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Connor Jeffers, CEO of Aptitude 8, interviews marketing, sales, and customer success leaders about how they are using artificial intelligence to innovate, optimize, and scale their go-to-market operations.
And our belief was that we
wanted to help reps workflow.
Automating the note taking, automating
the CRM data entry, automating the
scheduling, those things we did.
And we said the byproduct, the
other side of the coin is your
leadership also gets insights.
The solution was deployed as a workflow
automation solution, not as a intelligence
and monitoring or analytics tool.
Hello and welcome to Go to Market with AI.
A podcast for sales, marketing and
customer success leaders using AI
to scale their growth operations.
I'm your host, Connor Jeffers and I'm
joined today by Aditya Kothadiya, Founder
and CEO of AVOMA which is very relevant to
the AI conversation and so I will let him
introduce AVOMA and how it fits into
all of this and all of the cool stuff
they're doing, and then we'll get into it.
Thanks, Connor.
Really excited to be here and
yeah, as you introduced, I'm a
Co Founder and a CEO at AVOMA.
We have been building AVOMA
for the last six years.
AI is obviously a buzzword now, so
everybody's adding some part of AI
to their offering, but we were one of
those AI first company from day one.
That was the hypothesis.
We'll try to get into that as also how we
started it but fun fact, what AVOMA is,
and even just the name, it's an acronym
for a very organized meeting assistant.
And so when you think about it, that's
really how we started thinking about
building an AI assistant from the day one.
And what it does, it records, transcribes
all these customer facing conversations,
analyzes them, automate the note
taking for you, automate the notes
and save those notes into CRM, and so
provide a lot of, actionable insights.
So that you can for all customer facing
functions, can perform more effectively.
So that's a very high level
overview of what AVOMA is.
I remember the first time, I don't
remember if it was you or Mark, your
customer success leader, but someone
on your team told me that AVOMA was
an acronym and I was like, this is
the most amazing thing I've ever heard
because I think, I think not only is
it, it's a perfect name in that it is
both, linguistic, it's pronounceable
and it means something, which is much
more to be said for all other sort
of like five letter startup names.
So I love it!
Maybe something as a starting point
and I don't know this story and I'm
legitimately, extremely interested
in it, which is you say sort of AI
at the outset and I think to your
point, everyone's talking about
"We do AI this, if you add dot AI, you
know, your series A number goes up and
from the outset before AI was cool, you
were out here seeing this, tell me where
did sort of the, not the idea, but the
"I'm going to make this into a company.
I'm going to build this into a thing".
And what was sort of the
response at the time now that
AI and conversational intelligence
in this space has become a
thing and you were starting this
business and raising money for this
business before that ever happened?
No, you're bringing me
now in my old memory lane.
So, but, yeah, this is, this journey
started, I would say I will not take
full credit for this and, my previous
company, this is back in 2009,
was in the social commerce space.
It was called Shopalize and we were
building social support and marketing
offering on top of Twitter and Facebook.
Was that your first one?
So your serial, that number
one, this is number two?
Yeah, this is my number two company.
So that company, again, I got
lucky enough, fortunate enough.
Company got acquired by a large
customer support company called 247.ai
and, in 24 seven, so they wanted
to acquire our company for all
the customer facing conversations
on Twitter and Facebook.
So we were analyzing all this
Twitter or Facebook conversations.
At that time, natural language
understanding was still popular so it
was part of machine learning AI stream to
understand the customer sentiment, what's
going on in the customer support world.
So that was mostly text at that time?
Yeah, it was predominantly text.
And, this is where, how I got exposed
to the voice side of the things as well.
So my first company got acquired and
this is back in 2013 and, I stayed
there company for many years and, part
of the story, so the visionary CEO at
that company pushed me to start figuring
out what is the self service experience
of customer service is going to be.
And one of the technologies that they had
at that time was, if you remember, what
people call IVR, this, you call 1 800
number and then you listen to the menu.
Press one to do this.
Press two to do this.
I remember I was doing, what, 2013,
probably 20, I remember like TalkDesk.
I don't know when TalkDesk was
a thing, but I remember this
was a big deal in the sale.
This was like the hot trend in CS was you
can make them route themselves and you
can get it to the right place and do this
omni channel thing and everything else.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so that's exactly what we were doing,
but for enterprise geared customers.
So 24 seven operators in the similar
space with the contact center, you
know, customers like Amex and Capital
One and Best Buy, these were their
customers, very large enterprise.
So any few minutes that you automate, they
have thousands of customer support agents.
So you imagine the customer support
volume they have and so any few minutes
that you can optimize in their customer
support used to be huge time savings.
Yeah.
So I was given this charter that what
is that, self service experience?
What can we automate from these live agent
interactions and at that time we initially
build the product for the text chat based
support, chat support interaction that
you see now in intercom and all of that.
Again, I'm telling you literally, we
had this back in seven, eight years ago.
Yeah.
We would automate these things.
We would not, the generative AI
that you're seeing right now, it
was not as advanced, of course,
but at that time, the deep neural
network was getting really popular.
