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Practical Go-to-Market guidance specifically for B2B software and service companies between $5MM-$50MM in revenue.
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#50: AI Empowerment in Sales: Building Momentum with Ashley Wilson
Discover the journey of Ashley Wilson, co-founder of Momentum, as she takes us from her early career in marketing and sales at SoftLab to her innovative work with developer tools. With a unique blend of creativity and strategic insight, Ashley's story is a testament to how diverse experiences can lay the groundwork for groundbreaking ventures. Explore the cutting-edge world of sales enablement as we discuss the vital role of sellers as enablers in the digital age. Uncover how AI-driven tools and quality content are reshaping the landscape, providing sellers with the means to help buyers make informed decisions. With platforms like Momentum, Slack, and Salesforce at the forefront, we examine the crucial "build versus buy" debate and how companies can strategically integrate AI to stay ahead.
Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than $50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support. Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now.
Gary:All right, welcome back pros, we are very excited to be here with Ashley Wilson of Momentum, and Ashley first came onto our radar screen several months ago actually. Our bud, kyle Norton, was with us over the summer and then he had done, actually, I think, a session on SASTR where he started to reference Momentum and he's an early adopter of technology, as Ashley, I'm sure, will let us know and really had some very nice things to say about his experience with the org and the problem that he saw Momentum being able to slot in and fill, which aligned perfectly with our buyer-led approach, and so we're really excited to have Ashley here. So welcome Ashley.
Ashley:Thank you so much, excited to be here.
Gary:So, for the benefit of the listeners, just a quick couple of minutes. Couple of minutes 90 second. More of a we'll get into. We really want to get into the Momentum origin story, but just more your, your career arc, and then you know what led you to, to Momentum.
Ashley:Yeah, so we've been. We've been building Momentum for the last couple of years. We we founded the company at the end of 2020, raised our seed round in 2021. Before that, I was running a product marketing agency. So my background's in marketing. Before that, I was a consultant and worked for a company called SoftLab. I'm an early employee, got my start discovering what I like doing, discovered marketing, did sales for a little bit, but then I realized the stress of the quarter ending, and then it all starts over again, starting at zero in part.
Ashley:Oh, it's like oh, this is, this is hard, I can handle it more now, but I think like 22, 23, um, marketing kind of, was the path that I ended up going down and uh, yeah, and so I can get into kind of the momentum story when we, when we get into that, yeah, well, obviously so the product marketing any specific industries.
Gary:I'm just always curious how that kind of seeded what was happening there that started to seed the idea for momentum.
Ashley:Yeah, so product marketing for me. So Softlabs, where I started my career in 2010, was a developer-focused tooling, so I ended up kind of having a bit of a niche within developer tooling.
Ashley:I stayed at Boss Ops for five years and then I started consulting for a lot of early-stage dev tools and actually out of that is how I started the product marketing agency, olivine, because I kept getting asked to do the same sort of thing They'll enable my customer stories, positioning and messaging. And I realized, oh, do the same sort of thing, they'll enable my customer stories, positioning and messaging. And I realized, oh, there's a picture to productize this, turn it into an agency.
Ashley:I think at the time this is about 2014, 2015,. Lots of content agencies and lots of demand, gen, but not product marketing and, as we've since learned, product marketing is a super critical, super important. I feel like now product marketing has definitely had its heyday in the last couple of years and companies understand it, so I was able to kind of ride that wave a bit and build a kind of an agency model around it Got it Awesome and we were fans of Olivine.
Gary:The content was spectacular and agree completely. Like it's, you know, a very strategic approach to how to think about. Well, we call it marketing, but yes, it's marketing, but honestly, sales product, it's all part of marketing. So um that's a fantastic background, all right. So you woke up one day and said I'm going to start a company. How did uh? What is the origin of momentum? Yeah so the origin of actually.
Ashley:Yeah, yeah. So I I mean I personally after leaving Softlabs and doing my own thing and starting all of mine, I said that I wouldn't go back to probably doing a startup again unless it was my own.
Ashley:And if I could be like a COO, like operations. I really didn't want to just be within the marketing function because after running Olivine I of course had to figure out how to start an LLC and run a finances. And you know, when you run your own consultancy, as you guys are, you get a much broader picture of business.
Andy:And.
Ashley:I really enjoyed that. I really liked that piece of it and I also knew that I really liked that piece of it and I also knew that. I mean not selfishly, but part of why I started Olivine was actually because I was getting back into singing. I was becoming a singer again. Oh wow, and so I ended up becoming a jazz singer in San Francisco for a while.
