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Chewing Glass: Stories From an Early-Stage Entrepreneur · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:16
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 0:17
  Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 0:20
  I'm your host, Matt Heinz.
• 0:21
  Very excited to have y'all here.
• 0:24
  I can't believe it, Ben.
• 0:25
  It is Memorial Day weekend already.
• 0:27
  I feel like I just watched the Rose Bowl.
• 0:28
  I'm serious.
• 0:29
  Like it just, I'm so, um, and here we are.
• 0:33
  But, it's all good.
• 0:34
  If you are joining us live today, in the middle of your workday and
• 0:37
  work week thanks for being here.
• 0:38
  We're excited to have you here.
• 0:39
  If you wouldn't mind, saying hi in the comments, we'll be able to see that if you
• 0:43
  have a question, if you have a rebuttal, if you have a rant based on what we
• 0:45
  talked about today, we'd love to see that.
• 0:47
  We can bring your comment up on screen and we'll have some fun with it that way.
• 0:50
  If you're watching and listening on demand, thank you so much for doing so.
• 0:54
  You can find every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio on demand
• 0:57
  at salespipelineradio.com.
• 0:59
  Very excited to have with us today.
• 1:01
  B2B legend, co-founder of Peel, graduate of Techstars 2024 Ben Henson.
• 1:07
  How you doing man?
• 1:08
  Ben Henson: I'm doing great, pal.
• 1:09
  I'm doing great.
• 1:09
  Matt Heinz: What did I miss in that list?
• 1:11
  What did I miss?
• 1:12
  Proud University of Vermont graduate.
• 1:14
  Ben Henson: Yes.
• 1:15
  Proud dad to two wonderful kids, an 8 and 4-year-old.
• 1:19
  Happy.
• 1:19
  Happy gardener.
• 1:21
  Happy for Spring, Live in Bend, Oregon.
• 1:25
  Have never been able to even consider leaving B2B.
• 1:28
  Demand gen. No.
• 1:29
  We're stuck here now over the last 25 years.
• 1:32
  I think this is it for me.
• 1:33
  I think we're here.
• 1:34
  This is it.
• 1:34
  The destination has been reached.
• 1:37
  Matt Heinz: So I wanna talk about Peel.
• 1:38
  I wanna talk about entrepreneurship.
• 1:40
  I wanna talk about the arc of your career and what you have done.
• 1:44
  You were at a, I wouldn't say startup, but just a tech company
• 1:48
  running sales for 11 plus years.
• 1:50
  Yeah.
• 1:50
  And now you're running a business.
• 1:52
  And that's a big change.
• 1:53
  I wanna talk about that.
• 1:53
  But first you mentioned that you're a gardener, like that
• 1:55
  could mean a lot of things.
• 1:56
  What are we putting in the dirt.
• 1:58
  Ben Henson: Well, my wife is a master gardener, so a lot
• 2:00
  of times I'm just the laborer.
• 2:03
  But we have a huge greenhouse.
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  Bend, Oregon is a very wintry climate.
• 2:07
  It's a snow centric town for.
• 2:10
  You know, five or six months of the year.
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  So we have, multiple year old tomatoes that are, vines this thick.
• 2:16
  Mm-hmm.
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  We grow kale, we grow all the different hot peppers.
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  We do all sorts of stuff.
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  And I'm actually a pretty big hunter as well.
• 2:24
  So we have this fantasy dream of, hunting and harvesting the meat and
• 2:28
  growing the vegetables and our little hippie enclave in the middle of Bend.
• 2:33
  Matt Heinz: That's awesome.
• 2:34
  That's really fun.
• 2:35
  Yeah.
• 2:35
  That's cool.
• 2:35
  Yeah.
• 2:35
  So like I said, you were at Integrate for a very long time.
• 2:38
  Mm-hmm.
• 2:39
  Rose through the ranks, running sales there.
• 2:41
  What went through your mind, 'cause I've been through this process as well, why the
• 2:46
  hell did you decide to start a business?
• 2:48
  What made you decide that going from employee to entrepreneur was a good idea?
• 2:55
  Ben Henson: I have this affliction where I'm an eternal optimist and I
• 2:59
  just can only really see things through rose colored glasses in a lot of ways.
• 3:04
  And it was a couple different things, man.
