---
title: "Why Your GTM Strategy Is Broken—And How AI Can Fix It"
episode: 46
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Neel Kamal"
guest_title: "Founder & CEO, AdamX"
date_published: 2025-10-29
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:56:59
word_count: 8977
topics: ["ai-in-gtm", "gtm-strategy", "brand-positioning", "sales-enablement", "demand-generation", "enterprise-sales"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/neel-kamal-gtm-strategy-ai/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Why Your GTM Strategy Is Broken—And How AI Can Fix It

_Neel Kamal on the synthetic buyer, the 84% shortlist rule, and seeing your go-to-market through your customer's eyes_

**Episode 46 · The LeanScale Podcast**  
Neel Kamal, Founder & CEO, AdamX · Hosted by Anthony Enrico  
Published October 29, 2025 · Updated July 22, 2026 · 00:56:59  
Canonical: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/neel-kamal-gtm-strategy-ai/

**Topics:** AI in GTM · GTM Strategy · Brand & Positioning · Sales Enablement · Demand Generation · Enterprise & Public-Sector Sales


## Executive summary

Neel Kamal is a serial entrepreneur — founder of BoostUp, one of the category-defining revenue-intelligence platforms, and now founder of AdamX, an AI-first company he built directly out of the go-to-market pain he lived at BoostUp. He and LeanScale co-founder Anthony Enrico have been in the trenches of GTM together for the better part of a decade. The episode opens on a big frame: the intelligence layer isn't just another technology like the internet — it's fire. We have the raw power, but someone still has to invent the pan before we can cook with it. That metaphor runs through the entire hour.

The origin story is a question that haunted Neel at BoostUp: why isn't conversion 100%? He had built a product customers genuinely loved, yet only a fraction of prospects bought. His mistake, he realized, was selling inside-out — 'what I know, therefore you must know, therefore you must conclude I'm the best.' Buyers don't work that way; they judge you through their own set of lenses, anonymous and out of your sight. COVID's remote-meeting shift only pushed conversion the wrong direction, and then ChatGPT's late-2022 arrival turned the itch into experimentation. In April 2024 he and his partner spun out AdamX.

The analytical core is the B2B buyer journey. A buyer starts with curiosity or pain, runs searches, reads forums, reviews and peer recommendations, and — around the 60–70% mark — builds a shortlist of three or four vendors. Empirically, the number-one vendor on that shortlist (not yet selected, just the best impression so far) wins 84% of the time. The implication is brutal: the game is often over before your full-on sales team ever engages. Becoming number one splits into marketing complexity (your buyer is anonymous — you can't see when or where their journey starts) and sales complexity (by the time they talk to you they're highly informed and comparing you live against competitors).

AdamX's answer is the 'synthetic buyer' — a large language model trained to think like your customer's actual buying committee, complete with a synthetically generated company, hierarchy and pain. It walks your buyer journey and your competitors', organizes 400–600 touch points into 'episodes,' and scores you episode-by-episode so you fix the real problem (weak testimonials, missing third-party validation, inconsistent messaging) instead of guessing. Three products sit on top: TopJourney scores your journey against competitors; TopRep has the synthetic buyer listen to every sales call, flag patterns and condense 157 hours of recordings into 53-second clips (plus 'golden moments' you can turn into website testimonials in half a day); and RolePlay lets reps practice against the toughest buyer they will ever face. It reframes enablement from a one-size classroom into personalized coaching — don't waste time teaching a great server to serve; fix the backhand.

Who should listen: founders and CEOs under board pressure to 'bring AI in,' CROs and sales leaders drowning in unlistened call recordings, CMOs trying to see their brand the way buyers actually do, and RevOps operators tired of tracking G2 reviews and drop-off rates that all reduce to a single question — how does your buyer rank you? The closing warning is pointed: a generic ChatGPT website dump produces generic, unactionable commentary ('your website is too long'); the winners will be the ones thoughtful enough to apply purpose-built intelligence to a specific problem, and the rest will be 'the dinosaurs of the last era.' It's not about being good, Neel says — it's about being best, because your buyer is grading on a curve against your competition.


## Key takeaways

1. **Buyers grade you from the outside-in — you sell from the inside-out** — Neel's founding error at BoostUp was assuming that because he knew his product was best, the buyer would reach the same conclusion. But the buyer sees you through their own lenses — their pain, their prior tools, their competitive research — most of which is invisible to you. You might have built the world's best product; if the buyer can't see it, it doesn't exist.
   _Why it matters:_ Stop optimizing your pitch around what you know and start reconstructing what the buyer perceives at each step. The gap between those two views is where deals are quietly lost before sales ever engages.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders, Sales Leaders

2. **The 84% shortlist rule: the game ends at 60–70% of the journey** — Around the 60–70% point in a B2B journey the buyer narrows to a shortlist of three or four vendors. Empirically, the vendor with the best impression at that moment — the 'number one,' not yet the selected winner — goes on to win 84% of the time. That means the outcome is largely decided before your sales team gets a real at-bat.
   _Why it matters:_ Invest to win the impression race early (search, forums, reviews, testimonials, message consistency), not just to close well late. If you're routinely vendor B, C or D at shortlist, your CAC balloons because you lose more than you win.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders, Revenue Executives

3. **Two complexities: an anonymous marketing buyer and an over-informed sales buyer** — Becoming number one is hard for two distinct reasons. On the marketing side the buyer is anonymous — you don't know when they started, what they've seen, or how much it hurts, and you only appear when they finally hand over a real email. On the sales side the buyer arrives highly informed on the problem, the solution space and the competitive landscape, so the rep has to impress, not just qualify, in the first meeting.
   _Why it matters:_ Design marketing to influence a journey you can't fully see, and enable sales to win a first meeting against a buyer who already knows your competitors. Both failures trace back to the same root: you don't actually know your buyer.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Sales Leaders, RevOps Leaders

4. **The breakthrough is a synthetic buyer, not better buyer identification** — Neel used to joke he could win any deal if he could 'put a chip in their head.' AdamX built the next best thing: an LLM trained to think like your customer's buying committee, wrapped in a synthetically generated company, org hierarchy and pain scenario. It's not about identifying who the buyer is — it's about modeling how the buyer thinks.
   _Why it matters:_ A trustworthy synthetic buyer lets you audit your own go-to-market through the customer's eyes at scale — walking your journey and your competitors' — which is impossible to do objectively from inside your own company.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders, RevOps Leaders

5. **Diagnose the real problem, not the fashionable symptom** — Scoring the journey episode-by-episode tells you precisely where you're hurting — thin customer testimonials, missing third-party validation, or an early message that contradicts your later message. Neel spent five-plus years at BoostUp solving problems without realizing they were the buyer's problems, mis-allocating resources against symptoms.
   _Why it matters:_ Fix the specific episode that's costing you, not the loudest internal opinion. Don't do a website refresh when the real gap is missing third-party validation, or buy a marketing-automation tool when your messaging is simply inconsistent.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Founders, RevOps Leaders

6. **Your internal playbook doesn't score points with the buyer** — A sales manager flags that a rep forgot to book the next meeting or skipped MEDDIC questions. That has internal merit, but the buyer doesn't care — they don't like you more for booking a meeting. What actually costs you is dancing around a pricing question the buyer just watched a competitor answer directly, which reads as evasive or unready.
   _Why it matters:_ Coach to buyer impact, not just process compliance. Following the internal playbook is necessary but insufficient; the impression you leave with the buyer is what wins or loses the shortlist.
   _For:_ Sales Leaders, RevOps Leaders

7. **TopRep turns every call into pattern recognition — at inhuman scale** — Calls get recorded but almost never listened to; reviewing a whole company's hundreds or thousands of calls is inhumane, so leaders live with the problem. The synthetic buyer listens to all of them and flags patterns — 'inconsistent pricing discussion,' 'poor security requirement handling' — with 53-second evidence clips instead of 157 hours of audio, drillable from CRO to team to individual rep.
   _Why it matters:_ You can build a targeted quarter-long program (e.g., 'get great at security requirements') off real, repeated evidence rather than one anecdotal call — and give managers tougher, better-substantiated coaching conversations.
   _For:_ Sales Leaders, RevOps Leaders, Revenue Executives

8. **Golden Moments: mine calls for testimonials and product feedback automatically** — Buried in call recordings are the exact moments buyers express what they love — 'sold on the solution,' 'this beats your competition hands down.' The synthetic buyer captures, de-dupes and ranks these 'golden moments,' filtering out the noise ('thanks for waiting,' 'love your Zoom background'). AdamX ran it on itself and stood up a website full of real testimonials in half a day.
   _Why it matters:_ The same call data feeds product feedback, case studies and marketing — work that used to take hundreds of hours of customer-success coordination and still missed most of the signal, because your buyer is 15 people you'll never all speak to.
   _For:_ Marketing Leaders, Founders, Customer Success

