The Remarkable SaaS Podcast #147 - Ilan Kasan, CEO of Exceed AI - On the journey from poor product fit to customers writing raving reviews
This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the sales & marketing space that has the power to increase sales productivity by over 80%, and my guest is Ilan Kasan, Co-founder and CEO of Exceed.ai.
Ilan is an accomplished product leader with proven successes in driving product, user experience, strategy and execution and building products users and enterprises love, such as Webex.
He has deep expertise in mobile, web, & application software & SaaS products, and built an 18-year career in general management and product management for leading global technology companies, including Cisco, WebEx, Comeet and others.
Ilan has been an earlier guest on my podcast. Our first interview was back in February 2019. Lots has happened since, and what triggered me to get him back on the podcast is to hear his story about how the market has changed, how he orchestrated his organization for growth, what he’s changed to survive the pandemic, and what lessons he learned in this process.
Here are some of his quotes:
We learned a lot. And the biggest change: we know very well who is not our customer. We have Product Market Fit. We know that we solve a real problem. We know who we should sell to you. But we hadn’t figured out the Go-to-Market Fit.
The Go-to-Market fit is one of the balance between product, sales and marketing to help us sell the product. Another way of looking at it is that a good Go to Market fit is: If you understand how your customers buy. Your Go-to-Market has to fit the way they buy and not the way you sell.
By listening to this interview, you will learn four things:
- How to move from product market fit to Go-To-Market fit
- Why it’s liberating to say no to prospects
- That products don’t only need to do functionally what it says it does – more importantly - It needs to do it in a way that delights customers
- Why it’s not enough to just have a good story and a good message
For more information about the guest from this week: