The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the impact Marketers can make by generating more leads, of higher quality, with less effort. My guest is Yonatan Snir, Co-founder and CEO of CliClap, an AI-powered autonomous lead generation and qualification solutionHe is an expert in data-driven marketing with over 16 years of experience, helping organizations utilize technologies to improve business performance. In 2016, he founded CliClap together with Arie Zaks, who now acts as their CTO.Prior to CliClap, he opened a marketing agency, focused on helping brands transform their marketing operations into a data-driven organization. And before that, he served as the Director of Global Marketing Operations at NICE Systems.It was this big idea behind CliClap’s product that triggered me to invite Yonatan to my podcast.We explore why so after so many years of marketing automation, the tools we use still suggest to visitors of our website the wrong topics of conversation (which is awkward) or ask people for their commitment way before the time is right (which is annoying and pushy). We then address how technology like AI is offering us a completely different approach to the challenge, one that delivers results almost too good to be true.Here are some of his quotes:“We have a lot of traffic on the website that's not converting today, and many tools and many new tactics are being used to try and fix that. But eventually, we see that only friction converts.The numbers, the benchmarks that are stated today by Forrester, Marketing Sherpa and other research, is that we looked at talking about 2 to 4% converting to leads, and only half percent is converted to opportunities.The reason for that, at least from what we found, is that on B2B, you give the same experience to everyone.The fact is, it's not a one-size-fits-all. A lot of people are being missed out, because they're not used to getting this kind of experience in today's world, where everything is becoming much more simple in our consumer head.So, the idea is to try and understand for each visitor when, and what's the next best thing. And when it's ready, ready to stick and move to the next level of engagement.Not too soon, not too late.”By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:How, by staying curious and challenging the established and accepted ways of doing, it is possible to deliver remarkable impactHow in a crowded, red-ocean market, it is very possible to get customers to shift from a competitive solution to yours by having clear differentiation.Why the traditional cloud solutions for marketing have been focused on the wrong metrics of delivering scale and quantity (i.e., output), where the real impact is created when you focus your product strategy on quality (i.e., outcomes).

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform how the enterprise does business. My guest is Heidi Messer, Chairman and Co-founder of Collective[i]Heidi has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the digital economy since the commercialization of the Internet. She is the Co-founder and CEO of World Evolved, a platform for global investment and expansion. She is one of the founding members of the Zokei Network, a global network devoted to encouraging innovation across art, science, business and technology. In addition, she is an active angel investor in and advises numerous startups.Prior to Collective, Heidi and her brother, Stephen Messer, co-founded LinkShare Corporation, which is host to one of the world’s largest online affiliate networks representing some of the largest and fastest-growing publishers and merchants on the web. The company is widely considered to be a pioneer in the world of digital advertising.Heidi is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world and universities on entrepreneurship, digital marketing and advertising, business intelligence and the Future of Internet services. She has been cited in various publications, including The New York Times, Inc. Magazine, and The Nikkei.She has received several honors, including being selected as one of 2012’s 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs.The mission behind Collective[i] is to remove uncertainty and inefficiency around how B2B companies generate revenue through their sales organizations. They do so by using AI to remove tasks, identify important social connections and guide sales professionals to the activities that will yield the highest ROI. This approach often gets them referred to as the “Waze for sales” – And this triggered me to invite Heidi to my podcastWe explore why today’s salesforce is wasting 70% of their time on non-revenue-generating activities, and why, in order to solve that challenge, you need to go beyond automation. As such, we explore how the combination of network-based technology, community-sourced and proprietary data, in combination with AI/ML, enables to predict buying patterns and provides levels of visibility and actionability previously unattainable for sales teamsHere are some of her quotes:“My co-founder and I got together and said: “What is the next big opportunity?” after watching the marketing world transform, and we saw on the enterprise side and the revenue management side, specifically sales, as being the next big thing. That’s what led us to found a Collective[i], which is short for collective intelligence.”“The entire enterprise will be transformed using a combination of data networks and artificial intelligence. And when I say transformation, what I mean is not automation. I think that's a common misconception. Instead, what we looked at is; Where areas where humans are underutilized? Where are areas where their jobs have become something other than what they were originally intended? And for us, we looked at revenue and in particular sales organizations as a ripe place for this, where this technology could completely reorganize and allow human beings to shine and show their true talents.”By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:Why taking a network approach to creating insights has the power to solve some of our most valuable challengesHow, by using AI as a guide, we can raise the potential to increase both the value humans produce as well as the way they value their work.Why being a fast-follower doesn’t work with AI, because the advantages are so far superior.