Latest / The Marketing Brief / Sreedhar and Brian Talk Revenue Activation and Human in the Loop B2B Solutions (S1 E26)
Transcript
- Brian Aucoin: to the marketing brief podcast. I am your host Brian equan. And this is the podcast where we briefly touch on topics across the marketing landscape. And as always, we're joined by an industry expert. Today we're very excited to be joined by Sri Sri dar, pen and NeNe. Did I get that right? Sri dar This one. Sreedhar Peddineni: That's right, you got it very, very close. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Brian. Awesome. everyone. ⁓ My name is Sridhar and the founder and CEO of GTM Buddy. We're a revenue activation platform ⁓ building software to help revenue teams selling to other businesses, if you will, where a B2B company and helping sellers sell better, if you will, by delivering the information they require in terms of their client engagements just in time in their workflow. That's what we focus on. So this is ⁓ newer category that's emerging called revenue activation. That's where we are operating in. And broadly over the past 25 plus years now, I've been an entrepreneur. This is my third company. I started my career back in 2000, 2001 timeframes with a company called Host Analytics that I have co-founded with my partner Jim Abelin in the areas of Brian Aucoin: revenue activation. Sreedhar Peddineni: budgeting, planning, financial consolidations. That was the early days of SaaS. Moving on-premises software to the cloud a subscription model. Did that for the first 10 years of my entrepreneurial career. Around 2011, co-founded a company called Gainsight in customer success space. And were early days of every subscription-based business trying to retain the customers. How do you ⁓ be about that? And the birth of a function called customer success. been through that journey for the next 10 years, that's between 2011 to 20. And 2021 is where I started this journey of building GTM Buddy. And interestingly so, one nugget, Brian, for you, I know you're a seasoned marketer. And one of the problem statements that the categories started, you know, Brian Aucoin: Mm-hmm. Sreedhar Peddineni: This category was called revenue enablement. Prior to that, it was called digital content management for sales with companies like Highspot and SciSmack trying to solve for it. The problem they were trying to solve for ⁓ have marketing function. You know what? They produce a lot of content. And only who are consuming that content is marketing themselves. Reps seem to and ask for that same content again and again and again. And they need one place for creating a content repository, if you will. And bingo, there's a birth of a category. This was early days of Google Drive. These days you probably would organize that content in Google Drive and search is somewhat getting better. So content platforms took birth in 2011, 12, 13 timeframes when it was a real problem. And you would take all of this content, a business might have thousands of documents, you will, presentations, PDFs, case studies, lot of what have you, testimonial videos and so on. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Sreedhar Peddineni: they would organize all of this content, this marketing produced content into files, folders and so on. They would tag them and hoping that the search would work better. And people will start using the marketing content and the categories goal was sales and marketing alignment. This was all like the birth of a category if you will. Now with AI, a lot of things are changing in terms of, know, nobody is buying content repository, static content repositories now. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Sreedhar Peddineni: Now the question really is about you might have 2000 pieces or 5000 pieces of content that you have produced over time, reps are not going to read all of those content. You need to deliver a subset of that information that they need in the context of a deal that they're working on. Depending the industry, depending on the persona that they're interacting with, how do you sift through all of that content and how do you deliver this micro content, if you will. That resonates the prospect. Brian Aucoin: Mm-hmm. Sreedhar Peddineni: So that's what we call just-in-time revenue activation to help the reps with the right information at the right time and deliver it where they live. that's of what we do, but I ⁓ the story of connecting back to marketing function was important. ⁓ Brian Aucoin: Good job, Joe. Mm-hmm So that and that's the space you you work in You guys ⁓ out, but I love this idea of revenue activation. So how do you define? ⁓ activation. I know you just did a little bit of it that but I would love to hear from you What is revenue activation? Sreedhar Peddineni: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Revenue activation is the ⁓ you are delivering the that rep requires when they need and where they live. And we are talking about human rep and we talking about a human rep augmented by an agent. So it's a human in the loop AI acting the role of an assistant. Brian Aucoin: Gotcha. And it's a human rep we're talking about? A human sales? Yeah. Sreedhar Peddineni: and an assistant where a human is not going to a chat GPT and he research this account for me, research this person for me, but an agent knows who you are meeting, knows about the account, knows about the person