Ep # 186: Why Land and Expand Breaks Without Post Sales Discipline ft. Paige Tyrell (Chief Growth Officer & Co-Founder, Prefixbox AI)

Paige Tyrell 00:05 But what no one is really talking about is that if you don't have a process that already works, introducing AI is not the magic bullet that will say, you had a hard time doing lead generation before, but now if you use our AI agent, we'll figure out all the lead generation. Intro 00:21 Welcome to Across the Funnel, where we dig into concrete go-to-market moves across sales, customer success, and account management so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego. Adil Saleh 00:37 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is Across the Funnel. Adil, your co-host. We are super interested in talking about how AI is impacting the retail side of things like e-commerce. I know that for some time, when AI actually made a big boom about 16, 18 months ago, when it came with anthropic models and all, a lot of these SaaS, I would say e-commerce SaaS or SaaS in retail, kind of took a little bit of a pause, and they're trying to make sure how AI can be so efficient when it comes to hunting for products, when it comes to recommendations for products, when it comes to discovering these products for retailers. And this is a more than a hundred billion dollar industry. That's why we were trying to explore more with the Chief Growth Officer and Co-founder at Prefixbox. Paige, thank you very much for taking the time. Paige Tyrell 01:34 Hi. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here and discuss all this. It's been, as you mentioned, a very eventful time in e-commerce, not even in the last 12, 18 months, but really since COVID, because that shook everything up back in 2020 with all the supply chains. Everyone was rushing to move online, and then it was a big boom in technology. Then the market kind of re-stabilized itself, which was not at the level that people thought would be growing forever. So that took a little bit of a hit, and now you're right with AI, it's really revolutionized what's possible, what teams are trying to achieve, and it feels like every week or every second week, there's some new news. I don't know how closely you follow it, but in the fall, the big wave was that you would be able to check out on ChatGPT. They integrated with Shopify and Etsy. Now it turned out that that's not exactly the case, what they were saying. So every day is something new. It's a really eventful and exciting time to be in the space. Adil Saleh 02:29 Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, yourself, you've been a growth leader for more than a decade now, and you're optimizing not just sales and all these marketing operations, and then working across the sustainability side of things. How do you see this? I know that you are more towards the retail side of things like e-commerce, but as a growth leader, how do you see this? Is this something that makes you excited, the way AI is moving really fast, optimizing the bandwidth? Every leader is trying to do more with less, introducing new technologies or building internal agents and all of that. So how do you see this in a broader spectrum as a growth leader? Paige Tyrell 03:09 It makes me excited, and it also makes me really tired because there's some new tool every day. There's this new sales motion, and if you use this agent, it's gonna revolutionize your whole sales process and change everything. And I think people, to some extent, are overestimating what's possible, because I think a lot of the conversations around using AI in sales are like, you can do it at scale and leads will just come pouring in. But what no one is really talking about is that if you don't have a process that already works, introducing AI is not the magic bullet that will say, you had a hard time doing lead generation before, but now if you use our AI agent, we'll figure out all the lead generation. So it basically will accelerate and optimize what you're already doing. But if what you're already doing isn't exactly working, it'll show you that faster because it's gonna do that same thing at a higher volume. So you can find the pattern much easier. So I think you still really have to focus and make sure that you have the fundamentals right on your outreach, your messaging, positioning, ICP, all of that. And then once you have this model that's working, then it makes sense to introduce AI in specific ways when you identify what it is you're trying to achieve, because there's not one size fits all AI tool. It's like, okay, I wanna optimize lead generation, or I want to go through the pipeline faster, so improve pipeline velocity, or reduce the time to follow up with prospects, or something like that. So you really need to know what it is you're trying to do. And I think now, I don't know how you see it or what you hear, but now I kind of feel like they're selling a lot of different tools as the magic bullet. But still, at the end of the day, you need a strategy that works before you can bring in other things to optimize it. Adil Saleh 04:57 Yeah, absolutely. We hear this a lot as well, because you gotta nail it first to scale it, and you gotta know your workflow that's