GTM efficiency, AI, and the future of SaaS Sales with Jen Igartua (Go Nimbly)

0:01This is a silly way of saying it, but we're getting back to selling on the golf course. We're getting back to in-person, people want to be having meaningful interactions with the people that they're buying from, and it's becoming a much more strategic sale, even at low ACV values. Welcome to the SaaS Revolution Show, a podcast by SaaS.com. Here we interview SaaS founders from around the world who've been there and done that. They share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses, their operations, their path for securing investment, and more. Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your well-being, and navigate the complexities of this ever-changing industry.

0:42I'm your host, Alex Thuma, and together we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success. All right, welcome back to the SaaS Revolution Show. I am your host, Alex Thuma, CEO and founder of SaaStock, also general partner of BackFuture Ventures, and really delighted to be joined today by long-term friend, also LP in BackFuture, if I'm allowed to say. And she is the CEO of GoNimbly, also the host of This Week in SaaS. I almost said This Week in Startups, but corrected myself. And maybe some will know her as the Barbara Walters of SaaS or soon as well. I do read your post, Jen.

1:23Thank you. But welcome, Jen Iguata, CEO and co-founder at GoNimbly. Thank you. Thanks for having me. What an intro. I'll be Barbara Walters. Actually, you can call me Barbara for this episode. Okay, Barbara. We may confuse people when they see Jen Iguata. I keep calling you Barbara and they're like, what is he smoking over here? But I'm not smoking anything. But lovely to see you. Are you in sunny Brooklyn? I am. I'm in Brooklyn. I'm in a part of Brooklyn called Bushwick, which is like the very cliche. When you think of Brooklyn, it's kind of the cliche. Everybody here has a weird outfit and weird hair and they're all in a polycule and, you know, smoking weed.

2:08And that's a little bit about Bushwick. The hipster, hipster side. Yeah. And so we have, I mean, it's probably nowhere near as good but uh where i live there's a town called margate and uh everybody there and sorry to those people i'm not sure anybody's listening from margate or the sass business but it seems that they care more about how they look uh than anything else and uh um which is not a bad thing but it's such an extravagant way like if i go to the pub there i feel uncomfortable because i'm in my black t-shirt and jeans and so um i don't know i like i admire them but i also like to feel comfortable in the pub when i'm having a pint 50 of people in my neighborhood are probably djs also not a bad thing we don't hate djs or people that dress well it's just no just me you don't want to date them me exactly me and jen are just like boringly dressed we're not boringly dressed but you know we're kind of we know our market we know our market um but jen uh so good to see you first time guests in the podcast been doing this for 10 years and probably known you half that time or more um yeah and um yeah look i always start i can like we assume that the audience doesn't know you although you're building up somewhat of uh a profile and a following as the host of this week in sass which i think is going quite well and we want we want to dive into that but for those that don't know you, who is Jenna Guata?

3:37Yeah. So, uh, I, I am more than, than just professionally, but I'll, I'll start there. I started off my career at a company called Blue Wolf. And if anybody's been in the space for a while, they were Salesforce's biggest partner. So the lure is that, uh, Benioff called Eric Barrage, who was our CEO and said, Hey, you got to start a services business, uh, cause this is blowing up. And I was hired specifically to be part of their marketing automation business. And what was sometimes a frustrating experience, which was I was surrounded by people very focused on Salesforce and the sales experience, and I was focused on top of funnel, turned out to be a really big gift because it meant that I had that crash course of what it looked like to break down silos, to work within teams, to, you know, really obsess over the integration and data flow of these tools.

4:23And that's what led us to start, it's me and a couple of ex blue wolfers to start go nimbly. Uh, it was, we didn't have the tag for RevOps, right? So we're a RevOps agency, but we didn't have that word. So instead we called it unify the business stack. And again, you know, the, the whole premise of all this is your internal silos and your internal bullshit's getting in the way of a great customer experience. It's losing you money. And we're very focused on that kind of process and tech. I'm very lucky. Uh, I don't think I've ever said this on a public forum. So Alex, you get the inside scoop. I started the business.

5:01My first customer ever was Twilio. And they're still with us today. Really lovely. But I had no idea who they were. I've been embarrassed to say that at this point, whatever. It's been 10 years. No one's going to get mad. But I got a phone call and I was like, hey, they need someone for their Eloqua to Salesforce integration. I was kind of hot in that space. And I was like, oh, okay, I guess they do text messaging, whatever, I'll take it. And that's how we started GoNimbly. I didn't realize they were this kind of rocket ship and unicorn that I built a business on top of. Our second customer was somebody that left Twilio and went to Zendesk.

