Rajan: AI is reshaping businesses and ignoring it could leave your industry disrupted. I'm Rajan and this is Pivotal Clarity.We talked to those building or using. AI founders and engineers with real world experience. Our aim is to cut through the hype and see where AI is truly making an impact. If you're a business or following tech trends, these conversations offer clearer insight than most of the press. Let's get into today's episode. Welcome to part one of this episode on Pivotal Clarity. Today I sit down with Amit Panday to discuss practical AI tools, marketing and GTM in AI. Amit is a close friend and I've known Amit for over two decades now. He spent the last two decades building software products for companies large and small and in some cases helped design them, market them. And Amit worked at Oracle and Yahoo and he designed AI products at startups like Tact and Aviso. Amit is a person that I always go to whenever I have questions about go to market, especially when it is about doing across multiple geographies. He's built inled teams across different continents. Amit, I'm so excited to have this conversation. Welcome to the podcast.

‍

Amit: Thank you Rajan. Congratulations on the successful launch of Pivotal Clarity.

‍

Rajan: Let's start with a very simple question. What is your favorite AI tool?

‍

Amit: My favorite AI tool these days is actually lo. I never thought of it as an AI tool but as I've started using LOOM more and more and in the process of you know, building a lot of things from scratch right now, I've realized the tools I'm using on a daily basis, the simple things that they do, some of the cancellation, some of the transcript editing, so that I can cut out all of my hoursam, silences. Listen to myself at 2x. I don't even know how much of that is advanced AI, but it's, it's just fascinating to see how well that's been working. And in a personal sense I've been tripping a lot on animal based art which I like making through Metas, AI Assistant and WhatsApp because it just feels like a very natural way to use AI. I know it's not like mid journey or cutting edge, but just that integration into WhatsApp and then you know, sending that bootleg to my like favorite people that I create different kinds of art from that's been on the personal.

‍

Rajan: Side I think we all under appreciate how much you know, meta can do in the AI space. Like they Came in as a late entrant, but they've been quietly and sometimes maybe even loudly releasing products and they all continue to impress us, isn't it?

‍

Amit: Absolutely. Well, of the really interesting things, I don't know if this is happening to everybody, but I'm experiencing this with my own meta AI that it keeps prompting things like, you know, so if I ask you to make a scene with a 18th century setting with like an elephant and a monkey having tee in a forest or something, then it limitedly then prompt me, would you like to see yourself as a central character? And I've never taken the bait, but you know, when I think about some of the things we'll talk about today, you know, between now and a perfect simulacra where, you know, we are in a constructed reality, you can think of it as the kind of reality that Thanos is able to create an Avengers in an instant. Right. It feels like the tendrils of the future are like finding their way into these messages one message at a time and sort of tempting us into that. And I'm comfortable now with making my own AI replica. I've been experimenting with some tools on that. But I haven't reached the stage where I feel the need to see myself as the central character in arcs and narratives that I may never live. But I feel like we're not that far from meta with the glasses and everything, taking us to that kind kind of science fiction that we probably saw in the 1980s.

‍

Rajan: If you worked at tact almost about eight years ago, right. And at that particular point in time was really cutting edge in terms of the AI that they were building. What is different between like what happened when you were working at TAK and what is happening now?

‍

Amit: You are familiar with this. So we can use it as a reference point that the old Carota Paris deployment installation cycle, when I think back to that, or I think back to working in HP in the enterprise, mobility side or other things, it is so true, man. It is so true that at the time, the vision of a personal AI assistant for every seller that can you know, capture your meeting notes and be by your side and so on, which we were building in 2017, 2018, now that feels trivial, but specifically at a technology level also, at the time I remember the NLP engineers would tell me that intents was really hard. And you know, I still remember the architecture, architecture diagrams from those days. It feels like you can't talk about those today because it's just sort of assumed that those things are trivial and I think this is causing a bit of a false narrative also that I'm sure this problem is already solved but it's still not you’d 'agree with me that voice to voice, you know where we can keep walking around like the movie here that is still not there yet. Will it happen? I don't know but so you're absolutely right that in sales this has been a great example that the seller AI Assistant that Taed Conversica and some of the companies at that time were doing in 16, 17, 18 is only now in the form of actually not just in the tech companies that are in sales tech but also I guess Microsoft co pilot Cleen and some of these they're showing that vision from seven years ago.

‍

Rajan: What do you make of the speech to speech announcement that happened in Dev Day Dev for yesterday.

‍

Amit: I'FULLY caught up with it again. But one of the things that I have been thinking a lot about is going back to kind of where I started my career in UX design. That atmosphere will continue to play a huge role. You know when you are engaging with the voice personality, even the subtle choice of wave form and how natural it feels. I think that is a huge bearing on how you feel about the technology. The thing that I've been most interested in and I, I haven't seen the demo to know if they've matched up to Hume or they've exceeded home in the emotion detection and sort of response to that. Even across hundreds of people I have spoken with this year. One common theme is that an effective voice to voice interface which may be purely voice to voice or Voice PL multimodel for a lot of people still feels more human like than the on one side which kind of feels still conversational but not human like. And then of course the digital human era is just starting to unravel it. So you know if I show someone, someone like you see some, something sophisticated in 3D versus voice you immediately hear people say oh this just feels so much more human like. And just one observation on that and I think this is where Open Air is doing really interesting work on setting the ceiling and the floor in a way that it's definitely making it possible for more and more people to quickly launch these vice agents. But more importantly I think it's showing us use cases of things that where these are long unsolved problems. If you remember last dev day when they showed the Khan Academy Story with the father and the son and then like they're looking at that thing. I said, you know this if done right would have an impact on education. And so I would go back to an era you might remember, you might remember 20 years ago when companies like CKS consented existed in Bangalore, you know and in the, you were, you were a mobile maven. So you remember the time that there was this idea that mobile would transform education. It's taking that long. But you know in facing now this could really have this other effect of any voice to any voice, the original Douglas Hodaddler Babelfish happening in a way that we don't need to get into this but, but the dominance of the west versus the spreading off ideas everywhere. I think it's been great to see to be honest, demo days and dev days be about demos and devs, not about we won't get into the alternative.

