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80% of the Deal Is Over Before the Buyer Talks to Sales · Selling AI

• Warren Kucker: Hey there and welcome to another episode of Selling AI. Today we're diving into the evolution of the B2B buyer journey, specifically what happens in the 80 % of the deal that may already be over before a buyer ever talks to your sales team. I have Braden Young on the show today. Braden is the co-founder and CEO of Slash Experts, a platform that connects prospects directly with existing customers before they ever hop on a sales call. Braden spent nine years as co-founder of Sendosa, scaling it past a thousand employees. And he's moved on to build slash experts because he kept watching the same problem happen, specifically when he was trying to organize dinners for his prospects to meet his customers. ⁓ So in today's episode, Brandon and I talk about why reference selling hasn't really been re-imagined since we started it two, three, four, five decades ago. How AEs can move references from end of the deal cycle to the very beginning without really like much of an uplift. And really what happens on that first sales call when AI-sisted buyers have kind of already shown up with a lot of that dark research prior to the call. All right, let's get to it, Braden. Thank you so much for being here. Looking forward to getting into the show. Braydan Young: Yeah, one good to be here I I saw you on another show and I said any guy with a background that looks like my background I have to make sure I get on that guy's podcast so You would think we were in the same room yeah if I got rid of that that right there Warren Kucker: We just scooted you over a little bit so they could have joined in the middle, right? Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, exactly right. Amazon just killing it with the podcast backgrounds. That's great. Well, listen, first, speaking of backgrounds, why don't we dive into yours a bit? Tell us about your journey, both in sales, but as an entrepreneur and what eventually led you to what you're doing now at Slash Experts. Braydan Young: Yeah, Warren, we were actually just talking about it. So started writing tech and tech sales. It was actually insurance and I was in insurance at a college because 2009 is a bad time to graduate college. And it was like, are you going to go? And I ended up in a sales job and selling insurance. But I learned quickly that it was too old school for me. And like I was in San Francisco and I remember I told my boss I wanted to do this thing called a webinar. And he was like, we don't do webinars. We're a hundred year old company. I was like, all right, I got to go into tech. So was in tech for a while, jumped around. I was in SDR. I was in AE, ⁓ did transactional, did relationship sales. And I met enough founders along the way where I was like, I could be a founder or at least pretend I'm a founder. And the first crack at it was a company called Coffee Sender. It was a way to send coffee gift cards, Starbucks gift cards via email, text. It was fun to build, launched it with a sales buddy. We were like just two AEs trying to find a side hustle for your money. It's probably the best way to describe it. And it of grew really quickly. Hit it at the right time. was like 2014. Folks were looking to be different in their emails. Like all of those cadence tools hadn't come out yet, but mail mergers were big. And so you would use these Google mail mergers and send this generic message to a million people. And we're like, what if we put coffees in these messages? That took off and then like we, ⁓ coffee center turned into Sendo. So, so the way to send not just coffee, E-gifts, also physical things. So things, your logo on it, ⁓ things that people could just essentially get to their mailbox at home. And we had really early product market fit. was one of those where engineering was abroad and my co-founder and I were in the U S and we were just selling this thing like crazy. It was like, we were really building the plane as we were selling it, which is probably a bad thing for. the folks that are listening that are more on the engineering side because our product was not perfect. Like we built integrations as we sold them. So was one those where it was like, hey, sign up for the list and like we're going to have this launched in two weeks. And we had really good product market fit that it helped. And we grew that to a pretty good sized company. then COVID happened, which was a blessing for us because everyone went home. And when you're at home, companies are like, I got to send things to my employees, to my customers. to my prospects and we happen to have a whole gifting platform. So we went from 50, 60 folks to a thousand during COVID, grew really fast, learned what not to do, learned what to do along the way and built a pretty big company. We had a ton of customers, ton of employees doing a ton of revenue. And while I was there, I kind of got the itch to go start something again. was, you mentioned it at the beginning, I was at a dinner and I saw a customer and a prospect talking about our product. And I was like, this is crazy. I shouldn't have to travel around and have dinners, even though they're great. We should make it easy for a customer to be able to be a back channel for a prospect. So we built this tool internally, rolled it out into a thing called slash experts, and we've selling that for last year, a little less than a year. I'm making it easy for references to be at the top of the funnel versus the end when you're kind of like, ⁓ don't know if I could find a reference. So it's been fun to build. We raised some money, and now we're a year in, and seeing if we can grow that into something. Warren Kucker: That's really interesting. It's funny how fast process and tech moves and how easy it is to forget how it used to be. I've actually come back to a lot. I started my career in 2007 at UPS and we would have meetings like crazy. Most