The Real Problem with Sales Today

0:00 Today we have Robert Mosley, CEO and founder of GTM Engine and really, really excited to walk through what they're bringing today. They're building the platform that is the perfect platform if you're in sales, SDR, anything go-to-market, and they are really pulling together some of the most important components of being the best version of yourself when you're selling to your prospects. So Robert, really, really excited to have you here. And also, every time we have a founder, I love just hearing what gave you the idea and inspiration to get GTM Engine off the ground?

0:40 Yeah, yeah, Anthony. Appreciate it. Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I'm kind of a startup junkie, right? So I've been, this is my ninth startup actually, like first one I founded, but I mean, back it up a little bit. I started my career as a software engineer out of college. I joined this little company called Jobs2Web. It was a startup, like literally in like a dentist office. We ended up getting acquired. And I made enough money to like buy a car, and like for somebody fresh out of college, I'm like, oh man, startups are super cool.

1:08 Like this all happened every time, right? Like why wouldn't everybody just work for startups? So then I just kind of got the startup bug after that, did it again and again and again. So I mean, it's been going on for like 17 years now. So how we got here is like, I'm typically like first on board on the go to market team, right? So, you know, move works part of like the first group of folks hired there. Same thing at Harvey, same thing at CopyAI.

1:38 And always end up like setting up the systems too, right? It's like, okay, usually we don't even have a CRM, right? Okay, so how do we put together a process from scratch, which is interesting because it's both an opportunity because you get to set it up the way that you want. But it's also, so like, I love that part. But like the thing that frustrated me over and over is like, as you grow, as you scale, as you get people actually like using this system, like it inevitably falls apart.

2:05 It always does, right? I think like this is part of the problem you guys solve is like you go in and you clean things up for people. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about this because, you know, we put so much time and effort into something just for it to like not work. Well, what makes it not work, right? And basically came to the conclusion that it's people. You know, you can put the best process in place ever, but if there's no way to like legitimately enforce that process, it's going to break, right?

2:35 And I think like sales is a perfect example of this because like they have CRMs, which are essentially reporting tools. And they're really good at that. You know, there's an ecosystem around them and they're integrated into all these other systems. And so theoretically, if everything is correct in there, everything flows, everything's, you know, rosy, you can see exactly what's going on.

2:52 But as you know, like, that's never the case. So when I wanted to start this company, because I think we're in a spot now where like AI got powerful enough, where it can like just everybody has a call recorder, it can synthesize like calls, it can synthesize emails, you see this, everybody uses a call recorder today. So give me a summary, give me a follow up or my next step, stuff like that. But like, more powerful than that are like, well, what are the questions that your entire leadership team like wants to know about your sales process, right?

3:20 So those are the 100 custom fields that you have in the opportunity object that you expect the sales team to fill out, which they don't. And even when they do, it's like usually like not trusted, right? Because that's not their job, like their sales people, they're supposed to be selling, not like doing like data entry, they spend like 20% of their time doing this stuff, just to do it poorly.

3:41 But anyways, like AI got to the point where it could do that. So instead it was just a summary, like what if we listened in and like continuously like grabbed every piece of data, every piece of communication that happened on every single opportunity, and not just like give you a summary on here's how the call went.

3:56 But like, hey, these are the fields like this, for us, like CRM they use the call recorder they use, this is their use cases, this is their buying process, this is their budgetary cycle, here are the people that are involved to hear the array of competitors that have been mentioned and the use cases under which they've been mentioned. Because when you can do that's really the only way to solve it, right? Like you get people out of the process. So I've been banging our heads against the law on this problem for about a year and a half now.

4:27 I think we think we cracked it. I think we're there, which is pretty cool because I mean, like, it does really open the floodgates for some really cool stuff when you figure that out. I think you've done a phenomenal job and I'm really excited because I know you have a demo prepared for us today. But really one of the main pain points that you're solving for is getting that data populated and it really is the biggest breakdown in the process.

4:51 And because humans are humans, they forget what was said on a call, or they don't articulate it in the data the right way, or they simply just don't do it because you're mainly hiring people who should be in front of people all day. Like you said, they should be selling, not entering data. But it's all the rich data that the company needs to make decisions. So automating that flow of data into a structured manner into your CRM is just unbelievably valuable. So, and I know there's so much more to GTM Engine, but starting there and solving that problem first really unlocks so much more potential.

