Welcome to Pay Attention, where Attention's CEO and Founder, Anis Bennaceur, interviews some of the smartest minds in sales, growth, and product leadership.
Anis Bennaceur (00:04.482)
Sam, very excited to have you here. Welcome to the show.
Sam Levan (00:09.468)
And it's Sam here. Thanks for having me and it's going to be interesting with the French accent today.
Anis Bennaceur (00:16.152)
I love that. We've had a few actual French people in the past and Americans actually loved it. So maybe there's the French accent, but there's also lot of the insights that are quite ahead of the curve that come with the fact that you're French. So yeah, very excited to have you here. I would love to start with...
Sam Levan (00:35.588)
I think that's
Anis Bennaceur (00:43.842)
You know, this question that I always like to lead with, which is, would love to know what were the three most pivotal moments in your career that led you to who you are and where you are today.
Sam Levan (00:56.313)
Wow, starting deep on the questions.
Sam Levan (01:01.403)
Actually, two or three stories, I think that's impacted my career and my life quite a lot. I'll maybe start on the jump I made from having a happy, quiet, very good life in the South of France. So that was back in 2007. I lived in the Riviera. I woke up in the morning with a field of lavender from my bedroom.
Long story short, I was not in tech, but I missed the science that I studied at school. And I had this opportunity to join the founding team of a small startup close to New York, just like one customer, two people in an office. And I made this jump and a lot of my friends at the time were like, this is insane. What are you doing? It was not as cool as today to work in startups.
I lost money, like I was, like my bank account was going down for the first six months. And that jump, not listening to my friends, was one of the best decisions I've made. I'm forever grateful to my wife on letting that happen.
Anis Bennaceur (02:10.772)
What year is that?
Sam Levan (02:12.571)
2007.
Anis Bennaceur (02:14.3)
So quite ahead, right? Especially when you think about France, tech really started booming in what 2014, 2015.
Sam Levan (02:23.107)
Yep, Yeah, brought quite a few from Europe to the Bay Area and to New York. Immigration was interesting because nobody knew about the education system and yeah, now that has changed.
Anis Bennaceur (02:39.192)
That's really interesting. 2007, you moved to the US, you start working in tech. And yeah, I'm sure a lot of people back in France were telling you, what the hell are you doing with your life? And then how, I'm curious, what were some of the insights that you're seeing in the Bay Area?
that the rest of the world, especially the rest of Europe and France, wasn't quite seeing.
Sam Levan (03:19.467)
That's interesting. I think I moved first to like New York and Connecticut before moving to the Bay Area. The speed of innovation, think how fast like innovation is adopted in the US, I think is much, much faster. So one of the things that's really like excited me and that I'm still like, love the US and this country is
by how ready people are to try things and adopt new technology. I think the Bay Area specifically, I think was ahead of its time all the time. So that is, there is something that you cannot replace for sure. And Europe is, I love Europe, but I think it's still catching up in many, areas. No offense to my friends there.
Anis Bennaceur (04:06.328)
That and so that makes sense. You know, you're in the East Coast. It's kind of like, you know, that perfect middle ground between the Bay Area. There's like a little maybe too further ahead in Europe. That's kind of like catching up. What were some of the two other kind of like pivotal moments in your life?
Sam Levan (04:28.767)
I think I have to mention how I really fell in love with automation, AI. I think ahead, like lot before even AI was talked about or data science was a concept. One of the things I was working on is a project with Gartner where I was working on creating a kind of a recommendation engine that would automate
Some of the outreach that the account managers at Gartner were doing with our customers. So, you know, when you work with Gartner, you are assigned an account manager, they new research. And one of the responsibilities of your account manager was every week to say, okay, here are new research that came up and here are like things that you can find relevant. I will send it for you. And what I worked on was actually automating that piece and one, saving the account manager's time, but also making it better.
compared to having every account manager being trained on that one. That was back in 2009, before even data science became a thing. And think the Gala team was awesome. The email would still come from the account manager, so it was not like a newsletter. But doing some A-B testing, we found an increase of 20 million in terms of revenue just from that one project.
