The Role of Technology in Relationship-Driven Sales

Ashley Kent (00:00): Hello, I am Ashley Kent with Growth DX, joined today by Jeff Feldgois, co-founder and CEO of Revealed, who is building sales intelligence specifically for teams selling into healthcare. So this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart and what I live and breathe every single day. It is such a uniquely relationship-driven industry.

Ashley Kent (00:25): And you know, at the same time, there's now such an incredible amount of technology that's out there that can help make our sales process smarter and more efficient. So I'm really excited to dive into the balance of what that looks like, particularly across B2B healthcare. And Jeff, we are just thrilled to have you join us today.

Jeff Feldgoise (00:44): Thank you, Ashley. Really excited to be here with you and chat about this topic.

Ashley Kent (00:49): Perfect. Well why don't you give everyone a little bit more on yourself, kinda what brought you here and what brought you to build Revealed.

Jeff Feldgoise (00:58): Sure thing. So I've been a builder throughout my career for the last 10, 10 or so years building in the health tech vertical. And before that, I built in a related vertical from a challenging perspective, the financial services fintech space. So I've had a lot of experience leading product teams, engineering organizations, and selling throughout my career, selling software services to large organizations.

Jeff Feldgoise (01:27): My last venture, I was part of the management team of medical weight management company, a health tech, that sold to clinicians, practices, hospitals all around the world. We were in about 60 different countries. We had about a hundred thousand patients on the platform. And it was really, really hard. And so we built Revealed. My co-founder Kareem Malik and myself built Revealed to really support our prior selves and make our lives easier to bring technologies into these large healthcare organizations. We are also doing it for all the people that we know, all the other founders out there, operators who are really trying to navigate what's really a challenging thing to do. So we're really excited to make everyone's lives easier and shine some light on this dark, dark opaque world.

Ashley Kent (02:23): It is definitely that. And I think it was one of the things that I massively misunderstood when I first jumped into the health tech space. Interestingly enough, I actually came from the financial services space prior to this and investment world. And you could get right into decision makers a lot faster. And I think, diving into the healthcare space, we had the amount of passion that is behind health tech and the solutions that people are building is so invigorating and that's what gets people excited to get into healthcare. It's what got me excited to get into healthcare. But it can become incredibly daunting and just can really beat someone down to get into the process of healthcare sales and particularly in B2B as you're selling into what, like you were saying, whether it's provider organizations, health systems, payers, it is a completely unique sales cycle and no payer organization is the same as the other. And it completely is dictated by what's happening in policy. What tailwinds are we attaching to. And so I'm curious from your perspective, being on the operator side prior to this, you know, as someone who may be shifting into healthcare or dipping their toe as a first-time founder, selling into B2B health, you know, it's not a typical B2B sales cycle. What did you experience firsthand that made selling into healthcare different than maybe your even fintech years when you were operating within there?

Jeff Feldgoise (03:45): Yeah, they are quite different and very much agree with everything you just said. The organizations are extremely different. You know, hospital A is not the same as hospital B. One might be a nonprofit, one might be a for profit, they may be an individual organization, they may be part of a larger, a larger system, a nationwide system, for example. So you really do need to understand the organization. You need to understand what drives them, what obviously healthcare organizations are there to serve patients and drive health outcomes. But there's a lot of other things that motivate these organizations very differently from one to the other. So I would say first off, understanding the organization, understand how it's structured, understand the motivations and really what their missions are beyond just patient care I think is a very important thing to think about.

Ashley Kent (04:43): Yeah, I think that's one of the things that I mean, even down to, you know, you can identify it hard enough, I think, in healthcare, you can have different audiences. It's like, do we go into provider groups? Do we go into health systems? And then we have an arm, you know, that we could sell this directly into payers. And wow, look, we have employers too. And I think the even the focus of choosing the vertical itself can be such a challenge on the offset. And I've experienced that myself, because there is opportunity in different ways for you to partner with different organizations. So even after maybe you've decided on the vertical that you're going after, it can go into, you know, all right, say we've targeted provider organizations, but you know, their reimbursement model is gonna be the entire thing that dictates whether our solution is beneficial for them or not. Do they have a large patient panel there or, you know, are we fee for service? What does that look like? And how much kind of understanding of that does someone need to have, before you start actually going to market and solidifying that as you're figuring it out?

