Ep # 175: Turning Sales Content Into a Sales System: The “In-Home” Playbook ft. Dean Curtis (CEO, Ingage)

Dean Curtis 00:05 I find that when I talk to business leaders, they typically don't have metrics to measure the software that they're putting into their business. We demand it from our customers to say, what are you trying to accomplish? What problem are you trying to solve? But most importantly, what metric are you trying to move in your business? Intro 00:23 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 00:38 Hey, greetings everybody. This is Across the Funnel and your host Adil. I know that this year has just been like fifth episode and we are trying to make sure that we serve the biggest burning pains that AI brings. It's quite strange that AI brings a lot of pain to a lot of these founders listening. It's like how to kill the distribution, how to make sure that we get the products right. It's been easier than ever to build the right product, but the distribution has been the biggest and the noises keep coming and coming really in quick succession. So that's why all these sales enablement content, how people get more eyeballs, close more deals, become so important. So today we are going to talk about Ingage. I'm speaking with the Chief Executive of Ingage, Dean Curtis, today. And Ingage, just a quick background. I know we've had some of the proposal tools and tools that are turning contracts into intuitive presentations in the past, but these were more towards the enterprise sales and those kind of motion. They're not AI-native or technology-first companies. They're working more towards the mid-market to enterprise segments. So today we're going to talk about Ingage, how they are helping sales teams close more deals by intuitive content and deal-breaker presentations. So thank you very much, Dean, for taking your time. Dean Curtis 02:08 Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Adil Saleh 02:11 So now I know that it's been pretty long. It's quite a long journey. When I say like seven, eight, ten years, it's a long journey, looking at how AI has impacted and how people are going multi-product and people are going covering adjacent verticals as well, like look at Gong, look at Salesforce, like all these CRM categories are getting consolidated. So now being a Chief Executive, I know that you've recently taken on this role. How do you see this spectrum of AI impacting your category, sales? We talk about account executives, talk about SDRs, BDRs, account managers. They are using on average three to five tools in small to mid-sized companies. So how do you think that this is helping? Is it helping? How do you see your position in Ingage at this moment, the way that AI is evolving? Dean Curtis 03:08 Yeah, it's a pretty big question. I think when you look at AI, it makes things fast, cheap, and easy. The question is what's the quality, right? So I'll give you a classic example. I was asking my operations person to give me a dashboard that pulled in metrics from three different places and told me the story I really wanted to see. Now HubSpot didn't solve it. I didn't want to go buy a piece of software. So I said, all right, well, let me see if I can code this using an AI tool. And within an hour, I had a working prototype of the dashboard that I wanted. But that doesn't mean I'm going to dump our dashboarding software because that actually provides a tremendous amount of value. So you have to think about what role AI is going to play in building fast prototypes or even replacing full systems. But understanding in general how you adopt software, I think is going to play into a lot of those decisions. To believe that you're going to simply take a piece of software out and replace it with a vibe-coded thing that you did on Sunday while watching a football game, I think is a little short-sighted. I also think it's a little short-sighted to walk at a conference and decide you want to buy a piece of software on the spot. I think those two conversations are the same, and people have been doing that for years as well. So it's awesome what you can do with the technology. I think it needs to play into the overall strategy and be part of the strategy. It can't just be a shiny object that you're chasing because it will end like it does a lot of times when you buy things that you shouldn't. I mean, we all have a garage full of stuff that's a regret purchase at some level. I don't think there's really much difference. But let's be smart about planning and being attentive to the ROI that those solutions are bringing to us. Adil Saleh 05:00 Okay. And, of course, it comes with a lot of noise. It's so hard to make decisions, and you have so many options. And when it comes to distribution for those products, you look at their websites, you look at the messaging and use case, you think that, oh, this is a platform that's going to change the world, and that's the only tool that we need. And then when you get inside the platform, it's not as good what they commit because since there's so much noise, the distribution became so hard. Everybody is trying to be unique. Everybody is trying to go one plus. Everybody is trying to do everything onto their website. So while making business in your category, I know that there's so many platforms that are, I would say, in three to five years that have had a huge year growth. I would not name them, but presentations for sales execs. Dean Curtis 05:49 Yeah. Adil Saleh 05:50 How do you see this, whether making this, you're making onto your Go-To-Market in the recent times, how big of a challenge was it? What kind of initiatives have you taken to make sure you have the unique proposition while they're making it and the chaos and all the noise and everything? Of course, a lot of platforms got funded, too. I believe a filthy amount of funds that got