Ep#72: Empowering B2B Sales: Insights on Tech Entrepreneurship, Global Expansion, and Streamlining the Sales Process ft. Jinal Jhaveri (CO-Founder, Enable US)

Jinal Jhaveri 0:02 Think of it like Amazon, right? When you buy stuff on Amazon, you don't need to talk to like, five sellers. And for meetings, you can just go and buy it. Why doesn't that exist for b2b sales? That's what we're trying to do. Taylor Kenerson 0:15 Welcome to the Hyperengage podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here, we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearth the hows, whys and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement. Adil Saleh 0:33 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is Adil from Hyperengage podcast, I have a very special guest with us today. Now, he is co founder and CEO at Enable us it is pretty big task that comments from San Francisco Bay area, it's helping businesses transform their digital buying experiences more for, you know, buying selling buyers and sellers and direct customers. So we'll talk about that as well. Prior to that he was a part of the CO founding team at Miss small, it's also a remote platform for remote teams to hire on board and basically nurture more Pelant, mostly on the engineering side, as per my knowledge. And we'll also explore is, you know, long journey at schoolmate as a co founder and chairman, and also previously the CEO. So thank you very much now for taking the time from your schedule. Jinal Jhaveri 1:28 Thanks so much for having me. I'm super excited. Adil Saleh 1:32 Absolutely. So looking at your experience in the past 15 to 20 years, you know, with vast experience in the leadership role, as well as, you know, roles and on the board, side as well. So you've been leading the board for different platforms. So how did you see yourself like initially, someone, someone from, you know, as you said, backstage that it's, you know, someone from Lea evolving at the platform get getting all the knowledge, getting starting all of these startups over the over the next 15 years? What was the mindset? You know, because a lot of our startups are from also originated from India, and the CO founding teams, they have had a similar journey. They're heading towards the same and they might look up to you. Jinal Jhaveri 2:21 Yeah, no, thanks for the question. So, yes, as you said, I grew up in India, my last name actually means jeweler, and my family has been in the jewelry business for forever. So while I studied engineering, I was always amazed by the freedom my parents had when they were doing their own business. And so I studied engineering there, I decided to come to the US as a as a grad student in computer science at USC. But back of my mind, I always had that, wow, that's still type of life on a level where I can have my own business. And so after working for a couple of tech companies, early stage startups, I jumped in and started, started my entrepreneurial journey with the first company that he said, It means more musical actually was originally called log of n. And the goal was like, I was good at engineering. And so I would help other companies scale that infrastructure with my skills. But it started, things started growing very quickly, we started getting demand for more work. And so eventually, we grew it into what it's called mes more where we help companies hire, retain, and nurture engineering teams solely focused on Latin America. So that's the that's how it started. Since then, I've started a few other companies, some of which are venture backed, starting with early stage investors like Y Combinator, but also we went and raised a lot more money after that. School mind is the second company that I started, it's focused on helping kids find the best school of their choice in the US. And so as you think about, as we think about kids staying living in an area, and parents wanting their kids to go to the best school, that's the best fit for who the kid is. And so us specifically has this notion of school choice where you get your zoned school, but you can also apply to other schools. And then there's a whole application process, there is a lottery process, which decides whether your kid gets into the school or not. And so we built a software that's now used by more than 20 25,000 schools in the US, where they can use our software to assign the seats to the to the students, and then it's enabled. And I'm happy to talk more about enable us as we go further. Adil Saleh 5:00 I love that I love the way that you are trying to make an impact with schooling. Like, I have one question. There's not a lot of, I've got a lot of friends that are bound to go to the public school. So you got some, you know, government collaborations as well, because, you know, a lot of times, they're just bound to, you know, go to the schools, like we have friends in New Jersey, they go to Cedar Grove, that's a public school that they they're supposed to go there cannot afford a private school. So, do you guys have any sort of government collaboration to enable this young talent to go to the school of their choice 100%. Jinal Jhaveri 5:36 So all the customers of school mind, our public schools, school districts, charter schools in the US. And so it's 100%, selling into the public school space, where historically they used to run this process manually, on paper, super error prone. Just imagine, like one kid applying to a school and application got lost. And now they didn't have a chance to go to the school of their choice, that could have changed the trajectory. And so that's where we come in the buyer software, everything is streamlined. Parents can apply on a phone, a lot of low income families that cannot afford to take days off, they can actually do it on their mobile phones, apply their kids to school in literally less than few minutes. So yes, you're