Sequencers Are Obsolete in 2026

Most GTM teams are still optimizing a sales stack that's already obsolete. Anis Bennaceur, co-founder of Attention, joins Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski to make the case that sequencers - and maybe even the CRM itself - won't survive the next few years of AI-native selling.

In this episode of GTM Uncensored, Anis explains why he told Outreach's own CEO that sequencers are obsolete in 2026 (and got agreement, not pushback), why most "pipeline problems" are actually visibility problems, and how bad lead routing is quietly costing revenue teams 20%+ in missed ARR.

Adam, Dale, and Anis discuss:

• Why no one responds to a 14-email sequence anymore
• The real difference between a pipeline problem and a visibility problem
• Whether the CRM survives the next decade of AI-native GTM
• How to turn a manual workflow into an agent instead of a top-down mandate
• Why copying your top sales performer's playbook can backfire
  
  

Chapters:
(00:00) Introduction: CRMs are gonna go away
(00:31) The Ventura Ops scenario: fixing a 14-tool sales stack
(02:26) Why sequencers are obsolete: the Outreach CEO story
(05:29) Attention as a "revenue operating system": redefining the category
(09:01) Turning manual workflows into agents, not top-down mandates
(22:48) Does the CRM survive the next decade of AI-native GTM?
(28:43) From investment banking to sales tech: Anis's unusual path into GTM
(31:47) The hidden cost of bad lead routing: 20%+ missed ARR
(36:56) Monday Morning Move: pipeline problem vs. visibility problem
(44:08 ) Why copying your top performer's playbook backfires
(45:36) Wrap up: dream vacations and thank yous

Creators and Guests

Host

Adam Jay

Co-founder & Managing Partner of Revenue Reimagined

Host

Dale Zwizinski

Managing Partner & Co-Founder of Revenue Reimagined

What is GTM Uncensored™?

Most GTM content covers the same ground. GTM Uncensored finds the operators actually in the seat and digs into what's true in today's GTM, not what sounds good.

Every guest is currently building a company, leading a revenue team, or running a GTM function inside a real business. During the show, Adam and Dale push the envelope until the real story comes out.

The show goes where most content won't: The motions that determine whether a company stays in business, or goes under.

GTM Uncensored is built for B2B revenue leaders at $5M–$100M ARR who are accountable to a number and need a real-world playbook, not philosophy.

Every episode ends with a Monday Morning Move. One specific action you can take this week, and a series of Uncensored Questions where listeners get unfiltered answers from people who've actually been there.

What we cover: Pipeline & GTM motion, post-sale architecture, CS & retention, NRR/GRR mechanics, RevOps, AI in the revenue org, executive branding, and more.

Your hosts: Adam Jay and Dale Zwizinski are co-founders of Revenue Reimagined. They didn't build a consulting firm. They flipped the fractional CRO model because strategy without execution doesn't move the needle. The questions they ask on air are the same ones they're solving inside real companies right now.

GTM Uncensored is the GTM conversations nobody else is having.

[00:00:00] Anis Bennaceur: I actually met the CEO of Outreach a couple weeks ago, and I told him, "You're gonna hate what I'm gonna tell you, but I think that sequencers are obsolete in 2026." He responded to me, "I actually agree with you." I would tell anyone, "Hey, if you guys are using something like Outreach, like just cut it off because there's a new way of doing things."

No one responds to sequences of 14 emails anymore except to say, "Hey, stop reaching out."

[00:00:31] Adam Jay: Alright. So on GTM Uncensored, we always like to open with a scenario that's gonna put you on the clock, Anis. So here we go. Ventura Ops, they're a twenty million dollar B2B SaaS company. Their CRO just walked in with a big problem. The sales team's running fourteen different tools. Reps are spending forty percent of their week on CRM updates and note-taking, and close rates have dropped two quarters in a row.

This sounds very familiar to your everyday, right? the board is asking whether the go-to-market stack is the problem or whether the people are. So you're the CEO of an AI-native revenue operating system, go figure. What's the very first question you're asking the CRO, and what's the one thing you're gonna tell them to cut before they add anything new at all?

[00:01:14] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah. The first question I would ask them is, why were you brought in, right?What is your objective? What are you looking at, uh, when you're looking at your business in a year from, from now from a revenue perspective? Where would you like to get?I try to understand that.

Let's say he or she tells me, we're at twenty and we want to double to forty next year, right? The next question I'll ask them is, what is your growth rate looking like? What are the things preventing you from getting to that objective right now? And so once I know his or her objective, where they want to get, what are the blockers to get there?

What are the potential friction points, right? You start very top-down, especially when you're talking to CRO. Understand what are some of the things that have been blocking them recently from or preventing them to hitting their numbers. And then I start getting more and more in the weeds of some of the pain points and get more and more tactical over time.

[00:02:10] Adam Jay: I like it. What's the first thing you would tell them to cut before they add anything new? And you, you see this every day, right? Like y-you guys are, you're a revenue intelligence platform. We'll talk about that in a little bit. But you walk into people that have five, 10, 15 tools.

Other than a competitor, what's normally the first thing that you're like, "Dude, get rid of it. Useless. Bloat."

