Ep #132: Trust Crisis: Why B2B Sales Are Changing ft. Manuel Hartmann (Founder & CEO, SalesPlaybook)

Adil Saleh 0:02 Hey. Greetings, everybody. This is deal, and we have done like third episode of this year, 2025 I know that we've done loads less and the preceding years ever since 2021 Adil Saleh 0:16 because we are absolutely cherry picking these founders, these innovators, people that have made a huge difference, especially in the days of, you know, AI, making this big impact into the sales success all entire GTM function that we talk a lot about, you know, thinking about a lot of these SaaS platforms, doing automations, workflow automation for sales organization, however they, you know, of course, now they're pretty much overwhelmed using technologies, but there, there's some handful of coaches, especially in Central Europe, that are not that are being more strategic, have these experience and expertise to convert seven figure deals, eight figure deals, you know, with good of an impact, and to be able to Have some sort of a playbook that you can scale and retain those those amounts of amounts of amounts of revenue. So for that reason, we have today Manuel Hartman, who's the founder and CEO of sales playbook for quite some years, almost like six years, he's been serving as the business, and prior to that, he's been, for the last 15 years, has been helping B to B SAS companies, these founders from scratch to build like sales organizations, sales operations. You know, one of the, you know, bigger achievement than when I met him in London, was, you know, automate sales functions and sales organizations within HubSpot. I mean, that was, that was a real thing when you know HubSpot launching all of these, their CO pilots and everything, but they still need like expertise to make sure that they get the right data that drives action. They have all the automations and personalized email automation everything. So there is so much that we're going to learn specifically on how to scale B to B SAS sales inside HubSpot. But apart from that, I would love for Manuel to, you know, just share some thoughts around what is the industry mirrors really like? What is in this age? How is it going for B to B SAS sales, and you know how AI is impacting the outbound and all of that? So Manuel, thank you very much for taking the time today. I know it was long over it. I really appreciate that you always make time and you know, finally, we're here. Very Manuel Hartmann 2:25 much looking forward to the conversation. Thanks so much. Adil Saleh 2:29 Perfect. So just to you know, of course, your background, lot of people already know you in the Central Europe, for a lot of listeners out in North America, I would appreciate if you just go ahead and tell us a little bit about what kind of you know, some of the strategies that you have laid down for some of the B to B SaaS companies out in this Europe, or even in the in the North America? Manuel Hartmann 2:51 Yeah, I think what we're seeing in B to B source and B to B software says it's more about revenue. It's about go to market, right? So the old playbook start working of just like, sending out a ton of emails and then, like, telling me, like, hey, today's a discount, and then just buy. Like, the economic alignment is really different. It's not zero interest rate policy anymore. And a lot of people have been burned as well in terms of trust. So they've been promised, like, huge ROIs, like, hey, just click a button and everything's integrated and so on. And that hasn't come true 2020, to 2024, so they're much more skeptical that we experience a true trust crisis in B to B. I think in general, it go also goes into like Thailand, it goes into marketing and so on. So marketing is becoming more important, again, in terms of increasing awareness and trust and demand and pipeline like, from real, ideal customer profile, I think focus is becoming more important again, about being really sure who you help the most in terms of companies and in terms of people, and then how you cater to these people with the right go to market motion. Like, is it no touch? Like self service products like growth, is it like a low touch inbound led a lot of, like, basically one to 10k deals. Is it more like medium touch, like 15 to 50 cases, like high touch, 50 to two to 50, 500k like, what you can call basically early enterprises, or, like, mid market, or is it then, like dedicated in terms of the you only have, like, 10 accounts, like you sell to aircraft manufacturers, and it's basically more basically Boeing and Airbus in Europe. Manuel Hartmann 4:27 And most like, when we talk about B to B go to market, what most people mean is really five and six figure deals, right? Like basically 10 to 10 to 100k and 100k to like, a million deals in total contract related value. And here, I think what there's a few consolidating movements ongoing. So one is in pipeline generation, like marketing and sales need to work closer together, like inbound outbound. The buyer doesn't care. The buyer has one buy experience and one experience of a company. So everything. You do on the inbound side, like content, virtual events, basically family led marketing and all these initiatives, they need to work closely together with trigger and signal based outreach, like great copy that's really relevant, that that's basically integrated. I mean, just listen to Jason lemkin's podcast today, and like he was tackled by slack reps. As Jason Lemkin was like, Hey, do you wanna buy slack? I was like, Well, I've been a customer for years. Like, how come in 2025 like a public company, like, acquired by Salesforce, company tackles me to sell me a new product if I'm already customer. So the holistic customer experience is becoming more important. Another thing we see is like, this huge shift in terms of like, CRM, which is like the send, the piece of, go to market, in terms of tech, right? It was all Salesforce for a while, and then it was like, everything like, or do Zoho, fresh works, sugar, CRM, Zoho, like, send, this guy called, I think now it's audio pipe drive, and now, like, we see four out of 5b, to B entrepreneurs with five to 200 FTS, like full time equivalents, we see basically using HubSpot or craving HubSpot in terms of because anything else then HubSpot and Salesforce breaks up on, like 1,000,002 in AR and Salesforce is just becoming too complex. You need, like two JD nights, and they ordered to control the force, and it's too expensive, quite frankly, as well. And I think the third shift is that people start to take customer success and revenue operations more serious, like if you're doing 10 million a or if your net revenue retention is 100% that means 10 million come to your bank account next year. So customer success is probably more relevant than the two to 5 million you're going to probably add up as a 10 million company, and you cannot afford to just throw people at problems anymore. So revenue operations, in terms of really understanding what you can fix with process versus people, and understanding