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Jarod Greene [00:00:00]:
Hello hello, and welcome to another episode of V5. I am your host, Jarod Greene and this is V5 where we take exactly five minutes to talk about some of the hottest takes and get on our soapbox with respect to what's going on in B2B, SaaS, AI and all things in between. I had a very special guest today. This is Claudia Natasia. She's the CEO of Riley AI. Claudia and I used to work together at another company back in the day and she was so gracious to give me five minutes of her time. I had to say thank you and she's going to tell you her hot take now. So, Claudia, what do you got?
Claudia Natasia [00:00:38]:
Thanks, Jarod. My hot take for today is actually using AI to do research, and particularly market research or customer research. I noticed that when I talk to a lot of our users and I could speak a little bit more about what Riley does, but when I talk to a lot of our customers, our prospects, anyone in the market right now doing research, everyone is relying on AI to understand customers, including running customer interviews, using AI, searching for competitive analysis on AI. And my hot take is if everyone is just relying on the same model to do the same research, not using your own data, but using existing models, then how are you being competitive? Essentially all of these companies are pulling from the same model, the same data. The whole point of getting competitive edge is to find the one nugget, one golden nugget of information that other people aren't seeing. But we're all now pulling from the same type of information and, and that's what we seek to crack with Riley. That's the problem that we are so passionate about solving with Riley. That's awesome.
Jarod Greene [00:01:38]:
So you have your own proprietary Data, you have AI and all the LLMs, you put those together, get a unique set of insights.
Claudia Natasia [00:01:45]:
Exactly.
Jarod Greene [00:01:47]:
Gotcha. And why do you think people aren't doing it? It seems so simple when you say it, but what's the barrier for somebody to go, oh yeah, I should do that?
Claudia Natasia [00:01:55]:
So it's two things. The first thing is it's of course quicker if we want a quick answer, similar to how we get on Instagram or TikTok for quick little videos. We often just search on GPT or Perplexity for some quick answer to a problem we're trying to understand about our customers. That's the first thing. The second thing is buying cycles. Companies make it so hard to sell data tools, and I think because the procurement cycle is long, it's harder for buyers to want to actually bring their data into these existing models to to understand the trade offs that they might have to give in the short term of going through this procurement cycle compared to the long term gains.
Jarod Greene [00:02:33]:
We went down this path a while ago and I think we hit the same barrier of like it's quick and easy just to use an off the shelf LLM to serve an answer. It's going to be long and hard and arduous to get our data into it. So let's maybe do an in between of an LLM to inform some pieces. But that has proven to not be scalable. There's different levels of just like insights and intelligence. I was keen to see you guys solve for that. Yeah. What are some of the use cases that you guys would help customers achieve?
Claudia Natasia [00:03:01]:
Yeah, so we do a number of things. We automatically analyze all of the calls that you have with your customers from a user research perspective. So if you're doing user research interviews, we analyze all of that, we bring in your competitive data, we also bring in sales calls, etc. So combine all of that together and then produce a prioritized lists of recommended insights. Essentially work on these five things because they'll have the greatest customer impact and it brings the voice of the customer, the voice of the users, voice of sales all together in one space. And I think that's really important because again, back to the LLM example, Only relying on LLM and not bringing in your own data, only relying on competitive analysis through LLMs essentially pigeonholes you to information that other people already have. The way we refine and the way we tinker our model, and it's something that I've been actually building since college 15 years ago, is to try to figure out how exactly do we extract golden nuggets for each of our customers that we don't share with competitors, but essentially ends up being their competitive edge from all of these disparate sources of data.
Jarod Greene [00:04:06]:
Data as a competitive weapon has been talked about but rarely leveraged. Claudia, when we met a few years ago, you talk a little bit about what drives your passion for user research. You've been the most passionate professional I ever met on it. I've seen you speak on it, I've experienced the work you've done. Where does that come from? Where do you wake up and say like this is my thing, this is what I'm going to go do and this is what gets me going.
Claudia Natasia [00:04:27]:
I think it's the intersection of being able to tell a customer story in a way that makes a meaningful impact to their lives and also being able to drive success for the business. So the first example, telling the customer story in a way that makes a meaningful impact to their lives. I remember talking to a user back when I worked at a building payments point of sale who recently faced hurricane in her small business and she lost everything and so she was able to tell us exactly what she need, we were able to build it for her and she was able to get back on her feet very quickly. That insight, that story made a significant meaningful impact to that user's life, which was phenomenal. At the same time, the stuff that we build also listening to our users helped scale US to fill $50 million in revenue within just a year, which is also fantastic. So seeing that intersection come together is really what fuels my drive for this space.
Jarod Greene [00:05:17]:
So Claudia, where can people learn more about Riley AI?
Claudia Natasia [00:05:20]:
Please visit us on askriley.io. A-S-K-R-I-L-E-Y-dot-IO. And we're happy to give you a demo or a free trial.
Jarod Greene [00:05:28]:
Awesome. Thanks for the time. Today the V5s go quick, so we'll have to poll the audience, get our own user research, and see if we bring you back for an extended clip. Because we do do extended clips with some of our amazing guests, you being one of them. So really appreciate your time today. Thank you for enlightening us.
Claudia Natasia [00:05:44]:
Thanks so much, Jarod.
Jarod Greene [00:05:45]:
Appreciate you. Talk to you soon.