S5E4 - How Engineering and Sales Partner with Richard White of Fathom

Hey, everybody, it is Richard Harris, and for once in a long time, I'm doing the intro to the podcast. I am here with my co. Founder, co partner. I don't know. Oh, everything at this point, Scott, lease. This is the surf and sales podcast. If you haven't come, then you need to come to the event coming up in November. If you have come, you should tell everybody in the world why they should come to the surf and sales event. Looking forward to today's podcast. Scott, you feeling better? How you doing, bud?

I feel better. I'm. I'm probably 85%. I had. I have had Covid for the last couple weeks and it's been a miserable, awful experience.

Yes. And if you don't know Scott, when Scott is miserable and awful through illness, it's worse than his regular miserable and awful, which is kind of what he's like on a daily basis.

I'm miserable. Then basically everyone's miserable. Yeah, is what Richard's trying to say. I bring everyone down.

Yeah. No, you don't. We just sit back and laugh. So he's, He's. He plays the victim very well. But anyway, let's stop talking about Scott and let's talk about our guest. Richard. I didn't even ask how to introduce you, so I'm going to let you do that. We have Richard White here. Richard, tell everybody who you are, what you do. Give them some context about your life, your career, your current role, all that kind of stuff.

Sure, that should be no problem. How much time do we get for this? No, I'm just kidding. Richard White. I'm founder and CEO here over at Fathom, which is just actually. Yesterday, G2 announced we are the number one highest rated for satisfaction product on G2 out of about 9,000 products for this year. Fathom's an AI meeting assistant and kind of conversational intelligence tool. Before that, I'm actually an engineer by trade, SL product designer. So. But at my last company, User Voice, which I ran for about 12 years, got to about 10 million revenue. I actually ran the sales team for a year, too. So, like, I feel like I've got. Got like, you know, some, some battle scars from being an engineer trying to run a sales team. And that was actually partly how I got into this idea of Fathom, you know, No, I take notes on meetings. I think that's pretty clear. It's nice to have an AI meeting assistant like Fathom do that for you. But I also ran a sales team for a while, and I remember trying to, like, extract good notes out of my team and how painful that was and trying to get them to all their stuff in the CRM. And so eventually I just built a product that's like, great. We're just going to automate all that away so they can just focus on being sellers and not being scribes.

And let's. Let's be honest, too. Like, I. I was a very early adopter of Fathom. I used it before it became what it is today.

And Richard.

Richard's been very kind to let me, you know, Scott, as, you know, provide feedback, which is, you know, always pleasant to hear from Richard Harris. So I'm excited to talk to you about a lot of things. I don't think I realized you had this engineering and sales leadership background, which is really cool.

And knowing you, sort of having gotten to know you, your personality feels very business sort of oriented, as opposed to what I. As what we traditionally see as sort of the introverted technical founder, all that kind of stuff.

So maybe I haven't been able to ship code in 10 years. Maybe that's, you know, I'm just. I'm just pointing hair now and just managing.

Right.

So what.

What was the biggest hurdle in terms of, like, finding this simple problem to getting it to, you know, MVP status? What was your biggest hurdle for you?

The mean, the biggest hurdle was. It's actually, you know, Zoom is actually a very complicated product. There are a lot of different configurations and whatnot.

And then, dude, they got so many buttons at the bottom of Zoom, it drives me nuts. I was just talking about it before we got here. If someone from Zoom is listening, please let. I think Scott said it the other day, can we customize that bottom bar, for God's sakes? Like, can I get rid of the stuff? I don't need a whiteboard, right? Like, how do I customize that?

Yeah. So, you know, we had this idea early 2020. We started working on fall of 2020. Actually was very fortunate. I got to grab some of my best engineers from my last company, which, yeah, starting. Starting a company with great engineers is kind of like starting on second base. But it took us about a year to build the first version of Fathom that was, like, reliable enough that people really would use it day in, day out. And I think the other challenge is we, you know, I think, like, even Zoom recording itself takes, like, 30 minutes or they get you the, like, recording after the meeting. And in my early testing, I was like, that's not good enough. It needs to be faster. Like, I need. If I'm going to Rely on this thing to replace note taking and give me my, like, summary of the meeting right afterwards. Like, needs to be fast. And I remember the engineering team being like, how fast does it need to be? I was like, I don't know. Just keep making it faster and I'll tell you when it's like, fast enough. And I think we got done about 30 seconds. So like 30 seconds after the call ends, it gets me the. And I was like, okay, that's fast enough. Right? I think we've. We're now down to, like, less than that. But that was a really big challenge for the engineering team is like, how do you take a thing that normally takes 30 minutes and how do you do it in a tenth of that time? So a lot of fun technical challenges in the early days of the product.