of the people were in the room and if not, you dialed into the phone. Nobody ever logged into a screen share. If you had a PowerPoint, you told them what slide to switch to, right? It's wild that that was just 20. Braydan Young: Yeah. Warren Kucker: ish years ago and then like Zoom, WebEx ish didn't really start coming out into the middle of the 2015s. I didn't really think about HubSpot basically the first sequencing outreach tool in 2015. Prior to that people were using mail merges to do like mass emailing like mail chimps with coffee center links built in there. That's kind of wild. Braydan Young: Yeah, was Mail Merge's, it was a Google product. was called Yet Another Mail Merge. And it was like, it was like two, was like two bucks and it was great. like, like SalesLoft had just come out, but SalesLoft was more of like a hacking tool. Like you would use it to scrape a page and try to pull a website. And that was, it was awesome. They got in trouble. But yeah, like the big sequencing tools like wouldn't come out until later, the Outreaches and SalesLofts and HubSpots of the world and. Warren Kucker: Okay, that's pretty ironic. That's funny. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. Braydan Young: Now we're on to the next iteration of those, or third iteration of those. Warren Kucker: Yeah, yeah, it's funny the next iteration might leave that iteration behind if it doesn't become useful anymore. Yeah, right. And it really has, right. So like, I mean, so that's what an eight year run where that seemed like that's what sales would be all the time, right. Like that's all I ever knew I started my sales career in 2017. I couldn't imagine that it would be different. That was a pretty short, short window of technology there. Braydan Young: I think it already has, yeah. Or like the time you would take back then to find an email. Like imagine like being like searching for like someone's email and like how our phone number and then like ZoomInfo came out to make that easier. And now ZoomInfo is probably on their way out. And so it's one of the, which was crazy. Warren Kucker: No, agreed. Yeah. I spent the first seven months of my sales career calling the front desk of corporations thinking that's how you did it. So I was just like trying to speak to John in finance at Apple, 1-800-APPLE. It was like a weird scenario. Braydan Young: Yes. Yeah. I mean, you and I both said we sold dental offices at some point and like you always someone always answered if you called like during like a Wednesday at, one o'clock, but it wasn't the person you'd want to answer. We always called them, you know, like some of the front desk and you're like, how do you get past them to the dentist? And like how hard that was. Warren Kucker: No, No, and again, like I'll move, I know where I go, I know a little bit of an old sales tangent, but with dental was interesting. was like, I couldn't get them to show up for the meeting frequently enough. And I'm like, I gotta get, like, how do I get my invite onto their schedule? Like I need it in their PMS, right? Like they don't have a calendar that they're working off of. They have a series of patients they see. I mean, can never quite crack that code. But yeah, just like an old school environment where you pop into the office, you bring coffee or donuts or send it to them. and see if you can get a $100,000 enterprise deal out of it. So it's a fun. Cool man. Well, listen, let's talk a little bit more about Slash Expert here. So in particular, obviously, you're passionate about the role. think what's interesting here is how this future look of what the buying journey could be like. So you talk about how you said 80 % of the deal cycle is really over prior to that first discovery call. Let's pull into that thread a little bit more. Tell me a little bit more about that thesis. Braydan Young: Exactly, right? Yeah, I we're so I think it's good because you bring up old technology and a lot of the time when you have a problem to solve or if you assign to somebody on your team to hey, we got to figure out how to get more leads or we got to find a software that can help us with whatever the cadence tool is today. You go into research and how do you research? You go to G2 and you read reviews, but those are static. Do you trust them? Not really. I think that like that's old. You're like, I don't know. And then maybe go and like you search online or you go to an LLM and you'll find things that they'll recommend. But As you get recommended different tools, usually you go and ask a friend. You're like, hey, we're in the same role. ⁓ They're at a different company. And you're like, what do you use? Does it work? And so so many of that happens before you even go to the page or the software or the tool to actually request a demo. You've already looked at the reviews. You've already probably talked to a user. You've already probably been like, I think this solves my problem, but I'm unsure. So you've done so many of those things, which we call 80 % of the deal cycle, before you actually go and talk to sales. Then once you're connected to somebody, it's like, great, walk me through the demo and let me know about price and things like that. And it's a very long and crappy process. And you hope that it would just go quicker. And PLG tried to solve that. Like, hey, let's put a free thing in here and you can play with it. The problem is people got lost. I'm going to come back. And so we're solving that through, let's take these amazing customers that already love your tool and let's connect them with people that are trying to solve problems. Folks that are the prospects that are like, hey, I'm trying to figure out X and what my peers use at other companies. And if they happen to get on your website, awesome. Why can't their first step be talking to one of those users? Or even their second or third step. Maybe you've talked to sales, you've had a good experience. But you need someone who's a user who can help you, like, hey, how do you sell this internally? Or what was the process that helped you get your boss on board? And things like that can only help move the deal along, especially when you involve a third party. So that's what we built. We made that process easier. And you mentioned the go-to-market stack today, I think, is more smart AI tools come out, more agents come out, more superhumans come out. There's still going to be a human loop at some point. So it has to be someone you talk to, like I think you can use whatever phrase you want, but the human in the loop or one throat to choke or something goes wrong, I think that we're very far from there being no one involved in a sales process. There are exceptions, AWS, Snowflake, sure, but I think like other new tools, ⁓ there's one that to be somebody that you're actually talking to. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah, before we dive into the really strategic future looking, let's talk about the tactical. What's the process, what's wrong with the process now in terms of this? Everyone wants a referral, wants to talk to a customer. What's wrong with it now and how do you solve for that? Braydan Young: Yeah. So typical referral process is, hey, can I talk to somebody who's already using you? And at that point, you're pretty convinced you want to use a product, or you want to buy it or test it. And so that rep, there's two paths. Path one is maybe they have somebody who they've always used, and they're like, ⁓ this person's in my back pocket. You should talk to them. That's one route. The other route is you go to a Slack channel, and you request, hey, my prospect wants a reference. Can you help me out? They should be in finance. The marketing has to go find somebody, prep them, then give the sales rep, then give it to the deal you're trying to close. So it takes sometimes days, maybe a week for that person to actually get someone to talk to. It's long, it's cumbersome. It's one of those where that person's ready to go, they just need to talk to a user to basically check the box on their end. We were always trained in sales to try to avoid the reference by sending over case studies. And you're like, ⁓ here's a case study. Isn't that great? No. Let them talk to a user, because that only shows them that they'll have more success talking to an actual user off the record to help get that deal done. So that's the typical process now. What we do is we basically will show a page of a bunch of people that are customers who already love your product and that prospect can pick who they want to talk to. This way there's a simple click of button right on the calendar. Think of it like a massive Calendly page where there's hundreds of customers already love you who are willing to have a conversation. And you can really talk to them now. Our AI will pair you with somebody who is maybe like you, same area, same time zone, and you can have a conversation right away. Warren Kucker: Yeah, that's interesting. You're absolutely right. mean, it's been the same process for 10, 15, 20 years, right? Like you want to speak to a customer. You got to like make that, then you reach out to the customer you asked. It's several days to coordinate, then some coordination there and it's two weeks later. And sometimes you don't find the right one, Braydan Young: Well, and there's two, there's always the path. If you're a CRL, your path is like send a case study. Or my favorite is like, hey, you're not a large enough deal for us to actually bring in a reference. We like to protect our customers. So we don't want to, that's all BS. Like if you want, like that's how you're trained as a rep to avoid those, which is fine, cause you're trying to get a deal closed. But our solution, our product, this makes it so it's easier to just send over a link for them to talk to somebody. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, so it's interesting. Let's talk about the parts of the sales process that something like this could kind of break or revolutionize depending on, know, like half full or half empty, right? So in like a buyer's journey, you're starting a buying process, you're trying to spark up a little bit of interest and you have a problem, I might be able to solve it, right? Like, and that's how you're getting a second conversation out of it, right? And then from there, you're just trying to justify whether it's worth the time to continue to explore. And that first, let's say half of the buyer's journey. Can I size this? Why is it more important than other problems you have? What would your life be like if you had a solution to this problem? And then along the way, what you're trying to get from, let's say, demos and customer references are validation that your product works the way you say it's going to, and can I see myself using it, right? And that's really the only reason that that part of the sales process exists. And then you're going into establishing what will happen when I implement, and what is the contract like, and we're closing a deal as we move into implementation. This customer reference piece, you're right, absolutely happens at the end. What does that do to the buyer's mindset if that gets pulled into the beginning of the sales cycle? Braydan Young: it builds major social proof. the go, you mentioned it like after your first demo, after your first connect, let's say you've done your research, you've taken a couple of demos with a couple of competitors and now you have like two or three like folks that are softwares. You're like, maybe I want to buy one of these. And the reason every single one of those sites, websites look exactly the same. is because they know it works. you go on those pages, there's all these logos and it's to give you, make you feel warm and fuzzy that, hey, Meta and Oracle uses this product. So when I'm doing internal selling, I can mention that's my boss. I can be like, hey, like this is the thing that our competitor uses. I saw the