Ashley:My gosh, it's so awesome. Yeah, I needed an agency versus me as a consultant so that I could have this business front, and I ended up bringing in subcontractors. I ended up bringing in Rachel Lambert as my co-founder at Olivine, so we really grew it into a thing where it wasn't about me as a consultant, it was about the business.
Ashley:So I could work part time, charge better money than me as a consultant and also be a singer. That was also why I was like I'm never going back to a startup, because I'm like I got a nice life. Now that is so awesome.
Gary:What a nice little hidden story.
Ashley:Yeah, yeah, that's kind of where I was at in 2020. And then my husband, Santi, who's one of my co-founders at Momentum he really wanted to start a company again and he had founded a company previously was ready to do it again, and Moyes was his first employee at a previous company. Moyes is our co-founder and CTO, so they actually started Momentum. Yeah, they started Momentum. So they actually started Momentum. Yeah, they started Momentum and Ray and I kind of functioned as a third part-time co-founder doing product marketing and kind of helping them with customer interviews and positioning and messaging and personas.
Ashley:It was the pandemic. All of our business had kind of dried up a bit because marketing agencies in 2020 got immediately annihilated and so it kind of opened the door for us to to help out. And then, really about six months in of doing it kind of part-time, I realized that there was a pull to kind of jump back in and I realized that the hey, I said I might want to do this on my own If it was my own company and I could be COO, and that was sort of presented to me.
Andy:Yeah.
Ashley:Careful for what you wish. Careful for what you wish for, but I, I was, it was.
Gary:It's been a great run, so what was the so this, the pull to start the company I understand, having been there, although I promised my wife I would never do it again is what was the challenge that you saw collectively that led you to like, hey, I think there's something here.
Ashley:Yeah, I still. We're still kind of fundamentally in belief of what we originally saw even though it's evolved a bit which was this idea of kind of called chat. It was looking at the way that you kind of are operationalizing your day-to-day within a chat platform like Slack. So, being especially in the pandemic and moving to remote, that real work was happening within Slack and paired with kind of workflow automation and the emphasis around the no code movement and relying on automation to kind of make things more efficient, we just saw that as a big opportunity. And of course this is pre-Salesforce buying Slack, and so you're kind of seeing it just sort of connecting the dots a little bit. But that was the original thing. We got excited about that. Hey, there's a new trend emerging around digital work, slack and chat platforms as being the place where work is happening and workflow automation. So Momentum was born out of that idea and us saying, hey, going to market with a horizontal kind of broad platform is just so hard, what's?
Ashley:a vertical we could pick within that that has real impact on the business and real revenue attached to it. And so we said, hey, sales teams and we had all kind of been involved in sales in our own ways them on engineering as CTO, me in marketing and just saying that this is the organization that has the most, probably the most change happening and the most impact in this new sort of digital remote world.
Gary:Yep Got it. And so at what point did you I mean because you think about the timing right. You have that trend going, and then kablam AI GPT gets released and everybody's business. You start scratching your head. Were you thinking about that? As you talk about it? Chat ops how do we make sense of this unstructured data then? And then this tool becomes generally available and it really just puts wind in your sails, or was it? Was it more transformative than that?
Ashley:yeah, so we didn't. We started thinking about kind of the ai trend in 2022. Um, so, yeah, about two months before chat gbt landed on the world that's september 2022 we we went to dreamforce that year. Um, we had some dinners with, like through our investors that you know with product leaders at open ai who were just kind of informing us of, like, what we thought was possible.
Ashley:What was going to come in 10 years is probably going to come much, much, much sooner than you think, and I think that, paired with meeting other founders and companies that year that were already like, that was when jasper was just like yeah, yeah, ripping it, and he's just like yeah. And then that night we went home and like signed up for jasper, we were like, oh my god, what is this?
Ashley:thing so we definitely had a moment of, oh, we need to jump on this bandwagon. This is transformative and also this is a huge opportunity for us to take advantage of. And I think in some food providers have worked for many years so they just immediately were able to kind of get it into the product and say and. Then we really had a couple of months of saying like, are we now pivoting, are we building a new thing? And and and. Over time. So we were able to get on the sales for ai ai for sales bandwagon really early and I think, through our customers able to see that the platform we had been building, which was really workflow automation for revenue team and particularly connecting things back to Salesforce, actually was a perfect back end for plugging AI on top of it.
