Transcript: PEAK Sales Summit 2022

Tech Stack Panel Discussion
Butler Raines, Brandy Ringler, Will Allred, Ralph Barsi
October 20, 2022
Nashville, TN

Butler Raines:
But I'll take it. And I have no idea how we're going to top-up John. That was pretty amazing. So y'all have to forgive us there. Welcome to our sales tech panel. I'm super excited to have these amazing humans on the stage.

The modern sales tech stack is something obviously I think about a lot, and I think, to a high degree, all of us have become somewhat reliant on. In the spirit of this topic, I'm going to ask each of the panelists to not only introduce themselves, but also their company and their technology. So Brandy, can we start?

Brandy Ringler:
Sure. Hi, happy to be here. I'm going to be contemplating life after this panel, so tough act to follow, Jamie. My name is Brandy. I lead sales enablement at Gong. I started about three and a half years ago when we were roughly a hundred folks.

Prior to that, I sold for many years, always in startups and always in scaling startups. And if you don't know Gong, we are a revenue intelligence platform. But I think the simplest way to put it is that we listen to and analyze frontline conversations and interactions and surface areas in your business like pipeline people and what the market is saying in a way for you to make data-driven decisions.

Will Allred:
Hi y'all. I'm Will Allred. I'm the co-founder of a company called Laptint. Jen probably gave a much better introduction than what... So I'll try to live up to that.

So we're a sales email assistant and we help reps hit send on their best emails possible. We all probably get cold emails every day. And they're either personalized, they're wordy, they're awful. And so we sit in your rep's inbox and we help give real-time feedback so that they can hit send on a better email. And then for managers and leadership, we provide visibility into what's actually driving the effectiveness behind that message.

Ralph Barsi:
Thank you, Will. Hi everybody, I'm Ralph Barsi. I'm reeling off of John Barrows' talk, specifically about the section on gratitude. I'm a bit old school, I've been doing this for some time. And just the fact that we're talking about a tech stack at all, I'm grateful that we even have a tech stack because I remember when we didn't have a tech stack.

I oversee the global inside sales organization at a company called Tray.io. And we're in the business of integrating and automating all the components of a business's tech stack. So we serve as that platform or that tray if you will, that's a bedrock beneath those tech stack components. And we help knit together all the different applications and services that the enterprise uses today. So I'm grateful to be here. Thanks for having me.

Butler:
Thank you, Ralph, Will and Brandy. Full disclosure, I'm a huge fan of all these companies and people, so I'm trying not to be biased here and as we go through the talk. All right, so I've been building sales tech for about 10 years myself.

My experience was CRM, I'm trying to get them all in order, sales engagement, data enrichment, conversation intelligence, sales enablement, revenue forecasting, all the things. Ralph, you were one of the first people I met in the industry.

Thank you for being here. And just want to get, you touched on it, a little bit more of your perspective of how you experienced it. What do you think is next? What more sales tech could we have?

Ralph:
That's a tough question to answer. Yeah, I have seen an amazing proliferation of apps and services, the evolution of those apps and services. And frankly, it's been a bit of an explosion of apps and services. So it's twofold.

On one hand, it's a bit staggering to think about all different apps and services that have rolled out in a short amount of time. J. Ryan was talking about it earlier today, you have to approach your business and you have to approach your tech stack and the usage of that tech stack, asking the question, what are we actually trying to do here, because ultimately, all the components of a business's tech stack are really extensions of the people that use those components.

So if you're not really good at writing emails, yet you've just invested in an email writing tech stack component, you're going to have a hard time, it's going to be an uphill climb. Same with conversations using platforms like Gong, et cetera, you have to have a plan in mind.

It's also important to remember the adage from a blogger and cartoonist, Scott Adams, he quoted a long time ago saying that "losers have goals, but winners have systems."

So you need to check yourself and check your business within the business on how dialed in and how buttoned up your processes and your systems are. That way you can streamline efforts, drive efficiency and productivity across your business unit, and ultimately across the enterprise.

So, on the other hand, it's inspiring to see this evolution of proliferation of apps and services because as Butler mentioned, it's created a lot of categories. Sales engagement was not a category when I started selling, and now it is.

We have gifting, we have the bolstering of data analytics. It goes on and on and on.
So a lot of companies have been born from this evolution and this proliferation, and a lot of roles and titles have been built and born because of them.

You have a brighter spotlight on RevOps teams now as well as biz apps teams. So you have to take a look at both sides of the coin. Where I think things are going really comes back to the people and comes back to the focus that we were talking about earlier, April, from HubSpot was talking about the importance of focus.

And I see a lot of businesses now, even though, especially in SaaS, we sell B2B software in a lot of respects, you have to take a B2C approach now to address the user of your service versus the business that uses your service.