‍

Rajan: That's so true. I want to sort of go into something which is very related to this. Back in the days working with consumer company, you have a design background then used to sort of design products from a product and what people will now call us product led growth. I mean I tell folks that product led growth is like you know, make an awesome product. So you worked on products like that. And then now most recently I worked with enterprise and when I look at startups that are doing well, I mean I think those two opposite ends of the spectrum, even B2B companies which are taking a product led approach of building awesome product that it triggers word of mouth and then amplified further. So those type of products are taking off. On the other hand there is top down starting from the board, then pushing to the CEO and then selling anything that is available by the GTM team that when they are putting it on AI that is getting traction, companies like Lean and Writer and others. So there are these two extreme ends of GTM and then there is role of AI also in GTM. So I talk a little bit about GTM and AI and its overlap and their thoughts on that.

‍

Amit: I think first off while there are successes where there are companies which just did one of these two models and a classianian Orurov Viva. I think it's generally been very difficult for the majority of companies to just stick to one model and do exceptionally well there now I think Viva and the very specialized vertical model where the number of players that enter the market itself is limited and you have all sorts of other funky like five forces interactions that actually help startups to charge 250k, 500k and so on per customer. It is possible that you just have a great sales team, you have a very particular product for the vertical and you keep like building that kind of business. But if you look really far, there are only so many successes like that. Now on the other hand, the PLG world you mentioned, there's a lot more successes there. But I think this no man's land is very dangerous, risky. And I've I've seen more companies including once I've been with where we got both right. It's just really difficult to do right. And I, I think one of the interesting things is that doing both right is not just about getting your goat market model right. And I'll just make an observation like above and below. So when I say above, what I mean is the organization structure, classic command and control, actually works really well for a vibe like company. Actually works really well for an open like company, right? You have maybe three business lines. It works sort of really well. You may not have everything documented. If the CEO gets sucked up by a plane in the sky, you're in trouble. But it works well for what, whatever it's worth. The problem is that if that model is a complete misfit for PHG in a way, right? Because at the end of the day you think about the products that have the best onboarding, for example. In many ways it's a shame that despite so many products having good onboarding, more products have shitty onboarding. But you can directly translate the lack of design effort, PM effort and perhaps even writing effort into, into like copy of the, you know, campaign sequences and such directly into like, I wouldn't necessarily call them B players, but sometimes A players in B environments are basically B players too. And that's because the notion is what you said, that you know, whatever selles, let's sell it. So I think that the companies that are in the middle that are trying to get this hybrid of pure PLG sales assisted PLG and then classic enterprise sales, I think they've somehow figured out a way to marry command and control with enough that decentralization. Because you and I both know as people who built things that it usually takes a couple of weekends of some inspired work for in onboarding flow to happen. The rest of it, you know, the Jiras and the stories and the whatever process you want to call it in UCD and whatnot, those are nice ways to describe it, but ultimately it's is the imagination and inspiration of people. Now in terms of Go to market and AI is three quick observations. I think the first is that you know the imbalance is real. Sales TechCak has been the most oversee. Marketing, tech, a little less oversee, customer success tech, sales engineering tech, all this tech only now starting to get attention. Customer success tech. I don't know, I mean it still feels like it's getting rolled up into sales tech basically. But certainly this sales engineering type of tech, pre sales tech. I find this very interesting because this means that enough niches are getting the distribution of energy in go to market. But there's also this counter trend happening which is that the future of CRM is not CRM, right. The feature of CRML'Autonomous GTM. The, the future of marketing automation is autonomous marketing, whatever you know that might mean. So the specialization and then the compression of the AI GTM stack are both happening together. So that's one I think is'super interesting. And the second interesting trend is the replacement of a lot of the tasks that otherwise most companies are just never able to afford. Classic example. The first time I had a digital marketing team, ages ago I had a guy who was a really good digital marketing leader. And he said okay, we need a normal SEO person and a technical SEO person. And I said okay, I'm not as smart as you might think I am because you know I came up through these other ranks. Why do I need these two people have. When he explained it to me I still didn't understand it but I understood that the rules were different. Now there's an interesting question of the, you know I think the sports equivalent in different sports is the utility infielder or the all wrong player. Right. If AI creates an all around GTM player, what does that mean? Now you can't have the sales engineer also be the product marketer, but you could in theory say that a, good. And we know people like these, oh hey, he or she is a really good content marketer, product marketer, brand marketer in one. So I think AI taking on portions of these roles makes it really possible to think of GTM the way one thinks of elastic cloud instances. You know that you spin them up, when you need them, you spin them down. But what this also means, and hopefully this is good news for labor versus capital that it means that a smaller set of people can actually run your entire go to market team with a swarm of these things around. Now you know, whether you use Mayfields language or you use like coworker language, digital Worker language. I don't really have an opinion on that. I think eventually we'll have to make peace with the fact that a lot of these teammates are future replacements of us. And then the last thing I'll say about GTM is that the paying is very real. That the biggest opportunity, the pain. When I say the pain, I mean the, you know, the dollar to 64 cents being spent to get $1 of new revenue or 50% of both the st taxes and sales and marketing are not used or quota att tenement is worse than 10 years ago. All that shit is true. So what this means is that these new companies that are coming in, I do think they have the best opportunity in the coming years to replace those systems of record that people have put in pitch tech slide for VC'but. Think about it. Day clarity at TEO in the CRM phase they happen now at is the question of challenging old CRM. But in the last decade we never saw any of that. And I think that's great. Right? So we believe in good competition and fairness. So I think it's ultimately all very good for the consumer of GTM, which continues to be a great consumer. Growing spend at 20, 30% IIT.

