Meet the AI ‘Superhuman’ That Will Outsell Your Top Rep

0:00What is One Mind? What are you building? We are building superhumans for go-to-market. It is a face, voice, and a go-to-market brain in the form of a virtual AI that has empathy and can understand the buyers. And she does that so well. So if you're dry, she's going to be dry. If you want to lean in and you want to be funny, she's going to inject humor. So wild. Where did this idea come from? The best categories are built on a fundamental thesis that the majority rejects. Am I going to rent my house out to a stranger for Airbnb? Am I going to get in a self-driving car? No, these were all like absolutely positively, most of us, no, not doing this.

0:35How should marketers be thinking right now? What should they be training themselves on to stay relevant? I know this is going to sound crazy, but I think everybody should be thinking about it.

0:46Amanda, welcome to Marketing Trends. Thanks, Stephanie, for having me. Excited to be here. I'm excited. I don't know if you know this. I think I told you this back in the day, but you are my first official Marketing Trends guest ever. Oh, how did I get so lucky? I know there was some like reschedules. And I was like, I told Amanda back in the day, she would be my first. And then people start getting booked in between you. And then all of them got shifted because of the holidays. So I'm really excited to have you on here. I know when we connected, I was just like enthralled by your story, all the stories you were telling me, all your background.

1:16I'm like, we need to get you more exposure to the company you're building. And so to start this interview, I wanted to ask you, if I went to your former colleagues, your friends, people that you surround yourself with every day, and I said, who is Amanda? what would they say about you? Ooh, that is such a good question. And I did not have this prepped. So the first thing I think of, so this is how I describe myself. I got really clear on my personal mission statement and I think it embodies who I am. I like to say I'm a passionate, positive, spiritual warrior to empower women and girls. So I think if you ask the people closest to me, they would definitely say I'm passionate.

1:55I am 99.9 % positive. We're not all always, but my set point is pretty high. And I'm always on a mission. So I think that's what they'd say about Amanda. Like I will, and I'll break down walls. I'll make things happen. I love that. Okay. And then what about former colleagues and people you maybe early days at Sixth Sense, what would they say about you? I think they would say I have quite a bit of empathy. Like I truly care about people at my core. I think I'm always thinking about the human side of it. which is interesting as I go out and try to build human replicas in the form of AI. I'm always thinking about how to inject humanity and empathy into the experience.

2:37So I think you would find most people would say that. Some people would say that I'm probably ruthless and quick and will make tough decisions, which sometimes can be hard. But I'm always trying to put the company first before myself and before the team. So that's, you know, can be difficult and I'll make difficult decisions as needed. So why we connected in the, you know, on our first time we met was around these unconventional marketing strategies that you were just telling me like snippets of like, here's what I did at Sixth Sense and here's how I, you know, started that company. And so I'd love for you to maybe back up again, go into your background.

3:15Like, where did you start? Tell me like the audience a bit about Sixth Sense and then some of your strategies throughout that informed where that company got to today? Yeah, so if I'm gonna tell the Sixth Sense story, I have to go back before Sixth Sense and tell how it got started and how I got started on my journey. So I grew up below the poverty line, lived in 22 houses before I was 18. And I'll never forget the day that I basically graduated college and I was walking down a blockbuster with my oldest brother. And he said, what are you gonna do now that you're done? And I had a journalism degree.

3:49and before I could get a word out, he said, oh, you'd be lucky if you were a telemarketer. And that really pissed me off. And I didn't have a chance to respond. And in my heart of heart and in my gut, I felt I got to prove him wrong. And then that's when a year later, I started my first company. So I'm a serial entrepreneur. So I started my first company, which is just, was a services, a healthy lifestyle business services company that went on for 16 years. And Sixth Sense got started from the idea I was working with Cisco and HP and Intel and other big enterprise companies. And we were looking back on data and doing analytics.

4:27And I had a thesis that was, instead of looking backward, what if we could look forward? What if we could look at patterns of companies that buy from Cisco? And then when other companies are exhibiting the same pattern, could I predict that they're in market? That's where Sixth Sense was born on the thesis of intent data that we can look at intent and look at signals and determine when companies were in market. So then went out and sought venture funding. Sixth Sense started, came to life. And yeah, so that was the story of Sixth Sense and how it got started and was on a mission to bring ABM intent data and AI, you know, before AI was a thing, you know, it's a new hot thing in a different way.

