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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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#52: Revolutionizing Sales Enablement with Ross from Accord
Ever wondered how to balance visionary ideas with practical reality in the startup world? Our discussion with Ross takes you through the rollercoaster of startup funding within the lower middle market, emphasizing the importance of well-defined customer profiles and resource allocation. Learn from his experiences at companies like Stripe, where thoughtful, deliberate growth and collaboration led to sustainable success. By focusing on core issues and avoiding premature scaling, Ross shares how startups can achieve innovative and robust product-market fit. Finally, the episode explores the evolving sales landscape, particularly the shift towards a more prescriptive sales approach. Ross explains how Accord revolutionizes sales enablement by integrating best practices into existing workflows, eliminating the need for separate tools.
Ross Rich LI
Inaccord.com
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. Welcome back, pros. We have another exciting episode, and this one we're very pleased to have Ross from Accord with us. As you know, we've been spending a lot of time in and around buyer enablement space. It started with digital sales rooms and has quickly morphed from that as we started to unpack that a little bit more, which, no surprise, aligns with our buyer-led growth framework. So, ross, welcome to the party.
Ross:Thanks for having me, yeah, really excited to, I mean, jam on a topic that is near and dear to my heart. And you know something I was so passionate about that I left my day job to build a company around. So, yeah, excited to dig in today.
Gary:Yeah, and live to tell about it.
Ross:So let's go For now yeah, but yeah right.
Gary:So before, we're definitely going to spend some time on the Accord origin story, but talk a little bit about your background and what led into that.
Ross:Yeah, I mean, I feel like everyone says, know, especially in sales. Oh, I came from you know, a different kind of background, but you know, I think it's something that a lot of people fall into because you don't go growing up, um, you know, it's there's, you know, doctor, lawyer, dentist, whatever you don't really think salesperson, um, but uh, yeah, I started my career, uh, after university, actually in the music industry. I moved to la, then new York, and I was working at Columbia Records, managing artists on the side and working with some cool acts from Columbia like Pharrell and Calvin Harris and others, trying to be the next Ari Gold. But I don't know if you follow Entourage, but it was his assistant, lloyd, in reality.
Gary:Oh yeah, that wasn't a lot of fun. That's such a great analogy.
Ross:You get yelled at every day. You're not even invited to the decision-making meetings. It's not as much learning. It was very honestly, yeah, very bureaucratic for being in a creative space, which was really surprising to me, and I wanted to get back to the roots of what led me to that industry, which was kind of this entrepreneurial, like thinking about, hey, what concert are we going to put on, what album are we going to produce? You know, where are we going to play? All that kind of stuff.
Ross:And that's kind of what led me to San Francisco, applied to like 45 different jobs, somehow ended up as one of the first sellers and go-to-market folks at Stripe back in 2015, when the founders had the crazy idea to actually talk to customers for the first time. They were wildly successful based on their kind of you know, developer engineering, led APIs on the website for people to sign up. They were like, well, we should probably start talking to some people and getting people to transition over to Stripe, versus just start with us as a as an early stage company. And, uh, since then, kind of fell in love with all things sales, but the art and science behind it, and that's what led me to starting Accord after five years there.
Gary:There's a whole serendipitous story in going from music guy to Stripe salesperson, I'm sure. So maybe over a beer we can unpack that a little bit more.
Ross:Definitely some stories there, more so at the Snoop Dogs of the world and stuff like that. But yeah, I definitely enjoyed my time at Stripe a lot more than uh, than uh, than Columbia, which is so weird to say. Yeah, who?
Gary:would have thought outside looking in yeah, all right, so, um, so what was happening in that period? So this is the 2019, 2020 period. Right, as you start thinking about what's next and what was the genesis for the problem that you sought to solve in starting Accord.
Ross:Yeah, it was never like what am I going to do next? What's something interesting that I could build a company around? It really came from what I was doing every day and I was really passionate about at Stripe, which was after I became consistently top seller and leader. There it was. How can I help up level the rest of the team? Because at the beginning, first of a kind deals and big deals were needle movers for the business. Once you start getting dozens of sellers and growing internationally and all that stuff, you don't really matter in terms of, like a company outcome perspective. It's just, it's mathematically true.