5:32 Yeah, I mean, like you have to solve that problem first. It's not just like getting the data in there, right? Like you also have to have the relationships correct. So meaning like, who's actually, who am I talking to on this opportunity? There's an object in Salesforce called opportunity contact role, which I'm sure you're aware of. And like no one uses it, right? So it's like, who are our champions? Like if you ask a really good salesperson, they'll rattle it off. It's like, yeah, Brenda's our champion. She's great.

5:58 We were texting last night. She told me that she's talking to Steve next week. They're going to make a decision on this, but they're also looking at this. Like, don't rattle it off, right? Like none of that stuff is in Salesforce though. And so how is leadership supposed to like help coach, help like block and tackle? Hey, maybe they can go talk to like the VP of sales while the sales rep was talking about that. Or maybe we need to bring in a solutions engineer to run a demo for this person who is kind of skeptical about our solution and is on more on the technical side.

6:26 You know, what should they show? What should they talk about? What were they skeptical about? Like all this stuff is up here, but it never get like that handoff gets fumbled all the time. Right? So like one, you have to get like the data in there, which is really important for like reporting and dashboarding purposes. But like you also have to create the records, right? Like is there a contact in Salesforce for every person that you've talked to on this opportunity? Like probably not. Like is there any data on that contact? Do you actually know who they are? Like even what role they are? Like maybe role and like basic stuff like that.

6:57 But by role, I mean like what role are they playing in this like procurement process, sales process? Because then you can start to turn your CRM into like, you know, it's even hard today to like build a report. It's like, give me a list of all my customers. You know, usually that can't even be done in Salesforce, which is wild because like C and CRM stands for customer. But you can't even give you like a reliable list of who your customers actually are, what they own, how much they're using it, like who's using it, can't do that.

7:28 And that's the whole promise. So you need like remove humans even from that stuff to like really get that right and you got to get that right first and then all the other cool stuff falls into place. Yeah. Well, and I've heard, I've heard some of these promises before, but your platform is the first time I've seen it done in a really elegant and intentional way. So yeah, I'm really excited for you to kind of show what does it look like when you're in GTM engine, what type of data, what's capable so people can kind of get their hands wrapped around what this can do for their GTM work too.

8:03 Yeah, for sure. Yeah, let me just jump into that then as I'm pulling this up. So it's actually kind of like a crawl, walk, run the way that we typically recommend folks start. So it starts with, I'd say, the RevOps people, right? And so like the very first thing is just like connecting systems, right? So connecting your CRM, connecting your call recorder, connecting through Slack or Teams or like whatever going through and then connecting up your Gmail, whatever you're using there. Setting up your team structure, boring stuff, right? Setting up your field mappings, right? It's like it sets up an instant two-way sync.

8:48 So every time like we update a field that we're filling out, we sync that back to the CRM HubSpot Salesforce. This can run completely in the background, right? So like typically we recommend just like start this stuff. Like let's just start like auto-creating the records like so via integration with email calendar. We see a new email. We create that record. We run the associations. We run research and enrichment on that. And then any thing that's said in that email or anything that's said in the call that they participated in is synthesized and updated on that record. And then we'll create like the opportunity contact roles and stuff.

9:28 And then you kind of like the first process is just like remove humans from that role. Like AEs hate, you no longer have to fill out Salesforce. I know it sounds like a very bold claim to make, but it's 100% true. Like they're bad at it anyways. You don't even want them doing that, right? Like even if you could do it as good as they're doing it today, which is really poorly, you would do that every single time because that gives them like 10, 20% of their time back to like actually sell, which is super useful. But then like something interesting happens.

9:55 Like after that, like then you start to realize like tools like Salesforce aren't really built for salespeople. Like they're built for reporting and dashboarding and leadership, but they're not built for salespeople to help them like actually sell, right? They're built so they're like creditor faces. They go in there. They input data. They get yelled at every Wednesday before like the weekly forecast call. They'll make sure like the CRM is updated. And that's all the time they spend in that. They use other tools to take notes, you know, completely. So anyways, like then we built a UI.

10:26 It's like, okay, well, if they don't have to, if the interface for inputting data no longer makes sense because they're no longer inputting data, like what does an interface look like, right? Because then they become consumers of data instead of producers of data. Meaning like, hey, here's everything in your pipeline for this quarter that you have closing. Here's the healthy stuff that we think is going to close. And we think it's going to close when you think it's going to close. And here's some of the unhealthy stuff. So anything highlighted in yellow, like this isn't going well.