Jeff Feldgoise (05:42): Yeah, I think it's critical. And really I think that is the job of a founder, of an executive at a company that is going to be selling into the healthcare vertical to really understand where do you add value, where do you have the best fit in terms of what you're doing with what could be the different business models, you know, whether it's an ACO or whether it's something completely different. Maybe you should be selling into pharma. There's really I think no shortcut on that. You really just need to understand your business and then make some decisions about how to target the right market. And honestly, you know, our business Revealed, we're not trying to solve that problem for companies. We're really looking to say, okay, great, you have a market that you have figured out how you're gonna go after it, or rather this is a market that you want to go after. And then we're going to help you figure out how to go after it more effectively. Understanding the organizations that are in your TAM, understanding who the people are and how to reach those people. So it's I think it's really the job again of the executive, of the founder to make some of those hard decisions by obviously doing the hard work, talking to potential customers, doing the discovery, figuring out where the need is and really sort of honing in on the right sub segment of the healthcare market to go after because it is massive, right? Healthcare is massive and extremely diverse from pharma to payers to provider organizations of all different sizes.

Ashley Kent (07:19): One hundred percent. And so kind of zeroing in a little bit more on where you guys specifically focus in Revealed, how do you see the biggest challenge? Is it the length of the sales cycle, the number of stakeholders that are involved within this, the difficulty of figuring out who actually has authority? Is it getting into legal? Where are those roadblocks that you've seen actually once you've identified where you're going? All right, now we've got to go through this arduous process that we all talk about, that 18 to 24 month sales cycle. What do you see as the biggest challenge once you've made that decision?

Jeff Feldgoise (07:49): Yeah, so the sales cycle is long, no doubt. I think it's more of a symptom of the things that you need to do to bring a deal, a sale across the finish line in healthcare. And I'd say probably the biggest challenge I think is determining who are the right people that have the authority to move this through the process. And then being able to nurture those relationships, manage that process efficiently because you would prefer it not to take twenty four months, you would prefer it to be something that is somewhat faster. You may or may not be able to impact that, but you certainly can spend less of your own time. Sale by being organized and understanding what the lay of the land is within the organization that you're targeting, like whether you should even be targeting that organization at this point in time. Perhaps, they're going through an EPIC implementation and are really not going to be considering new technologies for six months. So then let's not spend our time focusing there right now. Let's focus on somebody else who is more ready to implement and has a stronger motivation. So I think it's being savvy about how the team's time is being spent and where it's being applied. I think there's no question the sale is complex. You're gonna have multiple decision makers involved no matter what. We see typically, you know, ten to thirty decision makers among our customers selling into large health systems, for example. So it's something that will take a sophisticated sales approach, but being organized is really going to help you, like I said, spend as little time as necessary in order to actually move the deal forward.

Ashley Kent (09:32): I love that. I mean good gosh, like ten to thirty people that you're having to navigate and work and, you know, to your point of being organized and finding that balance of like where do you keep the relationship human and leverage that and then where do we leverage technology to be able to then scale the things that allow us to stay human within there. And, you know, we hear all the time that healthcare is relationship driven, but we're talking ten to thirty stakeholders. From your perspective, what does that actually mean in reality? In the life of the day of someone who is working an account over these twelve, eighteen, twenty-four months? 'Cause it's not just knowing a bunch of people, to your point, it's staying organized and keeping that relationship nurtured and keeping it moving. What does that look like? And where have you seen it be really successful? Because that's a loose term, relationship driven, but what can that actually look like and to be successful?