So DNN is what we call.
And one of the things I realized
that we were working with Microsoft
speech recognition engine at that time
and I saw the accuracy was
phenomenal at that time.
And I was like, "Oh my God", if the AI
can detect the speak to, the speech to
and translate into text that accurately,
there were so many different options that
were possible and my aha moment was that I
was in the product leadership role there.
So I used to still build the
product, but I would be constantly
in front of customers, pitching
on new ideas, new vision, trying
to sell, go on our sales calls.
And I realized that so much insights
were getting, getting shared
at that in those calls that our
product team were never having had
any access to those conversations.
So my view was that, "Hey, why don't we",
I had domain expertise now of building
AI products in text and some sort of
speech model, but I was building it for
customer support domain.
And I realized that me as a B2B kind of a
professional selling to B2B companies, I
felt my life was all over the place, I'm
doing all the bunch of meetings, taking
notes, manually typing all these notes,
sharing different flavors of notes with
executives, different flavors of notes
with our engineers, and it just felt
like I'm spending way too much time.
And the nuances of the
feedback is getting lost.
So that's when I, realized that, "Hey, if
the accuracy is so good, why don't we do
something in my own, solve my own problem
and start solving for the meetings?"
So that's was the aha
moment for AVOMAs journey.
By day one, we knew that this
is going to be AI based product
and we also knew that it's
actually a very complex product.
So I'm going to probably dedicate 10
years of my life to solving this problem.
I made sure that my co founders had
that kind of commitment that this is
not going to be quick, easy sell because
my first company, to be honest, got
sold pretty quickly within three years.
I got lucky.
We made decent money and we thought, okay,
now we found to solve the next problem.
It has to be a lot more complex problem.
Nobody had anticipated generative AI
would become as popular as it had became.
But yeah, we have been working
on the generative AI for the
last six years, pretty much.
Yeah.
So something that I'll get back.
You and I had a conversation,
I don't know, some back before
it was cold in New York.
So sometime this past summer
about fundraising and I was sort
of going through the same thing
and you did a really good job of
putting my pain in perspective.
I was complaining about going through
this fundraising, like, "Oh my God,
you're doing all of these on Zoom".
Like I had to go to California
and block whole days.
And like, now you can
actually work during it.
And I thought that that
was very prescient.
What was the reaction as you were
going through that at that time to
AI centric pieces because right now,
I mean, now there's like venture
memes of, "Oh, are you doing AI"?
"No, like, Oh, I'm not super interested".
It didn't sound like it was a super
easy conversation to me when you
were telling me about it, but.
No it was not, it was not.
So the funny thing was that even though
If you aren't seeing this on video,
Aditya's face just went back to his,
like, he just saw the explosions and smoke
out in the distance of his war history.
Though it is, I mean, it's, it's like,
"Oh my God", you're trying to remember
me all those days, the painful days.
There were actually some
good moments as well.
And, so the interesting thing would
happen at that time when I started
AVOMA I left my job full time.
I did not have Co-Founder, we did
not have a product, but I knew this
is the problem I want to solve.
I met with lots of PhDs, lots of people
who had worked on this summarization
problem, but unfortunately no one was
willing to actually start a company.
Eventually, after six months of constantly
talking to lots of people, I was doing
customer research and trying to go
deep into the problem understanding
and at the same time, I
was trying to build a team.
Eventually I, had my Co Founders
agreed to join startup with me.
We started building the
product at that time.
And when we started talking to people,
people at that time, Gong and Chorus were
already live, they had raised a lot of
capital, they were instilled, but the
product was already out and we didn't
know this and I was like, "Oh my God,
it's exactly what we wanted to build".
But they were much ahead, more
kind of, senior people who had
done some of these things also.
A lot ahead in the game also, and
the other hand, we also saw some
other companies like YCR and Otter,
they were also, they had also raised
a pretty decent amount of capital,
they had also launched the product.
So when you get into the market,
that's when you realize that now
there are, you're not the first
one and there are many companies,
but at that time it was not.
I still felt like both these products
were solved in a different way,
where the way we were thinking on
the problem was not exactly that.
So there was no U turn for me to go
back and join another company again.
So I still kept talking to investors.
We decided to raise capital at that
time, knowing that, okay, there are
people who are much ahead of us.
And so we said, "okay, we also
got to now invest resources".
And we got lots of notes, lots of
rejections, largely because people
thought there are four or five
players, the market is over and
I was like, how can that be over?
Here is the gap that the
way I see in the market.
And, but, very few investors
got ready to invest
and all you need is one investor.
So that helped us to raise
our seed capital, which is 1
million dollar at that time.
And very little capital compared
to all the other providers.
But eventually, the problem was also
was you're raising capital also you're
building and you're trying to sell.
And so at that time before the
COVID happened, you have to go the
way you had to come to California.
Even we are living in California,
every investor meeting takes five
hours and then it was taking so much
time away from your meet on day to
day operations and running business.