[00:02:30] Anis Bennaceur: I smile as I say this, but I, I actually, uh, met the CEO of Outreach at Gartner, a couple weeks ago, and I told him, "You're gonna hate what I'm gonna tell you, but I think that sequencers are obsolete in 2026." And he actually-- he responded to me, "I actually agree with you." So I had to tell anyone, "Hey, if you guys are using something like Outreach, like, just cut it off because there's a new way of doing things."

No one responds to sequencers of 14 emails anymore except to say, "Hey, stop reaching out

[00:03:04] Adam Jay: Stop it. Stop sending me-- Stop sending me 14 sequences. that's very interesting to me

[00:03:10] Anis Bennaceur: There are some, some, you know, like AI native tools that are more focused on, you know, next best actions versus actually having the sequencer. And so the next best actions are different things, right? that are rather than like a fixed sequence, it's more of like the right message via the right format, via, the right place to the right person.

That's like a lot smarter. yeah, I can shout out maybe some tools like Ample Market or Regie.ai or UniFi, you know,that are kind of like smarter there. But even actually to close the loop there, the CEO of Outreach told me, "Hey, the next best action it's the next thing we're focused on.

Exactly. It's like insight to action, right? What is the insight? What is the action that should be driven off that insight, right? And the insight could be even something like, Let's say you were to build everything ideally internally, right? It could be something like, hey, the exec sponsor that you should be connected with actually uh, used to work with one of your power users.

Let's say now you, you were to build things internally, like this is a lot of the stuff that we're doing internally, right? Take your power users and then like try to map out their connections. And it's a beast to build, but over time now, you know, hey, I'm trying to get to the CRO of this company that we don't have access to.

That CRO used to actually work with, uh, someone else at their last company, right? That someone else loves our product. We can ask that someone else to introduce us.

[00:04:33] Adam Jay: You mean go, go to, go to network actually works instead of, you know, a, a seventeen s-sequence that now I think has moved so much from email to LinkedIn. I'm getting so many LinkedIn sequences that it's so clear it's a sequence. I, I-- And to your point, like I don't even respond to tell them to stop.

Like I just delete it. It's, it's obnoxious

[00:04:54] Anis Bennaceur: I block people now, right? Like from the third message, I block people on LinkedIn.

[00:04:58] Dale Zwinzinski: And it's always been about value, but it's not, now it's not like static value. It's not like send me a PDF file of like a case study. It's like, how do I put in information to generate a calculation based on what I'm trying to accomplish or something? So I think it's, I think it's different.

And it, this comes back to a question that we've been thinking about with Attention for a while. So you describe Attention as a revenue operating system. It's evolved over time, right? I remember when we first talked, and it's not a sales tool. That's a really big claim.

What's the scope of an operating system? And isn't it the scope of like a CRM or like a sales engagement platform? Like, what's the difference?

[00:05:36] Anis Bennaceur: I think we started with sales and we got market pulled towards account management teams and customer success teams and BR teams, right? But our bread and butter has always been sales. And whenever we even launch a new product, we're always gonna start with sales before we start to, start thinking about the other teams that we start expanding to, right?

And they end up, being more of an afterthought than really us working really hard to please the other teams. Everything has to be a byproduct of us actually, super serving sales teams. Eventually those are the teams not only that lead with the experiments, but also, this is like where you get all the revenue coming from.

The second thing is, we started as a simple product that will auto-fill your CRM, right? one input, which was your call recordings, and then one output, which is your CRM. And over time, we started growing a different number of inputs, so including emails and including, now Slack.

Just everything that you wanna ingest, and then wherever you wanna output the information. It could be not only your CRM now, but obviously Slack and email reports and wherever you want the information to land, right? And that led us into our sales, that the equivalent for us of next best action from a deal execution is like, how do you best execute on your deal today, right?

It's not just like, how do you generate cold pipeline. On our end, it's how do you make sure that your deals are getting, you know, all the follow-ups are getting done properly, right? Like you finish your call, you should obviously write a follow-up email to your prospect, but also the other thing is you need to multithread better, right?

And so populating these actions for multithreading is very important. And then you grow into more and more actions that are given to you as a rep to better win your deals. It's a tremendous amount of work that we need to do.

We need to also understand what drove success and what drove outcomes in the past in order to now give you better and better, insights and better actions for you to drive your deals. And then the last thing is, as a manager, you need to understand how is your team performing. Where are things slipping through the cracks, right?

And so we're giving a view to the manager, not only in terms of, "Hey, this is where your team is actually messing up. This is where your team is not taking action on certain deals. You should nudge them." But also, here are some insights about proactively about some of the things that you should know about your team, right?

Like your reps are Not setting up next steps the right way. Your team is, just simple as that, right? But also your team is actually, we've seen it even using our own tool, a rep will try to get way too technical with their buyers and lose them along the way, right? In the old world, you had to go in, listen to transcripts in your call recorder.

