Fireside Chat: Transformational AI for Sales – Go From Killed Deals to Killer Points of View

Foreign.

Welcome. Matt. We have had the pleasure of speaking before and I'm really fascinated by.

Your passion for creating a native AI company, a solution for sales teams that make salespeople infinitely more effective. And you also bring joy back to the work of selling.

Glad to be here and happy to talk about it.

So let's begin with Podio. The name, I think it deserves some recognition. There is a place in Italy where there's a 300 plus mile race that ends with a very steep hill. And a lot of people try to win that race, but very few actually make it to the end.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So Poo is sort of a, a reference to a, the end of a bike race called Milan Remo, which, which is Gerhardt said, is a 300 kilometer race that ends on a hill called the Poggio. And I, I find it to be just a fascinating, fascinating race and a really good metaphor for competition and strategy, which is it's really about seven hours of, of to a layman watching a bike race where not a lot happens. And it's really about.

Kind of putting your team leader in the right position at kilometer 297 out of 300 to go compete for the win on the Poggio. But the real race happens in those first seven hours, in those first 297km. About preparation and teamwork and strategy just to have a shot to win. And so as we think about company building and about competition and about helping all our customers, it's really about how do we drive, leverage, how do we be really smart about what we're doing, how do we put ourselves in the best chance to win? And in a, in a world that it's getting increasingly harder for, for revenue teams to win.

Have you actually raced competitively in Italy?

I have not. I'm a sort of semi competitive cyclist here in the Bay Area. Never, never quite on the, on the pro path, but I do, I do go to Milan Cineremo quite often and ride the Poggio and watch the race. A bit of a pilgrimage for myself.

And how long did it take you to. What was your fastest time?

It's actually a relatively short hill, so it's like a kind of eight, nine minute climb for me. The pros do it a lot quicker.

And what, what, what is the pro time?

Oh, I believe they set an all time record this year. Well below five minutes. Wow. Yeah.

And yet your, your heart rate goes up to what, at the peak?

Depends how hard you're taking it. But you're somewhere between 170, 180 if you're really pushing it and get above 200 if you're really suffering on a hot day.

Wow. It's an amazing race. I'm fascinated by that. But you mentioned strategy and there's an analogy between winning a race and being competitive and having the right tools. So AI obviously is a tool, but it needs to be part of a strategy. So can you sort it out for us on how to think about AI as a strategic tool to win and as AI as a, a tool that has unlocks so many possibilities for salespeople to do better?

Yeah, absolutely. I think when, when I think about AI and when we as a company as Pojo think about AI, it's, it's really all about leverage and there's a lot of different places to get leverage. There's some very tactical places to get leverage that I'm sure everyone's familiar with, call recording and things like that where you know, used to take up a bunch of brain power taking notes or even kind of calendar management and things like this where it's not really going to change everything that you do but, but it's going to give you some brain power back to really spend time on, on higher leverage things. And so as you sort of think about AI, there's all number of use cases and over time as AI gets more powerful and people find new ways to harness this power, it's just going to drive more and more leverage. Some of those again are going to be tactical, some of those are a little more strategic. Like what, what we're doing at Pojio is really around helping sellers and helping organizations drive account strategy through really, really good points of view. Something that in the past was an incredibly manual process to the point that often folks just don't do it. Because if you spent all of your time on strategy, you would spend none of your time on execution. And at the end of the day you've got to go out there and spend time with customers and really solve their problems. But for us it's, it's this extremely high leverage use case of, of how do I really focus what I'm doing? How do I be strategic in the way that I'm interacting with my customers from first touch to post sale and really just solve big problems for customers and make sure that I'm not wasting my time on their 10th most important problem.

Matt, can you share a quick success story that illustrates all this?

Yeah, definitely. And just to kind of level that a little bit, when I kind of talk about points of view, this is this is really like a tailored perspective for how I as a seller at a company can solve a customer's problem. And not just a problem generally, it's the problem. Right. Especially in a dynamic world, things are changing very quickly. The priorities last week are maybe not the priorities this week, but there's always some kind of top of the pyramid priorities that folks have. And so we're all about helping you identify those priorities, position yourself to solve them. And so the way that we do that and sort of the success that we have, There's a really good case study that we recently just published with a company called Dialpad, which is super fast growing company. I'm sure everyone's somewhat familiar with them, but they're kind of on a path from 300 million in ARR to a billion in ARR. And a big part of that is their kind of move up market and enterprise segment. And so they've been working with Poggio and this was a really cool case study for us because what they saw using Poggio to build these points of view was a 70% increase in revenue in their enterprise segment with 20% less pipeline, which may strike you initially as oh, less pipeline. But this is really a question of efficiency and focus and making sure that they're spending their time on the places that they should and sort of disengaging from the ones that they shouldn't. And there's a very kind of particular challenge that they were solving, which is in the enterprise segment. A rep could waste six or nine months chasing the wrong opportunity, only to find out at month seven, eight or nine, hey, like I probably shouldn't have been spending my time here. That's going to blow the rep's year. Right. And you start to add a couple of those up and your team and your company are going to start to have challenges with Poggio. It's how do I become really, really efficient with my time and drive that leverage on my time to make sure am I solving a really key problem at this customer? How do I position for that? And if not, let's go on to the next one. Let's go find a place where we can solve that and really be judicious with your time and drive that leverage.