5:06But 12 years ago, it was using AI for sales and marketing. Okay. And then when did you start Sixth Sense? 2012, 2013 is when we officially formed, but I was starting to build the company and the thesis and going out fundraising in 2012. And what was fundraising like for, I mean, to me, that's like, especially when it came out, it was so cutting edge. I mean, now I know there's so many competitors and everyone's kind of figured it out because you all figured it out. But back then trying, what was raising money, especially as a woman, like back then? Hard, very hard. Yeah. Very, very, very hard.

5:39Yeah. I, I think I look back now and I think if somebody told me how hard it was going to be and what the journey I was going to go on, I wouldn't have done it. I think I probably would have said, no, that's not for me. I'm going to stay on the easy path because I had a healthy lifestyle business that I was living across the world and I would hire really smart consultants and IT managers to help deliver the projects that I would go source from these big companies. I had 66 VC meetings, 22 all partner meetings before I was able to raise for six cents and kept thinking I would be at the finish line and realized that, you know, I didn't have, I didn't fully have the right team behind me.

6:18And then I acquired a YC company who became my co-founders. And soon after we had multiple term sheets. So it was a combination of, we had, you know, let's call it nine out of 10 of the boxes to check, but you really have to have all 10 in order to raise the money. And so I always say that when people come to me with ideas and they're going to do something, it's the idea isn't enough. The market isn't enough. The technology, the team isn't enough. You have to have all of it combined. And that's why I got so excited about what I'm doing now is I just knew what we had. I had all the boxes and this was going to work.

6:49At least I still believe strongly that one mind is off on a really incredible journey that very different world than when I was raising for Sixth Sense. But yeah, it was incredibly difficult. Okay. So early day Sixth Sense, building something. I mean, you guys created an entire category, so probably hard to explain what you were doing. What were some of the tactics that you did and you and your team did to get exposure for this brand new concept? Yeah, I had a thesis that it was, I knew we were out there, everyone was doing things and like building their lead gen and their pipeline. It was all about the individuals and how can we get a new lead, a new individual that would come into our pipeline and fill from the top to the bottom.

7:28And I was trying to get people to think about things differently from a buying center and an account-based perspective and use intent data and use this idea of signal and somebody actually having a need and timing being important. So my thesis and what we did with the marketing team was always this, the line of go big or go home. So, you know, we had raised a considerable amount of money at the time. So we raised 12 million for our series A. We didn't have a seed round because I had built, you know, the basis of the product on my consulting business. So uniquely like other companies, you know, one mind we have raised a seed round and And I've done it the traditional way, but at Sixth Sense, we didn't.

8:03And, you know, we would, I would double down, like at the serious decisions event, we would be the number one sponsor as if we were a massive company. And then we would do no other small booths. Like we're not going to do the Salesforce little teeny booths. We're going to do everything we do. We're going to do big. And, you know, that worked for us. Like people thought, oh, who is this new kid on the block? They must be somebody because they have this massive presence everywhere we went. And then there was like tactical, like little guerrilla marketing things that I would do. Like, you know, when we would send out a press release, I'd make sure I tag all of the influencers in the space.

8:35So it showed up in their LinkedIn feed. And I mean, it sounds obvious now, but in 2012, it wasn't obvious, right, to do those things that other people weren't. So I was always trying to find scrappy ways to get exposure. And I think I'm kind of doing the similar thing now with OneMind is we don't have a marketing team. And I can promise you we do not have a pipeline problem, which is pretty exciting. at the early days to not, we're a few months in and like over 10 million in pipeline right now of highly qualified opportunities, which is like beyond exciting. Wow, okay. So since we've teased it enough now, tell us more about what is OneMind, where'd the concept come from and what are you building?

9:13Yeah, so OneMind, we are building superhumans for go-to-market. And so it is a face, voice and a go-to-market brain. She can spit up, she spins up her own laptop in the virtual cloud and can do the things a human can do. So she can give a pitch, she can give a demo, she can share slides, she can join a Zoom, she can answer the questions, she can write the proposal. So our goal is to build your go-to-market team in the form of a virtual AI that has empathy and can understand the buyers. We're putting the control back in the buyer's hands away from the sellers. So today, if you think about the pain we're really solving for, we're solving for two things.