In the new world, we surface this to you as a leader. We'll be surfacing this more and more to you as a leader proactively. I think the word proactive is extremely important here

[00:08:38] Adam Jay: I couldn't agree more. I think the days of having to go and pull calls to find your data and listen to calls to find your data,are long, long gone. and if it's not being proactive and not saving time, the tool, whether Attention or anything else, isn't gonna exist. the game has changed and arguably is changing every single day, transparently. Anis you've worked with God knows how many sales teams using AttentionI'm super curious where most of them start and where they get stuck, not just with Attention, but specifically with like when they try to bring AI into their sales motion, because I'd imagine your conversations are spanning much more than attention.

[00:09:26] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah. They generally start with a very simple pain point that very few tools actually do. It's just auto-filling the info in your CRM so you have one single source of truth, right? And then whether, you know, that single source of truth is actually your CRM or your data warehouse, like that's a different problem, right?

But we'll auto-fill your CRM and then you can have that information sent to your data warehouse. So that's in your pyramid of Maslow, like that's basic need, right? The next thing though is where we see teams getting a little stuck is on knowing what to do, right? Like you, if you go in and tell them, "Hey, you can build whatever agent you want," they won't know exactly.

They'll just tell you, "What are the other teams doing?" That's something very often that we hear from clients, which is, "Tell me what your best customers are doing." We can be very prescriptive about things, but the issue is that if you tell them, "Hey, you know, like we'll give you the five top agents that clients are using," over time they'll tell you, "Oh, only one or two was useful to us."

And you know which ones they are, right? Generally it's pre-call prep, which helps the reps. And then another one would be just give me an analysis of closed won or closed lost after, whenever deals, are successful or not. The other things are not as useful to them. The reality is, and how I see the best teams operationalizing it, is that they go to something that they've been doing very manually, in the past, and they just like try to build an agent around it, right?

What is the manual workflow that they do, and how do they get that workflow going from manual to fully automated, right? And so rather than doing it top-down, "Hey, these are all the things that we see the most successful teams do," it should just be like, "What are you doing internally that's taking you a lot of time or that's blocking you that we should now operationalize for you?"

I'll give you an example, and this is where FDEs are very helpful. It's a client will tell us whenever there's a deal that's closed won, in addition to having a handover note to the CSM team, they also fill manually this Google Sheet every single time with a ton of information.

They do that manually, right? What we really did for them really simply was have Attention auto-fill that Google Sheet for them every single time a deal gets won. That's very custom to them, and this is how they work, but we automated that, or Attention's automated

that

that for them

[00:11:53] Dale Zwinzinski: I think that problem exists everywhere. Like we were just working with a cl- I was working with a client that was working on,

It's kind of funny that, you know, like next best action has been around forever. So I remember being in the retail space and rule engine technology and decision engines were always next best action. You go to like... And Amazon, like they, they were great at it, right? It's "Okay, you buy this, now I'm gonna sell you that."

And so this has been around forever. and if we looked at sequencing the way we should really be looking at sequencing, that's really what it should be anyway. It should never be a straight line. It shouldn't be like, do this and do that and do this. It could be like, do this, then there's a decision point, and then you do something else.

compensation plans. And so they were like, we, I built out compensation plans for them, and as it always happens, the territory shifted.

They, somebody left, you had to reallocate accounts, like all of this stuff happened. And then she's like, "Well, I have to go rebuild all these account plans and compensation plans." And I'm like, "Okay, hold on. Let's take what we originally built out and I'll build you a Claude skill for it, like it's super simple, and it'll just start asking you questions to go through the process."

It took her two to two and a half hours to build one comp plan. We did it in 10 minutes based on the template that was already built, the pro... And then the next, very next conversation, the very next, statement was, before I can build all these comp plans with this, I have to go reallocate and rebuild the territory plan, the territories again."

And I'm like, "Hold on. You just, we just went through this process and exercise. Let's map out like all the things you do." Sh- And she's like, "No, it's too complicated." And then like we started like digging into it, like asking one question at a time and she's like, " Okay, I think we can automate that." I was like, " Okay, you make a decision here."

She's like, "Yes, I make a decision here." "Okay, we write that down or put it on the Lucid chart," or like, "How do we map it out?" And then all of a sudden like, yes, there are things that you are not gonna be able to automate completely, but like if I can take 80% of y- what you're doing manually, and I can cut a two-hour process and you have 10 of them, now you have, you know, 20 hours, and I can do it in 20 minutes.

People just aren't thinking that way, and I think it's a complete mindset shift

[00:14:06] Anis Bennaceur: 100%. I was talking to a client yesterday about, PLG versus let's say, human-led onboardings with a top-down motion. Andwhat, What that client was saying in their case is that it's way too hard to properly onboard a client because there are so many different nuances when-- that, that you need to capture.

And the reality is,

no, you

can actually

[00:14:25] Dale Zwinzinski: No, it's not true

[00:14:27] Anis Bennaceur: all do it with AI now. it's not as hard as you think. It's just kind of intellectual laziness, right?

[00:14:33] Adam Jay: the in-intellectual laziness goes back to the very first thing you said, Anis, which is, tell me what your best customers are doing." And th-th-this is a balance, right? We see it all the time. Just because someone else is doing it doesn't mean that it's right for you. But on the flip side, asking where your bottlenecks are doesn't mean we want to fix stupid.