So that's really like triggered, I on my side, like a very deep passion on how do you leverage technology, data and science to automate some of the work that people do that is not like the best part of their day and even like making that better. And I can tell you like from there, I got a bit crazy. I started applying this in all kinds of areas in my life. For example, like building a bot that would scrape Craigslist.
find all the cars with LLM that did not exist, find what the model year take, make, and then ping the API for Kelly Blue Book to find the price, arbitrage, and then doing the outreach. So I actually made money by buying a used car, using them for two months and selling them, finding arbitrage. So it was more than just work, was in all kinds of areas.
Anis Bennaceur (06:47.234)
You're basically building agents, agentic workflows before people even knew what the word agent was and how they're calling it today.
Sam Levan (06:57.239)
Yeah, it was pretty insane and fun.
Anis Bennaceur (07:00.792)
I love that. And so how did all of this lead you to build your current company today, MadKudu, which I by the way realized I haven't even introduced you as the CEO and co-founder of MadKudu. Tell us what MadKudu does today. And first of all, how did that get you to building MadKudu and what is it that you guys do today?
Sam Levan (07:21.295)
Yeah, so MadKudu, if you haven't heard of us already, we help go to market leaders, so CROs and CMOs do signal-based selling. And signal-based selling is simply taking the buying signals that exist in your market and making that actionable for your sales team. So I'm to share more on how that works and some of the results and why it's relevant today. But that's what we do at MadKudu.
Anis Bennaceur (07:50.456)
And how did you come up with actually the idea of starting to work on this? And was even the original idea something that you kept on building on? Or what pivots did you have to go through? What iterations led you to the product that works best for you?
Sam Levan (08:10.091)
It evolved quite a lot. think similarly, sometimes you don't have the name for what you're doing or it's not as crisp as what you get to as you learn. And the world was quite different when we started. Why I started the company was coming actually from one of my friends that I had, like Jeff Defenser. And I give credit to him, I think, for MadKudu.
And he had hired two data scientists in his team. He was trying to leverage some of the data that he had internally in the data warehouse back in the days, which was not as popular as it today, to understand which accounts to go after and then craft an actual outreach that would get better responses. And there was something a bit stuck, I think, with data science team. The CEO was breathing down his neck saying, hey guys, why are we spending money on data scientists? We don't want...
science projects and marketing, why don't we do the basic stuff, right? That's the fundamentals. But TLDR, after like two weeks where I helped out a little bit, we doubled the pipeline. So that was a big win on that one. And I was thinking, look, if we can leverage data that becomes more and more available to everybody and help make this data actionable for prospecting and engaging with customers, that'd be a huge...
value for CMOs and CROs and also the right way to build the company. that's where Matlou came from. But as we build the company, we found that account prioritization, lead prioritization of inbound and for product-led growth companies was a big pain point and a big use case. So we really started the company focused on predictive scoring, collecting different signals.
to identify which accounts to prioritize. That evolved into something much bigger and powerful, which is quite cool today.
Anis Bennaceur (10:11.356)
Got it. And so you came up with this insight, right? What was the journey into validating that this was something that was going to be a big need for clients rather than having to educate them on something that they didn't know?
Sam Levan (10:30.555)
Yeah, that's great. I wish I had talked to you a bit before. I think on that one, if I had to do it again and go faster, think setting as early as you can makes a huge difference. I remember, we did like an MVP, actually went too far, think something even like too good, I think before we went to market. I remember the first conversation where we...
We had different use cases that we were testing. was prioritization for inbound, we also churned risk identification. So we had a few hypotheses as to what to try. And the first conversation was like, yeah, I love what you guys do. We do a pilot, we love what I see. And we're like, okay, let's talk price now, right? how we $1,000 amounts, that's good to go. Like, wait, what? And that's too much.
Anis Bennaceur (11:24.682)
Hahaha.
Sam Levan (11:26.523)
500? Wait, what? And it was like 250? No way. So we ended up at $49 a month on the first customer we had. And I think the question became, OK, why is the perception of value $49 a month? And that really accelerated our learning as to what is the exact pinpoint that's valuable for who is it valuable for. Now, our largest customers pay 300k.
almost $500,000 a year. So we went a long way from the $49 to creating more value for customers.
