The Exchanges

Q about this, like, you know, we all have this problem. We have like, 10,000 PowerPoints created over, you know, two, three years in the beginning of a company, and we never know where we store them, or what worked in terms of closing a sale, or whatnot, and when we need them today, we don't know where to find them. That's like one big use case for your platform, right?

A That's a, that's a big use case. I mean, from, from SMBs to big enterprise companies, the same is happening everywhere. Salespeople are downloading content. They're changing slides. They store it on their hard drives. You have box, you have SharePoint, you have other, you know, shared drives, and it's just a big, big mess, and Shobat, we want to be the single source of truth for salespeople, making it easier for marketing to create what we call buyer experiences, so think about, um, from simple folder file structures in a branded environment to easily find the content, to really guided selling, highly Active ways of presenting materials, sharing materials, asking questions to the customer, and then getting to that right piece of content. And we want to do that wherever a salesperson needs to get the job done. So, um, we have customers who have big inside sales teams. Um, and who mainly do their work behind the laptop or in Salesforce or in the CRM system. So we have integrations with Salesforce and Gmail plugins and Outlook plugins.

AI assessment note: “That's a, that's a big use case.”

Q That's good. Okay, well, that's great. Let's, let's dig into kind of how you've driven the success. So take us back to year one. When did you launch the company?

A We launched company, 2011, uh, on the back of the first company I founded, uh, it was called in the pocket. You mentioned it in your introduction service business. Um, I founded a company together with Louie, uh, my co-founder and we had a, so app developer service business. We had companies coming to us with various requests at that time. Again, it's 2010. I, iPhone was just, you know, I think three years out, something like that. iPad was just launched or about to launch. And so a lot of companies came to us like, Hey, we want to get our content on mobile devices, or we want to have products and services optimized for these devices, or please develop as an application. And so we had a company come to us, say, Hey, we have a sales team. We have a big trade show. We want to stop using paper. Can you develop us an application to make them Present materials on the booth and easily share it with the customer. And as we started looking into that problem and how, how, yeah, that company used, um, content and what the challenges were, we actually discovered like, Hey, this is like, it's not, You know, it's not just a problem for this company. Like there's many companies that create a ton of content that have, that are struggling with equipping reps relevant.

AI assessment note: “We launched company, 2011, uh, on the back of the first company I founded”

Q Interesting. Interesting. That's great. How, how did you, did you kind of nail that right off the spot or did it take you some editing to figure out ramp up periods and how many leads to give them and how many SDRs per AE?

A I would say it, it, it took a lot of, uh, going back and forth. And actually, to be honest, we're, you're still in, in many ways, I think as a sales organization, you're always going, you're not making massive changes, but you're, you're always, I think you always need to be focused on fine tuning the engine and seeing what works and what doesn't work. And we've made some For example, we've made some changes in terms of, um, what is the, what is the cutoff point for mid-market and enterprise in the past? What, what shop had has mid-market. So that's zero to 2000, uh, employees. Then enterprise is 2000 and beyond, but then we also have a global enterprise account team. And those are like four people focused on, um, the really, um, yeah, those are named accounts between the four of them. They have about a, I would say a About a hundred, probably, you know, a hundred, a hundred accounts that were focused on, on, um, either closing or expanding. And, and so depending on obviously, and that then trickles down to how you market, how the BDRs work.

AI assessment note: “I would say it, it, it took a lot of, uh, going back and forth.”

Q Can you be specific though? Give me like name one feature that these bigger customers appreciate that these other competitors haven't developed.

A Uh, I mean, uh, there's, I, I think the first, the very first feature back in the day, I'm now talking, uh, seven years ago, uh, was the fact that Showpad was a fully branded environment. You could really, you could basically create your own application. Uh, at that time, if you wanted to have your own app on your, on your, uh, mobile device or iPad, you had to go to the app store and the whole submission and companies were creating their own apps, but Showpad, you could through an, through an interface, a web interface, Marketing could create, um, their own buyer experience at that time already, backgrounds, own logo, create this really, um, yeah, interactive environment for sellers to sell, and it was something at that time, it sounds simple, but nobody had it, and it was quite, it was quite hard back in the day. Remember, the first applications would constantly crash on your phone, uh, and on your iPad, and we're talking here B to B, um, Enterprise. We're selling to bigger companies. They don't want to equip their sales team with something. And at that time we were mobile focused. Now today we're a bigger platform and we do more. But at that time, the fact that we had a enterprise grade application, which was super stable, super snappy, simple interface, it had all the content, branded environment, it's not, it wasn't like that we had one magic feature that really triggered …

AI assessment note: “the very first feature... was the fact that Showpad was a fully branded environment.”