what you need to do next is become really essential in terms of capital efficiency. That was a rather long introduction to Adil Saleh 7:04 that. I love the way that you have, basically, you know, troll it down to, you know, how you know enterprise and market to enterprise sales are changing and how they are now more working as an analog of marketing, and more, you know, as a conjunction of marketing, then, you know, just like sales, like traditional sales, like account managers reading people out and calling, cold calling, you know, reps and, you know, trying to build some relationship, having coffee table talks and all. So I was so curious on the customer success and revenue operations when it comes to, you know, first set and figure deals, but again, how they can enable their team, like revenue leaders and success leaders to be more data driven, coming being data from within, like, you know, CRMs or any third party sources. Because I've heard this a lot, that a lot of these companies that are cutting down on tools, cutting down on budgets, a lot of account managers that are serving the enterprise mid market segment, they're not aware of some of the interactions, some of the qualitative data coming through, like emails, sales intelligence, like conversation intelligence, all of that, but they're just focused and relying on maybe some basic metrics, such as how they're using the product, what kind of licenses they have consumed. So how data has played a part in sales that are slightly at a greater lifetime value for a customer? I Manuel Hartmann 8:36 think, I think it needs to become a bigger part of it. I think that the issue is much more fundamental than in customer success. Like people are not sure that they hired. Are they customer service managers and they dare to reset passwords, or their customers apart and they just pick up calls to explain the product better or more people? Or are they basically quota carrying reps a sheep, like a wolf in the sheep's carriage? This is basically selling to existing customers. And who's going to take care of customer success, surely. So it's this hybrid we see emerging in 2025 and depending on who you hire, right? Like, some sales are just going to existing business and say, like, hey, rolling this up your inbox. Buy more licenses, doesn't work. And then you have custom success managers, which are really friendly people. I just want to help. I did out, and you can be okay. Here, customer has been using, like, the second product of our portfolio, like, tell them, like, figure out, like, give them a five figure. I don't feel comfortable asking for money. I don't so it's really cultural as well. And then people have caught resources in customer success, and suddenly people have, like, 100 versus 20 accounts, and you cannot have a monthly conversation with 100 accounts like, it's just like the math doesn't add up to be well prepared in terms of being data driven. I mean, there's still, like, what the HubSpot was for marketing, and now is. For sales like, and then there's like, there's gainside and vitally and plan head and churn zero and what have you not. But I mean, none of these tools really fixed customer success in a way that HubSpot fixes sales or that that a platform such as clay fixes go to market engineering, so clients asking us, like, where do we build customer success? Like, hey, let's, let's build it in. Let's build it still in. HubSpot, in service. Hub is becoming better that, like, existing business pipeline having different stages and flows and so on. I think it's, it's usually underserved, like, as a Customer Success person, where do I go to to learn? It's hard. Adil Saleh 10:42 It's a huge statement. By the way. I appreciate that. You pretty opinionated, and I love that. But, you know, I've met a lot of ups customers, and of course, previously, for the first two, three years, I didn't have, like, a lot of, I would say, like, personalized tracking for all, like user level tracking and all this, like feature level tracking. And now, in the last one I have two years they do have, but it's the biggest thing that they come up with is the cost, because they have to pay smart money to HubSpot versus a CSP platform, success platform, or any good market tool that they can use to trigger the right data inside HubSpot. And while the CS team stays within there, or even not there. A CSV platform or a third party platform can be a source of truth only for CS organization, and then marketing and sales can stay within HubSpot. So how what's your viewpoint on this? Manuel Hartmann 11:33 My viewpoint is that it's looking about cost efficiency. Like, how do I pay, like, 50 versus 80, versus 100 bucks a month on your sales, because you pay 300 or whatever, like, if you do everything before fixing effectiveness. So I often get this thing like, Hey, I'm like 5 million a or I have like 10 sales reps and five customer success managers and three marketers, so, and then me and my COVID, so I need to pay like 20 licenses for everything in every hop in every hop in hotspot, and it's costing me, like, 5200 km. Like, why do you need 10 sales reps of 5,000,005 customers? Access managers should be like, two customers, exasperations, like, three sales reps. Like, I mean, how much? How much revenues make? Every rep making? Like, yeah, 200k is 300k this person has not closed anything. This person is just resetting passwords. Like that should be a workflow like all the best deals should go to fewer reps. And, no, you don't need to buy HubSpot operations, hub and marketing enterprise and sales enterprise at 5 million like, you just bought too much system with too much people on your payroll and too little enablement in terms of, like, the right processes, the right go to market motion, the right ICP, the right product market fit. So that's one thing. Like, people try to just, like, throw more tools, and then just looking at tool costs, and they they basically slightly disrespectful to the people in terms of, like, let's save on tools and let's just hire three more people to do stuff. The second observation is, and I was a Salesforce, I mean, for five years. So I'm a big fan, like, I got to know Salesforce at Tesla, 2012 great CRM for large companies up on, like, 500 people. The second thing is, people try to save a few bucks. And then there's a saying like, Hey, if you find that Adidas trading you're wearing, if you find that expensive, like, take a cheap one and buy three types. So they basically get, let's say, pipe drive, not running on pipe drive. It drives the pipe it's good for, like, small deals and small companies. But then they buy a pipe drive, and then like, oh, I need to schedule meetings. Let's buy Calendly, or I need to build these reports, or let me buy data box, or I need to sign contracts or let me buy Docusign. Oh, and then I also need to, like, have, basically, templates and snippets and everything. So I need, like, a tool for that. And then I need to send out quotes, so I get plumber dog, and then suddenly I have, like, seven tools. On top of that cost me, like 20 bucks each per user, just because I want to pay, like, 70 bucks versus 100 bucks. But now I paid 200 bucks, and if somebody asked me, like, where's that thing? It's like, oh, let me open seven tools and maybe find it if I own a good day. And then eventually, once they're big enough, they basically go to HubSpot or Salesforce series D company on like, hey, look, you're at a company size at like, 400 400 employees, where you probably Salesforce, makes a ton of sense. I was like, honestly, like, I built and scaled refops here, and honestly, we could just do the same in HubSpot, probably cheaper. But I agree with you that it would be a huge pain to rip it out, like the whole Gong integrations and everything, like chili Piper, all the flows and so on. Like, no, we'll stay on it, but honestly, today, we probably saved like, a double digit amount, and it would be at higher adoption. Adil Saleh 14:49 Interesting, interesting. And what about like, of course, I'm not talking about the size of the organization, but you know, for for a lot of founding members, like. A lot of these marketing teams that are just starting out first two years series a maximum looking for the product market fit using HubSpot, just for marketing, it has been hard for them to, you know, see it as a Customer Success tool or seed as any other like GTM tool, otherwise. So how hard is it, technically to integrate all the data sources make sure everything pipes in when it comes to product, use, it, interaction, all these other matters, like billing metrics and chat, also some of the qualitative data metrics coming from sales intelligence, because, of course, they're not big enough to use, like platforms like Gom, maybe say they're simply using, let's say tools like just to record the meetings and everything. So technically, Manuel Hartmann 15:42 I think people over communicate things, people, people started to take tools as an excuse to not pick up the phone and start dialing, and to not ask if a prospect ask for a discount, to ask the real why and how they can help them, and to not fly, not basically drive or fly to the customer for an onsite kickoff workshop and stay at home and obsess over dashboards. So I see this all the time that, like, sales and marketing people, they're there like, hey, shall I shift the MQL to the SQL with this lead scoring that is on top of AI and on top of everything. And like, shall I put them in a new nurturing sequence? My question is always, do you have a phone number? I was like, yes, like, a good call, like, and if the answer is no, like, get, get it tool, get, get loose, or prosper, or whatever, I can call time, get the phone number, and then call and have a human conversation. This is what it's all about. Like, B to B, C, H to H, human to human. So I think there's too much tech now out there, and people, people hide behind tech. It's like going to the gym like the strongest people, like the strongman the power lifters, like the CrossFit people, the rugby players. You start, you see them doing deadlift, squats, bench and overhead presses and kettlebells and like, there's, it's basically metal, like anywhere between 20 and 200 kilos. And as there's no fancy technology, gear and electronics and measurement and blocks like they just do fundamental movements like call somebody, find out what bothers them, like with winning by design, situation, problem, impact, critical event, decision criteria, decision path, like, follow that you don't need a digital sales room to craft a three point mutual action plan. Like audio writes be after this, like, hey, thanks so much for your insights. I audio to send the recording here, Link manual to approve. If you can go live like you got it like, but I can write back, like approve and then like audit, to publish podcasts within a week and tag manual in the LinkedIn post. That's it. Like, no technical head, Adil Saleh 17:43 yeah, man, I think I get your point. And I 100% agree with, you know, over utilization of technology and relying too much on the technology when it comes to sales, especially in in the segments where, you know, you cannot easily, you can buy time people, but it's harder to, you know, buy trust. So personal connection is super important. Like, how do you see, I mean, I was coming to that anyway, outbound, with this lot of conversation intelligence platforms coming along, and, you know, nobody can, you know, pick whether it's human, whether it's AI, you know, even a lot of these IVRS, they're coming through for a lot of BPO industry. They're transforming that and support tier one. Tier Two is already vanished from, from, from, from the industry, and now they're more focused on sales. So how do you see outbound being someone who's done it, and, you know, scaled for so many companies for like, 15 years now, and how changed it is. How is it different now with all of these generative AI models and, you know, these technologies, Manuel Hartmann 18:48 right? I think on a fundamental level, if something works, more people will work that thing, and that will make it work less. So people need to work it more for the same outcome, and that that's what's happening with outbound in general. It started with sales of the outreach and zone just making it easier to strengthen tons of emails. And then AI accelerated that by like, a factor of order of magnitude. So if I now get 100 emails a day versus 10 emails, like, the email needs to be much better. I probably need to, like, have that follow up. So I even notice it so rotating inboxes. Like, yes, we also use, we also use smart lead and hey, Richard and so on, but in a in a thoughtful way, right? Like, do it in a way that's like 50 to 70 words, like, make sure, make it count, make it relevant. Like, it doesn't. Everybody's tired of the hyper personalized like, toilet crap, like hey, Audible, it's great. Like, I saw that you're on a podcast with me. Like, wearing a black auditor's sweater with a white logo and like that you have it basically like black hair. That's zero useful to you. You already know that already it would be useful for you if I tell you, like, hey. On. Trust. Like, I'll send you an episode where I talk for an hour in the number one Swiss business podcast about, like, the role of trust in in go to market. Feel free to add it to the show notes that that's like, not personal to you, but that's relevant for the conversation. So I think that's, that's the fourth one thing. And the other thing is that there's this, this concept around trust, of four, 711 that to trust somebody, you need to see them in like, four, four locations for seven hours with 11 touch points. So we met at a physical event at, I think it was saucer right, not grow Europe at sauce. So we had a beer together physically. Then we talked on the phone briefly, then we had a LinkedIn message. Then we saw each other on, like, a few posts. So even if you only met once. It feels like we know each other for a fairly long time, and people always think like B to B, mid market enterprise, it takes a long time, but that that's just an excuse. It doesn't take time by itself. It takes exposure in terms of interpersonal relationships, Adil Saleh 20:58 multi touch, personable relationship. And it could be, it had, it could have different shapes. It's not something that you need to necessarily send them emails every time and follow up everything, which is what I get wake up to every single day, you know, like, eventually, like, Manuel Hartmann 21:14 not. It's not about duration. I mean, like, you know, probably some people that you've known for a decade, and you know, particularly close, and you talk about, like, Hey, how are your house together? And you probably, like, came really close to some people in your life within days or within weeks. Like, sometimes you are at the festival, at a conference, you see people in the morning, when you arrive, you see them over lunch, like you grab a beer. When the event is done. You basically take a drink at the hotel board that feels like you've known that person for ages, like it's been 12 hours. Adil Saleh 21:48 Yeah, absolutely. So it's not absolutely, it's not like it's not about the duration and time sensitivity. It's more about being personal and being multi touch in a very personalized way. So how do you what? What is that formula that you have? I follow your content a lot. Very honest. I am my co founder. We like you so much. And before coming to this podcast, he told me that it's just like that. You're going on a seashore and you are thirsty, but you can only drink as only much. So make sure you get as much as you can. And from this guy, and, you know, that's what I mean. It's primarily for me to learn this B to B SAS, and fortunately and unfortunately, I've been, you know, raising this baby, this product, in times when AI is huge. But again, it's overwhelm, like people have, people come up and share the things that work for them, and if you overwork it, it's not going to work for you anyway. So which usually mentioned, so what is that? You know, that thing that you mentioning only for the B to B says outbound to scale it, personalize it in a B to B says, I don't think it's not about numbers. It's it's about making sure that you get, you're able to buy time for the people and getting to know them more and build this connection, as you always speak, when, when you share content like that. So, yeah, Manuel Hartmann 23:02 first of all, truly appreciate the attention, basically, that you, that you give into, to me and to the content, like, glad it's useful, like, huge inspiration to sometimes, I suspect, like, nobody, nobody cares. Like, why do I do this to some basic cathartics for me. But I think that's, that's really what's happening in B to B, and maybe as, like, three mini case studies, the voiceover of really successful clients, like, I mean, one client they really sell to, like, Fortune 500 companies, corporate mobility. Look classical output doesn't work to the Chief Human Resource Officer of Deutsche Bank of Volkswagen or so. So what they did was they put up a physical event, gathered 250 people in the center of Zurich, and then they used outbound LinkedIn and email to basically invite people to for that as like, hey, look the chief, more like corporate mobility Officer of Siemens and post and spb and like these companies is going to be there. Exit, invite only. Like, here's an invite. Please sign up. And then they orchestrated like, one on one meetups, like via, via networking app on there so they could actually see, like, which existing customer meets with a new customer, meets with one of the employees, meets with a key opinion leader. And that was very useful. So they do it again this year, even if it's mid five figure expense overall for the physical event. The second thing we see working really well with company that does legal or legal work, automation, or automation of legal work with AI, and it's just, like, really, really sharp on ICP, like general council or fast growing tech companies. So like the founder, like, we've been in touch for like, maybe 212, years. So she was okay, active on LinkedIn, and now she's really putting out three, four or five posts on LinkedIn, these very thoughtful video pieces which might get like, 1020 engagements, and then, like, hey, a day in the life of a general counsel, which got like one and a half 1000 engagements, like, for three posts in like, a month. Um. So that double website visitors that help them book like 35 to 40 calls in in just like this year, basically like in last less than three months, it helped them to actually just increase efficiency, also in a team, right, like not hiring a full time marketing person, just just basically making that happen on the founder led marketing side. And the third example on the trust space is a company called keen health. They do mental well being for enterprise, really enterprise ready. It was just that the former mental health lead for McKinsey globally, and he just brought, like, a huge acumen, like with his personal story, with the work he did. So they started a lot with workshops and professional service initially, but it really helped them to scale really quickly from zero to mid, seven figure, ar, without too much funding. I mean, it enabled them to raise, like funding or they want, probably, but it really helped them to invest into professional service, tell a personal story and go really deep on the expertise. Adil Saleh 25:59 Mm, love these stories. Love these stories. And folks, just to give more insights into manual when we met him, because a lot of people that at HubSpot ancestor, they went and, you know, post parties and all these, we met, like more than 70, you know, founders. A lot of these are consulting founders, because, of course, we connect more with people that are basically getting and doing the, you know, getting their hands dirty with with these VDB SAS companies, which manual was one of and to be very, very honest, I think this, this conversation that we had with him out in London, it was more practical, like he told us, like, Hey, I'm not taking these clients. I'm taking these kind of customers. I know the traits of my customers, and I basically segment those customers because I know I can really help them. I can make an impact as a sales leader. So thinking about agentic AI like, how do you think it's impacting your work, consulting, work with these with these companies, I know that, of course, it's, of course, it's not something that you know that can, that that can replace a human, but it's going to be an augmented resource that you can have like COVID and Co Op pilot, like Chinese, you know, cheaper language models coming on as people are building really good technology. So how do you see it shaping up for you, Manuel Hartmann 27:22 I think, is, if I, if I'm allowed to reference, like, teenage sex and big data and everybody's talking, very few people are walking. So every time, like, I had this, like, not nights, but I mean, like days where it's like, oh, like a generic AI, like, will not be needed anymore, and people will figure out everything. So every time I ask a crowded like a keynote, also like, who's using chat GP who's using Gen AI every week? And like, 98% of the hands go up. And then I was like, who has asked chat GPT, the quantified monthly cost of inaction for the economic buyer to not fix the problem you're solving. And all the hands go down, all of them, 00, like, everybody's like, using AI and ask them about their day and how's the weather, and like to write more bad call emails and annoy people. Very few people go deep and actually make it useful. And I think that's that there's, there's a tremendous amount of use case when you can make the human go away. I mean, I just posted today, like, a five minute walk through on how we leverage like a custom testimonial. GPT to take a call recording, put the transcript, copy, paste, let it write like a complete case study, situation, parent, pain, impact, critical event, decision outcomes. And it does it really well. So previously, it took me like half an hour to write a fairly short, crappy case study. Not that crappy, but okay, and now it takes me like, five minutes to do the whole case study, and it's so much better, and it's specific. Yeah, a lot of people hire content marketers nowadays, or, like, whatever they call it, then a full time position, or they hire a freelancer for 3k a month, and the GPT does it pretty much, Adil Saleh 29:02 yeah. I mean, you know what we did last year, yeah, in this third quarter, yeah. So we had, like, more than 120, episodes. And of course, we were building platform, platform for customer success team. So what we did, we created a custom chat GPT. We gave all the content of all these episodes, like, created a files of those transcripts, like multiple files. They cannot, like, take a chat GPT cannot take, like, massive file sizes. So we cut it as, like, 1015, file sizes with 120 conversations like these. And we asked co pilot, because we were working on our content strategy, like, what kind of clusters keywords are we going to be having based on Bucha as a marketing team before hyper engage. So he came up with all of these, you know, data points, success metrics, these kind of journeys, that you can do this, keywords and clusters and, of course, high level pillars, and then using the same, same custom chat GPT, we, we asked him, hey. Okay, what kind of you know problems, or the best, let's say, playbooks that we have for onboarding in these kind of segments that we spoke during the episodes, and like that category came up, like 15, conversation, 16 conversation with these thing and that actually that is helping us clean our co pilot and CO agent for our customers. So and of course, we're not fully relied not only we're doing some user interviews and all, but you know, it cuts up, as you mentioned, cuts up a lot of lot of time and work. Manuel Hartmann 30:29 Yeah, agree. Adil Saleh 30:33 And also manual on the agentic when it comes to go to market, tooling and everything, and processes and everything, I know that you're a big believer of using less stack and doing more and smarter. And of course, with people that are smarter, like make sure that you you have pretty much the best combination of having the reps and the technologies, post wise, as well, as you mentioned earlier, as well. So how do you see these tools that like, go to market tools, how you're leveraging them? What are the best in class for you that's working in like, let's say, mid market segment, if not to mention in the in the SMBs. Because, of course, they always juggle around, and it's good to experiment. And of course they have a problem like, with the cost as well. So how do you see, like clay, like tools, like these? Because a lot of these founders, they are struggling three to six months they waste, you know, just to, you know, get the right to qualify the right tool. Manuel Hartmann 31:28 Yeah, 100% I think, like, there's so much out there that, I mean, I have the privilege or sales people get a company with, like, now five patent generation consultants, we have the privilege to look at all these tools, pretty much like trained and try them out, because we have, we got leverage, right? We tried them out for, like, basically a dozen, a few dozen clients at a time or so. I mean, in terms of pipeline generation, it boils down to clay as a centerpiece for go to market engineering. And then you feed in sift or website identification, like person level. You can use RB to be in us. We cannot in Europe, GPR. And then you have a tool like trigify for social engagement that trigger signals and if clay. And then you have a reach for LinkedIn outbound, and you have smartly for email outbound. Yes, there's a ton, like a dozen substitutes for all of this, like tripify and like growth machine and so on for LinkedIn and instantly for email. And there's lemlist and Apollo and so ever but I mean, boils down to Hey, rich and smart lead I think, don't do anything wrong. And then on the hops on CRM, like clear HubSpot, favorite, we plot the new solution partner, not because we just love orange, but it was like demanded by B to B to B, entrepreneurs with five to 200 employees, just as a serum of choice. And then on other tools, there's some really pragmatic things, like a job form sometimes does the trick to just like do speaker registration or like discovering qualification quizzes or spot forms are just too ugly. And like, air table is like not integrating as well, maybe. And then there's little things which which are useful, like ocean IO, not little things, but not as mission critical as a CRM, but highly useful to build look alike target accounts or surfy, to send your LinkedIn contacts and conversations directly to your CRM. And then we use tldv, which understands German, which is highly useful for us, even with German, for call transcripts and so on. For intelligence, because you can then auto classify along spice the metric or whatever you prefer as a go to market methodology. So that's roughly the stack. And then there's whole categories out there for lead intelligence and sourcing and digital sales and all of that. And I think probably, like 70% of them will go out of business again in the next few years, because there's just 100 tools doing the same thing. Every company needs only one Adil Saleh 33:53 yes, yes, because it's too big of a stack for a company to do it at scale for longer periods of time. And of course, for even a lot of these funding companies, like they get funded in the first two years. And then, of course, the growth matter is not because it's a huge competition. It's always growing. There's, it's not even part. So they're not able to, you know, raise funds again, and then they're shutting down bigger. You know, you might have heard a lot of stories, but correlated, and a few other founders that could, of course, not for this reason, but of course, it's one of the reasons that they're not able to, you know, raise more funds, and they've earned the luck, and same is on the other side. So how do you see customer acquisition in the B to B side is it's getting harder and harder, because eventually, you know, people are not investors, not putting more money into it, in the B to B, you know, mid size, as much as they were during the COVID and post COVID. But how do you see like acquiring customers for mid sized company, maybe postpartum? Market fit, or slightly pre in the first three to four years, or in the B to B? SAS, Manuel Hartmann 35:07 yeah. I think there's this two trends there. We could probably do a whole episode on, like, the role from venture capital to private equity and going public now it is more mm day transactions and like, cost, GTM efficiency and so on. I think two fundamental trends. There's like one, founders need to realize that they're probably not going to IPO, and they they need to get to a critical size of, like, at least five to 10 million AOR and like, with like, six figure a bit there ideally seven to be relevant for private equity, so to be relevant as an acquisition target, and not just like, acquire like, join us, like, give all the money back to the VC, and then, like, work a decade for for nothing, financially, right? So that that's one, like, I mean, find a way to go from like this, 123, million to five to 10, because that gives you optionality to do private equity M and a roll up something whatever, like management buyout, whatever is useful. The second thing is, source is not that, like, I mean, funding is back spending, step back from companies. It's just like, there's, there's no incremental budget for AI. AI is taking a lot of their budget. And you need just, just like being a bit of a parrot, to Jason Lemkin here, but, I mean, you need feature parity in the sense of being useful. I think you can have zero AI in your product if nobody else in your space has it, and it just solves a really relevant problem. You can be SAP and just like be the backbone of logistics and finance and controlling and whatever you can be an HR system. But I mean, if a competitor's out there and they just auto, they do the work, versus giving you a dashboard to look at and click buttons you're not gonna hold in the market. And I think the third trend in this is really that, like, people basically overextended. People went into, like, a UFC fight, and they thought it's one five minute round, and the referee comes back, and it's like four more to go, and they're exhausted and they're injured, and they basically don't students, like, what? Like, I basically put down everything, like I lost, like, I told my family, I'm going to be back in five years, and they're going to be, like, a multi, multi deco millionaire, and I'm going to be done for life. And now, like, I need, I basically need to work for like, five times, five more years to get back my tube to my leg, breath, right? I get anything and like that. That's like this, the jaded, the broken and the done model in revenue leaders. You see this a lot people say, like, oh, I want to have a VP position, but I don't want to do the work, or I like, I SDR means I, I fire sequences from my dashboard. I don't call, call people. Sales means, like, I only do inbound, like, I don't do outbound myself. Like, I don't want to go to the conference. But for me, this is, this is frustrating to see, right? Because, like, I love, like, go to the conference, call the customer, go to the kickoff, ask them how they how they're happy, right? Like, ask them for the testimony. Write your own copy. Like, have a say in hiring. Like, go, go, basically and go to a new niche, right? Even if you make it with less money. But this hunger and drive less people have it. The ones that have it, they strive. The other ones, they really struggle. And I think that that's where the AI part comes in. Like, the the best salespeople, they make more money because they they bring way more value in, like, hard times, the medium ones, they they can get, like, can become good with the right coaching and enablement and environment and the bad ones. I mean, the order takers, basically, people need to buy? Like, no, it was literally like, look, like, my boss, boss gave me an order to buy Salesforce from you because it's in the garden magic quarter on top one, and we don't want to make a mistake. Like, we 100 people. Like, not everybody needs it. Like, can I sell you 80 licenses? Like, sure that. That's, that's, that was a sales rep. And now some people, somebody in common. Businesses are like, look, we're evaluating HubSpot versus Salesforce, and HubSpot is reacts cheaper. What can you do when the rep is like, I can give you 50% discount. No, I need 60. Like, oh, I'm out of options. I don't know how to create value. Adil Saleh 39:14 No, because I was also thinking that there's a huge, to a fair degree product, product, let us become a bigger part of conversation. When there's so much of AI you can do so much, it's in so less time with so less expertise than domain expertise I'm talking about, I'm not talking about like any random guy, like even people like with no domain expertise. They're building products that are good about you see why, comrade, I've spoken to more than 70 of them right here. I've spoken to platforms that have, that have been built like seven, eight years long. They're like 5 million plus annual recurrings. They're kind of struggling. And they say that the kind of features that we committed, you know, two years back, we can do it in three months. And. That's a sad that's not a sad story. The sad story is a competitor that's just born yesterday. Can do this in as much time. So how do you see the product led side of things like building really, really good product and beating the market and beating the competition? Bootstrap or funny, I like the guys, Jason Friday Basecamp, these folks, David and Jason, they've done really good like Bootstrap for like and very, very profitable business, business from a business wise and really good product as well. How do you see this product light thing? Manuel Hartmann 40:38 I think, as amazing for smaller annual contact values, so anything up to 5k, maybe 10k afterwards, people for five, six figure, mom, people still want to have a human conversation, especially if it impacts their core processes. Like, if, if I it's like, like, if I move houses, like, I'm okay. That's the stunning thing. Like, where people say, like, Okay, I'm gonna put down all my hard earned money of, like, 15 years, and they're just gonna buy, like, a property and I haven't looked at it, but somebody told me it's gone if I don't sign right now and they don't wire, like, 250k like, out of my pension fund. But that's just stupid. Most people in normal purchasing decisions, they still want to understand, like, hey, is this working for me? Like, do you understand my use case? Will you help me make the cultural transformation happen? Will you help me integrate this and, like, make the processual changes, and help me out how to use the product because it's needed? Like, adoption is, like, the key thing why sauce fails. So I think, like, there's three