Anis Bennaceur (12:06.312)
And so what was it really that allowed you to kind of like, you know, make your value prop a lot more enticing, create more urgency towards your clients, to make them realize that, you know, basically their hair is on fire, you know, versus something that is kind of like, hey, this is the future vision that you need to get to, otherwise you're going to be left behind.
Sam Levan (12:33.785)
I'll tell you at least, yeah, the mistake we've made and the thing where we were today, like doing missionary selling is extremely hard. What we actually like found to work a lot better is to understand where people are today. What is the problem that they talk about right now? And they're just aligning to that. So even in our conversation, when we talk to prospects and companies, we are
always looking for what we call pain and train. So pain, do you have the pain? that's, think on our side, we help companies bring more pipeline and more efficiency. There is not a single company on earth that's like, I don't care about pipeline and efficiency. We know we can help them. know RICP. have no doubt that if you buy our product today, we will deliver that customer outcome, pipeline and efficiency. The challenge though is pain is not enough. It's pain and training. And the train...
is basically there is an initiative in this company or this team that is already starting or being evaluated. So you just align the value prop to that initiative. And for us, we have a few trains that we work on. I don't think as a vendor, you should have the modesty to understand that you are very rarely going to start a new train in an organization.
especially if you have more than one user. If you sell, if you just sell to one person and your user is just one person, maybe, but as soon as you have two or three people in your buying committee, making a decision with three people is taking a lot of effort. And I don't think vendors are going to drive that. It becomes education, but education is not growth or money.
Anis Bennaceur (14:21.606)
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Do you think in that case then typically a good framework would be to sell them on an immediate pain and need and then upsell them on kind of a future vision?
Sam Levan (14:37.019)
What, 1000 %? think the vision is interesting as for brands, interesting, think for, for sure, like for the company and execs wants to understand what a company is going, but they don't buy a vision, especially in this environment. They buy because they have a very concrete problem to be solved right now. And exactly what you said, like we're solving this problem now, delivering value and then.
If you deliver value, I I really love our customers. They often say, look, they're not trying to squeeze every penny from you. They want to make sure though that when they buy a software is being used, deliver value, and then they can go and ask for more budget and more money.
Anis Bennaceur (15:17.985)
That makes sense. And so when you're selling today your product, would you say in one single sentence is the biggest burning pain that the customers are having? What is typically the most frequent compelling event that you're noticing when people come in and say, hey, I need to buy my kudu yesterday?
Sam Levan (15:38.043)
Yeah. We actually don't go today with just one. I'll give you, it's better, we found to be better to be more precise and we have basically a few triggers. But one is simply outbound is not working anymore. There is a pipeline gap and we need to make outbound work again or just making it work. So many people have tried, 70 % of have an initiative trying to make outbound work.
And I think the number is like 80 % of those initiatives fail. So that's one is something that's very important to us. The second one is converting better the inbound that people have. Inbound is still a big channel, but there is a lot of noise and inefficiencies. And at some point, either sales complain hard or the CFO or just marketing wants to get more from the bucks that they're spending there.
Anis Bennaceur (16:35.768)
Okay, so typically, and what is, you know, within a company's growth, kind of like, how would you define the moment when this tends to happen? Is it based on headcount? Is it based on, you know, some role changes within the company revenue generation? How are you thinking about that? Maybe funding.
Sam Levan (16:58.523)
Yeah, and I think you're thinking very much into like, sometimes when we think of ICP, we're like, hey, what's the company size? What is the industry? Like very much like thinking as a database. I think those are like good proxies for that. But I think for sure those initiatives are often driven by new people joining it. So I think on that one, when a new CMO comes in, when a new CRO comes in,
That's a big trigger for that. Everything that's around new strategy. So every year, and it's interesting, almost at every board meeting, companies that are very inbound driven, then there is this discussion about, we need to be sales led. And the companies that are sales led, we need to be PLG. So it is always this thing about where you are should be the other side. Companies that are very enterprise say, hey, we need to sell mid-market. And companies that are mid-market say, we need to move to enterprise.
So I think there is those clear cycles and initiatives that are big triggers, I think.
Anis Bennaceur (18:07.326)
The grass is always greener on the other side, right?