Jeff Feldgoise (10:22): Yeah, yeah. So what does a relationship look like? It looks like building trust with a number of people on the other side of the table at the organization that you're selling into. So how do you have them gain confidence in you as a person that they can trust, as a solution that is going to benefit their organization and make them look good when it's done, right? Everybody is motivated by being successful within their organization, within their career, and they want to have confidence that what they're gonna be putting forward is something that's actually going to work, it's going to fit the way that their organization operates, it's gonna meet their security and information security requirements. So all of those things are important. Different things are important to different stakeholders. So back to understanding the organization and who has responsibility for what parts of the functions at the organization is extremely important because everybody is going to be caring about different things. Your clinical champion will care about the efficacy if this is something that's clinically oriented. Your financial stakeholder is gonna want to know what the ROI is, your head of IT security is going to wanna make sure that this checks all the boxes that are gonna keep them safe and out of trouble. So you really do have to think about their domains and what they care about and how you can again build trust that what you're doing is going to be a positive for them. So that's, you know, if you want call it relationship building, it takes you showing up to solve their problems, showing how you can solve their problems, and being a force for making things simple and understandable and beneficial for them.

Ashley Kent (12:19): One hundred percent. And I think about it from the marketing perspective too. I always say, I mean, marketing in B2B health is a completely different beast. We're not even in, say, your direct to consumer healthcare space where we're able to see attribution from, you know, this top of funnel thing happened, which led to this form fill, which then led to this. I mean, it is such a multi threaded experience and the role of marketing within there is to then help, within all of those different positioning statements that you're gonna have against all the different stakeholders, how are we showing up in those ways? How are we continuing to reinforce the trust? And that's just, once you even get that opportunity to have this in pipeline, then there's everything at the top of the funnel from your thought leadership, credibility. I mean, it's just all about trust to your point.

Jeff Feldgoise (13:00): For sure.

Jeff Feldgoise (13:01): For sure. You know, and to answer your question about the role of technology here, the relationship is very much a person-to-person thing. It's what I am saying and how I'm supporting the buyer, particularly the champion, as they're gonna be moving this through the organization. And the technology is in a supporting role. It is there to provide the details to help make the seller's job more efficient. It is in no way going to replace their judgment about what's going to be valuable and then also the really, you know, the solution and coming up with the creative options to be able to bring this technology into an organization that's unlike any other, right? And being able to put that together really is, I say, on the shoulders of a solution oriented seller who needs to be real in a lot of ways thinking like a product person. And, you know, my background has been in product and I think that's actually been a real benefit as I have sold into large organizations because you approach it really in a consultative sales approach and you're thinking about it from my buyer has a problem that I'm trying to solve.

Jeff Feldgoise (14:13): Yes, I have technology to sell them, but really what I'm trying to do is solve their problems in the best way possible. And I think that's really where sellers differentiate themselves, the really good sellers versus people that are, I'd say, being more transactional. So technology is there to support, it's not there to replace that, say that higher level solutioning or problem solving.

Ashley Kent (14:37): No, one hundred percent. And it's, you know, not having this like you're probably never gonna come in and say, here's exactly how we do it and here's how we work with you. You don't really get that power. It's gonna be the other way around and really building that solution together, which does allow you to have more of a relationship and a collaboration and stickiness ultimately versus you being just a transactional, you know, we do this thing with this widget and here's how we fit in and we can, you know, be just like anyone else, plug and play at the end of the day.

Jeff Feldgoise (15:02): Right.

Ashley Kent (15:03): Well, taking us kind of a little bit back on the prospecting side of things before we actually are getting in within enterprise healthcare, I think this is probably one of the most challenging spaces for a sales person. And I'm saying person because the number of different roles I've seen in sales that people are hiring from an SDR to you have a chief commercial officer who's owning this to someone in between. I mean, it is so challenging to get in the door.

Ashley Kent (15:35): With that and it depends on the organization. So if it's a super large, enterprise, payer organization that you're trying to get into, all the way down to a provider organization. Say it's a single provider group. I think one of the hardest challenges is in healthcare specifically, I see that they may not be active on LinkedIn. Email is not at all gonna be a channel that you're gonna be able to get into. Also titles are across the board. There is no consistency in titles, so from a targeting perspective and even leveraging technology, it can be really, really challenging to try and prospect and figure out who you need to be speaking to, how we're getting in there. And so, how have you seen that it's been effective to actually figure out who matters inside the account? And then maybe some ways to try and get the foot in the door? Or does it ultimately come down to hey, get me an intro, and that's going to be our only way to get in at the end of the day?