It was very painful process, especially
when you get so many rejections.
And the worst part was I would
be absolutely happy if I would
get rejection on the first call.
Yeah.
The problem used to be people would
love our immediate differentiation,
our initial prototype, what we had
built, the generative AI capabilities
we had built at that time and then
the first partner would get excited.
The more they get excited, then
they would bring the same argument.
"Oh, what about Gong?
Why wouldn't they do what you're doing?
What about Otter?
Why wouldn't they do what you're doing"?
And eventually we would get "no"
and it, by the time you're investing
this four or five meetings.
So that's when I've had a little
bit of frustrating moments early
on the pre COVID fundraising.
I think, the thing that I just
I want to latch on to because I
just like is resonating with me
so much, which is the same thing.
You're like, I spent one call with you.
We had one conversation.
You didn't get it.
It's not for you, whatever.
And I think you have this.
At least I felt anyway, that this, this
air of, reverence feels extreme, but like
reverence or deference to, to the investor
folks are like, Oh, these are really
smart people that are going to get it.
They want it.
And then you like are spending a lot
of time and you get to the end of it
and they're like, "ah, I don't know.
We just don't like it".
And you start to wonder, am I crazy?
Am I doing the wrong thing here?
And I think that was something
that I feel before going down the
fundraising path, a lot of people had
surfaced to me and said, and you're
like, "Oh yeah, you know, it's hard".
And I don't know, man, it's just like
getting hit in the face every day.
Yeah.
But you learn, right?
So this was my first time raising
that kind of capital and then when
we started building our business,
it started growing and then we, we
got to a million dollars in ARR.
So we said, okay, now let's do series A.
And at that time we, I had a
completely different mindset.
Yeah.
First of all, this is right after COVID
and so people, investor was still on Zoom.
Everybody was still on Zoom.
People are not meeting in person
and the window was about to open.
So I had to time like, okay, I'm not going
to go through this in person meetings
again, chasing all these investors.
Before everyone starts in person office,
as long as everyone is on a Zoom, let's
immediately start raising capital.
And our revenue also had reached to
a point where I felt comfortable.
So we went and raised capital.
So the two things I did,
one is I would say 99.
99 percent investors I met on Zoom.
So, we didn't even our series
A investors, lead investor.
We did not meet them in person.
Post, after the round was
closed and everything else.
And there were all these
myths of "Oh, you can't build
relationship" and all of that stuff.
I didn't believe in that.
If you're authentic, if you're transparent
and everything else, even with Zoom,
you can build great relationships.
I felt like those are just the
excuses people have, but yeah, so it
didn't really matter, so we raised
the capital, we got a lot of commits
and everything else, but the, here's
the thing, another thing I did.
Second time around, I told investors
by the time, the funny thing
was that many investors who had
rejected us in the beginning because
of COVID, Zoom became popular,
the remote work became popular.
Our story started resonating and everyone
wanted to invest and people are still
funding this 10th player, 15th player.
I'm like, when we had five players
back in the market was saturated and
now you're funding the 50th player.
I don't understand, but investors
also, I lost a lot of respect from
investors to be honest, at that time.
I realized that these guys are all
formal guys, nobody has a context.
nobody has strong belief of some
or certain things and so they had
capital and they just wanted to
deploy at any valuation for anything.
Didn't really matter.
Is it truly going to be a hundred
million dollar company or not?
And how many hundred million dollar
companies you can build in this space,
Gong and Chorus were already much ahead.
So, that was definitely
a perspective we had.
And so then I started, when
I went for series A, I was
very strict about this thing.
Like if you're going to eventually
give me the reason that Gong and Chorus
are there and that's why you don't
want to invest, give me that answer
right now in the first call itself.
I don't want to invest time with
you going through the rabbit hole of
this process, three, four meetings,
and then you bring the same reason
after talking to your all partners.
So, I was very little bit to some extent,
arrogant, but maybe a little bit of
that, that confidence was there that.
You come on board here are the objections.
Nothing makes people more excited to
buy or invest than if you're like,
I don't just, I don't really care.
You just let me know.
To some extent it was there
because we were growing, we had
revenue, things were working and we
needed capital no doubt about it.
We also got a lot of rejections, but
I was trying to optimize my time.
Rather than sacrificing running business.
I said that I'm not going to
invest more time with you if
you're already not committed.
This is not, let's not kind of
learn and you get educated by
me sharing a lot of information.
So that's what happens and
so I was mindful of my time
based on my previous learnings.
But again, obviously you need
that level of confidence.
You need that traction.
To kind of demand those kind of things,
but yeah, those are the experiences
of my fundraising journey at AVOMA.
Oh, thank you.
That's amazing.
Tell me about, so something that, that
I think is really interesting and I'm
curious about both where, what segment
you guys started with, but where you're
at is, AVOMA is not just focused on, sales
and sales centric function, which I think
a lot of the folks in this arena are kind
of focused on more of that sales centric
and a lot of people love building
sales tech because it's easier to sell.
They have budget.