Sam Levan (18:11.077)
There is a bit of it, yeah.
Anis Bennaceur (18:13.624)
Okay, so typically as you said, it's kind of like new people coming into new executive leadership, new kind of strategy to get more market share and so on. so what did you, let's deep dive a little bit more into signal-based selling. In your case, so what got you to realize that this was going to be a big
market.
Sam Levan (18:46.245)
Just listening to our CMOs and CROs, because there is so much change going on right now. It's pretty insane. Things that worked 12 months ago have stopped working. Things that did not work start working again. New things are showing up. And I think the companies that we see have the most success really understand the changes and adapt fast. I'll share a
a few things and why single base selling is more relevant than ever. think one is simply the saturation of inbound channels and the fact that for every single company, the CAC has been increasing. So, pay has got very hard. Inbound as a channel is necessary, but you're not going to build all the gross you need just from inbound. So, there is that part.
And at the same time, everybody's like, okay, let's do complement that with Outbound. And Outbound has got harder because everybody's saying we need to do Outbound, buying the same list of people, same phone numbers, same emails, right? Using the same tools, reaching out to the same prospect, saturation of that channel as well. So for us, used to be very, very... A big of the big use case we had was...
really understanding which account to go after, prioritization of your inbound or prioritization of your outbound. But the trigger for the larger value proposition around single base selling is there were so many buying signals, like in systems that our customers have, but also outside. The challenge of sell was not doing something with it.
So I think the main thing was, okay, here's an account you should go after. Here's a lead you should go after. Here's a phone number. Here's an email. And sales were either not reaching out or was reaching out with a very generic message that do not convert well today. Once we started giving the sellers more context, started, like some of the sellers started crushing it. So we looked at why are they crushing it? How do they use that context to actually do something with it?
Sam Levan (20:58.575)
And then we realized there is maybe like 50 plays, what we call plays, but basically like associating different signals and to a specific type of outreach. And if you basically give sellers not only the signals, not only the context, but also the plays, like the actions that they want to take. One, they save a lot of time because they don't have to connect five dots together to decide what to do. Two, they reach out to more people with much better messages. And we literally had like, we started seeing SDRs.
who booked 10 meetings a month, booking 90 meetings a month. Like not 20 % more, it was going to 10 to 90. So that's where we knew there was something to invest deeply on when you see that kind of success with a sales team.
Anis Bennaceur (21:44.376)
Do you think going from like 10 to 90 is still current today when you're seeing such a saturation of email going out and also Gmail and Outlook cracking down on spam and open rates and blocking, reducing the open rates with especially recently the cookie tracking pixel, right?
How is that going to evolve in your opinion?
Sam Levan (22:20.483)
I think the mass, I think what's dying for sure is like the playbook, revenue, predictable revenue playbook. Buy 10,000 emails and phone number, put them in a dialer, put them in a big sequence. think that game is over. You used to build companies like up to 10, 20, $50 million in revenue with just one playbook. mean, those were like amazing days. You could build a company much, much more easily. That's gone away. But I think the...
a thoughtful outreach at the right time with the right people, with the right value proposition, like the basics of selling and marketing will always work because you are putting yourself in front of the right people, adding value in this process and buyers, they still want some help in the way they buy products.
Anis Bennaceur (23:10.528)
So let's say today I'm a company, I don't have anything that is, you know, a signal that is using signal led messaging. And so what would you say are the top three signals? Obviously, I'm sure it depends from on one con what company we are and what we're doing and who we're selling to. But what would you say are three easy actions that we should set up for? Let's say, yeah, signal led outbound.
or inbound, just selling it.
Sam Levan (23:42.777)
Yeah, let's make it super concrete. one of the things that's very important to understand is, I think there is, when we say signal-based selling, most people will think more signals. What is the magic signal that exists out there, that someone is in market? I think signal-based selling is less about signals. It's more about the actions that you take, the selling parts. How do you connect the two together? And I'll give a few examples, right? So we don't talk so much about signals, but more about the plays.
I'll give you like a few examples of that. Reactivation of lost opportunity. I'm starting with something that's boring like hell, but it freaking works, right? It's incredible that for 90 % of companies or 90 % of sellers within the organization, there is not a consistent always on outreach on people you've talked to in the past for which a company is showing interest again. And concretely, like what does that look like?