Jeff Feldgoise (16:28): The intros are helpful for sure.

Jeff Feldgoise (16:30): However it is not everything. We think that titles, as you're saying, are hypotheses about people that might be interesting, but really we have to figure out who has the responsibilities within the organization. And who you're looking for really differs based on what you're bringing to that organization. So if you're bringing an RCM solution, that's going to be completely different than if you're bringing, say, a radiology imaging solution. So really understanding what is it that I'm selling, who is my buying group from a responsibility perspective, right? Obviously there's gonna be somebody on the finance side, there'll probably be somebody that's championing on the clinical line perspective. There's going to be, like I said before, IT, security, all the different folks, but that group will be different depending on what you're selling. So we think about it in terms of, you know, identifying the buying group and then finding those people. And about forty percent to fifty percent are not on LinkedIn if you're talking about people that are in the clinical space. So figuring out where they do live online, getting an understanding of what their responsibilities are. You know, is this somebody that's sitting on the AI committee or not? Is this somebody that's got responsibility over decision making for this type of hardware purchase, for example. So really looking at what's going on in terms of job openings and how's the organization describing that and hiring managers, who's speaking at conferences and what are they talking about? It's typically going to be somebody who has a responsibility. So really looking for those signals that exist in the public domain or in other sources, bringing that information together, understanding and understanding the map of the organization. That's something that we do for our customers all the time.

Jeff Feldgoise (18:26): It's not straightforward that you're gonna look for the VP of RCM because that's not who the person's title is in all cases and very often you have to really look for who's got the responsibility within the organization.

Ashley Kent (18:41): I mean it's wildly nuanced. I mean, you just introduced, you know, fifteen to twenty different variables right there that someone, if you were doing this manually, I mean this would be their full time job just trying to cull together, you know, the story and understanding that. And so from a technology perspective, I think that has been what has been so interesting today of how do we leverage technology to, you know, pull that information for anything that is public and, you know, something that would take us as humans, you know, days and days to pull together, leveraging the tech to surface that so then we can make the human connection after the fact with informed data behind it. What is, is that something that you guys are, you know, actively supporting with Revealed and what does that look like, you know, maybe in a specific example?

Jeff Feldgoise (19:25): Yeah, it is. So that's a big part of what we're doing is really helping to sort of shine the light on these buying organizations. So I'll use the example of RCM. So if I'm selling an RCM solution to, say, a health system, there's gonna be those, say, ten to twenty different personas that I wanna get in front of. So let's define those personas up front and then find them for those organizations that are of interest to me. So, you know, it'll probably be whoever is in charge of billing. There's probably somebody in the denials or claim management space who has overall responsibility for that within the finance organization and so on. So really mapping out those different roles and then finding those people and then everything about those people. So sure there's the basics like how do I actually reach them.

Jeff Feldgoise (20:20): But it's all the things about what they're saying online, what they're doing, if it's in the clinical space, which, you know, is not really relevant for the RCM example, but let's just say in the clinical space, what are they publishing? What are they saying at conferences? What are they actually doing? So that you really understand as much as you can about each of the people that you are going to get in front of. What do they care about? What are they thinking about? What are they saying? And then information at the organizational level. What is the organization thinking about? What are they challenged with? What do they have in their five year plan in terms of objectives? So really understanding the organization, understanding the people that you're going to need to win over in order to get this done, that's a lot of, like you said, manual work that can be automated and it's not a sort of one and done thing either. It's, you know, these are 12 to 24 month deals. So this information needs to be kept up to date. You need to be understanding when something changes. Perhaps there's somebody that steps out of a role, somebody that steps into a role. So really monitoring the organization, understanding when's the right time to reach out to people with full information, that's the job here. And it's a seller for sure, but it's also marketers. And to your point, you know, if it's, say, an SDR that's doing some of the initial outreach, it's how do they reach out, not with, you know, generic blasts of email to, you know, 100 people in the organization, but very, very strategically with information that's going to be relevant and helpful and get a response, whether it's through email, which is getting harder and harder given the AI slop factor that's out there. Or perhaps it's, you know, at events. We see events being very effective for a lot of our customers and understanding where people are going.