so right, it's 100% government collaboration focused on studying in the public and charter schools. Adil Saleh 6:33 I absolutely love that. And I can only imagine how big of an impact can make into the lives of these young kids. You know, because that's, that's, that's where, you know, you nurture their mindset, you develop the mindset, corrector, all of that. And it depends a lot in a kind of country that I'm living, it's big enough a problem, by the way, in Pakistan, that education, like 60% of our population is not getting the education they need, you know, it's education system for minor Elite is so freakin biased. That, you know, sometimes you cannot help them. Yeah, there's like 20, you know, 20 100 100 20 million people out of school, and they're just, they don't have a way to get quality education in the in the government schools. And of course, the government is not that, you know, on the economy side, they're not investing too much. That's a whole different debate. But I love the way you're trying to process business. And there's a huge amount of respect I have inside for you. Okay, so my is my, I'm sorry, if I mispronounce it. More specific. mismo. Yeah. So most, you're more focused towards lady Mecca. What is that reason? Jinal Jhaveri 7:43 Yeah. So one of the things when I moved to the US, I realized as I started working with companies is that there is always more demand for talent than the actual technology, engineering talent available. And so people are folks are always looking outside. The thing that I realized is, a lot of times a lot of companies were hiring in countries like India and other time zones, like I grew up there. But there is always a challenge of not having enough overlap between us and those teams. And so to bridge that gap, one of the things we start exploring is, are there other places where we could also expand that talent apart from amazing talent in India, so that there's always that bridge between engineers and product managers working in the US with the teams offshore. And that's where we started exploring places like Costa Rica. And then we since then we have expanded to around 12, or 13 countries within Latin America. Some of these are small countries like Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, but also very big countries like Argentina, Brazil. And the benefit is, you get the amazing talent in Latin America, at a reasonable cost, but also having a huge overlap with the teams in the US. So that's what led us to build teams, they're Adil Saleh 9:17 very interesting, very interesting, because we are pretty much close to the startup community. So it becomes a very big challenge, not not challenges, not only the getting the top notch talent on the customer facing side on the on the technical side, as well, but also how they can optimize the cost. Like sitting in us as a startup. Of course, it's pretty littering to have a startup in the Bay Area. But you know, paying someone 150 grand a year is not that possible for every startup when when it comes to you know, making sure that you have the runway for at least six to 12 months. So in that in these kinds of scenarios, like how do you see it helping in the text? out of space, because of course, they're their companies that can go on demand power, let's say we have, you know, we have a recruitment partner here that hyper engaged that help get the GTM team. So you know, top notch customer facing teams from Pakistan from Canada. But again, the case is there, these are small businesses on the growth stage, but not specifically the startups because startups want people that are hybrid, they are wearing different hats. They are, you know, multi, you know, skill set, they have kind of different skill set, and at the same time they get it on a cost that is that is helping them, get them on longer term. For longer term. Yeah, no, see that happen? Jinal Jhaveri 10:42 Yeah, absolutely. So that's exactly those are the reasons why. It's, it's better to, not just within the US, but outside the US. And in countries where there are amazing engineers, LATAM, obviously, India and other Philippines and other areas to the benefit is, if you're in the US, you're always competing with talent, competing for talent, with companies that are paying significantly higher. And they already have a huge brand name, right, like companies like Google and Facebook, Amazon, there are always the destination for these engineers to get amazing benefits, amazing salaries and stock options and things like that. So for startups, actually, it works out even better, because as they're still building out the brand name, and they don't have a lot of cash in the bank to pay. They can actually have amazing, hardworking talent that can work long hours, like startup that startups need to succeed, but still not have to pay them a lot of money. And they can still do, not just salaries, but also stock options. Keep in mind that a lot of these countries still don't have the type of technology companies that are hiring actively in the US and India and other places. A lot of these companies still don't have that inflow of technology companies that is taking away the talent. And so that makes it easier for startups to hire talent there versus hiring in the US. Adil Saleh 12:13 Absolutely, absolutely. And, and another aspect to it, apart from the costs, apart from the, in all of this is actually getting the, you know, nurturing the initial mindset. It is super important for startups to, you know, not hires such experienced people, like, you know, it's I'm not talking about eight players just like to say, you definitely need smart people, but at the same time, you need people that you can that are teachable, you know, you bring one training center, a training and management platform, that doesn't cost a lot. Yeah. If you know, as a founding team, and