Anis Bennaceur (24:22.168)
Bye.
Sam Levan (24:41.915)
You know who's on your website, either anonymously or not anonymously. There are a lot of solutions of the anonymizer or traffic. You can see who is going to events, engaging with your content and all of those things. You can see on LinkedIn also who is engaging with your brand. Can you connect those types of interactions to opportunities that you've lost in the past? And instead of starting the quarter and saying, okay, we need to pipeline for the new quarter. Let's just reach out to the 200 people I've talked to last quarter.
No, you talk to them right at the moment where there is a renewed interest. So that's one that always works very, very simple, but the consistency and the automation of that, I think, is one of the blockers for companies. Another one that works amazingly well today, a lot of buyers are reconsidering their budgets. So I think for a lot of companies, churn has been much, higher than it used to be.
But at the same time, if people are churning product, they're offering churning product to buy another. So, and Replace have worked very, very well, I for a lot of our customers. And the Rip and Replace signals are pretty straightforward. Like if you want to start extremely simple, when someone goes on your website and on your website, you compare your product with others. Or when they click on an ad, like a lot of ads that say, we're better than X. I mean, very few sellers use that signal in their outreach.
to basically say, I've looked at, you know, it seems that you're considering our product and maybe like, competitor A. Here is like the main reason why people from competitor A, you know, buy our product is the pinpoint that you have with competitor A. This works amazing. It's not about, you know, do you have a pain, like, can I help you? Let's book a meeting. So, read and replace, amazing. the last one I'll throw quickly since you asked for three.
We talked about hiring signals. I think a lot of companies look at hiring signals more as, are they hiring a developer, a security officer, and those kinds of things. They don't look what's inside the job description. So one signal that's great is looking at what companies are hiring from, what have they hired in the past, and what were the job descriptions. Those job descriptions are amazing to describe the pain point that these companies have. So just look at it and put your value prop.
Sam Levan (27:04.334)
in front of those pain points.
Anis Bennaceur (27:06.24)
I love that. is great. So let's talk maybe about what you're seeing across your customer base. Can you of share a real world example? You can maybe name a company if you're allowed to, or keep that name private. that made the shift and saw huge changes. But also, you're quite impressed by
you know, some of the creativity that they had, you know, getting back to you and coming up with ideas that you hadn't thought of before. I'm pretty curious about that.
Sam Levan (27:43.321)
Yeah, by the way, I don't have any new idea. Our customers are all the ones doing the thinking for us. We just listen. I have plenty of stories. think one that just comes to mind now, I really like the team at Lucid. think Nick Rico is an amazing leader. I the sales organization and ops organizations are doing some great work. One of the things that can be interesting for folks to hear is...
Anis Bennaceur (27:46.584)
You
Sam Levan (28:13.515)
Sometimes you don't need to have fancy ideas and invent something really new. Those ideas already exist in the organization. And one of the things that I think very few leaders do, and that frustrates me a little bit, is looking at what is actually working on the outreach. I often go to events, I meet with a lot of folks and I often ask, if you look at your prospecting, what your SDRs do, or if you have full cycle AEs, what do they do? What are the...
like a few messages that works best for driving pipeline. Where is it coming from? Is it like 20 different ways of engaging customers? Do you have like two ways of engaging customers that work best? And I think few people know. Everybody has an opinion on the website. Like the CEO will say, hey, the website was saying this, we should say that way, CMOs, CROs. But when it comes to prospecting, that black box where, hey, that's SDR team. Those SDRs, like nobody cared about them.
the people in sequences who know what they write. And on that one, think Lucid, for example, has been very good at this collaboration between sales and marketing. So for example, like when they did the exercise looking at what prospecting was actually working really well for them, basically they realized there were like two plays that works amazing. One play is simply a consolidation of accounts. Like you have multiple people from a company.
buying the product in different units. So the value prop is very simple. Reach out not to the people using your product, but to the person in charge of the stack. And basically mention that you have a few users, explain the value proposition of consolidating those accounts into one. And that's a play where I'm amazed that that's not something that everybody should be doing. If you have such a...