9. **Personalized enablement beats the one-size classroom** — Traditional enablement treats every rep like a freshman taking the same required courses — the good ones get bored and disruptive, the weak ones feel exposed being compared to the top. Real coaching is like athletics: don't waste time teaching a strong server to serve; drill the backhand. That was impossible at a 1:1 coach-to-rep ratio — until TopRep (watching every call) plus RolePlay (practicing only your weak spots) makes it feasible.
   _Why it matters:_ Replace generic curricula with rep-specific practice targeted at each person's actual weaknesses, and let new reps practice on their own time against a synthetic buyer instead of burning live pipeline to ramp.
   _For:_ Sales Leaders, RevOps Leaders, Founders

10. **It's a relative game — be best, not just good** — The buyer journey score means nothing in isolation; it only matters relative to competitors in the same shortlist. You can run an average journey and still win if everyone else is worse — and you can run a good journey and lose if a rival is better. Winning is measure-improve-measure-improve against the competition, not against your own baseline.
   _Why it matters:_ Benchmark every episode externally, not internally. Spending heavily to improve a phase where you're already ahead — or where you're too far behind to catch up — wastes scarce resources; put them where a fixable gap actually changes the ranking.
   _For:_ Founders, Marketing Leaders, Revenue Executives

11. **AI is fire — you still have to build the pan** — Neel's central metaphor: the intelligence layer is a paradigm shift bigger than the internet, but raw power isn't enough. Dumping a website PDF into ChatGPT yields generic, unactionable commentary — 'your text is too verbose' — because a generic system gives generic answers. The value comes from thoughtful, purpose-built tools applied to a specific problem, one technology at a time.
   _Why it matters:_ Boards want overnight 10x, but the win isn't AI-generated text — it's using intelligent, use-case-specific tools to genuinely save time and multiply output. The issue is rarely that teams don't want to change; it's that they don't know what to change.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives, RevOps Leaders

12. **The only voice that matters is the customer's** — Executive committees burn cycles in analysis paralysis — one person's view versus another's, where the biggest title or the loudest voice in the room wins. None of that is the right way to decide, Neel argues, because the only authoritative voice is the customer's, and nobody in the room actually represents it. A synthetic buyer puts that voice on the table.
   _Why it matters:_ Anchor GTM decisions in a defensible representation of the buyer rather than internal opinion or hierarchy. It cuts through debate and redirects investment toward what the buyer actually rewards.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives, Marketing Leaders


## Frameworks

### AI Is Fire — You Still Have to Build the Pan (01:30)

**Definition:** The intelligence layer is a paradigm shift bigger than the internet, but it's raw power like the discovery of fire. Value comes only when you invent the 'pan' — thoughtful, purpose-built tooling — to cook something with it.

Neel uses the metaphor to separate hype from utility: a generic ChatGPT dump gives generic answers, while a use-case-specific intelligent tool applied to one real problem creates genuine 10x leverage. It sets the tone for why AdamX is a purpose-built application, not a prompt.

### Outside-In vs. The Buyer's Lens (04:04)

**Definition:** Vendors sell inside-out ('what I know, therefore you must know, therefore I'm best'), but buyers grade you outside-in through their own set of lenses — their pain, prior tools and research — most of which you can't see.

This reframes the conversion problem: it's not that your product is worse, it's that the buyer's perception of you is worse. Closing the gap requires reconstructing how the buyer sees you at each step rather than restating your own conviction.

### The Buyer Journey & the 84% Shortlist Rule (09:24)

**Definition:** A B2B buyer moves from curiosity/pain through searches, forums, reviews and peers, forming impressions the whole way. Around 60–70% of the journey they build a shortlist of 3–4 vendors, and the best-impression 'number one' vendor at that point wins ~84% of the time.

Because the shortlist forms before the full sales motion, the deal is largely decided early. Being routinely vendor B/C/D drives CAC up because you lose more than you win. The goal is to be number one in the journey, by design, not by accident.

### Marketing Complexity vs. Sales Complexity (11:56)

**Definition:** Two obstacles to becoming number one: marketing complexity — the buyer is anonymous and you can't see when or where their journey starts; and sales complexity — by the time they engage they're highly informed on problem, solution and competitive landscape.

The marketing challenge is influencing an invisible journey; the sales challenge is impressing (not just qualifying) an over-informed buyer in the first meeting. Both trace back to the same root cause: you don't really know your buyer.

### The Synthetic Buyer (14:22)

**Definition:** A large language 'thinking' model trained to think like a specific customer's buying committee, wrapped in a synthetically generated company, org hierarchy and pain scenario — a high-fidelity representative of your real buyer.

Instead of identifying who the buyer is, it models how the buyer thinks (e.g., a MongoDB buyer: a 2,000–4,000-employee firm with a database engineer, architect and VP of engineering). It can then walk your journey and your competitors' to audit your GTM through the customer's eyes at scale.

### Episodes → Journeys → Personas (16:27)

**Definition:** A buying journey of ~400–600 touch points is organized into discrete 'episodes' (a Google search, asking the community, exploring a vendor website, reading a testimonial); episodes roll up into a journey, and journeys attach to a buying persona.

Structuring the journey this way lets the synthetic buyer score each episode and pinpoint exactly where you're hurting — thin testimonials, missing third-party validation, inconsistent messaging — so you fix the real problem instead of guessing or doing a cosmetic website refresh.

### Buyer POV vs. Sales-Manager POV (27:28)

**Definition:** A sales manager coaches to internal process ('you forgot to book the next meeting,' 'you skipped MEDDIC'); the buyer scores you on impression, not process. Dodging a pricing question the buyer just saw a competitor answer is what actually costs the deal.

Following the internal playbook is necessary but doesn't earn points with the buyer. The synthetic buyer grades reps on buyer impact — the moments that create or destroy a favorable impression — which is the signal that determines the shortlist.

### TopJourney / TopRep / RolePlay (30:01)

**Definition:** AdamX's three products. TopJourney scores your buyer journey episode-by-episode against competitors; TopRep has the synthetic buyer analyze every recorded sales call for patterns; RolePlay lets reps practice live against the trained synthetic buyer.

Together they solve both sides of the impression problem — the marketing/journey side and the sales-execution side — and turn ramp from a two-year suck-it-up into targeted, on-demand practice against the toughest buyer a rep will ever face.

### Golden Moments (36:19)

**Definition:** The moments buried in call recordings where buyers express what they love ('sold on the solution,' 'this beats your competition hands down'). The synthetic buyer captures, de-dupes and ranks them, filtering out noise like 'thanks for waiting' or 'love your Zoom background.'

One data source feeds testimonials, case studies, product feedback and internal awareness. AdamX ran it on its own calls and built a website of real testimonials in half a day — work that used to take hundreds of hours of customer-success coordination and still missed most of the signal.

### Personalized Enablement, Not the Classroom (42:59)

**Definition:** Reject the freshman-classroom model where every rep takes the same required courses. Coach like athletics: don't teach a strong server to serve — drill each rep's actual weakness (the 'backhand').

Personalized coaching was impossible at a 1:1 coach-to-rep ratio. TopRep (watching every call to find the weakness) plus RolePlay (practicing only that weakness) makes it feasible at enterprise scale, so the good reps aren't bored and the weak ones aren't just publicly compared to the top.

### Best, Not Good — The Relative Game (48:01)

**Definition:** Your buyer journey score only matters relative to competitors in the same shortlist. An average journey wins if everyone else is worse; a good journey loses if a rival is better. Winning is measure-improve-measure-improve against the competition.

This forces external benchmarking of every episode. Investing where you're already ahead — or too far behind to catch up — wastes scarce resources; put them where a fixable gap actually changes the ranking, since the race is about being best, not good.