• 3:06
  I mean, before 11 years at Integrate, I had worked nearly eight years at
• 3:10
  TechTarget, went through their public offering and sort of went through
• 3:13
  that process and worked with Craig Rosenberg and Scott Albro at TOPO.
• 3:17
  Then Focus, which is when we first met, which was 2008, 2009, something like that.
• 3:23
  And then, yeah, 11 and a half years at Integrate.
• 3:26
  And when I was exiting there, I was thinking about two different
• 3:29
  things I was thinking about.
• 3:32
  How can I create something for myself, right, where I can be
• 3:36
  more in control of my own destiny?
• 3:37
  I went through private equity acquisition through Integrate.
• 3:40
  I went through an IPO at TechTarget.
• 3:42
  I went through a strategic acquisition of Focus, and in each of those
• 3:46
  different cases, I just felt out of control of my own destiny.
• 3:50
  Yeah.
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  And I couldn't actually be in charge of what happened and would
• 3:53
  I be able to profit in the good results that I had helped create.
• 3:58
  Matt Heinz: Right.
• 3:58
  Ben Henson: So that was kind of like one part of it.
• 4:00
  And the other part was I had a really.
• 4:02
  Great partner who is willing to let me take a risk and is a person who
• 4:07
  has insurance and makes a good income and sort of like, so the risk seemed
• 4:11
  a little bit lighter and it seemed like I could kind of try and grab
• 4:15
  that brass ring a little bit better.
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  And then the third was the market opportunity.
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  So when a guy spends 25 years in demand gen, understanding
• 4:23
  that intricacy and where there's opportunity felt very clear to me.
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  It just felt very obvious and it wasn't creating a new demand gen
• 4:34
  product necessarily was how can we actually give the buyer what they
• 4:39
  would be interested in consuming?
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  And how can we remove friction from a part of a process that
• 4:44
  has gotten so overwhelmed that it's in jeopardy of crashing.
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  The whole thing, the whole go to market motion is in jeopardy
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  of being crashed because we've overdone all these different things.
• 4:55
  Yeah.
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  And when my co-founders and I were iterating on later versions of Peel.
• 5:02
  It really became obvious to all of us that, you know, there's a way to do
• 5:06
  things differently and there's a way to be helpful and useful and that just
• 5:12
  seemed too good to pass up and then, you know, you meet a couple like-minded
• 5:15
  guys that are animals and away we go.
• 5:18
  Matt Heinz: That's awesome.
• 5:19
  Yeah.
• 5:19
  Your experience in go-to-market roles and in MarTech, I think really
• 5:25
  made you uniquely positioned to sort of see the problem, right?
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  And every good product, every good opportunity starts with
• 5:31
  like a problem not being solved.
• 5:33
  Can you talk a little bit about that?
• 5:35
  Ben Henson: Sure.
• 5:35
  Absolutely.
• 5:36
  Yeah.
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  I mean, that to us was really the biggest thing.
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  So in each of those different roles I've had at each of those companies,
• 5:42
  I've always worked with marketers trying to solve marketing issues.
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  So I've been a seller living at the intersection between sales and marketing
• 5:50
  and how difficult that job is and how there isn't real opportunity to work
• 5:55
  outside of the traditional confines.
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  Now, in the last two years, AI's come onto the scene and a whole
• 6:01
  bunch of different things have happened, but the actual process of a
• 6:05
  organization and an individual having a conversation still is disjointed.
• 6:10
  So as we looked at it, what we originally thought was the part of
• 6:15
  the process that seems to be ripe for opportunity isn't the demand gen.
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  I know I can capture as many CMOs at this size organization as I want.
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  I can get 'em to download a white paper.
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  I could get 'em to go to a webinar.
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  I know what events they're gonna go to.
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  I can find the people.
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  But how can I actually engage with them in a useful way and how can I help them?
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  And that's what the opportunity rang loud and clear to us.
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  And the buyer has told us what she and he have wanted, and
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  that's, leave us the hell alone.
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  Don't come at us.
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  So with AI, was there an asynchronous way to go in there at the time that
• 6:53
  they're actually thinking about this one problem that I could solve for them?
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  Is there a way for me to engage with them in a meaningful way that's actually gonna
• 7:01
  move their process along a little bit?