a product that works that way. So that's one example of clay that works amazing that basically they could replicate for all their sellers and automate across the organization. that's one that was interesting as an insight. But the other was one of the seller was having a lot of success reaching out by looking at basically she found that when people were looking at Lucid and they had like some special shapes like for
Sam Levan (30:35.353)
during databases. So Lucidchart is a suite for collaboration and one of the key products is on diagramming. And she was basically reaching out and hey, it looks like you are making mapping networks. And we have this product offering and these features around automatically maps AWS networks. Response rate amazing. She like gets into calls and then she would close a lot of business. So that one was making leveraging.
What are people looking on the website? What are they doing in the product? Understanding the use case that they have and reaching out with a very specific use case tool to improve that. So those are stories where we've seen massive improvements in conversion rates and then from that.
Anis Bennaceur (31:19.724)
And so thinking about you guys are at Metcoudoo today, what is your biggest source of revenue generation from a top funnel perspective? Where do you see kind of like the biggest clients coming? What are, you know, just curious the, I'm sure you're dogfooding your own product, but tell me.
Sam Levan (31:38.361)
No, we don't duck food, we drink our champagne. Exactly.
Anis Bennaceur (31:41.592)
Obviously you're French, right? I should have gone with that one. But yeah, tell me more about you guys.
Sam Levan (31:50.703)
Yeah, and maybe I'll share also a bit of the bigger point of view on distribution. I think sometimes we think very much into are you inbound, are you PLG, are you outbound, are you partner-led, and you have different funnels. We're seeing more an integrated point of view where inbound reinforces outbound, outbound reinforces.
For example, events and those kinds of things. for us, I think we still have a very strong word of mouth. That's interesting.
Our prospects say, I heard about MadKudu from X or MadKudu is used by a friend of mine and he was saying X and Y. So word of mouth is very, very important. At the end of the day, if you build a great product, people like it and see success, then it helps every other channel that you have. So big one, but the other one is obviously a single base selling where we leverage it to multi-thread on LinkedIn, emails, and we don't do codes today. So that's something we might experiment with.
Anis Bennaceur (33:17.579)
It's really interesting. Well, you should definitely try out Attention where Attention can analyze thousands of your conversations and tell you all so the compelling. So sorry, go for it.
Sam Levan (33:25.102)
Yes!
Right.
No, no, I love the actionability and the space, I think, on the cool intelligence and what goes beyond that. think it's a space that's evolving super fast and we're just touching, scratching the surface of what can be done there.
Anis Bennaceur (33:44.704)
Absolutely. And so, you know, I have a question for you, which is what are some problems that, you know, in 2024 shock you in the way that they're being currently under addressed, right? What are some things that the SaaS world could be doing better if most people were trying to build 10 % better solutions of one another?
Sam Levan (34:12.943)
That's a big question. I'll tell you my pet peeve maybe on that one. And I go back to not something like fancy and hypey, but going back to the customer. Really understanding the buyers and having the humility to really see things from their perspective, where I think for lot of companies, every company sounds the same. I go to events, I hear people pitch, and we all sound the same, right?
We're all seeing the same thing, the same product. What I thrive to do and I push for that is to have a very strong point of view where you're clear on your ICP and you're very clear on the differentiated approach. So on RN, for example, we are in the single base setting category. think there are a lot of players there and more are going to come because...
I mean, it works. there's a gap. The market is not going to space still. But we have a very clear point of view and angle on how we want to solve the problem and how to solve it for us. Specifically for us, we don't believe in AISDRs. We don't believe in adding more platforms. Because as soon as you have a mid-market enterprise, you tend to have multiple different tools. And we basically see partnerships.
and basically making other products, enabling other products to do single-based selling as the approach that we have. So very different feature set, approach, and philosophy. I wish, I think, sometimes a company would be bolder in having a point of view on who they serve and also how they want to serve that and take a stand.
Anis Bennaceur (35:56.248)
that makes sense to me. when you look at your space, they, you know, the whole, the signal bay, signal based selling world seems like more and more players are coming into your space. and it's getting more competitive in your opinion. what do you think it like, how does that impact?
the rate of innovation, right? There's a lot more money that gets invested in the space. It's getting easier to build solutions, you know, and to program fast compared to a couple years ago. How do you think this is going to even impact your rate of innovation, the directions that you're going to be taking? Is it going deeper into your solution? Is it kind of like going more broadly?