And we had a client that migrated from Salesforce to HubSpot, and they had a very archaic process in Salesforce that they're like, "Well, we need to rebuild this in HubSpot." Well, why? It's a stupid process. Like, we don't want to carry it over. And I think you have to find this balance in the middle of like what is best in class, but at the same time, what are your specific problems to your business that could be solved with AI?

I could bring all of the AI that Attn uses for Attn into Revenue Reimagined, and if it doesn't fit my use case or my business model, it's absolutely useless and I've wasted all of these cycles and all of this money. It's a balance.

[00:15:30] Anis Bennaceur: 100%.

[00:15:31] Adam Jay: It's interesting. A-all of this go, though, when we talk about AI ties to data, right?

Like there, there's a data problem underneath an AI problem. And you and I have talked about this, Dale and I have talked about this when he's actually willing to get on the phone with me, but garbage in, garbage out. So you're building on top of sales data, that's often incomplete, certainly inconsistently entered, sporadic at best.

H-how do you solve for this, and how do you train people to solve for this on an infrastructure level so that they're not getting sh*t outputs?

[00:16:09] Anis Bennaceur: It's all about your single source of truth, right? I'll maybe get out of sales for a second becausean hour ago I was talking with my co-founder about this, and we're right now in the process at our sales of just building processes and systems a-across the entire business, right?

And so within sales, we're doing things, really well because that's our bread and butter and, we have our source of truth being our CRM, and then we operate everything on top of it. That being said, all the other functions, we-- I-I'll deal with the very tactical problems that we have internally here.

There's a big gap between what our engineering teams know about the development of the product and then what sales and growth know about, product timelines and how things are getting built, right? And so the conversation I had with my co-founder, Matthias, was really simple.

It was, "All right-" Rather than doing what people have been doing for the past, 20 years, which is you build an entire slide deck with your product, your product roadmap and your timelines and so on, let's actually rethink this from first principles. And so what we were doing instead is, similar to sales, basically we have Linear that is our source of truth for customer tickets, but also product features getting built.

We auto-fill or auto-close tickets in Linear based on the GitHub, pushes that are happening, from the engineers, right?So that's kind of like your source of truth. Within Slack then, we get a message every single day about how things are evolving against the timelines that we've set up internally, right?

And now you start having this source of truth for product that can go in and auto-build your Google Slides based on that source of truth, right? You can just, program now Claude to go in and automatically build all of your slides based on that source of truth that you set up, right? You can have the same thing, let's say now for, hiring, right?

If your source of truth is your ATS and you're actually tracking everything in your ATS, then at that point, you can do a lot more work based on that. You will probably see that some data is missing over time, but that's okay. You can figure out how you include more and more of that data and that source of truth, and then things get automated, right?

So if you're spending too much time as an org manually updating your Notion documentation or manually updating your Google Slides or creating additional and additional documentation that get, gets lost and outdated, you're probably doing things wrong. The reality is you should have all the right processes and systems that update only once that source of truth based on the right inputs, and then everything else should stem from that.

[00:18:59] Dale Zwinzinski: and I think what's happening is the... We have a lot of data all over the place. It's all about digestibility of the data. So you could have a single data stream that Anis needs to see as a CEO, but your head of sales needs to see something like in that data stream in a completely different way, where it's not like it, it doesn't, he doesn't need all of your data and you don't need all of his data, but the data stream's the same.

So I look at things as can we get digestible data in a place where we can make decisions on them? Because if we don't, the problem is we will always go to a place of either I can't get the data, I can't get it in the way I can make a decision, and then people quit on it. And I think until we get to that place of figuring out...

Because like you were saying, in linear you have the product stuff, but you also have tickets, right? And so it's the same data flow you d- but both processes need to digest it in a different way

[00:19:57] Anis Bennaceur: 100%. Yeah. It's how you present it to the teams that are not used to reading it that way, right? The, The Sauder and the growth team won't be able to read the information linear like the engineers are reading it. And similarly, the engineers, if they want to know something about our sales or they won't know how to

Go into Salesforce and read like the reports, right? how you represent that or re-architect that information to, people so that they digest it the right way, I think that Claude, actually Claude will do it really easily, right? hey, just present this information like pipe-- our sales pipeline, present it in a way that's digestible to an engineer in case they're actually interested in learning more and, and knowing what the other teams are working on.

[00:20:37] Adam Jay: but back to the intellectual laziness as well. Yep

[00:20:41] Dale Zwinzinski: a lot of people... We were just having this conversation right before you jumped on w- for a client, They're looking to grow their business. They are trying to have all these measurements. And so one of the things I said to Adam is like, "Do they even have access to all this data?"

And the answer is, the data's available, but it's not accessible. that's a difference, as well. Like, how do we get that data accessible into a place? 'Cause it's like I have stuff in CRM, and then I have stuff in Linear, or I have stuff in Notion, or I have stuff in Jira, and it's like all over the place

[00:21:12] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah, that's a good question. This is an exercise that we're currently going through. the main question is, okay, we have all the info, for example, from our group-- for our growth team hosted in our data warehouse. Does that mean, like, that our BRs or our AEs should have access to the data warehouse?