10:52 Like either health score is low, meaning like probably they're not going to buy from you. Or maybe like health score is high, like some of these, but it's just like in a different quarter, right? So it's like they're going to buy, but it's just not like they're not going to get it done in time for you to like hit your number this quarter. So it's just kind of like, okay, what should I work on? Right? The other thing is the biggest thing that I've seen in like my 17 years in sales is that like stuff just falls through the cracks. You're managing 20 opportunities, inevitably stuff falls through the cracks. So we built this calendar view.

11:29 This does a couple things. Let me share this. What's really neat about this is it just it only shows you like your external medians. This is just dummy data too, so I don't get too married to this, but shows you external medians, it's color coded as well. So like red means like you had the meeting, but you didn't follow up at all, right? So like clearly I've done a very poor job here, according to this dummy data. Green means you did follow up and they responded, and then it'll be color coded yellow if you followed up and they didn't respond. So like you immediately know like, crap, I forgot to follow up after this.

12:03 I followed up with these guys, but I'm probably need to nudge them because they never got back to me and like this one is good to go. And then also, who are you meeting with, right? What are your upcoming meetings, right? What's it going to be about? What's the status of the opportunity? Who are you meeting with? What's interesting to know about them? How does our product align for them? We're lucky because we're salespeople selling the salespeople. So like we're kind of like practitioners of our own tool. That's not always the case. Like when I was at MoveWorks, we were selling to IT service desk managers, right?

12:35 Like the salespeople were not IT service desk managers. They had never done that role. They didn't even know what ITSM stood for. So just being able to like guide them, be like, "Hey, here's who you're meeting with. Here's why they're going to care about our product. Here's what you should talk about," right? Personally, for each individual that's going to be involved in that is a pretty big deal just for preparing correctly for meetings. Any questions on that? No, it makes a ton of sense. And I really think that calendar view is probably my favorite because that's how I think about...

13:10 I do a lot of selling, especially the founder, you know, early stage. You're going to be doing a lot of selling. So this is part of my workflow. And then so seeing, I use my calendar for everything. So that's how I remember, "Hey, what meetings did I have?" And I love that it's like, "Hey, you didn't follow up with them." And it really is as simple as that. Are you giving them the information they need? Are they being responsive? And then, yes, getting all the information kind of in one place in your cockpit to manage everything that's on your plate. I 1000% agree Salesforce is not built for salespeople. I think it's built for RevOps more than anyone.

13:51 So getting the information that they write is great. They do a pretty poor job at building for RevOps. Yeah. Well, of all the personas, I think that's like RevOps leadership. People just want to see the dashboards. Exactly. I mean, that's the whole point of it, right? What's actually happening in our pipeline? What's going to close this quarter? What's healthy? What's not healthy? But people loathe going into an opportunity or going into a contact to update stuff, like nobody ever wants to. Yeah. That's right. So a lot of buttons. Oftentimes, you'll go in there because you want to move the stage here, just have a good call. They agreed to POC.

14:29 I moved this to the POC stage. You do that, and it pops up. Warning, you can't do this because you've got to fill up these five fields first. And then you look at those five fields and you're like, "I don't know." So then you put NA or you make something up or whatever, just to unlock yourself from being able to move it to that stage. And so just the whole process that you put around that to enforce data collection because you know they wouldn't do it if you didn't put that in enforcement then actually leads to data that you don't trust. But on the flip side of this, when we're analyzing all this, there's other things over here too.

15:03 In your court, these are emails in your inbox related to an opportunity that requires response that you haven't responded to. Or meetings like this that you haven't followed up with. We draft this. You can edit this and you can send it directly from here. And then we're going to show you. How are you performing? Where are you at for court attainment? Where are you expected to land at if nothing changes? And then how do you compare against your colleagues? I'm pipeline coverage. I'm pretty healthy here. Wind rate? Yeah, I'm doing really bad. I'm like 33% below my colleagues. So this is something I got to work on if I'm going to be above average AE.

15:38 This is where my focus needs to be. Even this stuff is super hard to find. Even for managers, you're trying to coach your team. How do you know how to coach them if you don't know what they're good at, what they're bad at? And all your interactions with them are just asking them, "What's going on in this opportunity? What's going on in this opportunity? What's going on in this one? Tell me about this one." You never really get a chance to coach. So this flips that on its head. You start from objective data, objective truth and go from there. Well, and I think a lot of, at least the good ones, a lot of people in sales want to self-coach.

