#469 From SDRs to AI Agents: Frank Sondors on Redefining Outbound Sales

Episode 469

[00:00:00] 

Mehmet: Hello, and welcome back to a president of the CTO Show with Mead today. I'm very pleased joining me, I think a well known figure, especially in the SaaS and builders space. Frank Sondors, founder of Salesforge and other [00:01:00] forges. Thank you for being here with me today. Um, as I was explaining to you, just.

Before I hit the record button, the way I love to do it is I keep it to my guests to introduce themselves. So maybe some people they don't know you, I doubt that. But still tell us a bit more about your background, your journey, and then we can kick it off from there. So the floor is yours, Frank. 

Frank: Sure, thanks, uh, for, thanks for having me as well.

Um, so my name is, uh, Frank Sondors, and I'm the, um, CEO of, uh, sales Forge. Um, not a CTO. I have a CTO and I have a CPO as well. Both of them are actually engineers. Um, so I've spent, um, in software and sales for well over a decade. Um, so you could call me a software guy, you can call me a sales guy. Um, it's for me, kind of same, same, uh, started my career really back in the days, uh, at Google, so Big corp.

Uh, 60,000 plus employees. Um, work out of the Dublin office, uh, for the, for, for, for them. And sold a bunch of ads. And then I moved over to, um, uh, working for a company called SimilarWeb, [00:02:00] um, in big data and kind of competitive intelligence space where I learned, uh, how to give your competitors really hard time, how to aspire in them and all that jazz.

Um, and then I, uh, went over to work for a company called Black Row. Uh, they're in the machine learning space, so that's the, that's called the old school ai. That AI still exists, you know, you have to predict in real time. Conversion probability of a certain user and what they may do on your website. So that was really, really fun.

So this is when I was exposed to AI for the first time, and I, I did there some good, um, good stuff in terms of scaling, uh, for the company and selling that as a SaaS solution to a lot of, um, uh, heads of marketing. And then, uh, in my last job I led a sales team of about 50. Um, and this is where I had the, um, inspiration I guess to, um.

It's inspiration to, uh, start Salesforge because I observed in my last job. Um, that it was growth essentially at all costs, [00:03:00] right? So the main way how you were acquiring a sales pipeline and how you were, um, closing in on revenue was by just by hiring more and more heads. So that was the main lever to target attainment, and I thought that was really broken.

Why wouldn't you have significantly fewer heads in your team? Um, and being able to achieve superior output levels. Um, I always typically say, you know, for every 10 salespeople that you hire, and I hired hundreds of salespeople in my lifetime and also fired a lot of them as well. Uh, but you would typically say that for every 10 salespeople that you hire.

One is an only natural, really, one is the max. About two to three people can be trained up to be somewhat good as a person that's natural. And 60% is typically deadwood. So these individuals should not be, um, in sales, um, uh, they should be doing something else, but not definitely sales. But, so a lot of people will end up in sales from different walks of life, but many of them are just not designed to be in sales.

So they really, what we're trying to do is increase the [00:04:00] output of the 40%. Um, and reduce essentially the, the 60% of the headcount for the companies out there. 

Mehmet: Great. And, uh, thank you again Frank, for being here with me today. Now it's good. Like you explained why you started it, um, you know, your current company, um, but why no one else was taking care of the multiple challenges, um, that, you know, usually especially.

People who are working in SaaS will relate this a lot. And you mentioned like grow at all costs and you know, just hire more salespeople. Uh, do you think the direction was going towards non relevant tools or was it a blind spot that no one else was seeing Frank because. When, when I look at the stack that you've built, and this is why, you know, people will understand why you, why you wrote their Salesforge and other forges is because, you know, the, [00:05:00] there's a stack behind, you know, sales, especially in in our business, in SaaS and technology in general, that people think, and I, you said something really that with me, some people, they end up.

Uh, finding themselves. They are working in sales, but they shouldn't be there. So what are like these blind spots that you spotted and then you build this whole, you know, concept of, you know, having this tool that can help people in increasing the efficiency of the current sales force that they have? 

Frank: Yes.

So the, uh, the best way to look at this is, is that if you are in a VC backed. Company, um, typically VCs and everybody, including your CEO, would tell you go hire more and more people because typically more heads and sales has meant more pipeline and more revenue for the company. Um, and that was the old school way of thinking.

However, most smart sales leaders out there in the world that would typically agree that more heads in sales doesn't mean more sales for the [00:06:00] company or more pipeline necessarily. Um, and. The, the main problem, just that I have observed, um, apart from, you know, more, you know, more headcount didn't lead necessarily to more sales, was also the fact that to acquire net new dollars these days for any software company or any other company out there, um, is really becoming more and more expensive.

So, um, and that's because there's more competition out there. It's much easier to build software out there. Um, so that's why you have more competition. So essentially, it doesn't matter what you do and if, even if you believe that you're in the Blue Ocean, trust me, there is some, there is a competitor.