They're trying, nothing's easier
to prove than, Oh, it'll help
us get more cash on the door.
And I'm super interested in where
do you see functions of teams?
And what do you guys see some from
customers beyond just like the sales
recording an coaching component?
Yeah, and this goes back to, from day
one, people always ask me, "well, did
you how many times you did pivot, or
what all different things you tried"?
And to be honest, this is exactly what we
have been trying to build from day one.
The reason was that we had extensive
customer research and, I'll tell you,
the reason I said that why we still
felt there's a gap in the market, while
Chorus and Gong existed at the time,
they were predominantly focused on
sales coaching as a primary use case
and when I look at any time competing
in any market or any product as a
startup, I look at three things.
What's your market?
What's your product?
And then, what's your go to market?
And you, if you want to compete,
you have to have differentiations
at least minimum two, the best is
definitely you have to have in three.
So can you have a different market?
Can you have a different product?
And can you also have a
different go to market motion?
So when I looked at Chorus and Gong,
they were all top down, focus on
sales coaching as a primary market,
going after mid market and enterprise
customers, very top down sales led motion.
So the go to market motion
was also a sales led.
And I felt like, okay, I see that's a
primary practice, but I didn't believe
that in the next four or five years,
that's going to be a predominantly the
motion that people are going to love it.
On the other hand, you
had the, Otter and YCM.
These were insanely horizontal products.
So a meeting professional can use
it, a student can use it, journalists
can use it, a podcaster can use it.
So the problem...
When you say horizontal, you mean non
specialized in any particular function.
Exactly, exactly.
So all functions, any use case.
And the problem was that with that
approach, I felt it was predominantly
just the transcription play.
There was not much
workflows that were built.
Not much kind of AI analysis
was built around that.
And so I felt these both approaches
were good in their own thing, but I
felt there was something in the middle.
And for me, it was corporate
professionals, but customer
facing professionals.
And when I say customer facing,
it was not necessarily only sales.
It meant that you could be client
engagement, customer success, partnership
and I felt even recruiting to some
extent and all this, even a sales
leader, when I've looked into it, they
do some sales calls, but they also have
a lot of internal one on one meetings.
And even there, the note
taking was important part.
So I felt restricting a sales
tech tool only for coaching and
only recording external calls.
I felt it's limited, but I didn't
want to also go to horizontal
where anybody can use it.
We wanted to still optimize
the workflows for knowledge
professionals who only do meetings.
So we say no to podcasters,
we say no to students, universities,
that's not our ideal customer profile.
If somebody only wants AVOMA for sales
coaching only use case, then we get
them in the door, but eventually they
realize that, okay, they can use AVOMA
for more than just the sales coaching,
for internal note taking, collaboration,
all the other use cases also happen.
So that's kind of the vision we
had from day one, that we believe
that, go to market functions
work very collaboratively.
There's a, handoffs happen throughout
the process, starting from SDR to
sales, sales to customer success
or sometimes implementation.
And I felt you need to build a
tool that goes across all these
functions to persist the conversation
history with that account.
Because SaaS companies have
optimized their functions.
Oh, AEs are going to only do this.
They're going to hand it over to CS.
CS are only going to do this, then
hand it over to somebody else.
And, but the customer
is only the same person.
We are handing over for our
efficiency, but the customer
is getting bad experience.
Because now after AE does discovery, CSM
is going on the call and CSM says, "Can
you share me your business initiatives"?
I just spent a super long time
telling everybody else upstream.
Yeah, exactly.
So the whole idea was that
how do we really simplify
this account handoff process?
And make sure that there's
a context persisted,
people understand these
things, people leave.
There's already churn in some
of these go to market functions.
So when these happen, how do we not end
up giving bad experience to our customers?
So that was the vision I already had
that we need to build a product that
scales across all the functions,
not just for the sales coaching
but for customer success and
not taking workflows as well.
So that's, that's kind of the
genesis we had at the beginning.
Yeah.
I mean, so it's super interesting
for me and we, I'm an AVOMA customer
across two different businesses.
What's interesting about what you
said is, we use it for everything.
And so I, at no point, I'm, this gets to
a question, I promise, but I think for us
at Aptitude 8 for services,
our sales team uses it.
We take all those call recordings,
they inform our scoping process.
So sales engineering, they can go
escalate and ask other people who
weren't on the call and we're not saying,
"Oh, well, do they do this thing"?
And you're like, "I don't remember.
And my notes don't say it".
And instead we have the call recording.
I think there's an efficiency component
of that, but there's also just nothing
better than the actual customer language
and what the customer is looking for.
And so we see that use case there.
We use those every time we have a new
deal move from our sales team to our
service team, there is a step in our
internal onboarding of all of everyone on
our service team reviews all the AVOMAs.
It's noted, you're written
in our internal systems.
They go through, they watch all
those calls to understand what
is the customer trying to do?
What is their problem?
How does it inform what I'm doing?
And our services team uses that
to inform everything they do.
And then in the event, there's, a
escalations for us as a whole other
like account management engagement.