16:10 And they want to know where they stack up against. It's a competitive environment. So if my win rate's low, then I'm going to be like, "Hey, how do I get that up?" Yeah, precisely. Exactly. And you need to know, we're strong. I see this all the time with SDRs that get promoted into an AE role. They're super good at generating pipeline, of course. That's what they've done. Basically, their whole working life up to that point usually. But they're not good at managing a complex deal cycle because they haven't done it before. So this just points out, yeah, you can build 1,000% pipeline coverage. But if your conversion rate is a quarter of everybody else,

16:51 that doesn't really matter. You're just burning through all your leads. So the other thing is, on this step of, hey, start with just collecting the data, cleaning up your CRM. There's a bunch of CRM hygiene stuff here that I didn't talk about, too, which will auto-enforce relationships, ownership. So if somebody leaves the company and they own all these records, we can automatically move them over to other people. Can we pause for one second? Sorry. Yeah. I'm just going to, like, buy robot vacuums. Yeah, take your time. I heard something. I thought maybe the window was open. Yeah, it's super loud. You probably can't hear it because of the noise cancellation,

17:33 but for me, it's super loud. All right, I'm back. So anyways, then we can also analyze the opportunity stuff. It's like, how healthy is it, really? What's likely to close? And this is a spectrum. So think of this as a two-dimensional view. The further right you are on this, the healthier the opportunity is. The further up you are, the more likely it is to close when you think it's going to close. So up here would be your safe bet. We think it's going to close. We think it's going to close when you think it's going to close. Down here, acceleration opportunities, we think it's going to close. We don't think it's going to make it in time for this quarter,

18:13 like whatever time frame you have selected here. These are the ones, like, they're not real, right? The AE might include them in their QBR presentation, but they're dead or they're not going to happen. And then up here, it's like, this is a really interesting category because it's like, if it is going to close, it's going to close in this quarter, but we don't think they're going to select us, right? Either they're leaning towards competition based on our analysis or buying nothing or whatever. But they've explicitly said, we're going to make a decision by X date and that date would be in this quarter.

18:46 Yeah, and I think you have those labeled well appropriately. Those are the ones that maybe you have an opportunity to affect. And they may say, hey, we have a deadline to get this done on the state. I've definitely been in deals like that, where it's a bake-off against three vendors or whatever, and we're making a decision December 1st. Okay, so yeah, it might close then, but your likelihood of win, like you said, you may need to get in there and really, really position yourself well against whatever alternative they're thinking about. Yeah, they're not responding, whatever that might be, right? So basically, too, you're exactly right.

19:27 You hit a point, which is the whole reason we built this, because it's like, okay, this is dummy data, so this isn't super aligned with what I would like. But anyways, you have your target, right? How am I going to get there? You have your safe forecast. Let's say the target line is right here. I got to pull in some at-risk stuff. At-risk being like, it's in one of these categories, right? So where would I look first? First thing, I would probably look here. I would say closer to this line, we think it's going to close, but we don't think it's going to close this quarter, like just barely, like down here, it's like further away, right?

20:02 So I'd look for things close to this line, because you're the ones where, if you find out early enough in the quarter, you know, like right now, our fiscal year ends January 31st, but I have two months to see if I can do something to accelerate this one, right? That's where I would look first. Now, some of these over here, like, would be good to look at too, right? Okay, well, why, like, are they not responsive? Are they like, you know, what is it, right? What's super cool about this is like, you can dig in, and you can start to see because we're tracking all this data. So let's take a look at just like this one, for instance. Like, I can see this one,

20:37 and I can click into any opportunity and get like a full sense of all the data, you know, where it's at, what stage it's in, the health score. I can click into this. We actually plot this over time. So you can see like how the health score changes. You can see how the interest score changes, which is a bit different, like somebody could be interested, but like not have budget, so they could, interest level could be high, but health score could be low. Forecast close date, how this has changed over time with like each touch point. So if like somebody sends in an email and says like, hey, super sorry, wasn't able to get budget for this quarter,

21:08 but let's touch base in February, your fiscal year. Forecast close date would automatically be adjusted. Health score would go down, and we would flag that, right? So you would know right away that like, hey, this thing, like instantly, basically, as soon as email comes in, like we're processing this stuff, and you can start to do things about this. It's like, okay, they didn't get budget, but maybe we can do something clever. Like, hey, if we can get that signed this quarter, like we won't, you know, send you the invoice until next quarter. You know, the things that you can do to get around that stuff.

