ve-BINAR: AI, Automation, and the New World of Lead Gen

Hi everybody. Welcome to today's Venducks vminar. I'm Andrew Miller, one of the partners at the Vendex Group where we focus on helping clients to grow their sales leadership capital. I'm really thrilled to have Zach Vidabor as our guest today. I'm going to let him introduce himself in a second. Today's webinar topic is AI automation and the new world of Lead gen. In a nutshell, Zach is the co founder and CEO of Octave, an early stage company that's aiming to disrupt the whole world of Legion. The processes with AI driven hyper personalization at scale. So Zach, I hope that I've got that basically right. In this webinar we're going to explore the world of Outbound and Legion and the way it was up until about a year ago or so. What has changed today? Where is it now and where is it going? Especially in the context of new AI tools, agentic AI and hyper personalization. We'll dive into this topic in a second, but first just a couple of quick housekeeping notes. We'll keep everybody muted for the duration of the webinar and then there's a Q and A at the end. You can either then use the chat function in Zoom or LinkedIn Live to submit your questions or just feel free to open up your mics and engage with Zach directly. At the end of the webinar webinar is being recorded. It'll be available later today on our site and and on YouTube. Zach, welcome. It's really great to have you appreciate your time and the perspectives that we'll be getting from you. Just to kick things off, Zach, tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey and your journey on how you got to where you are today as the co founder and CEO of Octave.

Well, thank you for having me. I feel somebody made a comment on LinkedIn yesterday. They're like Zach Vidabor and the Vibinar that feels like a match made in heaven. So it was my destiny to be here many, many years ago. I was born to a humble family in Mountain View, California. Kidding aside, I guess my professional career started selling copiers was my first job so in San Jose, California. Beat beating the streets for Rico, if anyone's familiar. Basically Japanese Xerox getting my teeth kicked in wouldn't change it for the world now great experience but at the time pretty, you know, coming out of college, not what I thought I'd be doing, but was extremely fortunate to through a family friend got introduced to LinkedIn and so I would say that was my spiritual awakening to the world of sales I know and live and love today was I got the opportunity to join the inside sales team at LinkedIn early. So 15 years ago, took a job on the sales development team at LinkedIn within their talent solutions business. And I'd say that that was what inspired my passion for sales, you know, and it took it, you know, off the, off the used car parking lot, if you will, and into. Wow. You know what, what really got me excited was it felt like it was this back door into companies to really learn about them. And that was always what, you know, was make it much easier for them to get more sophisticated in how they detect spam. Right. And so you can imagine there's for a long time, ironically, we don't talk about it much and it kind of has nothing to do with the business. I'll answer your second party question later. But my co found actually he was an engineer on the Gmail spam team. So like he knows about, you know, this is a, from the dawn of the Internet fighting, spam has been a issue that has been dealt with. And it's gone from, you know, very simple block certain keywords, you know, type protection measures to now highly sophisticated. Right. And what AI enabled is, Google is now able to very easily fingerprint messages. Even when you're stitching in different variables, even when you're using Spin Tax and these other techniques, AI let them really peer through that in a very easy way. So it got incredibly easier for them to go like, hey, we can fingerprint these things almost instantly. You have some type of campaign, one person sends that thing to spam, all right. All of the others are some simple variation of that. Like I'm, I can detect all those instantly and I'm going to send them all into a black hole. And that's what started happening. So that was, yeah, a little, you know, a little over a year ago now. But that is where they, they truly did start to tighten the screws down. And it was, you know, AI fighting AI, you know, in some sense. So that's changed the landscape a lot. We can dive deeper there. I guess to answer the second part of your question, no, in terms of why do we start Octave? It had nothing to do really with this problem, you know, like we being a better mousetrap to beat spam systems is like, that is not why I'm getting three hours of sleep a night. You know, that's, that's not the big dream. We think there's something more fundamental with AI and just helping Companies be more precise and authentic and tailored in how they tell their story to every customer and prospect in their market. And you know, personalization is like generally the word for this. I like to think about it more as like contextualization. Like, that's how I've always thought of the problem. People generally, they don't get, they don't engage with a sales process because you tell them about themselves. Hey, saw you, went to saw you, blah, blah, like, no one cares. You know, what they care about is like, can you identify a problem that people like me have and that you have some type of hypothesis or perspective around and some type of value for me? Do you have knowledge? You have expertise? Do you have a tool? What is it? And I think companies got really, they got away with murder in terms of being able to go out with these big wide value props. Hey, we help financial services companies be more secure. Well, great. You know, there's 10,000 companies that do that. You need to be far more precise with your message. And like, that's the heart of what Akiva is like, how do we help you really tell your story in a very precise way to all the different stakeholders and buyers and prospects in your market. And email happens to be a one delivery channel for your message. Right.