There's a customer.
Maybe we're behind schedule.
Maybe it's their fault.
Maybe they're upset about something.
We use keywords in AVOMA to
flag and trigger CSMs to get
involved and go talk to those
customers when they're frustrated.
And we also use it across recruiting.
But what's interesting is, and we
do it for technical interviews.
We record all of our technical
interviews so we can circulate them
to other people and get their feedback
as well and then on the software
business, hapily, we, I think what you
touched on at the beginning, right?
And I think most people in
product are like, I should build
a product for product people.
And then you're like, there's not
that many product people and no one
gives them budgets, so let me go
build a product for other people.
,But we do it a lot for a customer
researcher Slack all the time is,
"Hey, you should listen to the snippet.
We just showed a preview of
this product to somebody.
They're really excited about it.
You should hear about it".
And I think for me, I'm so spoiled
being an entrepreneur living in the
world of recorded meetings where
I can just be like, "Oh, send me
the recording and I'll watch that".
And that like thinking about
not having that freaks me out.
And so my question for you is
like, when you're having these
conversations with customers
how often is it a single
team and a single buyer?
Is it, are people looking at it as I want
to buy across the entire organization?
Do you have to do a lot of education
for them to understand why they do that?
So look, I have to give credit to Gong for
being a Gong as a market leader, right?
So they're amazing in what they've
done in marketing and they've
educated the world and the world
looks at this world in a unique way.
Like, Oh, the sales team
is what we need this for.
So a lot of the times that's what
people do come in and there's demand
It is interesting for sales, right?
Is like, at least I feel it
comes from a position of distrust.
Like people are just anxious about what
their sales team is doing all the time.
And so it's like, I need to, the
sales team having calls that I can't
review and I can't coach them and
like, what are they telling people?
Yeah.
And that, that fear was a big motivator.
There is, there was that effect.
Like Gong, a lot of Gong customers
come and tell us that, "Hey, this is
about a big brother monitoring the
way of sales is monitoring my calls".
Sure, Reps do get value.
But the way we were, this is where
Avoma's solution was very different
from a story point of view.
So if you look at it, what Gong's
positioning and story has been that
observe what your reps are saying.
They are saying pricing were at
this point or they're not saying
these things at that point.
And so that's what the emphasis was
on how reps are saying certain things.
That's important.
But what we did was we said, well, it's
not just for the big brother monitoring.
Let's actually help people who are on the
front line, which is the reps themselves.
What are reps going through?
So we looked at reps end
to end meetings life cycle.
What did they do before the meeting,
during the meeting, after the meeting?
What did they hate most
about those workflows?
So note taking was a big workflow,
entering data into CRM was a
big workflow, scheduling back
and forth was another workflow.
So we started listing down all
these workflows and we said, when
we want to deploy a solution which
has higher retention and higher
adoption in the product, then let's
go ahead and build something for the
reps who use this every single day.
Here's the thing inside the we had
at that early on was people were
going buying Gong 10 licenses 20
licenses, and when I would go and ask
vp of sales, "how do you like Gong"?
"Oh, we love Gong."
"How do you how often you what do you do"?
"Well, once in a while i'll go
back and listen to the call".
So it was basically a insurance policy.
You would go back watch calls once
in a while and then I would ask
reps "how many of you are using it"?
Well, you know, three people
are actively using it.
So you bought 10, 20 licenses.
Only three or five people
are using it actively.
Something was missing because reps
were still taking notes manually.
They were listening to calls if
something was forgotten, but the CRM
data entry still was happening manually.
And we said, these are the
gaps are in the market.
The way the solution was
built for coaching use case.
Fine.
Leaders are getting value once in a while.
What if you give value to the
reps on an everyday basis?
And this is where even our
pricing reflected that, we said
we will offer monthly pricing.
Why are we locking you
down in an annual contract?
If you are happy with monthly
pricing, we believe in our product
giving you value on an ongoing basis.
If you fail, you will churn.
So we took that bold step.
Nobody at that time was offering
this monthly kind of pricing.
And our belief was that we
wanted to help reps workflow.
Automating the note taking, automating
the CRM data entry, automating the
scheduling, those things we did.
And we said the byproduct, the
other side of the coin, is your
leadership also gets insights.
But the primary thing we, the solution
was deployed as a workflow automation
solution, not as a intelligence
and monitoring or analytics tool.
And that's the difference that we did
with from a positioning point of view.
We had to educate customers.
Customers would come in because
Gong was educating them.
The demand was being generated by Gong.
So we had to capture the demand and then
try to tell us that, how are we different?
We were not like, "Oh,
Avoma is a cheaper Gong".
Sure.
We will, we want it to be affordable
and flexible, but that does not mean
that I want it to be a cheaper Gong.
And, we had this story
narratives were different.
We were challenging customers that,
you're starting here, but what
about your customer success team?
What about your internal teams?
Even though, I would ask the
sales leaders, "how do you
do your pipeline review"?
And they will say, "I
do this, I do this".
"Do you give feedback to the reps?