21:38 But if you find out last day of the quarter, you can't do anything about it, right? Right. Yeah, I think it's, you know, obviously you can tell, um, how you've designed the platform. Um, you and your team have had a lot of experience in sales to understand like those nuances, what's important, what matters to somebody who's coaching someone on a deal and just getting the right information to the right person at the right time. So you can actually do something about hitting your number or not, where I think a lot of teams, like there are a lot of VPs of sales that are, you know, probably extremely talented,

22:23 but they just have no way of knowing where to go in and coach their team and help where they just don't have the right data. Well, I mean, they, they spent so much time figuring out what's going to close that they have no time to actually like impact what's going to close. You know what I mean? And I think like, I've talked to a lot of sales diggers and they're like, they really pride themselves. Like we're super accurate on our forecasting, which is great, right? Like you want to be accurate. Like you can't plan otherwise. Where do we hire? You know, how much budget are we going to have? Where do we cut back? Whatever.

22:58 I don't think that's really the role. Ideally, I don't think any like sales parallel. If you actually asked them, it's like, is that really what you should be doing? Like, that's not it. Like they want to be like field generals, you know, like front, front of the line, like on their horse, like, you know, saying like, all right, troops over here. We're going to flank them. And you know, you know, whatever, maybe a bad metaphor. But I think you get my point. Like that's where their skill set is better used. The other part where this gets super cool, right? It's like we're extracting all this data. Again, like any field that you want, right?

23:27 So we understand not only what we know, but what we don't know. So we do good deal gaps and suggested strategies. These are like all the custom fields that we would want to fill out. This can be any data type. It could be like true, false, a number, date, whatever. But what's cool about this is like we also package together like, okay, what are your next steps, right? So it's pulling this out. And let's say something like this, like develop a custom ROI calculator using Cyberhaven sales metrics and growth targets. Review this with decision makers. So we need to do this. This is hard, right? You have to know like, what are their sales metrics?

24:03 What are their growth targets? What is our pricing going to be? Where is our pricing calculator? How did they say that they're going to look at ROI? Because like maybe our standard ROI calculator isn't actually aligned with how they're thinking about this. And as much as salespeople like to think that we can control the process, like, you know, buyers control the process. If they say that this is how they're going to look at it, and the CFO says like, this is how I'm going to account for this, then guess what? You're not going to close the deal unless you like give them what they want. So anyways, like to accomplish this task,

24:35 develop a custom ROI calculator using their sales metrics and growth target. That's a hard job, right? Like the AE probably doesn't have the skill set to do this. They're going to pull in lots of people. So we also have this genie feature, which is like an agent, which I can just say like ask genie, right? Help me complete this task. Just click that button, click send. So this agent is like integrated with a bunch of different tools. It's full reasoning. It can do a lot of things. It has access to the whole context, every touch point that we've ever had, all the contacts and who they are, all the data, right? So we know their current team size.

25:13 We know their projected team size. We know what our annual pricing is going to be because we've talked about this and just by talking about it, we've extracted that. We've collected that data and it exists on these records. So we can see like the inner thoughts if you want. So you can see, you know, this user is asking me to develop this, here are the key decision makers, here are their pain points. Here's the value proposition mentioned, pricing, growth context. Okay, so now it's starting to put this all together, right? And this is impossible unless you have the underlying data context, right? So because this is all here and we've extracted all this

25:50 and we've updated it with every single touch point, we have all the inputs that we need to do this. So I can put together really, really cool stuff here. And I could even say like once this is done, you know, it's like, okay, what do you want me to do now? You want me to schedule this call? Should we customize the assumptions? Let's say, yeah, you're like this one, research any, yeah. Could you research some benchmarks to make the case more tight? Yeah, and while you're pulling this up, I mean, to ask a sales rep to, one, take the time to do this, two, assume they would do it well. And then three, like bring in the relevant research and data.

26:33 I mean, it would be hours and hours of work. If they even thought about doing it. Yeah, exactly right. Like that's the thing. And then I mean, like usually like they're not, you know, I've been in sales for a long time. They don't, they ask somebody else to do it. Usually it would be, you know, somebody like me, which would be annoying. But like also like, you know, you jump in, you help. But the other problem is, is like I would get pulled in on these projects and I'd be like, okay, cool, we got to do that. Do we know these things, right? Do we know what their sales team size is? Do we know like how they're thinking about ROI?