into the Series C and Series A. They understood, like yeah, it's more about growth, too. So now, as a chief executive, how do you think that positioning has become the hardest in your category? Or what was your, I would say, the playbook that had broke so far for Ingage to maybe in certain verticals? Dean Curtis 06:36 Yeah, I think what's really important is know who you are and know who you serve as a customer base. So if you look at what we do, we help you create amazing content for your sales team, give you all the tools you need to share it with them so they have the latest version, and then we give you an analytics platform to measure how it's performing in the field. If you were to judge us against every presentation software out there, you might say, well, you don't have this or that or the other thing. I think the term presentation is often a generic term like Kleenex, right? You could say everything's a PowerPoint, but in reality, not everything is. So when you look at the actual use case of what our customers do, our customers typically sell in someone's home. They typically are there from 60 to 180 minutes trying to help them understand the value of the solution they're bringing. It's primarily home improvement, home services. So to be real specific, someone's coming to sell you a new roof. That process is incredibly complex. You as the homeowner need to understand all the complexities of what a new roof entails. Do I need plywood? Do I need underlayment? Can I just put something over the top of these shingles? Do I need to replace them? Could I just put a rejuvenation solution on top of what I already have? What if I have solar? How do I get that removed? There's so much complexity to a roof sale. Well, what we do is we help people build content that is extremely consistent for their sales team. When most people think of a presentation, they think about the Monday meeting they have and creating a bunch of slides to make sure the executives are up to speed on the latest of a project. It's not what we do. We help you create and embed a sales system into a presentation so that you can teach it, you can train on it, you can build confident reps that can deliver that in a way that makes the prospect, the prospective client, super confident in your ability to solve their problem. So you could say we're a presentation software company like a bazillion other people. We're not Gamma. We're not going to quote, type in a little prompt and give me 15 slides. That's not how it works. There's psychology behind the sales process. There's before and after imagery that really helps solidify what people think of you and building that trust to hire you as the solver for the problem that they have. So I'll go back to your question, how have we differentiated ourselves? We've stayed true to who we are. There's ways that we're integrating AI into our platform, but it's not simply, I mean, we did this at the beginning like everyone, hey, write your headlines with ChatGPT. Awesome. But where can I use AI from a data perspective to understand the hundreds of thousands of presentations we deliver every week? How can I help all the other roofers out there? How can I help all the other siding installers out there to be better at sales with the information that we have? So leveraging the data, the data is the moat. The information that we have about how people present and how people win, that's the moat. And how do we leverage that in our product in order to make it easier for people to get up and running? That's where we're spending our time. Adil Saleh 09:53 All right. That's amazing that I know that this is so much of categories that that's why we're talking here, but these are the industry verticals that we've never explored, and they would never, like customers at Gamma and all these platforms, they would never imagine that a presentation or a content can be presented or integrated with a sales process in the way that you are doing. And you mentioned that analytics platform, and I know you're pretty big at the ROI component, the ROI side of things like revenue impact, and also thinking of your install base, you mentioned a few industry verticals, how you're measuring the revenue impact. And of course, this has been the biggest talk of the town since this AI and the evolution and the options that your buyer are having at the same time to deliver the value the fastest, like the time to value. So how you're ensuring this? I know that analytics, that platform that you're talking about is a bigger contribution of that too. So could you also explain that process a little bit, and then we'll jump into the post-sales and how you're helping your customers win and keep it from there? Dean Curtis 11:02 Yeah. My opinion is if you are hiring a piece of software to do a job in your environment, you hire a CRM. There should be a metric that you're tracking to prove that why you hired it is actually they're returning the investment on that. It's no different to me than hiring a team member and holding them to a standard and saying, you are hired, you are here to move this metric in our business, and you should measure that on a regular basis to see if it's happening. I find that when I talk to business leaders, they typically don't have metrics to measure the software that they're putting into their business. We demand it from our customers to say, what are you trying to accomplish? What problem are you trying to solve? But most importantly, what metric are you trying to move in your business? Close rates, average ticket, how much time people are spending in the home, those are real dollar value things that they can tie our solution to improving or not, so that they can say year in, are we helping return the value or are we not? If you don't have a specific ROI metric on each of the pieces of software in your