Gary:You know it's not how I felt.
Ross:But it's just it's mathematically true. You know, it's not how I felt, but it's just. It's just objectively the case. If you are a 200% rep every quarter, it doesn't matter if there's even 30 reps. Yeah, like it's just it's insignificant.
Ross:So I started thinking, yeah it's like so how can I be higher leverage and I think that was in how do I take what's worked for myself as we scale up this team really quickly and help put that in the brains of folks that are joining, to have a shorter ramp period? Because the ramp time is really high for something like Stripe because it's both very technical. It's very heavy on the business side as well. We're talking about international expansion, different currencies, different payment methods, like very complex sales motion at market. I was trying to build all of these things for the new folks joining or to up-level existing sellers and I found all of the stuff that I did really didn't make a big impact and that was frustrating. So we'd work with ops and enablement and sales leadership. We'd bring in trainers. Actually, probably the most impactful thing was the culture stuff.
Ross:But changing fields in Salesforce and stage names and internal confluence pages and notion pages around our playbook wasn't the thing that reps were going to go back to when they were working with customers. And the thing that I found through my experience that led me to be a successful rep was really partnering closely with my customers and working with my champion to kind of co-build everything as part of the motion right. We're building this business case together. We're building this work backwards plan together. We're building the stakeholder map for the internal external stakeholders together. And that was the templates and the stuff that everyone would ask me for.
Ross:Not all of the things that I would spend 90% of my time from an enablement perspective that you would think would be typical RevOps and sales enablement. It was the on the ground collaboration with the customer stuff. And so that was the light bulb moment to go out and build something that met both the operations and finance needs of, you know, sinking back to the CRM and the right process with what actually matters on the field and how can we tie those two things together with modern technology to make something that works for sellers and customers but that also helped build a repeatable, really rigorous, operationalized process for leadership to scale.
Gary:So hopefully that's helpful context on kind of what led me to starting. No, that's fantastic. Well, I know we're going to unpack some more of that idea of you know, building in public together, right, and the original version of building in public. Yeah, because that, you know, that is it's so. It sounds simple, but it's so profound in how it changes the. You know everything from a company perspective. Okay, so talk a little bit about the timing. Obviously, you know anything that started in 2020, there's a lot of change since then. So the original vision when you started and then how that's evolved over these rapidly changing last four plus years.
Ross:Yeah, well, I won't bore you with how crazy it's been to start a business in the last you know four and a bit years, with COVID right away and with, you know, the banks potentially going under for all the startups including ourselves, and just all the ups and downs of the hiring and layoffs and all that kind of stuff. But you know it really is started and is continuing to be the same kind of core mission, vision product. But I would say it's changed. The lens of that continues to kind of like broaden and narrow. By that I mean when you start you need to have a big vision, right. You need to get something that excites you, that excites your early hires, co-founders, investors, customers, when nothing exists.
Ross:So it kind of needs to be big, right, it can't be super, it needs to be exciting, that quickly, quickly, quickly needs to shift to building something in reality that needs to be hyper narrow to actually have impact. So I don't know if you've ever seen the classic like YC diagram of like you know you start and there's the initial enthusiasm, then it goes to like the trough of sorrow, then you kind of like slowly work your way out of that. The way I internalize that is it starts exciting because you only get to talk about big stuff. It's not about how you're executing. It's like, oh, your ideas and you're passionate about it, and the right person and the right background can be so excited about something. Then it's like fuck, I need to build something that's going to add value in a market where products have been built for decades.
Ross:So you need to compete against products and workflows and things that exist that have been around and refined for years and years and years, and to make an impact, you actually need to build something super narrow to find like the right fit to start to add value and grow from there.
Ross:So it starts big and then smaller, and then you kind of need to like oscillate between, as you move to the next segment or product or something, you need to think bigger and then you need to get smaller. So that's this kind of constant every you know six months, 12 months going between them. That's what I found really challenging and I never really heard anyone talk about. I think we thought both too big for too long and sometimes too narrow for too long. When you make those shifts, I think that's where the business really propels.