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  Mm-hmm.
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  And then answer the question that's never been answered, which is.
• 7:07
  How do they actually feel about my thing after they've gotten a little taste of it?
• 7:12
  Yeah.
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  After they've read a white paper, did they think that was a thinly veiled
• 7:15
  sales conversation that they just had?
• 7:17
  Yeah.
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  Or did they think that that was actually useful?
• 7:20
  Right.
• 7:21
  Matt Heinz: We're talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with, Peel co-founder
• 7:25
  Ben Henson, animal Welfare enthusiast.
• 7:27
  We'll get into that a little bit later as well.
• 7:30
  Yeah.
• 7:30
  Um, you are you.
• 7:31
  And so, and, and we're using, I mean, just full disclosure, we're
• 7:34
  using Peel as well, like you using it for testimonial development,
• 7:37
  using it for customer onboarding.
• 7:38
  There's so many interesting use cases for this.
• 7:40
  I assume you guys are still in what I think Sangram, will describe as
• 7:44
  like, problem market fit, right?
• 7:46
  And saying like, we know there's a problem.
• 7:47
  Mm-hmm.
• 7:48
  Is there a market for solving that problem?
• 7:50
  And how do we monetize a market to solve that problem?
• 7:53
  So it's a little bit of a game of Jenga you play at those early stages.
• 7:58
  Talk about that process a little bit because I think a lot of people
• 8:00
  listening to this show, like, you know, have not started a business, have not
• 8:03
  been grappling with that firsthand.
• 8:05
  Just, I mean, don't want you to give away any secret sauce, but
• 8:07
  like, talk about that balancing act.
• 8:11
  Ben Henson: It's incredibly difficult when I started at Integrate, we were
• 8:15
  a B2C company and we very quickly were rolling into B2B and sort of
• 8:19
  had to create a market for that.
• 8:21
  And that was, you know, lead orchestration or lead management.
• 8:25
  And the great Scott Vaughn and others sort of helped frame that conversation.
• 8:28
  So I do have some experience in trying to create a market, but the
• 8:32
  challenge that we face today is.
• 8:36
  AI is a mandate with every CMO worldwide pushing down onto their organization, but.
• 8:43
  That means nothing.
• 8:44
  That's saying like, use technology.
• 8:47
  Right?
• 8:47
  Right.
• 8:48
  So it becomes a question of like, where is that efficacy?
• 8:52
  What's the priority for them right now, et cetera.
• 8:54
  So we have this friction in being an AI company when everyone's interested in
• 9:00
  AI, but also thinks that they understand and how to use AI in, in myriad ways.
• 9:05
  So that.
• 9:06
  An interesting market force that happens.
• 9:09
  And then the second thing that we're really learning more and more about
• 9:13
  that has been more of a friction point than we planned on is our tool can be
• 9:17
  as great as it is, but if they, the marketers aren't getting it out to
• 9:23
  the market, then people don't see it.
• 9:26
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 9:26
  Ben Henson: So being able to have ownership and influence over things
• 9:31
  outside of our control has been probably the most interesting
• 9:36
  challenge in the whole process once we've actually onboarded a client.
• 9:39
  Mm-hmm.
• 9:40
  It's actually easier in the sales process.
• 9:42
  'cause when you're talking about it, it's a lot easier than saying,
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  okay, now we need ownership of, we gotta get nurture emails out.
• 9:47
  We got to, you know, we gotta hang off your page.
• 9:50
  So now you have.
• 9:51
  Your web people sort of getting involved, et cetera.
• 9:53
  So it's just a bit of, a bit more of the complexity in addition to
• 9:58
  finding that product market fit.
• 10:00
  The, last interesting thing for us is we have such a horizontal product.
• 10:04
  When you think about.
• 10:05
  Who all would you want to have a conversation with?
• 10:08
  That list gets real long, real fast.
• 10:10
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 10:10
  Ben Henson: And so stacking the priority and the intent around, okay, this is
• 10:16
  the thing that we have to go solve for.
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  Let's go learn how to do this well, and then.
• 10:20
  Bring that out into other spaces has been an interesting challenge in of itself.
• 10:25
  I bet it has.
• 10:26
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 10:26
  I'll definitely encourage folks to check out peel.ai.