then you enable people, so enablement program can be huge, with people from Latin America, from people from Philippines, you know, people in the in the Middle East, in India, there's so much gap. And compared to companies that are looking for a players, and there, they don't have such a nurturing ecosystem to you know, develop the mindset and develop the, I would say the work ethic, a lot of this matters a lot in the startup. Jinal Jhaveri 13:19 Yeah, no. One on that. Yep. I agree with you. Adil Saleh 13:23 So on enablers, I've seen that observe that you're doing three of these businesses all together at one time. And I was just thinking that how the dots dots connect, like talking about school meant, it's more of, you know, enrollment management, talking about baseball, it's more of, you know, more teams, enrollment, or, you know, of course, nurturing and all of that, that definitely makes sense. Uh, what about enablers? Yeah, digital experiences you streamline? Jinal Jhaveri 13:52 Yeah, so that's a great segue into why I started Ebola. So squirming got acquired a few years ago, and I moved to the chairman role, I'm still involved as a board chairman. But that allowed me to then take it take some time off, and kind of think about what I want to do mismo also run by my co founder, so I'm not actively involved in a day to day operations. So that gave me some time on what I want to do next. And then I joined a venture firm as a venture partner. And as I joined the venture firm, I also had a chance to think about what were some of the things that I wish I had existed at my, during my time at school made me smile. And one of the things that was very interesting. So as a VC when you are investing, companies are pitching you, they're creating these decks, they're creating this deal rooms, data rooms for you, and they're pitching it to you and making it easy for you as a VC to review everything, ask questions and invest. Now, if you think about the same phenomenon in b2b sales, and I got to see that firsthand at school meant, where I was leading sales early on where I was growing the sales team And what I saw was two main problems. One is, as a CEO, when I was selling, if I needed something from my team, everyone would stop and help me out. And second is the thing that I saw at the VC firm is the notion of making it easy for investors to review everything. So that connected the dots there, like why doesn't something like this exist in the b2b sales where first and the seller, whatever they want. That could be case study, that could be a white paper that could be a customer reference, why can we have one easy place for them to find it and then create personalized deals room very quickly for the buyers, make them feel like a VC make them feel special by giving them everything they need to review on their own, without spending hours and hours in demos and calls and follow up calls and things like that. And so that led me to, to build enable us basically enable us is what I said, it's a sales and buyer enablement platform, it makes it easy for the sales team to find everything they need to sell. And then using that information, they can create a personalized digital sales room for every single buyer. The buyers can review it, they can ask questions, they can invite other stakeholders, they can even sign the deal, all in one single place. And so that's what enabled us. That was the rationale on why I started enable us. Adil Saleh 16:38 Very interesting, like, we talked to a lot of VC firms. And, you know, they tend to say that, you know, when I when we look at the growth metrics of these platforms that are looking for investments and funds, it always takes us like, make it all makes us ask questions all the time, because they're not so seamless. And they're not making sense, a lot of times, they are sometimes so wish for because a lot of startup teams, they are so energetic, they are emotionally so married to their idea, and you know, their journey, and they think that in a year time a year for them. Because they have acquired like in first three months, 15 customers, that's that's how it's gonna look like they create numbers. So how does this fit for, for this kind of motion for a startup to enable a startup to have sort of a realistic buying experiences or realistic, you know, sales metrics for they started to raise funds, and sit with investors and make them feel confident on onto their, onto their intelligence? Jinal Jhaveri 17:44 Yeah, so spot on. So as in the early days, mostly the founder or someone from the founding team is leading the sales. Now imagine, as you're leading the sales, imagine, for every sales calls that you have, now you have to send a personalized email, or DAC, a case study a customer reference, and then respond to these questions that they have sent more material and then sign the deal. As a founder, you only have so much time that you can do that. And so wouldn't it be awesome if the whole process of birth, starting from the very first touchpoint, send them something to review before the call, follow up with the recording of the Zoom call, follow up with proposals follow up with customer references. If all of that can be automated, then as a startup founder, you can actually manage orders of magnitude, more sales, and more opportunities and more deals than you can manage today. And so we have customers that are very early stage startups, as well as mid stage companies and to some public companies that are using our software. And the main goal is how do we make it easy for the sellers to sell fast, and to sell more. And so that's the whole goal. And so both startups and large companies can benefit from it. Adil Saleh 19:07 Okay, so how does it fit in a sales ecosystem? Let's say they're using Salesforce as a CRM, they're using, you know, for pipeline management platforms, different