What are the other main channels?

Your website, LinkedIn ads, every phone call your reps have. Right. Like your story is, I'd say in. It is in hundreds of different touch points a day. You know, it could be tens of thousands depending on the scale of your organization per day. And fundamentally our belief is you need a system of record for your messaging and positioning. Right. Like, we believe what you do, the problems you solve, who you do that for, how you solve them, your proof points, these are the atomic units of why the hell do we exist as a company? And our kind of argument would be similar to your engineering team. You have a code base where you codify what the heck does the product do. You have visual design assets in figma that is like, what does this thing look like? How does it feel? And we want Octave to be the home of how do we explain that to our market and our customers? What the heck we do? And that context is the foundation for a lot of jobs to be done in an org. Whether I'm a salesperson reaching out, sending email, whether I'm a marketer launching campaigns and identifying audiences, if I'm a pmm, a growth person, right? There's all these places that are grounded ultimately in like, who are we trying to talk to, what are we Trying to explain. And our enemy there is word docs, PowerPoint, static wikis. Right? That's, that's our enemy is like we think there needs to be in a world of AI, a brain and a system of record for that stuff that is real time and is the spinal column of your go to market stack. Right. Sales. And Salesforce doesn't know if you sell insurance or you sell shoes. Right. Like it is just rows and columns. We want to make every tool smarter by virtue of we know what you do, who you're selling to, the problems you solve. And that we think can fuel a lot more powerful and precise experiences with your company, whether that be in email campaigns or how your reps talk to people on the phone. Right, it could be. And any number of things in between.

So are you actually saying and doing that if I have 5,000 prospects out there, I've got 5,000 CEOs and companies who I think would be ideal clients. And they're all slightly different. I all have slightly different problems to address. But fundamentally, depending on the way that we tell the story and bridge what we have to what they need, that that is what you're doing. 5,000 slightly different stories saying the same thing to 5,000 people.

And at its core, yes, for some of the workflows we're powering, we are 3D printing. Every email, every message is a little bit different for every person, a way to think about what we're doing. Again, personalization is probably the word people would think of most for us. How I would maybe give an example of how to think about this is let's just say we sold payroll software, right? Good news, every business in the world needs payroll, right. We can go sell them. And like I'm going to be going after, let's say I T finance and HR leaders, right. Those are going to be kind of my departments that I'm going to go after. And I'm going to have a slightly different message for it than HR, than finance, about how I talk to them about payroll. And now what we're trying to help you do is like we believe you need to go much further than that. Like if I'm talking to a HR leader at a retailer and I know a retailer, if I'm thinking payroll, I'm thinking, well, you have the majority of your staff is going to be hourly, they are going to be paid differently, they're going to have a different experience in your company. You have much fewer salaried employees. I'm going to talk about payroll differently to you than If I'm selling to another HR leader, same quote unquote Persona maybe, but at a, at a SaaS company where it's like for all intents and purposes, you have no one on, on hourly wages, right? Everyone's salary, they have a different type of relationship with your company when it comes to payroll, right? So like those are the type of things that we're trying to help that get that into the bones of like how you speak to the value and your use cases and how you solve problems, right? It's less about calling out hey, I see you are title at blah company and then bolt it to a value prop, right? Like we're trying to say how can I think about this message differently? Because I know you're dealing in a retail environment where shoot, you're like, you're onboarding and offboarding people at like a way higher clip from your payroll System than a SaaS company, right? Like what, how does that impact the pains you feel? You know, and so that would be an example of like where we're trying to give more muscle to organizations.

Give us a peek behind the curtains. How does this actually work for, you know, we're not talking about, you know, a multi billion dollar companies with all kinds of modules and different products or services. If there's you know, the insurance, insurance sales or you know, a standard set of services, very defined product or service. How do you change, how do you slightly Change the story 5,000 times for 5,5000 people?