Typically that competitor in most the cases is Excel, right? So Excel is always a competition, um, or a Google sheet, uh, these days. But, uh, there is typically at least one competitor that you have in this space. And that's because it's so, so easy to build software these days. Um, it doesn't matter whether you have a CTO or not, but there's also a lot of these, um, uh, new softwares that keep popping up out there, uh, where you don't even need a CTO.

So, [00:07:00] for example, lovable is one of them based out of Europe. Uh, where you can just, you know, prompt, um, the software and it'll spit out code for you and ultimately a software for you. And that's a nice start. And then after that, you definitely need a proper CTO after that. Um, but um, again, going back to the problem of when I observed, you know, that it was very expensive, I.

Um, to be acquiring net new dollars, um, to solve really the problem that we wanna solve, which is top of the funnel and the sales pipeline problem for the companies. That problem is so convoluted. It's, there's so many micro sort of problems that need to be solved, um, that it's a quite a huge undertaking from an engineering standpoint.

So in order to really solve that problem, you, you have one option that you can go down. Um, is the super app concept. The super app concept, meaning you just cram a lot, a lot of features into one single app, into one single brand. Um, and that, for example, could be, you know, examples [00:08:00] like Salesforce or HubSpot, for example, et cetera, right?

So one brand, one software, you just cram a lot of features and you satisfy the needs of your users. Now we thought that everybody's sort of building along the similar lines of building a super app, but in our space we didn't see what we call the other approach, what we call the modular approach, uh, where essentially, uh, build software and you compound on top of each other and you sell that the same user and to the same customer.

So, so as I mentioned, there's multiple different problems that are, um. Uh, customers have. So what we do is we essentially build a software for each on one of those problems. And then it's very easy to be connecting these softwares together from an integration standpoint, data flows and multiple other things.

So think of it as a sort of an Apple ecosystem or Microsoft ecosystem, right? Where you have different products that solve different problems, but they're talking to each other very nicely. So I'll give you like even an example feature that we have, uh, which is similar to. To those companies is we have, just like [00:09:00] Apple has Apple id, we have Forge id.

So you can log into the different softwares, um, and uh, seamlessly and, and everything is connected to one your one user account. So we are doing is we're building that sort of ease of use that the really the users were, you know, craving for. Because otherwise, in order to solve their pipeline problem these days, they really need to buy to be buying sort of about 10 point solutions.

Essentially from 10 different vendors, you buy 10 different solutions and you're stitching that together. That's what the reality looks like. I call that the Android experience. Um, and the Apple experience is where you're going to one company, this one company provisions all the softwares for different pain points, and you buy everything from one company, right?

So you have one invoice, one support team, et cetera, et cetera. So is that, there's that ease of use as well. So you don't, you need to hire, you know, a sales operations manager to be managing all that for you. Um, so we've been doing this for about 22 months right now. In 22 months, we've built six softwares.

That's how fast we build. Um, [00:10:00] about 12 months ago, there were just three co-founders in the company, and right now there's over 40 people in the business. Um, and in the first year we scaled from zero to $3 million in a RR. So that's how fast we grow. But um, the way we think about generally. About building these different products is we essentially have internally, let's call it a squad, essentially for each of the products.

Um, you have a squad and that squad just builds that product. It's essentially, it's like having a startup within a startup. So we have six startups within the startups essentially. 

Mehmet: That's, that's very cool. You mentioned something Frank, uh, I gonna come back about what tactics you use to reach the 3 million a RR, but you mentioned something about the top of the funnel, right?

And, you know, finding those leads. So if today I go to, to, to the website and I find, you know, different tools for me, but really like what I hear from, from people, their problems is always. To find not finding the leads, is to find like leads that [00:11:00] actually are kind, you know, aligned with what they are offering.

So this is why we see people, for example, you know, talks about like outreach and how more, you know. Uh, difficult. It started to become, um, you know, the use of ai. So some people, especially I'm talking from customer's perspective, prospect's perspective, they started to, you know, hate being reached out by, by, um, people like, just randomly.

So, from someone who's doing this, and you've done this also before as a, uh, sales professional, what are you seeing in this space, Frank? Like, is it really something which is, you know. People are struggling with? Is it lack of data really? Is it like lack of research? What is it exactly, you know, and how you are able to, to help also, you know, fellow software companies in overcoming these.

Frank: So the, the best way to look at it is that, um, a lot of the software that [00:12:00] has been built, let's say about 10 years ago. All of that software has been built, uh, with more humans in mind. So typically companies have been charging per seat, per license, essentially. And the bigger the teams in sales, the more revenue it meant, right?

So it kind of made sense back in the days. But these days, all the companies out there, I. Um, they wanna be essentially lean and me profitability is really the name of the game rather than top line growth. Um, so it's not about being more top line growth, grow, grow, grow. Even though you can still argue, some companies, especially the AI companies, they raise so much money, they're definitely not profitable and they're just growing, growing like crazy.

Whether that revenue's sticky or not, that's not a question, right, to be, to be answered. But I think you have to be playing smart because, um, so let's say in our case, you know, we only raised half a million dollars. Um, so we are BC backed as a company, though we never have burned that cash. We've been always profitable since day zero.

