Why most B2B CRMs are about to die — Doug Camplejohn (ex-LinkedIn, ex-Salesforce) on AI-native CRM
Doug Camplejohn, founder of coffee.ai and former executive at LinkedIn and Salesforce, shares his insights on the impending disruption of the B2B CRM landscape. He argues that traditional CRMs fail because they rely heavily on manual data entry from sales reps, leading to poor data hygiene where fields are only accurately updated when a commission is on the line. By moving toward an AI-native approach, modern CRMs can automate data ingestion, giving revenue teams accurate, real-time visibility into pipeline and buyer signals without the administrative burden. Furthermore, Doug emphasizes that the future of go-to-market strategy must be completely buyer-centric. He warns against the rise of generic "AI SDRs" that merely automate mass spam, advocating instead for hyper-personalized, one-to-one outreach and allowing buyers self-serve access to information. His ultimate advice for revenue leaders drowning in complex processes is to aggressively "secret shop" their own sales motion to identify and eliminate the internal friction points that don't align with how modern buyers actually want to buy.
Discussed in this episode
- How flattened learning curves at big tech companies drove Doug back to his startup roots.
- The inherent fragmentation of the CRM market and how generative AI is creating the next disruptive opportunity.
- Identifying the magic onboarding moment where specific user actions within two weeks drastically increase conversion likelihood.
- Why high social selling index (SSI) scores often negatively correlate with win rates due to reps commenting instead of selling.
- The harsh reality of CRM data quality, where the only reliable fields are the ones tied to a rep's commission check.
- Implementing a waterfall approach to data enrichment by stacking vendors and using AI to scrape unstructured web data.
- The failure of AI SDRs that automate mass spam, and the necessary shift toward value-driven, hyper-personalized interactions.
- The critical necessity of secret shopping your own sales process to remove friction and align with the actual buyer journey.
Episode highlights
- — Introduction and Doug's background
- — Leaving big tech for startups
- — Disrupting legacy CRMs with AI
- — Finding the magic conversion moment
- — The truth about Social Selling Index
- — Why most CRM data is garbage
- — Waterfall approach to data enrichment
- — What an AI-first CRM actually does
- — The future of GTM and buyer journeys
- — Secret shopping your own sales process
Key takeaways
- Traditional CRM data is flawed because reps only update to get paid.
- High social selling scores often inversely correlate with closed-won rates.
- AI-first CRMs automate data ingestion instead of relying on manual entry.
- AI SDRs that automate mass spam will fail; hyper-personalization wins.
- Secret shop your own sales process to eliminate buyer friction.
Transcript
What I am most excited about and everyone listening knows and dude, gut check me here. The last question we ask is always what's the one thing founders need to hear now or CEO's or revenue leaders need to hear now to to bridge the gap that they're drowning in. And I'll say it now and you got to listen to the end to hear it. It is the single best piece of advice that has ever been shared in 80 something episodes of this show.
100%. I totally agree. Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagined. Today's guest is Doug Campbell John, the founder and CEO of coffee.
ai, which is an AI first CRM. Doug is a proven track record in building and scaling successful companies with startups that include Myplay, MI5 Networks and FlipTop, all of which achieved successful exits. With leadership experience at LinkedIn as the VP of Sales Solutions, Salesforce as the GM of Sales Cloud, and Apple as a Quicktime product manager. Doug combines deep technical experience with strategic vision.
He's passionate about creating transformative products and building great teams. This is an episode you don't want to miss. Awesome. Um, Doug, so one of the first questions I have for you is working at all these huge companies like, what's the what was the motivation?
Not necessarily for just coffee, but to be like, I'm going to go do a startup. I saw you went from from LinkedIn to uh, to Salesforce, and then you did some investments. Was it the investing side that was like, oh, I should go try to just go build my own thing. Like what was that startup bug for you?
Yeah, it's actually funny. Like I'm really a startup guy. The the exceptions are actually the big companies. So, you know, I started my career, I was electrial engineer.
I started at Apple. Um, everything in between until I got to LinkedIn, I don't know, 15, 20 years later was like, has been startups. Well, you got bought by LinkedIn, right? So you got last company you got bought by LinkedIn.
Yeah, the last company got bought by LinkedIn and frankly, like we got there and we're like, oh my God, this is, you know, big companies obviously move slower. Um, I'm going to lose my mind here. And it was, uh, it was actually one of those things where I originally was just going to stay for like, you know, 12, 18 months, but I got to kind of rebuild the sales navigator team. We got to go rebuild the the product roadmap, and I was having a lot of fun, right?
I was really, you know, enjoying what we were doing and and the culture there and and LinkedIn is a very strong product culture based on what Reed and and others built at the beginning. And so I ended up staying longer than I thought I would and towards the end of that tenure, I was kind of getting bored and I didn't have bored is the wrong word. I would say my growth, my my my learning curve it started to flatten, right? I felt like I wasn't learning new stuff, um, which is always kind of my indicator of of of wanting to do something new.
Um, and Brett Taylor and and Mark called and said, hey, you know, we we think you'd be right to run sales cloud and I thought, well, that will be that will increase the learning curve, right? And so that's why I went to Salesforce. And, um, you know, I think that I Salesforce is an amazing sales and marketing and and business development, you know, corporate development company. Um, but ultimately, I wanted to get back to my roots as a as a startup guy and so when I had the right idea, I left and and started doing that.
And old tech, and it sounds like you're taking a page out of Benioff's book on going after the S&B mid-market, uh, as they did against Siebel. And, uh, he went out and got funding from. Oh, old tech, but they're still able we just got for one of our clients, they had a 9% price increase next year. Like it blows my mind that they could get away with that, but they know how hard that switch is.
Yeah, I mean, like never rule out Mark Minioff, right? Like Salesforce is not going away. Listen, the thing that's amazing about CRM that no one realizes is that it is a very fragmented market and as you pointed out, Adam, like once you're really locked in, it's hard to move. I mean, if you remember back in the '80s, there was a company called Act that was doing desktop PC software.
They're still around. They're still doing significant You just don't ever hear about them. Yeah, you just don't hear about them. I mean, Siebel like, which is now owned by Oracle, still has tons of customers for Siebel, right?
Out there. So this stuff never goes away. It just every decade there seems to be a new player that emerges, they get some footing. Um, so last decade it was HubSpot and really started to like eat into Salesforce on the on the low end.
And I think that when you have these disruptive technology curves like AI is is providing now, you've got an opportunity for another disruption. Yeah, 100%. So I I I want to go back, whether it be early days at LinkedIn, Salesforce, coffee, or any startup you you've been a part of. As you're building go-to-market strategy in motions, one of the things that we hear when we talk to founders is like, there's this moment where it's like, shit, I this is out of control and I I got to do something or we're not going to survive.
And we've heard everything from, I got to fire the entire sales team because they all suck. Um, our tech, our tech stack that we just spent $200,000 on is awful, and I got to rip it all out and that's sunk cost. The success momentum is garbage. We onboarded all of these customers, but none of them are getting time to value.
The 11X story, um, so to speak, where everyone cancels after trial. Like, talk me through like a moment where you were like, you just looked in the mirror and you were like, I got to fix something or we're toast. Yeah, I mean, I I'll give you a I there's lots of examples for that, but but I'll give you kind of a at least a large company example, a small company example. So, uh, at LinkedIn when I came out, came there, it was about sales navigator, the group I ran was about 250 million in revenue.
They're doing over a billion now. Um, and, you know, the assumption was like, hey, listen, this is a 250 million revenue business. It's like, it's cranking. It's great.
Um, but I when I really dug into the product, um, you know, we had no multi-year deals. We had no, uh, we had no, um, uh, what it really was was a few small features that were getting people over the line, but as soon as, you know, people were hacking the hell out of free and premium and trying to get those to go go, uh, work for them to avoid paying the the the premium, uh, sales navigator tax. Um, and so one of that was really starting to understand what was the magic moment when someone would convert, right? Um, so we actually did, we had a team there called BizOps, which I got completely spoiled, you know, startups don't have things like this.
Uh, but BizOps went in and said, okay, first of all, what is our biggest opportunity? Is it white space or is it actually doubling down on the the customers that we have? And it turned out that like, we just were not anywhere near as highly penetrated into the companies that we already had engagements with. So there was a great if we could come up with the right feature set to go expand that, that was a like huge opportunity for us.
And the other was, you know, we would churn out a lot of people in that first 30 days, um, who had not engaged enough with the product. And so the team did all this, you know, machine learning analysis and figured out like, oh, there's a engaged uh, seller metric they came up with that said, if you perform actions A, B, and C within the first two weeks, right? You are five times more likely to go convert. And that was the magic moment where like, great.
Let's focus all of our product effort. Let's focus all of our customer success and engagement efforts around that. And that was a huge turning point for us in terms of just kind of unlocking value. So it wasn't that we had to kill something, um, we definitely had to rethink the product pretty radically, um, to to to to find value there.
But it was something where, where, uh, we just didn't like we were kind of on autopilot because LinkedIn is in this great, uh, position with the dataset that they have to to not have to be as sharp as you might have to be in a startup, um, and be on top of that stuff. And is that where the social selling index started like coming out where like, there's that whole social selling. They try to figure out where people are actually utilizing the product? Yeah, I'm kind of smiling because social selling index predated me.
So Okay. It was it was actually, uh, something that we looked at. That was another thing that we had data to to go take a look at. And it turned out in a significant number of cases, a high social selling index was inversely correlated with your your your win rate, right?
Because you were spending too much time, you know, like, hey, how are you doing? Let me comment on your posts and things like that. So once we actually had closed one data coming in, once we had, uh, my team had built the CRM sync and we could pull in closed one data, we kind of realized that, and so if you, if you noticed in the years like social selling went from like on the homepage to kind of buried somewhere deep in menus, that's why. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So, um, as you as you guys are building out coffee, um, and going against some of the bigger competitors, like, how do you drive market awareness for the organization? Because a lot of startup companies and we're working with a couple right now.
It's difficult for them because they the concept of marketing and awareness isn't what you they believe, let's get a bunch of BDRs, let's do a bunch of calling, but then they're not getting the response rates, they're not getting the conversion rates. So, how do you drive that awareness, especially when you're going up against these big competitors and you have a bunch of other ones like PipeDrive and Adio, like there's a lot of like little people as well, so you kind of get stuck in that that. Yeah, I mean, the approach we're taking, there's a great book by uh this guy David Gerhart, uh, called Founder Brand, um, that I highly recommend. Um, he was the the kind of, uh, guy behind a lot of, uh, the success of Drift in the early days, um, from a marketing standpoint.
And, uh, so a lot of what I'm doing is I have gotten very engaged on LinkedIn in the last few months and starting to build that audience. Uh, we just launched our own podcast, Revenue Renegades. Uh, we've got a a strong list of folks there. Um, so a lot of what we're trying to do is is way in, you know, well in advance of when the product rolls out, which will be over the next quarter or two.
Um, uh, starting to starting to build that momentum and that awareness. And I think that's the the investment that we're going to do is more on, uh, these kind of, uh, brand building marketing pieces. But I also think it's getting in front of a lot of the those individual folks. So, how do you, how do you get connected to all of the, uh, funds that are doing, you know, investing in early stage companies and incubating those companies?
How do you become that, you know, natural part of the stack where they're like, oh, I got to go start a company. Let me go Google, Slack, Zoom, and coffee, right? How does that become part of that process? Sounds sounds fairly uh, like a good stack.
Coffee on top of all your texts. Yeah, good stack to me. Yeah. I mean every, everyone needs coffee, right?
Exactly. I'm sure that played in the name. Oh, there's yeah. We're we're having a lot of fun with the names.
Actually, I think that like the the uh, the the addition sizes for pricing are probably going to be like tall grande Vente. So we're going to have a good time. Yeah. I I I I like it.
I I think a lot of people don't realize how much or how simple naming could be. Um, so I started my career in pharma and medical device. And like the hundreds of millions of dollars that's spent naming drugs. Like a lot of people like Ambien, a lot of people don't realize is A M, B N, good morning.
Yeah. Right. Like you you would never know unless you spent time there. Um, but like something as simple as like coffee, like how you can play off of that with, you know, most people drink coffee.
Like we we could go on and on and on. Yeah, it was it was not a it was we paid $100,000 for the domain for coffee.ai. I I bet you did.
Every penny, yeah. I love it. I'm I I I do. I love it.
We you know, when you talk about those aha moments, I I want to tie this back to the go-to-market gap, um, which is the stabilization to foundation to repeatability to scalability. And most, if not all founders we talk to, have this build it and they will come mindset, and we're going to start a company and we're immediately going to have repeatability, right? The customers are going to come rolling in the door and I'm going to hire four sales reps and they're going to all do everything the same way and it's it's going to be amazing. Um, I've yet to see that happen, um, barring a few companies.
I think, you know, publicly Clay certainly seems to be the closest, but I'm sure they had more than their fair share of struggles as well. Clay, by the way, has been around for a long time. You know, they wandered in the Most people don't realize this, right? For many years.
And then suddenly, it feels like that's another one of those 10-year overnight successes, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, but when you look back, like, where do you think in your experience, and you've led a lot of teams in a lot of companies.
Where's the real? Where's the biggest gap? Is it stabilization to foundation? Foundation to repeatability or repeatability to scalability?
And why? That's a great question. Um, I I I do think that there is to your point, I think the whole lean startup movement actually in some ways was, and I used to work for Steve Blank, um, you know, who's kind of kind of the the the spiritual godfather of that that movement that Eric Reese took on. But I I I do think that there's a uh, a general premise that if it's not working very quickly, you give it up and you pivot to something else.
And I do think that, um, you know, listen, products are much easier to build right now, right? Than they've ever been. Um, it is still really hard to go find that true product market fit, not just like people are using my stuff, but people are actually opening up their wallets and paying for it and enjoying it and renewing, right? Yeah, 100%.
Um, so I love, um, so talking to Adam Robinson the other day from R B to B and he I love the fact that he's like was that like 4 million of ARR for R B to B and said we don't have product market fit, right? And almost every founder that you're referring to would say, you know, we've got over a million in ARR, we've got product market fit, right? Um, so I do think there's there's that level of, um, the to me the the the the Jeffrey Moore style Crossing the Chasm gap is about how do you go from I've built a product, I've got some people who are engaged in using it to a, I've really found a audience and I'm delivering a complete solution for that audience and that audience is now, I can I can rinse and repeat that motion. And I think that is where a lot of startups fall off before they ever, you know, see the scaling part of it.
It's so funny. I was just talking to, um, actually a rep today and we were talking about challenges with closing, getting deals across the pipeline. We talked a lot about value, uh, their their ICP, their buying persona, their value proposition, but I brought up Crossing the Chasm. Um, so it's funny that you brought that up because I think that is a really big challenge that people, like a book from, I think 2001 or it's like an old book, but you look at it and you read it and it's really some of the same challenges that we've been we've been struggling with they just kind of have gone away.
Um, Yeah, I mean, listen, if you're going to design the ultimate go-to-market system, you would basically say, here are the customers that are ready to buy your product right now, right? Yep. Then the next layer of the onion would be, here are the set of folks who are looking to buy something in your category right now. The next layer would be, here are the set of folks who are should be looking at stuff in your area and how do you go do that?
And you mentioned ICP, I think, you know, it's remarkable to me that companies who don't even have an agreement on what their ICP is between their sales and marketing department. So you've got no kind of alignment across all these go-to-market functions. Yeah, it's funny. I was just building a board deck with another client and I had the the CMO and the VPL, like we were kind of just going through the deck and getting everything together.
And the marketing guy did something really interesting, goes, let's stop doing calling sales and marketing. Let's just go commercial. And let's blend everything into the commercial strategy and enable that with the investors that had that commercial strategy conversation versus like, sales versus marketing or here's top of funnel versus mid funnel, bottom of the funnel. So here's our commercial strategy, and we built the deck around the commercial strategy.
Yeah. Um, which I think will start tearing some of these down. I totally agree with the ideal customer profile. So, based on that, and you've been in this space for a while.
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Um, back to that kind of, you know, the the onion analogy or the layers analogy. It's like, we are all taking these approximate stabs with different disconnected systems as to who is our ideal customer, you know, when are they ready to engage? What's the right message we should go deliver to them? You know, um, you know, are they properly onboarded?
Are they engaged with the product? There's all, you know, it it's it's really kind of a mess. Um, one of the things we say at coffee is you can't have good AI with bad data. Um, and so I think can can we like put that on a billboard somewhere?
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And I think that, listen, you know, as you know, most of the data in today's CRMs is crap, right? Um, you know, in fact, the last company we had FlipTop, we were doing kind of account and lead scoring, you know, Einstein before Einstein. And the the thing that was really fascinating is when we looked at all these across, you know, hundreds of clients, the only data you could trust in the CRM is when the rep was going to get paid.
And and and so the thing that we said, if a rep what fields does a rep need to go get their commission check. Okay, the deal we have to say the deal closed. Here's the proper dollar amount. Here's at least one contact that's associated with it, you know, you probably So you had some things that you could rely on and the data quality fell off a cliff after that because you were relying on them to do it manually.
So I think that this whole notion of how are how are folks engaging with my company and all like the more that we can automate the ingestion of that data and the synthesis of that data and some of it's structured and some of it's unstructured. So how do you fuse those things? I think the better off you're going to be able to go, um, get a real TLDR as to what's happening within the account and, uh, have a unified front across your go-to-market teams. I I can go super deep on data because I don't think and we talk about this a lot.
Shit data in equals shit data out 27 ways from Sunday. Um, and no one wants to spend the time, I don't even want to say the money, the effort to make sure that their data is clean. Um, and Dale, I forget we were we were just talking about this with someone the other day, or I was reading something about, oh, it was Kyle Nordin, who's the CRO of owner. Um, you know Kyle, we're we're all part of GTM fund.
Um, Kyle's one of the best revenue leaders I know. Um, and he was posting something the other day about the incredible success that his BDR team has seen, um, by not just changing like how they reach out to and what they're saying, but the quality of the data so that they're not spending time reaching out to numbers that are, oh, sorry, number disconnected. Sorry, email bounced. Um, and I think that not enough people realize that you could have all the BDRs, the best A E's in the world, the best CEO.
Hell, you could have the best product. If your data sucks, you have no chance because you don't know what you're doing. So, I'm going to put you on the spot for a minute. When it comes to data, specifically people data, numbers data, like where are you getting good data?
Is there a single source of a Zoom Info or Apollo or whoever or are you a big fan of clay and massive waterfall enrichments with your preferred providers that we do not need to mention if we don't want to because they're not paying to be here? Um, but I'm curious your thoughts. Yeah, we've we we've kind of taken a waterfall approach. We don't think there is a single approach for any person or company data.
And and frankly, you know, we have enrichment is built into coffee and so, you know, you don't have to go out and immediately go buy a third party data source. That's very cool. So, but but one of the things about it is that by no means is that all of the the niche pieces. I mean, we we kind of feel like the broad brush stuff should be covered by our enrichment, so you can get, you know, industry, revenue range, you know, LinkedIn profiles, titles, things like that when we have matches for that.
And we're and the rest of it should just be AI searching for stuff in the background. So if I have a very specific thing like I sell a remote work solution, right? No data provider is going to have that out of the box, but I should just be able to have a smart field that says, go take a look at the career pages of all of the companies in my in in coffee, uh, in in my instance, and go take a look if they use the word remote in their job postings, right? So then you can kind of fill in those kind of missing pieces there.
Um, but yeah, we we we we've not found a single magical source that that does it all. We did a huge data exercise when we got started, um, in the summer of last year, uh, where we probably looked at like 50 different vendors, 40 or 50 different vendors and did, you know, got all their data tables and did a bunch of bake offs and we ultimately selected multiple of them to kind of waterfall for for our in-house thing and I think that will be an ongoing process. But I'll give I'll give you an example of how bad the data stuff is in CRM. So we have a a free app.
We're going to have a a whole bunch of these little free apps, uh, as part of our demand gen, uh, program, uh, called CRM Grader that we rolled out. And the idea was, go connect your CRM and we will give you a score as to what's the quality of the data in your CRM across your deals, across your contacts and across your, um, companies. And one of the customers that signed up early on, I was looking at this thing and we have we have a a a tool inside of, um, coffee we call Revenue GPT, which is like a chat GPT style interface where you just ask questions. So I was like, hey, what's the average, you know, you're we're we're working with this this, uh, customer, um, and said, like what's our average, um, sales cycle?
And he gave me a negative number. I was like, oh shit, something something must be broken in our software. So we better take a look at this. And so my VP of engineering goes off and looks at he goes, no, actually, it's the correct answer.
What the reps are doing is they're not putting anything in the CRM until they have to get their commission check. And so actually, they're putting the create date is after the actual close date when they're putting information in and the average average deals is like minus 17 days or something like that. So that's an example of CRM gone really wrong. I I love that.
Now I was just looking at your site before you jumped on and, um, I was going to ask one of my questions I was going to ask is, what's better? The website grader from HubSpot or the CRM grader from from from coffee? But Oh, I think they're very different. They're they're mean it's totally different products.
I mean, like I mean like HubSpot has been our inspiration for that. So we were like, website grader. Yeah, and then Yeah, I could tell. I love it and I love it because you need you need a funnel, right?
You need I'll be super interested how many people actually will connect their CRM into something that's not completely. Like, I think it'd be okay if we had like if we were collaborating with coffee, we knew the customer to be like, yes, go integrate. Go connect coffee, um, and and grage your your CRM because it actually would help us. Because we go in every place and we're like, okay, first first thing, let's rebuild HubSpot.
We just did $100 million. We just did a uh company $100 million and they were on sugar and we just did a whole conversion to HubSpot. Oh my God. Um so it was it was kind of a pain.
Oh, it's yeah, yeah, that was that was not fun by the way. I'll be super And and we did it in 45 days. Like it was it was a list. Yeah.
It was a lift. So, a few things to your your point. First of all, like, uh, you're right. Um, the the friction of CRM grader is much higher than website grader where you just say, hey, listen, put in your email and and and name and we'll send you a report on your and we'll send you a report on your website.
We will have free products coming out of the next quarter that are kind of more like website grader where you're just literally putting in some information and getting a report sent to you and don't need to connect your CRM. Uh, but the I I I've always been kind of surprised about how many people are willing to go connect their CRM, especially small and medium businesses. Obviously, when you get to enterprise, they're like, here's my committee, here's my security review, all of that piece. Um, but the uh, but I've always been amazed that like somebody with admin access is like, oh, yeah, I'll just do that the way they connect their Google account.
Give you all my data. I'll give you all my data. Yeah, yeah. And so it's also it's I've always been surprised in back both at FlipTop and uh, and through even even with sales navigator when we when we did the Salesforce integration, um, the number of sales navigator customers that would just go connect to to Salesforce without having to go through some kind of, you know, big security review first, um, was surprising to me.
Yeah. It's uh, I mean we we work with companies where you'd be amazed. I mean, Dale, you you know what I'm I'm talking about. Like we've gone to companies that have call it a sales team at 20 and 18 of the 20 have super admin access.
Like it blows my mind. Like to be clear, we're we're a company of three and we don't even all have super admin access. Like that's how locked out we like one person, maybe two should have super admin access, not 20 of your reps who create 600 workflows. What's my login?
Yeah. Yeah. Forgot password at revenue hyphen reimagined. 1 2 3 password.
Yeah. No. But it's but it's also it speaks to one of the biggest strengths as you know of of companies like Salesforce is that kind of API system that that um that kind of App Exchange ecosystem. And so the ability of people to kind of get that information out of out of that system, um, you know, makes it easy.
But it also makes it easy for folks like us, um, folks like you to migrate folks into different platforms. So, Doug, when we talk about AI and we talk to a lot of people about AI and we were talking to someone Dale, I think yesterday when we were on a podcast. Um, excuse me, and it was about what's the future of AI, right? For sales.
Yeah. And there's a lot of like, oh, you know, it's not just data enrichment, um, you know, you have to look at more than that. Like it it has to be how do you allow people to focus on revenue producing activities and all that fun stuff. Um, but I think it's that's table stakes.
When I think and I admittedly I've not looked at your website in depth because I wanted to have the conversation. But when I look at, when I think of like the AI powered CRM. What I'm thinking is I don't have to drag my deal from one stage to another based on what's going on. It's going to put the deal in the proper stage.
And I don't need to fill out that I have a decision maker because based on the conversations and the emails and all the data you're ingesting, coffee knows that there's a decision maker associated with the deal. I'm probably thinking about this at too high of a level, but is is that where the vision is? Is that the CRM works for me as the rep instead of me having to work the CRM. Yeah.
Yeah. So the last part of it is is actually our tagline if you went on our website, which is the the AI fresh CRM that that works for you. And I think I did not go to the website. So I I I could be your marketing partner.
No, I'm not. You could be your marketing partner. No, we're we're still we're still kind of, you know, in early stage in stealth. So there's not a lot of product information yet on the website as as I'm sure Dale saw.
Um, but the but the general idea is, you know, it should be doing most of the work for you. Now, our particular view on the example that you gave of the opportunity pipeline is it we may not be ready to automatically, you know, create and move opportunities for you and just because I think you're going to say, oh, that was that was you misinterpreted that or you moved that too soon. But I think what we can do is to say, hey, based on what I heard, you know, from your last email exchange or the transcript of the last call, et cetera, you know, this seems like we should go create an opportunity and there's one kind of a one button confirm for that to go move something or or make it happen. Um, but the other thing is I I there's no one size fits all for AI.
So I mean, you know, everybody thinks now AI equals chat GPT equals LLMs, but, you know, there's machine learning, there's all kinds of different variants of it. So, you know, we're gonna when we say AI first, we truly mean from the beginning. Like, for us, you know, we never throw away data in coffee. So we have a data lake house in the backend.
So simple things like, hey, what is my pipeline look like compared to a week ago, right? We can go do for you. Or what was, you know, what are the last five states of this field, right? Let me go go see what that was.
Let me roll back to this previous version, right? So I think that's a big part of of of how do you have AI? Because again, over time, you know, AI is great for things like, let me give you a meeting brief for this meeting, let me go summarize that call that just happened, let me suggest some action items, let me draft a follow-up email for you, let me give you a TLDR so anybody can go take a look at an account or a or a person and see kind of what's what's the current status of our our company's interaction with that person or that company. So it's all great for that stuff.
But ultimately, it should be about, hey, you know, I noticed that, you know, we're this far into the quarter and, you know, you're a little behind on your pipeline coverage or, you know, things are like, how do you start to get more proactive? And the only way to do that is to make sure you're you've got history that you're capturing. I love it. I uh, I I I would try it.
I when when I think of all the co the companies that we work with that have shit data hygiene and poor CRMs and CRMs that have to be ripped out and like reps who don't want to work them and managers who are never going to do anything about it because the rep's the top rep and at the end of the day, if the deal closes, while I can't forecast, the deal closes. Um, I I I'm excited to to see it, to try it, um, and to learn more. Thank you. Let me uh, last question before we go into some quick rapid fire.
So, go to market's changing, right? Um, you know, it changes arguably every day. Um, we talked about how often you need to update, you know, things such as ICP or buyer persona. Um, but with that, you're an Nostradamus for a minute.
Where's go-to-market going? What's the future of go-to-market in the next three to six months? Broadly speaking, much broader than CRM. I like to think about it from the buyer's perspective, going backwards, right?
Because I think that so much of what we've done is seller push forward. So, I think about myself as a B2B buyer or just a consumer in general. You know, I want to be able to, um, have as much information that I can go get myself, right? And not have to talk to a person, right?
So, um, you know, things like, uh, I saw you had, uh, Jacco's book on your back shelf there, Adam. So, you know, yeah, behind behind the chair, revenue architecture. So, um, uh, I've known Jacco for a long time and and, you know, Amanda Keller from one mind actually was collaborated with him recently on effectively having a virtual Jacco, if you can imagine something, um, how how either exciting or scary that might be. There's a lot of Red Bull involved in that.
Um, but the, uh, you know, imagine, you know, effectively having an A E, uh, or an S E rather on your website that you can just query and talk to forever and get any information you want about the product. It's not like some secret hidden pricing, you know, page or, you know, you have to go do a trial before and talk to certain reps. So I think the giving buyers a lot more of the power, um, is is a big trend towards that. I think the other piece is we've all gotten really good.
Our our internal pattern recognition system have gotten good at filtering out spam calls, spam messages, all that stuff. The the the idea of the AISDR, which is like sales loft and outreach on autopilot, I think is is is a fail, right? I don't think it's the right the right approach. Um, I think like Mark Culo's doing an operator and I think other people who are saying, we have such precise data that you can effectively craft something where it's like, this is an email that would not make sense to anybody but me, right?
Um, it's that it's that's targeted to my business and it's about helping. In the same way that I think that that, um, you know, HubSpot kind of pioneered this inbound marketing. Let's kind of create content that helps. I think at a macro level they've done that.
I think it's now down to a one-to-one marketing level of one. So it's really about like, how do you help the buyer in their journey and how do you not try to force feed a lot of stuff through a through a funnel? I love it. That's great.
That's great. I think I think it's spot on. Let's let's let's end with some rapid fire. I want to take that out of Since since Adam was talking so much, I had to I had to jump in a little bit.
I am so rare that I get to talk when I'm on a call with you. Let's be real. Like let's be honest with one another here, Dale. What's the uh, what's the hardest leadership lesson that you uh you've learned and and what did you how did you resolve it?
I think, uh, hire slow, fire fast is probably one of the key things. Everything starts with people, right? And so, um, we do we've done this thing for my last, uh, couple companies where when you join, I give the culture presentation and I say, my job is not to create a family, right? My job is to put together like, you know, the most winning sports team I can.
And to that end, we're going to put a meeting on the calendar 90 days out. I always feel weird saying this, but like, in 90 days, we're both going to know whether this is working or not. And I think by having that forcing function, it's going to be a unless it's a hell yes, it's a goodbye, right? Yeah.
I could not agree more. Um, could not agree more. What um, if you lose everything tomorrow, what's the very first move you're going to make? Define lose everything.
Coffee coffee's gone. Everything that you've put into coffee is gone. You can't go back to LinkedIn. You can't go back to Salesforce.
The bank accounts or the exits are dry. You have a little bit of money, but like you arguably have to start over. What are you going to do? Where are you going to start?
That never has scared me. I mean, I think that, um, I actually think that they will find in the next 50 years that there's a a gene for optimism and a gene for perseverance. And I think they're the two most, uh, aligned indicators for success in entrepreneurship. Um, so I've, you know, I feel very fortunate.
I've got a, uh, a great partner, my girlfriend. I've got, uh, you know, my my kids are all doing well. Um, I've often my dad died when I was pretty young. And uh, the two things that kind of like has shaped a lot of my worldview is, um, he was I remember visiting him and he was he was kind of going like, there's so much more I want to do.
And I thought about that and he's in his 60s. And um, and I realized like, I could be 150 and I'd still be like, on my deathbed, going, there's so much more I want to do. So I've always had that kind of there's so there's more stuff in the world than I'll ever be able to experience. But the other thing is like, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, what regrets would I have?
Or what what issues would I have? And, uh, you know, there's a short period after my divorce where it was really, really tough for the kids. But like, other than that, like, I'm in a place where like, you know, anything you could throw at me, I've got my core community. I've got my my my my belief in myself and I'd go figure something else out.
I love that. That's awesome, man. An optimism gene. Yeah.
I like that. I like that. we're gonna find it for sure. For sure.
Yeah. I like that. I love it. Um, what's one piece of advice you you were once given that is, you know, you completely disagree with now.
So something you were given in the past and now you're like, that was that was horse shit. Um, I think the I'll just go back and and reiterate on the the kind of lean startup movement. I think that people give up too soon, right? I think that, you know, one of the reasons frankly for Microsoft's success is they're not particularly brilliant at products.
But they by like the third time they usually put out a decent version, right? So like with Windows, it was Windows 95, right after a bunch of biascos before that. Um, and I think that that, uh, belief that if you if your core assumptions are correct, right? Then you should keep going.
And I think that too many startups are like, yeah, we did that for six months and we didn't have a million in ARR, so we're going to pivot to something else. Um, or or this got really hard and and and I just don't have the the perseverance to push through it. Um, is is the cause of a lot of unnecessary failure. So I think the like, you know, the the whole the whole lean startup like, you've got to go measure everything and if it's and if it's not being measured and you're not hitting your metrics, go move to something else is is wrong.
I like that. I agree. All right, Doug, so most of our audience is revenue leaders, founders, CEO's. Um, many of them listen to the show because they are proverbially drowning in whatever their particular go-to-market gap is.
What's uh, what's your one, your single most powerful piece of go-to-market advice from experience you would give to someone who's drowning right now? Drink coffee. Ooh, I like that. I like that.
I think that it all starts with your buyer's journey again. So I think that so many people are focused on their internal processes, internal systems. How are we pushing stuff out to customers? I think like so I'm I'm a product person first and foremost.
I'm I'm a builder. I always, uh, for myself and product managers always said, go use the product yourself. Go be a secret secret shopper kind of of your product. A must.
I think for most companies, I think if they actually were a secret shopper to their own selling process, uh, they would discover a lot of waste, a lot of friction, a lot of noise, a lot of things that are putting customers off. So I think for me, the the first thing is, uh, how do you make that as, uh, simple as possible? I think there was an old, it might have been a Hemingway thing where he was writing writing a letter to someone who said, I'm sorry, it's so long, but I didn't have time to write you a shorter one. Um, and it's kind of that same analogy.
I think many companies build up these very complicated processes and need to spend time going back and simplifying it, starting with the buyer and working backwards. That might be, and this is a great place to close. That might be the single best piece of advice we have ever got on this show. Because if you don't and I I don't, Dale will tell you, I I don't I'm not great at giving out praise.
If you're not putting yourself, and everyone talks about secret shopping and this bullshit, and but like every CRO, how often do we talk about your your sales process doesn't align with your buyer's process. Your 17 different sales stages in your CRM are not how your buyer buys. If you're not going through that process and saying, would I fucking sorry buy from me? And if the answer is not hell yes, you need to change your damn process.
That is the takeaway from this show. Doug Campbell John, thank you so much for checking us out. Go check out coffee.ai.
I am excited to try it when it's available for release. Um, and we're glad that you spent some time with us, man. Thanks, guys. It was really fun.
Thanks, Doug. Appreciate you. All right.