Ep # 171: Intent Signals Are Broken: What To Do Instead ft. Omer Gotlieb (Founder & CEO, Salespeak)

Omer Gotlieb 00:05 I think the main challenge with AI right now is gaining trust. And we play on both fields, so we need to gain the trust of our customers and we need to gain the trust of their customers as well. Intro 00:20 Welcome to Across the Funnel, where we dig into concrete Go-To-Market moves across sales, customer success, and account management so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego. Adil Saleh 00:35 Hey, greetings everybody. This is Adil, the Hyperengage Podcast. Previously, I know that attribution has been the analog of inbound teams and all these sales organizations that are generating a pipeline for it. And that has become really hard for early-stage startups as well as even mid-market companies that are going for scale and acquisition between $40,000 to $150,000 a year deals. And this has become so hard for them to even invest in tooling or data points, as small startups. A lot of these are bootstrap startups. So today we are going to explore this growing pain in the sales organization, how they can get qualified pipeline into their funnel, how they can shape the buying experience, how they can complement and work as an analog with core marketing, like growth marketing. That has been the hardest. That has its own challenges. But I think this is something that we can discuss. So today for that, we have the CEO and Co-founder of Salespeak, an AI-native platform to shape your buying experience. If you're a SaaS company, if you're a subscription-based model, even a multi-product unit-based model, this is the time for you to shape how you can leverage AI, and we'll explore more and more. Thank you very much for taking the time. Omer Gotlieb 02:12 Thank you. Happy to be here. Adil Saleh 02:14 I love that. I know that a lot of these tooling, I would say, GTM tooling, they're trying to be AI-native, AI-powered, GPT-first. They're building their own LLMs. And then first year they do it like building some wrappers on top of AI, and then they try to fine-tune it and increase the capabilities by specializing it for different industries, different clients. How do you play in it? I know that you're unique and I want you to tell us more about it. Omer Gotlieb 02:46 Well, I think we have a different point of view. First of all, everybody understands that AI is changing everything for B2B. It's changing how buyers find you, how they research you, how they're making decisions, what they expect from you, how they want to communicate with you. And yet, if you look at it, there are two things that are happening. One is many of the B2B companies are still running old technology and running old playbooks. But as I said, there's so many tools out there that are really focused on, let's help the sales team and let's help the marketing team. And I want to bring a different approach. I really want to focus on the buyer, on the buying experience. And each one of us, even you and me, it depends on the time of the day, we're sellers, we're buyers. So let's put our buyer's hat for a minute. And I think that if we'll be able to create an amazing buying experience, that's going to be a win-win for the buyer and for the seller. So I think there's multiple ways of using AI. For me, of course, the simplest way is to use AI to automate processes. I think that's table stakes. I think that's easy. For me, what's really exciting is using AI to create different experiences. And like it or not, our buyers are getting used to highly improved experience. Whether that's riding a Waymo or even using ChatGPT or even using Airbnb and all those apps, the bar of expectation of, that's the experience I want, is going up and up and up. And I think companies that, and it's very naive, but if you really put the customer at the front, if you design for the customer, you're going to win. And I see many companies that are simply forgetting that. Adil Saleh 04:49 Yeah, that's the biggest talk of the town, understanding customer behaviors, exceptional behaviors and patterns. How, as a technology company, you're shaping it for lots of different customers in different segments and making it sort of a unified experience. And I know that one-size-fits-all, it doesn't work in B2B SaaS. A lot of these folks come and say, we are product-led and we are product-led sales and we have a freemium model, a lot of this. What kind of challenges while building up? I know you've been around for quite some time. It's more than almost two years now. Yes, more than almost two years. So what kind of things that you experienced in the beginning as a founder? I know that a lot of these journeys have changed during this time, fortunately or unfortunately, but tell us more about your days of inspiration. You came right in the middle of something that is a big shift in AI and a lot of tools streaming in from everywhere, these sales tools. So what kind of challenge from a business standpoint, Go-To-Market standpoint, as well as from the product standpoint, you faced when