Jeff Feldgoise (22:14): Be understanding what they're going to be talking about. And do you want each of your sellers doing this on their own, gathering all this information, grinding away on Claude, or do you want them in front of customers? I think it's the latter.

Ashley Kent (22:32): One hundred percent. I mean, and the amount of data that is now at everyone's fingertips to allow this to be much more customized and tailored to those that you're going after. I laugh at the email because, you know, it's interesting, like just two years ago, like if you're looking at like email outbound best practices, you know, the big thing was segmentation and personalization and, you know, that's the way to stand out, so you're not just sending a generic blast. But now it's so easy to make every single email completely different. You can reference the fact that you saw them speak at this conference, and you can add in all these little nuances because that data is available to plug into this between whether you're using Clay, you're using Swan, you're using whatever it may be. It's just kind of commoditized that. And now segmentation doesn't even work. And personalization doesn't work, particularly with an email. And, you know, I've heard health system leaders, payer organization leaders, you know, basically say, like, I just don't even check my email anymore, and I will not take, you know, a call unless someone said, Hey, I know this guy or I know this woman and, you know, we'll do that. But it's funny, it's the OG marketing that comes back with events. And I mean I'll tell you, I've literally gone to a conference because I saw that someone was speaking there and I knew it was a small enough conference that I could have a conversation with them. And I think that is the way that you're gonna start to get in front of them if you don't have a warm intro. And you've gotta just weigh that. I mean I could send that person five hundred emails and never get a response but I, you know, walked right up to them and, you know, now we have a relationship. And so sometimes it takes that and, you know, there's yes, there's technology to help you be smarter, but, you know, there's really no option right now of kind of, I hate to say this, like lazy marketing and lazy sales where you can blast. It's easier than ever to get volume and get all of that. It does not mean that it's gonna be effective. And I think that's been such an interesting thing that's just evolved even over the last two years, with AI and all these systems that are out there.

Jeff Feldgoise (24:25): For sure.

Jeff Feldgoise (24:25): I agree. It's also really potentially disruptive to your relationships and your deal if you are doing the volume game. This is not something where you wanna burn bridges if you, you know, make somebody unhappy who has some power within the organization, you may end up killing your deal. So I think you have to be careful. With our customers, we do help orchestrate and automate processes but we think that it really is the job of the seller to be in charge of whatever it is that they're sending out to the buyers because you have to be careful. You have to be careful to make sure that what you're saying is on point and makes sense, understands the context of the deal, right? What's happened so far. Being generic or being off base can set you back pretty significantly. So we're very much in the mode of let's automate what we can and make everybody efficient, but really make sure that a smart, thoughtful seller is in control of the communication.

Ashley Kent (25:44): I've always operated under that mentality as well, all the way back to, you know, when we have email drips that are going out and nurtures, I'm like, this is like OG marketing, like back in the day where we had to manually create the copy that went in there. But it was one of those things that as soon as you, if you don't set those up correctly, it is one of the fastest things that can kill a deal. It'll be like, hey, looking forward to our call tomorrow. And I just talked to them five minutes ago. You know, that goes out there. And so you have to be very judicious about where you're leveraging technology and how you're leveraging it. And I've always, you know, I continue to come back to like if you're plugging it into those operational things that you're doing that just consume a ton of time, leverage it for that. Like it is so strong there. But if there can be a human touch point where there's that human just crafted message or whatever it may be, keep it human. And you're gonna be so much more effective ultimately.

Jeff Feldgoise (26:35): Right.