Look, all of this stuff, I would be lying to misrepresent and say these things don't exist on a spectrum, right? Like there, there are some things that, you know, insurance is a pretty well understood commodity, right? Like changing that story dramatically every time might not be the right strategy. If you're selling AI powered endpoint security for a modern blah, blah, blah enterprise like okay, that we might need to do some more experimentation. Like what is the message that works, right? If I'm selling into a, you know, IT department that is getting inundated with everything is make your enterprise more secure. Like that's a harder battle to fight, right? So like these things exist on a spectrum. I'm not saying every, every place, all the time you need this like wild variation in your story. What I do think you need is like your message should always be tailored to like a, A, a small identifiable subset. You know, like.

Within.

Every market there's generally a way that you can go, hey, are we selling to financial services? You know, is an insurance company the same as a bank? Is, are they the same as a credit union? Are they the same as a hedge fund? Are they the same as a wealth manager? You know, like that would be like a, like an insurance type business. Like we would try and help them. Like, okay, how do you like chunk this down into like meaningful groups that you can put a tighter bow around and like give them a more specific message. And so, you know, behind the scenes, you know, we're using AI, we're using a platform we've built, you know, Shameless plug, anyone can sign up for free, go check it out. But you know, we've built a lot of scaffolding to help you answer some basic questions about your business. We do some of our own detect, we'll, we'll scrape your website, we'll see other information we can find about you and try and help you kind of identify what, what are these building blocks, you know, and then give you tools to refine these things. Like we are very much, I am very much a believer of human in the loop. Like we are not going to be able to do our job in a completely generic black box way. And there is no silver bullet here. But we can help you start developing this scaffolding around your process and the way you think about your TAM and your icp and how can we break it down in a more sophisticated way that could allow us to then go, all right, shoot, we were sending everybody like two different campaigns. Maybe there's not 10,000 different variations, but there's probably three dozen that maybe can work better. And like, how do we go test that in a way that's like efficient and fast enough to like not get bogged down in the work of like planning the work. You know, like that's the beat of AI is like we could build this stuff and launch it tomorrow and how do we just iterate a lot quicker?

Gotcha. And then, so then from the point of view of the organization, the sales, the go to market, the DevOps organization on the seller's side, what are best practices today on, you know, having the people, the tool, the platforms in place to support this activity today versus a year or two years ago in the old world.

I think there's a lot of things you can start doing there. I mean the new best practices are being created as we speak, so we'll see which ones stick today and six months from now. I promise you they'll be different. But I'd say, look, maybe just drawing a contrast between slightly further back in time. You know, a lot of teams I've been on and been a part of this, part of the sales process was like, hey, let's get together for sales kickoff. We're going to all learn the first call deck and we're going to learn the pitch and maybe we're going to like tune this thing up at some QBRs and check in with you. But like by and large in between there, your manager is maybe going to sit on some calls with you. You might have some people, you might, you might have the benefit of being in a bullpen where you can like osmosis from some other people. Or guess what, you know, the world changed during COVID You're sitting in your room alone. So, all right, hopefully you're doing your job and listening call recordings. But it was this very much. You learned the story by virtue of like hopefully osmosing this stuff, right? And like being able. It was tribal knowledge. Now I think you can do things and like our customers are doing things like this. Like when every SDR gets a lead, why aren't we in real time helping them research that lead, research that company? Look at our current source of truth of how would we talk to a company like that? And then we deliver them a package of hey, not just a name and an email and a phone number, but we go like, hey, here are four value props that we think might resonate with this person. Here are four pain points we think they might be experiencing. Here's four ways to frame that in a discovery question. Here's a sequence you could send them, right? So part of it is like, you know, there is a enablement aspect of like, hey, can we help people learn faster by just like getting this context in front of them constantly instead of hoping they learn this in some like training module or you know, the bi monthly, you know, check in with the team and you know, we coach them up. You know, how can. Every moment in time is an opportunity. When we see a new lead, when something comes across that we can actually append, we can generate this stuff in real time and append it to records in CRM or your sales engagement tool or your dialer, wherever you want this stuff, right? Like we can, we can get it in front of your people. So like that. That would be one example of, I think the organizations we see that are finding the most success. They're not, they're not hoping the reps on their team find this stuff and figure it out. They're giving them a like really strong baseline to start from. And then guess what? You are going to hopefully, you know, if you hire well you're going to have some LeBrons on your team. They're going to figure out, you're always going to have people that are going to be smarter than the AI and they're going to figure out the true alpha. And then the best practices are how do you have systems and tooling and processes that are quick enough to identify, oh, what's the new thing out there, how do we pull that back in and help the team fast follow as quick as possible. And I think that's what I'm really excited about, that I think is changing is that muscle of like so many teams I was on, the ability to like, fast follow was truly incumbent on, like, you'll have a few of those LeBrons and then you'll have another tier of like, people who are like, oh, I see what's working. I can figure it out. Then you got a lot of people that like, don't necessarily do that. That like, aren't necessarily. They don't think that way. They're, they're, they're looking for the playbook. Like, okay, how do we get that next big cohort of your team that like, if we give them the right stuff, they know what to do. So like, how can we take that from the, you know, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of velocity that organizations can gain in their process by like, how do we get the very tip of the sphere learnings into the bulk of the org as quick as possible?