Definitely not. But, uh, if it can be digested somewhere. Yeah. Uh, if it can be digested elsewhere to something, either if it could be Claude, right? but at that point, you need to set up the right MCP to, to that place to, to do the data warehouse. There's probably an easier format for them to digest it, and that's what your business operations teams should be focusing on, which is just how do we take things coming from only one place where a specific function is working out of, and how do we bring that up to a format where everyone can read this more and more easily over time?

​
[00:22:48] Dale Zwinzinski: So I have a quick question on this,

Do you believe there's a place where like the CRM, like all of these systems are actually gonna be obsolete, and there's just gonna be a UI layer that's sitting on top of calling all of these different systems?

Like, to me, the CRM is, like you're trying to build a CRM that's configurable enough to be widespread for everybody in the world, when in reality, attention may not need all the different types of things that are happening in HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever. But you have really specific needs and processes that you say, "Look it, these are the data elements I need.

And if I need another one, I just go create it and I'll just relaunch the UI layer."

[00:23:33] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah.we actively think about this, right? today, the value of a CRM is to have these tables of, accounts, contacts, opportunities, and just compressed information of those. From these tables, then you can plug in an entire ecosystem of tools, which is the second value of it, right?

Like your sequencer will work out of your Salesforce because of all these tables that are getting created. Today, you know, with limited resources, we focus on the things that are-- have not been built yet, which is your, your system of action, having the right ontology or the right,the right brain, the right, memory for your teams that will drive smarter and smarter decisions because no one's built that, and that's where the money is today.

over time, what will happen, I'm sure companies like Salesforce and HubSpot, I know for a fact that they're also going in that direction, right? In our case, it would be foolish to try to rebuild a CRM, but the reality is we're already rebuilding, a shadow, an AI-native version of your CRM in the background when we're ingesting all that information.

But we decide, you know, from a go-to-market perspective that we don't want to go in and replace your CRM because that increases the amount of responsibility that, you know, we have to, that, that we have to carry for you as a business, right?

[00:24:52] Dale Zwinzinski: so this is a good point though. You don't want to recreate it, but you have a shadow of the data, so it doesn't mean customer A doesn't say like, "Look it, I already have all the data. Why am I paying HubSpot or Salesforce when I can actually go create my own visualization of the data back to digestibility for my users?"

[00:25:13] Anis Bennaceur: 100%. We'll actually give you even a better understanding of what's happening within your opportunities and accounts than what a CRM will do, right? Because we don't necessarily compress the data. We'll actually give you an exact understanding of your opportunities, let's say based on net pickers, price or whatever it is, some form of a data compression, but you still have all your calls, you still have all the raw data and then the intelligence that you need and the insights that are you getting out of it.

for us though, if we started carrying the responsibility of being a CRM today, we will get pulled in a million other directions that

[00:25:49] Adam Jay: I can't even imagine

[00:25:50] Anis Bennaceur: are not our business, right? By deciding to reject the entire responsibility of being a CRM, right? Which is I'm seeing with AI-native CRMs today, right?

They're getting pulled into the wrong directions because they have to carry that responsibility. In our case, that just allows us to focus on the one thing that customers care about, which is driving more revenue for you, right? Through the next best actions and the deal execution that we're giving every user with smarter and smarter actions, we're actually helping you drive more revenue.

That's what customers should only care about, and it's, this is what we should only care about. That's, that allows us to get to this world where eventually instead of charging, from consumption basis or seat basis, we end up charging from, an outcome-based, model because we're actually helping you drive better and better actions.

At that point, if you're able to drive so much revenue for your clients, then the notion of a CRM becomes obsolete, right? And we can say, "Hey, who cares about you just drive it, driving a million different, connecting a million different things to, to these tables?" We're just driving 90% plus of the value here across your entire, stack of tools.

[00:27:04] Adam Jay: I'm a big believer that CRMs are gonna go away. I don't know... A-and when I say CRMs, the HubSpots, Salesforce pipelines of the CRM world as we know them today.

[00:27:14] Dale Zwinzinski: So, so do you believe, so do you believe a CRM is going to be a differentiation to an organization in the marketplace? Like, so a company that goes builds their own CRM with their own logic trees underneath, only based on the data, can they become almost a proprietary CRM in the future?

[00:27:33] Anis Bennaceur: You can. I think like are the two things that matter for a CRM, right? The data structure and then the ecosystem of integrations. The second piece gets a little more impacted, right? Which is all the different tools that you're currently using today, right? And that we don't want to go out and replace, today, right?

It can be your scheduler, right? Like Chili Piper or Default or whatever you're using. there's an entire ecosystem of tools that people still use today and

[00:28:01] Dale Zwinzinski: Why, why not? Why not ask claude, Claude Codo to be like, "Here's Chili Piper." I don't need every single functionality. It's costing me $2,000 a month for five people. Go recreate it

[00:28:15] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah, because i-in my opinion, at least today, there's an entire maintenance of the API

[00:28:20] Dale Zwinzinski: Good point. Yep

tools. And so if you want to go in and rebuild that, like it, it ends up being a nightmare. I agree. I just was curious where you were going with it

[00:28:28] Adam Jay: So if memory serves me correct, prior to building companies, you had an investment banking and M&A background. Is that right?