Do the reps, take notes for those,
action items you're telling them
in those pipeline review meetings"?
"They do".
And then, "are you
recording those meetings"?
"They're not".
"Is the feedback then
actually getting implemented?
How do you know that action
items are not getting dropped"?
So when people, when we educated our
buyers like that, they immediately started
realizing how are we different than Gong?
Compared to just, Oh, this is not.
And so people started telling me,
Aditya, now there are six or seven
conversation intelligence tool.
All of them we compare in one bucket.
Everyone Gong is the top in that
bucket, Gong, Chorus, Clari whatever.
There were a couple of other ones and
the AVOMA is completely different.
It changed how you have told us in terms
of the workflow as an organization.
Some people come, came
and started telling us.
This is our operating system.
You mentioned some of this thing that
even I had not heard how detail you
use it across different meetings.
So people started calling us that this
is operating system for our go to market
function and even the product function and
that was something enlightening and that's
kept us going, even though the market was
getting competitive, all of those things.
But, we realized that what we believed
early on is resonating with the
market and people are liking these
differentiated product offerings.
What is the, is there something that you
think of either that your, your team does,
or that you have a customer that's done.
That's just.
I'll give you some more context.
I think the coolest part of building
product is not when people do the thing
you want them to do and it works, but
when they do something that you never
even imagined that they would do, and
you're like, wow, that's incredible!
Is there anything that jumps out
to you or that you guys do with
the AVOMA that you think is really,
really different or unique, tied to
using it as a, as an AI meeting tool?
Oh, so many things like a lot of, to be
honest, I give a lot of credit to our
customers who are pushing us all the time.
They are leveraging AVOMA in
different ways that we didn't
think about and, like some of these
interviews and you talked about.
AVOMA has a very built in
privacy centric approach.
So one of the simplest thing was that
we realized that Gong's philosophy
was that every call is visible for
anybody to go and listen to, right?
When you're doing internal meetings, you
don't want your internal meetings to be
available for the rest of the org to go.
So then you have to manually go change
the permission, all of that stuff.
So, when people started using AVOMA
for internal meetings and one on ones
and recruiting calls, they wanted a
certain level of flexibility in terms
of how this default privacy works.
And so we said, "okay, all internal
meetings by default will be private.
And all external meetings, you
can define have more controls.
You can decide you want to
private or visible to org or
public and all of that stuff".
So those are the kind of things.
People started loving the
way how they were using it.
I'll give you another example.
Recently, one customer came in and
we had Slack alerts for a long time.
So one customer came in and he showed me
how many Slack alerts he had implemented.
And I asked him to show me some of the
things that are the way you're doing it.
One of the things, was that a lot of
the time salespeople or customer success
people will say on the call that,
"Oh, let me talk to my product team".
And, those words talk to my product team
is they say that to the prospect, if
the prospect hired certain, they forget
about it, they're not getting paid to
go and share feedback to the product.
That means like, don't worry about it and
we'll move on and if you sign, then it'll
be, thats let me talk to my product team.
Exactly.
And so, but we said, okay, how, how
can we actually learn this voice?
And so this customer had implemented
these different phrases and they
had implemented the Slack alerts.
And so I learned this from them.
We, I did not see how my sales
service was saying, and they were
exactly saying the same thing.
Yeah.
I went back and looked at it and
now we've completely automated
how you get the voice of customer.
And so our product team monitors
the Slack alerts and they're getting
some distilled notes, the deal size.
So there is no back and forth.
"Oh, what's the deal amount?
Is it important feedback?
Should we give"?
So now you know what is the deal
amount, what is the use case?
What are the key notes that have been
discussed in that you automatically get
all of this information in a Slack alert.
So, the reps even don't have to manually
explicitly share this information.
So the voice of customer, is
automatically being shared and
product team is acting on it.
So those are the, some
of the things that, yeah.
Like, can you claim that you're
a customer first or a product?
Like if you don't record these
interactions and circulate them through
your organization, then you're going
to be very hard pressed to be like,
"Oh, we're extremely customer centric".
Cause you're customers that will
take the time to talk to you and
give you the feedback when you
follow up with them centric, which
is a completely different thing.
I have such a huge gratitude
for our customers or people who
have given us feedback who have
pushed us like there is no way.
Now, obviously I will say this, but if
you go and talk to my team internally,
you will see that one of the constant
feedback I end up giving every single
day, how does this benefit our customer?
Start from customer.
How does this benefit our buyer?
How does this benefit our reader?
Even if you're writing a blog post or an
ebook or whatever it is, are we thinking
about them or are we thinking about us?
Sure.
You have, as a customer success
manager, you have goals to
book more meetings with your
customer to go do the renewal.
What's in it for them?
Have you thought about
their goals, their things?
So every interaction that we
are trying to do, the customer
centricity is cliche, I know it.
But, as you can see how we operate on
a day to day basis without customers.
Honestly, the more it's funny.