platforms that we cross to. So how does it basically plugs in into the existing workflows of the sales team? Let's say to midsize company. Jinal Jhaveri 19:27 Great question. So what it does is we talk to you we have integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and other CRMs. So what it does is as soon as a deal gets created in the CRM, automatically we know that a deal is created and an email gets sent to the seller saying click here to create a personalized room. Now that email as soon as they click it already has couple of things that they should be sharing with the buyer at that deal stage. It's critical. You don't want to overwhelm them with that Breathing, you only want to share the right amount of material at the right deal stage so that buyers have everything they need to review, they can share it internally, they can get approvals all of that happening while you send them the stuff. And so that's where it fits in. And then it sends a link in less than a minute you can create this room, send it out to the buyer, or the champion, they can start reviewing it, the best thing is, when they review it, you know that they looked at it, you know what their job title is? You know, Adil Saleh 20:32 when you have the visibility, Jinal Jhaveri 20:33 exactly. You can you can get their job title, you can see if the CFO looked at it or not if the CEO looked at it or not, if they can see what questions they are asking. And then you automate the whole process. But literally, instead of doing dozens and dozens of emails and attachments and phone calls, now you have one place, think of it like Amazon, right? When you buy stuff on Amazon, you don't need to talk to like five sellers and or meetings, you can just go and buy it. Why doesn't that exist for b2b sales? That's what we're trying to do. Amazon like experience for b2b sales? Adil Saleh 21:07 Sales or sales? Motion? Exactly. It's more like that. Exactly. Keep in mind. Jinal Jhaveri 21:14 Yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. And keep in mind that the new buyer is a millennial buyer. They are used to ordering stuff on Uber, they're used to ordering stuff buying stuff on Amazon. Now the disconnect is when they go and buy a b2b software, they expect the exact same experience and they don't get it. And that's what we're providing them with the notion of digital sales. Adil Saleh 21:36 Because we we we speak to midsize companies and they say we try to get I won't name any platform, but we will try to, you know, just expand the cases that they have put on a report is the long sales cycles, a lot of it gets like Lost in Translation, and you know, your customer, or your buyer is actually shooting in the dark. You don't know who has reviewed it? What step is it at right now, whether it's internal setting an internal review, whether they are not interested at all, you don't have visibility at the exact step result. And that's how I think in MLS can definitely potentially help these, you know, these subscription based businesses as well for b2b segment, we're sales cycles are pretty huge. And they don't have sometimes they just quit their sales in the pipeline in their pipeline for for longest periods, and it's hard, hard for them to follow up, and virtually customer gets. That's pretty cool. Yeah, the buyer gets cold. Okay, so now looking at enablers like you've been there for about two years, now. You're sitting at Thiede two, three years, sitting at seat. So what kind of growth metrics are you guys looking at in terms of, you know, go to market, how you're trying to expand the go to market motions, and acquire new customers? And what does the post sales operations look like? Jinal Jhaveri 23:02 Yeah. So yeah, so we started in 2020. Early on, we focused on getting to the product market fit, we were part of Y Combinator, that helped us a lot. And then we raised a seed round, in fall of summer of 2021, we launched the actual product and follow 2021. And since then, we have started growing the customer base. So it took us a few iterations on getting to the product market fit. I mean, it was a fun journey. But finally we got to it. Since then, we have grown more than 300%. Year over year, we right now, sir, more than 105 customers in more than 10 countries with most of the customers in the US. But we also have customers in Europe and a lot of other countries in terms of where we are growing. So we are going through three different types of sales motion, we have a direct sales motion, where prospects find out about us to places like GE to and others where we are a leader in our category now. So they come to us we do a demo. And then we sell them the product. We also have a product lead growth motion. And what that means is they can come to our site, they can try out the product on their own without ever talking to a salesperson. And they can only ping us when they want to. Or they can go and sign up on their own for however long they want. And then we also have a couple of other partners where we exist on their platform. So we are We exist on HubSpot and a bunch of other partners who are selling on behalf of us to their customer base. And this is mostly for enterprise customers. And so those are the three sales motion that we plan to continue to expand and nurture over time as we have seen a lot of success with those. Adil Saleh 24:45 You mentioned PSD. Like we use a lot of platforms, you're also building platforms and the goal for early startup in the first year is to make it central as much as possible. And then God operations teams test Hands in place to grow the lifetime value of those customers. When they get bigger, of course, higher CSMs get them book of businesses, make them served accounts, as well as possible and you know, make sure they adapt, retain and you know, try to expand them. So how you're trying to invest the