[00:28:37] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah, that's correct

[00:28:38] Adam Jay: Yeah. Okay. Want to make sure I'm talking to the right person. Sometimes my memory fades away. So interesting background for a sales tech CEO. I'm super curious, when you take that background, how did that train you or what does that make you see about RevOps and sales that just most founders in this space miss?

What lens does that give you that's your competitive moat?

[00:29:03] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah, it's interesting. The other day I was actually thinking that, if I had thought about things differently, if I hadn't done Attention, I would probably have built something like, Rogo or Hebiya, right? AI for investment bankers. I mean, that's besides the question that you're asking.

[00:29:18] Adam Jay: Sure

[00:29:20] Anis Bennaceur: Uh, but I think, I think, as a matter of fact, I had imagined something like this back in 2013 or 2014, which is just like auto-building your slide decks based on information that's online and so on.

Anyway, today how it's helping me though is that I mean, I, I deeply understand, you know, the finances of the business. the end of the day, it's simple math, right? But when I talk to a PE-backed firm, for example, I'll go in and talk to them about EBITDA improvement versus, just,the traditional other things that most software startups will care about, right?

Which is how do we improve, how do you improve, efficiency? How do you grow revenue? There's also an entire cost component. I think the other thing truly is just, uh, when you go, go have M&A, you just normalize 100-hour weeks and so you're a work machine.

And so that does not help me necessarily, in the product that we're building, but it helps me be, extremely not only hardworking, but really strong attention to detail, no pun intended. And you,you just make sure that everything's really well-structured overall, right?

There's not more. You know, if I had become an MD,at a bank, then at that point I would've been sold a lot more, to really large committees, which would probably help me in certain ways through enterprise selling one way or another. But it's still a very different skill set that you have, right?

selling, an M&A project to a large company, to a CFO versus going out and selling,

[00:30:52] Adam Jay: do you miss that world at all?

[00:30:53] Anis Bennaceur: no. I mean, I, I, believe it or not, I loved it. I loved actually the torture of working really late it made me a bit of a workaholic, right? I just would remember that

[00:31:03] Adam Jay: you, you and I were messaging at what? 11 o'clock last night?

[00:31:06] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah. Yeah. I got better lately. I try to go to bed at 11:00 PM. But yeah,I remembered in my investment banking days, like I, I would grab dinner with my mom near the bank at 8:00 PM on a Sunday, and then go back to the office until 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM on that Sunday before I start the week,the next day.

Obviously here at Attention,the level of intensity is not as insane, right? Because I, I really and deeply believe in sleep and being energized so that you make the right decisions, right? If, If I had stayed up until 1:00 or 2:00 AM working last night, I would not be fresh for this conversation today, right?

Anis, you sit across from a sh*t ton of sales teams,both on the vendor side, likely on the customer side. What's the most common thing you see that leadership teams think is a pipeline problem, but it's actually something totally different? Everyone likes to say, "We need more pipeline."

The easiest thing is just conversion in general, right? Think how to convert your pipeline better. Actually, I'll, I'll give you something that's, that very few people think about that I think is important, is like how do you route that pipeline to the right people, in your team? Uh,I actually got back from my honeymoon on Sunday and,the one thing that I immediately did, I think I got back home around 5:30 PM on, on, on Sunday, and the first thing I did is I opened my laptop, which I didn't have with me on my honeymoon, and I opened-- And I actually went into Claude and, did a full analysis of our using attention obviously, like what is each AE best at closing and what is each AE really bad at closing, right?

Because we were routing each lead, randomly across reps. I know that, you know, larger teams today will break down their reps across teams, AE, enterprise AEs versus SMB and mid-market AEs and so on. That breakdown might still be wrong, because it's not, backed with data.

But now, I ask Cloud code to analyze all of this across our conversations and our CRM data and so on. And actually, we found out that some of our AEs who we thought were really good at larger deals were actually not very good at larger deals. They weren't multithreading as well as some, one of the top AEs, for example.

And so it gave us actually an extremely precise breakdown of which types of leads each AE should get so that we optimize our revenue. And so we actually realized that had we done this a year ago, we would have gotten 20% more ARR

than we got today, right? And this is conservative. It could have been even more than that.

And so your teams are probably sitting on, 20% plus missed ARR because they're not routing the leads effectively. And it's not just at the company level, but even at the person level, right? Like I'm sure using it like your scheduler, if someone went to the same school as you did, there could be a chance at a contact level that first call probably goes a little better and that they include more people in the next conversation than if they didn't, right?

If that person has the same, like I'll give you an example, but I'm French obviously, and, and if there's someone who's French coming in, I'll definitely jump into that first call at one point or another. I won't be the one driving it, but I'll say hello. I'll make sure that I introduce myself, and I know that this is going to help the deal, right?

if people have the same background, same country, same ethnicities, whatever you want it to be, believe it or not, it will actually have a way better impact on the rest of your deal than if you just route it to someone who does not have the same traits. So that's something that you think about.