27:12 Like to do this, I have to know those assumptions, right? So even if I have all the skills to do this manually, I don't have the data to do it correctly, right? And this is like saving that context, associating that context with these records automatically without having to do anything allows you to do this. This is kind of a cool one. So it actually executed the research step. This is integrated with things like Proplexity and X7 and whatnot to do actually external research. So it comes back, right? Industry benchmark. They spend this much time with manual legacy systems from the Scartner 2025 reports 40 to 50% for 40 hour work week.

27:50 They spend, you know, 12 to 20 hours on admin tasks, okay? So it's like getting these industry benchmarks directly from and then it's recalculating this with industry benchmarks. Now, imagine how long this would take. We just did this in there. So imagine how long this would take to put something together, this good that's aligned with their data, what they've said, everything. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and then the follow-up of this too, like, "Hey, how do you want me to prep this? Let's get this in an email to the decision maker, whoever needs to see this." Like, amazing, like taking it not just from the steps but the actual asset and deliverable

28:32 and then the execution on communication. It's huge. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's like everything to like-- and this is like path to close here. These suggested next steps. They come from two things, right? There's like your own sales process, which like you configure in like settings and whatever, like when on implementation you do that. So like we know, "Hey, here's your stages. Here's our entry/ex or criteria between these stages. Here's typically how we would like a sales process to go." But then it's also contextual, of course, based on like what they've told us during the sales process that we actually need to do next, right?

29:04 And like probably weighted more towards that stuff. Because then you can come and you can see exactly, "Okay, how do I move this deal forward? Like, what are my like most critical blockers right now that I have to do?" Like even knowing that's super hard, you'll see emails, "Hey, you have time like to touch base next week." Like that's super lame, right? Your competition is giving them more than that. If that's all you say, like you're probably not even going to get that next meeting. If you give them exactly what you want because you've listened, maybe you even have to listen, but much more likely to close business,

29:37 give every deal like its best chance. And then anybody else can come in here, have visibility on the exact same context that you have. So if you do need to pull in an SE or you want to ask like your management for some coaching advice, they have the context coming in. So the big thing about this stuff too is like this isn't just sales. You know, like the more and more you think about it, like the one place where you consistently talk to your ICPs is like actually in sales. And their customer success, sure, a little bit. But like honestly, like they just set up like a quarterly check-in, maybe a little bit higher touch at the beginning.

30:15 But like in sales, you're having multiple conversations every single day with your ICP and your sales team is there, right? And like you've probably seen this where like sales is like, you know, what the hell is marketing talking about? Like why are they talking about that? Like we know because we have the most practice in this, like what they want. Like I'll give an example. I'm going to pick on a former company of mine, Moveworx, which is totally okay because ServiceNow just bought them for like $3 billion. So I don't think they're going to care that I pick on them. But like we have this problem. Like we're talking to IT service desk managers

30:50 and they cared only about can you resolve tickets for me? I'm underwater. I can't hire enough people. When I hire like a service desk agent, they last six months and they're gone. Like we're drowning in tickets and it takes us three days on average to resolve even a simple ticket. So cool. Well, we can do that, right? Hey, give us your ticket data. We'll analyze it. We'll show you exactly how many tickets that we can resolve. And they're like, hey, this is awesome. Let's go. On the marketing side though, they were talking about like, we had this thing called like Worktopia where it's like,

31:24 they were marketing us and like, yeah, it's like this magical place to work if you buy like Moveworx, like employee experience. Like I can tell you firsthand that the IT service desk manager like couldn't give two shits about employee experience. Like they were drowning in the work and they needed help, right? So sale, we never got any leads from marketing, by the way. But the SDRs, they were super clever. They would send like examples of this like analysis report that we did. They would send them out, say, hey, we can do this for you. You just sent us like, you know, export 12 months of your ticket data.

31:56 And we'll show you exactly how many tickets we can resolve for you. Would that be interesting? And they're like, everybody was like, yes, of course. So there's this like massive disconnect between like marketing, not knowing what your customers are saying. And this is like super important, like if you get the data model correct, right? And you populate, of course, like the opportunity object with like all the fields and other stuff that like you want to track and build reports on. Well, what about contacts? Like these usually they're never updated at all, right? So we'll create the contact role. We'll give explanations for everything, right?