Ashley Kent (26:38): With that going back to, you know, we've talked about like the, you know, ten to twenty people that you're developing relationships with, you know, within a certain account, typically you're gonna have a primary champion, right? And, you know, what does that look like though if you haven't created that multi-threaded approach and you're, say, working with a single champion within an account? And to your point, like they may transition to another role, they may, you know, you never know what could actually happen, where have you seen it fail where someone is too laser focused on a single champion versus creating multiple relationships within the account?

Jeff Feldgoise (27:15): Yeah, I think there's a couple of failure modes there. One you just mentioned, which is if you are over reliant on one person, that person changes roles or they leave the organization, and then you're kind of left starting from scratch, and that can be a pretty big setback. The second is really around how do you make sure you have the right people involved at the right point in time. And if you wait too long and, I mean, a perfect example is, you know, just say IT, if you wait too long to have, say, the IT decision maker involved, they're not gonna feel that they're part of the process. And there's gonna be a greater inclination to say no or not now or not sure that can do this at this point. So having the right people engaged earlier in the deal is, I think, a really important way of building the consensus that you need to get this done. So my personal belief is as soon as you have your champion saying this is something that makes a lot of sense, I'd like to, you know, move this forward, have a discussion about who are the people that your champion believes are gonna be stakeholders in the deal and ask. If you've earned enough trust with the champion, you should be able to ask those questions to disambiguate who are the important people, who's gonna be concerned about what things. Get that all out on the table. And then even I'd say, you know, when you're doing your demo, have a broad demo where you really get all the different people around the table so that there can be discussion amongst themselves as well, right? You wanna find out as soon as possible if this is a yes or a no. The worst thing is having something drag on for 12 months to then get a no because you've invested a huge amount of time, belief that this is something that's gonna grow your business.

Jeff Feldgoise (29:26): And then it doesn't. So it's much, much better to find that out early so that you can move on to the next opportunity rather than spending time. So get those stakeholders involved early. Have your champion bring them in. Don't go around the champion. Have the champion be an advocate to help bring those people to the table and make it a positive for the champion too so that they're sort of diversifying their own reputational risk, right? It's not just all on them. Now you have a decision that's being made by a cross functional team and you've got more people engaged. So sooner rather than later for sure.

Ashley Kent (30:05): Super, super interesting. I wanna bring us a little bit more back to the tech and I think something that Revealed is extremely strong and, you know, I mean, over the last decade, we have been Frankensteining tools and it's getting worse and worse. You have your CRM here, we have our outbound here, we're using this AI platform and then we're using, you know, API here, zap here. I mean, it is getting so overwhelming and just the breakdown that can happen between the different systems can be the number one thing that can make you lose a deal. How do you guys think about this of, you know, what needs to stay separate versus what needs to stay integrated so that the data is all aligned, it's flowing, because I mean, good gosh, the amount of data and just, you know, work you have to do to keep something up to date, even within a single system. Now multiply that across multiples can completely break things down. So how do you guys think about the value of, you know, keeping everything in one place versus keeping it separate?

Jeff Feldgoise (31:02): We think that there's tool fatigue for sure among the go-to-market teams that we talk to. There are too many tools that, to your point, have to be sort of stitched together in a fairly Frankenstein manner. The stitching together is getting easier with the GPTs and the Claudes of the world helping. But it isn't a full solution. If you say connect a dozen different go-to-market sources into Claude, good luck trying to get it to truly orchestrate that well. You know, is Jim Smith in this tool actually Jim Smith in this other tool? Or how do these accounts align up? And really getting the accuracy and quality that you want, as well as the token efficiency, so that you're not burning, you know, huge dollars on the AI. It's a real challenge for go to market engineers, for people that are leading RevOps. So our belief is no, it's not gonna be everything down to one, but it's gonna be a reduction in the number of tools, we think. And, you know, just from our own business, we're trying to be that one source of external intelligence on buying organizations. So maybe you don't need seven different tools to tell you about the buying organization, maybe you only need one there. You will probably still have a system of record for where the deal is. Is it going to be something that your reps live in, you know, day in, day out? Probably not. The pane of glass is probably going to shift to a Claude or a GPT or some other AI orchestration tool. And we think, you know, maybe the dozen tools comes down to a couple or three or four or something like that.