[00:34:48] Dale Zwinzinski: How do you figure that out though? 'Cause you're bringing people in, you're like, "Okay, you should be good at enterprise, you should be good at SMB and mid-market." Do you do like a, like a trial almost, and then based on the data on the trial? Because I can imagine there, there's a world where in one organization you may have been good at SMB, but in another organization you could actually be better at mid-market depending on your knowledge and a, a lot of other dimensions.

and this is going into a place where I've actually started thinking a lot about which our macro decisions are made up of a lot of micro decisions that are only based on the best data you have available today. But the data in the future, like three months later, is more perfect data than you have today to make that decision.

[00:35:39] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah, totally. I mean, in, in our case, for example,the latest hires, we weren't getting enough data on them, so we'll have to wait. But obviously the people that you've had for the past, let's say at least eight months, you have enough data to route the right, right leads for them.

You'll need to try it out, right? Based on where they sold before and your gut feeling as a leader, which is something that AI does not replace today. But a-as a leader, you put them in a specific seat, you see how they sell, and then over time you adjust.

Thinking out loud, you can probably like try to use some role-playing tool and see like how it goes. But I really don't really believe in that, right? there's, I think with- within a few months you rerun this every now and then and like how AEs are evolving over time and how the new AEs are, adjusting to specific deals and you just like send them, to certain leads that they might be able to close better.

That's the first thing. Second thing is like it also shows you where each AE has room for progression and you assess this every quarter or so.

[00:36:41] Dale Zwinzinski: Yeah. I love that. I think there's something there for sure, and I think there's some learnings there that we need to keep digging in on. As we start wrapping some of this stuff up, I could keep going forever. I love having conversations with you. we have started something called Monday Morning Move.

The Monday Morning Move is a key takeaway, and we do want your opinion. It is to look at the last five deals that went dark, and for each one to go look and see what was the last human action that the rep took.

[00:37:08] Adam Jay: And if you can't answer that, it's not a pipeline problem you have, it's a damn visibility problem. The issue isn't more activity, it's knowing and figure out exactly where that human judgment left off

[00:37:20] Anis Bennaceur: So if you cannot find, for example, the last activity, it's definitely that you haven't piped your systems together, right? You need to connect your emails and your call recordings to your CRM that, so that the activity gets logged properly.

Attention will, also just show you in your deal view what is happening within that opportunity, right? I would say like the one thing that, can't be automated is if a rep actually texted directly with, you know, out of the systems and texted

[00:37:50] Adam Jay: stuff

[00:37:51] Anis Bennaceur: Exactly. Right. They, they, they use their actual cellphone to text, What I know, you can't really go out and connect it unless the rep goes in and manually logs the activity in Salesforce, right?

And so that's where you have to

[00:38:04] Adam Jay: Yeah. And no one,no one does that. But I, I will say, and I've done this analysis at several companies, that if you aren't on a texting basis with your champion, um, your likelihood of closing that deal is substantially less. But to your point, how, how do you validate that? How do you track that?

[00:38:23] Dale Zwinzinski: Like, it's just a leadership thing. It's a leadership thing. 'Cause if you, these deals are so important, that leader, the sales leader should be like, "How did we progress the deals forward this week at some point?" they're like, "Oh, I texted them." "Okay, you didn't put it in the CRM, you have to put it in the CRM."

[00:38:37] Adam Jay:So, so Dale, should reps log every time that they text someone?

[00:38:41] Dale Zwinzinski: I think they should. I think as much as they should, as many times as you're connecting. 'Cause how do you really have an understanding of like how many touch points it takes to close a deal if you're only like, I don't know, only log it when you feel like it

[00:38:55] Adam Jay: I, I hear you, but the g- the good reps are texting their champions about more than just a deal. listen, i-it's, full transparency. It's no secret that we're partners with Attention, but I text Anis about sh*t other than deals with Attention. Do I have to log that every time? Does Anis log in his CRM every

[00:39:13] Dale Zwinzinski: but you're not, but you're not a, you're not selling to Anis. Like, like the context is totally wrong. Anis said this earlier, do you want to know that the person has his birthday or whatever that is? Those micro decisions, once again, become a macro vision and strategy execution.

[00:39:30] Adam Jay: So do, do you, do you log in HubSpot every time that you, you text one of our prospects?

[00:39:34] Dale Zwinzinski: No,

I don't

[00:39:35] Adam Jay: It's, I guess it's a sales leadership problem.

[00:39:40] Anis Bennaceur: I, I've seen one of our reps really good at this, which is like later in the process, he starts actually creating a, a shared Slack channel with a prospect, and that's almost an equivalent to texting, right? It's not as good, but it's-- Yeah. and at that point you can adjust the data from the Slack messages because the prospect is more likely to respond to you over Slack.

someone can ghost you as much on over text than via Slack, right? But via Slack you see that the person's online, so you have

[00:40:14] Adam Jay: I go stale on both, so

[00:40:19] Dale Zwinzinski: No, he just gets mad because I never respond to him. I left him on unread. Okay, Anis, let's do some, uh, let's do some on-subject questions.you work with tons of sales team. What percentage of them actually had the discipline of their own process, we were just talking about this for ourselves, to get from AI and what happened to what, what didn't happen?