I think the more that I
lead organizations, the more things
that in the beginning you sort of like
roll your eyes and you balk at, and
I think of things like, Oh, you know,
like leadership, having leadership
of people who can do leadership is so
important, the culture is so important.
Transparency is so important.
And you hear these things and
I think it's easy to be like,
Oh yeah, you know, whatever.
And like, I totally agree with you.
And I think it's, it's really easy to
be like, Oh, we really listened to the
customer and it's really hard to do well.
And, I, here's another thing, right?
So we rolled out one change yesterday.
Some customers did not like it.
And, immediately I got backlash.
There is a particular CEO who reached,
I did not even know the CEO to be honest
but, I was somehow connected
with him on LinkedIn.
He immediately came back on
LinkedIn saying that, "Hey, big
fan of AVOMA we raised our series
A hundred million dollar valuation.
And most of the credit goes to AVOMA.
Like literally, from day one, we
have used AVOMA to understand the
voice of the customer, build the
product the way customer wants.
So all our growth, I, and he's like, I
want to write a special letter to you.
You have no idea how much I love AVOMA".
And I had never met
this person in the past.
And then he said, "the only thing
right now, this yesterday's team that
you launched, team is not liking it.
Can you do something about it?"
That's a powerful, "but"
Exactly.
He was buttering me up to make
sure that I've made the change.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But really then it also, and then when
I said, "no, no, no, so you're not alone.
We got the same kind of
complaints from other customers.
So we are rolling back that change and
we will have this change by tomorrow."
So I was very happy again, again, he
said the same kind of positive sentiment.
So you can see that companies are, some
people believe that AVOMA or something
like this is only useful when you have a
large sales team and then you're trying
to do a sales coaching at that time.
I said even when I was an individual
Founder, selling and talking to
customers, is how we build the product.
I would not have time to go and share
the sentiment, the way you said,
like, it's not just the voice of the
customer in what tonality dimension.
It's important, your product and
engineering team understand the voice.
One of the biggest thing I used
to focus on that you know, Paul
Graham had this, that there are
sellers and then there are builders.
These are the only two people you
need in the company and a startup.
And my goal was that, how can I get
these two people as close to as possible?
So the go to market team, get them
together from sales, CS, all of those to
work with really well with each other.
At the same time, how do we divide
the gap between the product org,
what they're building and what
go to market team is selling?
When you reduce the gap between
these two functions, that's when you
have the fastest product market fit.
And so I cannot comprehend you on
that, that even AVOMAs, we, when
we were at 1 million ARR we were,
I think, what, 15 people company.
Yeah.
And at that time, the idea
was that we were able to
quickly understand what was the
customer's requirement, we
would immediately go back
and optimize it and build it.
Here's another thing, when we
hired our VP of sales, we started
talking about, the deal win rates.
And we said, okay, he told me that the,
"your win rates are pretty high, 50%.
And, the industry standard is around 25%".
I said, "50 percent is high?
Why is not 70%?"
So I'm like, why should you lose a deal?
If somebody is coming and talking to
you, and then I told, our VP of sales
that look, "if any feedback a prospect
shares in our call, if it aligns with
our vision, I need to know that."
The way AVOMA got to this point
is immediately prioritizing
those requirements on the
workflows that customer cares
about, the workflows they need.
Sure, you might lose one or two
deals, but the next time somebody
comes up with the same requirement,
I don't want us to lose the deal.
This whole SaaS industry believed
these benchmarks that, oh, 25
percent win rate is good enough.
Complete crap.
Then you put a lot of money
at the top of the funnel.
You have this, Oh, it's a numbers game.
Money is too hard to come by now.
Yeah.
And now it's difficult, right?
So now you want to
convert every single deal.
So my view was that 50
percent is not good enough.
I want 70 percent win rate.
Only if somebody has some completely
random needs and requirements,
sure, we will lose that deal.
Who has time to go and
evaluate products and not buy?
If somebody's spending time with me,
that means they have an intent to buy.
Why don't then I convert them?
So that used to be my mindset that
I don't think understanding customer
requirements and immediately giving it
to the product team and product team
acting on it on a priority basis is
how you become truly customer centric.
And then you try to get the
product market fit sooner.
And you, you definitely improve your
win rates purely because of that.
So something you just told me, which I
don't know, it made a connection in
my head that's so interesting, which
is, at the very beginning of hapily
when we launched Zaybra I was doing
a lot of founder centric selling and
I feel like I was able to move out of
founder driven sales much, much faster
because we were using AVOMA and because
we were doing the call recording,
because I was able to immediately
give somebody here, look, go look.
I onboarded the first rep and I was like,
"here are the top 10 deals we've won.
Go watch all of those calls,
read all the emails, read
everything, go through the CRM.
Here are the top 10 deals that we lost.
Give me and write me up a summary
of why did we win these ones?
Why did we lose those ones?"
I couldn't do that if we
didn't have the call recording.
No chance.
And I could go and have
him send me anything.
I'm like, Hey, this came
up with a customer today.
I didn't know how to handle it.
And now I can coach him
and talk to him about it.
