Buyer-Led GTM Replaces the Funnel

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video. Speaker labels are not included and some names and product terms may be transcribed phonetically.

[0:00] I've learned that the best founders are always selling. Welcome to the GTM Vault podcast hosted by Rick Kleta. We uncover the strategies, the pivots, and the breakthroughs turning startups into giants. Let's crack open the vault and find out how. Welcome back to GTM Vault, the show where we break down go to market strategy with the operators building what's next. Today I'm joined by Santos Sharon, co-founder and CEO of Zer AI, a buyerled GTM platform that's rethinking how sales and marketing connect with today's disengaged buyers. Santos has helped scale most Santos has scaled some of the most well-known names in B2B SAS. Previously serving as president and COO at apollo.io, IO COO at retention.com, contact out and lead genius and advising companies like Gong, Lucia, Lead IQ, and Zoom Info. He's seen firsthand how go to market has broken. Buyers are disengaged, expectations are skyhigh,

[1:06] and sales leaders are out of answers. With Zer AI, he's not just building a new tool. He's helping bring buyers back to the table and restore balance to to restore balance to how GTM works. Let's get into it. Let's start with zero AI. What was the founding insight behind the product and how do you define buyer le GTM? You know what I see a lot? Companies with solid strategy but terrible execution. They've got dashboards, reports, tools everywhere, but no one knows what to actually do next to scale their business. That's why I've been paying attention to what Zoom Info is doing. They're not just a contact data company anymore. They built a full system of execution. They're calling it GTM intelligence. And it actually works the list, writes the outreach, and triggers the play. No guesswork, no manual grind, just pipeline moving, predictable growth strategy that actually delivers. Check it out at zoominfo.com. Hey Greg, thrilled to be here. This is going to be a very engaging and interesting conversation. So you know I have been doing GDM for close to 20

[2:15] years now and I see a big transition coming and this is what led me to doing Zeri. So we are undergoing an era where all marketing channels suck right emails are going into spam. Nobody picks up phone buyers have decided not to show up on meetings. uh pipelines are historically down and last quarter when I was contemplating so CAC has gone up 60%. conversion rates have fallen, right? This is not how sales used to be. 10 years ago, 5 years ago, the sales math actually worked, right? And it was very predictable with the predictable number of uh activities. There was a proportionate number of uh outcomes at the other end, right? Now, it doesn't work that way. So, the answer is very simple. We got greedy in sales with automation, right? We automated so much that we almost forgot the needs of the buyer and we overwhelmed the buyer to a point where buyers are refusing to engage. So this is where um I think it's time to rethink the entire go to market and not to just make small incremental

[3:24] improvement in lead quality or more signals. I think there's time to kind of look at the entire funnel arach and this is what we are doing with zeroi and happy to elaborate in a minute but uh buyerled to me is where buyers start the process rather than sellers starting the go to market process and sellers help the buyer in their own search or journey because we talk about the seller pain but think about the buyer pain and buyer search cost. Buyers are not paid to buy software and with the number of vendors growing the buyer pain is also growing. So any vendor that can help the buyer with tools and research and content so buyer pain can be alleviated will naturally create trust and credibility. So that's kind of what I call bilelet GDM. You've been part of some aggressive outbound machines. In your view, what's broken in the traditional seller approach? So outbound was supposed to be the last mile of connecting with the with the buyer, right? I think with cheap data and cheap automation tools, a lot of the sellers just got lazy. So instead of connecting with say 50 buyers

[4:34] that is in market to meet their kota, they thought look why not send emails to all 50,000 buyers out there potentially and hopefully 50 of them will get the email and respond. But the other 49,000 and some change, they didn't care about the spam. Right? Now, if it was a handful of companies doing it, that was okay. But what happened is with the cost of data dropping and cost of automation dropping, entire market got access to the same strategy or same playbook. So then it turned out hundreds of thousands of companies started to do the same just batch blast emails or do a ton of phone calls to the same decision maker, right? And this just tipped the needle where the buyers were like just don't want to engage and then they started deploying tools to prevent spam. So I think that is what got broken where sellers just got lazy. They should have used signal they should have sent fine you can't identify 50 reliably send to 500. But the game became how can you send 20,000 or 5 million uh to kind of drive those 50 buyers, right? And that that's where

[5:42] we kind of outreach went rogue. What were the early signals that convinced you the GTM model had to change? So consistently over the last several years, I've seen CAC rise and rise and rise and now it's becoming unsustainable where the high cost of CAC is going to destroy companies. Some companies just won't be able to afford it, right? Conversion rates just kept dropping like 10 years, 15 years ago. I remember 20% conversion or on email wasn't unheard of. And now it's so tiny. And in order to solve conversion, the industry just propose to send 10 times more email, 20 times more email, right? So the number of email just kept on rising to get the same outcome instead of fixing what was broken. And and this is these numbers are eventually I realized a few months ago that this is not sustainable, right? This got to stop at some point. You can't just send unlimited number of emails. Um and and uh this is what prompted me to start zero for teams trying to adopt buyerled principles today. What are the tangible

[6:49] differences in how they operate? So I think this is uh while go to market is noisy for most marketers or sellers but the ones that can cut through this noise for them this is a golden opportunity right buyerled is how you cut through the noise. So if you can help the buyer reduce this pain in finding the right vendor and help in a way where you truly empathize and think about a typical seller. They go into a call trying to sell their product not to solve the buyer's pain. So if vendors create buyerled go-to market where they really want to solve the buyer spin even if it means recommending them to one of their competitors or giving them tools to research content that helps them identify the right vendors. I think these are strategies that will that buyers do remember in the long run and even if they don't buy from you today they'll buy from you tomorrow right ultimately the game is shifting to cut through the noise vendors have to create trust and credibility at scale not one-on-one like getting on a call yes people can create trust but that's not scalable to create trust at scale you

[7:57] got to really help the buyers through like office hours through tools and I see none of the sales team are equipped And in fact, the industry doesn't even have tools to help the buyers. Like there's no CRM equivalent of tool to help the buyers journey. Everybody talks about the sellers journey and the sales funnel, but there's no buyer funnel, right? So there's a lot that needs to be built in coming quarters and years. You helped Zoom Info evolve from a data provider into a productled GTM machine. What are the key decisions that unlocked that shift? Yeah. So the biggest shift was uh this was way back uh like uh 10 15 years ago, right? So data was being sold as uh Excel spreadsheets and creating self-sell product just uh accelerated the time to value and then that just uh created a new industry standard where now there are 50 vendors with similar product but zoom info was the first one to build it and that's just a a lesson for me that whenever you take the same value package it in a new form factor where the time to value can

[9:09] be decreased or lowered, you unlock a lot of uh productivity gates. That's what I did at zoom info and I did that a few other times and um because you could take this yeah so that can be done like even today you could take the same data same self apply AI and change the form factor right and then that could unlock a lot a new productivity for which you could uh charge a premium at Apollo.io IO. What were some of the lesserk known growth plays that worked well but wouldn't show up in a playbook? I think programmatic SEO really helped at Apollo. It helped zoom info as well. uh over my career I found that not people uh companies don't leverage programmatic SEO as much and now that would be LLM SEO or uh GEO that's the new terminology that's uh these things really help uh to to cut through the noise or gather attention and it's not difficult at all um just need to create a ton of content now every company is a data company and every company is sitting on some unique ique content that

[10:20] can be published or used to differentiate from others that are not leveraging these strategies. How do you approach sequencing growth motions productled, salesled, data when building a GTM or that's an interesting question. I try not to think uh in terms of productled, salesled or data. I think the best motion is combining all three. So I feel like every company should be say productled to start with get leads because that subsidizes the lead cost. That's how you land into accounts and then be really good at salesled to expand in those accounts and then use data throughout that process to gather intel. So if you think about say zoom info, they don't do much of product. They're only salesled, right? And then some other companies are only say productled, right? the the best company would be if they if they successfully combine the two into a seamless sales motion. Now, it's it's harder to do than just do one or the other, but that's that's where you unlock uh most go to market productivity. Does that mean um product analytics would have to sit with marketing and