5:35So like I started off with these incredible logos and these incredible companies. Now I know who they are and they're an amazing customer. But the bread and butter of the work that we do are these kind of mid-market enterprise level SaaS companies and how do we create all of the processes and tooling for their go-to-market team. And that's not, if you think that, or if I think that wouldn't be enough, you also have a side business, like you're running a pretty sizable business, but you have time to have a second business. And what is that? Because it is quite fun. Yeah. I run a company called Pillbox Games with like four other people.

6:13So as much as it's like a side hustle. I pop in and out. Two of my friends, actually, we grew it big enough. They managed to quit their jobs and are working full-time on that business. We sold over half a million dollars of games last year. So it's like, it's a, it's a real business. And it started out as just, we made a game on Kickstarter. Our goal was 10K. It was called a, it's a game called Side Effects, where you get an array of mental disorders and you have to be the first to treat yourself with drugs and therapy, relatable. And it did really well. We had a goal of 10K, we got$80 ,000. And all of a sudden, we were like, okay, I guess we made games now.

6:50So I've been doing that for over five years. And it's fascinating. And one of the things that's really interesting about it, we were really bad at it at first. But I'm learning a lot about B2C and applying it to B2B. And one of those things is we're throwing a conference this year. and I'm taking a lot of my experience at conventions, at game conventions. It's the same people that go, there are tons of nerds that go to these conventions that also work at SaaS companies that I meet there and they show up different and the vibe is different and it feels good. And it's a kind of very similar thing to the ethos of SaaS stock, which is like, how do you show up and allow people to relax and not posture and really be open about their problems and actually bring their full selves.

7:34So it's been really interesting to apply that to kind of my day job. Awesome. Well, you're doing a lot there. And if that wasn't also enough, but I guess it also ties in its marketing. You're hosting this week in SaaS and it's a lot of fun. Yeah. What a fun week to do it, too. Yeah. Yeah. There is actually like, you know, SaaS is not boring. There is lots of stuff going on, including corporate espionage. espionage. What is your do you have a take on that? I think you're going to be covering that without this will probably go out after sort of this post. But I guess for people sort of listening, they you may or may not be aware that there is some corporate espionage and legal issues going on between deal and rippling.

8:17And actually, I think you were the first person to certainly that I saw that broke the news. And then I googled it. And then I started reading the articles, but It's getting spicy. Yeah, it is. I didn't find the news. I saw someone else post it and then I posted it. But yeah, so on this week in SaaS, we basically find one topic that honestly, it's just like something that piques my interest and try to do like a la Jon Stewart, a little shtick. So I'm recording the one about deal and rippling today. So I've been doing my research and I've been, I got in touch. Rippling did give me like, they just basically have their talking points.

8:54It's just everything that's in the lawsuit. and I read all 48 pages of that lawsuit. It is printed out and read it. It is so fun. And I reached out to deal. Of course I got nothing. And, but I did reach out to a bunch of deal X employees and boy, are people talking like it does seem obviously if you're at the top levels doing things like corporate espionage, it's going to seep into your culture and other places. So it's not surprising. If, if anybody wants the tea, just go on Reddit. The Reddit boards are, amazing. Um, but in short, what happened is, uh, uh, there was an employee at Rippling, uh, his initials are DS, I call him D's.

9:34Uh, and, uh, he had been working there for a while, like a year. And then the last four months since like November 1st, his like usage was completely different. Like, it's very, very funny to me that this person did it. Rippling literally makes the, the technology that tracks your laptop usage. So it's like the worst company to spy on. And a really, really fun detail is this individual's number one, like search term before they caught him or like before he started spying was the dog's channel on Slack. And then after it was like deal competitive cycles. And it's just, I mean, I find that very endearing.

10:14He's a dog person, you know, and he got corrupted and money talks. I'm sure you got a bunch of money. And, you know, I canceled my Netflix because I don't, I don't need it. I got LinkedIn. Wow. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to watching that and your, your, your take on it. And also just following how that goes. And, and I mean, you're doing it, so we don't need to like do a whole podcast on that. But so if anyone wants to get hot takes on the spicy world of SaaS, uh you know follow jen on uh you mostly post these on linkedin right that's a yeah i post them on youtube but they get like 40 views more on linkedin linkedin's the place but uh but jen uh i i was recently i mean i guess kind of like what uh what go nimbly is now and uh a lot of the ways that you you help uh other sas businesses of a you know mid-size kind of uh and above is around like gtm efficiency right uh and um recently uh actually you were the the catalyst for me to come over to uh to new york uh to attend a dinner that you hosted together with clay and chili piper and i i think i i don't know if i was the i don't think i was the only founder there to be fair but it was a lot of like red ops folks right and a lot of the conversation around dinner is like all the amazing interesting ways that people are using like great technologies to be more uh gtm efficient and grow their sas businesses and given that's your area of expertise and i think also our audience you know they like maybe not a huge amount will be kind of like mid-sized but there will be some but uh i'm really interested in this topic and people are using uh tools like clay and apollo and others and so on there's so many now that uh you know i'm just constantly finding new tools every day, but would love, I guess, kind of your take on like, what is GTM efficiency, like deficiency, like how do you help companies?