‍

Rajan: You said something very interesting. You said that, you know, the future of CRM'is anonymous GTM. And I think in that phrase there is a lot to unpack. And especially when changes happen like this. Usually we make sense of the world through like common monikers, awards like CRM and people get it. But this autonomous GTM seems to be completely different. Right. So to understand that we'll have to maybe break it down into first principles and then say what is GTM? Maybe can you explain what is GTM? And then say what is autonomous GTM? And why autonomous GTM, uses the future of marketing. Otherwise it'd be hard to sort of make the leap between saying, okay, CRM gets replaced by autonomous'GTM which is like a powerful statement.

‍

Amit: It's a really important question. I think part of why CRM is such a big monolith for people, wanting to take it down is that historically it hasn't actually delivered the value for what people to the promise. Right. the cloud CRMs promised the cloud CRM became the same thing that SIL was.

‍

Rajan: So yeah, and SIL was called as contact management. Right. So it went from contact management to CRM. And then people said that the future of CRM seems like cxm, which is customer experience management. And then it has not lived up.

‍

Amit: To the hype and then actually it split, right? Because you're right, customer experience ended up only becoming something that happens kind of in like these fuzzy functions between sales and marketing. And it's often owned by like certain other teams and actually the, the chief experience officer never happened. just like the chief customer officer sort of happened and then it happen. So let's break this down, right. Ultimately I do like this idea over time that has developed that there's a product team and there's a go to market. So you, you know all the people that involved with building the product in a classical sense, engineers, designers, DevOps, UX, whatever, PMs, you are all part of one product team. Now how do you take the product to market? How do you, how do you find out who to market it to? How do you think about where to play, who to compete with, how to price it, how to think about competition? That's the starting point of go to market. But then you have to actually go to market and that's where it's interesting because your channels, the approaches you take to now reach this audience, I think of this is ob. Almost like you have a blueprint then at some point which is your go to market strategy and some of the tooling that supports your go to market strategy. And then you essentially have like digital road warriors and real road warriors. And what I mean by that is your salespele, whether they're pre sales or their account execs, VP of sales, HDRs, BDRs, partner development, ribs, doesn't matter. They're essentially road warriors. But the interesting thing about modern go to market is that you know, if buyers are spending six out of seven minutes in digital, essentially they're dealing with your digital road warriors, which is that little trail you left on TikTok or that thing that is on G2 that you may not like, but it's there about you. And so if you think about the entirety of all of this, this is a go to market team, classically thought of as marketing, sales, customer success. And then you know, the teams that help manage this, you can think of it as largely, sometimes business ops, but mostly revenue operations, sales operations, marketing operations. There is a trend towards unified go to market operations. Also. I would say that as of circa 10-3-2024, marketing ops and sales ops have generally tended to own their own domains because the tools are, you know.

‍

Rajan: Sort of slightly different.

‍

Amit: So what are the ways to Think about what is the opposite of autonomous. It's manual but it's also disconnected and it's like fragmented. Gt and this is because everyone going back to classic principal agent is just doing like their thing. So someone's job is to put the website up. Someone's job is to put a contractors form of someone's job is to train the sales people so they deliver value. But all of these people are not necessarily always talking to each other and I think this is fully coordinated. So in some ways I think if we did a Google trend search, probably somewhere in this last ticket GTM or go to market became a thing and in some ways just like BYOD, it's a thing and it's not a thing but it's been adopted by the most modern companies in the world and I think that's why it's been very healthy because it has re energized sales people. Say I bought a GTM. It's re-energized marketing to say I'PART a GTM and part of why I said that the focus of the future CRM could be thought of as autonomous GTM is that of all the GTM tech that exists today. CRM even though it's basically still a bunch of integrations and custom fields are all on top of these like account contact activity databases. It's a big element in that room. And so in a way there is no CRM equivalent in marketing. Marketing does not really have a system of record today. If you think about it, you know that HubSpot doesn't count. I could rip my up spot out in my last job and I would probably still largely deliver deliver the same like pipeline. So now when you think of autonomous I think this first step towards that is okay, so you connect these pieces in a better way. Once they're connected in a better way then you can say it's more unified. Then you say okay part ah are there parts of it that we can automate? So then it's more unified and automated where it gets autonomous in the classic like level one to level five of self driving cars and we're a long way from there. But interesting to me in thinking about it that way is that you don't think of it as a sales or a marketing or a customer success problem. You ultimately think of it as I had a product, that product had to hit the market and somehow serve the needs of my buyers. And those buyers are actually not like they're basically just State changes of the same object. At some point everybody's a buyer for you and then you know, once they become advocates for you, they still buyers, they just you know, facade changes. So I think the best analogy I'll give you is maybe, and this is something I know be you've done a lot of thinking on in the past is the shift to autonomous GTM I think is as much as shift to automation, multi agents, all of that. But I think it's also shift in theory to what you would call more connected ecosystems and marketplaces. You know, where if the value exists it can traverse through a network faster and reach who it needs to reach. And I actually think this is good for the small guy. And certainly we can talk about autonomous marketing or talk about something else, but I do think of autonomous marketing and sales as like sets of this larger movement towards autonomous GTM just to playback commit.