How much time do salespeople spend to get that point of view that's accurate, that reflective of the customer's true situation?

Yeah. So it's a really interesting question. I think if you, and I'm sure there's a lot of sales leaders in the audience here. If you sort of think about do My sellers build points of view. How in depth are they? Some of it's even just going to depend on the product that you're selling. I mean, if you think about a company, you know, had Benny off here earlier talking about AgentForce, imagine you're trying to understand the entire state of a company that you're selling, selling to like a Disney or a Walmart or a BP or a Starbucks, that it literally could take you. That's not days, that's, that's weeks. It could take a month of, of research of just trying to understand what's going on, what are their challenges, how are they trying to solve them? How have they failed in the. Or have they succeeded or failed in the past? Who are the people that matter? Have those people changed? And so, you know, as we, and we, we talk to our customers about this all the time, like, what are you doing today? What is your current state? And we get answers anywhere from, you know, couple hours to eight hours to weeks, and you start to do that math. If you're an enterprise account executive and you've got 20 accounts and you're spending a week researching all of those accounts to just understand what's going on, the math doesn't really add up in a way that's going to drive success. And so what often happens is people just kind of don't do the research or they don't do the synthesis and they don't build a pov. And so they show up kind of sounding commoditized, undifferentiated, talking about pretty generic things. And when you come and show up that way, you generally don't end up talking to leadership about priorities. You get punted down to someone at a lower level that's just not going to have that insight.

So help me understand the difference between somebody going on ChatGPT and saying, I'm making a call, let's say on Marriott, what are the five headwinds that they're encountering? What are the five tailwinds? And then mistake that for a point of view.

Yeah, really great question. So I think a part of that is just the depth of research required to even understand the base facts and to synthesize those in a way that's actually relevant for a seller. Because, you know, maybe I'm going and doing a book report on Starbucks and I'm gonna, I have a very different reason for wanting these. These five tailwinds or head, or headwinds versus I'm an enterprise seller. I have a very particular playbook that I'm running I have a very particular messaging framework or value framework that my enterprise prescribes. And there are very particular things that I'm looking for based on the solution that I sell. So the five or you know, five headwinds and tailwinds is probably more than you want to look at. But maybe one or two, the one or two headwinds or tailwinds. For me as a seller of, let's say Agent Force versus me as a seller of Dialpad, those are actually going to be very, very different because the point of view for Dial Pad versus the point of view for Agent Force, who they're talking to, what kind of things they want to sort of be talking about, are dramatically different. And so you end up with, with just a ton of tailoring that's required and using these sort of generic systems, they're just not built for purpose. They don't have access to the data, they don't know what to do with the data. And they often will just focus on the first couple things they find. Which is sort of funny because you think about the way that people use the web today. There's a lot of search engine optimization that goes into kind of things showing up higher and agents are susceptible to that exact thing too, which is whatever seems to be higher in the search rankings are going to be the things it comes back with rather than let's actually go get all the ground facts, not just from the big publications like Forbes and Wall Street Journal, but the kind of regional publications that often have some really, really good intel but are buried on page sticks of Google, if they're even there.

That's really interesting. So what you're really saying is that.

There is a poo, has a recipe that's like the secret sauce that almost guarantees success, that you walk in with a point of view that is respected by the client because in, in many cases, you know, clients laugh at the salesperson because what they have found is not relevant anymore.

Exactly. And I think the other piece of this too, when you start to think about the different ways that you can generate these points of view, there's sort of this really interesting, almost like paradox, which is that your point of view as a, as a seller and as an organization is maybe your most important asset. When you go to a customer, there's actually nowhere that that lives within an organization. Everyone that's reaching out to the customer is doing that research and that synthesis on their own. So your bdr, your account executive, your ABM team, your post sales folks, they're all kind of wild west because you can go to your CRM and you can look at what happened in the past and it's this record of the history, but there's nowhere to go to look for the future of the account. And so even if you can generate a really good POV after doing a bunch of work, you're going to want that to be in the hands of your ABM team and all these other folks, so that your company has one unified message that's kind of elevated to the level that it needs to be to go get that customer's attention, to really position yourself, as you kind of call it, as a respected partner, not just a vendor that's easy to kind of swat away and ignore.

Right. So there's AI, which is technology, which is not human. And there is the need in this age where society is sort of disconnected more than ever.

To have a truly enjoyable human interaction with the customer. What is your advice? How can people take the best of AI and be even better with other human beings?

Yeah, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a really interesting question and I think there's some philosophical angles there, there as well that, that I think are pretty fascinating. But I think this, this really does still kind of come back to this, this notion of leverage. And it, it's a sort of generic word, but you sort of drive leverage on these relationships. Look, at the end of the day, if I'm a seller and I'm reaching out to leadership at Starbucks, at the end of the day, these are two people having a conversation about problems. And what a POV is really designed to do is get at that human problem that is actually keeping these folks up at night. There's one way that this goes where you show up to a conversation as a seller and you say, hey, what keeps you up at night? Those are the ones where you'll get laughed out of the room, whether to your face or after the fact. If you can show up and actually have this really detailed understanding of what's going on in this person's world. I've done the work to try to understand your business, understand you as a person of what you are trying to achieve. What are the things that you actually wake up and go to bed stressing about as priorities for you or for your boss, or if you're the CEO, for your board and position myself to help you, but do that genuinely. It's not, hey, I've got this pre canned point of view that I'm telling to everybody. It's, I've actually done the work. I think I can truly help you. And if I can't help you, we shouldn't actually keep talking. Maybe we should Talk again in six months or nine months or 12 months when it's more relevant. But it's sort of positioning for that genuine conversation, which, which I think is. Is maybe a little counterintuitive for folks. As you think about this sort of prevalence of agents everywhere. Like, at the end of the day, it's really giving leverage to these. These relationships, which are inherently human at the core.

Can you give me a personal example where you have leveraged AI to create a better personal relationship?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting question. We do this for a lot of our customers. Like, we use our product when we go all the time, you know, to go and work with our prospects and customers. And one of the things that we really do is if you think about companies, and I think everyone's probably experienced this, there's usually one or two things. Usually it's one thing that is repeated constantly internally. It's the internal North Star. It's the goal, it's the things that people are compensated against. And for us, when you show up to a customer, they are actually looking for help to achieve that goal. And so if you can show up saying, hey, I know that your boss, you know, maybe you're talking to an SVP of sales or a CRO, the board is hammering you on this growth plan you're trying to get from, you know, X revenue to Y revenue. And it's hard. It's a dynamic market environment. There is so much going on, your head is spinning around AI. But I know that this is actually what is driving you and what's going to make you as a person successful. If I can show up and talk to you about that, I'm going to have a seat at the table. I can't guarantee that I can solve your problem, but I'm also going to tell you, hey, I can't solve your problem if I can't. Because as people, we want to succeed and we want to kind of help each other succeed. And so for us, a lot of it is allowing you to really be genuine around that, which is, hey, I've got a hypothesis where I can help you. Let's go test it. If it's wrong, tell me it's wrong. Maybe you're going to have some, hey, you're almost there. It's actually this. Maybe you're like, hey, you're actually just totally off. Like, for us, sometimes we'll show up to a customer and sort of find out there they're not really building points of view because they're, the selling price of their product is relatively low and it's more of a kind of like commodity sale. And it's really just about super high throughput for us. It's like, okay, you know, that's not where we're going to solve your problem and I don't want to waste your time. And I think people generally respect you for that and you both end off in a better place. And you know, maybe there's an opportunity in the future to work together, maybe not, but it's really around kind of driving leverage for that genuine human relationship.

So when you look ahead like two, three, five years ahead, what are you most excited about in the short term?

So with AI the pace is a bit mind boggling and I think one of the most interesting parts of this is, is how dynamic the change is going to be and how the way that we interact with software and the way that software does increasingly more things for us through agents is going to make the rate of change of even the products that we build change quite rapidly. And what that basically means is you get, you get to, you sort of have the privilege to reinvent what you're doing at a really, really frequent rate. And one of the really cool parts about being in a sort of cutting edge space is change and invention. And for us, and for me personally, it's really exciting to, it's a little scary, but it's also really exciting that you have to reinvent yourself every three months, maybe six months. And there are going to be things that come down the horizon that are going to completely change your perception of what's possible and you're going to have to react to those. And I think that's as an entrepreneur and just kind of being in technology and wanting to work on things that are know continuously interesting, what better place to be than that? And so some of it is, is really just the unknown I think makes it a really, really interesting challenge and it, and it makes it really hard or sort of a, it's a very unique time to be building companies just because of how quick this rate of change is. And you can, you can never rest on your laurels and the strengths of, of yesteryear potentially become the weaknesses of, of today. And so it really keeps you on your toes.

It's really interesting when I listen to you because what brings to mind is that we have moved from the industrial age to what I would call the transformation age. And essentially we are all transforming the world through new ideas and new ideas about how we develop a better relationship between people and, and, and machines. And I see more and more the machine being pushed in a role of the servant and we are becoming the master. But in order to be stay the master, we need to master more.

And become better people in the process.

Absolutely. There's a sort of anecdote that my first boss told me which I found to be really, really interesting, which is the way to get ahead in a career is to sort of find the things that your boss is doing that they don't really like, take those things off their plate because they're trying to do the same for their boss. Everybody wants to kind of get higher. And the cool thing about AI is AI does a lot of those things. And so without actually having to take your boss's job, everyone kind of goes up a layer. Right. Everyone gets more leverage, everyone gets to work on the, frankly, the more human problems. And I think that's the really, really interesting part of all of it.

But I think that we need to become masters at transformation. Like, you know, Marc Benioff has gone through many, many phases of his business. Were outsiders thought this is the end of Salesforce, they hit a dead end and they reinvented themselves. And, and I think you embodied the same kind of mindset where you know that in order to earn the future, you need to learn more about the future than your competition.

Definitely. And for us, I think there's actually a similar point of view, you know, big boots to fill with with Benioff. But I think agents are at the core. And the way that agents are helping us, the way that we're interacting with agents, the things that the agents can do are going to evolve, frankly, in ways that are impossible to predict. But if you've got these hyper powerful agents, you're going to reinvent the ways that you're working with them. You may not even have a UI in the future. Today we log into these applications. Those applications were not really built for an agentic world. So down the road, how are you going to interact with these systems? And when that change happens, we're going to have to rethink a lot of things. And so if you're not ahead of the curve on that, you're going to be potentially really, really far behind.

Well, we scheduled you, Matt, as a leader of a master class on May 20. Can you share with your audience what you'll be teaching us?

Yeah, absolutely. So, so it's really, it's really going to be around how to bring winning points of view to the table.

For your entire organization. So this isn't just sales. This isn't just sdr. This isn't abm. These are not isolated problems. This is how do you, as a company at scale, build these winning points of view so that you can align yourself to really solve these customer problems and drive revenue and drive retention. And so we're going to talk about some of the more philosophical pieces of this, and then we're going to get into the really tactical stuff of how do you actually build these? What are the ways that our customers have found success, and then how you can use pojio to do it potentially. But these are things that whether you use pojio or not, you should be doing. And so we like to kind of talk about the kind of high level of why it matters, how folks are doing it today. And then. And then, if you. If you're interested, we can talk about how we can really supercharge this and scale this and bring this into to be a core competency of how your organization orients itself around customer value.

I remember.

A saying by Werner Erhart, and he said that your point of view is the point from which you view. Therefore you can see where you stand.

That's an excellent quote. And I think there is a lot of. We talk about a point of view for a customer, but you also have to understand yourself. You can't build a point of view if you don't understand yourself. And in this case, it's really around as an organization, what are the problems that I should be solving? Where do I want to be spending my time? If you don't understand that, it's going to be really hard to have a valuable and believable point of view. And I think people can see through when your point of view is not genuine. And so I think there's actually a lot of kind of going back to where humans play a part in this. There's. There's sort of a genuine aspect of, you know, I understand where my value is and what value I can bring to the table, and I can match that with you. And it, it does require a lot of self.

And I think it goes back to one word, which is the why. Because if you understand the customer's why, then the sale is going to be a lot easier.

It's funny you bring that up, because one of the most common things that folks do with Poggio is really getting to the three whys, right, of why anything why do anything? Why now? And then why us? And that's what it really comes down to. And that lives in Poggio. That can be synced back to your CRM, but that is sort of the distillation of everything that we believe as an organization, you should be kind of pushing into the world in terms of how you relate to your customers, both from an ABM perspective, from a sales perspective, Anyone that's talking to that customer should know those three why's cold and be ordering everything they do and sort of orienting everything they do around that, whether you're a BDR or the CEO that's coming in to kind of drive the relationship sale.

So now we can conclude with just with one sentence, with one insight that wraps it all together, which is the clearer the why, the easier the buy.

We might have to steal that one.

All right, take it away.