So like, what percentage of the people that you work with actually do what you're asking them to do and then execute on that?

[00:40:44] Anis Bennaceur: It ends up being a spectrum, right? It's not a black and white thing. and it depends also on what they sell, how they sell. It depends on a lot of things and the amount of data that they collect. It all ends up being back to the data. I would say like, you know, it's an 80/20 where 80% will actually do the, the, the minimum of the things 80% of them will have all the data at least in the CRM.

So 80% of them will have 20% the bare minimum done. and then you'll start seeing, some more and more, teams that will actually use the deal view and have all the data in there and track it in there religiously. and then you have the remaining few users who are actually very clock built.

That fraction of users is growing, over time, and those people will actually create their own internal dashboards, their own internal systems, their own command centers where things actually match exactly how they want, everything to be presented.

[00:41:44] Dale Zwinzinski: That makes sense.

[00:41:45] Adam Jay: All right, question number two. Every sales vendor says they're different, right? Every single one. You've been on the buy side, you're on the selling side. What's the one pitch that you would never make that's technically true but is misleading?

[00:42:02] Anis Bennaceur: Wait, let me try to understand better. why would it-- If it's technically true, why would it be misleading?

[00:42:09] Adam Jay: It's a great question. So there are oftentimes, in my opinion, pitches that could be technically true. Like we can technically speed this up, or we could technically change this, or we could technically tweak that, but that might not be what you need, and it might not be the best thing for you

[00:42:26] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah. Um, I would say that, you know, we have a collection of, 30-plus AI agents that you can roll out in your business that will get you AI native, right? Or AI native, however.

that's technically true, but does that, does that mean that you necessarily need it? You don't need it, right? you might need two or three of these things, and actually, at the end of the day, we might just need to help you recreate from scratch some of the manual things that you're doing.

[00:42:53] Dale Zwinzinski: Yeah, and I, I can attest to that 'cause I don't use half of the features that we should be using in Attention. So, um, I think that makes sense.

[00:43:01] Anis Bennaceur: You never need 100% of the things that we offer in our tool. And generally we,

[00:43:05] Adam Jay: But you see it and you're like, "That looks cool. I wanna try it."

[00:43:09] Anis Bennaceur: Yeah, exactly. And I, I end up having, you know, we post very often on LinkedIn the things that come out, and we end up having clients getting frustrated sometimes telling me, "Why do we n- not use this?"

our response is generally, "Hey, yeah, let us help you. Let us activate that for you. No problem. You don't have to use 100% of the features that we offer." And as a matter of fact, you never need to use 100% features that any vendor offers. You need to always just think about it, bottoms up and think, "What do we actually need that we're gonna need to activate?"

And if you need to activate it, that's great. But, yeah, that's how we think about that.

[00:43:46] Dale Zwinzinski: Awesome. So we actually had this battle conversation and we're gonna put it to bed for once and for all. So CRM has been a fistful of rack for 25 years. Is it gonna survive AI or is something like attention eventually gonna replace it entirely?

[00:44:01] Anis Bennaceur: Oh, that's what we're betting on, right?

[00:44:04] Adam Jay: think we know that answer, right? Anis, what, what's one thing the go-to-market world collectively believes about AI and sales that you think is just flat out wrong?

[00:44:16] Anis Bennaceur: My thought is, everyone's been saying, especially, you know, since the Gong era, to name them,"Hey, replicate your top performer." I think that's wrong. I think that actually you n- you don't replicate your top performer across your team. What you do though is you understand what are some of the traits that top performer has that can be shared in a way with the other people, but I think each person has actually their own style of selling.

and they should triple down on their own core strengths to best sell. But if you try to kind of like replicate someone across the entire team, you end up having a disaster, right? I've seen, for example, an AE try to sell exactly like another AE and things went wrong, right?

There are just certain traits that might work out for the whole team, and generally it's, next best actions, things like that are outside the call. But, overall, if you try to force a rep, follow a methodology, when that rep is already killing it in their own ways of progressing a deal, maybe let them actually, progress that deal in, however they wanna progress it, right?

Sometimes if you try to enforce things a little too much and you try to make them uniform across everyone, then you might, end up killing your golden goose.

[00:45:34] Dale Zwinzinski: I think that's a great take. Um, and as we wrap this one up, and you just went on an amazing honeymoon and vacation, but so now you have to dream bigger. What's your dream vacation destination now after you went on your great honeymoon? Where's next?

[00:45:48] Anis Bennaceur: I don't know. I think that this is the best trip I ever done. I went to Bora Bora with my wife. I went to Tokyo recently, which was on my to-do. I would say actually like a place that I haven't-- A few places I haven't been to that I would really go to will include Australia or South Africa.

[00:46:04] Dale Zwinzinski: Awesome. Thank you, Anis

[00:46:06] Anis Bennaceur: Thanks to you guys

[00:46:07] Adam Jay: Anis, thanks for joining, man. We appreciate it

[00:46:09] Anis Bennaceur: Thank you.