‍

Rajan: What I hear you say is that you know CRM was this idea of connecting those accounts and contacts through like a database so that teams that are taking the product to the market after they have created the blueprint, which is the market strategy, they are ensuring that the marketing guys are speaking to the sales guys are speaking to the customer success guys using that account and contact database so that they are able to keep track of what conversation happened. It will go through that state change but it did not fully deliver the promise in the sense that it did not get them all into the same page, which is the purpose of that central system of record that we call a CRM now in autonomous GTM. Because AI can deal with a lot of unstructured data which is the biggest problem in getting all of them unified. You have different tools and these tools cannot exchange data and then not in the right format and structure and therefore they are all very disjoint. But now that AI can take out a lot of grunt work on bringing that unstructured data together and then also facilitate it. It lays the foundation of getting that autonomous thing. But I also like the fact that you talked about that. Level one to level five. Can you just click a little bit on that? Level one to level five on what it is. And I think that'emerging is a powerful way to think about a roadmap of how automation will happen. Automation will lead to autonomous.

‍

Amit: It's a great question puzzle I think is one of those companies that does AI for accounting and finance, they have a great level one to level five for example for autonomous accounting. And so you're right that creating this type of, thinking for any space, finance, hr, marketing, the sales and buyer side product certainly is a good way to think about where this is headed. I do think that some of the interesting tension is going to come from like level 3, 4, 5. What I mean is 3, level 1, 2, 3. Is it essentially just doing things in a way that they should probably have been done in the first place, right? Like it's things are just more connected and, you know, what happened, you know, why it happened. You know, the old, remember the old cliche of descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, all of that. But somewhere in this 3, 4, 5, where you're telling me what actions to date, like, you're not just giving me insights, you're telling me what actions to take. It does seem that, you know, once you bring everyone into this like, common space, the difficulty of that cannot be underestimated. Like everybody from Salesforce to even the lot of the sales tech tools, TR to do it. I mean, you've heard of a Common Room. They've been coming up a lot in the news recently. I was telling someone the other day that I think Common Room is executing the Salescroft playbook, which is what people thought it would be, which is like, hey, it's actually a workspace. It's a really difficult thing to pull off, a workspace. But where I was going is once you don't get the people into the workspace and now you have this unstructured data that is feeding insights. The frontier right now is between what actions should I take next versus you take your actions on my behalf. And so I think that's level four, level five in the autonomy. Right. And level five is ultimately take actions on my behalf with some oversight from me. And you know, I suppose that the end point of level five is it's all happening. I'm, I'm off on a beach somewhere or some like, holographic reality. And that's why things get really weird and interesting because we've always believed that like, human decision making is paramount to the success of organization. and I think at level four, we can still maintain that.

‍

Rajan: Yeah, I'm curious about that. Level one to level five now, how it is described, let's say in the GTM space or I'd love to know how the puzzle guys, describe it. One version that I've heard is first, it starts with an AI co pilot. And the bots are before this. So this first is an AI co pilot and AI co pilot, something that is operating in a synchronous kind of a mode and then there is assistant and then there is an agent. I mean and I'm talking about in a general intelligence perspective. Then comes AG and then comes super intelligence.

‍

Amit: Correct. And I think what you just described is a great way to think about it in the macro sense. Right, that absolutely there, and then you get to that point where essentially future ASIs are, we can't recognize it.

‍

Rajan: They are 100 times more powerful than AGI.

‍

Amit: Right, exactly. But here's you know just in the interest of 30 seconds let me just show you something because I had this open here as you were talking, right. This is what it looks like, this is what puzzle had done, right? Autonomous accounting levels, task automation function automation, problem detection, problem solving, problem resolution automation. And you know, and then they sort of describe how each of these work. And what's sort of interesting is that you know the analogy to self driving cars where the UN can still take control at any time versus automation that does not require human attention to get from point A to point B. And I think this is where you know, we are in this interesting era with GTM because the challenge is that at the end of the day if you strip out all the other discussion about whether how this impact impacts jobs, how this impacts costs and we know that the answer general really show only one direction in terms of how capital can be deployed. But if you, if you take a step back and think about how should you choose what to automate? I would say one, well anything that is done and you should automate it. But at the end of the day if your buyers, your partners, your stakeholders as a company of a GTM function, they are going to be served better by AI all the way then which we're seeing for all the crap that your SDR tech and next generation email automation tech is getting, it's actually better because the chances of finding an SD or somebody writing an email to a director of IT shipping in Norway, I mean you need a certain kind of, I don't know, passion for multi domain understanding to be able to craft a meaningful enough email. Otherwise you're better off with the formula right hook action, you know. So where I'm going is if emails are going to be written better, if potentially zoom calls are going to be handled better, potentially more and more things are going to be handled better, including pricing and negotiation by AIs that reflect the company's best interest versus some kind of messed up incentive structure that you know, a rep and a CRO have then the company's moral obligation should be to explore autonomous and AI in that direction. Because actually your humans may not be. It's not that they're acting in the worst interests of the company, but they may be acting in the good interests of the company, not the best interests of the company. And I think on the other side of this, just to end that point, it's the individual, right? Because now the individual, which is your me as a company of one, we also have access to a lot of the same autonomy. You know, I'm old enough to remember that there was a personal CRM move went which never took off there ago go. But I think it's an interesting thing. Whenever I see someone who has two 50,000 followers on LinkedIn, I always think, okay, the next generation of this, it'll be easier for people that are not n latest to this to get to that point where they have more optionality. Even if AI is going to reduce the net number of jobs, the remaining ones will probably be more value.