I have a question, if I may. Caesar here in San Francisco, if I may ask a question. Yeah, hi. Hey, Henning. Thank you for the invitation. Andrew, nice to meet you. I've worked with Henning for a little bit and yeah, so I see. Scott Martinez. You have a testimonial from Scott Martinez. Yeah, pretty interesting. I looked at your site. Just. I happen to work on Playbooks and I'm currently helping Salesforce actually with some training work for their new sales teams and. Yeah, very interesting. I hadn't heard about Okta before, so just wondering really basic question. I apologize. This is very simple, but do you.

Does it.

I know you talked about email when I jumped in five minutes late, but you do also. Is it both emails and LinkedIn messaging? Is this what your platform manages? So it's the outbound, so the playbook is aligned in both or one picks up where the other left off. So imagine you have some kind of a cadence where you're alternating between the two and then it's part of your AI. You have a nice Beautiful lady bot that also calls.

Maybe not.

But anyway, so tell me more. I mean, I'm really curious to know if it's an appropriate time to chat about those nuances. Right, sure.

I can give the quick and dirty. Right now our outputs are all text based. We are not doing any voice generated or highly visual slides, things like that. You know, we're not, we're not creating graphic design, generating that type of stuff yet.

So. Sorry, text. So it means you also do to phone.

Well, I just mean text based outputs. So that could be a LinkedIn message, that could be an email message. That could be what I was like describing a second ago where hey, I actually, I'm not necessarily shaping this for a prospect, I'm shaping it for a SDR and your team. I'm shaping a story for you to tell. Right. So just text based outputs in general. I can, I can. The form factor of it is you want a LinkedIn message. Great. It looks like this. You want an email sequence. It looks like that. Like I can do all those things. The one nuance in there we are ultimately, we don't control the pipes. So I don't send emails, I don't send LinkedIn messages, I don't make phone calls. Right. We would hook into another system the team has that's actually doing that. So generally there's a sales engagement platform, a sequencer. Things like those would be the tools we plug into and we have APIs and integrations to do that.

Got it. Cool. Thank you. And I'll explore more on the website.

Cool.

Yeah. Please sign up, it's free.

Thanks. Thanks, Cesar. That's a good question.

A question for Zach, please. Zach, what differentiates? Is it octaves?

Yeah, Octave.

Octaves.

What's the differentiator that keeps you from having to compete?

Oh, that is. I wish I was at a place where I didn't have to compete. That's not how I feel. I would say what makes us most different is I would say no one is going as deep as we are on helping you codify these kind of core components of your strategy. So going deep on Personas and use cases and segments and your reference customers and your product offering and services. Right. Like that's where we've really gone deep in our platform of like, how do we help you define all those things, keep all those pieces up to date and then that's basically our. We're building a unique brain for each company we work with that's based on how we train our own models and then the unique inputs you Give us. And then that's powering. Hey, if you build a sequence agent with us to write to 3D print sequences for you, we're grounding it in all that. So it's kind of all these pieces stitched together to give us, I would say, an advantage. It's not to say there aren't plenty of other people. You know, there are. There are a thousand apps out there who, if you want to click a button to generate an email, they got one for you. And it's, how well does that thing work? What is it? Right? Can you tune it? You know, the. The devil's in the details, right? Like, what are your different calls to action? Are you asking people for meetings? Are you telling people, hey, check out a video. You want people to come to a event you're hosting, right? Like when the rubber actually meets the road. There's a lot of things that go into, like creating a good campaign that aren't just generating an email. And like an org needs a lot of controls around that that we provide as well now.

So when you, when you go out and talk to somebody, artificial intelligence is starting, starting to become kind of a commodity in a way. I mean, I'm not, I'm not the smartest guy in the room when it comes to AI, but I mean, I, I've been training an AI for probably two years, and I'm getting really great results. But so there's a lot of commodity, there's a lot of people that say what you're saying. So how do you create your. For yourself a category of one, you know, just you. What are you, what are you saying to people to actually get their attention and to eliminate the competition, you know, so that they, they're not even going to talk to the competition.

I would say it starts from like, what we're really trying to build. Like, I. We are not building our own LLMs, right? We are using Claude and Gemini and GPT and Deepseek like everyone else, right? Those are the engines. We're building a car around it, and we want to build the best damn car. What I think a lot of other companies are doing is they are pursuing a slightly different goal. Oftentimes I see where AI, they, they are trying to kind of create a sales AI that's going to pass the goal is like passing some Turing Tests. Like, is this, is this human enough that somebody will respond? I personally look like I want to help. I don't want to help you create AI slop like the pros. And copy is important, but I Think that's actually the wrong goal. I think a lot of companies are building with the wrong goal. People don't ultimately engage with you and your company because they think you're human, right? Like, people will engage with you because they go, all right, this person, this is perspective and knowledge and an interesting hypothesis that I agree with. They've identified some problem, right? Like, I have a message that is unmistakably meant for me because it's identified some problem, set some pain point. And, like, that's what we're trying to harness AI to do, which is slightly different, and you end up with a different result. You know, I'm. I think the. You will always have humans involved in sales as long as we're all on this planet. And I think this notion of, like, how do we just completely rip the human out of it is like, that's why I see a lot of other companies building. And, like, we aren't building. And it leads us to a different product, a different experience, a different way we deliver our value through APIs and how we integrate. And, you know, there's. There's a lot that goes into it, but I'd say kind of that, you know, not to be too esoteric, but like, that kind of starting point.

And so what do you say. What do you say to people when you are first meeting them and introducing yourself, you know, to get their attention? What is it that you.

You know.

How do you introduce yourself so that they can see that you're worth talking to? I mean, I try to put you on the spot.

No, no, it's learned something here. I should be put on the spot. This is what I signed up for starting a company. You know, I talk to people a lot about, you know, the language you've probably already heard me use, about, like, the atomic units, like, in your go to market motion. Like, where. Where do you define who your Personas are, what problems they have? Your different use cases? Are those. Are those things orchestrated? Do you have those attached to a system that can help you and your team execute? Or are those just things that live in decks and docs that get dusty on the shelf and you never touch? And most people, like, identify with that as the problem. Like, I'm not leading with, like, hey, I have an AI silver bullet. You want to come see? A. A magic trick like that to me is just like, hey, we're an AI native company. We just need to use AI to deliver everything we do. But the problem is Evergreen, which is you got 18 different versions of your first call. Deck, you have 24 different versions of your messaging docs. All your reps are saying something different. You have a bunch of static templates that aren't working, and you're just firing stuff into the void. And that's generally. Most people are like, yeah, okay, tell me more now, you know, like that, that's usually the hook. It's not, I'm not trying to lead with, like, maybe I'm trying to ask.

You know, what would your elevator pitch be? Somebody just asks you at, you're at Starbucks and somebody asks you, what do you do?

Dan. Yeah, he, he's, he's. Zach has shared that a couple of times. I mean, I captured it, so, I mean, I'll send you the. But I, I think it's a very effective pitch. It's, it's very straightforward. I, I just want to just jump in, open up the floor to any more questions. I'm, I'm conscious of time. I, I definitely have at least one more question. Henning, do you. Henning, go.

Yeah, I would love to ask one, if I may. So I'm like so many others. I'm on the receiving end of a lot of cold outreach, and there are things that I personally like and things that I personally dislike. So I hate video. I hate text messages, and I'll never respond to them. I delete videos immediately. I like shorter emails over long text that I have to spend time reading. How much does your tool and all the other tools out there take personal preferences like that into account? So it's not, to me, it's just not about the problem. You know, if the message is around, can you handle more customers? The answer is, of course. But it, to me, it's about the style that you're applying, how you're trying to get to me individually. It's not just the question, it's also the style. And I don't see that reflected in what I'm getting today as cold outreach.

I think it's a great point, and I think this is why humans are going to have jobs for a long time, is there is a unbelievable amount of iteration required to figure these things out. You have to try a lot of stuff that's part of what we're helping people do is like, hey, how do you not have just campaign A versus campaign B, two different subject lines. Let's see what bites. Because underneath that, there are different, different problem sets, also different stylistic preferences. So you, like, you have to try a lot of things. Like, I, I think that's part of the beauty of AI and like what we're helping companies do is like, how do you crank that flywheel so much faster? So we cannot a B test. We can A through N test and like discover some of those things. And now some of those things are kind of undetectable. Right. Like stylistic preferences for certain types of language over others preferences for videos or not. Like, that's going to be really, really hard for any system to figure out. But my answer to that would be you need to try a lot of different things. You know, you need to do a good job of identifying like, who are the people that matter to our business ultimately. Like we need to tap them on the shoulder in a thoughtful way enough times that hopefully they engage with us. And it's going to take a lot of variations to figure out kind of what, what works for every person. Like there's, there's. The experimentation aspect of this is, is critical. You know, it's, it's, it's. You can't just black box it.

Thank you.

Yeah. So in, in the, the spirit of Hanning's question about being on the receiving end of this stuff. So here we are, mid-2025. You would think that some form of these tools have now gotten into just into many, many companies hands. Just I think yesterday I got a LinkedIn outreach saying something to the effect, hey Andrew, I see, you know, you have a prominent place in the real estate investment industry and we'd really like. So how is it possible we're still receiving stuff with those kinds of intros that are completely irrelevant?

I mean it is early, early, early days. I think we are this conversation we're having and the organizations that are look like we are a small company with big dreams. But like no, we're, we're not a behemoth selling every company on the world. And like there, there are company whether.

They solve for this issue. You, you would.

Yeah.

You would prevent that from happening.

We would help understand that talking to you as a real estate investor, probably not a good approach. Yes, right. That, that would be what, what we're helping to do.

All right, so just a couple of minutes ago, you used a word, you used a phrase. You're building a unique brain for each company, meaning each of your clients.

Right.

Okay. So in the world of sales, sales nirvana would be a unique brain for each prospect. In now the world of agentic AI, when I think of a unique brain and I think about 5,000 potential CEOs and companies that are perfect for what I and our company would bring to the table, the problems that we could solve. Can I have an. A unique brain for each of those 5,000 prospects that tell me all the time based on my programming of these agents. I want to know everything about these target CEOs. What are they saying, what are they publishing, what keynote speeches are they giving, how long have they been at their companies, how much money have they raised in their latest rounds, what are they advertising for in terms of new roles, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, which then give me signals and help me to then figure out how to bridge what I'm bringing to the table and what they're talking about and the pain points that they're feeling on the other side. That for me is sales nirvana. Are we there?

We're on our way. You, you can. Everything you're describing is doable and we're working with teams to help be part. I want to be clear, like there's, there's not, there's not one tool or one vendor you can go to. And like I got that. If, if anyone's saying they have that run away. There are, there are systems you can assemble to do that now. I think it's going to get a lot easier, it's going to get a lot faster. The, the real time nature, things are going to improve. But like yes, this is the. We are marching towards this nirvana. I think the. Where my argument would be is kind of like what we were talking about a second ago is like there are people that think they can build a true sales brain. You know that like somehow this, this agent, whatever it is, is going to know better than us. I think that is a long, long, long way off. I think there are going to be systems that are going to again, there will be things that are just automated and activities happen, but you will need human curation and orchestration and control over these things for a long time. There's just, there's too much nuance in sales and the reality is like part of what we're building and you know, our, our elevator pitch to like our technology. LLMs fundamentally like they suck at sales for a very specific reason, which is they are not. There is no ground truth in our field. There is astrophysics. GPT can go read 50,000 textbooks about physics and like it's good source material. It's been subjected to the scientific method by every institution around the world. Right. And so like it can. That's why all the LLM benchmarks are STEM subjects. Right. What we're trying to do is we go. LLMs are very powerful. They suck at sales. How do we give these brains a way to think about a field where they don't know, hey, I got a. I have a Persona. I got a use case. It's a warm outbound campaign. We're hosting a happy hour. Like, is the LLM gonna. It doesn't need.

