're tough. Like, I surfed for 45 minutes with no wetsuit last year.
Right.
But it's, but it's cold. So let's call it invigorating.
Let's call it invigorating.
It's. It's invigorating. Yeah. The sun will be out. It'll be a little bit breezy. It'll. There'll be people there, but not like crazy crowded. It'll. It'll be, It'll be real nice. It'll be nice.
Right? Well, the cool thing is, Scott, you've been preparing for two years by your daily cold plungers and your.
That's right. Yeah. I'm acclimating myself back to cold, cold, cold water.
Yeah, exactly. So cool, man. Well, it's good to see you as always. Let's introduce our guest. And I. I know you just told me how to say this, but I might butcher it, so please correct me. Anise Benasur. Did I get it right? Anise, who is the CEO and co founder of attention.com so welcome to the show. Thanks for tolerating our ridiculous banter. We'll try to shut up and let you talk more. And we're glad to have you. Why don't just before we jump in, give people a little bit of your background and particularly like, what does attention.com do? So they just have this point of reference as we have today's conversation.
Yeah, 100%. Thank you so much for having me, Richard. And you did not butcher my name. I'm the co founder and CEO of attention.com where our platform for sales. More specifically, we have AI sales agents that automate the work out of your sales conversations.
Right?
So think about your sales team having emails, calls, messages all day with prospects. How do we capture all of this? How do we build a brain that can delegate all these tasks to an army of AI teammates that will do the work for you? It can be as simple as, hey, I need to have a sales demo deck before each demo starts and get it shipped to me 15 minutes before my call starts based on my last interactions with this prospect all the way up to hey, I need to understand why we're losing deals. So give me a closed loss analysis over the last three months.
Right?
And so we can automate all this hard work with AI and with attention. About Myself I've been a founder for the past 10 years. Exactly. It will be 10 years in on April 15, 2025 about myself I'm originally French American Tunisian. I grew up in London, in Paris. I been coding ever since I was a kid. I was a hacker growing up. I was hacking web servers for fun in the early 2000s. Hi. I started my career in investment banking. A friend of mine called me one day and said hey, check out this. I'm going to start working for them. Do you want to join me? I thought it was fun. So I joined him and we ended up working for Tinder in 2013 when the startup was about six months old and did a lot of fun stuff for them, growing their presence in France. I founded a startup afterwards called Mixer, which was a professional network for creatives. He is LinkedIn for creative people where I was the co founder and CEO for about six years. And right before starting Attention, I met a gentleman named Matthias Wickenberg who was the founder of my biggest competitor at the time, a startup called Swipecast. We were waging war on each other in our past startups grabbed coffee one day and had a lot of respect for one another, really liked one another and decided that we would start our next startup together. So here we are working together over at Attention for the past three and a half years.
Sounds like. Yeah, how PayPal started too. They all hated each other when because Elon. Elon had a something different than PayPal and they hated each other and they went back and forth and then they sort of figured out they were Better together. So I have a question for you about your, your loss analysis, right? And just you know, half hearted question which is what happens if the loss analysis says I should get fired? Like does it, does it go that far? Does it, does it rank your team for you and then say hey, how honest is it?
How honest is it?
Yeah, look it will be as honest as you know, analyzing, hey, let's take all of your closed loss yields, let's analyze all the touch points and they will tell you, you know, not only why the person or when, when a prospect says hey, we're not going to buy for XYZ reason, it will go back into all the conversations and analyze them, interactions and analyze them under that lens and then it will be able to tell you hey, this is why you've lost a deal, right? You have not engaged with enough prospects, right? And typically as a leader you put in the main inputs as well that you specifically want to filter for, right? It could be a medpic or a spice framework which lens it will use or it could be your entire custom framework to analyze all of this. And so the AI will be actually really good at telling you hey, this is what's happening and this is why where you should have done a better job. It won't necessarily tell you that you have to be fired but it will show you the areas of improvement and how you can do better next time, right? And it is pretty incredible, right? Like I know for a fact we had a massive six figure deal over here at Attention that we were working on. We it was not a closed loss analysis but just a pipeline analysis. And one of the, you know, red alerts was that our rep did not really build a compelling business case for the prospect. And a couple weeks later I catch up with David Perry who was the VP sales over at Confluent, who's one of our investors. I tell him about the deal and he tells me without even looking at anything. It does seem like, you know, they don't have it your business case here. And I'm like that's really interesting. This is literally what Attention said. And so I went back to the rep, discussed the deal with him about it and he told me that it's true. He went out, built a business case that got introduced to the CFO and now it's in close one, right? And it is, you can't necessarily always say that this is what's going to happen. But it was one of those like aha moments for me where the AI was so damn good at telling Me what was missing for us to really push the deal further that yeah, our reps now believe it a lot more than ever.