12:13What are you seeing, you know, and like with your like client base, but like what you can share of the interesting ways that people are using, you know, stuff to, you know, really kind of grow their SaaS companies today. Yeah. And this is part of a really big shift. I'd say it's changed me in the last three years. definitely part of the macroeconomic shift money got expensive so we were no longer just being like I'm just going to triple my sales team and that's fine we used to really not care about the seller experience it was like not not a thing that was brought up it was basically well okay we need a double revenue I'll just hire x number more AEs pump them in let's just get them making more calls booking more meetings closing more deals and we're good to go and obviously money got expensive so now we're thinking, okay, how do I do this much more efficiently?

13:02How do I do this profitably? But then there's a second shift also that happened during that time. They were, we were bombarding, you know, prospects with a bazillion emails. And frankly, they had buying power right now. They don't all have buying power. It's going all the way up to the CFO. The deals are getting much harder. And also we got bombarded with so much messaging that at this point, I don't know about you, but I am amazed how quickly I delete emails and I don't miss any. I'm just like, whatever, This all looks like spam, delete, delete, delete, delete. And so we're working with these two different shifts.

13:32One, buying is higher, harder. The customer is expecting a much more unique experience. They're taking way less meetings. And then on top of that, you know, we were getting pressure to do it more efficiently. So all of our work right now is really very focused on how do we increase carry capacity for our reps? How do we get them selling more? How do we remove all the bullshit that they have to do so that they can focus on more human moments. And I mean, this is a silly way of saying it, but we're getting back to selling on the golf course. We're getting back to in person, people want to be having meaningful interactions with the people that they're buying from.

14:11And it's becoming a much more strategic sale, even at low ACV values. So I guess all of that together is bringing a focus for operators to be really thinking about, okay, how do I streamline? And not only sellers, it's also at the every go to market. It's at the CS level, it's at the SDR level, but really very focused on creating that efficiency across their workflow. So how would, how would then a company go about doing that so that their sales reps are having these steak dinners and, you know, playing golf with their customers? But like, you know, I would say on our side, and I think I meant, I can't remember if I mentioned before we were recording or after, as we're recording now, but like, you know, We're not a SaaS company.

14:56SaaS is not a SaaS company. I think everybody knows that, certainly those that are listening. But we've got some great sales people on our team, really great in person, but probably then struggling to get those meetings in person. And a lot of the conversations are happening on email or we're doing LinkedIn outreach. It feels like we're quite analog compared to all these SaaS companies who've got all these amazing things that they're doing. right? So, but if you are a SaaS company that is just like doing what SaaS looks doing and emailing and doing LinkedIn, like where's a good place to start?

15:33Like what should we should be looking at? So if I was coming into a company and just trying to figure out where the biggest gaps are, where are the biggest like areas for efficiency, I'll spill out some of the top ones, but the way I would try to find them, easiest way is go sit with your reps, go do rep rides. I don't care if you've got three or 30, just go create half an hour, make sure you have some people that have been there for a while, your biggest detractors, you know, your new person, just to kind of understand, do you even have a process? You might think you do and then find everybody's doing it differently.

16:02Can you look at areas where it's like really painful for them? You'll be surprised how they pull lists, how they add people on LinkedIn, how they prepare for meetings, all of that as such a, uh, an opportunity for automation. And we talk a lot about AI and AI and automation at this point are being used interchangeably, but really the goal is, you know, a lot of the goal is automation, right? Like the biggest area you can get go to market efficiency is how do I reduce the amount of manual tasks that somebody has to do? Then there's the other promise of AI, which is just like, hey, can I increase the quality of what I do?

16:36Not only can I automate my research, but I can make my research better and deeper and have like better insights and translate it into like smarter thoughts. And so there's definitely that up leveling that AI can do. But tier one for me is, okay, great. How can I automate almost exactly what you're doing and then, you know, make it more efficient. So with, with that, imagine that you've kind of sat with everybody and you've found some things. Likely what you're going to find is a lot of automation, like pre and post meeting. So how do I prepare? You'd be, it's a lot of time that people spend researching when they do it right, or they're not doing it and they're hopping on calls, kind of just winging it.