[11:28] sales would have to be involved? And so are we talking about more of like a unified revenue team where you have someone who's say um from the product team, someone from the marketing team, someone who's getting the insights perhaps from the product team and then passing that on to the sales team who or even revops before that to to identify which leads are more likely to convert so that then the sales right reps can come and harpoon the ones that are more that uh uh growth to me is uh you know removing all friction right when you remove friction every company wants to grow. It's like every human wants to grow and companies are just a group of team and humans. So everybody wants to grow. So if you remove friction in a say lead genen process. So if if your product is free or it costs very low and you don't have to convince the VP of sales and individuals can just log in with an email address and start using that's the lowest friction or lowest barrier to sort of use right but then as soon as somebody starts using now let's

[12:38] say you got 100,000 free users using a a variant of your product right and marketing could manage that. Now marketing could go into that and look for power users or look for a team that has 50 potential users but five of them or 10 of them are using. So now they feel like they can go to VP sales and say hey 10 of them are already using what about the other 40 and that and that becomes a good candidate to hunt with spear and then sales can go harvest in their own backyard for leads rather than go out and and look for leads which is far more expensive. This is how you build a high growth motion. Where do companies stall in their GTM evolution? Is it process, hiring, leadership or timing? That's interesting. I think uh companies get stalled because they don't question what they're doing often. GTM it's really important to understand that the market is like a living breathing thing.

[13:34] It's uh evolving. Buyers are evolving, right? And new technologies are triggering new sort of behavioral change and so on, right? But then if you are part of a sales team and you keep doing what worked yesterday, right? You find a lot of teams if they have been successful in the past, they want to get success doing the same thing they did before, right? Whereas now more than ever, GTM needs new innovation, new ideas and constant experimentation and not getting stuck with uh doing the one thing. Companies are differentiating themselves based on GTM and not based on product, right? and that and that uh uh needs to be embibed. Yeah, that that's um that's that's a really interesting point you made. In the past, product used to be the main differentiator where whereas now because the barrier to build has gone down so much, right? I guess distribution is is becoming increasingly important. So, it's it's really changing the game. And then when everyone can create and distribute content at scale, there's just so much noise out there, which brings us back to

[14:43] uh your point of buyerled GTM and why it's so important to have high quality interactions with the right. So here's here's one point uh that that could be interesting. Um there was a research recently that I ran into. Number one reason why buyers don't buy from a salesperson is because they feel like this salesperson and vendor that do not understand them or do not understand their problem. Right? So again buyerled is where a sales rep goes and listens to a buyer's problems response to help the buyer with their problem rather than going to the buyer and making a pitch. Here's my product. This is the four features we have. I don't care which ones you want but just buy me. But this is what we focusing internally on their capability versus focusing on buyers need and this will show up in in the in the sales process very early on for the buyer.

[15:40] So this makes me think and this might be part of your features at Zero AI. I I know we're still at the weight uh wait list currently, right? You haven't launched yet. So um uh so once let's say you have a a prospect if you could just put his website into a like just put the link of his website and click it you should be able to identify what industry they're in um how big they are and through this you could potentially analyze what features would be most geared towards their needs right and then maybe If you listened in on the first sales call and gathered the pain points through the conversation and then added that layer on top of the the data that you already have about the company, then perhaps you can kind of tell the the salesperson exactly what needs to be done, how to personalize that touch. What you just described is quite profound because it might sound simple and obvious, right? But most sales reps are not doing this and this is why they're losing deals but also they end

[16:50] up causing a lot of gotom market wastage because they do all these calls perfectly valuable calls. They talk to buyers and then because they don't connect because they're so focused on and excited about what they do rather than listen to what buyers need and buyers are a little confused and ambiguous. they're not able to articulate then you really need to listen between the lines right but a lot of bodu market wastage is contributed because of this mismatch you've worked with or built many parts of the modern GTM stack what's changed in the last 12 to 24 months that most operators haven't adapted to yet so what has changed is customer acquisition costs have just skyrocketed one research I've seen recently from winning by design is that it has gone up 60% in the last 3 years for top 50 public SAS companies. Now the question is so how do you cope with this keep your CAC kind of manageable? So to your question I think