Are you seeing adoption utilization in sort of unforeseen type areas that are like happy accidents? Almost like is it going to analyze a sales manager's one on one and give that manager feedback and say, you know, hey Richard, here's some stuff that you could have done better. You were too harsh or too mean in your one on one or it was unfocused or this 60 minute conversation could have been condensed into 10 minutes. Any, any feedback on I'm only harsh to you.
I'm only harsh to you. You know that, right?
No, I can, I could, I could take it anytime. I'm just cur. That type of use case or other sort of happy accident use cases that you're hearing from customers.
That's a really good question so far. I think I've only heard it once from an active customer who said we need to find a way to manage the managers, coach the coaches and where they implemented their own scorecard to evaluate these measures, these one on ones.
Right.
And I thought that was incredibly interesting. I didn't dig into the details, but now that you do mention it to me, I will, I will chat with our team about this and look into kind of like how this is working out so far and chat with a customer about this.
We want 10%, we want 10% of that. That's our referral program. So.
Overall I think, you know, I wouldn't call them unforeseen situations, but more like we've seen areas where we've expanded to product and marketing teams, building AI agents for them based on the sales conversations. I think that's not nothing really that new.
Right.
Like even incoming platforms have been getting when it comes to sales conversations have been used by product marketing teams without them being the main buyers. But that is something that we've seen as an area grow more and more over time and that has been giving at the end of the day, more power to the sales team. Because these, you know, client conversations are golden nuggets for everyone at the org. Oh maybe one that. Here's one that I really didn't see. Consumer sales.
Right.
Like tell me more about that. What does that mean?
Yeah, we have some clients who have actual call centers of people who call their prospects, call their leads and sell to them over the phone. And those, those, those leads, they're consumers, they're not actual businesses.
Right.
So an example is, you know, dental implants and these guys Are extremely, they're. They're extremely sophisticated.
Right.
Way more than I've seen with a lot of B2B clients because they have, they have so much volume that they deal with that they really tweaked and pushed our platform to an extent I have never even seen before.
So what does that mean, though? They pushed it because one of our questions, our next question kind of was going to be around, how do you differentiate in what could be perceived as a saturated market. Right.
I'll give you an example.
Right.
That I thought was really fascinating. So they built something within our platform that will, you know, if they have a prospect that is a no show, right. On call number two or call number three, they will run an agent that will take number, call number one or call number two to specifically analyze what was said in those prior conversations that led to no shows.
Right.
And I thought that was extremely interesting. I have never seen anyone do this in the B2B world. And in their case, because they have so much data and so much volume around this, they're able to get clear conclusions around this.
Right.
I thought that was extremely interesting. These guys.
That's a good one.
Yeah, right. They, they, they.
That's one of the, that's one of the reasons why it's so important to get people using your product in the beginning, regardless of the size of customer and sometimes even regardless of whether they're paying or not. Because you want to see how people utilize it. And sometimes they, they implement it in new and different and creative kind of ways. And to your point, they push you to innovate. They break certain things you got to fix. Right. And, and then you can start to, I guess then you're maybe more prepared for sort of larger customers that start to come your way as opposed to doing it the opposite way. And it's like, let's go talk to the biggest customer out there. Like, man, you're not ready for that.