working. At least it's good to work and experiment to introduce AI, and then introduce AI in a really specific organizational function, not just a broader function, because AI, if you see it as, like you talk about agent workflows, on a wide array, they don't work. You gotta make sure that, as you mentioned, you're only focused on lead generation, only focus on the follow-up funnel, you only focus on pipeline generation. So it is always good to have specialized capabilities and fine tuning it with iteration and experimentation, what works, what not. It becomes equally critical to do that scale if you don't know how it's gonna work. That's why a lot of these companies, especially these companies that have been heavily funded, like millions of dollars, and they had the money to fail and experiment, they are struggling now, two, three years down, because a lot of them came onto my podcast, these founders.Now you talk about companies that got funded in 2023, 2024. They are not hitting the growth numbers that their board demands and all these investors demand. They're struggling to raise their next round because the spend has been so much, because they were trying to ride the wave of AI bad enough when the AI was not there. They didn't know it because, as you said, they thought that it had some magic wand and it's gonna automate everything. It actually broke. Then the customer success side of things, when I started this podcast, it was purely a post-sales GTM podcast, like customer success, revenue, support, and all these leaders came up and said, hey, we are investing back into our customer base, into their success. That's how we are tracking success and all of that. So the success part has also been a growing pain in recent times, especially here in the Valley, because a lot of these companies are now not focused on acquiring more customers, but retaining their install base and investing into the success part, building multi-product or maybe adjacent use cases to make their products sticky enough. Because, as you mentioned, there's so much noise. If you talk about SMB to mid-market category, every GTM team, if I just talk about, say, account management, they have like 15 to 20 tools at their disposal that they can try. They look around on the internet and they see, hey, we might try this tool. We might evaluate it. This is cutting up the price. This is how we can optimize our budget. So there's so much internally going on. Paige Tyrell 07:47 t's totally overwhelming also, how can you make these decisions and then you feel like, okay, well, I tried one, it didn't work, let me try the other one because it was the tool. But I think a lot of the time it's the underlying thing. It's not necessarily the tool, because they all have their own specialty. But if you still don't know what it is you're trying to do, you can try all 15 tools and still end up at the same place where you started. And I think what you mentioned, also the startup scene changed a lot since 2020, not just COVID. You were getting huge tickets back in 21, 22, 23. Grow at all costs, and there was not really a focus on efficiency. So, okay, that's cool, you increased the revenue 4 million, but nobody was asking how much did you spend to increase the revenue 4 million, and it was 6, 8, 10. So nobody was checking on that. And now I think all the investors, and even founders themselves, are more cognizant of this efficiency metric. So I'm spending this, what am I getting back? Not just growth at all Adil Saleh 08:47 the ROI impact. Yeah, the ROI impact to it and how it's hitting the bottom line, because that's the biggest talk of the town, very honest, across all the GTM tooling. Because when I talk about post-sales, when we talk about marketing, when we talk about revenue, when I talk about customer success, every business is trying to optimize their tool base and tech stack and see how they can find the better ROI in a longer-term view, because acquiring customers now has started costing three, four times more because, again, the noise and competition and all. Perfect. I love the way this conversation started spontaneously. Paige Tyrell 9:20 Exactly. We're on the same page, Adil Saleh 9:24 O n our own internal dialogue that we've been having, because I've been working on the growth for Hyperengage and we are also a B2B SaaS product. Now talking about Prefixbox, and I know this category. I know that you're one of the first movers in hunting, discovery, and recommendation for any retailer, for any product. I'm talking about retailers with 10, 15, 20,000 products, just talking about the industry here in North America. How do you see this shaping in? Could you tell us a little bit more about Prefixbox and what it has done in recent times when it comes to automation, AI, leveraging generative AI to the fullest and at scale? Paige Tyrell 10:06 So Prefixbox is an AI-powered product discovery solution for e-commerce retailers so that shoppers can find what it is that they're looking for when they're looking for it, because if you can't find it, then you can't buy it. So the retailers don't make money. This space also has changed a lot, and I think really in the last year, year and a half, is when we saw a lot with ChatGPT. Not