17:15So how do I make that a no brainer? How we've done it for a lot of customers just to lift the veil, because I know sometimes people just don't get to specifics. You can integrate, say you use Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever CRM, get a button that calls, you send information to an AI and it brings back a summary. The way that I've built it internally for me, I have a button that pushes information into a clay table and clay literally looks like Excel, except each column does an action. And I send the LinkedIn and the email of the person and all the information I have. And I do things like go to LinkedIn, pull their last three posts, summarize them, go find out who the CEO's name is, because I've been on too many calls where they say Tom and I'm like, who the fuck is Tom?

18:01So like, get that information, go check their pricing page, tell me what their pricing models are, whatever is interesting to you. We work with intercom and they, for example, had a very niche requirement around they want to go after online gambling because you can imagine there's a lot of tickets there. But Zoom Info isn't going to give you that category. They're just going to say gaming, which also includes video games and a bunch of other stuff. So go to the website, scrape it and find the sub industry so that I have a better understanding. So it's like all of that sort of information and then just push it right back to Salesforce.

18:34Yes, you want to put it in field so that you can report on it. But I really encourage people a paragraph. It's so counterintuitive to when we started doing this. Like when I started my career, it was all about putting things in data points. This is more about as a sales rep, how can I read something? My brain's going to get smarter and consume it better if I'm kind of just reading a summary of this person, their industry. Oh, another one I really love is what are the last three companies they worked at and were those companies customers? So like, have they actually worked with us possibly? So a lot of the pre and post meeting is a huge area that you can automate.

19:07Clay, you mentioned Clay. There is something that you're using and I think a lot of SaaS companies are using. They're also one of the sponsors of RevFest, I mentioned, hopefully SaaS stock at some point. I did put in a good award. We are in discussions. It may or may not have closed by the time this says, but fingers crossed it has and people will notice that. But thank you for that. But yeah, certainly at the dinner that we were at and that you hosted and also Clay were a sponsor of. People were talking about Clay, but I've been hearing this, hearing them in the SaaS community, like, I don't know, like for a good 18 months and it's just kind of getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

19:47So there's one thing, like what is it like within, let's say, the tech stack that you see the SaaS companies are using or like, you know, like the key types of tools. We don't necessarily have to name like the names, but we can also because I think people will be interested. It may be helpful. But the things maybe even like whether it's what are people using, I guess, and then like at a starting point, because also all of these things come with a cost. And whilst we want to be efficient, it's like buy more software and all of a sudden, you know, it's becoming expensive. But like where to start and what are the things that people are using?

20:23Yeah, and I'll talk about a trend that I'm seeing, which has been really interesting because there's two things happening that are opposite of each other. On one side, it's getting easier to build point solutions. And so we're seeing a lot more internal teams saying, well, I can just build this myself. And it's not just GPTs. Like, again, I think we get really, really focused on that. And people on LinkedIn will talk about, okay, I have like a bazillion agentic workflows. They don't. They're lying to you. Most people do not have a bunch of agentic workflows managing their business. but there's a lot of opportunity to build.

21:00And I think operators are looking to build more instead of buy after, you know, in 2020 to 2021, we bought every tool under the sun. It sat shelfware and operators are frustrated. We also had to like manage a bunch of tech. So we had to learn it and then we had to get other people to adopt it. And so I am seeing as much as people are looking to build and bring on some of these point solutions and get excited about new kind of AI tools. at the same time there's a really big push towards consolidation the amount of consolidation project I think across the board all of our customers are looking to consolidate their tech stack even if the tools are not as good so I'll give kind of the the big example that I think anybody listening to this is probably thinking is like Gong Clary Outreach right you used to need all three and now Gong is building Outreach is Engage and they're building Forecast Embedded and Clary?

21:51Are they as good? Honestly, a year ago, I probably would have told you that it's not ready, but it's ready. It's ready. And now you can do everything in a platform. And sure, it's not going to be at the same level as outreach's features because they've had 10 years to build them, but you weren't using them. And so now what you have is two less integrations, two less tools to enable the team on, two less tools myself to manage, less tickets, less issues. And so there's another big push I think to do like, obviously there's a budget win when you consolidate, but it's the win of managing less. So again, I see these like two trends of consolidate on these platforms.