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the Procure-to-Pay space. My guest is David Griffiths, CEO of FISCAL Technologies, a leading provider of forensic solutions that empower procure-to-pay (P2P) teams across the globe to protect organizational spend.David has 20 years’ experience in growing technology organizations and has spent the last 15 years working with hundreds of Accounts Payable teams to help protect their corporate spend by preventing fraud and reducing risk. Prior to becoming the CEO of Fiscal Technologies, David was Head of Marketing for Bottomline Technologies and Commercial Director for European Internet Technologies, a supplier of e-business solutions. David holds an MBA and an Honours Degree in Business & Accounting.What triggered me to invite David to my podcast was his vision to enable the finance function to prevent high-risk transactions from creating reputational damage and become more proactive at the same time in optimizing performance.We explore the fact that we are living in a world where Risk & Fraud are increasing rather than reducing. We discuss why current solutions on the market appear to be so inadequate. How that results in reputational damage, leakage of working capital and underperforming financial performance. And finally, how technology such as AI can be used to deliver remarkable impact.Here are some of his quotes:The whole Procure-to-Pay space is dominated by hundreds of different technology vendors and really sit in two core areas.Firstly, around procurement and automating the whole procurement process and driving purchase order compliance and POs and three-way matching, and then the other side is about managing invoices and paying those invoices. There's a lot of technologies around automation.The more feedback we received, and the more research we did, we realized there was nothing to oversee all these different technologies to look at fraud and risk.We found that three-way matching doesn’t work.It hasn't evolved over the last 40 years.So our big idea was to provide oversight to this process, as a lot of organizations now are really exposed to unprecedented levels of risk and fraud.By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:As the velocity of our world increases and our options to get work done enriches as technology evolves, we are creating a new foundation for fraud and risk to grow exponentially.That the value of AI is not only to give insights to identify fraud and risk but possibly more important to also reveal totally new patterns that allow us to prevent these challenges altogether.That a lot of value is destroyed due to inertia in the market – the self-believe that ‘everything is under control’ – and that’s not only in the Procure-to-Pay scene. It’s universal.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around marketing automation that has the power to transform the way we can turn customers into buyers by using the power of content personalization, and my guest is Jon Shalowitz, CEO of LiftIgniterJon brings a wealth of experience in building innovative, fast-growth companies. He was CEO at XDN, where he transitioned the company​ ​into a category leader for application delivery services and led the company to a​ ​successful acquisition by Fortinet.He then co-founded CloudUP Networks and led the company as CEO to capture a critical part of the cloud data management market.​ ​He then became the CEO of Badgeville, a leader in Enterprise Gamification that got acquired in July 2016 by CallidusCloud, where, in turn, he created a new division to address the $20B Customer Experience (CX) market. CallidusCloud got acquired by SAP in August 2017, from where Jon moved into an interim CEO role at SnapRoute with the prime objective to re-focus the business. In April 2018, he became CEO of LiftIgniter – a Series A stage startup that helps B2C and B2B companies optimize their Web-based and app-based customer experiences in real-time.The way LiftIgniter does this intrigued me, hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore the challenges marketers have these days in meeting the expectations of their prospects and customers in the digital world we live in, while at the same time ensuring we are 100% compliant with data privacy regulations like GDPR. It has become impossible to keep up with manual segmentation and tagging as we all expect our suppliers to give us a personalized experience based on our behaviors – in real time.Here are some of his quotes:“I truly think that the marketing stack is in a position to move from evolutionary change that we had with marketing automation, to now something revolutionary with AI and machine learning.The big idea is that customer interactions, customer experience, and digital customer experience need to be number one, real-time, and need to pick up on signals in real time. And, related to that, need to be behavioral-based, or need to understand your behavior in the moment, or the users’ behavior in the moment, versus the traditional way of tracking and segmenting and really focusing on who you are.It's what you are, what you're doing, what you're interested in, in the moment, not who you are, and what you've clicked on at 10 other sites where you came to me.”By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:How you can leverage your 1st party data effectively and drive the best possible Customer Experience.That true breakthroughs in technology can only be achieved by taking a distance from the conventional ways of doing things. Too often, we get too engaged with improvement on improvement on improvement, where we should really start with a clean sheet.Why as a CEO it’s your duty to gear your company towards the most valuable challenge of your ideal customer, not the most interesting challenge. You need to apply a level of adaptability, and with that you’ll turn customers into fans.