business from a business standpoint towards increasing the lifetime value and the bill PLD motion? Jinal Jhaveri 25:22 Yeah, so a couple of ways. One is, now think about the sales journey, you talk to the prospect, they like your product, they ask you questions, they invite others, they got approval, they signed the deal. The journey of our software registered digital sales room doesn't stop there. At that point, what are you doing next, you're going to focus on onboarding the customer. Yes, and that also be the same room in which your CSM uploads, onboarding, material onboarding, training, and things like that. So now you start getting now we start expanding into the company by getting the customer success team also, user software, that's expansion. Okay, now you're expanding, and then the customer is ready to buy additional things from you. So we collect all the signals that are not just viewed by the customer success, but also by the account management team where they can see the look, the customer bought the product, they are on boarded, they are happy, it's time to go and upsell something else to them. And so that's how we expand is a lot of land and expand going on through plg motion, where they start with a smaller team, but then they start inviting other team members who are either helping them close the deal, or who are helping them onboard the customer, and then upsell to the customer over time. That's where we see the lifetime value of our users. Adil Saleh 26:48 So you know, a lot of these pod motion businesses notion, for example, Slack figma, their loads. So they are they're sort of monitoring us for as long as you don't get bigger, big enough for them to you know, make sure that they need more licenses, more team members, more users. So how, like on the usage based model, how you're planning out on on the expansion, that is also can be yourself. So our plan, and it gets directly to the sales team anyway, like, if you're a customer post sales team sees an opportunity. How does that process work around? Jinal Jhaveri 27:29 Yeah, excellent question. So today, yeah, so today, we actually don't have anything that's use it best. So once you get a license for the user, you have unlimited access to unlimited number of deal rooms, unlimited amount of content, or limited amount of upsells and onboarding that you can do in the platform. In the future, if our customers want that we will definitely explore so that we grow with them. I'm a big believer in user base. But I'm also a believer in first letting your customers give you input on what's right for them. Because a lot of customers actually don't like use it because they don't have a prediction on their budget versus licensed base, they can predict what they're going to spend for the year without seeing surprises that I have seen in some of these platforms, where month over month, your contacts go up, and now you have to pay more, something else goes up and you have to pay more. And that does create a lot of issues on especially in this environment, it does create a lot of issues on is my costs gonna keep going up or not. So that's why we have done it on a fixed price for unlimited number of deal rooms, unlimited number of content, we only charge per seat. Adil Saleh 28:42 per seat. Okay, so that means once the team grows, of course it has to pay per user. When select a lot of these people like how we're using the notion of like two businesses. I've got two team spaces around 1311 1112 people inside. So as soon as I need more, I try to make sure is that critical? Or should I just pass on the logins to one of the users so we can we can produce a lot that happened with net metrics. Clearly big scale. That's the question is how you're seeing and trying to cater this kind of scenarios. Jinal Jhaveri 29:17 Yeah, excellent question. So we, we want to be fair, right? Our main goal as the governor, the platform is help the seller sell fast and sell more. And so when they want to do that, sometimes as you know in the deal, they might invite their CTO, their CS person, engineering person, sales engineer to help them close the deal. The way the platform is built, we don't charge separately for them. We only charge if you are a new seller and if you are going to be creating more deals. So we make it fair so that we can do whatever needs to be done to help you sell more and sell fast. Adil Saleh 30:01 Yes. So if you want more sellers will have to pay more meaning that you you have more deals coming in to sell snack that makes business sense. Yeah, great, great. You know, it was I cannot tell you enough that how good I'm feeling having conversation with you because I haven't found an individual doing a lot of these things. I've done a lot of these things at that scale. So I really, really appreciate your time. And, and the way you've been so genuinely open to share your ideas and your approaches towards these businesses and the kind of impact you were trying to make. So I wish you really good luck, and I'll definitely see how we can touch back up real soon on some of the opportunities that it that you have so much to offer. Jinal Jhaveri 30:43 Sounds good. No, thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan of your podcast. So I'm excited that I was finally able to come and talk to you. Thanks again. Appreciate it. Adil Saleh 30:51 Take care. Thank you very much. Have a good rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode please share your feedback at adil@hyperengage.io. We definitely need it. We will see you next time and another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a Customer Success leader and how you can empower engagements with some building some meaningful relationships with qualified people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners do reaches out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.