business, I think it's really hard to understand, is the $100,000 I'm spending on HubSpot really worth it? Can I tie it to real outcomes in the business? And the more we can tie the software purchases to real money, I think the more value that you can see they're returning or not, and you can make good decisions on what to replace, what to vibe code, what to invest in, how to make changes and really make it thoughtful, not a feelings approach, but a real data-based approach. Adil Saleh 12:43 Yeah, that's the biggest thing, making sure it's all data-driven and sufficient based software economy. When I started this project, it was more about product usage, interactions. It was just more about that. 70% of your customer success was more about feature retention, how they're interacting with the platform, licenses, consumption, and all those renewals were driven by that. But now, I would say it's 50-50. 50% is more qualitative data sources, like what kind of activities they're doing outside of your platform. Let's say the growth of the team, some of the press releases, some external data points, like maybe some purchase within the day, maybe some hirings that they're doing, new executives that they're having, some other adjacent tooling that they're purchasing that gives us a leeway, like opportunities on expansion and all. And of course, some of these conversations that mentioned some of the red flags or maybe some of the data points that helps you maybe retain or expand having some sort of those cadences. So now, how do you see your success at Ingage post-sales to delivering value from day one, making sure, of course, they're well-onboarded? I know that's not easy, like plug-and-play, but you got to make sure you have people on implementation. Also, how is it onboarding them? Because 35% of these customers, I spoke to Gong, spoke to, I would say, $10 billion-plus companies, and we got them back in the first two years. And all of them said, we invested heavily into streamlining the onboarding part. That doesn't mean that they're trying to make it plug-and-play, but they need to know exact setups. Like, these are four setups, steps, and success metrics that we need to check before we go into the next stage. We need to make sure they are 100% successfully onboarded and they're ready to realize or get value from the product. Dean Curtis 14:41 I think that's one of the hardest problems any B2B software has to solve. When does the customer realize first value, and then when do they realize incremental value on top of that to say they're moving towards success? And what defines success? I'll go back to my previous response. Is there a metric we're driving? So, in our platform, the first thing we need to do is get content up and running. So, how fast can we get someone's first presentation created on the platform? How fast can we then get their sales team or whoever's going to use it up to speed on how to deliver it? Because delivering an interactive presentation on an iPad is very different than sitting with a clicker and boring someone to death, right? It's a very different experience. So, content, enablement, getting that sales rep up and running, and then success in the field. Well, for some companies, that could be a two- or three-day process because the content is based on some of our templates and it's really they're fast enough and running. For some, it could be 90 days because, well, our training schedule is once a quarter, and they want to make sure they're doing a good job of training salespeople so that they're going to make the best use of the technology. And also, there's a lot of fear because you're changing how I'm selling in the home. I'm hitting 100% of my numbers now, and now you're going to give me a new tool to go and, I mean, think about someone going up on a roof to install a roof with a brand-new tool. If you haven't taught them how to use it, precarious situation. I don't think sales is any different. If you expect something from them based on a new tool that you're deploying, you need to train them. So that time to value is so important. Get your content ready. Train people how to use it. Use it in the field. Learn and iterate. It depends on the company and how much they're investing in it, but it's a real investment of time and resources. And I think that's what a lot of people forget. There is no silver bullet technology. There is no set-it-and-forget-it technology. I don't care what it is. Even email, right? Email is like the bane of most people's existence because, yes, it's easy to use, but it's also the biggest time suck in the world because there's no guardrails around it. So I think that time to value, back to your question, is the most important. And being able to define those time to value metrics, no matter what the B2B software is, and then incremental milestones after that to say we're continuing to have success, that leads to a successful adoption for a customer. Adil Saleh 17:11 Adoption, yes. That's a real goal. If you could walk us through a little bit of your industry work. Let's say we pick one industry. Maybe it could be real estate. It could be manufacturing, oil and gas, whatever you're comfortable. And we walk through our people listening the entire customer life cycle, like starting from onboarding and how you're measuring success across the life cycles, time to time. And as you mentioned, across the journey, how you're measuring success step-by-step and then of course, what kind of teams involve, like are those account managers or customer success managers? So could you just take one industry? Dean Curtis 17:48 Yeah, sure. So, I mean, we sell to sellers. So I'll use a generic sales use case. It could be any vertical market. Well, there's a piece of content that you buy our software because you believe if I gave them better content, they are