Come on. 100%, right? Like the way we've always done it is start. We, we started selling to our smallest clients, right? Our average or the average of our top 10% clients. When we first started selling, I think was around like six to eight thousand dollars a year. And that was about two years ago now. Now that same number today is over a hundred thousand dollars. And it just kept growing over time. And the reason is that we never did massive jumps. We always kept growing the size of our clients more and more in an increasing way until we got to a point and we kept learning from these clients.
Right.
And that Allowed us to get ready for the next stage and the next stage, on the next stage, until, you know, going from SMB to enterprise. But we never, you know, now that I think about it, you know, we have in our first three weeks selling attention. Two years ago we had one of the biggest and best logos in the country come to us and they wanted to buy our software.
Right.
Unfortunately, in your first, in your first three weeks of going to market, you had an inbound come in from one of the largest logos that you could possibly get.
Exactly. It was incredible. And yeah, not only that, but also, you know, starts with a P, ends with an R. Incredible logo come to us. And you know, the head of sales was like, hey look, you know, we've seen every other platform, they're all, you know, 2019, you guys are the future. We worked through the sales process with them and then you know, we got blocked by their infosec at the time.
Right.
We were way too small and Infosec said just, hey, blanket policy. We're not going to let anyone analyze our calls or integrate with our emails because we're a public company and we also deal with very, very sensitive data. And you know, now in hindsight I think that this was the best thing that could have happened to us because we would have gotten destroyed if we had worked.
That's right, that's right.
Yeah. Like literally killed. And, and so yeah, we were just simply not ready. So I think, I think yeah, a lot of good things happen for a reason and I think that maybe in a few years again we'll get them. But, but for now, yeah, we'll. And I, I'm pretty sure that they ended up building this internally eventually.
I gotta. So you know, coming in from a, from your environment, which is interesting because you have this developer environment, your mindset that feels like that's your, your background. Right? Because you were, you were like War Games and you know, hacked into Whopper. For those who know that reference. The, the question is what was one of the, and the compliment first is that because you've done a couple of startups, you had a little bit of a business sales intuitiveness. So you figured out a couple of things. You're not like the first time founder coming in to build something and sell it. You've tried a couple of things. What's the biggest mistake you think founders make when they try to scale sales from founder led sales? Is it they think after five they can go higher ahead of sales? Is it they don't realize that the reason they're Selling is because the other founder, like what has been your experience? Because I think you, you might have had that experience when you first started and then now that when you created attention, you had a little bit more, you know, you, you had a little bit more, you know, meat on the bone around that experience.
Yeah, 100%. I think there are a few things both around sales and product around sales. The very simple mistake that some founders make is that they hire sales before they do marketing and growth.
Right.
They expect that their first salespeople are going to generate the pipeline and close it. Whereas in reality you need to do a lot of growth marketing so that you have, you know, more qualified pipeline come in and then your team should focus on closing that.
But do you think that, do you think that they're relying on that early sales team actually to do marketing for them?
Yeah.
To go out and get product feedback and it's like, well, wait a minute, that's not what you hired me for.
100%. I think every single founder should sell their first at least 2 to 300k of AR. I sometimes see founders go all the way up to a few million dollars in AR before hiring sales. I really think that as founders you should be working extremely closely with your.
How many deals do you think that is? Right? Because look, that's a five figure deal. 200,000 is four deals. Right. But you know, and it could be either one. Like it could be dollars, it could be number of deals. How many good conversations do you think a founder should have?
As many as possible.
Right.
And I think still think like while you have some sales reps, the founder should still talk to clients. Even today, you know, in the mid to late seven figures AR we still keep. As a founder I talk to customers all the time. So this my co founder who's our cto, it's extremely important that keeps you rooted into the decisions that you're making for your business. Now to answer your earlier question around how many deals, it really depends.
Right.