Jeff Feldgoise (32:44): The system is simpler, it's easier to integrate, and I'd say your go-to-market engineers, your RevOps leaders are gonna be doing less maintenance of those systems, trying to, you know, care and feeding of them, as well as the data hygiene side of it goes away in a big way. So you're not, you know, you're no longer babysitting your Salesforce or HubSpot CRM. It's something that gets done in a much more automated way. So that's something that we're really interested in helping teams automate that, simplify it, and then just really get it to a more stable operating model because it's been really, really hard for these go to market teams to make these systems all talk together.

Ashley Kent (33:28): I mean, one hundred percent. We used to just have to worry about our CRM and that was like pulling teeth to keep that clean and to get everyone to use it in the way that it was built to be used, or maybe someone didn't even invest in the architecture of it and it's just kind of being used ad hoc and not its full capability. So then you start to string in these other resources and it does. It becomes a full-time job just, you know, keeping the data clean and especially if you're using this as your intelligence of, you know, what is your sales cycle actually looking like? How are we staying on top of this from reporting to everything and make your life a lot easier when you're getting ready for board meetings or whatever it is. It has been an interesting last few years, and so I think yeah, to be able to consolidate that into fewer solutions will be a breath of fresh air. And it'll come first it was kind of building all the solutions, now it's how do we maintain and keep them clean and how do we leverage AI to do that as well. Because I think that's one of the biggest things I've seen when it's on the human, nine times out of ten it's gonna break down. You can have the best SOP, you can have whatever it is, but to your point, think of all those things you listed that that salesperson is having to think about and do to try and stay on top of the account. They're like, what, talking to Joe over here, but, you know, the record isn't getting updated because they're trying to be a human. So how do we start to leverage technology to fill in those gaps?

Jeff Feldgoise (34:47): Yeah, and there's, I think, a lot of advances happening, you know, across the tool set. You know, the CRMs are modernizing, they're seeing the challenges, right? The fact that no rep really wants to be entering data into Salesforce and they're responding and, you know, I'd say some are responding faster and there are a lot of startups that are going after the space. So I think it's a quickly moving space that will evolve.

Jeff Feldgoise (35:15): I do believe that the idea that you have a system of record absolutely will continue, right? We have to know what's going on in the deal, we have to have a way to pull that information together and that's gonna persist, but how it gets done, how the information gets updated, that's all changing.

Ashley Kent (35:35): No, which is super exciting and I think particularly too for founder led sales teams that, you know, so much of it lived in the brain of the founder and they were able to, you know, operate in that way. But say you've raised a series A, B, whatever it is, and now you're scaling up your sales team, you can't operate anymore by just what's in your brain. And you've gotta actually create systems that others can use and learn from and they've gotta have that, you know, system of record within there. And so I guess also too, especially from your operator experience, where have you seen that shift change in the adoption of technology because I've seen like chief commercial officers that have just crushed it, they've built this amazing book of business and they're at this next stage where they're ready to bring on SDRs and it falls apart so quickly because, you know, they held the relationships, they held all of this in their head, but there was no system to help keep that together. Where have you kind of seen in that transition of that founder-led to scaled sales organizations and where technology can really come in and with investment?

Jeff Feldgoise (36:33): Yeah, I think it's process and tools, right? So if the process is reliant on one or two people and the information is, you know, all based on their connections, their relationships, it is really hard to scale that. However, we do work with some customers who recognize that and they are building technology to extract that information. So for example, the 20,000 LinkedIn connections that the founder has are now being shared across the sales team so that the sales team can leverage that information. We also see that sharing account intelligence across the team, having a shared set of data intelligence that can be shared across marketing, RevOps, the sellers, that shared source of truth can really get everybody on the same page and helps scale systems, whereas if you have siloed information, you know, marketing's doing one thing and sales team's doing something else and RevOps is pushing other data into the CRM, it gets pretty confusing fast. So I think having something that is truly company wide, that is the single source of truth is really important.