I'm curious to know your thoughts of the founders there.
Sam Levan (36:55.993)
Yeah, yeah, One, think it's great when a category is being created and money is being dumped into that because I think the hardest, like what we lose against is not competition. What we lose against is people not knowing what could be, right? And I think same thing in your space. If you look at your space, like still you have, I mean, I was talking to a...
the VP operation of a 4,000 people company. And they were saying like, I was asking, how do you record calls? What call intelligence do you use? They were saying, we don't. Like, how can you have a company with 4,000 people, 400 sellers, not recording calls, right? So I think that's the competition that you have. that's in a way, like the competition that we have. So I welcome, I think, the fact that a lot of players come and people talk about it. In terms of
differentiation and angle, it's a very like, you have a few winners at the end. Having a clear point of view and moat, I think is what we're betting on. I think a lot of companies are like, no, no, it's brand, brand and go to market. I totally agree on that one, but I don't think it's enough. I do think having a point of view and for us, building a moat around two things, partnerships and proprietary data sets are the two things where we are like,
It takes a lot of time when we're seeing millions of dollars, literally millions of dollars on those things. Someone who wants to replicate what we do will have to spend millions of dollars because it's not about building software, it's about building data sets, and it's about building those partnerships.
Anis Bennaceur (38:35.516)
Yeah, I agree with you on that. That's kind of the one big thing. They're two big things that you're going to keep to build your remote today, right? And so based on everything that we just talked about, right, if you had to leave listeners with one key takeaway, what would that be?
Sam Levan (39:03.737)
Very simple. I would really look at what works on the prospecting side, like really opening your sales engagement tool, taking a few deals that you opened that went to stage two and look at what actual messages were being used and see if there is any reason not to have everyone replicate that message across your organization. That one literally takes half an hour.
And that can generate millions of pipelines with very little lift.
Anis Bennaceur (39:35.704)
Sam, if you had to shout out three people here who deserve a slot in this podcast, who would they be? Anyone in the good market world.
Sam Levan (39:48.277)
Ooh. As I mentioned, I have so many, so that one I'm reviewing my list and almost like, shoot, I wish you gave me like 20, but a few that come to mind. I think Nick Bicot from Lucid. I really like the experience he had.
the breadth of experience that he's had. So I would give a shout out to him for sure. I would also mention Autodesk. I think they have different teams, but there are a people there that I'd love to have on the show. And you said three.
Anis Bennaceur (40:41.302)
Yeah, any third one? You can stick with two, but...
Sam Levan (40:43.822)
Yes.
Let's see.
Sam Levan (40:53.765)
Yeah, I quite a few.
Anis Bennaceur (40:59.148)
Or you can make it four if easier.
Sam Levan (41:01.339)
No, let's see. And there is Casey from Sendoso, the VP marketing of Sendoso. I really like the work she did with the brand, Austin on the growth side and Tanner. But Casey, I think, has been putting this together. I think she would be a great person to add there.
Anis Bennaceur (41:27.256)
I would love to talk to them. Sam, this has been amazing. I'm sure a lot of listeners here will learn a ton about signal based selling, about you guys. I hope this is going to drive a lot of people to your website, everyone. So if you had to do a shameless plug here, Sam, go ahead. About MadKudu. What's your...
Sam Levan (41:49.499)
Yeah, I'm from Europe, so we don't do... But yeah, if you want to automate sales, more of this sales activity that can be automated and replicate best practices, for sure, go have a conversation with us. We're not salesy at all. We love to help customers. And even if you get a few ideas from the first call, which often people say, you guys should charge for that first call, have this conversation.
We take a of pride in adding value.
Anis Bennaceur (42:22.52)
So your website is madkudu.com, right?
Sam Levan (42:28.107)
MadKudu.com, that's right.
Anis Bennaceur (42:30.36)
Great, awesome, thank you so much. See you on the other side.
Sam Levan (42:34.201)
See ya.