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the sales execution space that has the power to help companies gain 99% accuracy in their sales cycles, hence achieve big leaps in productivity, and my guest is Dr. Cindy Gordon, Founder and CEO of SalesChoice, an AI SaaS Predictive and Prescriptive Guiding Selling Company.Cincy is an expert in SaaS, AI, business innovation, early-stage software commercialization & sales /marketing practices. She has held senior leadership and partnership roles in global B2B Enterprises, including: Accenture, Xerox, Citicorp and Nortel Networks. In addition, Cindy has also been a founder, VC, and an angel in emerging software companies. She is recognized for her innovation and thought leadership, has written over 13 books, and won numerous awards.Cindy’s passion is the constant pursuit of sustainable innovation and the creation of differentiated experiences to make our world an incredible place. That’s what triggered me, hence I invited her to my podcast.We explore the large-scale challenges sales professionals have in making their targets. The fact that 30% of sales professionals suffer from attention deficit disorder, and that attention span has dropped 50% over the past 10 years, is likely making this worse than better. AI is coming to the rescue here. It’s interesting how Cindy defines it: AI is not new energy then, it’s the new oxygen – we have to breathe it to be able to do things we’ve never held possible.Here are some of her quotes:“What drives me day to day is probably just ensuring that what is possible is real, and giving people the confidence that they could actually mobilize the change.It's all about building the confidence to just simply be, enjoy, and make it happen. Too often, we get paralyzed. And I think with the speed that has accelerated in businesses worldwide, people need to make more choices about where they're spending their time and what they're working on,The roots of the company are very much focused on that specific problem. The problem is that 30 to 60% of sales professionals don't make their sales plan targets or quotas in the B2B market segment.The speed, acceleration, or the age of distraction dynamics, B2B sales professionals have one of the hardest jobs in the world because of the noise factor.So that's the backdrop and we thought the thesis was: “Could AI, with predictive analytics and other AI methods, absorb all the historical dynamics of a firm and actually guide them?”During this interview, you will learn four things:Why it’s key to always look for audit trails once you add AI to your solution – Someone needs to be accountable for the predictions. And if you can’t stand in for it, the legal issues will be pretty significantThat the new way to deliver your solutions is not to give your users individual insights, but rather universal intelligence of all ‘the moves’. This will enable them to add even more value.That one of your responsibilities and opportunities as a vendor is to ensure the data keeps improving – that bias isn’t there – and that your predictions are transparent.Everyone knows that to succeed you have to stay focused. Possibly more important is to stay curious. To be looking around the corner for the market dynamics and the edge plays. Leave yourself and your people time to pause, reflect and time to think.

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 has built an 18-year career in general management and product management for leading global technology companies, including Cisco, WebEx, Comeet and others. During this time, he’s proven to be a successful product leader with a track record in product, user experience, sales, marketing, and building products that users and enterprises love.September 2016, he co-founded Exceed.ai around the belief that sales reps' time is precious and shouldn’t be wasted on menial, error-prone tasks. As such, they developed an AI Sales Assistant that automatically contacts and engages every lead in a personalized and timely manner in order to qualify and book meetings directly on the reps calendar – allowing the reps to be laser-focused on high-priority prospects. This triggered me, and hence I invited Ilan to my podcast.We explore the challenges every salesperson has in performing in their job and how the bulk of their time is spent on tasks that don’t use their competence in an optimal way. We also assess why a combo of Sales + AI delivers better results than simply trying to replace Sales with AI.Here are some of his quotes:“I was exposed to what I would say, the middle of the funnel, how difficult it is to manage a huge stream of leads.I saw how much time reps are spending in qualifying, getting back and trying to set appointments, talking to the wrong people. How many leads that marketing created, nobody actually does anything with them, or follows up one.So I understood that there is a real problem here that is not necessarily related to the size of the company, but rather the nature of the business.The problem is that when you get all those leads at the top of the funnel, you get a lot of noise.It takes a lot of time to work through all the leads and filter out the noise; it’s a very manual process.And we said, okay, this is repetitive, it repeats itself. So let's find a way to automate it.”By listening to this interview, you will learn three things:That to stand out in your market, you have to deliver value beyond what ‘the others’ are delivering. Going the extra mile pays off – and sometimes this means pivoting your business.That the value is in the data – and often the data is not there – meaning you have to find clever ways to gather it. This way, you are not building a product, but a platform that gets smarter and smarter with every interaction.How your biggest competitor is often ‘doing nothing’ because of inertia or simply being skeptical (or fearful). The ultimate way out is positioning.