## Quotes

_Speakers inferred from an undiarized transcript — verify before attributing._

> "It's such a big paradigm shift. I don't think it's even like internet. It's like fire, a discovery of fire. We are still figuring out what to do with it. We just have the fire. Somebody still has to invent the pan using which we can cook something on fire."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (01:30)

> "One thing always haunted me, which was why 100% of these prospects are not buying into BoostUp. Why do we have a rate called conversion rate?"
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (03:06)

> "The world is not that simple. The buyer has their own set of lenses."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (04:04)

> "You might have built the world's best stuff, and if they are not able to see it, then they are not able to see it."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (06:20)

> "What's so powerful about this shortlist, shown through empirical data, is that the number one vendor wins 84% of the time. And the number one vendor is not a selected vendor yet — it is just part of the shortlist."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (09:24)

> "The game is over even before your full-on sales team had a chance."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (10:05)

> "Even if you do win, the amount of effort is probably 10x what you'd put into something where you were shortlisted as vendor A."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (10:46)

> "This is not about identifying a buyer. It's about thinking how the buyer thinks."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (13:41)

> "Jokingly at BoostUp, I used to say that if I could just put a chip in their head and get all the data of what they are thinking, I can win any deal. So we ended up inventing the next best thing, which is we built our own buyer."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (14:22)

> "I'm just going to be having confirmation bias of what I believe in, being inside the dome of LeanScale."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (18:27)

> "Your buyer doesn't care about you booking the next meeting. No buyer cares about that. So you're not scoring any points with the buyer by following the internal playbook, although that is necessary."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (27:28)

> "We all know it as a leader, but we don't have an opportunity to go listen to each one of these calls. It's inhumane, it's impossible, and therefore we are just living with the problem."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (28:40)

> "If you can play tennis against the best player, that's the training you're going to get."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (29:18)

> "The good ones get bored in the class and then they create nuisances, and the bad ones feel under pressure because they are being compared against the good ones."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (43:43)

> "The race is not about being good. The race is about being best."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (48:01)

> "The issue is not that we don't want to change. The issue is we don't know what to change."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (51:40)

> "The biggest dog in the room wins. The biggest job title eventually takes over. None of that is the right way. The only right voice is the customer's voice."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (51:40)

> "Those of us who do not do anything about it will be looked at as the dinosaurs of the last era."
>
> — Neel Kamal, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 46 (54:30)


## Practical advice by role

### Founders

- Audit your go-to-market from the outside-in: reconstruct how a buyer perceives you at each episode of their journey, not how you'd pitch yourself from the inside.
- Recognize that the shortlist forms at 60–70% of the journey and the best impression wins ~84% of the time — invest to be number one early, by design, not just to close well late.
- Resist 'AI theater.' Boards want overnight 10x, but a generic ChatGPT dump gives generic advice. Apply purpose-built, use-case-specific tools to one real problem at a time.
- Benchmark externally against competitors, not against your own baseline — the race is relative, so put scarce resources where a fixable gap changes the ranking.

### Marketing Leaders

- Stop tracking vanity metrics (G2 review counts, webinars per month, drop-off rates) as ends in themselves — they all reduce to one question: how does the buyer rank you?
- Diagnose the specific episode that's costing you (thin testimonials, missing third-party validation, inconsistent early-vs-late messaging) before spending on a website refresh or a new automation tool.
- Mine sales calls for 'golden moments' — real buyer enthusiasm — and turn them into testimonials, case studies and product feedback instead of manually chasing a handful of happy customers.

### Sales Leaders

- Coach to buyer impact, not just process compliance — booking the next meeting or asking MEDDIC questions doesn't earn points with the buyer; dodging a pricing question loses them.
- You can't listen to every call, so use pattern recognition across all of them to build targeted, evidence-backed programs (e.g., 'get great at security requirements' this quarter).
- Replace the one-size classroom with personalized practice: drill each rep's actual weakness and let new reps rehearse against a synthetic buyer instead of burning six months of live pipeline to reveal a bad hire.

### RevOps Leaders

- Treat 'how the buyer sees us' as the north-star metric your systems should serve, and make competitive, journey-level comparison a first-class report.
- Instrument the full 400–600-touch-point journey into episodes so investment decisions target the phase that actually moves the shortlist ranking.
- Bring the customer's voice to the executive table with a defensible synthetic-buyer representation, so decisions stop being won by the loudest voice or biggest title.


## AI takeaways

**Thesis:** AI is a fire-scale paradigm shift, but raw intelligence is not the product — the value is in purpose-built tooling ('the pan') applied to a specific problem. AdamX's bet is a 'synthetic buyer' that lets a company finally see its go-to-market through the customer's eyes, at a scale no human effort could match.

- **Build the pan, not just the fire** — A generic ChatGPT dump of your website returns generic, unactionable notes ('too verbose'). Intelligence becomes leverage only when it's shaped into a use-case-specific tool aimed at one real problem.
- **Model the buyer, don't just identify them** — An LLM trained to think like your customer's buying committee — wrapped in a synthetic company, hierarchy and pain — can walk your journey and your competitors' and score you objectively, free of internal confirmation bias.
- **Pattern recognition at inhuman scale** — No leader can listen to a whole company's calls. A synthetic buyer analyzes all of them, surfaces repeated failure patterns with short evidence clips, and turns anecdote into a coachable program.
- **Personalized coaching becomes feasible** — AI collapses the 1:1 coach-to-rep ratio: TopRep finds each rep's weakness and RolePlay drills only that, so enablement stops being a one-size classroom.
- **The mandate — and the risk** — Boards expect overnight 10x from AI; those who do nothing become 'the dinosaurs of the last era,' but chasing AI-generated text instead of thoughtful, applied tools is its own trap.

**Agent & automation ideas**

- A synthetic-buyer agent trained per ICP that walks your funnel and top competitors' funnels and scores each journey episode (search, forums, reviews, website, demo) so you fix the specific gap that's costing the shortlist.
- A call-intelligence agent that analyzes 100% of recorded sales calls for repeated buyer-impact failures (pricing dodges, weak security handling) and drafts targeted, evidence-backed enablement programs by team and by rep.
- A 'golden moments' agent that mines calls for genuine buyer enthusiasm, de-dupes and ranks it, and auto-drafts testimonials, case studies and product-feedback tickets.
- A role-play agent that spins up scenario-specific practice buyers targeted at an individual rep's diagnosed weaknesses, available on demand instead of on a manager's calendar.


## Operations takeaways

### Revenue operations

- **One north-star metric.** Every tracking system (G2 reviews, webinar counts, drop-off rates) ultimately reduces to how the buyer ranks you — instrument for that, not for the proxies.
- **Journey-level instrumentation.** Break the 400–600-touch-point journey into episodes so investment decisions target the phase that actually moves the shortlist ranking.
- **External benchmarking.** Score every episode relative to competitors; being good in isolation is meaningless when the shortlist is a relative game.
- **The customer's voice on the table.** A defensible synthetic-buyer representation replaces 'biggest title wins' decision-making with the only voice that matters.

### Pipeline & marketing ops

- **The deal is decided early.** The shortlist forms at 60–70% of the journey and the best impression wins ~84% of the time — pipeline is influenced long before an opportunity is created.
- **Two-sided complexity.** Marketing must influence an anonymous, invisible journey; sales must impress an over-informed buyer in the first meeting — both stem from not knowing the buyer.
- **Fix the costly episode.** Diagnose the specific weak episode (testimonials, third-party validation, message consistency) instead of guessing — misallocated fixes waste resources and don't move conversion.
- **Impression over process.** Reps win the shortlist on buyer impression, not on booking the next meeting or completing MEDDIC — coach and measure accordingly.


## Metrics mentioned

| Value | Metric | Context |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 84% | Number-one shortlist win rate | Empirically, the best-impression vendor at shortlist wins ~84% of the time — even though it isn't the selected winner yet. |
| 60–70% of the journey | Where the shortlist forms | The buyer narrows to 3–4 vendors well before the full sales motion, so the deal is largely decided early. |
| 400–600 | Touch points per buying journey | The synthetic buyer organizes these into 'episodes' that roll up into a journey and a persona. |
| 164 calls / month | Calls analyzed in the demo | TopRep condenses roughly 157 hours of recordings into ~53-second evidence clips, drillable from CRO to team to rep. |
| ~2 years | Traditional rep ramp | Neel's experience at BoostUp: leaders 'suck it in' for two years to ramp a rep to great — the gap TopRep + RolePlay compress. |
| April 2024 | AdamX founded | Spun out with his partner after ChatGPT-era experimentation on BoostUp's own revenue problem. |
| 2,000–4,000 employees | MongoDB example buyer | The synthetic-buyer worked example — a mid-size enterprise committee of database engineer, architect, VP of engineering and DevOps. |
| Hundreds of moments → testimonials in half a day | Golden Moments payoff | AdamX ran the feature on its own calls and stood up a website of real, de-duped testimonials in about half a day. |


## Entities mentioned

- **BoostUp** (company) — Neel's prior company — a revenue-intelligence platform he built; the source of the 'why isn't conversion 100%?' pain that inspired AdamX, and where he tried friends' buyer-journey walkthroughs and paid exit interviews that produced data too high-level to act on. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/boostup/
- **AdamX** (company) — Neel's current AI-first company, formally started April 2024; builds the 'synthetic buyer' and the TopJourney / TopRep / RolePlay products, and used its own Golden Moments feature to assemble a website of real testimonials in half a day. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/adamx/
- **MongoDB** (company) — Used as the worked example of training a synthetic buyer — a mid-size enterprise buyer (2,000–4,000 employees) whose committee includes a database engineer, architect, VP of engineering and a DevOps person. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/mongodb/
- **Neel Kamal** (person, guest) — Serial entrepreneur; founder of BoostUp and now founder/CEO of AdamX, which builds a 'synthetic buyer' to help B2B companies win the buyer journey. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/neel-kamal/
- **Anthony Enrico** (person, host) — Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/anthony-enrico/
- **ChatGPT** (tool, AI Assistant) — Its late-2022 arrival shocked the market and sparked the experimentation that became AdamX; also cited as the DIY approach (dumping a website PDF into it) that returns generic, unactionable commentary like 'your text is too verbose.'
- **Claude** (tool, AI Assistant) — Named alongside ChatGPT as the widely available intelligence tools executives and boards have 'seen the picture' of and now expect teams to use to transform the business.


## FAQ

**Q: Why isn't a great product enough to win a B2B deal?**

A: Because buyers judge you from the outside-in, through their own lenses — their pain, prior tools and competitive research — most of which you can't see. Neel Kamal's founding lesson at BoostUp was that being genuinely the best product doesn't matter if the buyer's impression of you is worse than a competitor's. You have to reconstruct and improve how the buyer perceives you, not just restate why you're best.

**Q: What is the 84% shortlist rule?**

A: In a B2B buying journey, around the 60–70% mark the buyer narrows to a shortlist of three or four vendors. Empirically, the vendor with the best impression at that moment — the 'number one,' though not yet the selected winner — goes on to win about 84% of the time. The practical implication is that the deal is largely decided before your sales team gets a real chance, so you must win the impression race early.

**Q: What is a 'synthetic buyer'?**

A: It's a large language model trained to think like a specific customer's buying committee, wrapped in a synthetically generated company, org hierarchy and pain scenario. Rather than identifying who your buyer is, it models how they think, then walks your buyer journey and your competitors' to score you objectively — an audit of your go-to-market through the customer's eyes that's impossible to do without bias from inside your own company.

**Q: Why don't secret shoppers or exit interviews work for B2B?**

A: Consumer 'secret shopper' testing assumes an untrained buyer and an open process, but B2B buying requires real expertise and actively filters out anyone who can't answer discovery questions. Friends walking a competitor's journey only remember vague, high-level impressions ('the rep was warm but I wasn't impressed'), and even paid exit interviews produce feedback too high-level to act on. A synthetic buyer instead reports precisely where it went, what it heard, and why it liked or disliked something.

**Q: How can leaders coach sales calls they don't have time to listen to?**

A: AdamX's TopRep has the synthetic buyer listen to every recorded call and flag repeated patterns — inconsistent pricing discussion, poor security handling — with short evidence clips (about 53 seconds instead of 157 hours of audio), drillable from the CRO level down to an individual rep. That lets a leader build a targeted, evidence-backed improvement program instead of reacting to a single anecdotal call.

**Q: What are 'golden moments' and why do they matter?**

A: Golden moments are the points in recorded calls where buyers express genuine enthusiasm — 'sold on the solution,' 'this beats your competition hands down.' The synthetic buyer captures, de-dupes and ranks them while filtering out noise ('thanks for waiting,' 'love your Zoom background'), then feeds them into testimonials, case studies and product feedback. AdamX ran it on its own calls and built a website full of real testimonials in about half a day.

**Q: Can't I just do this with ChatGPT?**

A: Neel's answer is that a generic system gives generic answers. Dumping your website and a competitor's into ChatGPT yields unactionable commentary like 'your text is too verbose,' which doesn't tell a team what to change. His 'AI is fire, but you still need the pan' metaphor captures it: the value comes from thoughtful, purpose-built tools applied to a specific problem, not from raw text generation.

**Q: Why does Neel say it's about being 'best,' not 'good'?**

A: Because the buyer journey is a relative game. Your journey score only matters compared to the competitors in the same shortlist — an average journey wins if everyone else is worse, and a good journey loses if a rival is better. So you should benchmark every episode externally and measure-improve-measure-improve against the competition rather than against your own baseline.


## Timeline

- **00:00** — Meet Neel Kamal: from BoostUp to AdamX
- **01:30** — AI is fire — and we still need to invent the pan
- **03:06** — The question that haunted BoostUp: why isn't conversion 100%?
- **06:20** — How your buyer actually sees you
- **07:59** — The B2B buyer journey and the 84% shortlist rule
- **11:56** — Two complexities: the anonymous buyer and the over-informed buyer
- **14:22** — Building a synthetic buyer
- **16:27** — Episodes, journeys, and 400–600 touch points
- **20:48** — Why secret shoppers and exit interviews fail in B2B
- **25:26** — TopRep: analyzing every sales call at scale
- **33:44** — Coaching by team and by rep
- **36:19** — Golden Moments: mining calls for testimonials
- **40:26** — Role Play: practicing against the toughest buyer
- **42:59** — Personalized enablement vs. the classroom
- **45:04** — TopJourney: scoring your journey against competitors
- **50:54** — Why generic ChatGPT dumps don't work
- **53:40** — Winners, losers, and the dinosaurs of the last era


## Related episodes

- **Ep. 33: Why AI Won't Save Your Bad Brand** (Mario Paganini) — The brand-and-perception counterpart: Neel's thesis is that buyers grade you on impression, and AI can't paper over a weak one. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/mario-paganini-ai-wont-save-brand/
- **Ep. 25: The End of Sales Guesswork** (Christina Brady) — AI-driven sales practice and role-play — the same idea behind AdamX's RolePlay and TopRep coaching. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/christina-brady-luster-predicts-gaps/
- **Ep. 24: AI Is Breaking Sales — Here's How to Fix It** (Mustafa Saeed) — A sibling take on how AI is reshaping the sales motion and what to do about it. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/mustafa-saeed-ai-breaking-sales/
- **Ep. 88: Why AI Won't Close Your Biggest Deals** (Michael Kiernan) — A CRO's view of AI's limits in enterprise selling — the human-impression counterweight to a fully synthetic buyer. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/michael-kiernan-nextdoor-ai-wont-close-deals/
- **Ep. 29: GTM Product Demos: Exploring Ocean.io** (Michael Heiberg) — Same format — a live, behind-the-scenes demo of an AI-native GTM tool with Anthony. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/michael-heiberg-ocean-io-gtm-demo/
- **Ep. 34: Pipeline Is a Vanity Metric** (Guy Rubin) — Win-rate and benchmark data that pairs with the 84% shortlist rule and the case against tracking vanity metrics. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/guy-rubin-ebsta-benchmark-report/


## Full transcript

_Machine-transcribed and not diarized; speaker attribution is inferred._  
_Transcript only, as a separate file: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/neel-kamal-gtm-strategy-ai/transcript.md_

### 00:00 — Meet Neel Kamal: from BoostUp to AdamX

**[0:00]** We have Neil Kamal here today. So excited, Neil, for you to be on our podcast. Neil is a serial entrepreneur, founder of BoostUp, which is one of my favorite revenue intelligence platforms and is so good at understanding the go-to-market landscape. Since BoostUp, Neil has founded AdamX, which is a new AI-built first company, which he's going to walk us through. Neil, you and I have been working together for a long time. I think we have been in the trenches of go-to-market and have really felt the pain of what a lot of these companies are trying to do as they're building. So just really excited to dive in. I think a great way to kick this off,

**[0:48]** you built BoostUp, such an impressive platform. And I think that created a lot of the inspiration that you have for AdamX. We'd love to just hear the story, hear the pain that you felt and what gave you the inspiration to start this new venture. Yeah, great question. And first of all, thank you for having me, Anthony, and thank you for the shared journey we have had. The first time we met, what we were doing eight years ago and what both you and I are doing now, obviously, is greatly transformed. We live in the air of intelligence and the intelligence layer is

### 01:30 — AI is fire — and we still need to invent the pan

**[1:30]** not like just a new technology. It's such a big paradigm shift. I don't think it's even like internet. It's like fire, a discovery of fire. We are still figuring out what to do with it. We just have the fire. Somebody still have to invent the pan using which we can cook something on fire and things like that. So it is an exciting time that we are in the world, exciting time to be here in the middle of technology innovation. And it's really exciting to be here on your show. Like you said, you know, when we were building BoostUp, and you relate with this journey and

**[2:13]** so with your audience, founders and early team, engineers, developers, everybody else, they put their heart and soul in building a company. And as they do that, they are striving for the moon, everybody wanting to build the best product that they possibly can. For some portion of those companies, they get lucky and are successful in truly building great product out there. We did that. We felt by the time 2020 arrived, we were two, two and a half years into building our company and our product. We had already gotten several customers and many of those had used our competitive product in the past and then left that to come join BoostUp.

### 03:06 — The question that haunted BoostUp: why isn't conversion 100%?

**[3:06]** Which means in our mind as founders, we felt like we have arrived, we have built something of value that our customer life. I would go talk to these customers, would try to understand what they are liking about BoostUp and would try to then present it to our future customers, buyers prospects. But one thing always haunted me, which was why 100% of these prospects are not buying into BoostUp. Why do we have a rate called conversion rate? Why only certain percentage, whether it is 5, 10, 15 or 50? What about the others? Why are they not seeing what I am seeing or what many others have seen? At the time, I always used to approach it from inside.

**[4:04]** What I know, I will tell you and therefore you must know what I know and therefore you must conclude that I am the best product and therefore you should buy our product. Why would you go buy anything else? The world is not that simple and the portion here is that the buyer have their own set of lenses. 2020 was also interesting in the world because of COVID. We started having a lot more meetings because of COVID, but obviously remote meetings were figured out a way to get efficient and our conversion rate only started looking worse. It took a beating. It did not

**[4:43]** get better. In fact, it was trending in the wrong direction. Then came '22, the slow down and also towards the end of '22, a little known birdie, the chard GPT shocked each one of us. And then '23, when it became more mainstream available, that's when a couple of us got together and started experimenting with this idea that trying to solve the problem of boost up on wise our revenue, not as great as it would want to be. In that process, we ended up inventing something so cool, so powerful that it became a foundational change in our mind. And that led me

**[5:31]** and my partner at that time, Abhishek Gudkutya, to start AdamX. We formally started in April 2024 and it has been an exciting journey. It has been, every day has been a day of innovation, struggles and opportunities all at the same time. And that's the journey so far. That's amazing. I think the best innovations, the best products are really built from that organic hands-on. I've had this issue myself experience and especially knowing, hey, this is something that you use to help build boost up, that this is so powerful that you've already used your own company as a case study. To be able to bring this to the market is really, really impressive.

### 06:20 — How your buyer actually sees you

**[6:20]** Thank you. And I really drive inspiration from the struggles of leaders, CEOs, CROs, CMOs, many, many, many hours of countless hours of effort and work goes into building a great technology. But what is hard is how is your buyer seeing you and they always see the way they see you. You might have built the world's best stuff in there and if they are not able to see it, then they are not able to see it. And especially in B2B companies, the discovery process is not as simple and the process of going through it, first of all, the substance is of high dollar value. Secondly, it is not one person, but a committee of people who are in the buying group.

**[7:16]** Third, you might be serving more than one type of audience, enterprise, mid-market, consumer and different kind. And in their journey, you might not have just one product, but more than one product. And so how do you consign all of that into a journey that you could control where you are absolutely sure that you will be graded number one. In fact, if you let me, I'll share what the buyer journey looks like at the current time. Yeah, we'd love to see it. I think that'll be a good framework to set the stage and tone for how Adam X is helping to accelerate that and provide visibility. So I think taking a look

### 07:59 — The B2B buyer journey and the 84% shortlist rule

**[7:59]** at that framework would be great. Let's look at this, right? Everybody wants to understand and create the best experience for their buyer. That's why we have the entire go-to marketing team starting from top of the funnel all the way. But try to think from a buyer perspective, what is buyer doing? So this is a typical journey buyer is starting with curiosity or pain. They go through various searches, social media, publications, videos, webinar, forums, research, checking the ratings, asking peers. Eventually they either buy the vendor reaching out to them or they deciding that they are ready for demo. Then they go into demo, use case discussion,

**[8:45]** detailed demo, due diligence, ROI, business case evaluation, and so on and so forth. This is the journey that the traditional software but even hardware companies would go through and their buyer would go through. The interesting thing about this journey is that the buyer is forming impression about you from get-go, right? They are grading you from very first search. Where were you in the search? Were you in the top 10 or not in the top 10? What happened in the forums? What happened in the social media? Everything is adding to an impression. Then somewhere around

**[9:24]** 60-70% mark, depending upon the company, the buyer, your buyer, will build a shortlist. Well, one of the reasons they build the shortlist is because they can't possibly work with everybody in the world. Other is that they already have gotten more than enough evidence that these three or four vendors will be able to satisfy their need, right? So this is a shortlist and what's so powerful about this shortlist shown through empirical data is that the number one vendor wins 84% of the time. Now who is the number one vendor? The number one vendor is not a selected

**[10:05]** vendor yet. It is just part of the shortlist, but it is the vendor who you have the best impressions so far and you are still at 60-70% of the journey, which means the game is over even before your full-on sales team had a chance, right? So when I saw this data for the first time, my mind went into two things. First, I did remember some of the deals where I was part of the 16% and I won them and I was very proud of those deals because they take the heroism. Yeah, but those were brutal wins. Those weren't wins where you just like had an easy path across

**[10:46]** the finish line. You probably had to go through so many objections. Somebody on the buyer committee is already convinced that they should be using a different vendor and like those are the most brutal wins, probably a longer sales cycle too. Even if you do win, the amount of efforts probably 10x that you'd put into something where you were shortlisted as vendor A. Precisely. And we all remember the CAC calculation and so on and so forth. The more times we are in B and C and D, the CAC goes high because you are losing more than winning and therefore your cost

**[11:19]** will be high. Because from a buyer perspective, they are going to engage with all of these four vendor all the way till the end. So all the resources, the time spent, there will be four company which will be forecasting this deal and only one would win and winner takes it all obviously in any purchase. So that's a very interesting data, which means as executives, founders or leaders in the company, we would want to be number one in the journey, obviously. But the problem is becoming number one is complex. And I'm dividing this complexity in two parts, the marketing complexity

### 11:56 — Two complexities: the anonymous buyer and the over-informed buyer

**[11:56]** and the sales complexity. The marketing side complexity is that the buyer is anonymous. You don't know what they want, what is their current situation, what are they coming from, what are they shooting for, how much does it hurt, what have they looked at, where they looked at the information. None of that is visible. You don't even know when they start their journey. You don't know the timeline. You as a vendor start seeing that much later when the first time they'll download something and they're willing to share their real, the real email or real phone number

**[12:32]** on your website, right? And they are spending probably 15% of their time on your website, another 15% on competitor and everybody else, first party, third party, everything else. So in marketing side, the problem is the buyer is anonymous and you do not know them that very well on what do they want. On the sales side, the challenge is buyer is coming in highly informed. By the time they meet you, they have gone through an understanding of problem space because that's what they lift. They understand a little bit about solution space, various offerings,

**[13:06]** and they understand the competitive landscape very, very well, right? You against your competition. So they're coming in because they still want to talk to you. They want to give you a chance to tell the best version of yourself, but the sales rep, they will have to be so good in that first second meeting that they will have to form an impression of one up over your buyer where you are not just qualifying them, but you are also impressing them with what you got and the relationship building and everything else that the salesmanship is. This is hard for sales team and

**[13:41]** that's why it takes so much time and effort into building and enabling a sales team. So both of these challenge are related to we don't know our buyer very well. And this is not about identifying a buyer. It's about thinking how the buyer thinks. So jokingly in boost up, I used to say that if I could just put a chip in their head and get all the data off what they are thinking, I can win any deal. My team is ready to close and the hardest customer there is if we could just know what they are thinking. Obviously that's not possible. So we ended up at Adam X, we ended up inventing the next

### 14:22 — Building a synthetic buyer

**[14:22]** best thing, which is we built our own buyer. Basically what we did was we took a model and large language model, a thinking model, and then we trained that model to think like the buyer of our customer. Let's say we are working with MongoDB as a customer. Then we train a buyer to be the buyer of MongoDB. Now MongoDB might identify that for one of their buyer is a mid-size enterprise customer between 2,000 to 4,000 employees where the buyer is or buying committee includes a database engineer, architect, and a VP of engineering, and maybe even a DevOps person.

**[15:08]** Then we train the model based on internet data to think like those personalities what they have gone through. That buyer also has a company. That company has a size, an organization, a hierarchy, and a set of things that they are bringing out in the market. So we synthetically create that information. Then that company also has a problem or pain. They might have several applications, the applications are running low, the queries are high, or some application went down and the board is saying that this is not acceptable or the CEO is pissed about it, and the CFO is beating down

**[15:47]** their neck on why they are spending so much money and yet this is so reliable. That is also something we synthetically create, just like a real buyer. But once we have created those situation and scenarios, we feed that to the model. This model is a very good representative set of your real buyer. And then we do something beautiful with it. Then we have this buyer go through your journey, your buyer journey, and your competitor's journey and is able to give you a baseline of what does your buying journey look like, how good you are against your competition.

### 16:27 — Episodes, journeys, and 400–600 touch points

**[16:27]** A buying journey roughly consists of 400 to 600 different touch points. We organize that in form of episodes and episodes become the part of journey, journey under the part of a buying persona. So we organize all that data and then present it in such a way that you would be clearly able to understand where you are hurting. If you are hurting, let's say in the area of customer testimonials, because you don't have enough, you should fix that problem versus having lots of webinar. If you are hurting because you don't have third-party validation, then you should fix that problem

**[17:05]** rather than doing a website refresh. If you're hurting because your initial journey message is different from your later journey message, then you should fix that problem rather than having a marketing automation tool implemented. So in my own experience at Boost Hub in five plus years, we solve so many problems without fully understanding that those are problems of our buyer. And that is where the resource organization, what we need to fix then, and why we are not seeing the results that we want, why we are not getting the revenue, all of that fall entrapment

**[17:45]** because of that. And it is so hard to get this data. It's so hard to know all the touch points that your buyer might even go through to even give it a proper evaluation, let alone what your competitors have set up out in the market and what third-party websites might be saying about you or not saying about you. And to go through this with an unbiased lens, nearly impossible. If I'm looking at things, I'm immediately filtering what I'm looking at based on my perspective from inside my company. So if I were to use LeanScale as an example, if I'm looking to compare us to

**[18:27]** RevOps, go-to-market agencies, or other people, I'm immediately disqualifying things that I don't agree with. And that's not helping me. That's not putting me in a position to really identify where their position better than we are and where we can fill in gaps. Because I'm just going to be having confirmation bias of what I believe in being inside the Dome of LeanScale. So not only the amount of data you have to collect, but then to do it in a way that is actually going to be done correctly without as much bias as possible. That part, I feel like, might even be the harder

**[19:05]** part than the data part. And the values that you get out of it is you don't have to depend upon

**[19:15]** the old school metrics. For example, we used to track how many G2 reviews are we getting, how many webinars are we doing per month, how many website-based visits are we taking, what is our drop-off rate, what is our top of the funnel conversion rate, what is bottom of the curve. A lot of these things that we are tracking ultimately get simplified to a very simple thing. How does our buyer look at us? If your buyer is treating you number one, you will start winning. If your buyer is treating you number four, it doesn't matter how good one tracking system versus another tracking system it is. You're not winning because you do not create the best

**[20:03]** impression and minds of your buyer. Now you will win some deals irrespective because there will be a buyer who would hate every other competitor, so you become the default choice. And I have one such deal myself and my team has. But predominantly the only metric that matters is how your buyer likes you and where do they rate you. And unfortunately so far there was not a good way to measure that consistently. And like you said in an objective fashion where you're not biased from inside. Many many years ago during my master's program I had heard the concept of

### 20:48 — Why secret shoppers and exit interviews fail in B2B

**[20:48]** secret shopper that consumer technology companies would do. But you can't deploy that to B2B world because for two problems. One, secret shopper, the buyer is a consumer like if you're buying water bottle, you don't need to be an expert in water bottle. But if you're buying a relational database or no SQL database, there is a lot more that you need to know. And the second problem is that the entire process is built to progress or reject you as a buyer. So if you're not really answering the question in a discovery call, then you will be rejected. You won't be able to go

**[21:29]** to the next level. If you're not providing information correctly, you won't be sent that Gartner white paper and so on and so forth just giving some example. And normally it's going to be filtered out right out of the gate. If I were to go request a demo from another RevOps agency, immediately I'm going to say no, I'm not having a meeting with Anthony Enrico, founder of LeanScale. I'm not going to have a meeting. But taking the consumer approach, like you're saying, when I was in college, I worked at a restaurant. We would often go to restaurants that were similar. You

**[22:06]** could call them competitors if you want and then understand how are they preparing things? What is their service like? What are they doing that might be working? And we would have people come into our restaurant and test, hey, how are we doing? And write everything down. You know, how long did it take to get to the table? How long did it take for my food to come out? Was the server friendly, knowledgeable? Did they know everything? So we were able to test how good of an experience are we providing? And it was relatively easy to have that process in place. But you're right, in B2B,

**[22:42]** all of this information and data is gated and really, really difficult to get and really difficult to test yourself, let alone try to see what competitors are doing. Precisely. And the definition of what good looks like, what are they doing right, what is the not doing right, is a biased internal perspective is not going to help it. And in past, I have, you know, I personally have tried asking some of my friends to go through the buyer journey of our competitor. But the problem is that they don't remember the details. Like if the feedback you're receiving from a

**[23:18]** friend who is going to see your competitor's site or demo and saying that I didn't like your website, that doesn't help you because what are you going to do about that feedback? How do you change that? Versus if you said, I went to your website and I looked at the pricing page. And when I looked at the competitor pricing page, they had at least given information, even though they did not share the pricing, they had at least given the pricing, explain their pricing methodology, but your site didn't even have pricing page. That's a valid details that you can incorporate and make change with.

**[23:54]** But when you ask our friends to do this for us, we get very high level. It's like, okay, when you went to a sales call, what do you do? Like, didn't like, Oh, well, you know, the rep was warm and fuzzy, but I didn't get impressed. How do you solve that? What do you do with it? The other attempt that I have personally tried at boost up was we paid an agency solid amount of money to do exit interviews with our buyer. Some of them were our customers and others who actually chose our competitor. And, and the exit interview data, while it was very lucrative to get that data, we were not able to act on that data because of the same problem,

**[24:39]** because it is very high level readout of what is good, not good. But the advantage with synthetic buyer is it is telling you precisely where it went, precisely what it heard on a call, precisely why it get confused and why it didn't like something. And precisely what they saw somewhere else in your competitor space, and they liked it. So that level of details allows somebody within your team to actually do something about it and fix it and improve it, and then rerun the top journey and see if you have improved. Well, I would love to see it. I agree with the problem statement. I know how valuable the data is.

### 25:26 — TopRep: analyzing every sales call at scale

**[25:26]** And I think if you tested yourself and had competitive intelligence, you could do so much with it. I'd love to see how you've done this with Adam X. Take a look at the product behind the scenes in the platform and see exactly how you can tee up this intelligence for somebody. Absolutely. And before I do that, let me tell you about the other side, which is top rep, which we forgot to talk about because top journey is so exciting. So even after you build the journey, a part of the journey is also the engagement with the sales team. So if you have built the perfect journey, but your sales team comes in and they just qualify

**[26:08]** the prospect, didn't do anything to actually create a good impression, you're back to the same problem. So you got to solve both sides, the marketing side, our product, product and marketing side, as well as the sales side. So on sales side, what we do is, you know, these days, most of the calls, sales calls are being recorded anyway. We feed those calls to the synthetic buyer and we say, listen to these call. The synthetic buyer is already aware of the journey, already have a brain and training of your ideal customer. And so now we ask them to go through the calls and say,

**[26:45]** based on what you heard, analyze the rep and tell me, what did you, what did, what are they doing? Well, and what are they not doing? Well, you know, in modern times, while we are recording to calls, nobody listens to these calls. It becomes overwhelming. In fact, inhumane to ask somebody to listen to the call. And even if you could listen to a rep's call, how do you listen to the entire company's call? Those will be in hundreds, if not thousands, if you look at a cohort of them. And even if you could, how could you pull out the right information that's necessary to whether it's good or not? Correct. A classic example is when a sales manager

**[27:28]** listened to a call says, Hey, you forgot to, Hey, you forgot to book the next meeting. Are you, you forgot to ask medic questions because our process is for you to do medic. That's a very sales manager's point of view. And there is merit in that. But guess what? Your buyer doesn't care about you booking the next meeting and they don't like you more than your competitor because you booked the next meeting or you asked the medic questions or not. No buyers care about that. So you're not scoring any points with the buyer. You're not creating the perfect impression

**[28:03]** by following the internal playbook, although that is necessary. But if the buyer asked you a question about pricing and you danced around that question rather than answering that, then they get irritated because they just had another call with a competitor where they were willing to share that information. So now they're thinking there must be something fuzzy about it, or these guys are not ready to sell into us. And that's why you're not willing to share. If you give an over lofty explanation to a call, and I'll show you some examples, these types of problems are happening

**[28:40]** in our sales call all day. We all know it as a leader, but we don't have an opportunity to go listen to each one of these calls. It's inhumane, it's impossible, and therefore we are just living with the problem. So what are our alternatives? We basically say, well, the ramp time for a ramp to be great will be two years. So till the time we just have to suck it in, which is what I did at boost up. And that leads to all kinds of problems. And the idea of top rep is so that you can immediately understand what you're doing well and not doing well. And related to that,

**[29:18]** and the final thing that we offer is what we call role play, where by this time your synthetic buyer would have become the most intelligent buyer that you could ever find. It has gone through your journey. It has listened to all variations of your sales call. And if you can get to practice with the toughest customer that you can have, imagine how good can you become through that. It's like if you can play tennis against the best rules, best player, that's how that's the training you're going to get. And so we offer top journey to help your journey, top rep to help your rep and role

**[30:01]** play to ramp them up and actually get them to the best level. Yeah, it's so smart. We would normally wait, like you said, especially a lot of the companies you work at, they have a six month sales cycle. So you hire someone, you wait six months to see if they closed anything. Then you give them another three months because maybe there's some excuse on pipeline or they have a couple deals that are just about to close. And then you realize that you made a bad call. And that whole time you had somebody not good in C, you should have, you're wasting opportunity costs

**[30:31]** of getting a good rep in C. It's a huge time delay to be able to assess your talent. And I'm not only blaming hiring poorly, it's also a lot of time to enable people. So I'm excited to see that aspect of the platform as well, because I think that's super valuable. So this is a demo environment. You see three products in here, top journey, top rep role play. I'm gonna right now I'm a top rep, let's start there, then I'll take you to journey and role play. So we are looking at a particular CRO of the demo company. We have the last month of call, which is 164 calls. Synthetic buyer has

**[31:14]** listened to each one of these calls. And it has done the analysis at every level, you can look at at that CRO level, you can go to the VP level, you can go to even down to a rep level. So I'm gonna show that to you one by one. At a CRO level, it is saying that there is excellence in AI capability differentiation. That's great, your team is doing that very well. However, there is inconsistent pricing discussion management. There is poor security requirement handling. At this point, if you're a sales manager like me, who believe in your team, you'll be like, tell me

**[31:50]** more like where, give me some evidence of this. So click on any one of these things and you get to see clips, not calls or not three, 157 hours of call, but a 53 second clip or the next one, which would be a 50 second clip or the next one. When here, you can listen to the clip, or you can see a summary of what happened. And what does the synthetic buyer's recommendation is for you to do in this situation. For example, the salesperson appears uncertain about the status of security documentation and compliance requirement, expressing concerns about reminder

**[32:28]** without clear resolution. You can go to the next one. Deferred important security question to future discussion rather than addressing them right away should have provided key security certification, encryption standard, and so on and so forth. So at this level, if this is doing a pattern recognition, it's not about that there was this one time that your team or did not handle the security question. There is many, many, many evidence and almost a pattern in last month. And that's why it is flagging this up so that as a leader, you can create a program and then say,

**[33:08]** guys, we need to get better at handling security requirements. And I'm creating a program and we will make this quarter about becoming really, really good with requirement. Or it could be about becoming really, really good with discovery. How do we do discovery? How do we do intelligent discovery without offending or taking too much time with the buyer? These are programs that could be created. All these clusters are in relevance to so you have Michael's team up there. So let's say Michael's running the commercial sales team. And, you know, Anthony's running the enterprise sales

### 33:44 — Coaching by team and by rep

**[33:44]** team, you might have different insights based on what products or from a graphic segment or region they're going to accept, correct? That's right. If you go to, for example, another person's team, you will see different analysis for that team. And in this case, this team had 56 call, they actually show excellence in implementation transparency, strong product evolution and technical storytelling. But consistent weakness in meeting closure, taking too much time, run out of time, is not able to close the meeting on time, so on and so forth. Very different type

**[34:22]** of problem, which is a pattern in this. And that's helpful for this manager to then focus on in his call with his team, right? Nice. So smart. You're also seeing something that is really important to see more and more selling is about, you know, doing this calls very, very well, right? The call skills are directly proportional to salesmanship. And so you are getting the synthetic buyer rate your team based on their call performance last month, right? So if Andrea is doing really well in the call, you can click on Andrea and say, what is she doing so right? And you can go into her.

**[35:07]** Now we are looking at analysis of 10 calls of Andrea. You can go into a specific call itself. You can say, okay, she did really well on this green cross deal, what happened? And then you can click and see directly the red clips. The speaker introduces two account executives without clearly defining their roles on the transition timeline, properly creating confusion about her own relationship. You know, things like Andrea provides scattered handoff to Mitch, diminishing both their credibility by appearing unprepared and unfocused. And you can listen to these calls and

**[35:41]** then accordingly train her. This way, you don't have to burden to listen to a full on 50, 60, 80 minutes call each one of these calls. And yet you are able to directly help Andrea. And that makes the job for the manager easier too, because that's some ruthless feedback that she got, unfortunately. But sometimes that feedback is a little tough, even if you did see it. It's pretty easy to lean on the crotch like, well, this is what it said. Do you agree with it or not? So I think that's given the manager some tools for sure to have those tough conversations with

### 36:19 — Golden Moments: mining calls for testimonials

**[36:19]** her team. Absolutely. Precisely. It does another very powerful thing. You know, these days, buried inside these causes also what our customer love about our technology, right? And they are saying that with expression during these calls. And we're hungry to know that. Why are we hungry? What can I do with it? We can use that as a feedback for our product. We can use that for internal awareness. We can use that for customer testimonial. We can use that for case studies. There are so many, so much value in these golden moments. So we actually call it golden moments and we capture all of that for you. So you can click on it and directly buyer shows

**[37:05]** strong excitement about automatic data extraction capabilities, especially comparing it to previous manual processes by explicitly state they are sold on the solution and ready to move forward. These are golden words by express strong enthusiasm about AI contract review, particularly in considered customization capabilities on and on buried inside these hundreds of call, 164 call are these golden moments. In fact, we were so excited about this feature that we ran it on Adam X and I'll show you what it created just within last one year of having spoken to our customers prospects. We were able to capture hundreds of such golden

**[37:53]** moment and we put them on our website in form of testimonial. So if you go to testimonial on our website, you see these golden moments being said by people, which were took us all of half a day to put this together because the synthetic buyer is automatically capturing it. It is de-duping it. It is telling what is powerful. For example, buried inside these calls are also a comment where some buyer would say, thank you so much for waiting. I am sorry that I was five minutes late. That's not a testimonial that you should put on your website. They also are saying that I love your background.

**[38:36]** The zoom background that you have. I love the picture of your family or things like that. That's not a testimonial that you should put on your website. But if they said, I really like this feature. In fact, this beats your competition hands down. That's a testimonial, right? So the only way you can know that if you are a buyer yourself, which is what we have invented for you, synthetic buyer. So on and on and on, this is what these buyers have said about AdamX. And we did that by training a buyer for AdamX. And they are listening to the call and they're

**[39:15]** mining this and presenting this. In Bootstrap, this would have taken me hundreds of hours of work. And then too, I won't be this good at it because I'll have to go talk to my customer success leader who would then identify a few customers who are very happy. I'll then go talk to them, then schedule a meeting. And then, you know, there is like, it is an infinite long process of assuming you could even get to that point. And then you're still going to miss things. Even if you put in 10 out of 10 effort, you're going to miss those items. You're not even going

**[39:52]** to have a chance to get there. Correct. Because your consumer is not one person. It's, it might be 15 people in that organization and you will never be talking to all 15, despite your best effort. Right. So this is very powerful golden moment. So, so far we have talked about the observation, which is going to help the managers and the reps. We've talked about ranking, which helps enablement. We've talked about golden moments, which helps product marketing and marketing in general. We talked about product feedback. Now let's say that you are one of these reps and you're

### 40:26 — Role Play: practicing against the toughest buyer

**[40:26]** facing a particular problem. You don't, and you're a new rep, you don't have to wait to be beaten down by your CRO or your BP off sales. You can, in your comfort of your own time, you can go to role play and you can say, all right, I want to practice and they will be ready-made scenario based on your problems as a rep. So you're not generically practicing things. Let's say that you are struggling with meeting closing, then that would be a scenario here. Let's say you're struggling with discovery questions. That is a scenario here. You go here and you're able to

**[40:59]** talk to, and then if I say, join call, and I don't know if all you over audio will record, but we can give it a try. Yeah. We would have a synthetic buyer join this conversation. Hey Maya, can you hear us?

**[41:20]** Yes, I can hear you. Oh, that's great. Maya, thanks for being here. I see you had requested a demo by going on our website. My name is Neil Kamal and I am going to be your chef run for this call. It so happened that my friend Anthony Rico, he also was here in the office. He's considering joining our company and wanted to see how the interaction looks like. So he is also listening in. Do you mind and would you be okay saying hello to Anthony? Hello, Anthony. Nice to meet you. Let's get started. All right. Maya, it would be great to get started with an introduction

**[42:05]** about you, maybe a little bit about the company and what problems are you trying to solve.

**[42:13]** Sure. I've been with Horizon Biosystems for three years, starting as director of legal operations and now serving as VP. We're a biotech company based in San Diego with over 750 employees. Currently, we're looking to address inefficiencies in our contract management process, too many manual steps, no standardized intake, and limited automation. Let me stop here. Otherwise, we'll go into a... Love it. That was great. Audio came in great too. So no, that's an excellent example of, "Hey, let me get some reps in." And if you're a professional salesperson, your livelihood depends on your skill and ability to move deals along, position the product

### 42:59 — Personalized enablement vs. the classroom

**[42:59]** in its best light possible, and just continue to refine your craft. So the right reps, I think, would be really excited to have something like this where they can go do their own personal training on their own time or prep this way for a call that's coming up too. Precisely. So far, how we have been treating enablement, Anthony, is we have been treating like a classroom program and treating our reps really as a freshman graduate. And we say, "All of you will learn algebra one-on-one, and all of you would do this, and all of you would have to go CS one-on-one, and this and that." And the problem with that is that the good ones get bored

**[43:43]** in the class, and then they create nuances, and the bad ones feel under pressure because they are being compared against the good ones. In reality, professional training should not be like that. If you are an athlete, or you are a tennis player, and you are very good with serving, there is no point me wasting time teaching you how to serve. In fact, if you are poor with backhand, that's what I should be spending time practicing with you. But doing such personalized coaching was next to impossible because it would take a one-on-one coach to rep ratio. It would take

**[44:20]** our manager dedicated to that rep to make that rep great or an enablement person. That's not sustainable. That's not even doable in a modern enterprise. But with top rep and role play combination, it is possible because top rep is watching you, and role play is helping you practice only areas where you are weak at. I love it. I love it. All right. Time for the final and the thing that we started with, which was top journey. I think you're saving the best for last, so I'm pretty excited. All right. Okay. I think top journey has the maximum impact in revenue transformation and revenue acceleration of a company.

### 45:04 — TopJourney: scoring your journey against competitors

**[45:04]** What you are looking at here is treat them as demo companies. These are just names that you may or may not know of. What you are seeing is a persona. This is a buyer, and you are seeing the timeframe that is around, which means for this buyer, which is a full details of a buyer and the training that has gone into a director of legal operation in the timeframe of November, 2024. When that wire buyer looked at these five companies, it concluded that the buyer journey score of this company is 785 and the company number two is 1195 and so on and so forth. And visually speaking, that journey is divided in form of these circles. We call it episodes.

**[45:53]** Like for example, Google search is an episode. Ask the community is an episode. Explore vendor website is an episode. Customer testimonial is an episode and you go all the way to the top. You can see how these impressions eventually make this particular, the purple guy as the winner and then where everybody else is ranking in this order and they go up and down and eventually form an impression. And let me make sure I understand the data points here. So conduct pre-demo assessment to sales meeting. That purple line between those two steps seems to have a decent inflection point.

**[46:30]** So you are making a more positive impression and gaining more points during that time. Versus that pink line at the top. They're only going up a little bit to that one. So you're starting to close the gap, but they've already made so much headway earlier in the fire journey process that are just so much further ahead to where it's getting tougher and tougher to close that gap. Excellent point. I imagine if you were the CEO of this company and your CMO came into you three months ago and said, I think our problem is demo assessment and you spent a ton of money in creating demos and put that on your website. Yes, you've got slightly inflection point,

**[47:16]** but you are so far down. There is negative impression happening at this place and this place that this little bump in the help is not helping you win the race. So to truly win it, you will have to be at it, not by accident, but by being on that purpose. Measure, improve, measure, improve. And the cool part of measurement don't measure in isolation. There is no internal measurement measure externally against your competition. Let's say that you were actually a very average buyer journey, but everybody else in your space is way worse. You will win. So the race is not about being good. The race is about being best.

**[48:01]** It's a relative game to begin with. And that's what this does for you. So now we are looking at the entire journey. That's the top level view. You are seeing a summary here. What it is saying is that the CPI dominates in AI capabilities against ironclad and Agilof through superior gen AI feature, right? Better accuracy metrics and deeper integration example evidenced across Google search, webinar and initial documentation phases, which means for those episodes, for Google search, webinar and documentation in those episodes, you are doing really well if you are that company.

**[48:40]** But for example, implementation, reliability, concern lags. The company lags behind ironclad and seen in implementation consistency shown by broken promises and demo where community feedback. Six months Salesforce integration timeline versus competition faster deployment documented in ask the community and social media faces. So this is the part. There is no one reality. It's not like overall, there is only one thing that hey, you are very good with this at every episode. Different impressions are being formed in these episodes. You are poor here in these episodes, you are good here. So that allows you to then identify which episodes are hurting

**[49:29]** the most, which episodes are something that I can fix and then go further down in those episodes. Now, before you go to the episode, we also have this table view visualization, which allows you to look everything at a glance. For example, at forum level, just directly go into, oh, why am I minus 60? What happened here? You click here, you directly can go to that place. You can say, oh my God, there must be a feedback here, which is the same, which is saying negative things about us. Oh my God, we got to fix it. We got, but let's look at what the competition looks like.

**[50:08]** And this is what their side looks like. This is what this other company side looks like and so on and so forth. You can then go to the next. You can go to the next and you can keep on going on and on at different stages on and on and understand left versus right me versus my competition. Go look at the score. Go look at the observation, understand the observation, fix the fix based on that and then effectively. That's pretty powerful. I mean, to pull in that type of research would, would take hours and hours of work and you'd probably miss it. And then comparing, comparing it to your competition. That is to get laser focused in exactly where

### 50:54 — Why generic ChatGPT dumps don't work

**[50:54]** you can go improve some of your metrics, improve some of the impression that the market has on your company. That's really powerful. Thank you. And, and what another thing that I try to do this using chat GPT, I'll take a PDF of the website of my website, my competitor website, give it to chat GPT. The problem with that is when a generic system looks at that, it will make generic commentary. It will say things like your website is too long. It will say things like your text is too verbose or it will say like you have lesser competitor name mentioned, but that doesn't do

**[51:40]** anything because we have already too many voices on that table on making a change. The issue is not that we don't want to change. The issue is we don't know what to change. Too many times I've been on the executive committee in that table deciding on we should do this versus that we should change this versus that analysis, paralysis, one person's view versus another person's view. The biggest dog in the room wins. The biggest job title eventually takes over. None of that is the right way. The only right voice is the customer's voice. And there is nobody who represents that voice, but your customer. And that's why having your own synthetic buyer

**[52:24]** is such powerful and such enabling thing.

**[52:29]** Neil, I'm super impressed. I think any company could benefit from mapping out their journey. And like you said, it's not about being good. It's about being best and knowing how you stack up against competitors and making sure that you're making the right investments. Everybody has limited resources, especially now. People are running leaner than ever and making sure you're being hyper productive with the resources that you're deploying and making sure they're going to make an impact. Are they going to put you in a better light against another buyer and give you

**[53:04]** that opportunity to be in the top four, put you in that top one list. So by the time a salesperson ever gets on a call, the wheels are already greased for them to close that and move it along. Thank you. That's our story. That's what we did. Thank you so much for giving me a chance to be here and present that with you and to your audience. Absolutely. Neil, I'm always impressed with everything you're working on. You're always a few steps ahead of the curve of what's happening in technology, AI, go to market. And I am so excited because I know this is just the beginning

### 53:40 — Winners, losers, and the dinosaurs of the last era

**[53:40]** of Adam X. And I can already tell there's so many new applications that you could deploy and new ways to use the platform technology. So I'm a big fan of what you're doing, what you built. I'm really excited for our team, our customers, and our audience to take a look at what you're doing. And I just can't wait to see what you add to Adam X, what you build next. And when you do, we'd love to have you back. That's fantastic, Anthony. In final parting, I would say this, you know, the world is watching the B2B executives out there. They're your investors, your board members, your leaders. They all want you to bring AI and transform your organization.

**[54:30]** They're expecting overnight 10X better performance, lesser resources, more results. And everybody has seen the Chad GPT or Claude picture or the movie, and they are imagining many, many things possible. Those of us who do not do anything about it will be looked as the dinosaur of the last era who knew what to do before this intelligence layer was brought in.

**[55:00]** Now, as I say this, if I was in your shoes, I face an important dilemma and confusion, which is, how do I go about doing this? I have Chad GPT available at $20 a subscription. I have Claude available. I can do this. I can take transcript of a call, feed it to this. I can take a website dump and then feed it to Chad GPT and then have some input figure out. The world is not looking for you to just create some text generated by this intelligence engine, but be extremely thoughtful on how you would save time and produce 10X more output. That can only happen if you go look for

**[55:48]** and see these type of transformative technologies, which are intelligent, but they are also thoughtful about the use cases. One technology at a time applied like this will solve a lot of such problem. If you want to work with Adam X, we will be able to help you become number one in your bio journey. We will be able to help you solve your rep population problem, and we will do it in a way that you don't have to listen in to thousands of call recording or don't have to go into 400 different touch points and try to gather all of this on yourself. Thank you so much.

**[56:28]** Thank you, Neil. I don't know what I'm going to do with my Sunday nights now that I won't have to listen to all the calls, but I'll find something probably more fun or productive to do. But you're right. There's going to be winners and losers, so eloquently said, and I know if I were betting on someone to come out ahead, my money is always on you. So looking forward to seeing what happens next and can't wait. Thank you, Neil. Thank you. Thank you. Bye bye.


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