going to sell higher deal sizes, faster, bigger close rates, whatever that metric is you're going to move. Well, the first thing is building the content. So that's the first milestone. The second milestone is enabling the team with the right technology. Do you need to get them iPads? Do you need to teach them how to use the iPads, teach them how to charge them, connect them to the network? There's a huge list or there is a list, it could be huge, could be simple, of making sure they're enabled just with the physical technology. The next piece in our world is teaching them the value of the content you've created and why it's going to convert customers at a higher rate. How is it going to allow you to sell a roof faster? How is it going to allow you to improve the rate of rescission? So people who say after three days, no, they're going to have buyer's remorse. No, we can help them save some of those. So it's the ability to really train them on the what, but also the how. What is it? How do I deliver it? And why am I delivering it? That has to be trained. Once that's in place, there is a constant iteration of, A, is the content performing? Do people understand? Is it too vague? Is it not specific enough? Is it personalized enough? If I'm walking into a demographic of A, but the images shown in my presentation are of demographic B, it might not resonate. How do I improve that? So there's this feedback loop of content between the people who are delivering it and the people who are creating it that has to happen. That's the next phase. So we know there's that conversation going back. We can track, in our platform, we can track the analytics of how someone's delivering content. And then it's up to our customer, the analytics person, whoever that is, the analyst, to say, great, well, if Dean is presenting, he's closing at a 32% rate. If Jim is presenting, he's closing at a 42% rate. Let's look and see what they're doing with the content to make that difference. Is it a content thing? Is it a talk track thing? Is it a what we wear thing? I mean, it could be anything, but at least we give them some metrics on content to see if someone is doing something a little bit different, how do we learn from that? So it's that iteration at the backend that is constantly needed so that you can improve the content, therefore get it back out to the people, train them again, and have that success and that adoption. So to us, true adoption is after a year, is it an indispensable tool for the team? And if it's not, they're probably not going to renew. But if we make it an indispensable tool as fast as possible, we know we're going to almost guarantee that renewal on the backend of the year. Adil Saleh 20:46 Love it. And now thinking about the workflow, a lot of these buyers that are consuming Ingage, and of course analytics part is big enough for you to actually train them to monitor themselves, apart from you measuring their success in an all-in-one tool that gives all the data and everything. What kind of workflows these customers have? In traditional SaaS, it's like a CRM, they have support tooling. What kind of tooling that you have Ingage's access to to be able to give the best bespoke training and all the content that is more personalized to their sales process? Dean Curtis 21:23 Yeah, so we talk about this in terms of the entire tech stack. So where do we fit into that tech stack? Selfishly, I'd love to be the through line of the in-home conversation, meaning when they walk in the home, they start in our product. And when they walk out of the home, they end in our product. And the reason is, it provides a really consistent customer experience, but it also provides a consistent experience for the salesperson. So the salesperson literally could only have to have one piece of software because we can integrate with the CRM. So maybe when you open the presentation, it pulls in data from the CRM. So the first page has a picture of their house or their name or something like that. And then throughout, we can integrate with configure price quote tools. So maybe the sales rep has to go off and build a quote. We can pull that information in so you could present affordability and pricing. We can integrate with finance software so that you can pull in the latest financing rates and the different plans. Maybe even do a soft pull of credit right inside our app, not because of our technology. Well, it is. We don't have soft pull of credit, but what we do have is a way to embed that within the content that you created. So it's all those different touch points. Our customer base typically has a CRM. They have marketing automation. They have financing software. They have configure price quote tools and they have production software. We don't necessarily integrate with the production side of things, that's post-sale, but everything leading up to the sale, information about the lead, can flow into the content that they create and engage and then create an engaging experience for that prospect because we have touch points into all those different systems. Adil Saleh 23:04 Love it. You also mentioned the training part, internal enablement part for your customers. How is Ingage enabling sales team to get the best, I would say, practices based on some of the data points, some of the prior conversations and all these experiences that are yielding the best, those numbers, all of those. So do you guys have any sort of library or any kind of end plates inside Ingage to make sure that they don't have to re-learn everything so everything is kind of systemized and the data is right there. That is content that has run in the past and one vertical for one sales guy is reputable. So how does that process work? Dean Curtis 23:46 Yeah, our best clients will use the content they create and then use the interactive capabilities of our