I want to know more about.

You built something, and this may be a controversial take of so of sorts, and you can hammer me if you want, but you build this thing. It's been around for a couple years now. To me, at the time it comes out, it's like, holy shit. Revolutionary. I can't even believe this is possible.

Does it feel a little weird now that it seems like everybody in every company has something sort of similar in terms of the ability? I don't know if I want to use the commoditized word or not, but it's like, I don't know how to describe it. I'm just thinking to myself, if I was you, I would have been like, yes, I've built this thing. That's amazing. It's like from the future. And now I wake up today, I'm like, everybody has this. How do you, like, deal with that or think of that?

And.

And you probably have really good answers for it that make me look like an imbecile. So I'm looking forward to hear that.

I hope so. So started a company in 2020 and the key insight here was, you know, I've used other call recording solutions before I was familiar with things like Gong and Chorus. I actually interviewed a bunch. I interviewed over 100, like, Gong users before we got started. And, you know, kind of came away with like, the need is much bigger than just sales. Right. And actually, you know, sales is like the number one user of Fathom today, but it's still a minority of our users overall.

Right.

And so we said, okay, everyone could benefit from this. It's on a meeting. And the big insight, though is that, like, well, why is it only available to sales? Well, historically, transcription has been really expensive you know, when we got started three years ago, it cost us two, three dollars an hour to transcribe something, which doesn't sound like a lot until you realize, you know, how many calls does the average salesperson do per month? Right. So probably like easily 30 hours.

Okay.

It's $60 a month in hard costs. That's why you historically have to charge $100 for this product or something like that. We kind of looked at the providers for transcription and said we think they're all pretty good. Google's pretty good, Amazon's pretty good. They're all pretty good. They're all good enough that I think transcription itself will become a commodity and essentially will become free in the next couple years. So we're going to build a business. We're going to be the first people to get out there and give this product away for free because we think we can, we could tell where the market's going. Kind of the Amazon style of like, you know, we're going to go to where the market's going and we kind of said if we wait till when transcription is free, there's going to be a million competitors. So we can't wait till that. We've got to kind of make a bet that if we start now, by the time we get significant scale, the cost will come down such that we won't go out of business. Right. And that worked out almost exactly correct because I think, you know, we're now pay about 2 cents an hour for that thing that cost us $2 an hour three years ago. And you know, if it was still costing $2 an hour, I wouldn't be talking to you. I would be on the breadline. And so I think we're pretty fortunate. So we're not surprised at all that there's like a bunch of competitors in the space. But our whole, our whole thing was like, get there first, get out in front. And there's a lot of stuff you can do at scale that you can't do when you don't have scale. Right. When you, when you have the pole position and you're the market leader and you've got more usage than anyone else, it gives you, allows you to kind of get.

What are those, what are those things? What are some of those things? Because I think that's particularly for founders who are working and listening to this, or for sales reps going to work for early stage companies. What are those things that you can do at scale that you couldn't.

Yeah. So for us it's actually just infrastructure costs. Right. You, if you want to go start tomorrow and do all the recording solutions, like, you know, there's a lot of technical stuff in the back end. You got to spin up servers to record these meetings and you got to transcribe the videos, you know, store the video. And there's a lot of things where when you were doing like we're doing, you know, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of hours of this content per month, I can just, you know, optimize my system such that like my per hour cost is far below what you could achieve today. We kind of think that our per hour cost is about 10% what another startup would pay if they were just getting started out. And so that gives us a significant advantage that we can always keep the product, we can always have a very robust free version and a way that our competitors have to give you. You get three hours for free, right? No, no, we have, you know, tens of thousands of users that are using this every month putting tens of hours on fathom of recording completely free. We're the only ones in the space that still do a full usage, full unlimited usage, free plan. And that's because we have that economy scale of infrastructure.

Do you find yourself building products now thinking about how am I going to sell this, how are we going to go to market with it? Whereas maybe the first time before you had the experience of kind of trying to run sales, just building a product and, and maybe thinking differently about it. Is there a different lens you view things through now?

