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Jon Johnson:
So This is the show. Are we here? The show.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Welcome to Unjurned, everybody. I’m Josh Schachter.

Jon Johnson:
I’m John Johnson.

Alok Sharma:
Yeah. And

Josh Schachter:
and this is Alok. Alok, you cannot speak until spoken to. That’s the rules of the podcast.

Alok Sharma:
There’s a

Jon Johnson:
speaking stick that we

Josh Schachter:
need to pass around. Yeah. We we like to make it very uncomfortable for the guests and have them just sit there, like, wondering why they’re on the show for the first two minutes.

Jon Johnson:
I still think that the next time we have somebody on, that we should see how long we can go without actually talking to the guests. Like, if we can make it the whole episode Yeah. And just be like, alright, guys. We’ll see you later.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me of

Alok Sharma:
oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Actually, I have a fun I have interest in poking my nose into other people’s issues, so I just generally get in even if you ask don’t ask me to talk about it.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, let’s talk about that. Culturally, what is it called we we love to to get onto, like, racy, d, e, and I subjects and stuff. So, culturally, what are you talking about, Alok?

Alok Sharma:
I mean, once you grow up

Josh Schachter:
in a surrounding where the entire bazaar is of so

Alok Sharma:
many different kind of people and everybody is going to ask you all kind of things. I remember when I was very young, my grandmother used to travel in a train. By the long distance journey, she would have discussed, the similarities of each of the family members, what are the problems with the the daughter-in-law and the son. And they would have and that would be the shared conversation between the entire group of all 5 old ladies. And and that was considered okay. I mean, if you don’t do that, how will you pass your

Josh Schachter:
time? So Well, this is you’re referring to you’re referring to India. Right? You’re referring to your grandmother in India?

Alok Sharma:
I’m referring to India. So so the the bazards were a great learning place how to kind of just start talking to people.

Josh Schachter:
But was she at that point any idea. Wait. Was she interviewing? It sounds like she was actually interviewing people to find, you know, to find a matchmaking,

Jon Johnson:
you know, like How much money do you make?

Josh Schachter:
No. Yeah. My son. This sounds like a marriage thing that she was trying to do.

Alok Sharma:
That actually happened to one of my friends in in in the area. One of the Indian model, old ladies, she was trained in India. He walked over to one of my Indian friends, female. She was, middle grade, and she shouted, just asked out of complete ordinariness. Hey. Are you looking for marriage?

Jon Johnson:
I’m on

Alok Sharma:
the road. I’m looking for a suitable match for my son for my grandson. That was fun.

Jon Johnson:
I think it’d be a lot easier these days if I had the the ability to just walk up to somebody at a bar and say, are you interested in marriage? And then just go from, no? Great. Moving on.

Alok Sharma:
You heard that you heard that Ted, I think, TEDx recording or something by one of the professor at, NYC who basically is talking about that all the young men needs to go out and do a lot more dating.

Jon Johnson:
Oh, a lot more. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. That was no. It was, what’s his name? Scott Gallo was it Scott Galloway? Was that his podcast?

Alok Sharma:
Yes. Yes.

Jon Johnson:
Yes. I was just I feel like I was just listening to that. Alright. Love it when you reference a podcast on a podcast.

Alok Sharma:
Lovely. So what are we doing

Jon Johnson:
here, Josh?

Josh Schachter:
Well, this is Alok. This is Alok Shukla, everybody. Alok is the CEO and founder of Funnel Story, Funnel Story AI. And, we’re we’re so happy to have you, Alok, on the on the show. Alok and I just came back from Pulse separately, but we spent a lot of time together. And we had a lot of cool experiences and learnings, and so I thought it’d be cool to bring Alok on and talk a little bit about the cool stuff he’s doing with Funnel Story, what he thought of Pulse, and the trends and patterns that that he took out of it. You know, he’s doing stuff in AI for customer success, and so his vision for all that stuff. And, yeah, John, I feel like our heads

Jon Johnson:
I just wanna know about the food in Saint Louis. Like, what did you eat? Yeah. At Pulse. What was Barbecue. What was your favorite?

Alok Sharma:
I didn’t let Josh talk.

Josh Schachter:
Well, Alok Alok, you’re veg. Right? So I I do. I

Alok Sharma:
I can not understand.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, okay. Okay. So that was just a stereotype that I asserted towards you. I

Jon Johnson:
just assumed.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Let’s I just say

Alok Sharma:
it was pretty nuanced stereotype.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, since we’re going this direction. Right? So, yeah. No. The barbecue is great, John.

Jon Johnson:
Barbecue is great.

Alok Sharma:
Yeah. Good. Good. Good. Good.

Josh Schachter:
But I was gonna say I feel like our pets’ heads are falling off right now. You know that reference, John?

Jon Johnson:
Mhmm. I do. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Our pets

Jon Johnson:
Heads are falling off. Yeah. That’s a that’s a dumber dumber reference, guys.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Because last week, we had a replay. We didn’t have the episode. Week before, it was just me and John Gleason, which was great.