[17:59] most companies don't use LinkedIn effectively. So when I was helping jumpstart RB2B which is a project of retention last year. Yeah. Uh actually the the year before I decided to double down on LinkedIn and not have at that time not have sales or marketer and just use thought leadership to drive leads and Adam and I came up with a process which worked really well and I'm using it for zir anytime I need meetings I go on LinkedIn write some content and I have a playbook I apply that and within minutes I start getting meetings and by next 24 hours I managed to manage to get 50 to 100 meetings consistently each time. Happy to elaborate on the playbook. Um but uh yeah that's I don't think companies are using LinkedIn or network to its fullest extent. I think it's far more powerful than email and phone. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean we've seen the explosion of LinkedIn and I want to say the last 12 to 18 months. I would love for you to deep dive into that playbook actually. I'm sure our our viewers and listeners would as well.

[19:06] Yeah. So, so what I do is uh let's say um I I need some meetings in my calendar, right? People don't like being interrupted or getting cold emails, right? So, I realize that those meetings have to come inbound to me, right? But uh with some context. So, what I do, here's my playbook. Step one, I write some content which is related to the subject matter of the meeting. when people engage with that content, I know they're showing intent or they're interested in this topic. Right? Step two, what I do is I have some automation built where it looks at uh ICP of the people that are engaging. So I I scrub it. Let's say I only want to talk to VP of sales and VP of marketing about Zir.

[19:55] So I write some content around buy GTM or agentbased GTM and then whoever engages I look for are they VP marketing CRO CMO sales and then I drop them step three I I drop a very simple message saying hey I'm building Zir do you want to get on a call here's my calendar now it turns out about 50% of the people just book a meeting on my calendar and which is a like a huge number compared to uh like email like most of my email won't even get delivered to these guys. I mean they're decision makers and they don't want to show up on meeting. So I have pondered upon why the conversion is so high and here's the reason. So when they engage with my post I think there is a mini celebrity effect or hello effect for a few hours where they want to talk to me. They feel like they got some value out of the post. That's why they engage. Right now if I send that automation say a day or two later they've forgotten me. They don't know who I am. They don't care. They don't want to talk to me anymore. Right? So I take advantage. I've already given them value. Now I'm asking for something in return and I I ask at the point of impulse, right? In the few hours within

[21:05] their engagement, right? So if that context really helps. And then the interesting thing is if the meeting date is too far out, say over a week, then the no shows increase because they don't know who I am. They're not interested anymore. They've forgotten that content. So I try to keep the meeting like relatively soon very high. Every time I have run this campaign I have generated like 100 plus meetings consistently and I've done this like 10 to 15 times so far. That's amazing. I believe at RB2B you had a similar feature where anytime someone that visited your website who matched your ICP, you could create like an automatic email that would even be personalized to an extent, right? And that I thought that was awesome. Uh and this was 12 months ago at least, right? When you guys first started doing this, would you call that signalbased automation? What what is Yeah. Yeah. It it it is it it does use website signals and and first party data and intense signals. What's your take on how AI is being used

[22:13] in GTM today? Meaningful improvement or mostly noise? I think a lot of the AI today is noise. Once GTM truly adopts AI, I think we won't be able to see the difference between AI, right? It'll become so natural to our workflow. We won't care there's AI in it. It's like I turn the light switch on, the bulb goes on, I get light. I don't think about electricity, how it's working. Right. Similarly, we won't think about AI. But to your point, how AI will dramatically change GTM. So, one of the things we have built at Zir is uh I was talking about top of the funnel has 50% of go to market budgets. So, with Zir, what we have done is we have created a a buyer agent and a seller agent. So, sellers want to sell. So, there's an agent, they train it. Buyers want to buy a product. There's agent. They train it. And then we are getting the two agents to talk to each other to screen out and find the best match because buyers want to talk to say 30 different vendors to find who the top three vendors are based on their needs, right? All vendors want to take a stab at the buyer. So we are getting the two agents to pitch to each other and then the best match is where the two humans get on a call. So it's still humans are