Ashley Kent (37:51): I can tell you as a marketer the amount of times I, you know, the time I spend in a client's pipeline and analyzing the emails that are going out, the conversations that are being had, call recordings, and to be able to have that at my fingertips and not have to ask you how did that call go? You know, I mean there's nothing more annoying, right? Like afterwards for you'd have to regurgitate that and, you know, the amount of tools now that are automatically feeding this into the CRM so that cross-functionally all the teams are gaining that wealth of knowledge that now marketing, I know here's what people are pushing back on. And here are where their hesitations are and concerns. And then we take that into our marketing and positioning and think about how we bring that, you know, to the forefront. And good marketers are doing that, and good marketers should be living in the pipeline, and you need to give your marketers access to that. That's like, that's my hill I'll, you know, die on today, because I think sometimes they think it is, you know, this is sales world over here and marketing, you're over here to make it look pretty, but no. I want to actually know what's happening in real time, because I mean, you're getting just a wealth of knowledge in every conversation that you have that we're able to, you know, apply back to how we're executing on our side, too.

Jeff Feldgoise (38:57): Yeah, and we're seeing, you know, account based marketing being really important for these large deals and, you know, clearly without that cross team understanding of what's going on, you can't do it effectively.

Ashley Kent (39:11): One hundred percent. Well, sounds like guys are building something really, really cool that I know that the majority of my clients would all be incredibly interested in leveraging. I know it's something that would help make our lives easier as well. So thank you for spearheading this. It's a large endeavor to tackle. But, you know, having the right tools to pair with the right humans and then humans spending their time in the right places, I think it's gonna be the thing that ultimately, you know, is where we're gonna land. And humans still are valuable.

Ashley Kent (39:40): Valuable, which is great to hear. 100%.

Jeff Feldgoise (39:42): Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ashley Kent (39:45): And so I do always finish every single episode of Growth DX with something that we've been calling the one fix. So this is very healthcare specific, but if you were to get a magic wand and you could fix one thing in healthcare tomorrow, and you had no budget constraints, no regulatory constraints, no politics, what would be the one thing that you are fixing?

Jeff Feldgoise (40:06): Good question. So I guess going back to something that you opened with, which is, you know, the length of the sales cycle in healthcare. And, you know, in full disclosure, I'm not expecting to in the next six months meaningfully change that. It's a big challenge. But if I could wave a magic wand and make the healthcare sales cycle much, much shorter for life-saving innovations, for things that would make hospitals much more profitable and stable, I think that would be a huge, huge benefit if we could figure out how to get technologies from there's a need to something which is actually in place serving clinicians and patients much sooner. That would be, I think, a huge win for our society. Just being able to get amazing innovations in use sooner. It takes too long. We all say it. And I think if we could wave a magic wand and fix it, that would be amazing.

Ashley Kent (41:06): I love that. I had a conversation with someone a couple weeks ago and not to bring up the word COVID, but it was interesting. It was something that, you know, she was talking about how during COVID it was the fastest people were able to get their solutions to market. Because there was that driving this and there was, you know, and it was so interesting. And I asked the question, I was like, you know, have we seen people now become maybe a bit more agile? And it's like, unfortunately, no. We've gone back to, you know, how we previously operated, but people were getting solutions in market, you know, a month, two months, and they were moving through procurement super quickly. And so, you know, we don't want something like that to be the reason why we're moving, you know, forward. But it shows that it's possible. So how do we get there?

Jeff Feldgoise (41:49): It is possible.

Jeff Feldgoise (41:50): It is possible. Where there's a will, there is a way. And we have seen this in the ambient listening space where there is such a strong ROI and problem around clinician burnout that we are seeing much shorter sales cycles in that space than in others. So there is a way, if there is the will.

Ashley Kent (42:15): I love it. Well, thank you so much, Jeff, for joining me today. This was a really fun conversation for me because like I said, I live and breathe this every single day. I think about it, being on the marketing side, but partnering super closely with sales teams. So what you're building is really cool. And thank you for just sharing your insights from your operator lens and also on the tech side.