‍

Rajan: Amit, since you've actually done this, you've spent more than a decade in Silicon Valley, but before that you were in India. And then you've also worked with teams that are across border. So what are some of the GTM challenges which are very specific to cross border trying out things. What are mistakes that founders make or GTM teams make when they're trying to actually execute GTM across multiple geography because they think of distributing the teams across geography will bring them certain cost advantages. And one of the things that I always keep telling folks is that Silicon Valley is not a great place of building products. It's a great place of figuring out GTM. So it's always at the cutting edge of the GTM that they can. That's what makes a lot of businesses very, very successful. And those who come from outside, they have that disadvantage. What are mistakes people make when they're coming from outside of Silicon Valley and trying to actually crack a GTM of a business, whether it is PLG or whether it is enterprise led. In both the cases you'll see that there cutting edge work happens here.

‍

Amit: I think that we have to respect the good parts of history subtimes. At the end of the day, if you think about the generation of Sun Microsystems, the generation of early AT&T, both you and I, have studied the stories of very interesting Indian Americans from the 80s and 90s who first made it, you know, when it was much harder to to make it here from that side of the world. I think there was a level of understanding that all these people had when they got here that this is the market I'm been. I don't just need to dress like the market, I need to act like the market. I need to understand the market. Now one might face the same challenge as a Midwestern or Californian marketer you know trying to sell in Africa or you know try to market next generation payment tech in India which is superior to payment tech in the US and so I think the problem goes both way but especially for the B2B co companies we're talking about which often tend to come from elsewhere. I think there are three things a show one is that more psychological but I think this respect for understanding the previous generations of how things happened is important because the best people make today over here are based on bets that paid off for a 4050 year period. The bets who always knew but there were multiple bets. So for example Google Glass was a disaster. Now what is happening in this era of mental losses will probably take things off much more and so we can learn from that error. And I think one of my challenges with the different geographies we are talking about here and for some reason I don't know how or why but hats off to them Vix, Monday.com comm and gong they're all Israeli companies from different eras. I mean viix I didn't know wasn't ISRA come they until much later and they built this level of marketing and sales finesse sitting there that a lot of companies in other regions in order for India are getting to now. And I think that somewhere they stuck that balance between knowing the game and the history of the game but still playing it your way.

‍

Rajan: By VI you mean the w iix.com.

‍

Amit: Wiix the website builder which apparently a lot of that and each one of them had a different playbook. Remember Monday's playbook was video. I think Vix's playbook was was like ads. And the B2B cybersecurity side is very well known but the PLG successes of Israeli companies is that but you know I think that every new generation of companies that are coming out from cross border from India as well more and more entrepreneurs I think they're getting that balanced right more because see if you only study the game but you don't still play your new angle in the game you'll still be left out then you re just have flew into your str. You're not a Player. I think the players are good. You know, a lot of the companies I met, for example in the Opeca portfolio, the word I would use is posture or stance. Right. They were super confident that'in whatever they're doing and which means that the next to the next to the next generation, they will catch up on the history. But it's still a good idea to catch up, with the history too. The second mistake I think is ultimately talent though, right? That I think one of the best things about the go to market talent that exists in the bay and is anchored here is just that there is like a generation three, generation five, generation seven type of history. So let's take an example. You know, the highest product marketing jobs in the bar area are in the South B. Why? My guess is that if you look at like, you know, salary profiles, I think it's because the highest product marketing jobs are likely going to be in cybersecurity. And the cluster of cybersecurity companies, the biggest ones, are all in the South B, basically Old Valley, which SF would consider like, you know, too far to visit. But at the end of the day, those people who have been doing cybersecurity, product marketing or technical marketing, which you and I know is kind of harder than salesforce marketing, right? In broad targetities, they've had a 25, 30 year history. I think that when you're a team coming in from overseas, you want the cleverness, right? Cleverness goes a long way. But you want the person that moves at the same pace and has moved at the same pace for the last 10 years because they've seen a different level of history from maybe the Semantic days. I think there's not enough appreciation that sometimes tenure actually helps. And the last thing I'd say about you know, just sort of crosswater mistakes is, is that there's some of this lack of sometimes being bold, which is I see changing a lot more now where in many ways for your buyer it doesn't matter if you're cross order, right? So s very weird hack. But a lot of companies I see do this now. They say, why do I need a team page? So I think it's a clever hack. If you have a team page where you kind of check the boxes of a good global team page, you know, where you have a, you have a cute dog and you have two Romanian people and you have eight people and you have four Chinese people and you have two AIs in the future. Great. I think that's an awesome team page. It is tell a story, right? But if it's you know, three guys out of Nagpur, you know, city where I was born and you're like, I don't know, people might judges for it. You know what, don't even put on a team page. Ultimately they don't care. They're not gonna buy or not buy from you because you happen to be from somewhere. So I think this, this is where going back to where we started our conversation think about AI that's interesting is that the average AI product today generates better infographics then some random graphic designer sitting in some random place in the world. We already know this. Look, grammar is hard. I make mistakes in grammar. I don't even know which mistakes I make sometimes. But it's not like many of us. I studied in avent school and I probably had the highest maps in English but my grammar is not very good. And I now know this but I don't want to think about it. So I think that for cross border companies I think it is even more imperative that you use AI in your external communication because see as you said product caps are closing. So you don't have a disadvantage on product for the most part but you have a disadvantage in how you are represented. Because a company that has raised 500 million from you know, Silver Lake or Blackstone will definitely be able to hire 100 people that live in a 20 mile radius in Sanfieldgo, New York. Right. And each of those people is our advocates. They're powerful. It goes a long way. 50 people to represent as was strong to founder earlier today. Right. And I they bootstrappeded the company for many years and they're in the competitive sales tax place. And we were discussing this and I certainly. How many people are there in your company after three years that can basically go and tell this story. And I said you know both of these it's still you just few, literally just you. So this is something cross border companies can overcome like getting AIs at that interface externally where now I think that at least in the world of the sort of the western markets that we are talking about which includes India and like that, that here there's a great opportunity to hire some AIs and you hire some people. I think that could help.