So I think things are going to go a little more to the B2C play as we move forward and move on.

Butler:
Brandy, do you have any thoughts on that, what Ralph said?

Brandy:
I think I am aligned. I would go a little bit differently. I think the way that we've seen the sales technology landscape evolve is that when we started at Gong, there were two players, let's say in conversation intelligence at the time.

And what we're seeing now is, in our space specifically, a ton of competitors come in. And I think that's true of everything in the sales technology space. It was very limited before. If you looked at the chart in MarTech, it was crazy crowded.

And now, you can probably see the same thing in sales tech. And so what we're seeing is a lot of merger and acquisition happening, and a lot of platform plays versus best in class.

I have seen a lot of companies in their buying process move to platform. However, I think that there is a cautionary tale there. I think sometimes, acquisition is where product goes to die.

So you see companies acquiring technology and then saying that they can sell multiple product lines, when in reality, they just acquired that product line and are only focusing on their core technology.

So I think there's still space for innovation in sales tech. And I think that for buyers, the thing that I would caution is still make sure that you are vetting out best in class and long-term partnership versus short-term plays that were acquired.

Butler:
Will, lavender's pretty young on the scene. I was going to make some kind of joke about how young you look compared to me, but pretty new on the scene. And you, like Gong, have rabid fans. So you came into it while it's hot. So what's that like for you all?

Will:
Yeah. Well, shout out to John, super grateful for that first and foremost. The fact that people can get excited about a topic like email is borderline fascinating with me.

But it's interesting, you think about coming into sales tech. When we originally started Lavender, we tried everything outside of sales before we eventually got into sales.

We tried recruiting, we tried job seekers. It turns out there's not a lot of revenue you can make with that. But we still give our product away for free to job seekers, by the way. I'm super proud of that.

The way I look at sales tech is I look backwards and then I look forwards. So backwards, I think about a lot of what we've been trying to achieve with technology when it comes to sales. And that has been efficiency.

And looking forward, efficiency has been top dog, it's no longer going to be top dog. It's effectiveness that's going to be that.

And there's several trends that are driving that. One of the key things is pulling data in from all of the different places that it's been hiding. Over the next year, we're implementing Tray, and he didn't tell me to say that.

Super excited about what they've built because it enables us to do things similar to what Gong did in the early days. The phone call used to be a black box. You didn't know what was going on in there. And same thing with your reps and inboxes.

You know they're sending emails but you don't really know the quality of that message that's going out the door. So when I think about going forward, it's pulling information from all the places it's been hiding, processing it in ways that we've never been able to before, and then setting up a technology of the structure that actually enables people to do these things in real time when they need it.

Butler:
Thank you, thank you. I agree. I also call it the great proliferation of sales technology. And I think a lot of us experience tech bloat or feel like we do, and no one quite knows where to go to do what exactly.

And there's lot of competition in the space, a lot of momentum over the last 10 years. But the world's changed. We're coming out of a pandemic, the world is remote first, hybrid for the most part.

We are in or entering a very uncertain economy. How's that affect our industry and how's that affect the stack? Any ideas? Brandy? [inaudible 00:11:40].

Brandy:
I think for us, and I heard somebody else on an earlier panel say, "Understanding what the customer is talking about is key."

And so the number one thing that we're focused on is what is our market saying and what are customers saying about their own evaluations? And we are hearing a lot talking about consolidation, and buying processes are slowed down.

So for us, our focus, at least at Gong, has been on meeting the customers where they are. And so what that means for us is we've pivoted.

We're being more agile than you would probably typically see a 1200 person company be. We're offering pilots where we didn't offer pilots before. We're offering extended time to evaluate the services. We are bringing professional services, post-sales teams in to alleviate customer concern.

And I think ultimately what we are hearing and where we're winning is when we're talking about long-term partnerships and we're talking about what Will is saying, which is the infrastructure of technology.

So do you integrate, do you have native integrations across multiple platforms? Are you pulling in visibility where there wasn't visibility before? And that's what we're looking for as well in the partners that we bring on at Gong. And that's what we're seeing in the trends that our salespeople are having.

Ralph:
I would add also what we heard earlier today was, I think it was Doug was talking about it, I think it was you, Doug, just talking about getting in touch with what might be of service to the business that you're calling on and the people that you're talking to.

And again, J. Ry said earlier as well about just paying attention to what the heck's going on in your prospect's world. If they just experienced a hurricane and you're not aware of it, you've got some one-on-one stuff that you need to take care of.

Well, the good news is, and how it relates to the stack is there's a ton of components now that offer great intelligence and insights on the locations you're calling, the businesses you're calling, the verticals, sharing the industry trends that are happening and that have happened within the last six months.