Ashley:So I think we were able to, and then, of course, that is where we saw all the growth. I mean, we were seeing some growth in 2021, 2022, but not, we weren't quite there. And once we added that in, that really has been the unlock for us.
Gary:Yeah, so that's a perfect segue. I realize that we didn't really set the table for our GTM pros in terms of the problem that Momentum solves. Now we've had this evolution of where you sit today. Talk us through what the challenge that you see in this sales landscape and how Momentum solves that.
Ashley:Yeah, landscape in how Momentum solves that? Yeah. So we describe ourselves as an enterprise listening platform and what that means is that we can help any customer facing team in the organization gather the insights directly from what customers and prospects are saying. So we take unstructured conversational data, we feed it into Momentum. We're built on top of OpenAI. We do a lot of work to make the output of that data. You can push it to Salesforce, whether that's in the field. You can save it as a note. You could push it to Snowflake, which customers are starting to ask us to do.
Ashley:Push it to Slack for visibility, and the use cases that are really emerging are, of course, having a note, for every opportunity and account feels like almost like yeah, everyone can do that, but that's actually very novel still Like two years ago we did not have tech to do that.
Ashley:So that, at just like a table stakes level is, you have a great note for every opportunity in accounts so that when you have somebody who's new to the account or a handoff between AE and CS, you have a running list of what's actually been happening on these conversations Fields in Salesforce, of course.
Ashley:So, whether that's listening for MedPick or even just the next step, you can let the AI do that work for the reps, and I think it's both a time saver, but it's also just.
Ashley:You know, some people are better than others at getting that stuff into the CRM, and so let's just have almost a fallback so that on every conversation, whether the rep or the CSM does it or not, the data is there. Some of the emerging use cases that we're very excited about using our new autopilot feature, you can go run closed loss analysis on your last two years worth of deal and it's going through all of the calls and all of the email conversations. You've had to give you real answers as to why you lost the deal. So this is kind of what we're seeing today, and I think the future world is just going to be more and more of these sort of youth cases saying what is the data telling us? What do I pay closed loss consultants to do? What do I have my team, the voice of the customer, do? By listening through like hours and hours of calls and just saying how can we apply this tech to these different use cases to output data we care about, to make better decisions.
Gary:Yep, and you mentioned conversational and you said email, so I'm assuming it's ingesting, obviously, transcripts from calls, but also email communications, any like chat, in-product chat or support chats or things like that as well yeah, chat and zendesk, I think, are the next things we'll be adding in this quarter this next quarter um zendesk tickets, which, of course, will mean we'll probably have to support many other support ticketing platforms.
Ashley:Yeah, a lot of companies are using salesforce support, salesforce cases, so that that's included. Today. We already, you know, you know, write it all from Salesforce. Email today is supported. If you have outreach emails syncing to Salesforce or follow, we can pull those in to kind of the context window, the brain. Yeah, and I think more and more it'll be. You know, we have some customers that do all their support through Telegram, their crypto company, so they push their Telegram. Yeah, like 95% of it is in Telegram, so they save that for Salesforce and then we pull that in. So we're just finding that ultimately, we're going to need to ingest as many sources as possible and every industry is going to be slightly different and using different tools as many sources as possible, and every industry is going to be slightly different and using different tools. And then we will be the tool that will ingest it and be the connector and then push it out to where you care about.
Gary:Yeah, so that's so interesting. So we're going to unpack that a little bit. Let me start with that thought and work backwards. We mentioned before we hit record, we were talking about observing the idea that we, as sellers, our job actually is less to sell and more to enable our buyer to buy. And to do so, we need to understand what obstacles and hurdles they're going to have and to make it easy for our champion to be able to go and multi-thread their own, make their business case, what have you? So, rather than just throwing a bunch of stuff over the wall and saying good luck, you've seen the rise of the digital sales room, or buyer enablement or business cases or what have you.
Gary:And so, as we started to dig into that, that's just the delivery vehicle. It's only as good as the content that you put in it. And then we started thinking, well, what if we're having conversations? We don't have to. We can let the conversation actually populate. That that vehicle, right, so you can start to see how it's like. To your point, we're going to ingest it and then put it wherever you want it.