things which you mentioned there, like that, the ease, like, the product development speed, like, increased drastically. That has nothing to do with the go to market motion and the revenue model. The second thing, like on competition, like the competition is, like, it's way faster to build something. It's way faster iterate so you cannot rest on your laurels and just like, remain the same. And the third thing, which is actually concerning product led growth versus product enabled growth. I think even if something is very enterprising, like, let's say, like an enterprise, spend management like, if you can give somebody, somebody like a sandbox where they can play, and it helps you to visualize value, and you make it makes it easy to understand and evaluate and buy that that's product enabled, sales led growth like that. That's tremendously helpful to the first part, I fully agree. Like, I mean, I have some friends that they're starting product companies, right? It's like, oh, we, we two founders, like, two engineers now we hired a third engineers. Like, why? Yeah, because we need to build the backup. Like, I was visiting a prospect, and they showed me the future pretty much, and they have a no code tool. And it's like, okay, how far, how funny can this go? Like I said, like, build an ERP system for penguins. And, like, within five minutes, they build the whole all the objects, all the data model, all the logging configuration. And again, like, Okay, give me 20 penguins with laptops and where they live and what the desk is. And every like, Penguin had a Lenovo with, like the desk in Perth, Australia, whatever. And I was like, Shit, this was five minutes. This would have been like a year of building from then back then DeVos, whatever, and it's just there, and you write it in natural language. And I think it's people don't realize that this will only accelerate. So if you would say is you need to become like, a high quality strategy consultant that that's able to execute. If you are in engineering, like, learn how to leverage AI with cursor, AI and so on, like, and really solve hard engineering problems. If you in marketing, think deep about message, market fit and brand strategy and these sort of things. But you're not going to be paid to, like, put users narrative, since Reliance together, or, like, write code, or basically write the blog article that's done, the job is taken, to find a new one. I think it's true. Yeah. Adil Saleh 43:56 I mean, it is, it is, you know, a lot of a lot of this will, of course, a year, year to half back. We were thinking that it's not as fast as AI towards the B to B says, but now it is. It is, and the way China is picking up, you know, this new model that Alibaba and team, they launched just a few weeks back. It's amazing. So hopefully I stay open. Our data going to do with GPT five and accumulating all of these previous model to make it slightly more, significantly more reasonable, like reasoning model that better help with, with the with the complex problems. So, yeah. I mean, there is so much to that's yet to unfold. When it comes to AI supply, you're not building a product? Manuel Hartmann 44:43 By the way we played so does ask for the first million in annual revenue. So we invested like 100k and we merged, like, basically knowledge hop. So like the information product, plus group coaching, plus a one on one platform where you could book one on ones with like 30 masterminds. Intro is not. Doing that. And market demand shifted, quite frankly, as well. So we've had like, 10, 20k ACV, so annual contract value, and then people came as, like, I'm happy to give you 20k but like, Can we do it in a quarter, please? And can you do the job? I mean, that's the same, that's the same thing with, like, sauce versus AI, right? Like, it's not software as a service, but it's service as a software. So it's really about like, getting the job done, not building something that tells you, like, here's how to get the job done. So people don't want us to build, like, a Knowledge Hub to explain how to configure hubspots. Like, Hey, can you configure HubSpot? Like, give me like, can you get it done in four weeks? Like, every week we do half an hour an hour session, and you tell me what you build, and I give you feedback, if that works, and we do interviews and the same on pipeline, and people like, look, I don't have time. I agree family lab marketing is a thing. I agree we need to have, like, inbounded outbound so all bond. I agree we need to set up play and the whole shebang, but get it done. Make billion of my infrastructure so I can modify and iterate it and understand it, but you do the job. And I think like, yeah, sauce still seems attractive. But I think if you're building sources, a lot of it needs to be like services, software, like, yes, yeah, Adil Saleh 46:23 you outsource it to your friends. Hey, you know, these are the implementation you can really get your team trained on. And you can, you know, work with our customers. And, you know, having third party. So it's just again, like many Manuel Hartmann 46:35 services, many sales companies like, like Stripe or Shopify, just grows fairly present right now, apparently, or basically all employee of records like the remote the deals of this world, those are not sales place in terms of dashboards. They basically, they replace a service. Before you would have paid somebody to build your web shop or to figure out payments, you would have become a customer at a bank with tenants, with bank tellers. Or you would basically, like pay somebody, like to open an office and a tax consultant and whatever. And now, just like, there's a platform, but it said it's essentially a service package with a nice layout, and Agree, Adil Saleh 47:17 Agree. So how power does the growth look like for sales playbook, I'm always I'm checking on your event in October. For AR, missed that event. I really love that. By the way, I missed out on the marsh one because of a newborn coming in. So October will definitely meet in Berlin, for sure. But how's the growth looking like? Tell us more about what's what makes you excited this year at sales playbook and other projects that you're doing. And you know, Manuel Hartmann 47:47 most exciting is, most exciting is, is the client feedback in terms of, like, on laws, like six hops with implementations, we had like, 100% testimonial rate that basically, people's like, Hey, I'm really happy. Like, I'm happy to go on tape and tell people I'm really happy and why I'm so happy. And like, 50% gave a referral and like, Hey, can you help my friend as well? So that's, like, not a viral growth loop, but, I mean, it shows service market fit, you could say. And the second thing, which is making me really confident, is a team. I think we have the best team ever, like, for a patent is like hiring farmers, like small agency owners that had an agency with 100 to 500k annual revenue, and I mean, they just some things are very natural to them, right? Like, they how to service, like, how to sell, how to cater, like, how