[23:25] selling but now humans are not wasting time. and they're not getting false positive where every seller has to talk to all the buyers or every buyer has to talk to all the sellers. there's lots of calls that's makes them feel good about their calendar but then obviously they're not they don't convert right so I think uh initiatives like these that truly affect productivity and costs and efficiencies are going to be the one I think that will succeed to simplify does that mean the two agents would be training in the background and once you've identified which two buyer and seller agents have the optimal fit that would send insight back to the system which would help prioritize which accounts the seller agent should reach out to on behalf of the seller or it'll go ahead and it'll just go ahead and schedule a call.

[24:17] So then there will be a call like high intent high engaged call between a human buyer and a human seller. So first their agents will talk to each other. So seller agents will pitch to buyer, buyers will have question, they're going to ask those questions from the seller agent. Sellers will have answers to all all of those questions. They'll respond. Um and then once there's a fed on both ends based on qualifying questions, which is what SDRs primarily do, right? Then both then they set up a call on the calendar of a buyer and a seller, a human buyer and a human seller. But this call is very high value, right? And there's a lot of intent because let's say you you it schedules only top three vendors which means there's already likelihood of 33% that this deal will close it far higher intent than anything else out there and no humans were involved in doing this comprehensive buyeller say screening which is where there's a whole team of SDRs and revops and data and automation that goes on today. Theoretically that sounds great. What I'm having difficulty grasping is how do you get the supply side to buy onto this? How do you get the buyer side to Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So this is

[25:28] where uh where I talk about buyer GTF. This is so you're absolutely right. So we started with this. We saw this was a big inefficiency in the market and this is what's causing all those emails to go out and buy fatigue and spam. Right. We can cut through all of this. Now you're right. Why would buyers come to us and create an agent and say go talk to sellers and and tell right so we are building so that is one part of what we have built and we are already building the second part and then our entire platform would be ready to release the second part is a research agentic research so we want buyers to come to us with their problems and the problem could be hey I've got too much churn give me some playbook help me solve the problem right and then as we are solving the problem and this is all free. Think about uh you go to G2 every time you want vendor research but then G2 doesn't solve your churn problem. Only when you know that there are vendors that are that can solve CH problem then you go to G2 right we are going one step above like a mini Gartner or like a uh yeah I mean a research tool that can solve your problems right or give you at least

[26:40] playbooks or how others have addressed similar problems. We also connect them with their peers who have solved the problem. We connect them with agencies or experts that promise to solve the problem. Right? And then in the process we say hey there are some vendors. Do you want us to approach these vendors run an evaluation and come back to you and schedule meeting in your calendar? Right? So that's kind of the other part where we expect buyers to come and and we expect these buyers from the conversations we have had to use this tool every day for all their business needs. Right? They're going to ask us for playbooks and is basically a glorified B2B sort of capability search engine, right? And then in the process, we'll propose some vendors or agencies or consultants and then run some evaluations with them uh using the agent.

[27:31] The beauty of it is though, you brought it full circle. It's not just a search engine anymore because you're actually holding their hands and saying, "Hey, by the way, um, and if you want, you know, we could also do this, this, and this for you after you've won their trust perhaps with the premium layer." Is is that a a good guess? Absolutely. So, kudos to you that this is the first podcast where uh I have described what Zia does on both sides. So based on your questions uh but you're spot on without the other side this won't work. So we are expecting a lot of research content to come from our own users when they train their own agents and then they use their own content. That's awesome. Are there specific parts of the GTM workflow you believe will be fully automated in the next few years? I think research is a big part of GTM that uh right now I don't think either the buyers or sellers are doing enough research with AI. I think that part will get automated and then it'll go several notches above. Um and and that'll be key

[28:39] to cutting down on the noise and increase efficiency. The second part that I think will be completely automated is top of the funnel sort of lead genen and and at least part of it will get fully automated where you don't need SDRs and a lot of that can be just agents can do research call somebody send emails and personalized and and come back to you with highly engaged leads. How is Zir AI approaching AI differently than the current batch of sales tech tools? I mean we kind of touched on this but is there anything else you'd like to add? Yeah, a lot of the sales tech tools, they're trying to build a wrapper on top of like AI and provide kind of a endpoint solution, just one slice of solution. At Zero AI, we happen to use AI, but we don't think of ourselves as a an endpoint solution. We are a compound startup. We are building a a buyer go to market platform and we are solving fundamentally shifting the way go to market operates where buyers research they raise their hand they show intent once their problem is being solved and then sellers pitch in and provide answers to what the buyer is looking for

[29:45] and then help the buyer accelerate in their buyer journey. That's a fundamentally different way to look at it. Some parts are supported with AI but other parts aren't. But we we look at ourselves as not necessarily a AI heavy even though there's a lot of AI because why won't we building it today but it's a I think it's solving a a much bigger problem. One of the risks of uh AI sales startups are they're solving very thin slice of problems. You've advised some of the best in B2B. What's the most common mistake you see early stage founders make with GTM? Okay, I have a good one. I think early stage founders they are I think they are shortsighted often times not all but most of them are so they are focused on achieving their revenue targets or goals right for them a deal is a deal uh and they're desperate to get it right I think that's a mistake companies that focus on just meeting revenue targets are missing out and eventually it hurts them because the right way to approach your revenue targets is to build systems and repeatable process that leads to

[30:54] that revenue and if you do that then the next month you don't have to put in the same effort you put a delta less effort right because business as the business grows it gets more complex right I can say that now after having run larger businesses so now that I'm doing zir I'm trying to embibe some of that but I think a lot of founders especially early on they just want to get a deal and they just hack their way without building systems uh around say messaging, revops, automation, things that can be automated. They shouldn't be doing it manually. How has your operating experience shaped the way you're approaching building Zer AI as a founder? Yeah, I mean this is a good example of what we were talking about. I am frontloading a lot of the pain. So I'm okay if it takes me a little bit longer to start the company. You know, just like go to market, there's a lot of inefficiency in top of the funnel, right? Because there's a lot of ambiguity, a lot of noise. You don't know who is the right buyer. You talk to 10 and one of them show interest. Right?

[31:57] Similarly, when you're starting the company, there's a lot of noise, a lot of ambiguity. You don't know which idea is right, which will have product market fit. And so, there's a lot of eagerness to get to success or outcome without actually building the right processes. And of course, there's a balance, but I am trying to take a lot of the pain up front and I'm trying to build. Now I wouldn't have done this if I was not experienced. If I was starting, in fact I did 15 years ago I started my company. I I did none of these. I was just desperate to get some revenue. Now I'm like building messaging and content and kind of thinking through this in a more structured manner. What's one assumption you had going into Zero AI that you've since rethought? Yeah. So we are building a compound startup and I had read that building AI tools are really simple and easy because it's just a wrapper on open AI or chat GPD right at least that was my assumption and it was wrong because coming in there's a euphoria in 2 weeks you get like 50% of the or 60% of the app done because you just create an API on top and and these LLMs are really powerful right just starts it looks like

[33:07] uh if you could get here more than half in two weeks is then in another 2 weeks you could finish your app very wrong because it gets increasingly more and more difficult to finish and complete and if you're doing compound startup then it gets even more difficult because now other tools that you build have to kind of hold together and there's messaging and positioning and you have to think about so I think building AI compound startups um it just takes uh just is something I would warn people that in the beginning it might seem like uh you're moving fast, but then it progressively gets slower and slower to to do it right. That's a great point, Santosh. This was one of the most thoughtful and timely conversations we've had on the show. Thanks for breaking down what's broken in GTM and how Zer AI is working to fix it. For those listening, if you want to follow what Santos is building, check out the platform at zir.ai. And if this episode was valuable, send it to someone on your team, a founder, a sales leader, or a GTM operator who's thinking critically about what's next.

[34:14] You can find all past episodes and tactical frameworks at gtmult.wiki. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Thanks, Rick. And if anybody wants to reach out to me, please find me on LinkedIn. Thank you. Tech founders and VCs careers lessons GTM