32:27 So you can always check our work here. What I really like is this promoter score. So this goes like negative 10 to positive 10. And it's like at a glance here, I can see like, you know, let's pretend there's another one here that's like negative four. I can see like, you know, who are, who my champions and promoters are and like who my blockers would be. And I can see why. Yeah, I can click on this and I can see exactly why. But what's really cool about this is then I can go into the records view and I can quickly say like, yeah, I want to build. I'm going to pull in some of our other fields. I'm going to pull in promoter score, promoter score reasoning,

33:01 and I'm going to pull in, let's say like the ICP persona, which is like another classification that we do. Okay, so now I have promoter score, promoter score reasoning, ICP persona. All right. Now I want to filter this and say I want a list of all of the contacts who I've ever talked to, their ICP persona, where their promoter score is greater than or equal to seven. All right. Okay, so now I have this list. I can save this. I can share this with say the marketing team. Hey, marketing team, you know, here's who we talked to that loves us. Here's their ICP persona. Oh, and here's why. All right, with specific quotes.

33:54 So instead of like the marketing team going like, hey, you know, who can we talk to about a case study or like a quote for the website or like whatever, it's like here. Like there's a real live list of all of our biggest champions and why they like us, specific things that they've said. And then if you find one really interesting, just like I showed you on the opportunity thing, you can click into that contact and you can ask additional questions about that. You know, like, hey, maybe I want to build a case study for sales leadership, or maybe I want to build a case study for operations. Maybe I want to build a case study for, you know, C level, right?

34:27 C-suite. Like I can filter this even more. Say like, you know, I want when the ICP persona contains, let's say, I don't know, maybe marketing. All right, we've got a couple. We haven't typically talked to marketing people. We should, but sales, you know, executives. I can slice and dice this data very, very quickly any way that I want. I know exactly what to talk about. I know where they work. I know their ICP persona. And then I know where to get the introduction from, who the owner of this record goes. Yeah, that's super powerful. I mean, normally, like you said, marketing teams running around interviewing salespeople, maybe.

35:09 Usually they're just kind of doing it on the app. And then you also have the bias of the salespeople thinking, oh, why are people wanting to buy? So even if, even though they probably have the best, they're still biased. So to get, hey, here's literally what was said. And then you can trend it across multiple people and personas. Because I think messaging, it always has been. But even more so, getting your messaging absolutely dialed in is going to be the most important way to win in 2026. Like you have to. Yeah. Well, I mean, you have to, right? The channels are, you can't just buy sales loft and blast out sequences anymore. That doesn't work.

35:58 You can't call people. That doesn't work. No, AI has killed that. It's just completely decimated every single lead generation channel that we've used before. So what do you got to do? I mean, you got to go back to good old-fashioned marketing. If you're the one that can talk about the pain that your product solves, the most, the best, using the words of your actual ICP, you're going to resonate the most. That's how you win. That's how you start building more pipeline. Don't hire a team of SDRs just to manage templates or even AI writing sequences. That doesn't work. Go back to the basics. Yeah. I think it's like a mix of madmen with data.

36:43 So it's like pour yourself a whiskey and then get all the AI gathered data and then make something beautiful happen. Yeah. I mean, on the product side too, your product has to be good for you to win. Yeah. It's really good salespeople that try to sell bad products and they don't do well. It's not because they're bad at sales because product hasn't built, they don't listen well enough. And companies die all the time because of that. But you take this a step further. It's really this unified data model. What am I extracting? If people are no longer the bottleneck through the amount of data and the accuracy of data that I can collect from the conversations

37:25 that I'm having with our customers and potential customers, really you can track anything that you want. So I want to know what are the use cases that are coming up? What are the points of friction? Where are the competitors that are coming up? And how does that map to the use cases that they care about? If I'm a product person, that's what I want to know. They'll talk to customers, they'll use some analytics tools to figure out where people are clicking in the UI or whatever, but that doesn't get them all the way there. You also have to listen to what people are saying in the market. I think product teams are too focused oftentimes

37:56 on what customer success is telling them and what their biggest existing customers are telling them. So it's like the Wayne Gretzky quote or whatever. Go to where the puck is going, not where it's at right now. If you talk to your customers, you're where it's at right now. If you listen to what the field is telling you, then you can start to build towards where the puck is going. Yeah, and also a bias that your current customers have is they're already locked in with whatever your solution is. So they might not be looking at other solutions right now. It's not on top of mind. In their mind, the problem's already solved.

