Latest / Reframe First / Anthony Enrico, Founder & CEO of LeanScale | Sales Teams Harvest Demand, They Don't Create It
Transcript
- Oleksij Rak: Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Reframe First. My name is Alexey and let me welcome our today's guest, Antoni Enrico, Antoni's founder and CEO at Lenscale. So hi Antoni, great having you here. Anthony Enrico: Alexi, thank you so much for having me on the show. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, awesome. Thanks for coming. So from what I learned, you're helping startups on later stages basically go to market via AI automation and automating all the sales market and customer success processes and so on and so forth. Could you tell us a bit about what you do and we will start from there. Anthony Enrico: Yeah, of course. So we're a full stack go-to-market operations as a service company. So we manage everything from sales operations, marketing operations. And then most recently disciplined on our side is AI operations. So helping you build the infrastructure to automate the workflows that you need for your go-to market motions, as well as give you the data you need for your entire go-to-market team. Oleksij Rak: Awesome, awesome. That sounds interesting, especially in terms of AI automation processes, but we will discuss that. Who are your clients, basically? What kind of clients you work with at what stages and how does it... Anthony Enrico: Yeah, we focus mostly on B2B Sass and AI companies. So we're working with companies that are growing really quickly. They're venture backed. typically we come in as early as a series A. So you found product market fit, you're ready to start investing in your go-to-market motions. but we we go as large as companies doing over 500 million in ARR and they're marching towards likely an IPO and everything in between. And The way they find us, most of our business comes from our content or referrals. So inbound that way. And really just the reputation we've built over the last five years of being the best team to work with for GTM ops if you're in B2B SaaS. Oleksij Rak: Okay, and how much does it take to like build a proper GTM? Like the bare minimum, when below that it's no, it's a fake, it's not a GTM. So, well, what does it take to build a proper GTM nowadays? Anthony Enrico: Yeah, depending on the stage. I think you can you can get by when you're in the early stage if you're doing founder-led sales, if you have one or two AEs. I think having a proper CRM set up and then also having the right recording set up, most of the sales calls are happening remote. So getting that intelligence so you can feed AI and then getting your own personal AI tools going. So if you got Cloud Cowork or Building your own GPTs, that's probably level zero of getting things started. And then from there, what tends to happen is once you start scaling, you have, let's say, 10 sales reps, you have multiple marketing channels that you're putting significant investment behind. Then it gets increasingly more important to make sure you have really, really clear data. So you know. The return you're getting on all those investments. And so you can make decisions in the future. So, hey, do we double down in this segment? Do we expand in this market? Do we pull back on this particular marketing channel or invest even more? Or do we need to go create new ones? And once you get to that stage, and that's kind of what happens around series A, maybe series B, you really, really need to have your go-to-market data airtight. And A good analogy to this would be your financial data. You need to you you need to have accurate books in order to make decisions. On the GTM side, you need that level of accuracy too. Oleksij Rak: When companies come to you, do they usually have that or do you help them with building all this kind of stuff? Usually companies don't. They don't. Anthony Enrico: Well, usually they don't usually they don't call us if everything's figured out. So we're we're used to seeing we're used to seeing a number of things. honestly, if they have nothing, that's probably the easiest. So if we can just start everything from scratch and build it fresh, that's not a difficult problem to solve. Often we get pulled in when people have been trying to build things on their own. Maybe it's their first go at doing something like this. And then it just creates a spider web of issues and tech debt and automations that are firing that aren't really doing anything and you know, not measuring things in consistent ways. So usually we're in to be more of the cleanup crew once things have gone awry and then set them up for their next stage of growth. but either one, but rarely, yeah, it they're not calling us it's figured Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, I see. And when you step in, what do you usually automate? What parts of the system do you automate? Because nowadays you can automate quite a lot of everything, especially with recent advancement in the AI field. So what do you do? Anthony Enrico: Yeah, there's a number of areas. And and I I like to not think of it as just automation for efficiency sake. I think a lot of the automation we do is helping the effectiveness and increasing the quality and increasing the output that's happening. So I think of it as two buckets. It's how can we do this thing faster and then how can we do these things better than we were before? And there's things to be automated across the whole life cycle, marketing, sales, customer success. There's all kinds of of things. But some of the common ones would be things like automated inbound enrichment. So companies that have strong product like growth motions are getting bombarded with leads. Sometimes they're getting like personal emails, things like that. And then so how do we find data on these people, enrich it, and then get it to the right person on our side? So automating the inbound enrichment and routing process. And