Gary:So that's one aspect, that's the observation here. But then it's only as good as the depth and quality of the questions that are asked. So part of curious what you see there in terms of, if you think about the power that the platform can provide the minimum requirements necessary for an organization to actually get value out of it Like almost your ICP. When you see an organization, it's like, well, you have to have a firm process and know what you're doing. I'm imagining there's a big RevOps component here where you've got to know what you want to do with the data and how you want to activate it. But what are some of the things that you go through that you see as almost like minimum requirements to really, you know, get the juice out of the tool?
Ashley:Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, the first thing that kind of comes to mind is if you were to think about this as a build versus buy comparison. If you were to do this yourself at your company and some companies do this on a per team, per user basis of, hey, take a transcript, throw it in a chat, gpt, and ask a question you start to see a little bit of the power of oh, I can get some insights from this. But then to do that at scale, you need to now have a mechanism to automatically grab those transcripts after every single call.
Ashley:You need to push that into the system. It needs to have the context of your Salesforce opportunities data. It needs to have the context of your Salesforce opportunities data. It needs to have the context about your business. It needs to have the context of all the previous interactions and calls you've had. To make it something that becomes not just hey, who's my champion here? To hey, what's the likelihood of this deal closing, based on the last three calls that I've had. That's where you start to get into a parity with what a human would be able to do from doing analysis on this call.
Ashley:And I think that's ultimately what we're working towards. We're saying can AI be on par with us so that and I don't think to replace, but to be a true assistant for us, because somebody needs to have the conversation. You and I are chatting, we're having the, you are giving me the feedback, you are telling me what I need to know If you're the buyer and I'm the seller, real time, and I need to be able to ask you the right questions to get that out. We need to have that human exchange. Like nobody wants to talk to a bot, like maybe eventually we'll get there, but we're not there today. But all the other stuff that's going into that. Instead of me taking furious notes right now or ask for getting out this call, join the CRM, I can have the tech that's just there listening to what I need. So I think that that's where you need to have the infrastructure play infrastructure piece in place to make this something that actually starts to augment how you do your day. And so I think when we think about our ICTN team, you kind of have to fundamentally believe in that to start to get value, and I think the early adopters do, and we're seeing more and more companies that we're working with have kind of this centralized go-to-market off team paired with a cro who's like hey, ai is not going away. What's our strategy going to be? To where they're saying let's invest in in doing this and and that's where it goes back to the build versus buy.
Ashley:We definitely run into bigger companies that are trying to do this on their own and where, where they run into the limitations are, they have big companies where you might have hey, so this team's using gong, this team's using dialpad, this team's using zoom okay, that's three data sources right there where the calls are happening. They're using these, this for apollo emails, they're using outreach. Oh, what's the latest open AI model? Oh, and what about? In our Salesforce? I have this custom object for saving products.
Ashley:That is a lot to architect, even if you have five people on that, and do you want five people in your company managing that infrastructure? It goes back to the same sort of like cloud of 2008, 2009, 2010. Do you want to maintain that infrastructure yourself or do you want to just move it to the cloud? And so I think we're kind of in this next trend where that's happening and where forward-thinking companies are recognizing like this is becoming table-staked knowledge that we need to have. We need to be able to stay ahead of our competitors by tapping into the data and running really thorough analysis, and we need to have a platform to do that for us.
Ashley:And that's what I think Momentum ultimately is. It's an infrastructure platform, kind of behind the scenes.
Gary:Yeah, well, I was going to say that's really interesting because the way you describe it, the user interface is actually Slack and Salesforce and wherever else, actually Slack and Salesforce and wherever else. And presumably forgive my ignorance here. But let's say I get a recap of a call and it's pushed to Slack. Gary just had a call with Ashley and we have it structured. Let's say, we're fans of Spiced, so we have it in. What was the situation? Pain, so on and so forth. Yeah, Do I then have an opportunity, if I'm a sales manager, what? Have you the opportunity to come into that recap and query the recap directly and say did she ask this question or did he ask you know? What else did they say? Or is that part of the functionality as well?
Ashley:Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, momentum is trying to not be another tool. So that's why, by design, slack becomes our interface, salesforce becomes our interface.
Ashley:You can do the querying directly from Snowflake In that Slack example. Yeah, so the call summary would come in. You push it to a channel, push it to a person, push it to a group of people and within that you'll have the summary and then, within kind of a threaded message, you can go in and start asking questions. We have an ask momentum function that's using the whole transcript. You could also do that within a deal room, so that would be like a Slack channel tied to maybe a Salesforce opportunity and that could have context for all of the calls that you've had.