It will.

It'll say something to you as a yes man. Like, sounds all right, but, like, it's. It's truly hollow. Right? And so, like, that's what we're trying to build is how do we go? Like, these things are incredibly smart. They're so potent, they can accelerate all these efforts. But, like, they don't know how to think about the sales world. That's like the. The lattice we're putting around the LMS to go. Here's how you think about sales. Here's the nodes in the constellation of this company and what they care about in their market. And, like, that's how we get more juice out of the LLMs.

So you're saying. So just like electricians and plumbers and gardeners are not going to be disrupted by AI, so salespeople still have a future.

I believe more than ever. I will. I will make a bet with you all. We are. I don't know what the over under is, but I'll. Let's say two years. There is going to be a company that, like, their pitch, their. Their elevator pitch is going to be like, when you deal with us, you only deal with humans. You know, Like, I, Like, I. I think humans are just. They are. Unless we go to this world where the buying bot and the selling bot, they talk to each other and we all just sit at home and eat gruel, you know, like, unless we're on our way there, there's just too much trust. And we're all accountable to something. At the end of the day, you can't extricate it, you know?

Well, you've seen all the billboards around the Bay Area.

Oh, yeah.

Why hire any more BDRs in SDR, our AI software? Yeah.

Ask a question at your own risk.

Yeah. Please.

Yeah.

You have something, I see, called Prospector. Is this an appropriate time to ask about what it is exactly that you mean by. What does it do Prospector as part of your platform? Sure.

Yeah. It's basically an agent. It can help you identify. You can imagine. You could provide a list of target accounts and we know your Personas as a simple example. Right. Like, we know, hey, do you care about it Finance and HR leaders and so we could help go find those People for you to then get them into campaigns. But typically people would be like, linking our prospector agent and a sequence agent, right? Like, hey, here's a bunch of companies I care about. Can you go find the people I truly care about there? And then let's build messaging for them.

And so I imagine your AI could tap into current success stories that we have that are relevant for that segment and that industry, and then find that and then create the messaging, pull it from there. And is that basically exactly right.

So, yeah, like, one of the, One of the nouns in our platform, if you poke around in there, is like a reference customer, which you can think of like a case study. So, yeah, you can co. You can codify in the brain. Hey, here's all our. Our stories and customers we're proud of, that we talk about. And then it can know, hey, we're reaching out to bank of America. Like, we should probably talk about what we do at Wells Fargo. Hey, I'm reaching out to Lowe's. I should probably talk about Home Depot instead. Right? So, like, yeah, all of that is the stuff that we're helping.

And finally, just thank you for that. And I just wanted to also say that building on what Dan was asking about and the pitch and all those things, it's got me thinking about your website. I looked at it, I looked all the awesome testimonials you have, but I didn't see. There's one thing I didn't see, if I may say so, and that is I didn't see numbers. And, you know, some people are very numbers driven. Right. And so, you know, the left brain, right brain stuff, there's a lot of the right brain, but I didn't see any left brain. I didn't see any numbers there that say, yes, people have said, I've saved weeks on this, this is that, but I didn't see any specifics. I know that's hard to nail down. I'm just curious, are you planning to add somewhere there where somebody says, listen, I'm not talking about. We can 10x your outreach outbound. Okay, that's a good start. But in terms of the saving this and doing that, you know, it's all about what we. What is it that it's reduce, increase, gain, improve or save. It's Riggy's, let's say it's part of my sales training thing.

Right.

One of those things you still need to show stats that demonstrate, I think it demonstrates credibility. And also that there's more specifics on the numbers that you're achieving with your platform. So I was just wondering if you have that somewhere because I just didn't see it poking around the website. I just didn't see.

You are not mistaken, we are working on a number of case studies with some of our customers and we will be sharing more detail around that. And yeah, we are a living version of ourselves. Your messaging and positioning is never done and that's true in email campaigns and your website. So. So more coming soon.

Yeah, it definitely sounds interesting. I think I'm going to have to give it a try.

Cool, please do. I would love to. And please, you can find me on LinkedIn or anywhere. Would love, love to hear your thoughts. Good, bad and otherwise.

Nothing bad.

The cobbler.

The cobbler's children have no shoes.

Right.