The reason why I mentioned AR is because that is just going to be a determination of how much work you're going to have to put into those clients in general is going to be relatively correlated. It could be four clients at 50K CV or you know, 10 clients that 20 KCVs. You just have to kind of like get to that early point where you're getting enough requests, you're getting enough feedback to keep iterating on your product market fit and getting to a point where you clearly understand what is it that these early clients love about Your product, What is it that you're going to be including in your messaging within your go to market motion? And that is something that you're going to have to kind of like teach to your first AES. That gets me to the next point, which is the founding AES.
Right.
Should not be one. You should not be hiring a head of sales. You should be hiring two AES who have a very specific mindset. They should be similar to founders.
Right?
Let me interrupt you for a second. Why two?
Yeah, I love that question. Simply because they're gonna be learning a lot from one another. They're gonna be within, you know, within a small competition to, like, close more deals. And if one messes up, at least they don't have an excuse against you.
Right.
The other person could say, you could still tell them, hey, but look, the other rep is closing.
Right?
And you're not. That kind of creates an environment where they're both motivated, learning from one another, and eventually the carrot is the better of you two will end up, you know, kind of like getting promoted. That worked out really well for us. Jacob Fleischer, who was one of our two founding AES, is now our head of sales, and he's crushing it.
Scott, what made you ask that question? I think I know the answer, but I'm curious.
Yeah, Yeah. I actually prefer to hire three. I always hired three in the beginning because at two, you. Because that too, you can collude. You can use your buddy as a hiding spot, so to speak. I want to compete with you, but, you know, we work the same pace, we work the same hours, and it's easy to form a little bond. But the moment you inject a third person in there, it changes the whole entire dynamic. There's no way three people are going to collude kind of together. There's always one person who's going to do a little bit more care a little bit more and whatnot. And in my experience, when you hire three people, one of them is going to be good, like, really good. One of them will be good enough, good enough for now, and one of them is probably going to suck. And I need to figure out the background and dynamic there to understand, well, what made this person not work out and what made this person great. And it informs me of how I do my hiring strategy moving forward. It's, you know, you lower your odds of success when you. When you just hire two, I think two is better than one, obviously, so you get a little bit of, you know, role play, rehearsal, competition, and whatnot. But I always preferred to hire in three. So that, that was what drove my question to ask you, you know, why two?
So that's really interesting. We're actually doing this with three technical account, founding technical account managers. So that's gonna, I'll, I'll be able to get with more data on this. The one thing about having two, right? The biggest pain for me moving from no sales rep to two sales reps was generating enough pipeline for them, which was really, really hard. Even if I pushed them to outbound, I still wanted us to be very successful and I still want us to be. So I had to work insanely hard to go from, you know, enough pipeline just for me alone to now enough pipeline for me and those two. And by the way, yeah, I would consider myself as the third AE at the time because I was still selling with them, right? So they, they still had me as a reference point to selling us. The other piece is like when you're at the seed stage, you don't have that many resources.
And we kept being capital capital constrained is obviously, you know, changes the dynamic. If you don't have the money, you can't hire three. It's like, cool story, Scott. Hire three. Well, I don't have any money. Okay, I'm not really talking to you if you're the one who doesn't have money. But if you have, if you've raised and you have the capital, you know, I always found that, that was the.
I always found it though. Like, if you hire two, you know, you basically are. You're giving yourself six months to figure it out, right? Or if you hire three, you're giving yourself 90 days to figure it out because you're collecting more data, right?
It's also, it's also that much more data faster to know what works and what doesn't work, right?
And so now granted, if you really have no money, then that matters because in day 91 comes, yeah, you don't have cash. I get it. But so I got, I got a different question for you. This might put you on the spot a little bit. Bounding AES, right? That first AE, there's, there's been a rumbling the last few years started by two of the three people on this.
Call, maybe that we won't say, we won't say which two, right?