Ross:So when we, for example, we started we were gonna build this whole platform for a customer collaboration, all this stuff. Then we had to start building a product and the first thing that we built were basically a software for mutual action plans, because we couldn't build stakeholder mapping and business value everything at the same time. And then, when we did that for a while, we kind of zoomed out and we're like, oh, maybe we should put the business value case on page one instead of two and have the mutual, because that's just how it built. That was like this whole aha moment and things like that, I think, constantly happen through the journey.
Gary:So I'll stop rambling, but hopefully that's helpful. No well, I applaud you for actually coming to that so quickly, honestly, I mean, it's not uncommon for us to work with companies in the lower middle market that continue to fight that urge today. It's like you know the-.
Ross:Which one do you think is more common the big picture or the small picture?
Gary:The big picture yeah, because it's the founder often having to live in a world that is sharing that big picture vision, because they're speaking to investors.
Gary:And people are aspirationally wanting it to be true on the ground. Meanwhile, the people on the ground are like but that's not what we have, that's not the product we have, that's not what our customers want. That's like. This is the problem we seek to solve today and that's the tension we always see. And then, of course, it spills into poorly defined ideal customer profiles and you know, resources spread too thin and all of the that comes with that.
Ross:so it seems like you need to be delusional and that's the tough part is you get a hard we give founders a hard time about you know being delusional and all this person.
Gary:But you need that and you need to balance it with reality and it's this constant tension Um yeah, one thing that you mentioned that that I probably contributed to this is that you, you were you were intentionally or maybe unintentionally um capitally efficient when you first started. Right, it wasn't you didn't, it wasn't this big, huge raise. You went out and do these things, at least to our knowledge, um, and you know, I think there's a lot to that, like the discipline of you know, not necessarily bootstrapping, but really being thoughtful about the size of the capital raise and how fast you're going to go and what that's going to look like, and and thinking about the bigger picture, not just the company that you seek to build. But you know, if we take an extra 12 months and we take less dilution, you know all of that, was that part of you feel like contributing to that at all? What was that story for you?
Ross:guys. I won't take any credit for that, to be honest, I think we've done a good job of that, but I don't think, uh, to our credit I would say we did raise a really big seed round because you know X, you know Stripe top performer plus my brother is one of the co-founders. It was a Google Cloud and other startups before we have amazing technical co-founder. The problem and product makes sense and everyone's kind of dealt with that, especially VCs working with scaling businesses, and it was just great timing with kind of like workflow SaaS products at the time. So I would say actually in retrospect, I would have raised a smaller seed round.
Ross:I think when markets shifted was actually very positive for Accord as well as our peers, because I saw a lot of folks raise their next round like a growth round too early and start to scale the things that might not really be working but felt like were working, either in that market or because they spent a lot of money and metrics look good and they kind of lost what felt like product market fit at a scale.
Ross:That was very hard to adjust and us being kind of six months behind some of my peers, I think, allowed us to kind of stay in that kind of seed stage. And again, instead of six I would have taken four or three. And so you know like I actually would have taken, because people aren't the solution. When you're working on first principle problems and you're building a product from scratch, it's how much time can you spend with your end users and buyers to understand the problems and the pace that you can build that with a small group and it's way more fun.
Ross:Everyone always wishes you know they could be at that stage before. It's more fun You're close with people like handson. That that stuff is is an awesome um stage of the company and and I do think at the beginning we tried to do too much and then the market really forced us to slow down and be really rigorous around this stuff so I actually think it's been really healthy and a lot of really great companies are going to be built out of this last market cycle, having to really be crisp on what problem we're solving.
Ross:Who are working with all all of those kinds of things versus there. I mean there has been wildly successful companies built out of the kind of other time, but I think it's more um, I mean, everything has a lot to do with luck, but partially more luck than thought and strategy, cause you can solve a lot of things and make a lot more mistakes. Money lets you make a lot of mistakes, but then that can also force you into not solving the core, core thing that you need to.