Zach? I mean I, I could go on. I got so many. This, this stuff is very cool, very interesting. It is absolutely a new world. It is a, it's a, there's so many cat and mouse games out there and, and this is one of them there. If I can, one more question and then we're going to wrap up. I mean unless anybody else wants to chime in. Henning, are you seeing questions out there in LinkedIn or Zoom land?

No, there are no comments on LinkedIn Live.

Okay, so in this, Zach, in the same way that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google cracked down on bulk email, surely either today or tomorrow we'll be seeing AI used to identify AI generated outreach course. And how will that impact your business and companies adopting of these hyper personalized tools to scale their go to market?

I guess underlying that question like it is it. If the premise is all cold outreach and AI outreach is bad, then guess what? They, they can detect it today. They, they could block everything today. You know, if you're, whether you're Google or Microsoft or LinkedIn, they can detect it. It's literally, it's a financial calculator. This right? Like how much compute do they throw at the problem of like figuring out every message, right? And then they could block it all. I think the question is more about quality. You know if, if AI generated shouldn't need to mean poor quality. You know, we, we all look at the same BMW ad on TV and it's, it's a copy that's copied 1 million times over. We all look at the same thing. It doesn't piss us off. We go, all right, that's, they're trying to share a story. It's the ultimate driving machine. You know and so I think they're, I don't believe in this world where it's like AI generated equals bad. I think there is very, very poor a lot right now is like really sloppy. It's like it's using the worst of the beauty of these models. The speed to just stamp out anything is probably their like now. I mean it's, it's impressive at first, but now it's like the least impressive part. Right, Great. We can all create anything with a snap of our fingers. It's. How do you harness that to do really quality work? So I, I think there is a future for companies are going to need to grow, they're going to need to compete. There's going to be more competition than ever. I, I'm not worried about companies needing to invest in that effort to share their story in a really precise way with all their prospects. I think there's a, there's a future for me and many others.

I would, I would argue I like that response. On average. Who, who is your ICP in your, in your client base? Who do you sell to? Rev Ops, the CRO. Who's on the side of the table?

Great question. There's, there's two kind of motions we have. We sell to a lot of lead gen agencies, growth marketing firms, Rev Ops consultancies, like you know, either as a, we're a, you know, tool they use themselves to deliver an outcome for their clients or they're, you know, helping build systems for clients. When we sell to internal go to market teams typically thus far RevOps has been the buyer and you can imagine by virtue of we have APIs, you know, you're typically stitching us into a system so it naturally is landing more with like, okay, revops. Revops is kind of the owner of the tool. But then we have, you can imagine the training of the brain. Our users are sales and marketing and pmm. Right. Those people are feeding context in the system. They're coming into octave. But then what we've seen thus far is like Rev Ops and growth teams are like the okay, I will own this thing because I orchestrate on the back end, like going to plug these APIs into our execution tools, into CRM, into our email infrastructure, et cetera.

Great.

Yeah.

All right. It's hard to believe that we're running up against the top of the hour. This has been really, really, really useful. Learned a lot from you. And I could go on for another hour.

It went quick.

It sounds like you love, you know, this is your DNA. You love talking about this and doing what you're doing for people here today with us or Anybody listening to recordings, you know what's. How do people get in touch with you? Any parting thoughts before we check us.

Out our website without stats octavehq.com Please come visit us. You can sign up for free. I'm on LinkedIn. Please find me DM me. I'm very accessible. I'd say those are the. The two best ways. But yeah, it's free to sign up. You can check out what we're doing. Please give it a shot, play around. Would love your feedback and thanks for having me. This was super fun.

And if anybody mentions that they heard you on the Vendux WEBINAR and on LinkedIn, you will. We will.

Everybody, everybody gets the white glove treatment. They will get the double white glove of treatment. And yeah, happy to provide some extra discounting and incentives to anybody that hurts in this. Yeah. Double stats, two case studies. Yeah. Please let me know if anyone. This is where you found out about us. We will. We'll make sure to make things even more compelling.

Excellent. Zach. Let's do this again in the. In the second half of the year. This, this world is evolving very, very quickly. I'm sure in three, four, five months that there'll be different angles to no.

Doubt story I can.

Thanks a lot. Thanks. Thanks so much for your time. Great to have you today, everybody. Thank you for your participation and looking forward to the next webinar.

Thanks all.

Have a great rest of the week.

Cheers.

Thank you.