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform how we hire and manage talent going forward, and my guest is Caitlin MacGregorCaitlin is the CEO and Co-founder of Plum. After being President/Director of two startups, Caitlin founded Plum in order to transform talent processes to prepare business owners, like herself, for the future of work. Shortly after that, Plum was awarded the 2015 Gold Stevie International Business Award for best new product or service of the year. The company was also selected as one of the top 10 businesses led by women by Springboard Enterprises NYC.Plum's mission is to help companies hire, grow, and retain top talent with the power of AI and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. By measuring talents such as leadership, innovation, communication, and more, Plum hosts the single largest database for quantifying human potential at every stage of the employee journey – from predicting successful hires, to informing professional development, strategic workforce planning, and high-potential capability.This inspired me, hence I invited Caitlin to my podcast. We explore the challenges in the talent acquisition and talent management space, and why so many companies are challenged with hiring top talent. We also discuss how the changes in the marketplace require a different approach to hiring, reskilling and redeploying talent – and why assessing where someone went to school or previously worked are not the things to look for.Here are some of his quotes:“Some of the statistics say that, you know, it's a 50/50 chance of hiring the right person.A lot of companies don't have 50% turnover. So a lot of the time, what happens is that they're putting up with mediocre people.Maybe 20% of their organization are top performers. But if you understand what makes a top performer, a top performer, and you can quantify that you can actually change that ratio so that you can get more people that meet that criteria.It's really understanding that every single person has the potential to be a top performer, just not in every role, and that each person has a unique set of talents that makes them a top performer.So it's really about how do you figure out what makes somebody exceptional, and then figure out the jobs that will allow them to succeed.”During this interview, you will learn three things:How looking for scarcity can you help uncover hidden market gems that you can open by democratizing access.That to maximize your success as a software business it’s key to align every aspect – all the way from product strategy, to marketing, to Sales, to Service.How new business ideas are born by looking with a fresh eye at what it takes to avoid costly investment decisions.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the financial marketplace that has the power to transform the way we know it in two ways:Avoid disruptive shifts in financial market mood by predicting subtle changes in perception biasIncrease shareholder value and impact by offering a new framework of decision-making, such that early insights into market dislocations and even market crashes can be timely converted into new and persistent high-impact alpha opportunity centers.My guest here today is Efrem Hoffman.Efrem Hoffman is the CEO, Founding Architect, and Thought-Leader of RunningAlpha, an independent Canadian Innovation Think-Tank, headquartered in Toronto As stated on his website, he is employing patented and proprietary insights at the intersection of physics and finance to exploit market uncertainty for competitive advantage.He is a thought-leader in Smart-Data Analysis Architecture and developer of Quantum-Behavioral Trading Machines; Efrem has 145 citations and multiple info-tech patents referenced in patents granted to Fortune 500 Companies & Research Think-Tanks.His vision is rethinking the way we can collaborate with nature in order to better exploit uncertainty. With that in mind, he’s developing solutions that help investors build intelligent portfolios and see investment opportunities before they arrive and get noticed. From there, he helps them navigate around value traps to ensure they maximize the value of their portfolio. This inspired me, hence I invited Efrem to my podcast. We explore the challenges and risks of today’s financial market and how technology can help investors gain early access to opportunities previously only discoverable by the Wall Street influencers.Here are some of Efrems’ quotes:“My passion has always been about understanding the physics that underlies very unusual events.I did a thesis, which was basically on applying vision techniques in three dimensional radar in order to use AI in a more constructive way, where humans don't make assumptions about what's actually happening in the surroundings.I patented technology and there was a couple people, one from the University of Manitoba. Some of the professor's there noticed that some of the applications of that AI approach that was used for atmosphere Tornado prediction could be applied to the financial markets and understanding you know extreme behavior and what causes it to take shape during manias and panics.I'm most proud of actually being able to make predictions of it in very narrow windows and, and persistent windows for when market crashes are likely to take place, so that I could actually protect investors portfolios during those events."During this interview, you will learn three things:Why the best decisions can only be made when bias and sentiment are taken out of the equation – this is a clear area for technology to play a significant roleThat the solutions we create will gain in value exponentially when they not only predict a certain high-risk event accurately but also provide the ingredients to prevent it altogetherHow to find new sources for innovation by searching for use cases that are driven by extreme uncertainty. Tackling uncertainty can turn into a clear competitive advantage.If you want to learn more about Running Alpha’s latest product, “Capital Market Trends,” visit CapitalMarketTrends.