I, you know, I do think so. Between my first company and bad and second one, I think a lot more about distribution this time around. Last time we built a company, we built a product that people use, didn't think much about like what would people be willing to pay for this, etc. Etc. How many people are there out there be willing to pay for this? You might ask if you sold a product management. Product management is incredibly hard market. It's not a very big market. They're not a very sophisticated buyer. They don't have a lot of budget. Part of the reason we like this is we said, hey gosh, there's already people paying, you know, look at go and course paying lots of money for solutions like this in the market. And we actually think the market's 5x bigger than that because we think it's bigger than just sales. And so yeah, I think, you know, early on we thought a lot about like okay, this market is big enough that we can do this. But honestly I actually think much more about usage than about monetization. I kind of feel like if people are using a product day in, day out, you will generally find a way to make money off of that. Not always, right? There's some like, especially consumer apps where they've struggled to figure that out. But in a B2B world, I tend to find that like, you know, our top three goals actually for 2024 are customer satisfaction, user growth, and then actually revenue. Because that's kind of the, the stat. Like we think that's how things flow, make customers super happy. That leads to growth, growth of usage leads to revenue.

So question on, you know, going from premium to paid, right? Because you, you brought out the paid version, which you sucked me into. Scott, one more thing that's on my list of tools that I pay for.

Like, Scott knows, he, he, you know, he gives me about this all the time. How did you know when to do that? Right?

Is it, is it, Was it based on the total number of users? Was it based on. Now that we have this many users and the average person is doing this much, we know that they will experience the value of that.

You know.

How, how did you choose to do that?

We actually did it like I think we did it way later than most companies would, especially B2B.

I agree. I was like surprised that I, you know, when I saw this, I was like, finally he did this.

But we also did it way sooner than I would have liked in some ways. So I actually think a lot about, again about growth and usage first and then like I said, revenue later.

We, we had the product complete for free for a year before we even rolled out. We call our team edition, which is kind of like the manager version. It's the gong light, if you will. We rolled that out year and a half ago and that was predominantly where we monetized. We didn't even try to monetize individual users. We just, as Richie pointed out, we just turned on like a premium plan for individuals in December. And actually the impetus for doing that was not we looked at numbers and kind of saw how much money we make, we can make. It was actually that we had a bunch of features we wanted to, yeah, roll out, but they were really expensive. They're like these GPT4 level AI features. And unfortunately we did the math and said if we just give these away for free, it's going to cost us hundreds of thousand dollars per month. So I just functionally can't. But I want people to be able to get that experience of fathom. I want them to have the most cutting Edge, AI and Fathom. And so we kind of said, well, I guess we'll have to. We'll come up with a premium plan and we'll give everyone 30 days for free. We'll eat the couple hundred thousand dollars that it costs to do that, and then, you know, hopefully we'll get some paid user on the edge of it. But it was actually all driven from cost as opposed to driven from, like, you know, revenue maximization sort of strategy.

Scott, he's the anti.

You.

He wants to give this thing away and not charge enough, but now he can start charging everything, which is very you.

I don't know if that's fair. I get. We. Just before we started recording, we were talking about how many books I mailed off and. And distributed for free. I don't. I don't think that that's fair.

Yeah, well, I never said I was going to harshly.

I'm being harsh.

Yes. Well, it is Richard and Scott talking. Not. Not like this is shocking to anybody, is it?

How miserable was your experience leading sales?

Yeah.

I probably is more miserable for the people I was leading, actually.

You know, tell us more about that. Why?

Yeah, you know, I. I'm kind of an engineer by trade, so when I come into the sales team that I inherited, we were between executives. I was like, I can run the sales team. In fact, I probably learn a lot from it. And, you know, I did. You're going to laugh, but I like an engineer.

I was like, I'm already laughing. I don't even. I already know the punchlines.

I was like, well, if I'm going to figure out what's working, what's not working, we need to get. I need to get more discrete data. So I'm going to add. I think. I think I literally added 20 to 30 fields to our CRM and said, okay, after every. After every step of the process, I want you these 15 questions, right? And then we'll do this for six months. And afterwards I'll do this, like, statistical analysis of, like, what works and what doesn't. Right.

How long did that last? How far into six months did you even get?

I think I got like six to eight weeks in before I was like, that's impressive.

I was thinking six days.

Yeah. I think I had a very. I think that the. I had a very amazing sales team that humored me quite a bit.

And I.

But after, I think six weeks, they're like, we're doing more data entry than we're doing selling here. I was like, oh, okay, yeah, right. I forgot about that.

So forgot about the monetization. All right, so you. So you learned that part, right?

Yeah.

What else did you learn? Like what. What else did you. And what is. So two things. Like, I'm asking this question from two perspectives, Scott. I'm stealing your question.

Since I pay for fathom, I should probably ask all of them anyway.

What did you learn? And then what did. What do you think those reps, you know, what did you learn about sales and appreciating their role versus engineering? And what do you think the sales team learned about appreciating the engineering mindset? Because I think that often is a. Is a big challenge.

Great question.

Yeah, I think. I think I. I was thinking about the sales team as like a, like a function call in engineering, but it was like a very, like, lossy. What we call, like a lossy function call where it's like, occasionally it returns the right answer and sometimes it returns the wrong one. And so I was like, oh, these humans can't be trusted. I need to build a lot of structure around them. And I think over time I realized, like, oh, what I. I also was trying to enforce a thing where everyone sold the same way. And it was actually kind of funny because I saw, you know, people took different notes. People, like, did different flows their meetings. And we had guys that, you know, like, did really well and ran their meetings very differently and just, like, played to their strengths. And so I think one of the things I came to appreciate about Tellers, I was not. Surprise, surprise. I was not big on, like, rapport building. I was not big on, like, doing it. I was like, everyone just needs to, you know, just turn it into an assembly line sort of thing. And I came to really appreciate the folks that really understood. No, no, no. This customer doesn't need this part of the script. It doesn't need the script. I need to just have a human conversation with this person. I think what the sales team appreciate about me is, like, I actually did out of some of that, I didn't use all the data, but I was able to come back to them and say, like, oh, here's some data that proves, I think, the things you've been trying to tell me, which is that, like, we should stop talking to these. This segment of the market, and we should stop talking to these folks. And so you were trying to tell me these things, but I was expecting data and you were trying to give me, you know, your kind of anecdot. And now we've got both, and we're all aligned that, like, Okay, I get your experience and I've got the data to back it up. But it was a very oil and water kind of experience. Right. Like you've got these folks that are very good at their craft, almost doing it as like a. I feel like doing a form of art. And you've got someone coming in and trying to see like, no, no, no, that's the wrong, like doing science. Right. And so it's kind of a, I think in the end actually produced decent results, but there was a very messy kind of courtship there.

Do you think about building the team now the same way you did back then? Do you think like, oh, I have the formula for how to build and scale this team. I just have to replicate it or has the game completely changed?

I feel like the game has changed quite a bit, especially for what we're doing, doing with Fathom, where I feel like there's not. There's some analogs out there, but there's not actually a ton of products where it's like product is given away complete for free. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of what we're doing at Fathom is like more farming or it's like, you know, we're actually almost trying not to sell you anything. Just try to make you aware of, hey, we have these other additional features and things like that. And it's kind of led to us, I think, trying to create from first principles, getting the sales team creepy first principles, like, what are the right roles, if you will, rather than just bringing in, okay, we've got SDRs do this, we've got days do this. But actually some of it's work, some of it's not right. I think we've tried to do some things where we had like AES follow deals, great old grave, like be the CSM and the ae and now we're starting to regress back into a more traditional structure.

But it's an interesting thing. It's like even when we lose a deal, we don't really lose the deal. We just didn't win the upgrade off the free product. Right. And we'll build more features and we'll come back to them six months and three months or they'll come back to us sort of thing. And so it's a. It's a very different kind of sales cycle sort of thing when the user is going to continue being a user no matter whether you close them or not sort of thing.

What did the sales team learn from reporting to an engineer that they don't ever want to do that Again.

That'S a good question. I mean, again, I think, I think I was able to bring some data that they hadn't, you know, or like these types of things, this, this edge of market, this region, these types of things clearly are. I, I started interesting concepts of like, you know, here's our expected value for opportunity. And I don't, like, yeah, I don't think most people just thought about in terms of win rate. I'm like, no, no, like ASP times win rate for specific. Like what is the value of this meeting that you're doing? And we got really sharp on that and allowed them to have this like really good lens of like, oh yeah, like some of these meetings are worth 10x what these other meetings are worth. Right. And I think that was something that I think they kind of intuitively knew, but they couldn't quantify how big that gap was. And so I think they appreciated that like someone else is like kind of looking out for them and trying to like keep them focused. Like, I was just, you know, the way I manage engineers is I'm maniacal about how do I, like, clear things out of your way so you can focus on the highest value work. And you know, I think that works.

Well in sales leadership.

Yes, it does. That's an amazing.

Basically, that's basically what I'm doing there too. I think when I came in they kind of had this like, we try to do every deal and we try to do all the things. And I was like, no, no, I just want you to work on the, the highest value stuff and we're going to get all the rest of the way. I'm going to give you permission to like drop all these other things on the floor, sort of.

Right. So I, I think, you know, Scott and I, I think are both guilty of the, look, your time is valuable. You need to respect it and own it and control it. And the fact that you, you took, you created story based on real data to say, do you really want to have that meeting? Because it's not worth it. Not to mention, you know, the formula of how many fucking meetings are we having internally and what is that costing me?

Right.

Like, I would assume you have a strong hold on that at your organization that you make sure there's not too many internal meetings.

I always say it's ironic for a company that makes meeting software essentially. I really don't like meetings, especially internal meetings. I constantly am asking like, does this meeting need to exist? Could this meeting be a slack message? Could this meeting be A loop or something like that. Because I find I also have. I'm very annoying about saying, like, meetings are for discussion, not content delivery. And so if we find ourselves in a meeting where someone just delivering content, I'm like, oh, it seems like you have content deliver. Great, let's end this meeting. Now.

That's those executive meetings that we all went to where I'm reading off. Here's my numbers, Richard.

Right?

Yes.

So put that in slack. Good. Great. Love, love your numbers. Send me the presentation. I'll get offline.

Yeah. Eight executives in one room, and everybody's reading off their numbers one by one.

Yeah, right. Totally, Totally. I love that. That's. I'm going to tweet that out with your accreditation. Scott, I've asked a ton of questions. I'm going to.

Shut up.

What do you want to ask?

I want to know, if you zoom out a few years.

5, 10, where do you land on this? Like.

This, this debate of where is the future of sales headed? Is everybody going to get eventually automated and replaced, or is it really just going to be the best of the best who utilize AI as a component of what they do? Or this is all just like a fad and AI will disappear. Which camp do you fall in? And I don't mean, like right now, today. I'm talking about zoom out five, ten years.

Can I. Can I tell you my, like, dystopian kind of like Twilight Zone episode? Yes.

Like, it's my favorite kind of stories.

Oh, yeah, the story, you know, people. It's humans talking to humans over video calls. All of a sudden, AI comes in. And over time, it's actually. Occasionally the AI is actually talking on behalf of the human. Not all the time. Starts off being like 20% of the time. The salesperson kind of zone out, take a sip of coffee. The AI answers the easy question. And over time, that number actually increases from 20%, 60%, 80%, 90%. At some point, it's like the humans just get to page occasionally. It's like, hey, I think there's an answer. I'm stalling them.

Text me back the right response here. But what's funny, they don't realize is that the person on the other end of the line is also AI. And so there's this whole market where there's just millions of AIs talking to each other, kind of pantomiming how humans used to talk to basically have these conversations that could be like two APIs talking to each other, but they're not because no sides really agree to it. That's kind of like the hilarious dystopian version of this where it's just like we slowly don't notice. We think that there's a bunch of sales calls happening. Everyone thinks they're talking to human and they're not. I don't know that that's actually, I don't know how close we are to that. I do think it's the AI. What you can do with AI these days is amazing. I mean Richard, the, the premium version we rolled out in December that, that you bought and thank you for being a customer. Right. With these new summaries. That technology came out six months before and it obsoleted something we launched with AI9 like six months before that. The, the rate of change. It's amazing. And this stuff works really well. What it does. So I think there's a, I think the next couple years looks like a lot of your low level. Yeah, the stuff I was trying to get off my sales team's plate couple years ago just melts away. Right. Your data entry melts away. Your data analysis melts away. Even some of like the simple questions, right. Like can be handled by AI and it allows, I think sellers that are good to really focus more on being good. Kind of like you focusing on the higher value problems to a certain degree. I think it's a very scary time if you are in an entry level position because that's the stuff that's, you know, there's a lot of data entry and data analysis and you know, qualification work and whatnot that I think might.

Then those are, and those, those are skills that elite sellers acquired through experience over time and practice. So how are these brand new sellers going to acquire those skills in a world where all of that is just automated away.

Right. Yeah. It's going to create almost this, it's almost like the drawbridge. You get pulled up, right. It's like, ah, you guys crossed over. You got that. Great.

There's all these elite sellers. They're in good sh. But what happens when all those elite sellers retire or expire?

Yeah.

This is, this is, this is the stuff that I, that I think about and. Go ahead, Richard.

I was going to say it's, it's the, it's the stuff that, where you're like, man, I'm glad I'm old. I can get out of this racket before Richard.

Richard's way past the other side of the drawbridge. He's happy about that.

I'm like, I'm like so over here standing up on the Top and just waving at everybody. Come on by.

No, I, I, and I'm not actually that's the scary part. But you know, it's, it's scary. You know, my question is, you know, at what point is the human going to decide they're willing to not talk to someone to buy something?

Right?

Like we've, we've already done that, right. We could, you know, nobody will drop a hat to think to spend three grand on something at Amazon, right. There are a certain, there's a large group of people who will go buy a car without ever test driving it. Right. 50,000, 100,000 and not talking to somebody. And not talking to someone. I think that, and those are B2C. That's business to consumer. It's one decision maker. As it's a bigger deal, right. As it's a more complex thing and people don't like to make decisions by themselves. They're going to want to talk to a human I think a little bit more because somebody in the group's not going to trust the bottom. Right. Somebody wants to talk to somebody before I drop this, drop this amount of money. Particularly the person who's asking for the money because it's their job and livelihood on the line. So that to me I think is going to be the most interesting is, is when does it make a shift from B to C to B2B which it will like everything else. And I think it's going to be based on the buyer's desires and behaviors. And I think I said, you know, like last, like yeah, probably starting a year ago, if I were in sales, what I would be doing, I would be working my ass off to get into enterprise sales. I would be working my butt off to learn how to be at a larger deal complex sales cycle, multiple decision makers because they'll be the last ones.

That's the last one to go.

Right.

So I agree with it.

And by the way, don't you think.

People already want to buy stuff without talking to somebody? I do.

Well, I think there's, well, Richard, you answer the question.

B2B. I don't want to talk to somebody.

Yeah.

What do you think?

I mean, I think it, it depends on the complexity of what you're buying. Right. And I think one of the things is that the, the complexity of a lot of these B2B products is coming down. Right. Like we're a B2B product but are, you know, we work a lot to, we're increasingly over time trying to put more and more into self service like make the product sell itself more. Right. And I think, I think you know this is a product again our top competitor in Gollum. Right. Like you still have to talk to a salesperson. Five years ago you absolutely talked salesperson. It's a complicated product but I think even complicated products are getting easier for people to understand. And there's also just way more out of them. People are coming savvier buyers. Right. So they kind of know what they're looking for in a lot of these markets. But so yeah, except the new buyers.

The new buyers. So like all these founders that are coming along now, they have no clue. They're coming to Scott and I all the time for this stuff. Right. Which is good for us, that's good for business. So there is this multitude of people who are going to do it. Now if those founders are technical minded, I agree with Scott. They don't want to talk to a human anyway. How genocide curiosity for your enterprise clients or your or your business clients. Can it what percentage will buy fathom without talking to a human? Do you know?

Well that that's interesting because we actually, we have a fork in our kind of sequence where it's like oh if we know you're a small company we have you go in self service funnel and if we see that you're a certain size we actually force you to talk to folks and we actually start with sales assist first. Like we, we didn't let you self service anything in the beginning. We wanted you to talk to a human to buy everything because oh I.

Remember you had to schedule it. I had to schedule like like a onboarding walk there. I was like I don't need this, like I, I figured this part out.

So yeah, we did that because it was like I think I learned, we learned the most when people actually talked to our team. That helped us understand what pain points they had, understood what features we needed to add. And then over time we are now okay taking that team focusing more and more on those upmarket deals. Whereas in the beginning they were talking to oh you've got, you need to buy three seats, 20 bucks a piece. Right. You're going to talk to a salesperson. Right. We did it for everyone. So I think a lot of companies do the re or they start off with self service and then they try to like add on the enterprise sales team afterwards. We actually did the reverse and we said we want to over index on building relationships and when you talk to a human and getting your questions out.

So when you, you know, I've got some suggestions for you on product features, on your summary stuff. So we sure offline.

Get ready, get ready for a 10 page letter.

No, no, no, no, no.

I spent 10 years building a company that was all around product feedback. I'll get product feedback as a gift. Like the more you're. You want to write me 10 pages? That's amazing. Like I'm going to buy you a.

Engineering doesn't know what he's done.

You don't know what you've done.

Yeah.

No, it's not that hard.

I do.

I wanted to come back to what you were saying around engineers leading sales. It sort of dawned on me a little bit is that. And maybe this is what happened, I don't know or, or I'm projecting is that you were able, it sounds like you were able in many cases to provide the data to help them tell a better story. Right. Like to their pitch is that, you know, they were able to say no, this part of the story isn't good. And you were or isn't necessary and you were able to say hey, here's another way to frame this based on a picture of pain and a story. Am I right in that suggestion? Like that's a part that sales forgets. That engineer could help craft that story and maybe some cases better than marketing because it's so use case specific.

Yeah, I think you know I talked about like providing them data on where they're winning and not winning. But the other thing was like we were selling to a buyer that looked like me. Right. As a kind of product slash engineering person. And so there are a lot of times where I think what I got in trouble was I would try to tell them how to sell. Instead I just started telling them, hey, let me just tell you more stories about how I use our product and like what problems has helped me solve. I focus more on just like let me just teach you more about the feature, teach you more about customer stories and things like that and less about here's the script of what to say and here's how to like here's the right way to frame this value prop. Just I focused more on those use cases as being the target user myself. And that seemed to help a lot.

Yeah, that, that gives me the epiphany of sales we sucked at and still suck at this feature benefit story piece because it lacks the context of a story and you can help provide that context.

Yeah, I think when I came in they had a bunch of like here's a bunch of features. Here's what each feature does. It's like here's the six jobs to be done that the people that are hiring our productist do or looking for. Right. Let me like walk you through not just what our product does but like what's upstream and downstream of our product in that person's workflow. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Well let's, let's flip this a little bit. How can we be helpful to you? What kind of questions do you have for us if any?

Yeah, I mean I'm really curious. You know we were talking about the future of, of you were asking my opinion on the future of AI sales. I'm kind of curious what you think is the future of just the construction of sales teams. Right. Like you know, you talked about going more enterprise. We tried some stuff where like I said, we. I, I hate handoffs. Right. I hate. It's like customer talks to A and then B and then C. Right. And it's like something's lost in every step. And so we really like this idea of this like hybrid AE CSM didn't really work for a bunch of reasons because it's just too much ground for one person to cover. But we have very interesting product, right? It's a PLG product where it's like again we, we have this big install base. It's kind of similar to like maybe a slack back in the day or if you remember even before that like a yammer or this big install base. And we're trying to educate those users about like features they could buy or reaching decision makers better. Maybe not on the platform like managers. But I'm just kind of curious what y' all have seen in like the evolution of PLG sales recently.

We pretty open ended.

I think that there was a moment in time where people doing PLG thought that that meant they didn't have to have sellers at all. And I think that that dream evaporated by now and they realized you've got to have somebody to go after all these people who are using the product and we need to convert them somehow.

I'm personally not surprised that the AECS experiment failed. Too much ground, two different types of DNA. I do think that the SDR role does not need to exist and is likely in trouble as we zoom out a few years. I never liked the handoff like you said. I also had sort of a philosophical problem with only kind of teaching some SDR one part of how to be a salesperson. And, and not really so many companies not giving them the opportunity to move up into a closing roles. And then if those people Tried to leave to go somewhere else. They were stuck because somebody wouldn't hire them because they'd be like, oh, you've closed a deal before. So I never liked that. I never, I never built those kind of teams. I always had kind of a full cycle sales team and then after the deal was done.

They move over to somebody on the CS side.

So I think that sales teams are going to be smaller. I don't think you're going to see these like 100, 200 person sales orgs that Richard and I built back in the day.

Only in the most extreme type of cases, certainly not in the startup kind of world.

I think that.

There'S a lot more sort of educating, nurturing, awareness related type selling as opposed to direct outreach. I think that elongates sales cycles a little bit depending on when you hit the start point of a sales cycle. You know, you can fuss with that to shrink the sales cycle if you want, but.

And that means not, not so much like more marketing spend, just.

More brand awareness. And that comes from founders creating the awareness personally, like Richard White starts talking more and more and more online on all the channels, doing more podcasts, doing more video, and then the sellers that you have doing that as well. There are individual people whose brands are bigger than the company brand that they work for. And those people generate truckloads of pipeline. And I think that that's going to become more and more important and I think that you're going to have to have more and more kind of networking, more kind of affiliate partners, near bound kind of sales motion, co selling kind of sales motion. I've been talking about that a lot because I just don't see a world where executives are picking up phone calls much longer at all. You know, especially 10 years from now. Like me and Richard have both have two boys. I don't know if you have any kids, but like it's impossible for me to fathom my kids answering cold calls from a stranger in 10 years.