just because of ChatGPT and this checkout flow and whatever the buzz was, but what actually is possible in terms of understanding language from a computer. All of that technology, these large language models that ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity are leveraging, that went forward a lot, and that's an underlying key component in search because at the end of the day, search, even though you're not searching in a long sentence like when you interact with ChatGPT, it's about understanding the intent behind a keyword so that you can surface the right products for that. That being said, search used to be, I mean, people were kind of trained with Google, right? You would distill your thought into the fewest keywords possible to find hopefully the most relevant information. Now we're swinging back with ChatGPT and Claude, where people are asking questions, sentences, and people are starting to be retrained in that way of actually conversing with the machine. That's being reflected in the way that people search on e-commerce sites. So this is a long way around, but a lot of search engines aren't built to process full-length queries or to extract from a sentence what the meaning actually is. So now search has moved forward a lot because of what is possible with these large language models, and the way that e-commerce is changing is everything is becoming more conversational. So not just supporting conversational queries in a search box, but also having this agentic experience powered by AI, like a mini ChatGPT agent for your store. People got really burned because there was the chatbot hype in, I don't know, 2020 or whenever that was. That was like the next big thing. But that was really just decision trees. If someone asks this, then say this. It wasn't intelligent. You couldn't converse with it. So people kind of got burned by that. But now we're back in this agentic wave, so we don't wanna say the word chat or chatbot because that has that negative, stupid connotation to it of how they used to be. So now we see that everything in e-commerce is going in this agentic way, where you would have an agent on your site that knows all your products. It can work for product discovery, it can work for advice, it can work for support, et cetera. It's like having an in-store shop associate on the website. This is what retailers are interested in, and it's now kind of also a question of how do you blend that traditional search experience, where you execute a query and you see the grid of three or four products by however many rows, with this chat UI. So how do these start to work together? So it wouldn't just be a static search result page and then an agent in the corner, but can there be a walkthrough between the two where it's a more unified user experience and customer experience? So that's kind of where we are now, and there's not a clearly defined, like, this is the new UI going forward. But everyone's talking about it and thinking about how can we start leveraging this agentic experience, be more conversational. So that's the main implication of AI from the retailer to the customer, to provide almost this ChatGPT-like shopping experience or product discovery experience on your own website, in addition to surfacing products on ChatGPT, because obviously you want people to be able to find you across different channels. Adil Saleh 13:39 Love it. I love the unification part that you mentioned because a lot of these platforms, I would relate this more towards marketplaces, what they're trying to do when they build agents, they just give the chat interface and people communicate. They get their answer for that particular instant. But again, they cannot record it. They cannot call it back. They cannot replicate it. It's not unified. So it's equally important to have a unified sort of experience instead of just a chat interface. It's essentially easy to build, but it's not the correct way to have the end course of action, which is, of course, finding the right product and helping them evaluate a bunch of products so they can make the final decision. Thinking about the UX part, how challenging was that, building it for retailers? Because I know that sometimes the products change vertical, and the intent changes, the way they evaluate products changes, and it is directly tied to the way they make money. The success is kind of shared. So how are you making it a win for them, not just by user experience but also the education part? Because a lot of these retailers are not so tech savvy. So how did the customer education piece, you guys being a growth leader yourself, how did you guys crack that in the beginning? I know it's not that long ago, but how is that surfacing and building the customer education? Paige Tyrell 15:07 It's also been a long journey because when we started Prefixbox 10 years ago, not many people knew what's the difference between a good search engine, a bad search engine, what are the best practices, why would I need to change mine. So much of what we did on the marketing side in the beginning was this education, like these are the best practices, this is what your search engine should do, here's how you can evaluate if you have a good one or a bad