platform to train in the platform. So we have this concept of a pop-up within the platform and one of those that you could place on the page could be a hidden pop-up, could be a very visible thing, could be a video that teaches you how to use the page that you're currently in front of. So it's very meta of, hey, here's a recording of Dean presenting this in the home to somebody so it could be a training layer inside of the exact presentation. What some people do is they'll create a copy of it and maintain both. I personally prefer one simple and give people a way to very easily add those videos or talk tracks could be just an audio talk track so they can still see the screen. Hey, you want to go up here and tap here and have this conversation and you should talk about this for about 30 seconds. You should ask this question. If they do this, if they give this response, move forward five pages and go. You can give them all the training that you want right inside the platform, which is pretty powerful. Adil Saleh 24:53 Yeah, love it. And a lot of these sales, like you mentioned specifically, like you are not going to go for sale. It's always gone. All the processes, anything that you can enable up to the stage of making the transition, which is having the sale done. So now thinking about all these prospecting and data enrichment tooling and all of this, that gives at least now 80 to 90% of insights into leading up to a conversation into the customer industry vertical. All these signals that would help you drive meaningful engagements. How does Ingage do it to enable the content that is actually going to be used by, consumed by salespeople from that research part, like external research and all. Do you have any kind of AI implementation or AI infrastructure that is doing it for other engagement platforms? Dean Curtis 25:47 Yeah, I mean, it's definitely an area of focus for our engineering team right now is to understand how we leverage that in real time. What we do have today in the product is a way to think of, do you remember Mad Libs as a kid where you'd have a piece of paper and you'd have insert noun, insert verb, and it changes the story based on the person who puts in those inputs, right? So imagine your CRM is the input for the presentation, and there's 15 spots in the presentation that are placeholders so that the CRM can inform how personalized that content is going to be. That's what we do today. So imagine, I'll give you a real example that's the most simple example. One presentation for a 10 person sales team. But when I get to the last page, it's my personal information. And when you get to the last page, it's yours. I didn't have to build a custom deck. It just knows that because I'm logged into the system, I'm going to put my picture, my phone number, my email address, my follow-up, my QR code, whatever those things are that are going to be personal to me as a sales rep in that content would be personalized on the fly. So that's the kind of stuff we have today where I want to say it's very dynamic. We call it dynamic content based on the person, the team that you're opening it on. So let's say you have a team in Florida and a team in Maine. Well, you're probably going to have the same sales. You want the same sales content for the Maine team and the Florida team. But a house in Maine looks very different than a house in Florida. Well, when the Maine team opens it, you could make sure all the images match Maine. And when the Florida team opens it, you could make sure all the images match Florida. Same presentation, different person who opened it. We can do that kind of stuff. Adil Saleh 27:36 Love it. And on top of as much as you can get in terms of data and information from the CRM, it keeps it more personalizing. Perfect. So it's basically getting all the information and I would say data points from the CRM predominantly and working off of those. That's right. Okay. Love it. So now thinking about I know that customer success and revenue retention has been the biggest like everybody wants to retain and everybody wants to see like how, what are the ways to expand the customer base? And this has been pretty mainstream that they are trying to go multi-product or trying to have more features or cutting down on some features to put a more price in some of the capability and restricting customers. What are you guys thinking of in terms of I know retention as much as the retention is the focus, expansion could be a test more or same. So as a chief executive, what are the plans? What kind of initiatives are you thinking of having a bigger market cap in the coming years and making sure that you capture as much as the rest of the market or within the same vertical you're thinking, hey, these are the things that we could do to have maybe expand on the revenue side of things and top-line revenue increments. So I'll guess thinking and going into of course 2026 is a huge new game. Dean Curtis 28:55 Yeah. So there's a couple of things. One, we want to have multiple product tiers so that as people can grow with us so they have something simpler to start with and that's something we're working very, very hard on right now. Think of right, our current platform is the middle tier of where we are and everybody gets very similar tools. We want to provide additional integrations, additional capabilities on an enterprise side, but also a simpler piece of software that allows people to get in, have success really quickly and then grow into the middle tier. So one is, like you said, give me the, everybody has these pricing pages, give me the pricing page where I get the basic and then I can upgrade to the advanced and then I can upgrade even more to the super advanced version of the software. That is part of the strategy. The other part of the strategy is adding additional capabilities within each