And if you've got your ear to the rail on that and your finger on the pulse and all those other analogies and you're really paying attention to what's going on in other people's worlds instead of your world, you're going to resonate much faster, you're going to build that credibility and rapport that so many salespeople struggle to do a lot faster and a lot more often.

So leverage the technology and the insights that technology feeds you to actually be a real person when you're calling and contacting real people.

Will:
Yeah, the Florida hurricane example is an interesting one where I'm like, that data's, A, available, and can easily be piped in somewhere and showcased to somebody in that time of need.

It's not inconceivable that technology can help us put our best foot forward. But that goes back to this idea of being effective. So if you weren't going to bring up Doug, I was, because Doug's, not just [inaudible 00:15:22] of mentioning Doug in these conversations, but Doug's conversation about discovery, it's the same thing when you talk about cold email.

How you actually approach and set up that business conversation coming with research as opposed to just running your process, yeah, it's the difference maker that we're finding right now.

Butler:
Awesome. Okay. All of you are buyers of tech. We're all buying sales tech these days in one way or another, it feels like. How do vendors make the cut for y'all?

Brandy:
Usually comes down to two things. So the first thing is trust. Are they a recommended or a [inaudible 00:16:08] vendor? Is somebody on stage shouting them out, like I heard earlier for Will's company?

And the second one is are they a long-term partner, meaning do we see other companies that have scaled through where we are to larger also partnered with them? Is it something that we see like their technology is continuing to grow and it fits a need? So it really comes down to those two things.

I don't think that Gong specifically is evaluating any technology that would come in cold that wouldn't use a network that we use that says, "Hey, you should take this call." And also, we're partnered with other companies that are going through what you went through or come with a perspective, like Doug said.

I will say though, I just to keep it real, we're not really purchasing any technology right now. So my message would be maybe stop trying to sell a little bit to founders and be more proactive in just insights and giving.

And then I think I heard somebody earlier talk about renewals and churn risk. Every conversation is a churn risk with your current accounts. And so I think more so than even buying technology, actually it was the enablement panel, I heard them talking about how enablement should be focused on helping your customer account executives and churning.

And we're refocused on the customer journey and do we have the right touch points early in the process to evaluate if we're meeting the needs of our customers and improving that ROI. So I would say we're not buying technology.

If we are, it's because we have that relationship and we have a great referral network for them. And then the second piece is what I mentioned, that they're a long-term partner.

Will:
It's interesting. Yeah, I think about buying sales tech as somebody who sells sales tech, and we've got a long way to go. I had to sit through the world's worst demo about two weeks ago.

And the entire time, I literally would chip in every two minutes or so, and I'd be like, "Yeah, that's really still not interesting." [inaudible 00:18:41]. It just kept going, kept going. It was painful. But I think about why was I still there?

And why am I still interested in that technology? It's because it leans back on a priority that we have internally.

And so when I think about the way that sellers can be speeding up deal velocity or getting their foot in the door, which you're talking about, we're not buying anything right now, which means if somebody cold approaches you, you're probably not even accepting that conversation in the first place.

Well, it starts with either is this a priority or can we make it a priority? And if it's a, can you make it a priority, it's more about, hey, it would be really easy if you did make this a priority. I promise this won't be a difficult change.

Ralph:
Yeah. Two things come to mind with that question, Butler. The first is, I used to work with a really tough sales leader at ServiceNow, and he would often remind me to stop reporting on the weather and instead predict the weather. "Let us know what's coming down the pike, what we should be thinking about that we're not thinking about."

And I feel the same way when vendors are approaching our business. Tell me a few things that we need to be thinking about based on your research. And I think a lot of us in this room know that stuff. It's pretty fundamental, but it's pretty painstaking to see how it's not applied across the board.

Just the fact that we continue to have conferences like this and panels and keynote speakers and articles and podcast episodes, and the majority of salespeople just still don't apply what we're trying to tell everyone.

And there's a lot of great proven methods out there that work over and over again. You've got authors in the room right now. You've got some pretty special people that are among us. Make sure you leverage that networking and learn how to predict the weather in our marketplace versus just report on the weather.

The second thing is what Brandy said, stop selling for a second. I don't have 15 minutes to have a call with you this week or next week. I just don't have 15 minutes. So don't ask me to meet with you right out of the gate.

Instead, just think about my net dollar retention versus my net new revenue number, or my ARR. We're trying to just manage the existing customer base we have and provide first class world-class service to them so that we can maintain this ecosystem and thrive in the midst of this crazy economy.

So focus on that with us, and then the net new revenue will surface. So those are the two things I think about.

Butler:
And to think I was worried come on the stage that I would not have enough questions, we're unfortunately out of time. So thank you panelists for joining us here at PEAK and join me up here on the stage today, and all of your insights.

Ralph:
Thanks for everybody's attention. Thank you.