9:50One, from an organizational perspective, we're solving for, we no longer live in a world where it's growth at all costs anymore. We can just throw money at the problem where we need to cut costs and we need to grow. And people are a linear growth model. So as you try to hire more people to the problem, that is highly expensive, right? And your buyers aren't looking for that experience. Your buyers don't want to talk to a junior SDR, then an AE, then a solutions engineer, and then get routed to your legal team. And they have so many steps and we make it so challenging for buyers to buy. What if we could shift the power back out of your seller's pockets and into your buyer's hands and give them the power to be met wherever they go on the website, in Zoom, in your product, in deal rooms with a high quality conversation to get the answers to the questions they have and truly have an empathetic buying experience where the AI can ask the hard questions to understand their business, the pain that they're solving for.

10:48And then not only give the solution that matches their pain and what they're looking for, but also show the case study and the story and align it in a way that sellers, we have all the best of intentions, but can't do that in real time. They can do all the prep that they could possibly dream of, but they get on a call and then they just can't turn it into those experiences and give the buyer exactly what they want when they want it. So our goal is to build superhumans that can talk to buyers, meet them across every channel, anywhere they go, and put the control back in the buyer's hands and out of the seller's pockets and allow organizations to grow and grow efficiently and exponentially.

11:26So not to have a linear growth, but be able to grow exponentially without bloating the costs. Okay. So where did this idea come from? Especially after leaving Sixth Sense, I think you left because you were having babies, right? You were like, I'm good. And then what? Yeah, yeah. I left. I brought somebody in amazing to take over and they've had exponential growth since I've left. It's been awesome to watch from the sidelines. I always said, if you looked at my LinkedIn profile a few years ago, it said I was permanently on the bench. I was good. I was done. I was going to do what I thought to be the most important job in the world is to be a mom.

12:01But for those of you who have kids out there, being a mom is the single hardest job, as you know, Stephanie, on the planet. So I like to think I'm going to outsource that and I came back to work. So I say that in jest, but I'm a single mom with two babies. Fiona and Gia adopted my oldest and did a Petri dish baby for my second and decided that, you know, like I want my kids to see me doing the hard thing. I bring my oldest, I bring my four-year-old to events now. So she comes and watches me give talks at conferences. I want to do things differently. Like I think that I can be an amazing mom and go be a CEO and build something incredible for the world that I care about of B2B sales and marketing.

12:45So I came off the bench because a company had approached me. I wasn't actually looking. They had built this technology. They'd been working on it for five years and they had used it in a horizontal fashion. So they had cloned the likes of Barack Obama and Deepak Chopra were customers. And so we had, the AI had read all the books, could have a conversation and talk just like you're talking to Obama or just like you're talking to Deepak. However, all these use cases were very horizontal and it was hard to scale. And cloning one individual to me wasn't, I didn't feel that that was of high value. Like that, you know, it's kind of an ego play, if you will.

13:18Right. And I was like, where can we use this technology that can actually drive business growth. And it became really obvious right away to me, like we could use this in sales as a salesperson. Could this superhuman act as your best seller, as your best sales engineer, as your best AE, and as your best SDR on the website, meet the buyers where they are and give them the full pitch, answer all their questions, not just qualifying through a lurking chat bot in the bottom right-hand corner. So when I got clear that that was possible, I was all in on it and basically took the company, spun it off, created a new company, raised money, bought my team, and here we are.

13:54So wild. I mean, so it's interesting how like the first company you built was, let me help you find the leads. And then now the company you're building is like, I'm going to close it for you. I hope you get those leads. Like if not, go to Sixth Sense and get them there. And then we'll close them for you as you built the whole ecosystem. Yeah. I like to like ingest. I like to say I started Sixth Sense to find buyers and I'm starting one mind to close them. Yep. So what does the future of go-to-market look like to you then while you're building this out? I mean, it feels like it's gonna be vastly different in a couple of years based off how things are moving so rapidly.