I think what's so interesting is.
I, and I don't know that I have
the, here's Connor, I could make a
really annoying viral LinkedIn post.
So like if you're starting a new business
buy these tools, but I will tell you at
the very beginning of hapily I immediately
went and bought HubSpot, I bought Gmail,
I bought Slack, and I bought, I went
and got, we use Rippling for HRIS.
I bought that and we
added AVOMA instantly.
Like I, it seriously wasn't even
a consideration because I felt so
strongly that I don't, I think there's
tremendous value in being remote.
And I think that the value of having
all of that knowledge, recorded,
shared, available, being able to be
distributed throughout the organization.
I don't know.
I've never built an organization
that I didn't have that and
I, it like freaks me out.
Like it makes me sweat.
I can feel it.
I can talk to you for hours.
I have one last thing that I really
love your perspective on, because I
think that you have probably one of the
best ones in the space because you and
your team spend a lot of time thinking
about it, which is, you guys are coming
in and advocating for an AI product.
You are probably one of the first things
someone is buying and investing in
that is an AI centric tool.
How does somebody who is looking to
bring that into their organization,
help get people over the hump of,
we should make this investment,
we should make this change?.
And I think that you guys are
probably one of the first ones
that come into an organization.
And it probably gives people
one of the first experiences of,
wow!
This is incredible, like
where else could we use this?
and I'm sure that there's those early
adopters, but how do you help them
articulate the value and sort of
build consensus in an organization?
Yeah.
So without getting into
specific to AVOMA pitch, right?
But, the stories are important
when you try to bring AI,
people always also have this, this
whole risk of AI, both in terms of job
displacement, also in terms of, the
bad experiences when AI goes wrong.
So the way I always encourage people to
think about from two different lenses,
one is when you're trying to think about
AI, first of all, position it for what
is the experience customer experience
is going to be and also what is the
employee experience is going to be when
you think about customer experience.
I do not like to deploy AI
immediately wherever your customer
gets personalized experience.
So you want to probably deploy a automate
something internal stuff first and do not
like start sending fully automated emails.
Ai.S that, is that crawl, walk, run,
is it just like, it it's lower stakes.
You can, it, it's okay to
make some errors there?
Exactly.
Because internal stakeholders, you can
be okay, if you made some decision.
You can apologize too, right?
So it's understood.
But when you, the brands are so
important nowadays, so you don't want
to go and deploy AI with your customer
facing, customers or prospects and just
have fully automated approach there.
And eventually it would get
there, but there's also maturity
curve of where the AI is today.
So my recommendation is always
start with your internal team,
start optimizing internal workflows,
improve the efficiency there, and
then slowly use that to optimize
your customer experiences as well.
So when you think about even employee
experience, the stories matter there, like
the way we said, let's say, AVOMA versus
Gong story, we did not position it as
a call monitoring Big Brother
effect kind of a tool.
We said, "this is your personal assistant.
It's going to help you to
automate the note taking and
automate the CRM data entry".
So understand the pain points
of these your employees have.
Where are they focusing their time?
One of the things I ask people that
there will be job displacement.
That's no doubt that's going to happen.
But how do you empower your team?
Have the conversation with them.
What are the strategic things that you do?
And what are the tactical
things, tasks that you do?
Help them to focus more on the
strategic things that they do.
Having great conversations, having,
coming up with more creative ideas.
But, if you're doing this tactical
stuff of writing some basic stuff
or doing this data entry and all of
that, optimize that, automate that.
So I help people to think about it,
elevate your team to do more strategic
work and help them with AI to take
care of their low value tasks that
they do and automate those tasks.
So that way employees feel great about
themselves that I'm getting better in what
I do best and I'm not, I don't have to
waste my time in doing the boring tasks.
And that's kind of how the
best way of deploying AI.
And then that way you're happy employees
are now giving the best experience,
most strategic experience to your
customers rather than immediately
deploying AI to write automated
emails or something like that.
So that's kind of how I
think about how to deploy AI.
Start with employee experience first.
Automate the tactical part first.
and use the learnings to give the better
experience from a strategic point of view.
Thank you so much.
Aditya, I could talk to you
for hours and hours and hours.
You are seriously one of
my favorite entrepreneurs.
I think you are, if you don't follow
Aditya on LinkedIn, I highly recommend it.
He is great.
He has very great, non
cringy, amazing content.
I think you are a philosopher
CEO who clearly thinks very, very
deeply about all of the things and
I truly, truly am honored to be
able to spend the time with you.
Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you, Connor, for bringing me.
This was great sharing all my
past experiences and learning.
So still learning a lot, but this
was great sharing some of those.
Absolutely.
Well, thank you so much.
Check out Aditya on LinkedIn.
Check out AVOMA thank you
guys so much for listening.
Thank you for tuning in to this
episode of go to market with AI.
This episode was produced by Ryan Gunn,
Jordan Mikilitus and Saasly.Video.
Until next time, this is Connor Jeffers.
Stay curious.
Stay innovative and embrace
our robot overlords.