Ashley:The same sort of mechanism. Basically, you are able to kind of on demand get the questions that you need answered, but in a way that's not. Hey, AE, go to this next tool. We've got to train you. We have a web app, so we do have a tool if you need to get out of Slack, but just find people who want to stay in Slack because of this ease of information, the threaded message and the sharing back and forth and asking questions real time to each other and to the bot.
Ashley:It's just a very powerful combination.
Gary:Yeah, it makes it easily collaborative, instantly. So what are you seeing? I can imagine? You know we brought up Kyle Norton earlier and he's that CRO that you described right, he's passionate about using tech wherever it could be helpful, but also very outcome oriented. When you have companies that are typically starting and you have such a platform that can, honestly, it's almost up to the creativity of the individual, of the company, what you do with it, which can be paralyzing, right, because I'm like where do I start? Do you have? Do you do you have? Kind of okay, the typical entry path is here. We solve these particular challenges that are pervasive. You know they're, they're they, they add real impact. We can solve them quickly. And then, and then, how do you see people evolve? Or where you? You know you mentioned some of the creativity and use cases. But what's that? What does that um life cycle look like?
Ashley:Yeah, I mean, I think it's our blessing and our I don't want to say curse, but it's a blessing and a challenge to work through because of the flexibility and the possibilities and I think we learned early on that coming to a call and saying what do you want to solve for?
Gary:Yeah.
Ashley:Or how do you know what do you want to solve for? How do you want to use this, not what do you want to solve for how do you want to use this. Better to say what do you want to solve for. And really it's better to say what's the one thing you want to, what's the one pain point you have in your organization right now. What does your CRO come in saying they need answers to. What is RevOps feeling the pain on? And then we can kind of apply that to momentum. What we do is we like to start with one or two key use cases, which usually emerge from that question. So when I think about some of our recent EOCs, it's from hey, I don't know why we're losing deals, and Momentum could answer that for me. It could give me close loss analysis, because we're really trying to understand that as we build our 2025 plan.
Andy:Trying to understand that, as we build our 2025 plan.
Ashley:Really think about what are the reasons, whether it's competitors, feature gap, all those things go into the planning of the future. So, POC, maybe for two weeks we'll run that use case and then we always run summaries and I think summaries tend to still have that wow factor just because it gets deliberate in Slack.
Ashley:It's so helpful to suddenly have eyes and ears on all of your conversations across sales and CS. So we usually start with summaries and then, once you become a customer, we have a pretty high touch CS motion from the sense of we've got to really understand what are the problems and we have to kind of work with you. And the other angle of this is we have to kind of work with you and we have. The other angle of this is we have prompt engineers on staff now because so much of the output is in the prompting Interesting. So we have a prompt library. We see kind of best practices across customers. But then we also need to understand specifically for your business.
Ashley:When you say you're using Spiced, we got to fill in some more details about what the situation means for you beyond the Spice best practices. Right, so that's where kind of the consultative, kind of CF motion comes in. Where the tool is you can go in and tweak it yourself. The tool is self-service but that's a that's a pretty important component to you getting a lot of value out of Momentum. And what we do find is that if you start with a couple of use cases and build a couple of workflows and build a couple even flat to Salesforce notifications around pipeline hygiene. And hey, you know close dates in the past, can you go update it? Or hey, your renewal's 60 days out. Momentum becomes very sticky because we are just kind of embedded in the workflows.
Gary:Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it. Yeah, I don't know why I didn't even think of the hygiene aspect. It's like, rather than have your sales manager pull up your report and go through and like, hey, you need to update all these, just have the bot do it.
Ashley:Yeah it becomes like an objective and unobjective. You don't have to nag anymore.
Andy:And it's like people really like that.
Gary:Yeah, yep, we used to call that the wall of shame. Everybody who's got deals closing yesterday and they're still open. That's a problem. I was going to pivot over to AI, but before I do that, andy, tiana, do you guys have any questions on processor?
Andy:Literally, you literally have been following my train of thought. I mean you do that a lot anyway, but like it's pretty incredible. I would just like emphasize the Kyle Norton thing was really cool to see it live. I encourage everybody to go see that podcast. And somebody tell me what the name of that was.
Gary:We'll put it in the show notes. It was the Pavilion Demo Day for Momentum. It's on YouTube so we'll put that in the show notes.