tier to just give a simple upgrade. So those are upgrade mechanisms throughout. The other thing that that provides, if you're only, it's the old Henry Ford quote, you can have any color you want as long as it's black. When he built the first Model T, it's like, well, finally, I have one product. If you don't like it, you're no longer a customer. So the other advantage of having multiple platform, tiers across the platform is if they thought they were going to get all the value out of tier two, and now they realize tier one is better. You have a downsell mechanism. So that retention is so important. Logo retention, revenue retention. Well, if I can maintain the logo, but for a lower dollar, I'm happy to do that, if that's the value I provide. The key is the value that you provide and the willingness for them to pay, the gap has to be really big. And the bigger you make that gap, the better you are going to be seen to them as a value provider. If your gap is only this big, doesn't really help. If you stretch that gap, the farther we stretch the gap, the more value they see. That's the importance of defining what goes in those product tiers, the amount of money that they're going to be able to pay for those, the discounting structures, a million things you can have in terms of all the different ways to price and package your product so that you can get maximum value from the customer. But most importantly, they're not going to give you money unless you're providing maximum value to them. Adil Saleh 31:16 No matter what tier they're at, doesn't matter. You got to deliver. Yeah. Love it. You know, that's the thing. And when a lot of these platforms, at least in the last, I would say 14 to 18 months, they come up and they say like, we are going AI native, we are going AI powered, we're just using LLMs and building things on top. And this is going to be an augmented solution for teams that want to do more with less and all of that. So now when I talk to them a year, year and a half down now, they're so worried about API cost and how they need to price it, whether should they go with the user base or seat base or both. And even if they go user base, how they can make sure that the price is competitive because there's some new platforms with like Prezi starting from 5 million, 10 million, they could, they're going to blow them up. So it's so much of noise when it comes to setting up the GTM frameworks, thinking of getting AI models into play for your customer base. So what do you guys have thinking about it? Like first off, do you want to go with that route? Like having agentic workflows or having copilots within those? Dean Curtis 32:22 I mean, to me, it's all about providing maximum value in the shortest amount of time. So if there's a way that AI can help us do that, we're looking at all of that stuff. I think there's also an important thing to remember. We don't always have to be bigger, faster, stronger. It's okay to be who you are. And if you're providing value to the customer, they're going to continue paying you money because what's more important, keeping your existing customers paying and increasing three to 5% a year or losing half of them and having to go build your entire customer base all over again. We had the greatest customer quote come in last week. So we have this internal Slack channel of customer quotes, good stuff, bad, all the different things. And someone sent in a quote and did paraphrase. We're really thankful that you are staying in your lane and doing what you do best and not adding a bunch of crap. They literally said that, that we don't need and charging us more. So you have to really understand your customer, talk to them all the time, understand the value you're providing, and then only charge them more if you're adding more value. And it's not bolting on a bunch of extra features or doing an acquisition to be something you're not. It's about really focused on value to the customer. That will define what we do always as a company. Adil Saleh 33:44 Right, right. And then you previously mentioned that you're investing heavily into customer education to work, like to make sure you achieve that level of adoption, because that's pretty critical onboarding to adoption. So now what kind of technology or process or internals tooling have you had, apart from that analytics platform, to measure this from first step onboarding, first value path to adoption? Now when they're well inside the platform, they know how to use technology, they're well trained to it, they're able to get their numbers, they're getting going. I mean, of course, this is process and everything. So in this life cycle, what kind of technology are you using to measure success? If you say, so this has been the critical, and this is, in general, it's the most critical. That's where like 35% of the customer base gets churned. This is a survey basically we did with 180 businesses. So now, what kind of technology, what kind of processes, team that you have allocated there to make sure that you mitigate this, number one, mitigating the time to value, make sure you cut that time as much as possible, and doing the customer education adoption enablement to make sure they're well-adopted platform and they know what value is. And as you know, as team or any technology that you're using to make sure you measure that part of value, how they perceive value out of your product. Dean Curtis 35:04 Yeah. And it's a challenge because not everyone sees value the same way. So you have to understand how this customer segment sees value versus this customer segment versus this one, right? So in our product especially, some people look at value because the two days a week they go and run appointments, they use Ingage. Well, some people, if they're not using it seven days a week, there's no value. So how do I build a system