and knows that if you have met with that person before, hey, this is what you discussed the last time. Here are the open questions ⁓ is what you would want to be ready with in terms of creating personalized deck. earlier, were using the standard decks that we would produce and I would slice and dice those decks and share it with the prospects, right? Instead, you could create with AI, you could create a very personalized deck. That's for that particular person that I'm meeting. I've met with you twice. You know what? I've listened to you. And this is what you told me last time. this is what we discussed so far. And these are the open questions. And are the pain points that your business has. And this is how we're going to solve for it. How do you build that that human connection. And if you're a rep who is meeting like you're having back to back calls, 10 calls in a day, how do you find time to build that level of human connection, if you will. Brian Aucoin: and to show up prepared. Yeah. Sreedhar Peddineni: Yep. that's where the AI coming ⁓ the loop in terms of to really assist a human to ⁓ without putting in that effort that they really put in given that they're on these back-to-back meetings. ⁓ Brian Aucoin: Yeah, and what sectors or what verticals have you seen the most success in to date? Sreedhar Peddineni: So predominantly we sell to other tech companies and predominantly we have tech companies and any company that sells complex solutions, you Complex and solutions. These are not transactional sale, if you will. For example, I'm not selling a pen or ⁓ something $10 or a ⁓ hundred or even a thousand dollars, ⁓ but I'm something substantive in terms of price points and there's a team. So in... Brian Aucoin: Gotcha. Sreedhar Peddineni: Class typical B2B purchase these days as you the buying team is growing. even in our own sales, I've seen situations where there 19 people involved in a buying committee. So higher the price gets, like if you're into selling a few hundred thousands of dollars in annual subscription, it's not to be a single person's decision. ⁓ You're selling a committee. That's the reality. Right. ⁓ Now, as rep representing the vendor, how do I engage with these varying stakeholders? Every stakeholder comes in from a different function and has different pain points, different lenses with which they're evaluating you. I as a human, how do I keep track of all of this in my head? And great reps do it, but it's not easy. It's easier said than done. if I'm doing it all day long, then how do I keep track of all of this information? How do I process that information? ⁓ where the role of AI comes in really, really handy. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, as you're describing it, I almost think of we've done this for years in customer service, right? Kind of arming our customer service representatives with ⁓ data, that information. ⁓ you see parallels between this and like a customer service offering? Sreedhar Peddineni: Yeah, the same kind of infrastructure is being used across the board in terms of in service and support, if you will. A lot of that used to be more rules based systems or somebody calls me and I look up for ⁓ client information and if I need to look up the process, I look up elsewhere and do a of that. Now it's moving more towards a self-service systems. Self-service systems used be like, you know, the IVR systems are so passive right now. But there are AI driven systems in terms of, know, I could speak and I'm actually talking to AI. It's able to understand, it's able to answer my question more quickly compared to dial one for this, dial two for this, then you go to the another menu system, then you go to the third menu. can be completely eliminated in customer service. So that's a different application of AI. That's not what we do, but yeah, it's... Invading multiple sectors in terms of invading probably is the right word. ⁓ or making inroads into elevating a lot of different functions for sure. Brian Aucoin: Gotcha, yeah, but it's always centered around the human in charge there. your vision is really AI the human's ability to take on more calls, to close more calls, ⁓ that Cool. Sreedhar Peddineni: very well said. Yes. as a ⁓ soap, if you look at a lot of the companies right now, the zero interest rate policy is behind us. Inflation rates are going up. Growth at any cost is behind us. you're in California, know the tech ecosystem, free flowing ⁓ funding and all that's behind us. Now, everybody is looking at Doing more with less is a new mantra. That's the NOSTA for everybody. So the problem that we're trying to solve is how do you increase the capacity of your existing team to do more without overworking them, without killing them with work? And that's where how smart and intelligent informed use of AI comes into play. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. And how do you compete? Yeah. how do you compete with other businesses that are also using AI to scale their workforce? Sreedhar Peddineni: Yeah. So, and given that AI is where it is right now in terms of this such a dramatic variety in terms of the AI usage. you go and ask a typical technology business, if you will, or using AI, it'd be hard just to find anybody who says that we don't use AI. But how are you using AI? Then you start peeling the onion. Then you start getting into the detail in terms of, okay, if you were to pull your a thousand people company. Brian Aucoin: Right, to say yes, yes. Sreedhar Peddineni: or all thousand people using AI equally efficiently? Answer is a clear no, it would never be that's idealistic scenario. even then, ⁓ ⁓ a company, or have you standardized on AI systems, AI workflows people, you start getting into, okay, the many hands would go down. And critical are these business processes? How are people using AI? ⁓ The answer that we get is that, ⁓ you what, I use AI every day. I use ChatGPT. You know what? I stopped going to Google. Any question that I have, I ask ChatGPT and it gives me an answer. I'm writing an email. I want it to be a bit more polished. So I ⁓ ask Claude or a ChatGPT or a Gemini and it gives me an improved version or more polished version of my email. These are like everybody's using them ⁓ for that. But the question of, you ⁓ talked about customer service and I talked about revenue use cases. How many companies are there at that level of maturity in terms of instrumenting AI systems and agents to actually get this done? That's where the gap is right now. So the gap between AI haves and have nots, it's not as much having access to tools, but adoption. There's a big gap that we see in terms of AI leaders and ⁓ people who are still catching up. Brian Aucoin: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, and the way I've talked about it on this podcast is somewhere between ⁓ as a calculator, right? Like a tool that you need someone to use all the way to infrastructure, right? It is the backbone of how you work, which it sounds like you're more towards the infrastructure side. Yeah. Sreedhar Peddineni: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. So talk this and ⁓ many events I participate in and so on. Since I'm in industry, ⁓ we live and AI because we have to, ⁓ given the extent changes that are happening and so on. So ⁓ a lot times think about, what are the AI tools that we are building for others to use, you know, as ⁓ a product company building products? We want others to use our, you know, AI native products and services that improve their processes internally. But equally importantly, what I'm realizing is that it's equally important for me as the CEO of the company to think about how are we using AI internally for our business processes, for our own financial planning, for example, or for our marketing, in our sales process, in our customer success process and so on. And both are not the same. One is about building a product that other people will use. The other is about using AI more thoughtfully to increase the capacity of the output. So this is what we talk about. We have tripled in revenue in the past year, and our headcount has not grown. And the goal and the challenge that we looking at, can we repeat that feed this year? Brian Aucoin: Yeah, that makes sense. I'd love to always ask my guests if there's something they're excited about. This can obviously be in your professional capacity or in your personal life, ⁓ but something you're excited about right now as we sit in the middle of 2026? ⁓ Sreedhar Peddineni: So I'm just excited about it's almost like I'm building a company and I'm also back in school in terms of learning. So I'm in my ⁓ now and I've been around for some time, but the time seems so very different now with AI. And I think a lot of are still catching up based on my of things. But the pace of is something that I've never seen. So it's almost like for someone who is technically inclined and inclined about some things like this, it's like living in a wonderland right now. So I'm super excited about that. And in the same token, I'm also scared by it in terms of, you know, in the long term disruption that it can cause to employment. And I have two boys who are entering workforce right now. What does it mean for them? Brian Aucoin: That's great. Sreedhar Peddineni: 20 years down the line, 30 years down the line. I don't know the answers to that. I worry about it sometimes, but you know what? By worrying, I'm not going to change anything. It's not in my control. So just the best in terms of learn and have the on your side. ⁓ Don't be behind. ⁓ So. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, I think that's where I land as well. I think AI's got a brand problem right now, just as a general thing of how people feel, that they feel negatively towards it. That doesn't mean that the tools that they use or their daily interactions don't have utility, because I think they really do. They're just trying to find what feels good to them, what impacts their work life, what impacts their personal life. Sreedhar Peddineni: Mm-hmm. Brian Aucoin: But I think the one thing that at least marketers and people in business know is that you can't put your head in the sand, right? This happened with digital media coming in, this happened with mobile. ⁓ You can't just turn away, right? It's happening. So you have to learn it and be part of it and then figure out, know, what, how does it work for you? Sreedhar Peddineni: Yep. Yep, that's the million dollar question. How do you get it to work for you? Yep. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, I agree. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Sridhar. It was great to have you on the Marketing Brief podcast. This has been a brief conversation with We really enjoyed having you part of this. And ⁓ to the listeners out there, stay curious.