you launched back in 2020? Omer Gotlieb 05:58 Well, first of all, we live in an exciting time right now. My previous company, Totango, we founded it back in 2010, 2011. It's a completely different world right now. Creating a company, even two years ago than now, everything is changing around everything. And there are a lot of challenges. Luckily, the technical challenges is not that big. It's always difficult, but you can do today things that you were not able to do six months ago. We're building with a very small engineering team right now things that we were not able to build in Totango with probably 100 engineers. And these are all great engineers. And I think the technology really enabled us to jump ahead and really see the future. And three months after that, that's the future. So it's not three years. And that's amazing. I think in terms of technical challenge or even perception, I think the main challenge with AI right now is really gaining trust. And we play on both fields. So we need to gain the trust of our customers, and we need to gain the trust of their customers as well. Now, for me, it's a difficult problem, but it's a temporary problem. I'm old enough to remember that people said, can I trust a company to put my financial data in the cloud? Like, why would I do that? And of course, everybody's doing it right now. So I think the trust right now is, can I trust in AI? Can it provide me the right answers? This war is going to be won in six months, two years, but it is a challenge right now. So we've actually included a lot of technical and product mechanisms in our offering to make people trust us. I don't believe in a black box approach. I actually believe in exposing, okay, that's what you do. Imagine again, you hire a salesperson and it tells you, I don't think I'm trained enough. I think I'm missing that information. And I think I could improve here. Let's review all the things that I'm doing and see that I'm doing right. So our product is actually doing those kinds of things and enabling trust to our customers as well. But again, if you think about it, as a buyer, and I'm always going to focus, put your buyer's hat. If you are going to research a solution, let's say you need to buy something, a software product, whatever it is, and you have two options. You can either speak usually with a junior salesperson because you're not going to get to speak with the CTO right now. You're going to start with an SDR. Or the other option is to actually get your information from a smart AI. I know what I would choose right now, but even if I'm the smallest part of the market, my bet is more and more and more people are going to go and say, of course, AI is actually the trusted advisor that I'm going to look for. So I think again, the main challenge right now, and everybody that is doing AI is really with trust and how can you trust it internally? How can you trust it to put it in front of your customers? Will they trust it? And I think we've done really a great job there. We're learning a lot in the last two years and improved that as well. But you said, what are the business challenges as well? And I think right now we are selling to marketers. And I've spoken, I just came back from another conference. I really spoke with hundreds of B2B CMOs in the last few months. And think of what's going in their mind. Will I have a job next year? How will that job look like? And I'm getting pressure from my board to do something with AI. And there are 50,000 companies trying to sell me something, everybody waving their hands with AI and doing something. So the market right now is very chaotic. It is changing all the time. And I remember myself in Totango. I went on stages and explained everybody why I think the Chief Customer Officer is probably the most difficult job in the Go-To-Market business right now. And I've changed my mind. I actually think that right now marketing is a very difficult job. Because again, it's not clear what this job is going to look like in the next three months and six months. What are the tools? What are the KPIs? You hear from everybody things that we used to do when we were working are not working anymore. You've mentioned outbound and so forth. There's a lot of moving parts. I was in an amazing presentation yesterday about, can I build my marketing team with AI agents instead of hiring people? So there's a lot of moving parts over there. So I think the main challenge with companies like us right now is how to rise above the noise. How do you get to speak with the right people? Because once we do, everything is actually much easier. I think we have a great offering and there's a wow effect in those kinds of things. But the challenge is really rising above the noise. Adil Saleh 11:33 Love it. And a lot of these marketing KPIs you mentioned are trying to get more tangible and measurable as much as they can because there's a lot of noise, a lot of data. You mentioned AI. Agentic workflows are good enough for when you have highly targeted data points and contextual information, so they get specialized outcomes. But when it comes to marketing and things, let's say you're thinking like somebody is sitting on your website, reading about your blogs, that person could be somebody that's just reading up, likes reading, just for research. Somebody that wants to explore some of their use cases, like internal pinpoints around marketing, around anything. So capturing the intent has been the hardest even for the AI. So what's your viewpoint on this? I know a lot of platforms that came on our podcast as well, they tried to capture intent based on some of the clicks, some behaviors, all of those. I haven't yet found any product, especially in the B2B SaaS. In retail and e-comm, things are different. But when it comes to B2B software experience, it's a friction-based model economy that we do. I'm yet to find some product that really nails it. So now I'm talking to a product founder, and the father of a product that is something there, going in that direction. And what was your experience? How do you see it? Because as you said, things change. Things are changing so fast. You never know as a CMO what you come up with next and how things might change. I know there are data sources like Clearbit and People Data Labs and InsideView. There are so many data sources that you can capture data from and invest money if you've got money in the back pocket as a CMO. But I think still it's really hard. So what's your take on this? Omer Gotlieb 13:36 So first of all, I think capturing intent is a very difficult problem. It has become much more difficult in the last six to 12 months. And you gave a good example. If somebody comes to your website, does it mean that they have intent? Maybe they just want to read something. I'll give you even the other way. More and more people are not coming to the website because they're actually going to ChatGPT, but they actually have high intent as well. So the fact that they're in or not in your website doesn't necessarily mean that it's high intent or not. But I want to question ourselves. Why are we looking for intent? I know intent is important, but the reason people are looking for intent is because they want to engage, right? And first of all, I think there are some people that are not doing it in a smart way. Imagine what would happen if every website that you visited will send you an email after that. You're going to get crazy. The fact that I've been in your website doesn't mean that I'm allowing you to send me an email. It doesn't mean that I have high intent. Maybe if I was here and did that and asked. And so I think that outreach based on signals is important, but it has to be intelligent. And right now I'm afraid that a lot of companies are simply using AI to say, hey, we have one signal. Let's automate the hell out of it, right? Because we can, it's very easy. So if you came to a website, you get an email. And if you did that, you get, it's not smart. It's actually killing the industry, I think. Adil Saleh 15:09 This annoys a lot. This happened to me a lot. This happened to me. And as it is now, it has decreased a little bit, but I was in mid of 2024-ish. It was happening so much. Like whatever website that we visit, I get an email on my business email. See you next morning. Omer Gotlieb 15:26 Yeah. I'm opening my inbox every day and there are 50,000 spam emails. Most of them in the same patterns, like there's five, six different patterns that look the same. And everybody thinks they're smart because, hey, Omer opened my email so I can send them three others. And I think, I don't have the solution for that, but I think we need to be much smarter in the way we engage customers and really put them at the front and design for them. I, for example, think that any cold outreach is probably not going to be effective because I may have one signal, but if I'm getting 50,000 emails a day, and I am because of AI, I'm simply not going to check my email. And that's going to be a problem. So I think what a marketer needs to do is really create some kind of a signal-based systems with intelligence based on it. Never do something just based on one signal. Think of what really makes somebody really interested in that. Offer them a way to actually engage with you without signals. I heard Yamini Rangan, the CEO of HubSpot, went on stage and she said website traffic is declining for many companies, which means that if people do come to your website, it better convert. So think of the mechanisms that you put there in order to allow customers to actually engage. So I think natural intent is a very difficult problem. I think what you need to do is really build the systems of a lot of sensors with a layer of intelligence behind it, and then use this data to proactively or not proactively engage with customers and allow them to engage with you a different way. I think one of the reasons today that prevents customers to engage with you is that, think of it, I'm coming to your website, right? Why would I want to speak with an SDR? Like, why would I want to do that? And we're actually making customers jump through hoops before they actually get to speak with the right person for them. And I think we can change those kinds of behaviors. Adil Saleh 17:49 The engagement that is not deriving any value is not needed. It has to be more signal-based, and again, signal around context because conversational AI has been achieved high marks. Like, it is close to efficient. You talk about customer support, tier one, even tier two has been 70, 80% replaced. You talk about, in general, like generative AI, you analyze the context as well as the signals is going to be the next key. Talking about all these qualitative data miners, let's say, in post-sales, I'm exploring a lot for the last three years, had a lot of GTM leaders on the podcast, and now conversations change because things change. So a lot of people that claim things, like, barely one and a half years ago, that things have changed. And this is fortunate or unfortunate, but again, qualitative measures and qualitative understanding of context for AI, given any model built on anything, is going to be super important to drive engagements, meaningful engagements. Otherwise, it's just going to be, hey, I just checked you were sitting on the pricing, you were looking at those plans, and we can discuss all of that. You get my point? Or, let's say, for customer success team, hey, I thought you were over-utilizing your licenses, and I think that you need this. Let's have a cadence, or let's have a business, or DVR, or anything. You get my point? So context is super important. And I think as much as we can get the context, these qualitative measures, that's why we are trying to have these qualitative data sources integrated with our co-pilot, which are meeting notes and all these conversations layered with external data sources to basically have a context layer to it to get the best outcome. Omer Gotlieb 19:35 I love what you say. And even think about yourself as a founder. When you come and speak with a new person, in your head, you're trying to identify what context I have for him and what context does he have on me, right? And then you can actually base the discussion on those kinds of things. And it is a difficult thing to do because not a lot of people in your company have the context that you have and his company as well. So think of sending a junior salesperson to have those kinds of discussions. It is difficult. I'm not blaming them, but it's very hard. Adil Saleh 20:09 Oh, my gosh. I love that you mentioned. You know what happened just in the morning? I was just expecting my team to have a call feature, like Paul is coming on our stage, and he just confirmed it. He was in New York, and he just asked me, can you push your event a couple of days forward? Like, let's do it on October 28th. We had an episode last week. I had him back in 2021 as well when he joined ourselves. So I just asked my team, make a post, and this is the story. Just give them a little information. And they came up with a post that I didn't like. We use Notion for all the content calendars and everything, so they gave me for review. I said, get me to review as well. I saw it, and with just one prompt, I completely changed. I just used dictate, the prompt there. Instead of typing, I like to speak. So I just gave the story and context. Like, hey, this is what we spoke before the episode and after the episode. This is what he meant of how they tripled $9 billion valuation and this kind of initiatives that he has taken in the customer success organization that actually complemented it. The caption changed. It's a world apart. To your point, not everybody has it. And she came up, and she's a girl, and she came up and said, Adil, you had this context and you gave this prompt, and how come I have it? Like, just try to train me, like, how I can think like that. Omer Gotlieb 21:36 And that's the thing. It's difficult. And this is what really makes me excited about AI, because we can teach AI that. And AI can elevate the experience. And I'll go back to the website because I think it's easy. The website is the main gate of a lot of companies. But think of, first of all, the audience, right? The audience are people that are used to amazing experience. They've used ChatGPT. They use ChatGPT. They just came out of the Waymo, right? That's the level of experience. And then you're bringing it into your website, and you force them to navigate dozens of webpages that are generic or fill out forms or click a button and wait for a call from a junior salesperson. What if, instead of that, you can engage with them with a context-based discussion? You know some of the context the minute they hit you. They know where they are. They know the page they're in. They know maybe the campaign they came from. You have cookies. You know what your company is doing. You're trying to sniff exactly. It's not, how can I help you? It's not a stupid thing. It's really almost a founder-level experience. I don't think we can ever get to a founder-level experience. That's still, again, far away. But the level of experience, the level of data, the level of context that you can actually use and provide, it's actually amazing. And then everything, maybe they don't have intent. That's fine. Okay? But they had good experience. They'll come later on. Maybe they're not a good fit. They'll remember you. But the experience that they feel and the data that you get after that is actually amazing. And I think that's the difference between let's just put something and let's think about the user. If I would actually be at the shoes, wearing the shoes of the user, what would I do? I think that makes a difference. And really the technological advance that happened in the last two years in AI enables us to do many of those things already. Adil Saleh 23:37 And this is super important for these AI-native companies to achieve early on because they will grow with the customer experiences. They have, like, for internal segmentation, they have to fine-tune anyway to make specialized experiences on top of that AI layer. And then overall, as a model, they have to improve. So I love the way that we are driving this conversation. And this is real because a lot of these co-founders are saying, we are the best tool. We are giving the best specialized outcomes. You're right. We do some magic. And that's why we're here, Omer, being absolutely genuine and talking about these issues. And that's why I don't care this Hyperengage Podcast to be remembered as some podcast that only talked about problems, not fleshy, glorified things. That's fine. I consider half of my episodes, like 70 or 80, to be obsolete, absolutely obsolete, because things have changed so fast. Omer Gotlieb 24:35 Things are changing every day. Yes. Adil Saleh 24:37 So now from a Go-To-Market standpoint, I know that it's not easy. I know that you guys are funding, like, barely a three and a half, three million, pre-seed or seed. So with some bucks in the pocket, not so hard, like a lot of the competitors do, like, sales intelligence and marketing intelligence platforms that are leading the industry. So now, what was your Go-To-Market strategy in terms of trying to be specific, like, in terms of one segment and killing the onboarding? I know that you guys have a Freemium model that indicates that you have some sort of a product-led sort of a motion. So how did you kill that at the beginning? And how is that flowing in to do expansion there and all of that? Delivering value has been the bigger part of all of the conversations we had. And it has changed. And how do you identify how customers perceive value? I know that not a lot of these companies, they only use inbound or account-based marketing. Even if they do account-based marketing, they use it for different. So how do you indicate all of that? Omer Gotlieb 25:41 I love the question. First of all, again, I can't say that we've nailed the Go-To-Market, right? We're experimenting all the time. We're testing it. But let me tell you how I think about it and what's working for us. And again, what's working for us doesn't mean that it's going to work for other people as well. And I'm going to turn the question around. And instead of we thought about what's going to work for us, we're starting to think about what does our potential customer need? And remember, they're in chaos. AI, what, like, what can I do, right? So there's two things that we're trying, well, three things, but two things that we're trying to do. One is we understand that any marketing organization that really wants to be successful has to run a lot of experiments right now. Like, literally, I think the only real measurement of are you a good marketing human or not is how many experiments can you run a week and a month. Now, nobody knows if those experiments are going to be successful or not, but you have to develop a muscle of, I need to run an experiment. So that's why, again, for example, we don't have, obviously, I'm not sure they're going to like it, but we don't have annual contracts and annual commitments. We don't measure AI only monthly, because we want customers to stay with us because they see value. We want them to make an easy decision to start with us. We have a freemium model and actually a pay-per-use and a value-based model. Adil Saleh 27:06 Yeah, I think you learned the hard way from Totango. Omer Gotlieb 27:09 Yeah, yeah, no, but we know that, listen, if I would be running a large company right now and one of my executives would sign a five-figure deals contract with any Go-To-Market solution, he would probably not stay because how can you sign a year contract with a technical solution that might be obsolete next month? Everything is changing right now. So we want to enable customers to run a lot of experiments. And as a founder, I love when they go live and they start seeing the data. I mean, it's amazing, and they stay with us. So one thing is we enable them to experiment really quickly. That's why, again, our pricing model is very easy to start with. The second thing is we're always thinking about, okay, how do we provide them value? How do we provide them value? So, for example, I went and spoke with a lot of CMOs and asked them a simple question. Do you think buyers are actually using AI today to research about you? And, of course, everybody said yes. So don't you want to see what they see? Don't you want to see what AI is thinking about you? So we have a free report. It's your website, ready.ai. But you go in there, you put in your website, and after a few minutes, you actually get a comprehensive report about how ChatGPT and others are perceiving you, what's your messaging, what's your value versus competition. And people tell me, but that's not my messaging, or that's not the way I want to. Great, you need to fix it. So upfront, just again, we provided value already. The second thing is we've scanned probably more than 2,000 companies right now. We have a lot of data, a lot of benchmarks. So we're actually publishing the reports. So you know where you are. I mean, okay, it's okay that you don't have it, but 90% of the other companies don't have it. That's great. So we keep thinking about how do we provide value. And the third thing that I love is really there is a wow effect when people start using our product. So what we're trying to do in marketing is bring that experience as much as we can, even before you speak with us. So if you go to our website and you want to experiment with our product, on your website, you can just click on a button. You don't even need to speak with us. So you can get those kinds of things. Having said that, again, those things are working for us. Having said that, again, still a lot of chaos in the market, noise of the market, and that's obviously a challenge. And companies like us need to solve it without spending $10 million on Google Ads and billboards on 101 and things like that. I think those playbooks are going to die, but it takes time. Adil Saleh 29:53 Yeah, it takes time. I love it. And the companies that will win are the ones that are able to deliver value consistently. I love that you're making your entire motion one month at a time. A lot of these companies, especially AI-native, they're trying to bind them for annual contracts and all. And that doesn't make sense. You mentioned you got to make sure that you help them see value first, and you consistently deliver value with all you have. Things might change on their end as well, like how Go-To-Market. Omer Gotlieb 30:27 I'll give you an example. A prospect sent us an email today asking, how long will it take to implement? How much will the implementation cost? What would be the annual contract? And they were blown away. And I told them, let's get live next week. It doesn't cost you anything. You need to make a decision only for a month. So, oh, can we do that? They're not used to those kinds of things because many SaaS companies, no, no, no, you have to have a sales engineer dedicated for you for 90 days implementation that's going to cost you X. And if you change your mind after that, we'll charge more money. And then you need to commit to one year. How can you run experiments like that? And I think we're doing things differently. Adil Saleh 31:06 Love it. This has to be the core. The customer has to be the core. Previously, the customer-centricity, I spoke to AppsFlyer, a great man, CCO of AppsFlyer. So that is like three, three and a half years ago, one of the first episodes, like top, the first 20 episodes. So he said, the first two years we invested in how to deliver value the fastest. We worked on our onboarding, worked on packaging. Previously, it was more product. Now it's other factors as well. They do want to quickly make sure that they're trying one tool and they have this ability to explore more as well, because on the customer side, they know that with AI things are changing, new tools are coming. You talk about HubSpot and Salesforce has been the biggest CRMs and leading the category. Salesforce going first, HubSpot cutting 30% of the marketing in the past three years. Now ADO has come in, the categories are really falling. And in our category, customer success, Gainsight being the first mover, you had Totango. Now you guys like Grand Venture, that's fine. But when I was building a customer success platform, the category was shrinking in the same way, more tooling coming in. And this is pretty much on the buyer's end as well. You cannot, if you don't deliver value with the product, if you don't build the right product, you're not going to, in a longer term view, you're not going to sustain whether you're funded or bootstrapped. So love that. Omer, I know that you guys are pretty lean. You believe in having a lean team. And this is the biggest sign of having an AI-native environment and organization. So you're about 20, 25 people? Omer Gotlieb 32:53 We're actually about 15 people. I think the question people are asking me all the time is, how big are you? And my answer is, as small as we can be. And as a CEO, as a founder, I'll tell you differently. In Totango, it was always about how can we find the next person? Like, how can we hire? And here, I'm consistently thinking about how do I not hire the next person? Can I do things with AI? Can I do things differently? And again, we're still learning. We can do with 15 people things that we were not able to do with 100, 200 people in Totango. You can't solve everything with technology, but you can move fast and break a lot of things and build a lot of things, both on the product side, engineering, and Go-To-Market. I have probably 12 or 13 AI agents that are working for my Go-To-Market organization. And previously, I would probably need to hire two or three people to do those kinds of things. So yeah, the goal right now is not hire more people and grow in that size, but really how can we do that in an efficient way, in a smart way? And again, a different way of building companies today. Adil Saleh 34:04 Yeah, love it. And talk about some of the core DNA. I know that two years is not a lot of time, but with the kind of expansion that you got and recognition you had in the early years, how do you see what do you guys want to be known for as a team, as a culture? Like kind of things that you as a leader instilled onto your team, like sort of a DNA and all that. Could you share any of that? Omer Gotlieb 34:32 Yeah. And I'll share what's working for us. I don't think it's like a cookbook that everybody needs to use because eventually the founders lead the DNA of the company. First of all, we want to have fun. This is both me and my co-founder. That's our second company. We've had our share before. We know what it means to build a company. We want to do things a bit differently. And I think it shows. I think it shows that we're having fun in those things. But the second thing, if you ask anybody in the company, is buyer-focused. Really buyer-focused. How do we change the buying experience? Every time we're doing something, we're asking ourselves, is that going to help the buyer or not? Is that going to help our buyer and their buyer as well? And I think it's a muscle that you need to work on. The third thing is, of course, really AI-native. Now, I'm in AI for the last year and a half every day. And I'm still learning. Every day I'm learning new things. And that's also, I think, a muscle a company needs to develop. So even within ourselves, we have discussion like, oh, why didn't we do that like this? Can we do that with AI? I love those kinds of brainstorming ideas because it really, you almost feel it's expanding the brain of the company. Like the company all of a sudden starts thinking differently. Technology-wise, things that we were not able to do six months ago, not two years ago, six months ago, we're nailing those things right now. So I'm really excited about the future and what will the technology enable us to do. And I'm really excited from how can you move so quickly with such a small team and do a lot of amazing things. Adil Saleh 36:24 Love it. So some sort of questions that came from our community. Number one, building a sales or GTM or marketing tooling with not a lot of names on your big logos on your island. You had Totango, your co-founder had some, building some SaaS, having good exits in the past. Is it easy? Of course, you're not going to be funded like, a lot of these other marketing attribution or marketing or sales or that sort of GTM tooling coming alongside you with people that have good name and investors. Even if they want to invest, they put more money and they bet on them because they have done it for other businesses, for good or bad. How do you see it? How do you see that solo founder or founder, very small and based in the U.S. or overseas, wants to build something you know that they can build, anybody can build something really cool. How do you think, what they should do, how they should drive out, from a business standpoint? A lot of these founders, they are building something, but they are thinking that we are not getting enough customer recognition. Maybe it'll be talking like in pitching investors, like the 15 investors a week, not getting interest. You see the other side of the table as well. Like you meet VCs, you've been an angel yourself. So how do you see that spectrum for a founder that has not done it in the past, sort of a first-time founder? Omer Gotlieb 37:53 Well, first of all, it's not easy. Even for us, it's not easy. I mean, the fact that we are both second timers and we have some logos on our belt makes it a bit easier, but it doesn't mean anything. Like it does allow us to open more doors, but that's more or less that, that's it. I wouldn't bet on it. And everybody needs to remember, it's difficult for everyone. Even Lovable, took him years to actually, okay. There's a lot of examples that took them a lot of years until all of a sudden everything is easy. It is never easy. But I think if you build a real solution that does provide value, I think the next thing you have to do is come up with some kind of your own point of view and story. The challenge with, and I hear many companies, I'm investing in companies, I'm advising companies as well, a lot of them sound, look, and feel the same. And I think, first of all, come up with your own