Ross:So yeah, um I feel grateful that we didn't raise that huge growth round before we had the right product and mindset and positioning that we're getting to today. It kind of forced us to continue to refine and refine that yeah, the old slow is smooth and smooth is fast um yes, something I love it's so, it's like completely counterintuitive and everything that humans do, but it's for real.
Gary:Yeah, um, yeah, you can feel it okay, so, um. So let's now let's talk about the, so, the how the platform has evolved. But I want to unpack this idea of this, this collaboration piece, um, because it feels like to your point. I mean, that was something you were doing at stripe pre-2020 15, 16, 17, 16, 17, right.
Ross:And every top rep. This is not a Ross thing, this is what we found quickly.
Gary:I'm sure yourself and every top performer in sales does this unconsciously intuitively, and I think what's really interesting to us about this space is that, as you found out at Stripe, trying to find a way to operationalize or institutionalize that approach is really hard, because there's still this mushiness to sales, right, yep, and it's not like it's new, but I believe that in this era of peak software, which is every category has way too many choices, it's impossible for a buyer to understand what, realistically, is the relevant landscape of alternatives available to them, and so they're in this weird state where they're doing a lot of research on their own but, at the same time, there's so much to wade through that we're. The need for this collaborative approach to helping the buyer buy is more necessary than it's ever been in my mind. So how have you seen that, the, the, the, you know your experience with your own customers, or what you're seeing in the market in terms of the how companies are approaching this issue?
Ross:Yeah, that's an awesome question. I would actually slightly reframe it from collaborative for the most successful reps to prescriptive, with a back and forth. I think people want to be guided in the way that, if you've ever been to, like a five-star experience, an amazing restaurant, an amazing hotel or resort, the place where they just kind of know what you want and have seen the type of person before, come in here for their first time and can guide you through that experience.
Gary:Yeah.
Ross:Where they can ask a few questions and, like I've seen this before, here's, based on my experience, how you're going to be most successful before. Here's, based on my experience, how you're going to be most successful. I think that's what buyers are craving with how overwhelming the options are, and I think especially the mix of all the options. But then the social, the pressure internally to not make mistakes. With these layoffs, with cutting costs, it actually seems like making a decision is not just overwhelming in terms of the options but also in terms of, like socially, how that's going to react internally. And that's why I think we have more and more no decisions, because it's kind of scarier than ever to make a decision, even at the executive level, I'm seeing, because boards and investors and other folks are saying we need to be much more rigorous. We've bought too much before. We didn't use it, are you sure? Are you sure, are you sure? And sometimes that can lead to kind of like lowering the energy of of a deal.
Ross:Um so I would say I think it's moving to more of I'd love. I think Gartner said this like the sense making seller to me just like resonated so much Like how do you help people make sense of this stuff? They want to work with someone with a strong opinion, not just a talker, like someone who has a point of view, and if that maps to what they're thinking, great. And you want to be guided and that's how I always thought about sales is.
Ross:I might not know, as you know, especially earlier in my career, as much as this amazing CFO, cro, vp, but I know my space better than absolutely any single person you will talk to. You'll talk to a competitor, you'll talk to some of the company. I know our technology, I know the impact from customers. I've followed from buying it and and you know, tracking them and staying close to them. I know how this stuff works and gets done. That's why you're going to work with me and our company versus anyone else, because we're going to solve this problem together. Work with me and our company versus anyone else, because we're going to solve this problem together and that's what I think really wins still in this market.
Gary:That's such a great point, so I think we mentioned that last time we chatted we're big fans of the jolt effect, matt Dixon, which is part of this.
Ross:Exactly the concept we're talking about. They nail it in that book, yeah.
Gary:Exactly. They totally nailed it, and I think it was Matt Dixon, or maybe it was Brent Adamson, that wrote the Sensemaking article in HBR. But it's something that you knew, but they put words to it, yes.
Ross:And it's like this idea.
Gary:You're just like nodding along, hurting your neck, like, oh my God, this is so freaking true I it, my ability to get to confidence is lower than it's ever been. And, to your point, the whole idea of errors of commission right, which is when I make a choice and it turns out to be the wrong choice, or, first of all, if I make a choice, then I've, I've taken an action that everybody knows that I've taken.
