We recently had the privilege of sitting down for an interview with Tino at TAG Radio. Todd Wilson and myself were on the call to discuss our technology stack and core technical competencies that SalesLoft is bringing to the market. Checkout the transcript below or listen to the radio interview over at TAG.
Tino: Chris and Todd, thanks for joining me on Tech Talk today.
Chris: Thanks for having us. We’re really excited to be here.
Todd: Thank you.
Tino: You guys have been quite visible in the last year, at
least in TAG circles between the top 40 recognition and then
being a finalist in the business launch. I assume both of those
things got you some additional exposure. Did it help at all to
be recognized in those programs?Chris: Oh, absolutely. First and foremost, thank you for the
recognition. I think everyone on the teams is really flattered
over the community’s recognition of what we’re trying to achieve
and what we’re trying to bring to the Georgia technology scene.
We’ve seen a ton of great exposure.The feedback from the community has been amazing, and then the
reach of TAG has been more impressive as well. We’ve had a huge
amount of prospects and people in our.Tino: That’s great. We’re using it over here at TAG, at getting
daily job reports for one thing, which is very interesting.
We’ll assume that some of the folks that are listening in today
don’t know what SalesLoft is, so let’s get stated there and talk
a little bit about the company.Chris: Yeah, absolutely. We’re a B2B sales intelligence company. What
we do is that we hook into your CRM, and we pull out the
company’s and prospects that matter most to you, and provide
real-time relevant contextual data about them, by email, by your
CRM, by our online web application, via mobile. So we’re
delivering to you the information that you care the most about
on your prospects and company.Tino: The way I thought about this because TAG has a CRM system
that we use with almost 17,000 members now and a whole slew-load
of prospects. I’m trying to go deeper in terms of these
companies. I think as you described it to me before, I think
that value that you add if you go on a lot of these systems your
basic piece of information in terms of the individual or the
company.But as I understand it, SalesLoft actually goes much deeper in
terms of the kinds of data that you can provide your clients.
Is that right?Chris: Yeah, absolutely. When we first saw the product we really
wanted to look at what were the great consumption models out
there. If people used Twitter, [inaudible 00:02:18] Facebook,
people use news aggregates like Google news to get all this
great data about the companies and people they care about.But this big disconnect has always been, the data is not truly
who you’re selling to. It’s based on your social media. It’s
based on your personal interest.We go into CRM, and we mine out the people that you care about
professionally. That’s a huge value prop for us. In terms of
your original question, we go much deeper than sort of the face
level data you see out there. We’re going down and finding
internal content published by this company.
We’re finding the external news.We’ll go as high level as The New York Times, as low level as a
local marketing publication in a small city. So we have a very
wide range of data that we pull from that can deliver great
information on these companies and people.Tino: Well, being that we have a lot of listeners that have some
knowledge of technology, without going too deep into the
technology, I think you have some of your own validity
proprietary technology. Have you guys developed this or is it
technology that you’ve actually purchased? What is it that’s
unique about it?Chris: Yeah, absolutely. We are leveraging the latest big data
technologies including Hadoop and MapReduce, and apply them
towards our product. We’re really big on natural linguistic
programming, NLP, and machine learning. So, we’ve taken a lot of
these PhD, academic level concepts and applied them in our
product. This allows us to find contextual data
about those people.Tino: Yeah. So, talk about your marketplace. I think we know
some of the groups like SalesForce, that you’re kind of embedded
with in that. But who’s your target audience?Chris: Right now our target audience is – we’re looking for a sales
organization that ranges from two reps to 100 reps that has a
complex sale. They’ve used an inside sales organization and
they’re technologically leaning forward. We are a tech-forward
product, and we like tech-forward clients.Tino: Yeah, that was interesting, because when you presented at
the business launch I think that was made clear. So, there’s an
assumption and probably a reality that some of the biggest
enterprise companies may have more ability to dig deeper in
terms of their clients and they have relationship managers with
very much probably lower ratios, and that sort of thing. You
guys are really helping those first stage and second stage, and
growth companies I would guess, right?Chris: Yeah, absolutely and one thing we really wanted to focus on, is
that we really want to provide great data on small and medium
businesses as well. That’s not done in the marketplace
currently. So, we put a lot of effort and energy into our
technology’s gap stack to insure that, if you’re selling to
small and medium business and you’re a growing company, we’re
going to give you great data, just like we would give you great
data on a Fortune 2000 company.Tino: You guys mentioned earlier big data and I think that term
is kind of like the new Cloud, and before that virtualization
and those kinds of buzz words, if you will, going around. How
would you define big data?Todd: This is Todd. I’ll take a stab at that one. Big data is when
it’s at a scale where normal technologies that you might apply
to an application like ours, just it won’t really do the task.
So we’re leveraging massive distributive computing to look
deeper into the data than the marketplace has been so far.Tino: That’s good. That’s really helpful. So, Todd, do you have
any partnerships with any other tech companies? How does that
work?Todd: We’re working closely with Microsoft and Bing to create
exclusive data sources. We’re also reaching out to all the
CRM’s such as SalesForce, Sugar CRM, and Microsoft Dynamics, so
we can integrate better with them, and get that data.Chris: Absolutely. I’m going to piggy back on that one. We view
securing partnerships with the greatest data providers in the
world like Microsoft and Google. It’s one of our
biggest priorities. We’re in talks with them today to help us
deliver the best content possible to our customers.Tino: I think you mentioned before that you’re involved with
Google as well?Todd: Yeah, absolutely. We are involved two different angles,
including trying to get our content better distributed out to
the Google applications platform, along with really sort of
leveraging some of their internal API’s to help drive better
data.Tino: Well, it seems like the market is massive in terms of
potential for these companies that have two to 100 sales people
in the U.S. and beyond. How much competition is out there in
this space?Chris: So, we’re now considering our major competition a company
called InsideView. They’ve been around since 2005, raised about
$35 million in venture rounds. What they’ve done is they’ve
built a mediocre product on top of a great sales and marketing
organization. Our focus for our company is to build an
incredible product with an incredible sales and marketing
organization, and that’s our market differentiator.We always put time, effort, and energy in the product and it’s
always number one to us. It shows because we’re pushing new code
to our production every night. Our product gets better and
better every day. I think we’re hungry and we’re thirsty and it
shows in the marketplace.Tino: Somebody, I guess probably one of your leaders, at least,
is going through a program in Colorado. Put you on the spot
here, but you’re definitely an Atlanta company, right?Chris: Absolutely yes. Yeah, we are out on part of a national
incubator program, [inaudible 00:08:17]. We are 100% Atlanta-
based, and I think we’re all actually Atlanta natives in the
company. We love TAG and we love the city.Tino: Well, we love you guys being here. How long have you been
operating in this company and are you on target?Todd: Yeah. We’ve been around since September of last year. We had an
initial version of product, which we had about 20 companies on
and about 40 to 60 sales reps. We got some great feedback over
how to consume data, and how they want certain kinds of data. We
took all this wonderful feedback and turned it into our second
iteration of our product, which we call the SalesLoft Stream.That’s going to be launched coming here. The 2nd of July is the
day it launches, and that is going to be all these great
practices and lessons learned from the first product applied to
this new, I’m going to say, beautiful, new product.Tino: Well, guys thanks for joining me at Tech Talk today.
Congratulations on your progress and good luck. I’m sure you
don’t need it because I’m sure it will be terrific, but on the
up-coming launch.Chris: Great. Thank you so much and thank you for having us on your
show. We appreciate all the love and attention from TAG. It’s
been wonderful.