• 10:28
  I think there's so many different use cases for this and definitely,
• 10:31
  you know, give it a whirl.
• 10:32
  Let Ben know what you think along the way.
• 10:34
  I wanna change gears a little bit and just talk about life.
• 10:39
  And just finding your path.
• 10:41
  You know, you've had a long, successful career in Go to Market in
• 10:44
  the midst of your time at Integrate, moved from the Bay Area up to Bend.
• 10:47
  Talk about life design a little bit as the way you think about it.
• 10:50
  Mm-hmm.
• 10:51
  You know, in terms of like, you just, even in this, in our last
• 10:53
  10 minutes, you've talked about, your amazing partner, your kids.
• 10:57
  Living in Bend, spending time outside I mean, work's important obviously.
• 11:02
  And when you're starting something, you have a passion for it.
• 11:04
  And I know firsthand it can be all consuming, but if it's all
• 11:07
  consuming, then that doesn't lead to a very good life, quite honestly.
• 11:11
  Mm-hmm.
• 11:12
  So I just would love to hear you for, for others that are in some version
• 11:15
  of that journey, maybe early stage of it kinda what have you learned
• 11:20
  Ben Henson: When I was getting ready to exit, Integrate.
• 11:23
  I created a mind map for myself and anyone that's interested, I'd
• 11:26
  be more than happy to share it.
• 11:28
  We can link it in the comments of this post on LinkedIn.
• 11:31
  But the, idea to me was.
• 11:35
  I don't know what the answers are, but I can think of a bunch of questions
• 11:39
  and a bunch of those questions that came up to me were lifestyle.
• 11:43
  Do I wanna make a comfortable living and try and figure out
• 11:47
  a way to work 25 hours a week?
• 11:49
  Do I want to try and go grab a brass ring and create financial
• 11:54
  independence for my family and myself?
• 11:56
  Do I want to incorporate mentorship, which is something I really
• 12:01
  enjoy into my professional world, or do I wanna pull that back?
• 12:05
  Do I wanna work for somebody else?
• 12:07
  And if I work for somebody else, what do I want that opportunity to be?
• 12:11
  Do I want it to be safe and secure in an enterprise, or do I want
• 12:14
  it to be wilder more chaotic, but highly creative in a startup?
• 12:19
  Right?
• 12:19
  And I just kept asking myself more and more questions, and ultimately, through
• 12:24
  my questioning, even without answering those questions, it became abundantly
• 12:29
  clear to me what I wanted to do.
• 12:31
  And the thing, the catalyst for me ended up being, do I want to be a W2 anymore?
• 12:37
  I could answer that question as, no, I did not wanna work for someone anymore.
• 12:41
  I wanted to chart my own path.
• 12:44
  Yeah.
• 12:44
  So that was my first clear decision that I made, and then I was able to very quickly
• 12:50
  build a whole bunch of other things.
• 12:52
  Do I work in an advisory for myself?
• 12:54
  Do I start a company, et cetera?
• 12:57
  So I think that to me, it's asking the right questions, even if
• 13:02
  you're not capable of answering them right now for yourself.
• 13:05
  That is so incredibly useful and impactful.
• 13:08
  And because I was able to do that at times, when I get out of
• 13:12
  balance, which I'm often out of balance as a founder I can actually
• 13:15
  say, okay, this is intentional.
• 13:17
  This is a period of time.
• 13:18
  This is what I'm doing for it.
• 13:19
  I can name it, I can talk to my wife about it.
• 13:22
  I can even talk to my kids about it.
• 13:23
  Sort of like make this stuff known and understood.
• 13:27
  And I'm also, a huge fan of constant evolution of myself and who I am.
• 13:34
  I don't wanna be known as this person who I was 10 years ago, or 15 years ago,
• 13:39
  or even six months ago, because I'm not, I'm trying to evolve every single day.
• 13:44
  And a lot of that means like Monday I'm taking off and, my family and I
• 13:48
  are going camping for three days up at a lake and it's gonna be awesome.
• 13:52
  Mm-hmm.
• 13:52
  And I'm probably gonna take the week of July 4th off, and that was awesome.
• 13:56
  The first.
• 13:57
  10 months of this business until really probably February.
• 14:01
  I was working pretty close to a hundred hours a week probably, and I got way
• 14:06
  the hell out of balance and I got really screwed up and I was having actual,
• 14:10
  like physical things happening and my co-founders were having the same thing.
• 14:13
  So we, we realized and we were able to adjust and recalibrate
• 14:18
  almost in real time to say, okay.
• 14:21
  Nothing's gonna get resolved if I don't send that 97th email today.
• 14:26
  You know, it's okay.
• 14:27
  Like I can peel, I can peel sort of a couple layers back here and see the
• 14:32
  goodness, see the forest for the trees.
• 14:34
  And I think just that actual perspective of looking around for a minute has
• 14:38
  been really, really good for me.
• 14:40
  Mm-hmm.
• 14:40
  And then the last thing would be.
• 14:43
  There's certain non-negotiables that became negotiable.
• 14:46
  Physical fitness for me was one where I had really prioritized
• 14:51
  that for a long period of time.
• 14:52
  I stopped doing it.
• 14:53
  I was getting depressed, I was getting more anxious.
• 14:56
  I was, I. Sort of just work, work, work, work, work.
• 14:58
  I've refound those things, those cores for me that helped me throughout my
• 15:04
  day and now I realize their value more than I think I did before.
• 15:08
  Matt Heinz: That's awesome.
• 15:10
  Thank you for sharing all that.
• 15:11
  I think that was great.
• 15:11
  I think it's definitely, to me it's a journey.
• 15:13
  It's a journey that is forward progress, but not always in that direction.
• 15:17
  Sometimes there's up, you know, sometimes there's up and down, sometimes
• 15:20
  there's wobbling where you are.
• 15:22
  Sometimes it's a little backward.
• 15:23
  But I think a lot of this is, you know, it's all written in pencil man.
• 15:27
  I mean, you know where you wanna spend your time, what you value,
• 15:30
  different seasons of your life, maybe different parts of that.
• 15:32
  But I liked your idea of just being intentional about what
• 15:35
  those things are, communicating that with the people you love.
• 15:38
  And, you know, being willing to, to adjust and, your concept of having questions
• 15:43
  that you don't have the answers to.
• 15:44
  I think it was Donald Rumsfeld talked about those as the known unknowns, right?
• 15:48
  Things you don't know, but things you know you don't know.
• 15:50
  And that's valuable, right?
• 15:52
  Because not only if you name those, you're more likely to see them and identify
• 15:55
  them later or to know that, like kind of put them in perspective and say like
• 16:00
  how many of those are really important and what else is really important in
• 16:03
  your life that you wanna prioritize.
• 16:04
  So, totally.
• 16:06
  I appreciate it.
• 16:06
  Well, we're out time for today.
• 16:07
  Um, definitely Everybody check out peel.ai, Ben, where else
• 16:11
  can people know more about you?
• 16:12
  Ben Henson: Yeah it's get peel.ai.
• 16:14
  Right.
• 16:14
  Thank you.
• 16:15
  Yeah, yeah, no problem.
• 16:16
  And yeah we're on LinkedIn.
• 16:17
  We're all over LinkedIn.
• 16:18
  We haven't gotten back on the other socials.
• 16:20
  That's one of those balance things.
• 16:22
  Yeah.
• 16:23
  In action that that we've chosen one social platform and that's where we live.
• 16:27
  So we.
• 16:28
  I love to see anybody, any feedback anyone has.
• 16:30
  We just put a really, really incredible update on Get peel.ai, which is really
• 16:36
  leaning into the whole notion of vibe coding and vibe marketing, and you can
• 16:40
  build a conversation all by yourself.
• 16:42
  So any feedback, boy we'd just love to hear it and any other way that
• 16:46
  we can ever help we're here for it.
• 16:47
  Thanks Matt so much, man.
• 16:48
  Matt Heinz: Thank you so, so much for being here.
• 16:49
  Yeah.
• 16:50
  Thanks everyone for listening and watching.
• 16:51
  We'll see you next week, another episode.
• 16:52
  Sales Pipeline Radio.
• 16:53
  Ben Henson: Happy.
• 16:54
  Happy Memorial Day.
• 16:55
  Thanks.
• 16:56
  Matt Heinz: Have good weekend everybody.
• 16:56
  Ben Henson: See ya.