point of view. And can you be unique? Providing you are providing value. If you're not providing value, solve it. That's the first thing you have to solve. And then again, start seeing what's the best channel for you. I don't have a recommendation. Every company should have their own channels of what's working for them, what's not working for them. But if you do provide value, and if you have your own point of view, it should not be that difficult to go to the first 5, 10, 20 customers. And then they're actually doing their job. One of the things I love is, we see a viral loop of customers that’s sending us new customers. We have, I think, three or four CMOs that left their job, started a new job, in the first week brought Salespeak there as well. We see customers that see us on other websites. And they enjoy the experience so much. They figure out how to build it. And they're going to our website and starting those things. Adil Saleh 39:55 You're generating pipeline advocates. Omer Gotlieb 39:56 Yes. And we're able to do that because we do provide value. We do provide a good experience. And again, it's very easy to start with us and experience that. That's, again, it's not applicable to any type of company as well. But what I'm saying is, one, nobody should think that it's easy for anybody else. It's never easy. The second thing is, again, provide value, provide value, provide value, and come up with a unique point of view on how to actually tell that story and find out the right mediums and channels for you that are looking to actually tell that story as well. Adil Saleh 40:32 Love it. Because distribution is now a bigger challenge, like how you want to distribute and how you want to find unique messaging slogans and the song that you want to sing every single day. Back in the days, when I say back in the days, it's six months to a year. Omer Gotlieb 40:46 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's funny about it. Adil Saleh 40:49 So on LinkedIn, you talk about B2B lead generation or B2B marketing. You talk about LinkedIn like six months to a year back. We had founders that were having one hook. They're big names. Now, even in the Valley, in New York City. So they used to have one hook and they used to create some posts and use like 1,500, 2,000 likes and impressions, and got like 20,000 followers in three to four months. Now it's not happening. So you need to find Omer Gotlieb 41:17 The reason that it's not happening because there are 50,000 other founders that are using AI and writing things that you can see that AI wrote them. And you can go on your LinkedIn feed and everything looks the same. Everything sounds the same. Everything feels the same. Be smart. We really need this. We should stop using AI just to automate because it's very easy to automate. We should think about AI as providing a different level of experience, as brainstorming. Again, LinkedIn is a great example. I'm betting the next one would be Reddit because everybody's telling everybody today, yeah, you have to do things in Reddit. You have to do things in Reddit. Adil Saleh 42:00 Yes. They're shutting down some accounts as well. Like a lot of, Omer Gotlieb 42:051 I think one of the founders I met had a good name for it. He called it the spam cannon. You have a can, right? How are you spamming everybody? Don't use that. It's their own way. Adil Saleh 42:12 They're taking down a lot of accounts. Like I know some founders, their marketing team, they got taken down a lot of Reddit. Hopefully Reddit doesn't become another Quora. Love it. It was great insights coming from you and experiences. I love the way they are so inherently unique for yourself and your business. I know a lot of these folks listening can definitely translate and articulate it for their marketing teams, their founding teams. A lot of these founders, they're struggling to acquire customers. A lot of founders, they're struggling to get the right product positioning. That has been the biggest problem because a lot of these AI products, they say on their website what they do. You go inside and do the very opposite, or not as much as they've said on the website. This is the biggest thing that is going on because a lot of these folks here, they're not focusing, as you mentioned, focusing on delivering value, building the right product, and then messaging and distribution and storing and all of that. Quick wins is not going to stay for longer, as we discussed, and of course, riding the AI wave only for the sake of riding it, it's just not going to work. Thank you very much, Omer, for sharing your insights. I love the energy. It was super infectious and the connection that we had backstage and during the stage. Thank you very much. Omer Gotlieb 43:37 Thank you. I had fun in this conversation as well. Adil Saleh 43:40 Love it. Have a good rest of your day. Outro 43:44 Thank you very much for listening to Across the Funnel. If you got one useful GTM idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit follow. Explore Hyperengage at hyperengage.io and Dextego at dextego.com.