Um, so, and that's because we always had this. Mindset of always being lean and [00:13:00] mean. Um, just like, you know, we wanna, uh, make sure our customers are lean and mean through using our multiple products that are priced relatively, uh, inexpensive because we charge for the actual consumption rather than the licenses.

Um, the same, you know, we we're looking at us as well, you know, we wanna be lean and mean. So when we procure any softwares out there, uh, we look at them from kind of. Not from, naturally, from a seed perspective, but from a consumption perspective, right? So if we, if you're using more and more of that software, then um, then we're happy to pay for the actual consumption.

We, these are, you know, API calls or open ai, you know, um, model, uh, yeah, right? So where you're just, you know, consuming credits there. Um, that's how we're looking kind of the software landscape. And then we see a lot more sort of consumption. Um, so a lot more sort of what we call the cac, shifting from labor over to software.

So cac, meaning cost of customer acquisition. So within, you know, when you're running your business, you look at the cac. So how much does it acquire, uh, cost you to acquire, um, you know, um, to, to bring into net new dollars [00:14:00] into your business? Uh, typically labor is, is definitely the number one chunk in the business.

So this is why we're also going after the labor, like we're trying to essentially reduce headcount in sales, and particularly in this particular top of funnel. Um. And by doing so, um, it becomes a lot more efficient for you to be acquiring, uh, these, these net new dollars out there. Um, yeah. Does that answer the question?

Mehmet: Yeah. So how, how, what you do currently, Frank and I gonna go back about, you know, the strategy that you used, but how that, that compliment, you know what, for example, people in marketing would be doing for their sales, uh, workforce. 

Frank: People in marketing. So typically, um, marketing, uh, people aren't really responsible for the pipeline generation, let's say on outbound.

They definitely are responsible for driving MQs and, and making sure these marketing qualified leads, you know, turn into, into revenue, right on the inbound [00:15:00] front. Um. But yeah, definitely it's not happening on the, on the outbound front. Um, uh, as in marketing typically does not own the pipeline generation from an outbound perspective, this is where typically sales owns that.

So I'll give you an example in our case. Um, so in our case, we have, um, head of growth who owns the inbound, um, uh, generation of leads across all the forges. Um, and then. Um, so he, the, the primary KPI that he looks at is initially MQL. And the reason why we look at MQs, um, at least, you know, as the first metric is because we are product led, um, uh, company.

So we run in the form of PLG, where majority of the sales that happen within the four ecosystem happen through the self-service model. Right. So the user goes, uh, hooks up with the credit card and goes and purchases. Um, and we even have, you know, some people that, you know, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in that, in this particular way, right?

So where there's no essentially [00:16:00] sales assisted sort of funnel as well. Um, and that again helps us with, um, with, with cac, meaning that we don't need to have as many salespeople, um, processing these leads, et cetera. So we have currently, right now only three sales, um, people, um, then three people in marketing.

Um, and about two people in customer success, and then we have two. Three, actually three automation people. Um, so on the automation front actually, uh, we have one, uh, person who's in revenue operations. So she does typically everything to do with rev ops, HubSpot, et cetera. Uh, we have a guy that does, um, um, automation flows in N eight N.

Um, the goal of that is to make sure that you are killing all the repetitive processes that you have in the business. By doing so then you are, um, alleviating the pressure to hire more individuals to, to tackle kind of different kind of manual proceeds that you have internally. And then the final person that we have, which is I think, uh, quite new is still in the space, [00:17:00] is what's called a GTM engineer.

I. So a go-to market engineer, or I, I personally call these individuals sales development engineers, essentially people that are very technically savvy, um, that know how to use APIs, know how to use some sophisticated tools out there in order to generate the pipeline for the business. Um, so we have one as well right now recently that we hired.

And, uh, yeah, generally speaking how we think about the business ourselves, right? And which is what I recommend every founder to do, is how can you achieve these, um. Superior, sort of, you know, let's call pipeline. It was with the least headcount possible, right? How can you, or can you, or say pipeline by not hiring individuals, right?

And that typically means you actually need to hire people on the, more, on the automation front, right? So because there's a, there's a compound effect essentially that happens because as you build out more, what I would describe evergreen campaigns, sequences, right, that you keep on compounding, it becomes much easier and easier for you to attain.

Um. Your targets, right, systematically. So it's [00:18:00] all about compound, um, thought process, same as we are compounding softwares and we're selling up the same user and the same customer. On the acquisition front, you know, when we think about content, um, or anything else that we do, we think about if we are putting in some work, will this work lost?

So, you know, that's how we think about, you know, content. Um, YouTube for example, we're very aggressive on YouTube where we are, uh, putting out one YouTube video per day on YouTube. So it's, it's things like that, uh, that allows us to, to. Uh, scale our company efficiently. Um, and the, uh, I think the other side of the coin, right, where you're putting in the efforts and it has a short term effect, that's, let's say spending money on Google ads, things like that.