Andy:And yes, and you said something there, ashley, and you were just alluding to this right, that there's kind of prerequisites to and we always see this too right, you, you need to have a process of some type. You need to know why you want this. Uh, you need to know what you kind of want to get out of it. Obviously, you, you were able very well to extract that from people it sounds like. But you also mentioned just starting small, like going right to spice or med pick or something might be a bit much right out of the gate, but, as Kyle mentioned, he had a couple of use cases. One was just teasing out competitor names that showed up all the time in conversations and he of course, had a chart which showed close rate against competitors and then the frequency that they showed up of course. But that being a great example of something I would imagine you could put in place pretty quickly. Yeah, that's a great example of something like I would imagine you could put in place pretty quick.
Ashley:Yeah, that's a perfect example. I'm really glad that he kind of highlighted that, because he's done a really good job of helping us articulate some of that vision around taking unstructured and structured and saying he can close the feedback loop so much faster by saying what's a data set I want to tap into, what's a question I want answered, competitors, and now you just build a mechanism to get that. That doesn't involve going to the rep. It just circumvents needing a human to tell you that and put it in a system. You go right to the source and it pushes right to the place you need to do your reporting and I think that that's what we've built in the product is a way to get that back. That is a.
Ashley:You could, in a day, get that information. It's you install momentum, hook it to Salesforce. It's not a managed package. We pull in your fields a prompt pick the field pick if you're auto writing to sales force or you want the reps to confirm before it pushes and the feedback loop is going there.
Ashley:Like I, I'm proud of what we've built, but this is completely enabled by open ai. I mean it's like it's just, it's a marvel of the tech that exists now and the large language models that we now get to tap into, all the companies that are building in this age, and then getting to do our own little flavor of saying how could I apply, how could I fix, what problems can I solve on top of this, and I think that we're just basically trying to say you don't need a data team anymore to do this, you don't need to go through it, you don't need to have long meetings with your reps to get this answer. It's just like give it, put the tooling and the mechanism in the hands of the people who are right now needing the data and make it really easy for them to do it.
Gary:Yeah, the knowledge of the customer from the customer's words and perspective is so powerful and the feedback loop just accelerates for those who use it. And I think you know kyle would be the first to admit, and has admitted, that he's got an ace in the hole in um steve dinner his robots I was gonna say, I mean it's, he's got an incredible team, he is awesome.
Ashley:Look at jonathan, who's awesome. I mean it's just like. That's like a powerhouse combination. We actually have many times about how that is our kind of ideal customer profile of you. Have a super sharp rev op leader aired. You have a sales focus rev op leader with a rev op focus, bro RebOps focus CRO who? Both get tooling data process. That's like the magic. I think that they really are an example of, I think, what future teams will be and will need to be.
Ashley:I think the expectation is just that everyone is able to leverage tooling like Momentum and also understanding that the power is in the data and you need to have a way to get the data out, and I think CROs have to be more data driven.
Gary:I have a hypothesis that in no more than five years, the majority of CROs will come from RevOps. Oh, that's a good hypothesis. Because they're the only ones in the organization that have command over the entire buyer process, from acquisition to expansion, and it is entirely data and systems process driven right, yeah yeah, you're right.
Ashley:And you're making me sorry, you're just making me think too of some of the other. You know great, great customers we have and so many of them have this powerful RevOps sales leader combination where you really have to have. And then I love it too for the, the, the RevOps folks are just getting more, more respect, power and, like you know, I think the fact that the tooling and the so much is centralizing into this function of like go to market, ops or thinking about ops kind of full cycle and like when you design, talks a lot about this too. But it's, it's great to see that sales is valuing that Just as much as like just seeing it as like equal. You need to have both now to really be, successful.
Gary:Yeah, yep, yeah, yeah, and that's one of the things that we see in the lower middle market is they are it's. It's, unfortunately, the make that step, which we believe is a force multiplier, right, instead of making that investment in one of those more classic revenue functions, to make it in the RevOps function. But the ability to compound that investment is there, right, if you've got the right process and the right mindset around it. So, one, so one question.
Gary:You mentioned, obviously, the large language model, so one of the things that we've been wrestling with is so you think about all of the information that is flowing through your platform and how you know, every iteration, iteration, it gets smarter and smarter. Are you having customers asking about hey, we actually want to create our own model for this. Can you reference that? Or how are you seeing companies think about this AI asset that we are actually starting to develop? Do I really want it in a third party tool or do I want to build that domain Functionally? It's like my giant wiki of all things customers and business that lives inside of my company.