one. So we spent years really educating on that, and this is, I think, one of the most interesting changes, that now people know what it is, one, and with this agentic topic, it's really changed also how you sell as a tech business to other businesses because it's a hot topic. People know what it is. They know more or less how they would want to use it. They know why they need it. So it's a totally different conversation as compared to the beginning of, this is what a search engine is. Now they're like, okay, but can your agent do X, Y, and Z? You can actually give this live demo and say, look, I set it up for your store. Let's interact with it. What do you want me to ask it? Let's see. You can make it way more interactive. So it's totally changed how we've gone in that way. I think now the conversations with them are more about specific use cases because every industry has a different one. Like fashion, for example, they would want to use agentic commerce or an agent in order to help shoppers find the right product size because that means they can sell more and have less returns. For DIY, on the other hand, that's not relevant, but it's about, I'm gonna renovate my kitchen or I'm gonna renovate my bathroom. So having this more project base. So it's more educating around, for your industry, we see that these use cases are the most common. Is that how you would wanna work it? How would you want to put it in through your user flow? Because we could direct to the agent from the search bar, we could direct from the search result page. You can have these different push points from search to the agent. It's going through that because now people more or less know about it, I think, because everyone is talking about AI and AI agents. So that need to educate them on why it's valuable is gone, and that's really nice, that they just get it. Adil Saleh 17:17 Interesting. So now, I know that we already touched a little bit on this retention part, like how you're increasing the lifetime value. I know that looking at your packaging and pricing, adding more catalogs, there's so many signals that you can surface for your post-sales team to identify, hey, this is accounts for expansion. There's growth that we are signaling. Maybe we can do a cadence or business review, whatever. These are the accounts that are not so active based on just the interaction piece. On top of that, I know that you guys might already be tracking a lot of this and measuring success and health across accounts, especially for these bigger accounts, let's say with lots of products, I would say a thousand or more than a thousand products. So how do you imagine success, from just recording interactions? Are there some other qualitative data sources that you need to, as post-sales, record or analyze? Maybe you can have AI on conversations or meeting notes, any notes set, any feedback and feature requests, any problem that customers share during the meeting that lives in the CRM. So could you also walk us through a little bit about your tech stack and then how you're measuring success around these kinds of triggers or signals that you identify? Then, of course, you can share more what more success metrics matter. Paige Tyrell 18:40 I guess the best way to start answering this question is what we want to deliver to them is a conversion rate increase and a revenue increase. So everything that we do and we build and we sell is with that goal in mind, that we're gonna increase your conversion rate and revenue. Then you can have top-line metrics like by improving user experience, increase search user rate, et cetera, et cetera. The way that we package our products, we have different suites that they can buy. They're independent, but everyone starts with search. So we have the search suite, and that's usually where everyone starts. But then the space also has evolved and people want product recommendations, so we have that. Our agent is another product suite as well. These are all sold separately, and pretty much everyone, when they start with us, just buys search. The search price is dependent on the number of search requests, which can be correlated to their visit counts. So if you have more visitors, you have more search requests. It goes like that usually. In terms of product size, we have retailers with like 2, 5, 10 million products in the catalog, so we don't charge by that unless it is a huge number, because we can support up to 50 million products. So if it's gonna go that way, then our hosting costs are higher, then we have to have more costs. The journey goes usually like we outreach with search. Now that's moving more into the agent because that's the hot topic. People understand it. So it's a land and expand model where we'll sell one product, which is search, or now the agent integrate that, get that delivering value on the conversion rate and revenue. Because once you do that, the rest of the conversation becomes quite easy because you can already build the trust. So you say, hey, we did this, these are the results you have. Throughout those conversations of onboarding the search, because actually it's a very complex product and it does take some time to get that up and running, you can understand what other