Hint, hint, wink, wink. That around equity and that first ae. Because what is an AE being hired for at an early stage? Startup. It is to make that startup go and grow and to make founders, you know, millionaires and billionaires like that's like, let's be honest. Yet some founding AES don't get any equity. Some get a smidge, right? Like, you know, 0.0 whatever percent. And for me, as a, as a, you know, as someone coming from the sales side, I'm like, that doesn't seem fair. So I'm curious as to your opinion on this. Not what do you do, what do you offer, but just what. What do you think of that theory that. Well, yeah, founding AE should get a little bit more. A bigger piece of the pie.
Especially when you consider. Especially when you consider founding engineers get an absolute metric ton.
Yes.
Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll be very transparent here because I think people should hear real numbers. So two things over at attention. We've always been extremely generous with our employees, right? We're still under 50 employees at this point. And we've been very generous, both from a cash but also equity compensation. Jacob, when he joined us, I believe he was either at 0.3 or 0.4% equity when he started, which is 10x more than what, you know, typically founding AES get. But also what I did and what I promised them was, hey, look, if you guys are doing a good job and you're hitting your numbers, especially since that we have no. Nothing proven around, around, you know, how much revenue has been generated, you know, through quotas and so on in the past, right? You guys are kind of. BB are going to be an experiment. If you're successful, we're going to give you even more equity. There's going to be refreshers. And so for Jacob, for example, he went from 0.3 or 0.4% to 0.7% within that first year in equity.
Right?
And so that was relatively generous. And I still think there's room for him to get more over time as the team grows and that as we're more and more successful. He never asked us for anything. And we were always, you know, with all of our employees, if we're seeing that they're doing a great job and that they're working hard, we voluntarily come to them and offer them raises and equity refreshers.
That's one of the most fair answers I've ever gotten. So I appreciate, I appreciate you recognizing it. That's cool. Thank you so much.
And I mean, you've got somebody who's gone from founding AE to now being in the head of sales seat, which is every AES, every founding AES dream, probably until they end up in that head of sales seat and they go, oh shit, I have no idea how to actually do this job. So as a founder, how do you think about leveling up this first time head of sales and, and trying to provide them the resources and support that they need in order to be successful in that, in that role?
Yeah, that's a great question. I think I will take it back to why even did I see in him the possibility of being ahead of sales? And he would be, by the way, great podcast guest for you guys. But I think overall that what I really saw in him was his slope, right how fast he was iterating and learning from feedback. And so, you know, he had an extremely strong slope. So I thought that he would figure out how to be a great manager. And when you're at series A stage, you want someone who's going to be a great coach. You don't want not only someone, a great IC who's going to sell extremely well, but someone who's also going to be, you know, a player coach who's going to be able to give the right feedback to the reps and help them be successful. And so I saw a lot of coachability within him and I thought that he, that was going to make him successful. Now that being said, his first three months being a, you know, founding head of sales were painful. I struggled a lot the first three months with feedback and being extremely tough on him. And three months later I was actually very proud of him. And one of the things I did actually was that we had a few advisors who were sales leaders in different, you know, for different companies. And I asked them to coach and mentor Jacob. One of them being, you know, David Perry, who was the VP Sales at Confluence and invested in our series A. And so he had a weekly one on one with Jacob, David Barron as well, who was, who's the director of sales at HubSpot, kept a very close relationship with Jacob, helping him and mentoring him. And so with the help of the right people, I really saw him level up and be a great leader for his team. And his team has never missed quota to his day.
Well, let's hope he keeps that streak alive for, for his sake, for your sake, and for attention's sake. We're starting to move towards the end of the show here and we always try to wrap up the show by saying, how can we be helpful to you? Do you have any questions for us? So anything on your mind that you want to talk to us about?
Yeah, absolutely. I would love to even start with the first question, which is one what was one of the things that you've learned interviewing podcast guests around sales the last few weeks?
The last few weeks?
Yeah.
Learned in the last few weeks about podcasting?
Guess.
H. Wait. I'm waiting for you. You want me to go first?
Yeah, go first. Because I, you know me, I have.