This podcast interview focuses on product strategy principles that, if applied, have the power to deliver transformative innovation with triple-digit ROI. My guest is Richard Boyd, CEO at Tanjo.AI.Over the last twenty-six years, Richard has led or helped create some of the most innovative game technology companies in the industry. He has served as a game technology consultant for a wide variety of industries, including energy, healthcare, education and motion pictures. At Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin he created and led a group of innovative engineers and designers across all mission areas called Virtual World Labs. Richard joined Lockheed Martin in 2007 with the acquisition of 3Dsolve, a North Carolina-based computer game technology firm where he was founder and CEO.Prior to that, Richard was CEO of 3dVillage.com, which was acquired in 2001. 3dVillage was a spin-out of Virtus Corporation, where he served for a decade on the executive management team that created several pioneering computer gaming companies.Today, he’s the CEO of Tanjo.AI, whose mantra is “improving businesses, industries, and people’s lives by bringing machine learning and automation to the world.” This triggered me, hence I invited Richard to my podcast.We discuss how a pragmatic approach to solving everyday problems can result in transformative impact. We, too, often don’t realize the solution is right in front of our eyes, and the technology is already there to solve it.Or, as William Gibson once quoted: “The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.”Here are some of his quotes:“The sort of thing that drives me is bringing technologies to bear on problems to solve them in ways that humans alone cannot.it's looking at whatever activity you're engaged in, and trying to figure out, what should humans be doing with our effort and our attention? And what should we be turning over to machines? The answer to that question changes almost every year, almost every month now,Organizations who understand that, and figure that out, will prevail. And those who don't, not only won't be competitive anymore, but they'll appear to be handicapped very soon.If you can do something one time and have it not only pay 10x return on investment, but have that return be an annuity... something you're going to get every single year... the earlier you do that, the more effective and competitive you're going to be.That's why everyone should be waking up and looking at this carefully.You cannot afford not to look at machine learning”By listening to this podcast, you will learn three things:The key to machine learning innovation is to not overthink or overreach. Don’t paralyze yourself with endless research with uncertain outcomes, but instead be pragmatic. Look for proven applications with low risk - the low-hanging fruit problems unique to your industry, that have a certain outcome, can be applied immediately, and scale radically, i.e., can bring a lot of positive impact to many people very quicklyEvery organization has big data today. But it is a big leap from big data to information (data that has been organized) and an even bigger leap from information to Intelligence (information that has been computed so humans can act upon it). Machine learning is uniquely designed to help your organization make these leaps.The next century is about simulation. So, those who become adept at harnessing data intelligence to predict the future and be prepared for it, those companies will prevail.

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to 10x the impact financial auditors can make, and my guest is Robin Grosset, CTO at MindBridge AI.Robin has a track record as an entrepreneur, having worked in and founded successful software startups. This resulted in him joining IBM in 2008 through the acquisition of Cognos, where he was appointed IBM Distinguished Engineer. He has over 20 years of commercial experience in the field of Business Analytics. He was formerly the technical lead and chief architect for Watson Analytics, a groundbreaking cognitive analytics system. Robin holds many patents in the areas of analytics, data processing and security.Today, he leads the development of the next-generation MindBridge AI Auditor that helps professionals detect and prevent financial anomalies, including fraud. He’s created a vision around Human Centric AI, and shared that vision recently at TEDxOttawa.This triggered me, hence I invited Robin to my podcast. We explore the challenges in the financial auditing practice, and how, even after decades of automation, much of the practice is still very manual and sample-based, leaving huge opportunities for fraud. Beyond that, we discuss why a human/machine approach will always provide the optimal combination to create exponential impact.Here are some of his quotes:“The existing ways that people were analyzing or auditing financial transactions were inadequate.So, typically, they would use rules-based systems to do this.With the rules-based system, you're only going to catch something, you're going to find something that you anticipateSo, you have to imagine the circumstance to find the rule and then it will work it will never find anything you don't anticipate.We think it's a significant problem in the world. There's a group called the ACFE, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and they estimate the amount of fraud, misconduct, irregularities that are caught each year. They say that that's about $200 billion a year. But they also estimate the amount we don't find. So, these are not detected by any method we have today. And that amount is about somewhere north of $3 trillion per year. So, if you put that number in perspective, that's a little under $500 for every person on the planet.”During this interview, you will learn three things:Why human-centric AI is the key to take the impact and insight of virtually any solution to a different levelHow to overcome inertia for AI-driven innovation, especially in an industry that’s sceptical by designThat to truly disrupt an industry you need to avoid looking at the conventions and existing standards