challenges they're having more than what you could understand in the beginning of the sales process. So, oh, they say, I really wanna do cross-selling. Then, okay, great, we have product recommendation. So by landing with one product and working together through the integration, because usually we meet them every week in the integration phase, like, okay, this is the status, da da da, whatever, you get more of a feel for what their challenges are. Since we have a modular product, then you can add on more. Then of course they grow, because our goal is to help you increase your revenue and conversion rate. Ideally then you will have more searches, more customers. They know the search is good, so they use search more. Then at the end of the contract term, we'll review what is the usage and then, okay, look, you grew 15% last year, so we need to increase the contract 15%. So there are multiple different levers that we can pull in that direction. So mostly growth and selling an additional module on top of what we already have once we have more signals from them. So everything in that is in the CRM we use. Actually, we use Pipedrive. We used HubSpot for a while, but then Pipedrive, because it's mostly an outbound business and B2B. I feel that HubSpot has a lot of good marketing features and it's more tailored potentially to where there's a strong inbound motion, but Pipedrive is a more simplified enterprise B2B CRM, is what I felt in my experience. So that's the one that we're using there. Then we have other email marketing tools, et cetera, but everything is stored in Pipedrive. Adil Saleh 21:53 Okay. So if I was to ask, what is the system of record for all the post-sales team, be it success, implementation, as you mentioned there's an onboarding that has technical implications, so you need to make sure they integrate all of the products and everything, whatever it's at, from that point on, all the system of record is mostly Pipedrive, the CRM, or do they have any other data Paige Tyrell 22:20 So sales and CSM are in the same, so everything is in Pipedrive because then we have the customer and we'll say, okay, this customer uses search, upsell opportunity is product recommendation. At that point, after the contract is signed, the CSM takes over, and then they are responsible for the upsells. Having that all in one place matters Adil Saleh 22:39 Oh, they're responsible for the upsell. That's a more fair kind of a proposition because a lot of these sales teams that CSs has done their analog, and a lot of these in B2B tech core, they're like the commission disperse differently to the CSMs as to the sales when it comes to the instances when upsell happen. And most of the time they get reverted back to the sales exact for the upsell. So that's good. Paige Tyrell 23:07 Yeah, so they're also doing it, something that we started doing more of in the last six months, because they're the ones who are in constant communication with the customer, so they know what the needs are, they know what the opportunities are, they have the relationship. Sometimes sales can come in maybe for more difficult or complex implementations or negotiation or something like that. But since they already are in the flow with the customer, then they take it over from there. So all of that rolls up ultimately under me, so it's just in one CRM where I can check it. Adil Saleh 23:37 Gotcha. Gotcha. You earlier mentioned that this agentic mode, like the agent, is more as an additional license or additional product. So that's also an upside. Some retailers start with search and they grow over time, and of course you see the signals and everything. So if they want to have an agentic model, they have to have an add-on. That's how it works Paige Tyrell 24:00 Yeah Exactly Adil Saleh 24:03 Ok Perfect. So what other success metrics matter over the course of, say, the first two years in terms of increasing the lifetime value, apart from increasing the revenue piece, as you mentioned, the conversion and all? Paige Tyrell 24:14 That I think is more, so the conversion revenue is more top line, and that's what we want. Underlying, we want to reduce the zero result rate. We want to increase the search usage. We want to have them more active in the portal. For example, we have a merchandising capability, which is built in, so make sure that they're engaging with that and maximizing their value out of the solution. A lot of them don't know, or teams change from when you initially onboard them. So the CSM also needs to make sure that they're using it. We don't sell per seat, so it's not something like, you haven't logged in or you need to buy more seats. We don't have any parameter like that. So really, at the end of the day, it's about the revenue and the conversion rate. Are these increasing? We also do a lot of experimentation because in search you can have a lot of different settings for how you're gonna rank the relevance and what you emphasize and put weights on. So we run a lot of A/B tests for them. Let's say we released a new feature. Then the customer success team will say, hey, we have this new, for example, we released an AI re-ranker, which re-ranks the results based on AI. It's quite a simple name, but it also removes