A really fabulous memory, I would say. One of the things I learned is some people have very low tolerance for ever changing schedules. And those type of people I don't want any part of whatsoever. So if you can't understand that busy executive schedules change and sometimes you have to reschedule, and it has nothing to do with anything other than life interfering, then off you're not invited back. And you probably don't deserve the microphone or the platform to be on a podcast. So get over yourself. That's one thing. So I think I've created an archetype of who this type of individual is, and I have no interest in having those type of people onto the show. That's number one. Second thing that I've learned, there is a lot of unrest in B2B sales and tech and SaaS and all these things right now, and everybody, from SDRs to founders and even coaches, consultants like us, does not really understand what is happening and can barely keep up with their pace and rate of change. And that's not a negative. That's not a positive. That's just like everybody's kind of head is spinning a little bit, and so it's confusing and a little bit stressful. I think there's a high element of stress and confusion and a desire for clarity that nobody yet can. Can really bring about, and I think that's having an impact. So those are the two things that I've learned from our conversations with guests in the last few weeks. What about you, Richard?
I agree with Scott on both of those couple of things. You know, I'm learning that this kind of goes with what Scott saying is with the advent of A.I. you know, it's. It's another land grab, right. And it's going to be a. An interesting play. Right? What. What is a fabulous tool or service is slowly becoming a feature three to six months later, which I think alludes to what Scott is saying around. Like, it's just hard to keep up with the pace of what's happening. I also have had some people who are keeping their head in the sand around some of this stuff that they're. They're thinking that they have this great ability to stay focused on their mission of what they're trying to accomplish. But their head is so far down in the sand that they're forgetting that there's all this other stuff swimming around them and they're not paying attention. Meanwhile, other people we're talking to are paying attention. And, you know, if I had to bet, you know, if I had to bet on one of these horses, it would be interesting to see which one's going to be right. You know, I've also, the other thing I've learned is that some of the exact same mistakes that we have experienced in sales 10 and 15 years ago are being made right now by founders where they think they know how to sell and they don't have a clue.
History repeating itself constantly.
They think that, you know, as I always say, you know, they think they can read a book over the weekend and all of a sudden they're smarter than their sales leader. Right? They don't know how to delegate the business side so they can go focus on the other side of the business. And generally they're the tech founder. Right? So those. So that, you know, I'm learning that people are just stupid. Maybe, maybe, maybe I'm just reconfirming that. I've. What I've known is that people are stupid about certain things because they feel like they want to experience themselves. It's themselves, when in fact, if they got a little bit of advice from a smart advisor, they could accelerate by six to nine months. That's, that's what I'm seeing the most of these days. So it's a good question, though. It's a really good question.
That's really interesting. I have another, you know, pretty tough question to answer, but what is it, you know, given your experience and what you know about, you know, sales and go to market, but also what you're seeing with, you know, the AI revolution these days, you know, regardless of the AI piece. But what is something that in your opinion, is so obvious that it should exist, but it does not exist yet?
Oh, oh, oh, I want to take this.
No, no, let me go first. No, go ahead, go ahead, buddy.
I can tell you the answer to that. That is a million percent on the front of my brain right here. What should exist from a product perspective that doesn't is an alternative platform to LinkedIn, a competitor to LinkedIn, should exist. There is a million and one pieces of product feedback feature requests that, that we all could gather. I have so much of this already stored in my Google Drive somewhere. And some of these fixes are super simple, super obvious things that people have been yelling about and screaming about forever. And you know, the platform has a little bit of a monopoly and I don't really understand why and that I think somebody who's got the proper war chest, who also is adequately delusionally confident in their ability to pull something like that off, I, I think it's ready for disruption. I think the time is right. And how much do you think it.
Would take Scott, to get started? 50 million investment?