Is not going to happen. So I think you have to generate awareness early on and really warm people up. And then the seller needs to go in and activate this user base, this install base that you're talking about and convert those, those folks. And I, and I don't think that that is in my mind as hard of a job as some of us have done for the last couple decades. So I just don't think you have to have as many of them. I'm just thinking to myself, Richard, if I put a hundred people who are using the fathom product in front of you. They've all been using it for six months. Your job is to go convert those 100 people into paid users of some sort. There's no universe where you can tell me that that is harder than cold calling 100 companies out of the clear blue sky.

Right? Correct. 100%. So, and, and I agree, like, I think a piece of this to what Scott's saying and in general is.

Is that it's about the experience, right? Like I've been harping and, you know, it's in my book, the Seller's Journey, now available on Amazon, that there's no such thing as a buyer's journey. There's only a buyer's experience. And people will say, well, you know, you know, what if, what if I go land on, on Fathom and I want to go buy it? I'm going to go look and I'm going to do all this before I want to talk to a salesperson. I'm like, yeah, but there was an experience before you decided to do that. Something happened. There was some experience that generated you to do that. And so the journey is actually the seller's journey and it's a buyer's experience. So that's a big piece, I think, of, you know, what has to be grasped at a super high strategic level, like Scott's talking about. And, you know, we're starting to see, you're starting to see everybody come out and do their, their content, like Richard coming out doing something on LinkedIn or Richard, you know, Scott coming out and doing something. What I think will also happen is that you're going to have to have snippets of one particular feature, right? You're going to Instagram it, right? Like, Instagram is all about the experience. TikTok's all about talking to people. And so I think, you know, if you ever have bought something from Instagram, it's because it looks, it gave you some level of experience, which I think this content that's being created is going to have to become more experiential in that way to help drive the, the top of the funnel stuff. So that'll. And the question is, can AI generate that? Right? Can AI go cut this podcast up into a hundred things and then theoretically have AI post it and do Scott and I care if it's, you know, if there's a typo in the, you know, in the transcription. I don't know, maybe they do, you know, maybe, maybe we want the $2. I don't know. So I think it's Going to be much more experiential based on all this stuff. Which again goes to what Scott's saying about you got to know people and you got to do things. So you've got to create that relationship in a cold environment fish where the fish are, you know, in addition to sort of this near balance stuff that Scott's talking about.

Yeah, I think it's, it's.

Everyone wants to know kind of what's it going to feel like to use your product really early in their, you know, like. And I think that's, you know, no one wants to read. I'm not going to read your marketing wear website. It's got no, it's got synthetic pictures and like logos and like. No, no, like just, you know, it's. We, we maybe test the top. A lot of our homepage. Right. It's just like the more we show them quick little snippets of like here's what your life's gonna look like with this product. Like it just. I think this day and age, no one wants to, no one's gonna jump through 10 hoops to maybe get a glimpse of that on a demo call. Right, right.

I mean it's like, it's like being able to take your new summary feature and show that as a picture or on your website or in a. LinkedIn says if you wish this could be automated, it can.

Right.

That's gonna generate interest for the right people at the right moment and that's what you're trying to do and I think that's what you're gonna start to see and start to see more of on LinkedIn, which you don't right now. It's still the long form post, but I think the, you know, that's what quality content will be. It's still educational.

I love it.

Yeah.

Well, Richard, where can people get a hold of you.

You know, because I, they clearly want to come and buy Fathom as they should or get the free version, which is what Scott would do.

Get the free version. Fathom video. Yeah, you can go sign up, get the free version. It's. It's great. It's not like a. Like I said, we pride ourselves on not having a crappy free version. We got tens of thousands of people use every day. But if you want to come find me, I'm on LinkedIn. It's basically only social media I'm on these days, so feel free to drop.

I lost you there.

I hear Richard. I think Richard's hearing aids expired is what. Is what happened.

Yes, yes.

So I don't know. Maybe we did.

He's on, he's on LinkedIn, Richard.

Yes. There you go.

LinkedIn. It's his only social media that he's.

Using, which is funny because I just checked, Richard, because you and I've traded so many emails, we weren't connected before this episode on LinkedIn. So, you know, that's. Check your LinkedIn, everybody. Make sure you're connected to people.

So appreciate the time, man. Good luck with everything.

Thank you, Richard.

And yeah, thank you for having me.

And Richard, I look Forward to your 10 page memo on. On Feedback.

Yeah. All right. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Scott. Bye.