less relevant results. So we said, okay, let's run A/B tests for our customers that are interested. This was actually a paid add-on, but we said, okay, do you wanna run these A/B tests? I would say 85% said they wanted to experiment with it. That had crazy results. Just from our AI search engine to the one with the re-ranker layer, that increased revenue for them by 45%. So we run a lot of experiments and then upsell in that way as well. So it's very data-driven. I mean, that way also, how do you argue with it? Like, okay, this generated 45% more revenue. Would you like it or not? Adil Saleh 26:07 Would you like to increase your revenue? Would you like 45% more of it or no? Paige Tyrell 26:14 Well, that's also for CSMs' responsibility. Are they running these A/B tests? Are they introducing the new modules? We also are constantly releasing features that are included, but it can be hard to get them turned on because everyone's really busy in the day to day. So it's like, okay, have you onboarded the new features to the customers? Did we run A/B tests for new upsell opportunities? All of these things, from not just the retailer side, what's a KPI, but also from the customer success side, because again, all of those A/B tests, fine-tunings, modules should then impact the customer Adil Saleh 26:48 Ultimately yes. The ultimate revenue and conversion, that's what matters. That’s the best part about these platforms, not just in retail, in any spectrum, is when the success is shared and it's so definitive when it comes to hitting the revenue and conversions. How do you see your net revenue retention piece in percentage? Out of a hundred a month, how many of those get expanded, or what's the churn looking like? I'm just trying to get my head around this stickiness part. Paige Tyrell 27:20 Our churn is pretty low because search is a very sticky product because it's very hard to integrate, number one, and number two, AI-powered search engines learn from user behavior. So if you were to change search providers, all of the data that you've gathered with us, for example, let's say they wanna leave, all of the data that we have gathered and improved our algorithm with automatically, Adil Saleh 27:43 Yeah it keeps getting better with every experience Yes, that’s the best part about AI Paige Tyrell 27:47 Yeah so if you leave, you just go down so I think also, going back to our AI topic, that's something that businesses are gonna have to think about is the stickiness of your product. Because AI agents, if it's just an AI agent for sales, for example, that's so easy to churn because we were talking about like 15, 17 different tools. You copy your prompt from one into the other one, so that switching cost is so low. Whereas in search, and that's also why we want to integrate more of the search and agent experience, that becomes a much more sticky product. Adil Saleh 28:20 Yeah, and stickiness is not so much to do with, and you will agree with this, it’s not about building more features or shipping features or covering more use cases or more integrations. It's about fine-tuning the AI the way you’re doing with your customer the quickest, the fastest, and giving them the best outcomes when it comes to AI. In your case, it was recommendation, and in your case it had a direct impact on the conversions, and the numbers. So that's great. Perfect. So now, as a leader yourself, I know you guys are, how big is the team? Paige Tyrell 29:00 Around 30. Adil Saleh 29:01 30 people. All of them in Europe? Is this kind of diverse, like in Europe, it’s different cultures Paige Tyrell 29:04 Yeah, all in Europe. Adil Saleh 29:04 That's the best part. But all in one country? You've got some in Hungary, some in... Paige Tyrell 29:10 All in Hungary, Switzerland. I'm in Spain, so we're around here. Adil Saleh 29:15 Oh, great, great. I'm also planning to move, if in Europe, of course, in Spain. Better weather, you know. Paige Tyrell 29:22 Oh, really? Adil Saleh 29:24 Yeah because if you are to learn another language, Spanish is the language that's widely spoken. Perfect. So how's tech there, in terms of the core SaaS, AI-needed products, startup ecosystem? How's that in Madrid? Paige Tyrell 29:44 In Spain, it's growing a lot. I've been here for five years and when I came it was pretty low. There wasn't a lot going on. People weren't really talking about it because there's a lot of bureaucracy, so setting up your own business can be difficult. But the government is working on that. The ecosystem is starting to grow. There's a lot more people trying to start their business now. This idea of, I guess, it's not a traditional path, because when we were growing up, go to school, go to college, get your degree, work for Microsoft, work your way up, one of whatever the big tech companies, that's the traditional path. But now here people are starting to see, okay, this is actually a good business. Spain itself is well positioned because of what you just mentioned. So many people speak Spanish because that's a huge part of the world. So Madrid, or anywhere in Spain, is kind of the link if you wanna expand to Latin America or vice versa. You service the European markets, which are huge markets independently. So it's well