that understands, that's where AI is very helpful, to understand the trends with one account versus the other. We call it our customer health index, very common phrase I think that a lot of people use, which is custom to us based on the data that we're collecting. We have analytics, an analytics platform that we're serving to our customers, but obviously we have access to all that as well. So we know what people are doing, what features they're using in the product. All of that is contributing to a health score that drives real human behavior. Our customer experience team reaching out, making sure we're talking to the right people, helping people pass certain roadblocks if they're hitting them, or understanding that this is how they use the product, tell me if it changes. So customer health index in a general sense is the simple answer to your question. All the inputs that go into customer health index, we're constantly looking at that so that we can make the best assessment of who needs our attention and time, who's bumping up against the walls and needs more features that we could upgrade, who's not using it a lot and maybe needs a downgrade, who's actually right on target, let's send them a congratulatory email and be like, hey, you're hitting the metrics that you defined. Like all the way back to what I was talking about at the beginning. So using that customer health index is the most important piece of technology we've built internally in order to know who's who in the zoo and what they're doing. Adil Saleh 36:57 Who is who in the zoo? Yeah, that's crazy. It's just so in your case, like the value or realization and utilization of the product could be altogether different. And to build something custom that understands maybe in some customers taking the journey and all of this and then keep them segmented and then keep on giving you health scores or I'm sure you must have configured some sort of parameters to the weightage that it used to define a health score because that's been also one of the health scoring tooling. They are like, they're never accurate. So building it to your own is the best way to do it because nobody knows your customer or that segment and their journey is better than any of the tooling. Or you just go and configure all of that in some of the tooling that gives you not the accurate health score to drive the customer relationship. So now all of this is digital, like the communication that goes with email or how does the customer facing team actually engage? Dean Curtis 38:04 Yes, all of the things. So by email, by text message, by voice, by Zoom calls, we have a support chat, we have Intercom as part of our support team. So we have chat within the app. So we meet our customers where they want to talk to us. It's not a single point of entry. We make sure we can ensure that they have all the routes to us that they would need, but also that we also try to track as best we can the best way to communicate with a specific customer. Some people will never respond to an email, but if you text them, they're going to get back to you right away. Some people will never return a voice call. Some people pick up their phone every single time. You have to understand there's no one size fits all, and you have to understand for each customer, their best mode of communication. Hey, you want to get in touch with me? Don't send me a Slack message or an email. You got to text me. Adil Saleh 38:58 Yeah, I got you. And now talking about getting back to the customer health measurement and making sure that it's accurate, as accurate as possible. How do you compensate all these qualitative data sources, like people speaking on the phone with customers, people having engagements over the email or text, iMessage, all of this. Of course, it's always good to meet where customers are, but going back to that customer signal or certainly customer health side of things, how does it signal the information? Because, of course, a lot of these information that people speak becomes super critical. And I also didn't get that part that you mentioned in the beginning, that you want Ingage to start delivering value at the point of when the customer meet in person. And I was in San Francisco at an event and there, I don't recall that product, but there had a device that was actually recording that in-person keynotes and everything. And it was giving real-time summaries and notes to the team, their marketing team, they were taking creatives and taking actions real-time, like while that guy at Anthropic and GitHub, they were giving a keynote and it was recording all of those conversations and nudging their team members in the real-time. So could you also walk me through that part, because it becomes really critical for in-person meetups for your customers, for the training and enablement becomes a big use case. And second part, for all of these qualitative data sources, or I would call it information that lands, whether let's say your customer is having conversation with your rep over the phone, what is the next process, like your rep gets updated in HubSpot or CRM or in any way or shape to give that information or that health score platform that you built to analyze the stage or any opportunity expansion or churn signals or anything. Dean Curtis 40:54 Yep. So, the first one is, so in the home, so at the point of sale, at the point of business, we partner with people like Rilla Voice and Ciro. They're doing in-home recording. So we pair our analytics together, we marry them. So we can show a sales manager what they were showing on the screen when they said what they said in the home. So super powerful from a coaching perspective. We don't do the coaching, that's part of the voice speech analytics platforms like Ciro and Rilla. From our perspective, we're basic today growing with our use of AI to