‍

Rajan: So Amit, the one thing that you said was very interesting for me which is that I said like people don't care like whether you have the team page or not. And if you are from let's say NBUR then you why even have the team page? But that changed right? Know earlier if you were like selling enterprise software, right People had to know that the CD that they are purchasing is'going to deliver the promise that the person who's sitting across the table is this making. So they had to actually meet each other, run some POCs and then that will lead to larger enterprise deals. But then the shift that had happened in the last 15 years was saying that the purchase process had changed from I'm going to sell it to it is bought which is like from enterprise sales to assisted buying. And that was the whole shift from enterprise to software as a service. And that's where as long as you can deliver a great experience over the web, deliver the product over the web just through software as a service like that change happened now with AI. What do you think is is happening? What is the change in paradigm that is happening? That instead of selling it was assisted buying? Is it assisted agent buying or like how is that changing?

‍

Amit: GTM I think this is one of the top few frontier areas that is going to go through a lot of transformation for the reasons that you mentioned and building upon those reasons, bioface int tech is underserved. A lot of the quote unquote buyer intelligence types of tools ah are basically ultimately still sold to the CRO and trying to feed buyer insights into your sales team but not directly enabling your buyers is a little bit like the classic fox carding the house. It's not going to change anything because if the sales mindset is that my job is to change your mindset that you buy from me, then that mindset will not change. It's based on a fundamental asymmetry of power and information and the information democratizes and power shifts over time. you know it's just become more and more evident then that to your point buyers are just infinitely most solid than sales people are able to sort of, you know, meet them. I've heard now countless stories where companies outside of high tech have been expressing this sort of desire that you know, you're right, like ultimately my buyer just wants to have a good smart conversation with someone who knows what they're talking about. And again oftentimes that happens to be like three people sort of in the company. So I think that one of the things that will break the dominance of companies that were able to afford like large army of salespeople is connecting this back to PLJ that if we really have to enable buyers better, we need a new class of Technologies that is able to meet buyers and move them along at the speed that they're ready to move it. And you know, it's interesting, right? Like if you think about this as as jazz, then when the tempo picks up and the tempo starts picking up, then the tempo will go really fast. B2B buying and selling is not like that today. Everyone says that it should be six months, nine months. Six months, nine months. It feels to me almost like the way people used to say that well a certain number of people are going to die after an operation anyway before people discovered that you had to wash your hands. Right. We're kind of in that era where actually a buying process should not be nine months if it will be nine weeks. Because oftentimes we re just unlocking some of the crud of the asymmetries of power on like both sides. Because whoever has the need wants to get it fulfilled as soon as possible. And so where I'm going with that is that even today if you look at the most progressive companies in the world, I'm talking about anything that's not a develop seccops, dev seccos type of tool, right? If you are neuralic signals, if you're any one of these companies, datadog, Hasur or whatever, you are already in the future, the rest of the world has to catch up to you because you give sandboxes, you give data, you give extensive documentation, test it out, wr it out, touch everything in the store, break it if you want, complain to us, we'll add a new thing overnight that does not exist in most of interface, you know. So what exists in most of enterprise software is the old contactors form and it's crazy. I've spoken to a lot of CMOs who've told me and I've been in the same boat that it's not that I like it, but what's your alternative? You know so so what I was going is that before we get to true buyer enlightenment, actually both on the vendor buyer side as well as the next generation marketplaces and I think the shift to cloud marketplaces, next gen cloud marketplaces, hugely empowering at the end of the day because you know you feel like okay now I'm no shop in this mall is likely going to cheat me. And so I think there's gonna be a lot of, lot of good tech coming out in this, in this side of things. The question is really who's going to pay for it? And then to your point ultimately how do you change the Procurement operates because a buyer agent for you and me is one thing, but a buy agent for procurement and I think it'll happen and it won't be spend management. I think it's a different entry point.