Mm-hmm. For example, so we still spend money on Google ads, specifically bid on competitor keywords because we, in our space, we're one of the, what I would describe, one of the reddest oceans like sales technology, email, something to do with email. You know, generally speaking, there's a lot, a lot of hundreds of players.

Um, and so you need to apply what are called red ocean strategies in, in our case, like aggressive red ocean strategies where you're [00:19:00] trying to, uh, position yourself essentially differently than all the rest of the tools in the market. So unique positioning is definitely super important in order for you to be able to scale.

Mehmet: Frank, like, thank you. You answered a lot of question that also I had in my mind, and especially I wanted to ask you about the GTM engineer. You asked that, you also answered, you know, the question that you know about the, the scaling, the, the business and reaching the a RR you are at today. What I love about what you just mentioned now is you know about people should be in sales tech savvy, right?

And they need to understand, you know, how to do the integration because. And this is actually, I'm very big fan. You mentioned it two times, the red ocean and the blue ocean. And I'm very big fan of, uh, you know, the Blue Ocean strategy. You need to differentiate yourself. You need to create your own market sometimes, but yet, as you mentioned in the intro, you need to remember that still you have some kind of competition, even if it's not visible.

But [00:20:00] now I believe this is my theory. New founders or let's say. Younger founders are getting these yet, you know, there are still what, I don't want to be like very aggressive, but people who still goes by old playbooks and you know, they believe that, you know, this automation, including technology using AI is not useful.

So for these doubters or naysayers, I would say. What kind of, you know, real examples you can give Frank from maybe some use cases that you've seen yourself, um, serving your customers. 

Frank: Well, definitely, um, I can mention I. Um, our, what we call Pinnacle product, which is Agent Frank's named after me. So I spent in sales for, um, over a decade.

We've built out, uh, one of the best AI SDRs out there in the world, uh, essentially, which is a, an AI sales agent, which allows you to build pipeline sales pipeline fully [00:21:00] autonomously. Um, so you enter, uh, outline your value proposition in the software. Um, you then. Uh, set out your ICP in the software against the I ccp.

We source the leads for you. Um, and then we craft a unique email to every single individual in the language of your choice. So we combining essentially two data sets for every single email data set. Number one is the value prop, uh, essentially what we call the seller data. So what do we know about you and your business?

And then we match that, um, data set, uh, programmatically with what we know about. Each and every individual. So for, let's say about you, ed, uh, we would go and, um, search on the web, everything that we know about you on your website, um, maybe, uh, your podcast, even site. Then, um, going over to your LinkedIn profile, essentially giving us a very good context about you as a, as a person based on publicly available data.

So we call that the buy data. So we're matching the seller data and the buy data. We're stitching that together, and then we compute on top of that in, in language of your choice. Then we deliver that email. A beautiful email, which is highly [00:22:00] relevant. Um, we actually do that up to three emails of a span of two weeks that we deliver to the prospects.

Um, and then if the prospects reply back, then what happens is, um, then the agent will respond back to the prospect based on what's available in what we call the knowledge base within the software. So knowledge base, like let's called Digital Brain. So this is where you upload, um, all your information about your business.

So let's say sales playbook, pricing, FAQs, et cetera. This is essentially what the sales rep typically has access to in order. For him or her to do the, the job, right? Which is, you know, responding to replies of prospects and then trying to book them into a meeting. So what the agent, so when there's this conversation happening back and forth, right between the agent, which is fully autonomous, AI based right, replies back within a few minutes, um, uh, he has a goal in mind.

And that typical goal is to book a meeting. So what happens is MeMed, we, I would take, let's say your calendar link, let's say from HubSpot or Google Calendar link or Calendly, whatever. I'll hook it up to Agent Frank and Agent Frank will use that calendar link [00:23:00] to then, uh, book in a meeting with the prospect.

Alternatively, agent Frank can also ask for the link for calendar, link from the prospect, essentially. So that's an example, a real life example of where you are leveraging AI capability. Capabilities, automation essentially to drive. Real business value. Um, this was not something that was possible even like a year ago.

And the AI agents haven't been working really well actually, uh, last year. Um, because, you know, still this whole technology or about, you know, around sort of agent stuff is still in its infancy and it takes time to naturally to develop that. Um, but we will, we're one of the first ones in the market that has released.

You know, the agent and we don't discount the humans, um, you know, meaning proper sales teams. Um, what we believe is, and this is our unique positioning, is that we, the way we see the world evolving over the next five years is that, uh, humans will be working with AI agents. I. [00:24:00] In tandem together to achieve significantly superior output levels and to drive down cost per unit.

So let's say in our case, the cost per unit would be, let's say, meeting booked, right? So how much, how many dollars does it a euro does it take you to, uh, to book one single meeting, right? So you're looking to optimize that and get that down as close to, you know, as close as low as possible, essentially.

Right? So, um. So that's, that's, that's where we believe the world is headed, not just in the world of sales, but also in, in, in other parts of the business, whether it's finance, customer support, et cetera. We will see leaner and meaner teams across different, uh, organizations. Um, but we, I, I hardly believe that you can run majority of your bus business on just AI agents.

Mehmet: Yeah. Just out of curiosity. So, um, Frank, the agent, um. Does it have a, I would say limitation of, like, for example, it can handle this [00:25:00] amount of messaging or like this number of customers per day. So you need to have maybe like two Franks AI agent, Frank, or like, is it really like unlimited? Like you can just put it on your whole, you know, ICP database?

I would say. 

Frank: You can definitely do that because, um, our agent, Frank, um, runs on the other five forges. So think of it this way, that Agent Frank, um, as the pinnacle product of the Forg ecosystem, um, when we build another forge, so another software, we hook it up to the agent for the agent to use. So from a scalability standpoint, what, uh, what needs to happen is you need to build out what's called email infrastructure for the agents.

So we, we, we run our own private servers and shared servers as well. Where essentially the agent, uh, sits on top of one of the, let's say, email accounts. And that email account is being used to engage with prospects, and that's something yes can be scaled. Typically though, customers process about 1000, um, [00:26:00] leads at any given moment, and that's enough for them.

But if somebody wants to process up to 10,000 at any given moment, they can do so. Right. Typically, you know, it's not about, you know, um, spraying and praying in our, you know, our line of business. It's about delivering relevant messaging. And typically when you deliver relevant messaging, you will get, um, you know, replies back from the prospect.

So you don't, in most of the cases, you don't actually need to scale as much. Um. But it really depends on the customer. So some customers have, you know, millions of, millions of potential businesses as part of that tam. So total addressable market, while others only have in total 1000 companies. So if you only have 1000 companies in total.

My argument is you don't need to use much, you know, kind of automation software, et cetera, like automation software and, uh, a lot of, you know, AI agents and everything. Um, it really comes in handy when you have a huge TAM to, that you need to go after. Um, this is when you start thinking about hiring salespeople to process the tam, right?

So, um, and my argument is that's really a bad idea to be hiring just, you know, gazillions of people, uh, to be doing that. [00:27:00] 

Mehmet: Uh, the future of SDR because you know, like what you described, of what the AI agent is capable to do today is manual work. I know, because, you know, uh, I've worked with SDRs previously and I know how difficult it is for them because their whole focus is, and you mentioned to go search, you know, summarize, making sure that they are contacting someone that might be interested in whatever you are offering.

So. As we move forward, do you think the role of SDRs will be completely given to ai or we still need someone, you know, human who would be kind of co-working with the agents? And the reason I'm asking you, Frank, and you know, like usually people who enter the sales properly and the, I mean, not all the time, but I've seen like successful people starting their careers as SDRs moving later on as.

Account executives or what [00:28:00] some people, they call them sales reps and then going to, you know, leadership. So, you know, putting the AI in the, in the picture and, you know, considering both from technology perspective, human perspective, and career perspective. So how do you envision this to be. 

Frank: So, like I mentioned previously, I don't think that, um, you can fully move over to the fully agent world.

Um, so I'll give you an example of why not. So let's say, um, in one of the things that you definitely wanna do as a company, in B2B, you definitely wanna be doing what's called cold calling. You wanna definitely cold call your prospects. Guess what? Cold calling as, um, as a channel when it comes from. From an AI standpoint, right, ai cold calling is illegal in places like US and Europe.

So if in big markets, um, it's illegal to be leveraging any form of robo calling, agenda calling, essentially this is all the same, essentially, um, using systems essentially to call your [00:29:00] prospects autonomously. Um, if that is illegal, then that gives, you know, the evergreen, um, channel essentially for, for the humans to, to leverage, right?

Long term. So my thinking is that, um, really where humans will come indefinitely in handy is one is on the cold calling front. So that will, I think, never go away. Um, and b, also on what's called social selling. So essentially building a brand. As a human right? Building a brand or being an extension essentially of the company's brand, right?

So typically I say there have to be like three to 10 people that represent the company every single day on places like LinkedIn, et cetera. And that's not something any AI agent can do successfully. This is where you definitely need a human in play. Right? So these are the two main thing activities. That would, uh, remain, um, under, uh, human.

But where AI agents definitely come into play quite nicely is the other two channels in sales, which is, uh, one is [00:30:00] email, right? So humans are, most of them struggle to write really great email copies and it takes them typically 10 to 15 minutes to write a really great email copy before they would send off.

So they're just too slow to write really great email copies as well. Um, so this is where agent capabilities are much more superior in those particular cases. Um, and then the other channel, the last one is essentially social. So in social I also believe that, um, you probably have received a lot of, uh, templates on, let's say LinkedIn, right?

So everybody keeps on sending the same templates. You can see that it's probably, you know, sent to like other 10 or a hundred people or a thousand people. I don dunno how many, right? But you can see that template and people have a fatigue to looking at static piece of communication like a template because, you know, it has been sent to other people as well.

Um, so this is where, for me, um. Social channels like LinkedIn, et cetera, they, they're sort of similar to email, as in you will need to compute these messages. They're just different to email, right? Um, for me, LinkedIn is a bit like WhatsApp, right? So you don't need to sign [00:31:00] off, you know, best regards Frank Sanders or something like that.