analyze every single call and score it. So, we're building some of our own workflows with AI to score all the calls that our team makes, sales calls, customer success calls, customer support calls, renewal calls, account management calls to understand where are opportunities for growth for our people, but also where are the opportunities for better communication with our customers. We're doing a lot of that with our own AI folks internally. We see that as a real differentiator for our sales team and our customer experience team because we're learning every single call as you get a score and we're humble to say, all right, I scored a four out of 10 on that one. What did I miss? Well, you didn't offer a BAMFAM, book a meeting for a meeting. There's no next step. So, we're trying new things every single week to improve that process because we haven't yet found a piece of software that would do that for us. There's a lot out there. They're also really, really expensive and take a long time to implement. So, we wanted to be specific to what we do as a company. Adil Saleh 42:31 Interesting. Yeah. I mean, there's loads and loads of platform. There's so many team leaders came up and using those platforms, sharing the experiences during the stage. And yeah, I mean, things are getting better because some new age platforms are really giving them a real competition talking about this CRM category. You might've seen the shares of HubSpot dropping down in Salesforce. Attio is going big. And then GTM, they're a whole bunch of these GTM tooling that are growing super, super fast. And I'm in that category, by the way. Our implementation used to take, when we started about a year back, maybe the category was sort of industry verticals were different so that we made a smart move. Now, it is about two weeks before it was almost three months. We used to have customers ghosting us. They had to just do two hour work integrating their segment or HubSpot or integrating data. And it was that simple. But again, you mentioned that it takes a lot of time. Do you not go and integrate, especially in your infrastructure, where there's four or five different data sources coming data from different sources. And then you mentioned that interaction data is also three to four different sources, SMS, email, call. And even with the medium, I was thinking that if you could build your own note taker, but that again, that is only going to work with Zoom or Google Meet or Microsoft would not put for SMS and all of that. But it is simply pretty easy on the cost wise, as well as like, it's a week of job. You can get your own work. Like we built our own note taker just last week. We thought that, hey, none of these companies using Fireflies feed them. And it's so hard for us to enable them to just integrate all of those. Why not? They just go to the meeting user, choosing their own note taker. So yeah, there's so many, like you mentioned, if you keep customer at the center of everything and delivering value to those customers, center of everything, things become so simpler. So as you mentioned, that's the core part you built internally. So it was really, really nice. I mean, just one last question. There's a lot of these folks, they kind of look up to people that sit here and share some of the things that are so much related to their industry and vertical. And that gives them number one inspiration into like, hey, this technology works for this vertical. And if you're struggling or we're winning, there's more to learn. And there's people that are doing it slightly differently. And we can also adopt that. Second, it's of course, a lot of these founders like ourselves, they're just living in a kiosk. And they're previously, they were thinking that funding is the biggest thing. Now, it's not. It's about distribution and any funds that can help you distribute fast. I highly doubt that there's, it's just about finding a unique messaging, unique, I would say, unique storytelling strategies to get your product out in the face of the right industry vertical. So anything that you shared that makes you excited for this year going forward, any new initiative that you're taking product-wise, chief executive, marketing-wise, any initiative you're taking on to moving into different verticals or industries globally, what makes you excited? Dean Curtis 45:40 Yeah, I mean, I think thoughtful adoption of AI technology in our platform is number one. And then two is identifying the partners that we have a great, better together story. Because the more ways that you're helping someone to be successful, the more likely are you're going to stay sticky within that account. So if we go in and we're the only thing, but if we go in and we're married to two other things, and those three things combined provide 10 times the value, the opportunity to have great retention is there. So I look at partners being huge in our approach this year, as it always has been. And then being really thoughtful about what we do with AI and not chasing shiny objects, really building things that provide tremendous value for our customers. Adil Saleh 46:24 Absolutely. So it was really nice meeting you, Dean. So much to learn from you. It's so many insights that you, I mean, I got to learn a lot from your industry. I was quite honestly looking at the website, I should have had to sign up into your platform before even coming to this and see how is it different than many platforms that even came here that are doing like marketing presentation for sales decks for that. So thank you very much for giving me a different insight and changed my thought process into your category for the product that you built and wish you best for all that you do. Dean Curtis 47:00 Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it. Outro 47:03 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.