14:24So Mike Maples is one of my favorite investors in the Valley. And he talks about this concept of backcasting, right? So in backcasting is like looking to the future to build something. And that's how you create categories. And the best categories are not created from incremental change. So if you think about like Uber, were you going to get in the stranger's car? I'm not trying to get abducted. Yeah, exactly. Nine out of 10 of us were like, absolutely no. The best categories are built on a fundamental thesis that the majority rejects and a few accept and get excited about and like it and love it.

15:00And then all of a sudden the pros outweigh the cons, right? And so then we then start to see, you know, the laggards and the later adopters, and then it begins, it breaks out and becomes the norm. Am I going to rent my house out to a stranger for Airbnb? Am I going to get in a self-driving Waymo car. No, these were all like absolutely positively. Most of us, the majority were like, no, not doing this. And I feel it's the same right now with where we are with OneMind and building these superhumans. Every time I get a no where people are like, whoa, I'm not going to talk to an AI. I'm not going to talk to this face that's not a real person.

15:33But then you have people who have conversations and lean in and actually give her a shot and ask her the hard questions and give her their real pains and what they're trying to solve for. And oh my God, her answers just blow them away. And she actually has personality, right? So she's not dry just giving the answer. She has better personality than nine out of 10 of your reps, right? She can inject humor and bring in relevant context for what's going on in the world. It's actually amazing to watch her do her job and she does it so much better than a human would. So I like to think, what we're doing with One Mind is I'm trying to build a new way for go-to-market and teams.

16:07So it's not just, I'm not building a new inbound SDR, which that is one of the roles she plays. I'm not building a new sales engineer or solutions engineer. I'm building a new way to buy. If buyers could talk to sellers at any time in any channel and pick up on the conversation where they last left off, right? So the AI knows everything about the account going into the conversation, looks up in Salesforce or HubSpot, knows what's happening in the account and the opportunity, can have that context into the conversation. remembers her past conversation. So she doesn't have, you don't have to remind her next time you get on the call.

16:41She picks right back up. She gives the demo. She gives the pitch. She shows the case studies. She writes the RFP, responds to the RFP and moves the buyers through. So you don't have a solutions engineer. You don't have a sales engineer. You don't have the AE and you don't have the SDR. You're just talking to the superhuman who takes you through your journey on your time and your way. That's my ultimate vision. Of course, the world isn't ready for that yet. right so i am selling it as you come in and you talk to the inbound sdr on the website she's a ride-along sales engineer she's in passive mode ready to answer the hard questions so we are selling it in those siloed roles that's just because the market in the world's not ready but in a short amount of time we'll be selling that this is your ai this is your superhuman for go to market she can onboard your customers she can sell she can pitch she can qualify she can close and she does all the next steps and it's just a matter of like incrementally increasing her brain for each of those different functions.

17:33Yeah. Amazing. So what is the scope of savings? I mean, I'm just imagining, I know you, I tried to get in on this and you're like, sorry, Steph, you're too small. You're like, I'm working with enterprises right now. I'm like, oh man. So like, what is the scope of savings for having something like this come in? And I mean, honestly, probably replace like a large portion of your sales team. Yeah. Like say like, she's the cost of one junior SDR. And she's the cost of one junior SDR without having to pay recruiting costs, without having to pay benefits, without having to pay severance, right? So it is just the salary of one person.

18:09And she can do the work of 20X, 30X, you know, her efficiencies. The more, the way our pricing model works is there's a usage-based component. So the more usage she has, the more affordable she is per conversation. So if you just have her on, so for you, if you just had her on a few conversations, she'd be equivalent to maybe three or four people, which I don't think that's enough ROI. We need to, which is really interesting about AI. She has more capacity. She can do more. She's smarter. She can join in every channel. She has no time limitations. But when I'm selling this, she actually has to have exponential capacity of a human in order for people to say yes.

18:46Yeah. Right. So it's really like she's better than a human, but she also has to operate and cost exponentially less in order for this to work. And as we all know, like with, you know, everything that's happening in the world of LLMs and the generative wave and all the synthetic media costs are just coming down, right? The GPU costs are coming down. So whatever it is today, it's going to be a fraction of that tomorrow. And that's what's super exciting as well. Yeah. I'm especially excited for that. So when it comes to this space, I mean, there's a lot of misconceptions sometimes around AI, of course, because it's so new and people are still, I mean, even so many people still don't use simple things like chat GPT.