Uh, they have to be short and snappy, and I think you have to lead with a question. This is what I typically, uh, would say. Um. So, yeah, this is an example where you'll be sort of forced to, depending on the channel, to either use the human or the AI agent. Um, and, and we have, we still, I think, haven't seen a lot of regulations kicking in from a kind of agent standpoint.

So there may be, again, some, uh, some more regulations coming in, in, into force, um, as we progress. Um. But yeah, that, that's something still to be seen. I think this is why it's very important to be using, leveraging, essentially software that can accommodate both the humans and AI agents rather than using a soft one software for humans and another one for AI agents.

I don't believe that as a very smart sales leader, um, you'll be using two [00:32:00] different softwares to build sales by, by. So, yeah. 

Mehmet: Yeah, absolutely. And I believe also Frank, uh, correct me if I'm wrong, like. From integration with other CRM systems, uh, you know, for, for like, for example, a normal, you know, in the normal, uh, way we used to do it.

So the SDR will try to reach to someone and then they will log to. Whatever CRM system they're using, say, Hey, like, try to connect. I tried to do, so like is there any integration that you can do today, you know, with, with CRM systems just to update? Or is it just like you give the infrastructure and just, you know, the, the sequence and then still someone have to go and log manually?

What's going on? 

Frank: No, no, we just, like, I think other, um, sales execution, execution softwares, we integrate with, um, a lot of CRMs. So the typical ones, Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, um, we're about to release a atte, et cetera. So we are releasing, we, we are, we, we have gonna have about 10 [00:33:00] integrations, um, uh, very shortly, like native ones bidirectional, right?

So where you can sync, um. And then apart from that, uh, there's other systems that we integrate with, you know, so something that's I think, um, typically missed is we integrate with Slack. So you can get, you know, the replies, uh, either by humans, you know, AI agents fed directly into Slack. So that's also really powerful to be always, you know, keeping, um, uh, on track or what's happening.

Well, within the software even comes to replies. Um. But, um, I think it doesn't matter which software you are, it doesn't matter whether it's sales or accounting, et cetera, you'd wanna definitely integrate with the rest of your ecosystem, right? Um, which is, you know, the core ecosystem. And that will be typically the CRM stuff.

I think that's the main one. And something like Slack or Microsoft team, that would be another one. But then again, depending on the industry, there could be a bunch of other, um, sort of ecosystems that you'll need to integrate with. 

Mehmet: Yeah. Great. [00:34:00] Um, like if I want to have a kind of a look into the future, uh, Frank, like, uh, how do you envision, you know, um, you know, the forges I would say, and Salesforge and the other forges to be in the future?

Like any new markets, any, you know, uh, some other areas that you want to, to be in, uh, in the near future and in the long term future also as well. 

Frank: Yeah, that's a good question. So, um, so from a market standpoint, uh, the typical markets that all software's going into would be us, you know, north America and Europe, right?

This is where you typically play, however, um, as sort of competitors are busy in the US markets. So the typical markets, we're thinking about what we call other markets as well in the world. So what are the other markets in the world that would say mimic, um, mimic, let's say the US market? I dunno, G-B-G-G-P per capita, how much software they buy, how big is the economy like, all that stuff.

[00:35:00] And, uh, a, a playbook that I have learned from the Israelis is in your early days, you should be definitely going to the Japanese market. Um. That's exactly what we're doing. So we will be going, you know, and opening up to Japanese market in the next, uh, couple months. Um, and what that means is, you know, translating the website, translating the software, making sure that the products work also in Japanese when you compute emails and stuff like that, right?

So all that is like super, super important. Um. Yeah, that's what we're gonna be doing, um, from a kind of market standpoint. Um, so while competitors zig, we zag essentially, you know, so we doing something, we are essentially on a slightly different swimming lane because you should definitely want to, you definitely want to tap into the markets where you don't have as much composition, right?

Especially where you know, where you're in red ocean market. So go into, um, underserved markets with a great product, right? So, um, and it should be fine. And Japanese love, you know, sales, they love. AI stuff. They love AI agents, you know, so there's, there's, there's [00:36:00] a lot of that. Um, there could be other markets that, you know, we could have explored.

I just, you know, came back from Singapore. And in Singapore it's also a very developed market, but maybe it's not as big or not from a, an economy standpoint, or they don't buy as much software, for example, as the Japanese. So these are all these things that you need to consider. Now from a kind of product standpoint.

So, uh, so we have six products in total. Um, the Pinnacle product is Agent Frank, and then we have other products predominantly used by humans or Agent Frank uses these other products. Um, but we will be building another, uh, four products at least. So, um. So currently we, what we call in the stage where we, we, we have an ecosystem of products.

We'll go V one ecosystem, um, where we cater for the world of email. Um, and then we're, uh, in about, uh, a month or two looking to also, uh, launch LinkedIn as a second channel to email so that the agent can say, work across LinkedIn or you as a human you can use, you know, LinkedIn to engage with your prospect.