‍

Rajan: So one of the conversation that I have with founders is most mostly like, you know, and they think about product and then when they think about product they immediately start with JDVD saying that JDVD is this great framework we have to go understand what are the jobs the customer wants to do. And that's will, that's something that will give us insight into how they can do a better business, build a better product, better business. But I kind sometimes push back and then say hey JTVD is not important as much as HDTBs HDTB is how do they buy? Not just the jobs to be done, but how do they buy? So how do they buy? How is it changing that you are seeing like how is it changing with AI? I mean we talked a little bit about how people make mistakes or have like incorrect mental models about how do they buy when they are coming cross border. But then what is changing now in terms of how do they buy? Because that is what is going to sort of influence on how the new AI product GPMs are going to shape up.

‍

Amit: That's absolutely correct. So first off a lot hasn't changed with AI coming into this process yet. You know I know that the vision of where this is going to head, especially on the consumer side with what Jeremiah Wang talks about and such, that's definitely a very interesting direction. However like it hasn't really reached the shortest just yet. It's all still relatively early in terms.

‍

Rajan: Of your biotech that is still narrative shaping.

‍

Amit: It's nice shaping. Exactly. And I think even the you know the AI sdr, the first generation of them are ultimately doing the old outreach plus Bongorra plus six senses plus like write a bunch of generative A events together. But they're doing it in a way that your internal demand and t was not doing your internal debt was not. So it's actually great that some of these companies that are getting funded in that space are showing the power of how fast you can fill up calendars if you just had the search function work properly right at the right automation work. Now in terms of what is changing, I think the trust radius Data, the G2 data, the Garta data on this is like super interesting, right? a couple of quick tres. One is that definitely large brands are getting preference I think this is because categories are getting overcrowded so people need stronger brand signal partly because it's easier. So you have the same. Yeah, this motion long on my desk hasn't I go into a store I'm probably mentally going to use version nor or Maybe I use the CVs brand but will I use something that I've never seen before that's in a purple box? Probably not with five. So I think that's happening in enterprise software. People are buying much more the way they buy consumer products which is they rely on like a proxy, your brand saying it. And this is hurting right? Because 72 to 75% I think that's the number from the 2024 survey in last three years they create a short list of three 80% or three to five 80% of them buy. Eventually no matter how much consideration, evaluation they do, they buy somebody from that short, l that they created before they started the process. So true new entrance. It's sort of like what used to be called nepotism in movie industries. Like true new talent is not really being discovered as much as it as it should and that's not a good thing actually. But buyers are relying on that sort of proxy.

‍

Rajan: It used to be called as Matthews effect in VC industry, nepotism in the movie industry, brand in the consumer industry. And that proxy of trust signal. One of the things that I heard from someone long ago is in India the reason Tatas and Reliance are able to sort of launch oil companies and like beauty brands and like consumer retail companies is because they have the highest amount of trust in terms of like people trust them saying that if they bought something from them then it won't go wrong. And that is why they're able to sort of launch all kinds of industry and all kinds of products. And when you have the challenge of like either you have to select from too many options or like where the information is not easy to find out whether this is trustable or not, then brand becomes the clear signal that people rely on making choices.

‍

Amit: So it's super interesting on that ajar is that the brand signal is not coming from where we think it used to come from. So it's not coming as much from the classic marketing channels and it's certainly not coming from conversations with sales reps those are declining. It's ultimately coming from taste, feel, smell, touch the product which is basically trials and develop and so on. Surprisingly huge increase in it coming from peers or co workers as much as people who use the product. So go. Which is someone who's used that product is good. But can I talk to somebody who's been exactly. You know the in equivalent of this would be back in the days living in Bangalore, the closest concept for me was Chenk. So if I ended up having to go to Delhi, which I may have had to once upon a time. You want to talk to exactly someone who's been to the Delhi consulate who will tell you how to like manage your flights in and out. Right. And so that's happening a lot is. So what does that mean though? One click deeper people are trusting other people and literally random strangers who may have bought something more than they're trusting those brands. Which tells me that the GTM teams have a lot of soul searching to do because at the end of the day you're putting all this stuff out, you know, you've got all this great merchandising, right. But ultimately the person is going to the corner store and saying what do you think? Where's the best coffee in this like neighborhood? So if I click O just one, one other example, how will this affect my world and what is the ROI that I can get from this investment? This is actually a huge area of differentiation that buyers asking for. But this is a lot of heavy lifting that has to be done on the GTM side because GTM ultimately a lot of marketing side of GTM and the sales side of GTM is in the sense a consumer of the marketing side of GTM. Right. Because every asset you create, every digital property, every value calculator, every whatever email template, sequences, marketing creds it, sales does it. You can suck out all the salespeople of a company and you can still have a problem because maybe they own the relationships and the marketing team have never spoke it to the actual customer. But if the marketing means assets shouldn't exist, you wouldn't have the repeatable motion of G. But the way marketing teams create it is how do they create it? They created like the way Walmart is created. Right? We need those copper cleaners and we also need a section because somebody will probably want to buy milk and bananas. But the buyer is like, well you didn't, you know, if you asked me what I wanted I would have said that I'm just looking for glue. Now that is where generative AI and AI for marketing is fascinating because ultimately what we are saying is there's the point at which a buyer is ready. When a buyer is ready, you should Give them what they want that's literally the best thing you can do. And if the best thing that they want is that they want this then you know just get out of the way. And so these trends of brandal looking for deeper technical and value content before you buy, looking for trusted third party proxies and having like let me touch it, feel it, not on your terms, but on my terms. All of these are generating an interesting new wave of tech also. And I think the companies that at the edge of this are, are definitely doing something interesting. I mean my, one of my examples in this is in increase sals right? So demos have always been fairly hard to n down and demo tech is tell years old, nothing new but test box or also these kinds of companies when I heard that they're using generative AI, generative data, synthetic data, so that you can have like different environments created with data not like leaked from your master tenant or whatever. These are real problems that ultimately like if you show a buyer their world in your product that's great for the buyer. So I think no there's other trends we won't have tried to get into in this podcast but you know the buying groups and doing something for a buying group because everyone is trying to kind of make a consensus decision. I think the most interesting thing about this is that in tech while of course we have a lot of net new buying because net new categories are coming up and and you know one could argue that if you can build ah a gen-support app that is the next Zendesk or the next Cluso, and you can build it faster than them then in some sense apps become gen AI B2B apps become like Zaga fashion cycles and and I think that's good for the consumer right? You just need a different business model than to like support it. But ultimately a lot of it is replacement buying today. And I think you know that replacement buyer is something that I think is worth like you know deep dive in like talking to, to experts because the replacement buy has already been burnt once, they don't want to make the same mistake again. And if you take this all the way back to the you know the pinnacle Latin lines of capitalism, right? It comes down to fair exchange of value, fair exchange of pricing, fair and reasonable exchange of discovery of information on both sides so that the marketplace remains fair. I think that that is a really interesting opportunity in the next like five to seven years. And I'm excited about where CMO will play a role. CPOs will play a role because I think they'll play a bigger role than CRO'so.

