Leverage data to identify insights and triggers to help the sales process
Thesis/Idea
An SDR co-pilot
Currently, the SDR-Sales connection often doesn’t work well. SDRs are either too junior and therefore can’t really pull their weight OR they are good, in which case the Sales people don’t really do their job and instead overly depend on the SDR. The goal was to make SDRs more effective to help the Sales process.
The idea was to leverage data to identify insights and triggers to help the sales process: when is the right time to talk to a potential lead (i.e., did the person just get a new email address and job?), organize outreach calls based on expected pushbacks (a morning of calls with people likely to be price conscious), etc.
Why it didn’t progress
- A very red ocean – response from investors was that they had seen similar things.
- CROs don’t really care how the SDRs do their work. That requires lots of sales processes training, which we didn’t want to get into.
- Realized it was a feature-focused company and not a potential market leader.
- Tech defensibility didn’t seem high.
Validation
- Spoke to over 60 CROs, as well as CMOs and finance people in Israel and abroad to understand their pain points and willingness to use the product.
- Focused on bigger companies – enterprise SaaS, B2B – that use Gong and have a tech orientation.
Insights
- Spend time researching the many competing products
- Read decks/value proposition from early in the process to understand how the product evolved (look at early LI posts by the founders or via Wayback machine)
- Think in advance if you want to be a feature company or a company that is a market leader in some area.
- I like the idea of pre-consensus and focusing on things in which I have deep expertise.