logo on the website or this is the thing that Meta uses or whoever. So it builds social proof. So if you all of sudden introduce a customer who's like, hey, I'm a customer. use this thing and I'm in the same space as you. And that becomes like your second or third email. first touch. Imagine it gets very strong. All of a sudden another person is going to their boss and saying, I looked at the software, it solves the problem you wanted me to solve. Also, I talked to a reference already, someone who uses it, and this is how they're using it, and these are the results they saw. So it changes that internal dialogue conversation. now the two things that we track is how fast is the deal close if x was attached to it, and we're seeing it be about 2x faster in size. Because what usually happens is the person on the phone, the prospect and the customer typically will talk about price. And usually the person that they're talking to has been a customer for a while, so they're paying more. And so the price and the negotiation becomes a bit easier because they've already kind of had that conversation with a third party. Warren Kucker: Yeah, it's also like, I hadn't thought about that piece. It's price negotiation oftentimes is a hedge against like the value you're gonna get, right? So it's like, yeah, I have like, it's subconscious, but it's like, great, you price this, it's gonna be a $50,000 contract. In my head, I'm not really sure I'm gonna get all the value out of it, so I'm gonna negotiate this down at 35,000, right? Like, so it's almost like there's a direct correlation there. If you... of like async extract that value out where they're not as worried about getting the value out because they've talked to someone that's like them that uses it that gets equal value. The price negotiation discussion at the end is like easier. I hadn't thought about that at all. I was thinking about the emotional piece of like again you pull that conversation up front rather than waiting until the end but it's an interesting level set for the buyer there. Braydan Young: Most reps are panicked about that because they can't, because I think we're trained in sales to always be in control and you're forecasting this to your bosses and so it's like I'm forecasting this deal to close so I know what the next step is. So you're trained like when a reference is involved you're bit panicked because you're like I'm not on the phone and so I don't know what's being said on that phone call. And those calls can be transcribed and you get it back so you see it, but you're still not a flying the wall. And so it's one of those where the reps that I think will have success over the next years that involve a tool like us is they're okay with it because they've already built the need and they've looped in the right customer, our AI has, they're like, hey, a third party will help get this deal done because... Warren Kucker: Yeah. Braydan Young: like that'll essentially that's what they need the social proof. Warren Kucker: Yeah, I mean, based on your hypothesis, there's really two reasons why you probably have to let go of that measure of control. So one, most of the buying journey is happening when you're not on the call anyway, right? So like, so you don't have as much control as you think. And two, it's similar to the product standpoint. If you can't find a reference customer that you're willing to have someone speak openly to, that will help you move a deal along, it'll hurt. I mean, at scale, if you're doing that repetitively, you're trying to sell repetitively, you're gonna have that trouble anyway. right, the product is gonna fail down. You're gonna have implementation issues. There's a product issue there that really you can't control either. So getting over that is ⁓ probably ⁓ something that needs to be done from the sales rep standpoint. How do you see this, let's say this, from a reference standpoint, how do you establish trust between the referee, the person you're asking for reference from, and your potential prospect? You have like the Yelp scenario, right, where like Yelp created trust in reviews. Braydan Young: Yeah, yeah. Warren Kucker: and you trust that Yelp is not highlighting good reviews and getting paid to downgrade bad reviews. They may do that now, but you trust that. How do you maintain that trust level between, I didn't just cherry pick the one person that likes my platform and this is the person that spends all their time on my calls with. Braydan Young: Yeah. Yeah, the ones that do the best is so when you're using our tool, our AI can recommend the usually we pick a couple of a couple of folks. There's like two or three that we think that matches the space or the industry this person's in. And you can pick between the two or three. If you want others, you can usually go to their experts page and see a bunch that are on there. Now, that has kind of reduced the bias where you can pick who you want to talk to. But essentially, that customer is being compensated for doing the phone call. So there's all kinds of warnings that pop up like, hey, Warren's in a phone call. He's a customer of ours. But he is getting a thank you for taking time out of his day. And so that could give a lens of, I don't know if I trust this or not. But what are the alternatives? So you go to G2 and read reviews. And you're like, think these are legit. But also having a longer form conversation, one where you could actually ask real questions alone. Like, hey, would you buy this thing again? conversations get pretty real pretty fast you can do more than one you can do a couple if you want to and different opinions we have customers who they'll leave folks that can be experts who don't have perfect MPS scores like they have had challenges they have had problems and when they're asked like hey like was there a problem with implementation like yeah it was painful but like my CS person helped me get through it or like here's how the company solved the problem and