Ashley:How are you seeing that kind of evolve? Yeah, we're seeing it evolve, not on the LLM side, but on the push all my data to Snowflake so I can control what the output is. So there is a desire we're seeing, especially on bigger companies, to like momentum is the data pipeline for the unstructured conversational data, to push it to Snowflake. But then they want to have the ability to do what they want out of Snowflake and in Snowflake you're going to have all your product data. You're going to have this data. I mean you're going to have everything there.
Andy:Right.
Ashley:Not so much on the LLM side, because I think that we are all. I mean, I would assume I think we're accepting that, like OpenAI and you know all the other ones are. There's just so much investment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not going to build around and the rate at which the new models are coming out and just keep exceeding the performance of the previous one why would we not? It's just like a best in class, like what software company is going to keep up with that when that's not their core business?
Gary:Yeah, and I'm sorry, ashley, I meant less about the actual underlying LLM and more, but think of it like your own custom GPT, right? Oh yeah, yeah.
Ashley:What happens on top of it?
Gary:Yeah, exactly yeah.
Andy:Your own voice Right Like your brand's voice.
Gary:Yeah.
Andy:People are doing it a lot more with what Gary mentioned, which is like now we have a whole, is like now we have a whole. Well, we, we have a whole bunch of podcasts, right, that we could theoretically feed in, and it has all that information to reference. So it's like a layer yeah yep, yep, no I.
Ashley:I think that that's where things are heading. I think that we're going to be. The expectation is that the output will be so customized to your business that that will become just a the norm, the table, like you'll need to have as much context in there. Again, I think where we are finding is that we kind of fit in again as like the infrastructure piece for taking conversational data, ingesting it, doing the analysis on top and pushing it to where you want it to go and within the way you want it to go. Then you have further context about all the other parts of your business. Right, they have all of the whole history of your sales force, the whole history of your product data, all the knowledge base that you've built in a guru or whatever wiki you have, and then you're kind of getting the more holistic picture from there.
Ashley:So, I think ultimately, we become a piece of the puzzle in this new world that we're building for it. Where it does become, everyone's going to have their own. I think almost anyone is going to be able to have a back and forth about the knowledge base of their company and pull out everything they want to know real time, whether it's about an account, a customer, um, how do we do sock too? How do we?
Ashley:yeah onboard customers. It's like it's going to be a broad data set for, I think, to pull from. I mean, I think it's kind of like what we're seeing with like Glean or whatever. We're seeing this opportunity to say the knowledge is there, it's just living in very siloed places. A lot of times it goes to die in a Google feed or something. Let's pull it all into a centralized place. And I think when you think about revenue data, it's where the CRM falls short. Today Just doesn't have all of the context and data you need to really understand. Is this deal actually going to close?
Ashley:You just need much more real-time kind of interactive databases.
Gary:Right, yeah, that's a good insight. It'll be really interesting, I think, when we get, you know, fast forward, three, four, five years. You know these AI-informed. First of all, every software company will have some form of AI in it, right, and therefore we'll have all these solutions that have it. And it's like, okay, well, I want to, maybe I want to move from one platform to another or whatever. And it's like today we talk about exporting our data and take it with us, but now it's like, oh, and I want to take the model too, Because that's what I want. It's like my GPT that we built together on top of this. I want that, so I don't have to start from scratch. That's going to be interesting.
Ashley:Yeah, that's why we built our back bachelor product, because customers started saying, hey, can I pull all the data? Can I start filling in fields from the past, like I need all the context from?
Ashley:yeah the last three years of call because people are starting to see like, oh, if I have all the data going forward and it's possible for me to also have the data from going back, and we're just recognizing that we now have more complete data sets to make decisions off of, so I think you're you're totally spot on that. It's like you. We won't imagine a world without it in the future yeah, we won't be going back to, like the dark ages of not having kind of everything available on our fingertips.
Ashley:It's the same as like our phones. It's just like we just expect everything to be available when we want it.
Gary:It is crazy. It's like two years and we're already in the dark ages from just two years ago. Right, we're in the dark ages. Yeah Well, this has been awesome. We know we're kind of running short on time here, so one quick question and you kind of answered this is we think about where this can be applicable In terms of size of company, size of sales team, cs, what is a legitimate kind of entry point? And then maybe what's a sweet spot and I'm sure the big X factor is going to be that sales slash, cro leader, revops leader but presuming they have some form of that what does that look like?
Ashley:Yeah, I think our sweet spot is really. I think we start really being valuable to customers, kind of like Series B and beyond. We, of course, have some small startups working with us who just tend to be Slack native, and we certainly ourselves, we're Series A. We get a ton of value from momentum every single day. Um, I can't imagine a world without it. But the the sweet spot, I would say, is when you start to not have eyes and ears on everything going on in your business as a sales leader or a cs leader or ceo even.
Ashley:and as you go more up market, that gap between what your customers are saying and your ability to act on it just gets wider, because you just are farther and farther removed from the front lines. Momentum becomes the way to, like I said, gather product feedback, gather turn risk, gather any insights on deal health, where you start to say like I've got a whole team doing calls all day long, they don't have time to input things in the CRM.
Ashley:I don't have time to go ask them for it. We're not slowing down. I think the impetus on all of us in company building right now is to be like five steps ahead of the competition and what the market is seeing. So we just need like way more ammo, and I think that's when you start to really see the value of a tool like Momentum.
Gary:Yeah, and I would imagine I can actually see it lower than that, because if you think about some of the teams that we work with are five excuse me, five or six sellers, five or six CS, multiple sales cycles and stages You've got an entirely remote team, you know it's there's a lot of you think about the just for no other reason for the insights that you get, in the speed of those insights, that can be a real multiplier.
Gary:So well, ashley, thank you, this was spectacular. Really appreciate you making time, especially on short notice. Thank you for that.
Ashley:Yeah, I like that. It went more technical, which is great.
Gary:Yeah, we're guilty of that always. We're data geeks. No, it's good.
Ashley:It's better, it's like that. That's so much of what momentum is. It's just you can't help, but you want to talk about it as a tool. It is a tool, but the real value is in this other side of what it can bring to companies and kind of handle the building. You don't have to build this yourself.
Gary:Well for us we mentioned this at the very beginning it's eye-opening because I think that's part of the challenge that buyers now have and us as sellers have is that there is an element of paralysis because we have to rethink how to solve the entire revenue process right. All of a sudden you're like hold on, I've done it this way forever, and now what happens if that back to that creative piece? And I almost feel like there's this giant pause for people really trying to figure out how's this whole AI thing going to shake out and where should I be thinking about? You know, leaning in to to just fundamentally change the flow, because it starts changing org charts and responsibilities and how you use the data, and so it. It's so right, it's a fun.
Ashley:That's why I feel like the 2024 was kind of a 2023, saw a lot of early adopters of ai. I feel like 2024 was a bit of a lot of people, I think, sat on the sidelines.
Andy:Yeah.
Ashley:And I think 2025 will be a big buying year, because I think we'll be saying, okay, this isn't going away. The mandates are still there and we're starting to see I know there's been so much- emphasis on.
Ashley:We have a whole podcast, I think on this, on like the type of funnel A SDR use cases. But what about all this middle of the funnel stuff? Like? What about all this? It's just like this is what the LLMs are perfect at churning through tons and tons of data at scale and pulling out the insights. I feel like I'm hopeful that 2025 will be an emerging of tools like Momentum or us having conversations like this that are showing what's possible, so that you don't just tune out like oh yeah, I wrote a crappy email. I'm not going to use AI for sales, 100% agree.
Andy:You're getting into a whole other topic, which is really how opinionated the solution is. With AI, I think you're really in a good spot, which is it's not so opinionated like an AISDR. It's doing something and it's already kind of preconceived or too open, which is like you could go too many ways here. It's just kind of this blank shell and you have it applied, but there's still a lot of ways it can be done within that. It's a really good spot in my opinion.
Ashley:Yeah, thank you, we're hopeful that it'll be a good breakout year for us to talk about this.
Gary:You start hearing very pragmatic, performance-oriented people like Kyle Norton saying like, look, this is how we use it and this is what it drives for us, and you get enough of those use cases To your point. Like I sit on several boards I can tell you you're like what are you going to do? Because it's not going away and it's real. We're starting to see some real use cases here. So yeah exciting stuff.
Ashley:Well, thank you for helping us share the vision, the viewpoint.
Gary:Absolutely Good stuff, ashley, and thank you for the extra few minutes as well. Yeah, of course. Thanks so much. Have a great weekend. Until next week, go be a pro. Bye, thank you for tuning in to GTM Pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit gtmproco and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go-to-market skills. Until next time, go be a pro.