then on the flip side. automated outbound. So if you're more maybe mid-market enterprise, how do you automate the outbound motion by aggregating signals from the market, building assets or interesting things that are relevant to that person, and then reaching out to them on LinkedIn, email. That's kind of on the top of funnel side. But then I actually think, and there's a lot of content on that. I mean, you could. Open up LinkedIn anytime you're gonna see the 63 stage clay table that somebody built up. I actually think there are a lot more interesting opportunities in the middle funnel. So once an opportunity has been opened or a deal has been opened and you're working to get that to closed one, I I think the level of prep you can do with transcripts, automating, building. Proposals, automating, building SOWs. If you have any form of proof of concept phase in your sales process, AI can be tremendously helpful. Like, hey, connect to the MCP of tools that are relevant to them, build the assets that prove the concept of what your solution brings, whatever that looks like. There's so many opportunities in mid-funnel, and then help move it to close. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, With regards to the top funnel, what are the best strategies nowadays, especially since everybody is using clay nowadays and all those kinds of tools and everybody's trying to automate something with Claude code combination with clay and all these kinds of different... What are the best strategies that work nowadays? Is it like outreach? Is it inbound? Is it content? Is it personalized outreach? There are plenty of options. Which do you believe in? Anthony Enrico: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'll I'll preface with the the boring part of it depends. I I think it depends on your offering, your service, who you're who you're targeting, is a big one. And we always start there, but it's who in the world has the highest propensity to buy what you're trying to solve. Go find them. Don't worry about people who you think are in your ICP, but maybe they're not feeling the pain as much, go find the people who are feeling the most pain possible. And then reverse engineer the best way to attract or engage with them. I think first follow that. But with that being said, I mean it's no secret. The volume of Outbound has 10X to 100 X. I I'm sure your inbox, your LinkedIn is bombarded every single day with hyper personalized outreach. And you can, you know, I I know somebody didn't go read my post from six months ago and was really excited and then like buy my product. But I think I think because the volume of that type of activity has increased so much, it's made it very, very, very difficult to do effective outbound. So Oleksij Rak: Yeah, that's the right way nowadays. Anthony Enrico: So the only the only things I've seen work really, really well is if you can in in the outbound side, and then I'll talk about inbound, is if you have an opportunity to create something very valuable that's personalized, that's an asset for them, and then send them that asset, or you have some interesting offer that's free for them but personalized and actually adds value. Some companies that are doing that are pulling off outbound, but you have to be really, really creative and it has to be really, really personalized. you can't just haphazardly try to do that. Oleksij Rak: How about finding just the right moment when to send this offering, like listening to some signals, whatever, and just find the right moment when this offer is just the right fit for the person. Anthony Enrico: I I think that's table stakes. I think that's just part of this. So if you're gonna build an asset of interest, I'll I'll give you an example. I'll I'll share what we do. so the signal for us is anybody who raised money, hired a new CRO, or is looking for ahead of RevOps. Those are the three signals that are happening. Now, if I just reach out and say, Hey, do you guys need to go to market ops? I'm sure they already have a plan for how they're gonna do that. And so instead, what we do is we have research agents that go find everything we can about that company. How many sales reps do you have? What marketing channels does it look like they're involved in? What type of product do they have? So likely what are their go-to market motions? Is it going to be product led? Is it going to be sales led, enterprise, channel growth? go find any bit of information that we can understand what their go-to-market machine likely looks like at this time. And then we send a full Diagnostic of saying, hey, you're at Series A, looks like you have five sales reps, looks like you're running these channel motions and this and this. Likely your tech stack looks like this. And likely you're, since you just raise money, you're trying to go from here to here. So these are all of the things that it's going to take for you to go from here to here. Would love to do this for real and attach to your systems and we can give you a deeper diagnostic, but wanted to give you this, you know, just for what it's worth. So that's that's how we approach outbound. And it's gotta Oleksij Rak: Does it work? Anthony Enrico: be something like that. It works. It works. Oleksij Rak: It works. Okay. Anthony Enrico: Yeah. Does it work as well as you would hope it does? No. But it works well enough to where it's worth doing. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, at least you did your homework and you found the right moment when to approach them and the right message you have to approach them with. Yeah, it makes sense. totally makes sense. Well, what about inbound? So you touched the outbound. Anthony Enrico: I think you have to optimize for inbound. I think outbound is getting so so bombarded, so messy that you have to optimize for it. And the the biggest ones would be content. So you have to be doing content, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a series, whether it's educational content. and you have to make it meaningful. You have to give back to the market you're serving. Then channel strategies are huge as well. So find where you can partner with the right teams to help get in front of the right customers. And it's gotta be a better together story. I don't see a lot of your distribution partnerships working really well. It's gotta be something where their product and your product or their service and your product have a better together story. And then you're going after companies together. So those are the two. And I think that has been the biggest lever for our growth is those are those two channels. Oleksij Rak: Awesome. The content, what does a company do in terms of content? I know you also do podcasts for quite some time, for four years you mentioned. What else do you do? How do you try to sell your brand? Anthony Enrico: Yeah, we have a a a mix. So the podcast is one. That's the best way for me to get introduced to our buyers. So I podcast with CROs, CMOs, heads of RevOps. So then you have a smart conversation with somebody that is in the market you're trying to sell them to. So that's one of our channels. The other one is education content. So we go deep on AI workflows, exactly how we're building things, going into the weeds, going into the details. Showing how we set stuff up in Salesforce, sharing go-to-market operation strategies, just sharing everything we know. we throw it all on our YouTube channel and we post it on LinkedIn as well. Then I'll call it the segment would be like belief content. So this is mainly us. So the leadership team at Lean Scale sharing their take on things. Mainly that's LinkedIn, our buyers on LinkedIn. So that's what we're optimizing for. And then the other one is content for customers. So, you know, customer exclusive webinars, things that are only available if you're a customer and you have an opportunity to interact with the team and then see what other customers of LeanScale are doing. And when again, think about what you're optimizing for. Referrals is one of the biggest channels that we have. It's customer had a good experience, they share it. Or there's a lot of movement in our space too. Like CROs. Every twelve months they're in a new company. So So that helps optimize for the referral motion. and and then the distribution. We chose YouTube and LinkedIn as the main distribution channels to optimize for. and then we also, last thing, we also have a newsletter. We run it on LinkedIn. I know some people use Substack or others if you really want to own and monetize the audience, but the newsletter helps us give deeper written content too. And then what happens? So when you invest in all this, it's gonna help your outbound because oftentimes if they're somewhat interested, they'll come check you out and then they'll have a wealth of content to go get to know you better. Oleksij Rak: Basically with your built your authority you create a lot of educational content a lot of inspirational probably and and like client specific by close group and Yet it creates your authority Awesome. Awesome. But that's a lot and since especially since you do all of that for yourselves, that's huge With regard to two for instance a niche says brand comes to you they do not yet have a name, they are not well known. How do they at all start in 2026 with GTMs? So do they start with content, like explaining what they do, how they build and what service they provide or how do they even start? Anthony Enrico: Yeah, so if I if you're just getting started, then maybe I'll I'll tailor this to a B2B SaaS company. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Anthony Enrico: it's gonna be the founder. It's gonna be the founder. Zero to one is gonna be hand-to-hand combat, Oleksij Rak: So. Anthony Enrico: calling all of your friends, tapping into your network, and and getting to a million. And if you can get to a million, then things start to get easier. And from there, then I think the founder can Turn maybe into more the content game, and then and then start figuring out what motions make sense for you. It might be, you might have a really obvious channel play. You might have a really good way to do outbound, there might be something relevant. there's also, I I didn't touch on this either. There's also community-led growth. So Oleksij Rak: yeah. Anthony Enrico: if your product is really helping. A group that has a tight community around it, and you can give back to that community and be part of that community, a lot of that would be building content for that community. then I think that would be an area where you could really focus as well. So when you're but if you're starting, it's gonna be the founder calling every single person they've ever met in their lives. Oleksij Rak: I've heard about strategies of like, that you start with community first. So we build the community, you listen to the community and then try to satisfy their needs and to solve their problems. Do you believe in this kind of strategy? So start with community, like community as GTM strategy and then build products around it. Anthony Enrico: I found that the highest performing companies have a founder that was working in the industry, has a deep visceral understanding of the pain, and already has a lot of contacts in that industry. So they've been they've been living in that community, working in that community, felt the pain of that community, and then built a solution for it. So, yes, in a sense, and and I think if if that's how you're starting now. Some people will they're looking for an opportunity where maybe they haven't had personal experience. I think that's very, very difficult to do. And if if that's you, if that's the situation you're in, if maybe you're an excellent engineer and you thought, maybe I could build a product for this, then yeah, you're gonna have to go into that community and figure out what the people like, what the pain is, and then build the product that actually solves their problems. But I think that's very hard. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, but you know, nowadays product became a commodity with recent AI tool advancements, like anybody can build a product, at least some prototype and something close to MVP. Anthony Enrico: I think anybody can build a product, but it doesn't mean anybody should. And it doesn't mean you're building anything good. Like I I see vibe-coded products all day long, but it doesn't mean it's a production grade problem that speaks to a problem in an elegant way with taste. Like anybody could write a book, it doesn't mean it would be a good Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah, anybody can write a book nowadays either. Anthony Enrico: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: Awesome. With regards to early CS, what is the most common GTM mistake that you are seeing and that you're seeing again and again? And the most valuable probably. What caused them the most before they come to you? Anthony Enrico: over hiring and sales is number one. Oleksij Rak: Over. Anthony Enrico: Mm-hmm. Hired they hire salespeople too early. there's a thought process that the founder's going through that hiring salespeople will build demand. I I would really encourage anybody to think of their sales team. You need to pressure them to go build their own demand. You should push them to build their own demand. But the floor and the expectation you should have is they are harvesters of demand. You have the demand already coming in, they're there to turn that demand into a deal. And I so many times, and I will say I literally did this too after already knowing how this movie plays. I did the same thing. I was hired a salesperson. I was convinced that yeah, yeah, they're gonna go out and close a bunch of deals. And and they didn't, and it's not their fault. It's not their fault that we didn't have the demand at the time. so I think over hiring and sales. Or hiring too early is the biggest, biggest mistake. The second is an underinvestment in brand. And I think it takes I I'm on the GTM operation side. I'm here to like scientifically show you the ROI of every single marketing channel that you have. At the same time, I know not everything can be measured with that level of precision. You just have to make some bets. And when you invest well in your brand, all of your other channels perform better. So I see a significant underinvestment in brand. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, and brand usually takes time, like building a brand. Anthony Enrico: Yeah, brand takes time. And that's that's the thing where content takes time. it's gonna Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Anthony Enrico: be it, it's the quality is gonna be low when you start and nobody's gonna be watching. When you start, you gotta stay at it for years before it starts working. And then the channels and partnerships take time. All of the things that are slow, nobody wants to invest in. they create the most outsized returns over time. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, so basically start with brands and go to marketing part and only then start harvesting it with sales. Anthony Enrico: Yeah. Build a lights out product. I mean, there's some products that don't even need marketing. Like it that Claude doesn't need a lot of marketing. It's just so good that people are gonna they're gonna use it. So lights out product, then layer in incredible marketing, then get the sales team to harvest all those opportunities. That's that's the order and the sequence. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, I see. With regards to there are like two different strategies nowadays with GTM. It's like account-based one and person-based one. The second one is way more complicated, but which one do you like and what are your thoughts? What do you suggest to clients to do? Because you can take clay, you can listen to some basic signals which clay provides and you could just target companies. But the person that you target might not care about. you're right because like the person cares about their roles, their responsibilities, their compensation, what they get in return and this message may not be right so you need to be targeting specific people at specific points like but it's way more complicated than targeting an account. Anthony Enrico: Yeah, I think you have to though. I I think you have to because it at the end of the day, you're selling to people, people are buying from people. So i the end state of that is you're you're trying to get in front of a person. And even when you have firmographic, you know, this is our ICP, it's a B2B SaaS company doing this much revenue. Like, okay, but you that's just the shell that these people live in. I I think There's something your messaging will also be dramatically different if you take it to the persona level. I'll give you an example. So for us, yes, we focus on B2B SAS post series A. That series A to series suite is our sweet spot of coming in. We hang with them for a while, but it's it we don't normally land there. So kind of targeting in this earlier stage. And There's a big difference between a CRO who's doing this for their first time and a CRO who's on their fifth adventure in the world of startups. And our messaging to these two different CROs would be dramatically different. And we find that the CROs who have done this before are way easier for us to get in front of and close because they get it. They already know. I've done a This is my fifth go. I've already been in places where RevOps is a mess, where this is a mess. I walked into a board meeting with bad data. We started a fundraising process out of nowhere and I had no time to prepare and we had none of our data ready to go. And it made me look bad. I know I need to get this buttoned up day zero. So when we're messaging to them, we can use language that way. Like, you've done this before. You know, this isn't your first time. You know you're going to need this in the boardroom. You know you're going to need this for the spontaneous raise. Like, we know you. That wouldn't resonate with somebody doing it for the first time, though. So we'd try to point our messaging towards the pros. Okay, we're doing this for the CRO pros. But we wouldn't get to that point unless we got to the persona level. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Serial CROs, let's call them Serial CROs, they usually have Anthony Enrico: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: people they know, people like you they already know and they already worked with and they usually bring them with them when they step into a new assignment. That's at least what we've seen with our clients. they usually have a current kind of clients. So the same person. switches roles, switches positions between different companies, but he always brings us in because he knows that we can provide the best service out there. Awesome. With regards to your internal automation processes, you mentioned that you automated quite a lot of everything within your company. Which, like, automations, which agent do you think generated the most of value for you nowadays? What do you automate and what really did make sense? Anthony Enrico: my gosh, there's so many. Oleksij Rak: So just so you know. Anthony Enrico: There's so many good ones and they they they helped a lot of people in different ways. I'll just rattle off a few. I I don't know if I can boil it. I probably the one that had the biggest economic impact is the diagnostic process that we run. So normally we'd say we'd get introduced, say, hey, we'll come into your systems, we'll take a look, we'll let you know how things are, and then we'll build your roadmap of work. And these are the things we would recommend doing first. And that process would normally take anywhere from 10 to 20 hours. Like if Because we could go into their CRM and then we would we would ask have to do discovery and ask questions. So what we built is it's a series of agents, but it automates the whole diagnostic process. All we need is access to their CRM. Then from the CRM, we could see all the tools they're connected to. So we can see their entire go-to-market tech stack. We have what good looks like in terms of measurability. Do you have the right tools in place? Is everything that you have stage fit for what you're doing, data completion, all that stuff. There's a million things. So we automated that entire thing and then build out a lights out report that is more accurate than before, more engaging than before, and then builds a full roadmap of all of the things that we would do and what the world would look like once we got them done. And the likely go to market impacts it would have on conversion rate, sales cycle, et cetera, ability to scale. all of that we can now do with hooking up their CRM to our platform and automating the whole thing. So that it increased our conversion rate dramatically. it increased our ACV because they're like, I yes, I want all of those things. Let's do more work. and then it was unbelievably more efficient. So cut down all the time. I mean, we used to have people dedicated to only running this process. Now we don't even have anybody in that role. Oleksij Rak: Awesome, so you basically like connect to the CRM extract some data. How do you verify if the data is correct, if the data is complete and if it's good enough? Anthony Enrico: Yeah, well, normally it's not. So we're looking mainly at like the metadata, Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Anthony Enrico: like what fields do you have? What completion rates do you have? Okay, Oleksij Rak: okay. Anthony Enrico: you don't have these fields, you don't have these automations, you don't have these tools connected in your stack. So you're missing these key categories of tools. and you're not able to report on attribution, you're not tracking renewals. So you can see all of it just based on looking at the metadata in their serents. Oleksij Rak: Make sense. Awesome, awesome. What else do you have? Anthony Enrico: Yeah, so that's that's probably the biggest that one created the biggest economic improvement. but a number of things on yeah, it's huge and very specific. Oleksij Rak: It's a work and generates opportunities here. It's a big one. Anthony Enrico: Yeah. The the other one we're delivering a service, so Something that the project management side of of Lean Scale. So we we'll staff a go-to-market architect and a go-to-market engineer to an engagement. That's the bread and butter engagement assignment. And they manage a couple of customers. And the sheer number of like projects and tasks and updates and everything and communication, it's just a very, very high volume. So we built a full transcript pipeline that Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Anthony Enrico: takes any transcripts we're having with customers, puts them to agents that automatically build the tasks and then pushes in the format we want, of course, and the verbiage that we use and everything, and then puts them into our project management system. And then the person behind can just like approve or deny if they want to add them. And then also we automate our weekly sprint reviews and then our weekly recaps. So that's a big part of like our cadence with customers. So all the communication, all the project management is pretty much 90% automated just based on the transcript pipeline and transcript flow. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, so basically automated internal project management. Anthony Enrico: Mm-hmm. And and again, yes, efficiency gains, great. I'm most excited about the consistency of quality. So now I know nobody's forgetting something on a call or missing something on a call. We know everything is getting where it needs to be. And communication is super consistent for all of our customers. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Awesome. Did you try to productize some of your services or tools that you built? Especially since you know how to get them to market. You can wrap them and try to productize or try to sell them. Why not? Anthony Enrico: It's it's a good question. Something we think about. I think they are very specific to us. They're very, very tailored to what we're doing. but what we are doing is we are building for our customers custom workflows, custom agents. And I think a lot of the foundations are the same. It a lot of it is okay, how do we get your data into a context graph so you can count on the information from When you connect it to Cloud or any other AI. Then the other big component is how do you build the transcript pipeline? Because so many of these automations depend on getting the transcript data where you need it to go. So building those pipelines. And then frankly, the plug-in skills, agents, that's the easy part. Like you can just tell cloud exactly what you want, and then we can build that infrastructure. So we're building a lot of those custom. a workflows and agents for our customers. But I think the things we've built probably wouldn't be they're just so specific to us that I don't know if they're ready for a mass market. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, transcripts for sure, but because they are really deep into your internal pipeline. But with regards to checking customers CRM and understanding what needs to be done based on metadata, it could be open. Could be a great Anthony Enrico: True. Oleksij Rak: lead magnet for you. Just build a tool and drive in some traffic and build some content, drive in some traffic and probably it will start converting at some point. Anthony Enrico: Actually, that's a very good idea. Oleksij Rak: It's my... Anthony Enrico: I think we can I think we can make our diagnostic self serve. So I'll give you Oleksij Rak: You're welcome. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anthony Enrico: some royalties when we when we launch that. But that's a great idea. Oleksij Rak: We're trying to do something similar, cost calculators, whatever. So we drive traffic in, people can do some estimates for themselves. If they like it, they like it, and they can get in touch with us. not, maybe they will take the estimate and go do it by themselves or not. But still, that has got some value, so it's a great little mechanism. Anthony Enrico: Yeah, you have me thinking. Thank you. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, because my next one would be, what would you build if you were about to start some GTM tooling company nowadays? What would you build? Anthony Enrico: gosh. I don't think I would. Oleksij Rak: So like plenty of GTM tools, but they are like really, I would say they are not 2026, almost none of them. what is our missing kind of value? Yeah. Anthony Enrico: Well, if I were if I were to build something, I I'll go back to the philosophy I have. It's okay, what do I now have a very deep appreciation of? And what problems do I do I know probably better than anyone else? And I think at this point I know very deeply how to grow a services company and all of the things that we had to do to get to this point. And I think if I were to build something that was a product for Mass Market, I would probably convert this experience into a product for services companies that get the transcript pipelines organized, the PM tools organized, give them agents that. monitor the health of their accounts, like probably a whole ecosystem to help services companies do the job that they need to do. Because that's the experience I've gained over the last five, six years now, that I would probably convert into a product. And think there's also a huge tailwind. I I the mo the barrier to entry to build a product has decreased so much that there's just so much competition now. But There's a huge tailwind on service companies, especially if you can build the right software ecosystem around the service that you have. And I mean, a lot of these companies are they're achieving comparable margins to SaaS companies. So I think there's going to be a huge opportunity here in the near future too. Oleksij Rak: Also, what changes like, especially since you're running the podcast for years already, what changes have you noticed recently in the landscape? What changes? What was the trends are nowadays? Anthony Enrico: I recently I think we we're just getting past the discovery and honeymoon phase of AI, where a lot of companies threw a CloudMax account license into every single person in the company and said, just go build, just go do it. And I think you're seeing a lot of build versus buy discussions. There are a lot of tools that we are not buying because we're just Building ones that are better for ourselves. And and I think when the models get even better, I I mean, you know, when they had to take Fable and Mythos down, that it's the stuff that we were seeing being built with those models is really next level. So I think the build versus buy tension is gonna grow. And I think you're gonna have the more ability to build your own tools. I still think there's tools you should I think of it as outsourcing things you don't wanna do. Like you can build something, or you could focus on your core service and core product. And every hour that you focus on that, I think is gonna return more than trying to rebuild tools that other people have already built. But if you do need something specific, I'd say like our diagnostic process, the way we need to manage projects. it was worth the investment for us to build our own tools. So I think I think you're gonna see a lot of that. And then I I think the other one is on the AI operation side, it seems like it's consolidating down to RevOps on the go to market side, and then a group of engineering maybe on like DevOps on the engineering and product side to own the agent building, the plug-in building, the skill building. And rather than it being this bespoke thing where everybody has access to things. So I I think people were like running their own outbound go-to-market campaigns, enriching things their own way, doing their own research, building their own processes to run a POC. I think we're gonna see all of that come back. It's like you're doing an okay job, but if we centralize it, we can do a better job. And I I think we're gonna see a lot of investment in AI operations and a team to build your own internal tools. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, it's getting a bit harder to build a proper SAS tool nowadays because anybody can replicate it too if there is no specific value in what you build. So we need to have some domain specific data. We need to have like some overlap of different skills, technologies, whatever, some really deep domain knowledge and solving some deep domain problems. Otherwise... you are quite easy to just be built by some company for their own needs. That's what we also did. So we built few of GTM tools by ourselves because we saw no need to pay hundreds of dollars per month per tool, per account. Anthony Enrico: Yeah, and especially if some of the features are off. It's like, they don't do this thing the way I like it done. So I need to make it on my own. Oleksij Rak: One of the recent ones was some spreadsheets on steroids, on each field you can fill it with some data, whatever. It's just so easy to replicate. Anthony Enrico: Yeah, but I but I do think there's gonna be I think it's gonna I think software companies will become more like service companies because you'll have a core problem that you're building that you solve. Like for us, it's go-to-market operations. And I think what the customer is gonna want is outsourcing the problem. So even something simple like Calendly, like executive assistants kind of solved that with humans before now, Calendly came in and like, hey, we can kind of We can do this easier and more affordable. But there might be something specific that I need in my scheduling. And now I think because it's easier to build bespoke software, those companies can tailor their product for each one of their customers. So now it doesn't have to be, I need to build a product that's one product that every single person uses. It's I can build specific experiences and then have people tailor it to them. And then, of course, people powered by AI to keep your margins where you need them to be, but you can still run an 80% gross margin business. By the way, you don't need all of this front-loaded cost that used to be relevant in SaaS. All of that goes away. And all of those gross margins were kind of phony anyway, because you weren't counting the tens of millions of dollars you invested up front. So I think you can run just as healthy. margin of a business as what previous SAS was with a more high touch bespoke service. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, you're right. How do you get services company to market nowadays? Because especially the software services, from what I'm hearing, I'm chatting with a lot of people, everybody is trying to build their own modes. They are trying to protect their IPs, their knowledge to keep it in-house and just start using more and more agentic AI. How do you even sell this kind of service nowadays? What pot are you supposed to have? Anthony Enrico: Yeah, I would go services in particular, I think are it's more of a trust sale. And Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Anthony Enrico: and I think you're gonna be selling it depends. It it depends if it's a high-ticket high CD service or a low-ticket service. Low-ticket service, I think, will follow similar like mass go-to-market strategies. but a higher ticket service, let's say it's Anything 5k a month plus is they're gonna buy your brand and your content and your ability to engage and are you relevant? Oleksij Rak: Awesome. Anthony Enrico: I I think do you have I I think all of those, like do you have your own tools that you bring to the table? Do you have a brand that is resonating the market? Are you building content that they can go? Take a look at. do you have proprietary research? So do you take advantage of the work you're doing and turn that into research and insights that you can bring to the next engagement that you're doing? yeah, I think I think all of all of those inbound ish strategies or channel, if you partner with like we partner with HubSpot, Salesforce, Clay, all the major Gong, all the major go to market tools, we're partnered with them too. We also partner with VC and PE firms because that's a big signal for us too. So I think laying out your channels that makes sense for you too. I think that that's that's how you build it. But from zero, same story. The founder, call every single person you know, Oleksij Rak: start with the brain. Anthony Enrico: and that's it. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, and then start with the brand, right? Yeah. Awesome. We've covered pretty a lot of everything. So thanks a lot for a great discussion. Before we wrap it up, is there anything else you'd like to add on top of all that? Anthony Enrico: No, I think we covered a lot. I think the only thing I would add is this is my opinion on June seventeenth, twenty twenty six. Everything is changing so much. So, you know, Oleksij Rak: to. Anthony Enrico: thirty days from now, if if if things change, don't hold it against me. I think we all have to be very prepared to be agile and pivot as these major changes happen every day. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, it's changing so rapidly. like every single week is different already. Thanks a lot, Anthony for this discussion. It was a great one and best of luck to you. Anthony Enrico: Thank you for having me.