22:33And that's typically going to be your CRM, your marketing automation, your, what do they call it? Revenue intelligence technology. I think it's the category, but you're kind of gong and engage that space. And then typically you need like a snowflake or some kind of BI platform. embedded. And then the rest of it around are sort of this kind of like point solution space where you can start to kind of get interesting. And, you know, what, why clay, I think is getting a lot of hype is because clay is not a specific feature. You know, clay is not like, oh, hey, you need this for data enrichment. It is a, like I said, it's a fancy Excel sheet that lets you play and it lets you build and you can integrate it with all these other things.

23:18So I don't know, there's kind of like Hayreach and Dripify and oh my gosh, what's the Bethany is the Sense Park, right? Like all of these, you know, uh, tools, they kind of integrate with Clay and you can use their credits to send. So you don't have to get your own, uh, version. So I think that's why there's so much hype around Clay is because for operators, especially nerdy ones are like, I'm kind of getting to build without code. I'm getting to build all these automations and you get to test out some of these other tools to see if they actually, you know, work or do something for you. What is your, I don't know, like favorite GTM efficient tool that is not clay?

24:04Like what is one that people should like be checking out that you're quite excited about? I'm doing a ton. I mean, I mentioned Gong already, but I'm doing so much with Gong transcripts. That's really fun. And you could do this, replace Gong with like any other transcript that you have, but basically sending that to AI, like, you know, you could do chat GPT, whatever it might be, and basically analyzing for certain things. So we have automations that look for like negative sentiment, et cetera. But I also look for projects that I know are meaty. Are they mentioning frustration with data integrity?

24:39like, yeah, I'm, I want that. Are they mentioning PLG? We do a lot of work with PLG, bringing that through. Um, other tools that I'm like, that's more of like a, a process than a specific tool. Uh, I have my eye on POCUS. Um, you know, what's funny is I was a hater of POCUS when it first, uh, uh, came out because I was like, oh, well I don't want, and for anybody that knows POCUS was focused very much in the PLG space. And it was supposed to be, you integrate it with a bunch of data sources and it elevates expansions and it elevates kind of free trial to paid, you know, opportunities. And I love the concept, but I don't want my reps having to like go back and forth between tools.

25:20And now I got to go focus for my PQLs, but my MQLs are in Salesforce. And I was like, eh, it's just not there yet. And now they're pivoting and really kind of consolidating and thinking about like, okay, I need to manage my entire lead list and my entire, both MQLs, PQLs, every QL you can think of. And they're embedding a ton of AI to do that kind of research and outbound and all of that in one platform. So that's one to watch. You know, I think the problem with all of these is there's definitely overlap between tools. So then you start to pay for, you know, all features in one when you only need a percentage.

25:58um but yeah i'm i'm i i love their uh you know what i think that their differentiator is they kind of require you to integrate with product and third-party intent and everything else and so your ability to mix and match signals i think is very powerful given um there there is this obvious trend uh around gtm efficiency that we're seeing building because of all these great tools like do do you feel like what's your opinion on like if a SaaS company isn't thinking about GTM being GTM efficient are they just going to be left behind left in the dust from all those that are really going you know all in on this well so what's the idea between kind of efficiency and and increasing carry capacity etc is I can do more uh like I have more space to invest in other go market functions or make my team even larger and sell more.

26:54And so, you know, I don't know that I necessarily think you don't do it so you don't survive, but I don't think you become the next unicorn without a focus on efficiency. That being said, I've worked with companies that I remember going into them and they were massive. And I won't say the company, but it's a company everybody here knows and loves. And I remember talking with our head of IT and he said, we've grown in spite of our operations. And that's because they had a fantastic product that people wanted and bought and it moved them along. So on one front is like, do I believe in this? Absolutely.

27:27Are there unicorns that just have an incredible product, an incredible product market fit, and they can run real terribly? Also, yes. One other thing I'm thinking through too is the idea of investing in ops, right? Whether it's like you get into the hype of go-to-market engineer or rev ops or whatever you're talking about, like the premise behind all this is that you're hiring internally, operationally, so that we can get the most out of your go to market team. And so you know, the idea isn't that I'm so focused internally, and I'm go to market efficiency, because I'm trying to build a machine because it's fun.

28:02I'm doing it so that I can give my sellers more time to sell. And so it's, you know, what's the I get asked a lot, what's the right ratio? I don't necessarily think there is like a, hey, you must hire one per 20 or anything like that, because it depends on the complexity of your sales cycle, your goals. I don't know if you're implementing CPQ next year, I need a lot more headcount than if you're staying flat and just like streamlining. So that's a little bit about knowing your investment. But the idea is my operators are going to make my sellers and my marketers more effective and do more and therefore or grow the company more.