positioned, and a lot of people are talking about it now. How can we facilitate more entrepreneurship? How can we get more in tech? Because the flip side of that is the conversation about the US style, where it's very low regulation on AI, you can do whatever, where Europe has a lot more, even if it's just GDPR and things like that. So I see a lot of conversations around how will that impact the AI or the tech scene for startups in Europe versus in the US. But I think it will have an impact long term. But now everything here is growing and people are getting more interested in it. So it's good to see that. A community is starting to build, but it's at the beginning. Adil Saleh 31:24 At the beginning, okay. But it's just that the movement has started. Perfect. Because I do know a little bit about Stockholm, Sweden, but the weather is crazy. Paige Tyrell 31:34 Too dark over there. Adil Saleh 31:35 Eight months a year. It's crazy. I've been there a couple of times. Perfect. So now thinking about the culture piece, I know it's relatively easier for companies that speak the same language, that have some relatable culture, and a smaller team, not that big of a team, because a lot of these startups come up and say, we brought like 150 people last year, 100 people last year. So it is so hard to keep up with that DNA piece and operating principle. I strongly believe that if you make the right decision in the top line, the bottom line follows, no matter who you are in the team. There's always gonna be team members that are looking up to you, so you're always getting influenced and being influenced. So how do you see this part at your team? I know a lot of these people are from Europe. How did you set that operating principle? So if I am to recognize your team, what is that number? What is that slogan? I put you guys down as a team of young folks, go-getters, people doing crazy things individually, maybe gaming freaks and whatever. So how do you guys think? Paige Tyrell 32:58 What's the categorization? That's a good question. We spend so much time on our branding and coming up with our vision and our mission, vision, and values. But I think at the end of the day, the things that were the most important to us are always learning. The excuse, I don't know how to do that, is not an excuse. That's great. That means go figure it out and learn how to do it. People who are always open for new challenges, to figure something out, and I think that also ties into an ownership mindset, where it's like, okay, I'm empowered, I should figure this out. Honest people, because we want to build these long-term relationships with our customers. So it's not like a sales motion where you're gonna say, yeah, we promise the world and then you give nothing. That's not what we're in. So trying to be honest, good people. People that we like working with and having fun. Like being a normal person, not being a jerk, no politics. Show up to work where it's a place that you like, work hard with other smart people, do something cool, have fun. That's what we're about. Adil Saleh 34:04 Yeah. On the flip side, if you're part of a job that you don't like, you're doing a disservice. You cannot be great at something that you're not passionate about. I've hired and fired more than, I would say, 15 people in the past four years, and more than 50% of them, I went on and said, hey, let's sit down. Let's see where you can find your passion. Of course, visibility is not certain, you’re not gonna be visible. So, you gotta be uncertain and accept it, embrace it, and let's see where you can be placed better. A lot of people came up and said, hey, I'm not good at content. I might be good at something else. There's this one guy that started as a content writer, as some sort of growth person. Now he's managing agents. He's doing all the technology integrations, Claude MCPs, connectors, all of that. He's not been touching content or design or anything like that. So it's always equally good and fortunate to have leaders that navigate through those maybe incapabilities, or things that you don't feel like doing, and you keep on doing because you wanna get paid or whatever. So there has to be some leader like yourself. It's always good to learn from people because people are always complicated. They always change. That's why AI hasn't replicated them fully. Paige Tyrell 35:30 Yeah. That’s been the thing, right, like is it easier to manage AI agents Adil Saleh 35:34 Yeah. And also there's another piece. I was just talking to my co-founder, like, hey, the more people we're gonna have with these agents, the more complicated it's gonna get. It's so hard. Back in the years, not so long ago, like two years ago, it was more about optimizing the bandwidth to have a team of pretty smart people in Pakistan. It's a country right across China. More than 200 million people are under the age of 32. So the country with AI and all this, pretty smart people. But again, when you get people from a fraction of the cost, it becomes equally hard to let them go when things get complicated, especially with AI. You have agents, but you have five different people managing those agents, and the ownership is across five different people. It is so hard. So now