‍

Rajan: What was most exciting for me and what she's just now described is is that most people in terms of brand signal they're not looking just for the touch points or like something which has had like a legacy or anything like that. But it is more around hey somebody who looks like me, feels like me, what did he experience? And that is what they are going and relying on and as much direct as possible as opposed to not coming through like a moderated platform. Things like that. Which to me says that you it is back to those old work on good word of mouth right? And back to my like the earlier question which is like product led versus the enterprise sales Looks like even if you're putting a lot of structure and organization around getting an enterprise sales motion going, what you still need to do is is to actually make sure that you have gotten like what are good practices around the product led a growth where you are building a product that is so awesome that people feel like relieved using it and then because they are so relieved then they go and tell two friends and two friends tell.

‍

Amit: Another three friends and when it breaks, when you don't get what you need when you put in a request how the customer success and support frontier shapes your experience brand is shipped a lot more by that these sales and I think this is where a lot of founders get confounded because Or CEOs I think founders probably are product founders are a little different this way but they say but I brought the superior the IDC report says that I brought to superior we got the highest SCS on roadmap. I don't understand why didn't they buy. You must try to explain it properly. You know it's like if you, if you're an investor and you know I a startup and you're right into other and you're like you know what I'm going to talk to 7 people about ATH just generally talk to 7 people then probably with 2 people who will say they'll like who he's too funky or you know he talks too fast and I don't know like he's got a unique way of approaching problems too intense, whatever right? And you'll average that feedback out and be like okay, I kind of know what I'm walking into. This is something that CEOs and founders and and especially new startups I think they need to embrace. And this is why as you said, good word of mouth is your employee's word of mouth. It's your like liter, like your common community's waterdrop and doing good, doing well. I don't think those things are going to change in the future. because at the end of the day, yes, people won't always buy from people. I do think that people may empower AIs to buy on behalf of them from AI'who are on the other side. I think we'll see. Some of that sort of happened. But ultimately I think a lot of it just comes down to are you as a company creating a virtu cycle? Are you creating a visual cycle? And the last thing I'll say about that as it ties to one of the biggest challenges of enterprise sales that existed el was it wasn't just that you are too few sellers. I mean I get that that you're too few sellers and sales is hard in any kind of sales is really hard. So kudos to that generation that didn't have Salesforce or maybe had Salesforce but didn't have anything else. And you know, their calls couldn't be recorded, they couldn't get sentiment analysis and all of that stuff that modern salespeople from weeks benefit from. However, at the end of the day most CRO's only paid 15% or 12% commission to their sales reps. They maybe paid a nice cute little bonus to customer success and maybe to some of the pre sales engineers. But product didn't get anything. Marketing didn't get anything. I encourage more CEOs and founders to take the bold step and say wait a minute, how did this deal actually get source? Let me ask the buy why did you actually buy? And if the buyer says, you know the number one reason I bought this product is because your person X, whoever person X was, I just had a great time with them. Yeah, you know, sales was good too. Well then figure out the way to be fair to all of them versus the idea today, which I think it's a relic idea. It's die eventually. Right? The world does get better over time. that you needed an adult who looks like alec Baldwin from 30 Rock to start the sales process and that's when it starts. And then everything revolves around them and you help them, help them, help them and they're the quarterback and then they close the deal and then they get the big bucks and they go to president's club. What about that data analyst? What about that poor PM sitting out somewhere who built your demo tenant for like 720 hours on the basis of which they bought, not because the guy had, you know, great smiley shoes, right? But I just want to end with the opportunity to change incentive structures in GTM. I think it is a very interesting sub topic.

‍

Rajan: That's the end of part one where Amit and I discussed AI tools, marketing and GTM. In AI we'll dive into go to market strategy, CRM and how is AI reshaping global sales and marketing? Join us in the next episode. Thats it for this episode of pivotal clarity. This is an Upekkha podcast. Upekkha is an accelerator for global Indian founders building AI software companies. We're exploring the fast changing world of AI together with our listeners. If you like this podcast, you can find more on our website and other popular podcast apps. Subscribe if you want to keep up.

‍