I, I don't know. I don't, I don't know. You know, I'm not, I don't know how long it would take to build the thing from an engineering kind of perspective. So I, I haven't specced any of that kind of stuff out, but I don't think that it would take as much as it used to because people will migrate to and go where the right type of content is and the right type of creators and leaders and business influencers and stuff like that. And if you are somebody that is in that upper echelon or has access and ability to migrate that upper half a percent super user to a new platform and incentivize them somehow, people will follow. And the sentiment against LinkedIn is a little bit nasty right now, meaning it's a necessary evil. I, I very rarely talk to people who, who after they're done saying their business relies upon LinkedIn, don't also say, I can't wait to be done with this platform or, or use an alternative version. Every single person that I know talks about this stuff. So I don't think that it would be as big of a war chest as you might imagine. Nor do I think you need to have a billion and one users in order to create a successful alternative platform. And I think that's something that people focus too much on. They hear a competitor, LinkedIn, and they get overwhelmed and like, how am I going to get a billion users? You don't have to get a billion users to have a successful company, a successful product to deliver value to people. So that's my answer, as you can see. I was ready with that one.
Yes, you were so ready that I forgot the question. What is the question?
What product should exist that does not.
Right now, in your opinion? Something that's so obvious that it should exist. But yeah, and while you think about it, Richard, I think, Scott, you know, my answer to that maybe is that the average user of LinkedIn is much, much older than, you know, the other traditional, you know, social consumer networks. A and so those people tend to be also lazier to move out from one platform to another. They're later adopters. And so, you know, they. Yeah, because they're, they're being later adopting. That probably creates a stronger moat for a platform like LinkedIn, social networks for teenagers and early adults. I don't have TikTok. I'm 37. I don't have TikTok, and I refuse to sign up to TikTok. Maybe, you know, I'm the average age of the LinkedIn user, so maybe that there might be an element of response there. But that was a random thought.
I just, I like the fact that if he's the average age at 37 and I'm turning 56 in a few weeks, you know, I'm part of my. Part of the average, or am I skewing the average up?
You're skewing the average up and you're.
Part of the problem. Right, exactly. God, what product doesn't exist? The one thing I wish something would happen is I wish that from a sales perspective, when I send an email to somebody, right, and I'm in the dialing zone and I'm in the call zone and I've got the right data.
And my system, the kids call that the flow state. Richard. That's what the kids call that.
Okay. In the flow state, as soon as someone opens my email, I want my dialer to interrupt what I'm doing and call that person right away, because I am in the forefront of their mind. Like literally within 30 seconds or 60 seconds, the dialer should just know, presuming I have the data that I need to call that person right now. That is. And I've been asking for that for 15 years. I asked Sales Loft and Outreach years ago. Why don't you do that? InsideSales.com when that thing existed, I'm like, why don't you all have that? That's everybody's feature though, Rich. But it's a feature of a product. Yeah. So, fine, whatever.
No, you don't know. You gotta, you gotta answer his question the right way.
You gave him a feature.
Oh, God.
You didn't give him a company, you didn't give him a product.
Scott, I'm, I'm a tactical guy. You know that about me.
Yeah, you gotta ask the idea guy. Don't ask Richard that question. Yeah. Oh, great. He. Now, now this is why Richard wins, because he gives this tactical thing and now it's going to get implemented. Anise is going to build that for you. He'll be ready in two weeks. He needs two weeks product cycle by Monday. It's done. It's done.
Exactly. So, yeah, but I. I tend to be more tactical than where Scott is. Far more strategic about stuff like that, which is, I think, one of the reasons we get along.
So I got an endless stream of product ideas that. That just go nowhere.
This is true. He texts me, what do you think of this? All the time. I had one last night.
I sent you one last night.
And you love my answer, so.
Yeah. Yeah.
So.
Well, we appreciate you spending time with us today, man. You could check out anise Benor on LinkedIn, check out his company attention. They are making waves in this space. Good luck to you. Keep up the good work, man, and we will see everybody next time on the surf and sales podcast. Thanks for joining.
Thanks, everybody. And be sure if you're watching us on YouTube to hit that like and subscribe button, leave us a comment. And rather than seeing us on the next YouTube, come to Portugal. See us in Portugal. Hang out. Anybody who comes to Portugal, we'll put you on the podcast. How's that? There you go. Free offer. All right, Elise, thanks, buddy. It was really nice to meet you and spend some time. Bye.
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