GTM 113: Operator.ai, Solving the Great Ignore and GTMfund Incubating a Company with Mark Kosoglow and Max Altschuler
Sep 19, 2024
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Mark Kosoglow, Co-founder and CEO of Operator.ai, and Max Altschuler, Founder and General Partner of GTMfund, dive into the shifting landscape of sales and marketing tech. They discuss the alarming trend of buyers tuning out 90% of sales outreach, known as The Great Ignore. Mark shares how Operator.ai leverages AI to personalize outreach by uncovering unique insights, radically streamlining the process from 20 contacts to just 2 touches needed to secure a meeting. The duo reflects on their shared history and the challenges of relying on outdated data practices in a rapidly evolving market.
The podcast highlights the need for sales strategies to evolve beyond automation, emphasizing the importance of personalized and insightful engagement to break through buyer fatigue.
Operator.ai aims to revolutionize sales outreach by leveraging AI to provide unique insights that enable sales teams to engage prospects more effectively and meaningfully.
Deep dives
The Challenge of Modern Sales Engagement
Sales outreach has evolved significantly, now requiring an increasing number of touches to secure appointments, with figures rising from seven to a staggering 20 or more. This challenge stems from a saturation in the market where basic contact and account data lacks uniqueness, failing to capture prospects' attention. The podcast emphasizes that simply enhancing automation won't resolve the issue; rather, it necessitates a shift in strategy to better understand prospective customers and personalize outreach effectively. To address this challenge, innovative approaches that incorporate creativity and authentic engagement will be crucial for breaking through the noise.
Operator.ai: Redefining Sales Outreach
The launch of Operator.ai aims to provide a solution for optimizing sales outreach through advanced AI capabilities. This platform is designed to gather profound insights about potential customers, allowing sales teams to offer personalized engagements that resonate. By filtering through extensive data, Operator.ai helps sales representatives identify key factors that can drive meaningful conversations, significantly shortening the outreach cycle. The intention is to shift from generic outreach tactics to more targeted, information-rich interactions that genuinely engage prospects.
Market Landscape and Competitive Advantage
In a landscape where billions are spent on contact data with no clear competitive edge, Operator.ai positions itself as a provider of unique insights that differentiate its users from rivals. Traditional outreach methods rely heavily on readily available signals, leaving most sales strategies ineffective as many companies adopt similar techniques. With the advent of a competitive environment defined by data proliferation, sales teams must discover new strategies that get ahead of the curve. Operator.ai proposes a solution by emphasizing the importance of strategic personalization and insight-driven outreach, allowing users to capitalize on unleveraged opportunities amid market noise.
The Vision Behind Operator.ai
The founding vision for Operator.ai emerged from years of dissatisfaction with existing sales enablement tools that fail to meet modern requirements. The aim is to eliminate outdated business models characterized by credit systems and to prioritize genuine user engagement based on actual usage and insights. By simplifying the outreach process and focusing on quality over quantity, Operator.ai seeks to foster more meaningful connections between sellers and their targets. The team acknowledges the necessity of bridging technology and personal interaction to enhance the sales process, ultimately aiming for an environment where value-driven communication flourishes.
Mark Kosoglow is the Co-Founder and CEO of Operator.ai, a company incubated by GTMfund. Mark was employee #1 at Outreach and former SVP of Global Sales, where he helped grow the company from zero to over $200 million in revenue. He is joined in this special edition podcast episode by Max Altschuler, Founder and General Partner of GTMfund.
Discussed in this Episode:
The current state of sales and marketing tech, with too much automation leading to spam and prospects tuning out messages.
The Great Ignore, the place we have reached where buyers are ignoring 90% of sales activity.
How basic contact and account data has become commoditized and no longer provides a competitive advantage.
The launch of Operator, its manifesto and mission.
The founding story and team behind Operator, including Mark and Max's history of working together.
Operator's unique approach to using AI for finding interesting insights to enable relevant, targeted outreach.
Incubating a company within GTMfund.
Highlights: (4:00) Mark's background at Outreach and the early days of sales automation. (6:41) The problem with relying solely on basic contact and account data for outreach. (8:41) How Operator uses AI to find unique insights for personalizing outreach (14:01) The vision for Operator: going from 20 sales touches to book a meeting back down to 2. (27:58) The founding story of Operator and how the team came together. (32:47) Comparing Operator's approach to other sales tech tools and their shortcomings. (38:00) The dangers of AI-powered spam and the need for more targeted, relevant outreach.
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The GTM Podcast The GTM Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Scott Barker, GTMfund Partner, featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes and other interesting content.
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