So that's the, that's the next expansion from a kind of channel standpoint. But then [00:37:00] we will have other products that will be. Um, predominantly looking at increasing conversion rates within the funnel. Um, so definitely there's more products that come from us, can't share too much. Um, but, uh, we're definitely hungry and definitely are gonna be aggressively building more products, and especially these days is so much easier to be building products than say, five years ago, because you have, you know, these, um, apps like Cursor for example, right?

That helps you to, mm-hmm. Helps you to augment your engineers, right? And increase the output levels of every single engineer. So we're definitely giving that, um, to every single top engineer that we have on the team, um, especially senior engineers, right? So to to increase their output levels. So.

Mehmet: Absolutely. And to your point, like, uh, there's no better time today than start building something because it's became much, much easier. And I think Frank, honestly, like it's not a compliment, uh, because by the way, like I knew about, uh, Salesforge before, even like we, we've met and, you know, we were introduced for doing this podcast.

I was saying, oh my God. Like, you know, [00:38:00] if, like this is, if, if I, I am a founder today, right? Especially in the SaaS space and. I don't have any sales experience, like this is the tool that probably I would be at least experimenting that I'm sure, you know, they would, they would see, um, benefits because now.

Everyone talks about, you know, because before it was like, yeah, it's like building the team and having, you know, the right team. So now, and ideas and building, executing the ideas. So I think things are getting easy. And actually what you have done, Frank, is also, I'm not saying you made it completely easy still, they have to do a lot of work.

And you just mentioned they need to go show their faces, you know, have some social presence and do the social selling, but at least you know from the. Outreach part. I think you did a lot of heavy lifting for them because some people, when I talk to them, you know, they don't know also like majority of the things.

What I liked also, Frank, honestly, is that you explained this infrastructure. I didn't want to waste time, you know, [00:39:00] because I think by now people knows, you know about the infrastructure yet you need to have for outreach. 'cause people think, oh yeah, like you just put the list in a, uh, Gmail or like whatever Outlook and you send up telling them, no, it doesn't.

Or this way, you need a proper infrastructure to handle that. So I mean, like you've built this, um, you know, from the ground up and I think people will benefit out of it. But if we want to, you know, give a message to people like who have ideas now in mind and they want to start building, and maybe they are not like you, Frank, coming from a sales background.

Maybe they are coming from a pure technologist like. I would say practitioner background in technology and you want to give them this, you know, encouragement to go and start. So what you can tell them. 

Frank: I, I think the, the, the, the, the, the biggest piece of advice, and I think it has been said many times, is just go and speak to your customers or to the users, essentially, right?

So just go and just do that and do that every day. Try to [00:40:00] have, you know, five, 10 meetings a day with diff, you know, with the users in the segment where you are digging for a problem. For a solution that you're looking to build, um, because by speaking to the customers, and, you know, I typically speak to, you know, to 10 to 20 customers on a daily basis at least.

Um, so if you, if you're going at that velocity, it's very hard to get things wrong. Because you have so much sort of input data, so much feedback that's coming, uh, from your users on a daily basis. So you can't get it wrong. So that's why, you know, spend a lot of time with your users and whether you're gonna build on something like Lovable or you know, some other kind of ai, uh, engineering software, it's up to you or you're gonna get a proper CTO, uh, or you're the CTO yourself, you know?

So, um, I think. Really go after real problems, you know, that need to be solved. Um, and the way to figure this out, you know, whether something is real or not, is, is really by speaking to the users and many of them. So, you know, before we launched Sales Forge, we did [00:41:00] 40 user interviews, properly recorded, semi-structured interviews, and we got four paying pre-orders before even shipping a single line of code.

So that gave us the conviction that we're onto something, right? So, um. So it's that that's the validation work that you should be doing, so, yeah, 

Mehmet: absolutely. And just like final thing, um, Frank, uh, as founder and leader also as well, like, how do you continue to grow also on, you know, personally and professionally to make sure that you're steering, let's say the, the company towards the sustained success.

Frank: Good question. Um, so yes, so I think that, um, the companies that, uh, are the fastest growing that typically, um, consume a lot of knowledge on a daily slash weekly basis, um, and they've, uh, they, they feed off kind of that knowledge from, I would say other founders that probably are smarter, better than them, um, could be in different categories.

Um. Definitely. Um, [00:42:00] another thing that you can do is, um, attending, you know, industry specific events. So let's say I'm in SaaS, so I would, I would, right now I'm flying right now into two conferences. I, one in Croatia, one in, uh, Austin, Texas. Uh, and both conferences are about SaaS. So, and you're essentially learning from a SaaS, um, leaders in terms of how they build their companies, what are, what are the pains that they're going through, et cetera.

So this is something that you definitely want to do, um, if you don't have the resources to go to these conferences. Uh, fair enough. The other thing that you can do is, um, uh, just, you know, approach people on LinkedIn and, um, you know, say you would love to grab some time for 15 minutes to learn, you know, a thing or two from them.

Um, that's definitely, that's something I've done and other people have done also with me. Um, and otherwise then, you know, specifically, let's say for sales, there's a few, uh, there's a networking, let's say community called sales hookup.com. You can sign up for that community and then on a weekly basis you'll be connecting with another sales, um, individual somewhere around the world, you know?

So that's something I still today. [00:43:00] Otherwise, if you're looking to connect with other founders, um, on a weekly basis, then you can check out something, what's called lunch club.com. Um, so this is where you're putting yourself into routine to be speaking to people on a weekly basis. You have to force yourself essentially to, to go out there and I.

Engineer for luck, what I call, you know, so the more people you speak to, the more events you go to, the, the more lucky you be, you will become essentially right. Luck just doesn't come out of nowhere. It's, it's because you're speaking to individuals, it's because you know you're jumping even on a pod like this and stuff like that.

This is how you engineer luck for yourself and your business. Um, so going and, and being out there, um, having eyeballs on you all the time, um, it can only benefit you. So, um. You definitely wanna figure out your own routine and your own way of connecting to your users or other peers in the industry to always, um, uh, you know, uh, feeding your brain essentially on a cons, on [00:44:00] a, um, consistent basis.

Now, the other thing that you can do, and this is something that applies to me because most of my ICPs, so ICP means ideal customer profile. So my customers are users, most of them are based on LinkedIn. Okay? Um, what I typically say, you can engineer your feed on LinkedIn in particular way that, uh, you know, let's say you open it on a daily basis and you feel like you learn something.

So what I typically say, you know, connect with definitely your customers on LinkedIn. Um, connect with your competitors, so you have them always on the, on the radar. So you can, um, like, just like in chess, you can navigate, you know, um, the competition, right? So while they're moving this direction, you may be moving that direction and so on and so forth, right?

So definitely have them always on the radar. So follow your competitors, follow their company CEOs and stuff like that. Um, and then also follow people that just give you free advice, um, on LinkedIn, let's say on a daily basis. So one of those individuals is Jason Lempkin. Jason Lempkin is one of the, um, SaaS, uh, VC sort of godfathers out there.

He's been around SaaS for a long, long, long time. Back in the days you can only [00:45:00] read about SaaS on his blog. Nowhere else, there was no other sort of learnings to be gained. Only Jason Lemkin was kind of sharing knowledge, like, you know, 10 years ago. Uh, 10 years ago. So, um. So, and it 

Mehmet: has, uh, the famous conference as well.

Frank: Yeah. Saster. Yeah. Unfortunately I'm not making it this year, but I, I went to that one last year. Um, but the, like, these are the people and there's a lot of other people like Jason Lemkin on LinkedIn that share knowledge for free on LinkedIn. You just need to follow them. And the people that don't give you value on LinkedIn, just unfollow them.

That's it, that's all you need to do. It sounds easy, but it's like an exercise that you need to do. I don't know. Once a month, you spend an hour and just optimize your feed until you're super happy. And then you feel like every time you open, you know, your LinkedIn feed, you are learning a ton. And then absolutely it makes you 1% better every single day.

That's how you have to, that's the mindset you have to be in. 

Mehmet: Absolutely. And I think you are also active on LinkedIn, uh, Frank, [00:46:00] so people can follow you there, right? Yes, 

Frank: yes. 

Mehmet: Great. Just one thing before, before I close, uh, you mentioned it about, you know, people who send, uh, LinkedIn messages. So for me, if I find out that someone, it's nowadays very easy to figure out, they just copy it, you know, and they didn't customize it.

I usually try to not reply and I know they put it in the sequence and I know they will send a reminder after three days and one week. But people get surprised, especially the ones who write to the point and just like, Hey. I have this need your thought. I reply them and they get surprised by the way they said, oh, like you replied us.

I said, yeah, because you, you told me what you want. Like, you didn't write me like one full paragraph that I have to go through to understand what you're trying to do. So yeah, be to the point. As, as Frank mentioned, Frank, really I appreciate, you know, the time and I think the website is Salesforge ai, right?

And uh, yes, it's. I gonna, I [00:47:00] gonna put it in the show notes. I'm gonna put also your link then, um, and of course, the resources that Frank mentioned, they were very valuable. Frank, thank you very much for, you know, the time today. I know like how busy it is for a founder, especially on a Monday morning. Just for people to know we're recorded on a Monday morning.

And, um, I appreciate also, you know, all the insights that you gave us today. It's very useful for founders, especially in the SaaS space, B2B SaaS space, and of course to people in sales in general. I. How things are shifting and which direction, you know, uh, we are heading to. And as usual, this is how I end my podcast episode.

This is for the audience. Guys, if you're just here for the first time, thank you for passing by. I hope you enjoyed if you did, so give us a tamba. Share it with your friends and colleagues and subscribe also as well. And if you are one of the people who keep coming again and again, thank you very much for your support because all what you did this year for the podcast, we are able to be on the top 200 charts in multiple countries on the Apple [00:48:00] Podcast.

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