19:24They're still trying to figure it out. What are some misconceptions that you hear that you think need to be addressed in this space? Yeah. The first, my favorite question people ask me, they're like, oh, does your AI hallucinate? We've all seen the stories, right? So we've seen the example where, you know, I forget what it was at Chevron and was, and Tesla came in and we're like selling the AI, the bot was selling the competitor's product. You know, that happens all the time, but there are ways to create guardrails and you can create really tight guardrails where that doesn't happen, right? So you can really prevent that.

19:55And my favorite response when somebody asked me, well, will the superhuman hallucinate? Will she, you know, say something that's not accurate or sell our competitor's product? I like to say, does your seller hallucinate? And how often do they hallucinate to get the deal done and make up an answer? And she's gonna do it again at like exponentially lower rates and a fraction of the rate. And we can keep her on super tight guardrails. And the way we've built her is she's not fully generative. So if she were fully generative, and that's what we're relying on, she would hallucinate all the time. And so I think that's the challenge with some of the bots that people are building today.

20:28We use a combination of deterministic, so the if-then, the old school way of doing this, with the generative. So it's basically, she goes down different paths. She's goal-based. She has a goal. She knows what she's trying to get to. And she has to stay in her lane for the tasks that she's doing and what she answers. how she says it, we use the more creative generative approach so that she sounds relatable. She sounds like a human, but what she's saying, she's going back into a more deterministic way and using, you know, just traditional methodologies of embeddings and different rag architecture, et cetera, to make sure that she's saying it accurately.

21:04Okay. So then she basically has rules built into her system that you build out that you can be like, your goal is to close the sale. Here's the things you can or can't say. And then if you get questions that you actually don't know the answer for it. You just say you don't know. Like it's instead of just hallucinating. She deflects and says, Hey, I've only been trained on this. I don't know. And then we have something called a knowledge gap detection, which when she gets a question about something she doesn't know, she flags it to our customer. So it would go back to, for example, New Relic is a customer.

21:33Go back to the team at New Relic to say, Hey, she didn't know this answer. Do you want to fill that gap? So then they can fill that gap with the content. So the next time somebody comes in and asks the question, she doesn't, just defer the answer. But sometimes you don't want her to answer the question. And when we first released Mindy, when people asked us about pricing, she'd just say, I don't know. You're going to have to ask the human. Do you want to schedule a meeting? I'm happy to schedule a meeting with one of our humans. Now she answers the question and she'll say, we're about the cost of a human.

21:59And she shows a slide that shows how our usage and our pricing works without giving specifics into the question. Yeah. It'd be cool if she was like, I have to go take a bathroom break. I'll be right back. she does really funny things like that it's actually my favorite like magic moments are when people really lean in and have a real conversation and then they like when they try to say something funny she'll get you right back with your same humor so mirroring is like a tactic we teach salespeople right you want to mirror who you're talking to and she does that so well right so she if you're dry she's gonna be dry if you want to lean in and you want to be funny she's going to inject humor.

22:36So we, we like her to like emulate who she's talking to so that eventually right now, each of our customers chooses the profile of what they want their superhuman to look like. But my ultimate goal is that the buyer would choose that I get to choose who I buy from. I want somebody who culturally aligns and resembles, you know, what, what, who I want to talk to. Let me, what if you could choose your seller? Like imagine going to a company, going into Amazon and, you know, you're about to buy, you know, AWS services and you could say, yeah, I want to buy from that person. Like that's the person I want to buy from with that personality.

23:09You know, it has the same culture background as me, talks the same or looks completely different because I don't want to buy some from somebody who looks like me, et cetera. Yep. Yep. That's amazing. Okay. So now to switch back to, you know, I'm a marketing leader listening right now, and I want to hear about your scrappy marketing techniques in going into 2025 right now because you're you have this company you're having to do things very different than how you built six cents before and how you built your previous company before that so what things are you doing today that you think are contrarian or different that other marketing leaders are probably not even thinking about yeah i mean honestly we are really we're doing something i didn't do in the early days i made a lot of mistakes at six cents and one of them was we did not eat our dog food early enough it took us a while to start using our own product for ourselves.