38:32 So it's like the easiest person who's not giving you the most critical feedback. And I found this too, for my own business, when we started LeanScale in 2021, there were no RevOps agencies. That wasn't really a thing. Now, they're all over the place. So we would go into places and we never even experienced going against a competitor before. It was like, we might hire in-house or we'll go through all. But now, we're in plenty of opportunities where it's like, yeah, we're evaluating four different people right now. And this one said they offered this service or they're supporting these tools. So that lens of what we're hearing from our prospects

39:17 is so much different than if we went to our customers and said, hey, what do you like about what we do? And where do you think we can do better? So you get much more critical and real feedback from the market. 100%. I think what you guys are doing is super clever too. And I understand why the market is kind of, I think, moving towards external RevOps versus internal. Because some of the hardest jobs in the world are being an internal RevOps person, where it's like, you're hired. It's like, hey, here's our Salesforce implementation. It's been here for 20 years. Don't touch it. Because if you do, something's going to break.

39:52 Because every time you try to remove a field, it's broken some process down the line. But I think external folks like you, you're very cutting edge. So you see the new tools that are out there. Hey, well, there is a new, better way of doing things, where I think an internal RevOps person just has to kind of work with the stuff that they have. Totally. And that is one component, staying in touch with the market. Because when you're internal, you rarely have a ton of time to do your own research and figure out what's going on and get you busy keeping Salesforce on. 100%. So even here at LeanScale, like, yes, we do proactively do some research.

40:36 A lot of our research comes from the podcast and doing content and bringing on new tools and technologies like yourself. But the main source of R&D actually comes from our engagements. We go into a customer. They already have a certain set of tools that they really like, or they're looking at something that they think is really interesting and they are asking for support it. That's how we learn, like, oh, that's something that we can use over here. So the pressure of our engagements themselves. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I mean, I think, again, it makes total sense, right? That's what you should do. You should hire somebody who's seen way more things.

41:17 Like, hey, we have 20 customers or 50 customers, whatever. And we've used 100 different tools. Your situation, here's what I would use, here's how I would do it. Oh, and we're experts at starting it up. I think there's-- and that space is constantly evolving, too, especially go-to-market space. It's very-- there's new stuff coming out every day, right? Yeah, and I think for us, I think it's like high complexity, but actually pretty low variability between companies. Like, all the problems are the same, and most of the solutions are the same. So if I'm looking at a Series B sales-led growth company,

41:51 they're going to have the same problems and the same recommendations are going to help them. It's very complex, so it's hard to know exactly what the right answer is, but that right answer will fit across most companies. So that's why outsourcing something like RevOps, I think, makes sense. There's a lot of things-- I struggle to find a lot of really good outsource SDR companies just because I think the messaging is unique and-- Yeah. --outsource sales and then outsourcing product. Sales and product, those really, really have to be internal. Yeah. That's the heart of the company. You can't put the accountability-- Especially early on.

42:33 Like, if you're Nutanix or some big behemoth and you want to go just through channel, then that might work. But yeah, not early on. Like, you can't. You have to have that in-house early on, for sure. Absolutely. Robert, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for walking us through the platform. I think-- I'll start with the beginning. You really solved one of the most-- this really painful problems that people experience getting data from calls and meetings and emails into the CRM in an organized fashion so that you can actually start to do something with it. You can start coaching your reps. For the rep themselves, they have a clear path to close

43:14 for each one of their opportunities. They know who to follow up with, when to follow up, and I think-- I can't say it enough. It's so intentionally designed, and you can tell that the people building the product have done sales before, which can be rare sometimes. So it's just very, very well-designed and well-built. So I'm really excited about what you all are doing, and I know there's probably so much on the roadmap that I'll be launching soon, too. Yeah. But just in closing, what's the best way for people listening to get their hands on GTM Engine, get in touch with you or somebody for your team? Yeah. I mean, most obviously, just go to the website,

43:55 GTMEngine.ai. There is a cool little demo that you can do. So if you have a call recorder already, drop a transcript from that into that, and we'll show you all the structured outputs and how it would look in Salesforce or HubSpot, as well, just so you can validate it on your own data. Like, "Oh, cool. I actually didn't know that." Yeah. It takes a couple minutes to run, because these AI processes are going to be basically spin up. You have 50 to 60 agents to process the data and look at it from different angles and whatever. But you can kind of see for yourself, if that looks cool, reach out to us. We can get you set up and get going.

44:28 Actually, implementation isn't super hard either. It's typically 30 minutes to an hour set up field mapping, then it just processes and-- You're good to go. Amazing. Amazing. Well, for anyone listening, head over to the website. I think you'll be really impressed with what they're doing. And Robert, thanks again so much, and can't wait to see what you guys do next. Awesome. Thanks, Anthony.