to plan and so on. Like, less than a pharmacist person, basically starting a job that they learn. But I'm former agency only, like, what has been with us for a month, when he closed two deals this week already. And like, is it been operation within a week or two? And the third thing is just, there's a lot of white space that I didn't expect. Like, there's, we're probably the only hot spot. CRM, so sales are focused. Agency in Dach, we still, like, maybe the only hybrid demand and pipeline generation agency truly focused on mid market and enterprise on, like, high annual conduct, values and in sales enablement, revenue enablement, like customer success, is this huge, wide space. And also, I hear from like, two, three sales leaders that quit or get quit every single week. And this just leaves a lot of white space also to professionalize sales, to professionalize sales and but people don't take they cannot hire, like, a VP sales for 200k or so, yeah, but they need to get closes done, and people coach and like, help and close deals. And they figures it's just like too much, too much load on too little people. Adil Saleh 49:42 I mean, amazing. And of course, it's, it's because we get to direct a lot with with these sales leaders, success leaders, founders, and a lot of them. They're, they're doing it at scale, like they have the data ops. And, you know, the product team works with them for all the data and infrastructure and all. What Goes rare to the success and DTM revenue, all of that. So it has, it has been a challenge that they have a dedicated team of ops, especially these, these, these B to B size companies that are serving inside Salesforce. You know, that is another complicated world, like, you know, build a custom object in Salesforce takes. That's a profession, so it's a good so how do you think, like Salesforce versus, you know, I know there's a lot of competition there, tapping in HubSpot is building them big time in the mid market, a small to bid market. How do you see it planning for HubSpot in the enterprise segment? Manuel Hartmann 50:38 That's an interesting question. And I think one of the key reasons to put inbound so, like, the HubSpot version of dream was from Boston down to the San Francisco Bay Areas. It wasn't about about, like, just like, getting tons of Silicon Valley startups. It was really about implementation partners as well. So I've been part a bit of, like, the Salesforce hype, like 2012 14 onwards. And a big part of like, why cost, like, customers have not been successful with software, was like that there was nobody there to implement it properly. That was just like painting Salesforce blue, painting HubSpot orange. I think in the enterprise, the product is getting there on HubSpot. I mean, the iteration speed is really compelling in terms of getting enterprise ready features they built, especially on the sales up like two years ago. I wasn't such big fan. It was just like, not mature enough, and it will really depend on those hubs, but also get the integration partners ready to do implementations for like 500 to two and 1000 people, that there will always be, like a cap, not always a long time, but available for the next one or two years via cap that I estimate, like two to 5000 people, where, like, at 5000 people, you just need, like, very complex access rights and like whatever functions, and like, 20 custom objects and so on. And that's just not like HubSpot DNA, right? And I hope they don't go for this. Like, I think HubSpot can easily expand up to like, 1000 people that they can do so today already, I really hope, I really hope, that they don't become this, this one size fits all. Like, okay, now suddenly we go, this is first part, yeah, when people ask me in 2012 or 2014 like, hey, Salesforce, the number one is, like the only player that can do this, like cloud based. Like, what can possibly go wrong? Like going SAP and acquiring everything on the sun and just putting a Salesforce ban on it, and that's what they did. And you have like, five Salesforce clouds, and none of them talk to each other properly. That by now probably, but I mean, a tremendous cost, and it's not the same architect, it's not the same user experience, it's not the same product, like it needs to be charged separately, and HubSpot has been doing that really well so far. Adil Saleh 52:55 There is, there is another debate going on that how, how well HubSpot capitalizes the Multi Product industry and within the CRM category, and of course, you know, going, Manuel Hartmann 53:08 Yeah, it's such a master class, and it puts this mark on my face every time, like, there's something like I want, and then I, like, get a 14 day professional trial, like, welcome to The devil. And it's like, that's actually cool, but like, is it worth making the case to the CFO to get service up, to get marketing enterprise, to get, say, enterprise like, because they're really good at hearing right? I mean, some assumptions are just blonde bluntly, like mad, in a sense, like, but no, no. CRM, does it like native MRR, like AOR tracking and subscription management. I was like, do I need to buy your highest version in sales hub to as a sales business from a sales business to track? MRR, seriously, you gotta be fucking kidding me. Sorry for that. French, Adil Saleh 53:56 yes, absolutely, absolutely so. Manuel, it was always fun sitting with you, learning from you. And I've now paid my debt, you know, for audience to learn more from you. And of course, Manuel Hartman is the guy people you guys can reach him out on LinkedIn, and it's always ripple, always very responsive. Always shows up. And what I love about him is that he's always, always giving away, always sharing knowledge onto his post. You know, subscribe to his pages, and I'm sure he Do you have a newsletter too that says, play with great direct blogs. Manuel Hartmann 54:30 I do a weekly newsletter, more or less. It's like, less consistent than the LinkedIn posts. I think I need to get better, like a company like lower seven figures does well, I feel like for us, LinkedIn, we do LinkedIn reasonably well. We do events reasonably well, and we do referrals and basically value reasonably well. We really bad at SEO. We start on SEM, LinkedIn, ads, newsletter, like it's working, but it could be way better. Adil Saleh 54:59 Yeah. Yeah, a year from now, year backwards from now, B to B to B says s, he was not that big gig because people were more lengthy. And acquiring the customer is not about just numbers and waiting six, seven years to rank your keywords. It's more for, like, smaller business, but now it's going to go big. So we're also working very hard on getting our SEO playbook ready and making sure we've got a lot of content to not being too good. But yeah, it's, you know, the best time to start it now. Absolutely Manuel Hartmann 55:25 amazing. Closing words, thanks so much for your time. Thanks for having Adil Saleh 55:29 me. Yeah, thank you very much, man. All have a good rest of the day. God bless you. Likewise. Manuel Hartmann 55:33 Bye.