it's more about having people that know what AI is, the fundamentals, how these LLMs work and all of this, and getting them to manage those agents and keep getting better on the capabilities of the agents. Paige Tyrell 36:36 Yeah. That's gonna be, I think, the big learning area now. How can you upskill yourself to be AI literate so that you can be more valuable in the workplace, or do more, or become more productive? But I think that's also kind of scary. Back to your very first question, what does that mean? We were talking about this today. Sales, I think, already has changed and it's gonna only change more. If you think about outbound, email inboxes are flooded. It's all automated. It's like low-quality messages that are irrelevant. The same is also now happening on LinkedIn. If you log in, you've got all these random messages. So if you accept someone you don't know, that means you're gonna get put in a flow of 8, 15 messages. So then you have to spend more brainpower to sort through, is this real or not, because you can't just delete everything because maybe it's real. So in sales, how are you gonna stand out and get into contact with the people that you actually need to get in contact with? Maybe it's gonna go more old school, where it's going back to the events, meeting in person, this networking. Adil Saleh 37:41 Yeah. Human connection. Absolutely. I follow the Academy Awards every year for the past 15 years, and there was this one movie named Train Dreams. That movie was shot, 75% of the time, in natural light. It was all natural. Of course, so much production has been replaced by AI-generated work, and directors and producers are thinking, hey, how we can use AI to produce more, produce better, be efficient, and have more thrill and all. But on the other side, there's these movies that people connect with, and that's how they get nominated for these prestigious awards. I think not long from now, like two years from now, people will still crave authentic videos and founders sharing their real experiences, sitting on a desk or maybe walking in the morning. These kinds of videos would be more of something that we would all crave for, apart from these Super Bowl AI-generated ads and all that. Paige Tyrell 38:50 Yeah, I agree. It'll be interesting to see how everything plays out, and I think we'll find out soon because it's moving so fast. Adil Saleh 39:00 So fast. Perfect. So one advice for any woman in a leadership role feeling kind of left behind because she sees everybody doing better. Like every founder, one moment every day or one day every week, thinks like, hey, these folks are doing really good. I see the 3,000 likes and comments, and they're getting viral posts, and they're building workflows in Claude, and Claude is like, you go on LinkedIn and in the next five or six seconds you get a post that says, hey, I've built this workflow in Claude and this automated and increased 50% of my sales or revenue or whatever. So for that woman thinking that she's left behind as a founder, starting out a product, two, three years in the journey, what is that one advice that you would give? Paige Tyrell 39:52 One, not everything you see online is true, so use your critical thought on that. And two, don't give up. Because a lot of these people who've built successful businesses, I think, were also sold that dream, that old startup one. You start your business, two years, you become a millionaire, your company is a unicorn, you're growing. That also is not true. Most of the companies that hit unicorn status were between seven and 10 years old. So even when it's really hard, even if it feels like you're behind, don't give up because the only way you're actually going to lose is if you stop doing it. If you keep doing it, success will come. Thinking critically about what you're doing and optimizing where you need to. So don't keep doing the dumb thing, but if you don't give up, success will follow. Adil Saleh 40:38 Love it. I was just listening to Mel Robbins just a few months back, and that kind of stuck with me. She was talking about the tagline of Nike, just do it. So it says, you don't have to perfect it, just do it. It clicks with me. Sometimes it's more about doing it than doing it right, and having strong perseverance, and making sure you have the consistency, whether it's branding, content, customers, marketing, whatever. So make sure you're in the game. You're in it all the time with the same level of energy. Sometimes it goes up and down. External sources could be there, but always get back in the game. So thank you very much, Paige, for the time. The energy was infectious. Love the notions that you have, full of thought and strong grip on the growth side of things. I wish you the best and will keep following your journey. Paige Tyrell 41:37 Thank you very much. It was great to have the discussion. Looking forward to more in the future. Adil Saleh 41:42 Absolutely. Likewise. Take good care of yourself. Have a great, wonderful day. Paige Tyrell 41:46 You too. Outro 41:48 Thank you very much for listening to Across the Funnel. If you got one useful GTM idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit follow. Explore Hyperengage at hyperengage.io and Dextego.