Ross:Yeah, and it's binary.
Gary:At that point it either works or it doesn't. But if I do nothing, then that's now. I'm comparing against an opportunity cost that you know. There's a thousand variables and nobody's ever going to go back and try to do a study on what was the opportunity cost.
Ross:That's going to give me a hard time about not doing this thing.
Gary:There's other priorities, yeah, yeah yeah, exactly, I'm like sorry about that. So, um, and and I think to your point, yeah, and I think to your point there's multiple facets here. I think in some industries, like you talked about at Stripe I mean, you didn't enter Stripe as a payments expert- no, presumably.
Ross:No I didn't even know what. To be completely honest, I didn't even know what API stood for, and that's what we were selling.
Gary:Right when I joined.
Ross:But I definitely learned and did the research outside of just the job too and did boot camps and did all this stuff to be educated, to help make sense for my customers, because that's what I felt like my job was.
Gary:It'd be interesting to hear from your perspective.
Gary:This existed at Stripe at the time.
Gary:But one of the things that we see and again, we're predominantly working in companies in the lower middle market, so they, by definition, are people who are wearing a lot of hats and are strained. They don't have a training in an able-dement department, right. But I think the thing that we see is that, look, your sellers are never going to be where you need them to be if you don't make it part of your operating system to help educate them, not just on the product but on the buyer's world how they buy, how it gets implemented, what the process they have to go through to do that you know, how they're measured, what success looks like, all of that like literally walking a mile in the buyer's shoes, and it's so rare that that's done because it's hard work and just curious. And so that's one aspect of. The other aspect is it feels like that's probably what you're starting to see with Accord is that it is a, it is a vehicle that, because of that collaborative effort, actually provides a feedback loop to help educate, you know, sellers on that process.
Ross:Yeah, I think, um, when I think about that, especially for high growth, smaller companies or even bigger ones, I think it's more of a cultural thing than a than like a tactical training thing.
Ross:I think you need to have the perspective of, like we deeply understand our customers and people will. It's like what are you looking? You know the classic like thinking about something manifested. So if we're thinking about that, we're going to pick up on all those things during customer conversations organically and I think sticking with customers post-sales will do that without necessarily needing dedicated programs. I actually think we really overcomplicate it. So I think if you tell people like hey, what really matters is the stuff you mentioned. Where do they spend time, how do they think about their job, what are the things they do, I think you're going to pick up on those things and ask those questions organically and I think really sticking with your first few deals to partner with or be responsible for the onboarding and post sales I think again organically gives you that where it's just adding more complexity to make it something separate to the job.
Ross:I think the teams that have that culture it just kind of happens and the right people that care about that stuff. Right, and it was really shocking to me going from the payments fintech world and selling usage-based products and consumption-based products to SaaS. Starting Accord was my first time in SaaS, because the culture around the things that you just mentioned and making customers successful is not at all the same because of how you monetize those data companies, infrastructure companies, whatever they only make money when folks are live and consuming their product and growing that. So the focus isn't just on closing deals, it's do we have the right resources when we close the deal? How are we staying with them? How are we finding new use cases and adding value to build those champions internally? That happens just on the sales side in SaaS and I think taking that approach from the usage-based, consumption-based markets and companies to SaaS is just like an amazing unlock.
Gary:So that was kind of a surprise to me. Did you actually bring that in at Accord then, maybe even early on or throughout? It's like, look, we're here to see that you get to some moment of impact.
Ross:I honestly think I just took it for granted and didn't realize that was a thing you need to focus on when the model doesn't work like that.
Ross:I actually think I was thinking about it the old way because I was trained on that and that's just how my mind works, taking for granted that folks that are coming in if they've been in SaaS, that's not the model, that's not what they've been trained on. You hire someone who's been very effective, very successful in their career. They've been doing that for five, 10, 15 years. We don't share that mindset and I think we were kind of talking past each other and had mixed expectations for a while when.