I think that that helps close the deal even more. When you say everything is shiny and don't worry about it and implementation takes an hour, you're like, I don't know if I trust that. And so usually when they talk about an issue they got through, like that'll help a deal close even faster. So I recommend to our customers to not have every, not, you know, every perfect reference would have some on there that may, you know, would say things were challenged, but they worked through it. Warren Kucker: Yeah, interesting. ⁓ I know you've only been doing this specific function for a year or so. So you may not have a large enough data set. Are you starting to see specific metrics in what usually results in a closed one opportunity versus a closed loss? Someone wants more than one conversation. A conversation lasts x amount of time. Someone asks these types of questions. Are you starting to see indicators where once that starts happening at scale that sales leaders should start to look at this as a pie in the liver negative buying signal. Braydan Young: Yeah, I think because we're seeing these calls take place at different stages of the deal cycle too from like the beginning like. like pre talking to sales and in the middle like where they've already talked to sales or somebody at some point and the ones that happen in the middle are very good deal accelerators around like moving them to the next stage. We're not seeing all those deals close but we're seeing like when a conversation is more so we look at it as more than five minutes which is seems like a small number but they've at least been on the phone for five minutes and had a conversation about it. We'll track deals that have an expert attached and ones that don't. We're seeing ours are closing. Last time we looked at this about 2x faster. So a 60 day cycle we're seeing is like actually more like 15-20 days which is kind of awesome. ⁓ Then size, seen about 10 % increase in size, but that was unexpected. So we'll see as we continue to grow, if that continues to change and adapt. We're getting better as we roll up more ⁓ agents as to what, because we also use case studies and we also use reviews to put in these emails. Like if you don't want to talk to somebody, you can read a good case or a good review. We're seeing what gets clicked there. And if it got clicked, then we're seeing like what leads to a closed deal. the first ever tracking like who they talk to. So we don't have enough data here yet, but most references, like I say, I introduce you on a deal I'm trying to close. There's never an activity in Salesforce like, hey, Braden talked to Warren for a reference in the deal close. So like, let's give credit to like this customer Warren who helped us close this deal. That's never really been done. And so we're able to be like, hey, hopefully in a year or so we'll know what deals we should put Warren on versus Braden on depending on size, depending on location. depending on person. like we've only gotten smarter there but that's kind of the plans over the next six months to a year is like hey let's recommend the right person. Warren Kucker: Thank Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe one more question in this space before we maybe talk about some of the broader buying journey implications here, but how are the references like enjoying like handling it? Do they enjoy this mechanism better than typical? Where you're trying to coordinate? What's their feedback? Braydan Young: Yeah. I think so, I'm a reference on a couple of softwares that I love and I'm always happy to do it. But there's two things that I don't like about it. One, end of quarters when you get asked usually the most. And it's usually a panic and it's usually like day of. And you're like sure, I'm on the phone right now. And two, like they don't track that I did it. So like one of the big things is like we gave power to the actual person, the customer, the expert, as to how often they'll take phone calls. So maybe it's once a month, maybe it's once every two months. But once they're done, they're pulled from the page, they cannot be booked again. And that's been huge because they have the ability to be like, hey, I've already done a call this quarter. Because typically, to be referencing, there's some usually software discount applied to it. So you're like, fulfilled my duty. I love your tool, but I'm not doing 17 phone calls for you. So that helps a ton. Secondly is they're gifted. So most folks are really bad at saying thanks to references. Maybe they once a year, they'll send a bottle of whiskey or something, but most suck at it. Ours, it's an actual automated gift saying thanks, and so there's kind of a GLG play there of, hey, thanks so much, here's your payment, and you can do what you want with that. That's been kind cool to go both those out for folks to be able to get thanked for their time. Warren Kucker: Yeah. What's interesting too is you really streamlined it for them as well. honestly, like if I was in a scenario where I agreed to be a reference for a piece of software and twice a month, there was just a calendar invite that showed up on my calendar. I didn't have to go through a bunch of back and forth. I didn't have to be connected. I didn't have to schedule and find the right time. It was like on Thursday, I 15 minutes with a prospect for a slash expert that wants to talk to me about how I'm using it, right? Like no problem taking that call as opposed to what otherwise might be a longer commitment to just trying to coordinate. Braydan Young: Yeah, exactly. Four emails, back and forth. Warren Kucker: and schedule. Yeah, just like, just put it on my calendar. I'm happy to do it twice a month for 15 minutes. And that'll be, and I'm just because I enjoy the piece of software there. So that's really, it's a fascinating business model. This is interesting. So one in particular, there's so much tech in go to market, just because that's where revenue is. On top of it, I had this theory that every company that builds software on the planet also had a sales team and then they see an inefficiency in sales. So they decide to build something for sale. So there's a lot of tech here. In this space, didn't seem like much. It's weird to find some blue ocean here in go-to-market tech. Is there reason why you think this hasn't been addressed well in the past? Braydan Young: Yeah, yeah, one, I'm pumped to you say that because I think as I go for funding, I'll send this clip to people. So yes, yes, the blue ocean. There's, yeah, there's, there's, I think that like references are tough because so how has it, how has it been controlled in the past? Like usually a sales rep, if you're a good sales rep, you have a couple of folks in your back pocket who you use and you avoid going to marketing because you know it's slow. Warren Kucker: Yeah, boys, yeah, yeah, yeah. I refuse to be a reference in your funding calls. Braydan Young: And so it was kind of solving your problem so you didn't see as much of an issue. Customer marketing and sales doesn't have a great relationship with their customer base, which we've noticed. So it's one of those where you close a deal as a sales rep and you're like, sweet, and you throw it over to CX and then you never talk to them again. And that doesn't work anymore. I think that with the world that we live in of land and expand deals, with stuff that takes time, with account managers who are trying to upsell deals, that's think the biggest issue is our tool not only touches sales, it also touches CX, it also touches marketing. folks who've tried in our space, that's the tough part, is you to build something that's really easy to use. You have to build versions of it that marketing can use, that sales can use, that CX can use. And with the surge of Agents like that's been I think now's the time because everything that we've talked about is controlled by agents You don't have to log in it's all done via CRM and like you don't have another platform to go and log into which is always sales is biggest problem They're like I have 30 platforms to log into is too many Warren Kucker: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, you're right. And in theory, like the problem wasn't so great, right? It's not like no one's looking at like a missed end of quarter, right? And saying, we missed by 20%. You know what? It's our reference problem, right? So like that's no one's looked at it that way. But then the uptick, one, if you just like from a blatant, from a sales process standpoint, this all happens at the end of a sales cycle. 70 % of deals got closed in the last two weeks of a quarter. So you're just rushing. Braydan Young: Yeah. Warren Kucker: to get reference calls going in the last two weeks of a quarter. And if someone's busy for three or four days, you miss your target, right? So there's that aspect to it. That's just an easy, blatant way to do it. But then when you really look at doing this more efficiently drives win rates in a way that's appreciable. It's really a fascinating piece of tech to solve a problem that people haven't solved. Braydan Young: Yeah, you're also burning your customers alike you at that point. And it's one of those where you're like, hey, do you call for me? And you're like, no, I already did seven for you. And so that's one of those that doesn't really work. making this easier, there's deals that are slowed down or dead. And the way we look at it from sales is like, our typical sales funnel is 60 days. And I think that could be much, much quicker if you gave all the elements that they need to help sell it internally. Yeah. Warren Kucker: Yeah, self-serve. Cool. Let's transition to little bit more strategic buying journey. ⁓ So I'd say there's a new way to approach this part of the buyer's journey. Is there anywhere else that you think is tangential to this in the buyer's journey that should be disrupted in terms of how we're managing that part of the process? Braydan Young: I think one of the big ones is references. think first demo is a big one too. So like when you go and talk to a like sales rep for the first time and like they're you their demo, there's always, we've done away with like the disco call of like, hey, like I think hopping on the phone and doing a disco call for most companies would be crazy at this point. So you're typically on the phone with an AE and you want the information right away. And like there's a lot of tools that are trying to grow here. We're like, you have technical questions. You have like, do we fit in my stack questions? And like when someone has to loop in an SE and loop in different people, just takes too long. So like, I think if you're able to get someone to commit to a half an hour on a demo, you should be able to get everything answered on that phone call, whether it's technical or non-technical. And there's a lot of tools that are coming out that are helping train, helping things pop up with the AE. But one of the big things is if you're an AE right now and you don't know how your tool works technically, like you're behind and you should. because planning another phone call with your SE just slows it down. And so I think that's a huge one, especially in the enterprise, is having an idea as to how your tool works from a technical side. And then once you're ready to commit and buy, just being able to get in there the day of, it's amazing to me when I'm like, hey, I would like to purchase your tool. And then you sign a contract, and then it takes five days to actually get your log in. You're like, dude, why can't I log in right away? That's crazy to me, especially in mid-market enterprise. Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. We've been talking about the fact that like, like buyers don't want to do discovery calls for like six, seven years at a minimum. Do think that's accelerated more recently? Like where it's like, now they're done. They're done, done. It's official. Like they are not interested in 40 minutes of back and forth of what their problems are. Yeah. Braydan Young: No. don't think it's gonna happen anymore. mean, think that like hopping on the phone, this is like a hot take, hopping on the phone with somebody who's right out of college is great because they're being trained. I get that from the perspective of like having salespeople. But hopping on the phone with somebody who just has a list of questions to run through, like if you have questions, like send me a survey and maybe I'll get to it before I on the phone with you. Or there's so many tools that are out there that can tell you what my stack is, what I've tried in the past, like where my renewals are. You can get all of that before you hop on the phone with any sort of prospect. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah, right. Braydan Young: And if that's not being done, then you're not serious in your role. Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah, interesting. It's a good way to look at it, right? And so what that creates is that what you really need to do is you're condensing the buyer journey into a tighter window, right? I think what it's, yeah, yeah. Braydan Young: Well, you said it at the beginning. mean, like 80 % is done. Like I've already decided this tool is one of them that solves my problem. I want it. And like now you start this two month journey of like trying to purchase it. It's like, no, I've already figured out that this is going to help me. And now I want it. And now I don't want to have to go through the rigmarole of talking to a disco call and AE. Like just get me in there. Like let me talk to a customer because like that might help me figure out how they put it in place. But I just want to get it going. And that... Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yep. Braydan Young: That's why there's so many AI companies. If you look at the anthropics of the world, that's why they've gone from one billion to a trillion dollars, because you can log in and use it day of. Warren Kucker: Yeah, that's a good point. I think that buyer's journey in the past has been about de-risking a purchase, right? So that's why we spend this time. So great, we have to find the right balance of de-risking it for them. And I think something like doing referrals better and quicker is great. What's interesting then is what you have to come armed with is it's almost like what seems to be driving this urgency over the past three, six months when I talk to folks now is that sales teams seemed to need to capitalize on interest before it wanes much, much faster than it used to. It's almost like our intention span. I have a problem. I need to solve it. I want to solve it quickly. And if I don't, I'll probably just forget about the problem and move on to another one. There seems to be this Amazon same-day delivery kind of problem solving in the enterprise that we're solving problems rapidly. I need to move on. And it was only a problem for two days. And if I didn't solve it, something else comes up. really quickly. That sounded like an appropriate way to kind of phrase one of the aspects to why this is kind of being pushed this way. Yeah, yeah. Well, like on steroids. Braydan Young: Yeah, like time kills all deals. Like if someone's like, yeah, hey, think, yeah, I think we should move forward. It's a great sign this. Yeah. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. I'm like, it's like you lose your buyer's attention like really quickly, right? Like I have no idea what my problems were six weeks ago at this point. I know what my problems were now and you had a shot to solve it now and then I just focus on what, but it's not like then it's not good. It's unintentional. I'm a gnat just like chasing whatever the problem is in front of me, right? But like it seems to be the speed that's happening right now that means, yeah, you have to be really knowledgeable, add value really quickly, get through a buying journey as fast as the buyer wants to get to it. and capitalize on urgency that is fleeting at this point. Braydan Young: There's a, I always used to get in arguments with my co-founder, Asindosa, with this. So when I give demos of any product I've ever sold, when I give, I hate decks. I think decks, like starting to go through a deck is one of those things where I'm like, don't care about who founded your company. right? Like I would jump right into product. Warren Kucker: Yeah, same here. gotten scolded for this take multiple times, but I agree. Yeah. Braydan Young: And I would show, I'd be like, here's, I have a generic walkthrough, but like if they wanted to go down certain tabs, I was happy to do it because it helps. I was giving me that information. I needed on how to sell them, but that's something we don't train with the reps. It's like the generic walkthrough deck. You've now built the problem. Here's the solution to your problem. Here's who had success and he gave me your credit card. Like I think like that is one that doesn't work at all anymore. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Braydan Young: I think people have different challenges to try to solve for. So if you do get on the phone with a sales rep and you're like, hey, this is the problem to try to solve, let them guide the conversation a little bit. And think that that's having a generic walkthrough, man, that's painful. Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Are you there's a shift right now in the market that's being talked about, but I don't know if it's actually happening where we're or there's been a movement from away from like ARR and to MRR like less commitment, faster deal cycle, measuring growth on an MRR standpoint. Are you seeing the same when you're out there talking to these companies? Braydan Young: Yeah. Yeah, we felt we found that too. I mean, like you said earlier that like people want to de risk like, hey, like I so signing up for like a 12 month contract sometimes where you know you're out, let's say $30,000 or $12,000 is scary. So if you have an MRR deal where you're like, OK, I'll try this for a month and see if it works or doesn't work. So yeah, I've seen a lot. mean, AI is probably the biggest culprit to that because you can try a tool for 14 days or 30 days and see if it works or not. And if it works, then you commit to it. I do like the idea of outcome-based pricing. I think that's great to disrupt SaaS. We're playing there too. Warren Kucker: Yeah, right. Braydan Young: The MRR thing is rough. It's kind all over the place. And all of a sudden, that changes your renewal schedule. ⁓ But I think that's why a lot of companies are moving towards enterprise too, because they are still committing to two, three-year deals. But I think for SMB from mid-market, I agree that that's going to go away. I think that'll move more towards MRR. Warren Kucker: Okay. Yeah, because they want it still, yeah. Interesting. Cool. Great. All right. Well, maybe the last question for what you're doing at SlashX right now, what's the vision for where you think it may be a year or two from now? If it's like taking three steps beyond this initial solve that you've created for, what does that look like, those two, three steps? Braydan Young: Yeah. I think there's an entire business I'm building kind of behind the scenes as we build this. So companies are offering up who their great customers are, which is amazing. But we're able to also ask them, hey, what other tools do you know really well? So we're able to build kind of a really cool expert network of people that we can offer up to other companies that might not know that this person should be referenced for them. So if we have four or five customers that are in a similar space and someone signs up, they're like, ⁓ I know these four tools. And we can let that customer of ours know, hey, John just signed up over there, they say they know you really well too and he loves you. He should also be an expert for you. So if I get to the point where I have kind of this flywheel of people that are joining and are asking like, hey, like what tools do know really well? I become a lead gen tool as well for folks who are looking at like for the actual customer base to get to know them better. Yeah. Warren Kucker: That's interesting. Yeah, what are you using with this tool, right? That's an interesting space, right? It's interesting because what you're honing into is like there's like this evangelist class that you're kind of like tapping into because of just ease of use and friction. It's almost like ⁓ how does that get leveraged in the future, right? So like you had this notion of crossing the chasm, you find these like. diamond in the rough users that love your tool, even though it's kind of janky for the first couple of years, you're building as you're going, they're okay flying in the plane with a couple of things that malfunction, right? But then how do you leverage that as you get into your next stage of customers? It'll be fascinating to see. ⁓ If we could tap into that systematically, there's definitely four or five tools used right now that they approach me and were like, would you be willing to be a really easy, ⁓ frictionless 15 minute call once a month? Braydan Young: Yep. Warren Kucker: to just talk about the tool, but yeah, I'm not gonna do that for Gmail, who cares about that? But if like Clay was like, yeah, like you used the tool a lot, would you be interested in being evangelized for this? Yeah, I'd be happy to have two conversations a month on this. So it'd an interesting way to, I mean, you could shatter the buying journey. I don't know that you will, it'd be impressive if you do, and then you'll be doing this next podcast from that background on your yacht. But like it'd be interesting to just like, you can create a peer to peer, I mean, who cares what the buyer says? They're obviously skewed, right? I wanna talk to people that are using it really easily. Braydan Young: Yeah. Right? Warren Kucker: I'd be on any buyer buying process I'd be wanting to talk to three people if it was frictionless, right? Like and they were rewarded for it and they cared to do it and I wasn't bothering them. I'd absolutely want to talk to multiple users in that case. Braydan Young: I agree. Or even if you've bought a piece of software already that you're like, this thing is not doing what I wanted it to do, but you sign up for a year, being able to go and talk to a user or a customer is an interesting use case too. I think that like the idea of community that every company wants, I everyone wants a trailblazer community that Salesforce built, but like most aren't doing anything to make that happen. And so this is a step towards making it easy. Yeah. Warren Kucker: Right. Yeah. Yes. It's too hard. It's a market problem, right? Yeah. It's interesting on upsells, right? So upsells are becoming more and more of a prevalence in the sales journey, right? So I have a new product line. CS is not the greatest salespeople in the world. That's not their core competency, right? So great. Tell me how other companies are using this new product line. Well, here you go. Talk to this, Vatera, who's using this, for example. Really fascinating. Braydan Young: Exactly. Warren Kucker: ⁓ Brayden, ⁓ where can people find you? You write anything out there, post anything where people want to see where you're... Braydan Young: I am, yeah. I post a ton. I am the only Braden Young, B-R-A-Y-D-A-N on all of LinkedIn, so please connect with me. I know, right? Like, my parents were creative. Yeah, they're creative with that spelling. Also, check us out on slashexperts.com, too. I mean, like, happy to show anyone who wants to check it out. And I appreciate the time, Warren. Warren Kucker: surprising. that's thanks to the parents for that second that first why really like cap shot. Awesome. Thanks for being on. Looking forward to seeing your journey as you kind of progress. Braydan Young: Thank you.