Ross:I didn't have that aha moment of wow, like this is very different, yeah, a very different model, and that you need to be much more intentional in sass around that and actually do like what would I think would be considered like less organic things. Um, and focuses on the customer post sales, um, then, then, what is what is usual?
Gary:yeah, which is so interesting because we always tell anybody that will listen that what your buyers want is actually to look through your marketing and sales process and see themselves on the other side with your customer success team implementing and seeing how other people that look like them implemented Right. It's like that's what they it's like get me through all. That's ultimately what they want answers to. So if your salespeople have actually done that and they've walked through people, imagine how much more powerful they'll be in the sales process.
Ross:The conviction level, saying specific people's names and examples of hey, this is what we did. We went on site and this is what the kickoff looked like, and that's the stuff like you're saying that they care about. That's the risk for them and again, I think we just take it for granted in SaaS, where other models I think are both harder but also easier because you have that built in. You need to get that right to be, considered successful. You actually don't need to do that for a while when it comes to upfront contracts.
Gary:All right. So this is a perfect entry point for Accord, because we're like 25 minutes into this and haven't really talked about the product. But let's talk about high level, just all the pieces, how it fits together. We've talked a little bit about how it solves the problem, because I feel like this facilitates exactly what we just talked about. Right, it's pulling in all of the things that need to happen for them to get to the moment of impact, so that you de-risk it for them. You're literally helping them to your point, guiding get to the moment of impact so that you de-risk it for them. You're literally helping them to your point, guiding them to this state of. Based on what you've told me, this is what I prescribe for you as a recommend, as steps that will get you to this moment of impact.
Ross:Yeah, um, I mean if, if we put it simply, I think of a court as, basically, how do you take all of the things that your top folks innately do and get right so everything from, and we only sell to like mid-market enterprise sales teams and customer success teams, because this is for considered purchases, not something like sub 10k? Yeah, what are all the things that those top reps and csms and ams are doing? So right there, they're aligning on real objective outcomes, not just features and functionality. They have a really prescriptive roadmap that they're collaborating with the customer on. So they're aligning on real objective outcomes, not just features and functionality. They have a really prescriptive roadmap that they're collaborating with the customer on, making sure they're holding themselves their internal and external stakeholders accountable. They're mapping out the right stakeholders proactively, multi-threading, getting high and wide.
Ross:How do you operationalize that? That's kind of where we come down to, not just fields in Salesforce and changing stages and all the things that we've all tried a million times and get frustrated and end up micromanaging people and reps getting frustrated. It's building all of those best practices into their workflow. So you have a standardized what we call playbook or process that has those exit and entry criteria and kind of objective outcomes for each stage that are built into their workflow instead of feeling like a separate thing.
Ross:So the idea behind Accord is this shared space with internal and external you know processes and assets that you would typically be creating. So everything from that separate business case that you're building on you know a PowerPoint or Google Doc, that separate you know work backwards plan that you're building in Sheets or Excel or something. The separate you know stakeholder map that you're building in. You know there's LinkedIn as a tool. There's tools on Salesforce like Miro boards and all that kind of stuff. How do we put that into the process that also syncs back to Salesforce or your CRM. So you're getting credit for actually the closing activities you're doing instead of having to re-report on them.
Ross:And that was a big thing for me. I felt like what I was being asked to do by ops and enablement was actually slowing me down and I was getting paid. You know reps are typically 50, 50 or 60, 40. Like you want to be doing work that's helping you get paid and helping the customer be successful. It's very frustrating if you're a top seller wasting time on these internal tools. So the things that I want to be doing to move the deal forward should be giving you the data that you need to run the team, and so it's kind of the combination of both of those pieces standardizing the process and playbook. Well, you know it's 2024, we should be able to, you know, sync that data back to fields and objects. So hopefully that's a helpful perspective on what we're building and why?
Gary:Curious when you get into this so presumably you mentioned this. Like you're, ideally, you're working with companies that have a pretty firm view of what they want to do, whether it's you know they've got. They've got the various stages. They know what the the multi-threaded pieces are. They know what the content needs to be. They're using medic or spiced or spin or whatever. Um, do you find that when they start working with you and they can start to get more feedback from the buyer, that they actually start to change some of their pipeline stages to reflect that?
Ross:There's a lot of iteration. I would say the biggest thing that happens is actually leadership getting on the same page as the field, because there's this huge disconnect, I think, between the level, that leadership whether it's RevOps, whether it's CEO, whether it's the VP of sales and CS with the folks on the field. There's always this huge disconnect of, like what it actually takes to get deals done, to get customers onboarded, to get deals renewed or upsell, and this makes it tangible so you're kind of speaking the same language and getting that visibility into, like what is really happening at the macro and micro level to align there. And that's kind of the aha moment that we quickly see. When we sign with a customer, help them even build out their playbook or process during our sales motion is like oh wow, I didn't realize. Like these are some of the reasons why we have that disconnect between the different teams to uplevel the sales motion.
Gary:Yeah, that's a great insight and so, obviously, in the period that you've launched this little thing called AI, kind of dropped a bomb on everybody in software, um, how, how, you know what was your first aha moment around that and how has that informed the product?
Ross:Yeah, I, I think, um, I think there's there has been an over-rotation of a product. Is AI versus? Ai is a tool within a product, and that's how I see it. I see it like we have amazing technologies around front-end code, backend infrastructure, databases, mobile first, all that kind of stuff. It's another thing to find ways to add value to our end users and so, yes, that's that's. It isn't the we're not. We're not now like we're an AI company. Ai should be. Every company is going to need to be using.
Ross:AI, but not an AI company, and I feel like that's when you're really obsessed with solving problems with customers. I don't think you get lost with that. I think when you get excited about just technology for technology's sake and trying to find problems, and you're not passionate necessarily about the thing that you're working on and haven't done it before, I think it's really easy to over-rotate and that's what I've seen a lot in the market and again, it's amazing technology. I use it, our team uses it all the time, both internally as well as building into our product. But that should be obfuscated to our customers and end customers. That should just be another thing that you use Accord to be more successful with your clients. It shouldn't be its own thing. So that's my it's great insight.
Gary:Yeah, it's the old a product in search of a problem versus, to your point, falling in love with the problem and then using whatever tools are necessary versus you know. Yeah, a lot of that's still out there, for sure.
Ross:And I think it's people chasing the valuations, the change in the market, and now it's oh, this is a way for me to get back to my multiple or the thing that I thought I was going to get to but I didn't. And now it's an opportunity to kind of pivot and do that and we've just kind of stayed really focused and passionate about kind of the core um, the core problem and product that we went out to solve and are excited that there's, you know, even more ways to add value to customers.
Gary:Yeah, and I mean, uh, one one person's opinion, but I I would agree with you entirely because I think that the like, the equilibrium in my mind around AI is going to happen really fast. Like people are, you know, we're already in fact, previous conversations over the last weeks or so have been around this idea that you know, there was a lot of buzz around it when it first came out. Then there was a little bit of like sitting on our hands trying to figure out where it is, and now you're starting to see some real use cases where it's being applied and actually driving impact and people are going to start leaning into that and, and it's like it's to your point, it's not because it's AI, it's because it's inside of a tool that already solves a problem that needs solved.
Gary:It just does it a little bit differently, perhaps more efficiently, more effectively.
Ross:So exactly, Great point, okay. Well, I know we're getting close on time here, so first, how can people find you? Yeah, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. It's Ross Rich, easy name to remember, and our company is called Accord. The website's inaccordcom, it's I-N-accordcom. We don't want to spend the million. Point something for the uh for without that, and I'll I'll stand by that as well.
Gary:Smart move. Yeah Well, and we'll put links to to that, both of those in the show notes. Um well, ross, we really appreciate you being able to spend some time with us and riff on this. Uh, just a fascinating space. You guys are killing it Really like what you guys are doing, and and appreciate you giving us a peek behind the curtain.
Ross:So yeah, it was fun. Thanks for the conversation.
Gary:Stay with us for just a second, but for the rest of the pros out there, have a great week. We'll see you next week. In the meantime, 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.