Alok Sharma:
And we

Josh Schachter:
missed you and Christy. But and then Christie’s gone this week. We’re supposed to have the CMO of SalesLoft on today. She had to bail. I think she had a personal situation to take care of, and we’ll see. We’ll see what happens next week. I think it’s just the summer of love right now that we’re getting into.

Jon Johnson:
No. It is. I’m also, the chaos is is thick, on this side of the the coast too. I had my daughter’s, like, school celebration where they handed out awards and had to run home to an app to record this podcast, and then I gotta go to my son’s award. Like, life is just it’s chaos. How do you keep track of it?

Josh Schachter:
Speaking of chaos, Alok, tell us about your founder journey.

Jon Johnson:
That was a great transition job. Tell us. Let’s reference chaos back to b to b sales on LinkedIn. Tell us

Josh Schachter:
about Yeah. But Tell us a funnel story, and then and then let’s work backwards. And I wanna talk quickly. I wanna talk about how you got there, the origin story.

Alok Sharma:
Yeah. Final story, we built it out, our own experiences, all the cofounders. Actually, that is a perfect segue to actually start with my background first, and then I will come to from the school. So, actually, I have some time in the podcast.

Jon Johnson:
Yes. Absolutely.

Alok Sharma:
So, me and my both of the cofounders come from cybersecurity. I have worked for 2 decades in cybersecurity. My both of the cofounders have at least 15 or 10 years of experience in cybersecurity. That’s all the things that they do. We are here to solve the problem of, large data and making sense of insights out of that, because that’s what we do, data cybersecurity, for almost 10 or 15 years. I mean, I for last 10 years, that has been one of the single biggest projects that I did, whether I was in my tenure at, McAfee, shift left. We look at, so many events, attacks happening any point of time, and the ability you have to make judgments in less than 5 seconds on what that means. And, I mean, my

Josh Schachter:
cybersecurity is all about big data, Big data analysis, basically, is what you’re saying?

Alok Sharma:
It’s it’s happening like that. I will tell you a small story. I was at Pinpurwai in 20 6 15, 17 time frame. And, one of the largest shoe company, I’m not going to name it, but they used to launch a campaign online, where they could launch a new shoe brand, and they would like, to give at least 2,000 discounted shoes to the most important fans. And guess what was happening? The bots used to take away all the shoes in less than 20 seconds. Right? And, entire marketing budget was gone to the bots. And, not only was it a disaster in campaign, but the point was that you had to decide within 20 seconds who is a human and who is a bot.

Jon Johnson:
Oh, wow. Wow. Yeah.

Alok Sharma:
Right? And you are look you are talking about at least 2,000,000 events happening in less than 20 seconds. And to make sense of who is human, who is bots, their humans are less than point 001%. Those kind of, things that you have to determine in security these days. Because it and and and if you look at that, I mean, the and if you look at customer success or sales and and Josh, so many conversations, so many meetings, so many product data points, so many events point of view. The the the struggle is the same. What matters? Who matters? What is the most important thing you want to do? And that’s what we what we are doing on our side of the house, understanding what makes in the product adoption funnel, what makes sense in from a churn retention funnel, and trying to pinpoint what matters. And we are using our expertise from what we learned in cybersecurity industry to come to field of post sales and makes that, make that happen for our industry.

Jon Johnson:
You know, it’s funny. You you were talking before we started recording. You’re talking about your background in cybersecurity, and I’m sitting here before we even started this conversation trying to figure out, man, what is the Venn diagram of cybersecurity and customer success? But when you just distilled it down like that like you’re doing the same thing that we’re trying to do it it it there is such crossover in making the right decision at the right time, and understand like, making those human decisions quickly, is incredibly valuable. I I am totally bought in. I’m only gonna hire cybersecurity guys from now on.

Josh Schachter:
Well, dude, there there’s huge overlap though because, like, I know of so many even at Pulse, like, I I’ve met so many CS leaders in cybersecurity. We’re about to go into several, contracts with a few of these companies. Like, it’s it’s such a a prominent vertical in customer success is what I found out in the past few months.

Jon Johnson:
That’s so interesting. So walk I mean, you talk about, what what’s the word? Events. You were use it you’ve used this word a few times, events. Right? So with with this story that you’re talking about with the shoes, you know, 2,000,000, however many bots are are doing this, and they have to make, a decision on those 2,000,000 events, which one’s a human, which one’s a bot. How do you think about events in the customer success space? Obviously, we have so much data, so much so many tools, and half of them are AI. Right? So how are you how are you thinking through kind of that human slash AI, like, model between the 2 where we are humans using automation to make our jobs easier. But that might also false positive or or trigger an experience on the on the digital side that that isn’t necessarily true or or maybe is marked as a bot or marked as spam. We see this all the time.

Jon Johnson:
Right? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Alok Sharma:
You you actually refer to a very interesting problem, which is very unique to sales, post sales, or customer success, which is which we did not have it in cybersecurity. So in cybersecurity, when you are interacting with any kind of threat actor, as we call it, or any kind of operation of any kind of a product. All those things are digitally deleted and digitally recorded, which means, if you are an antivirus, you are looking for files which are malicious and you will whenever you will find something, you will create a new virus. So it’s an event is created from you itself and, whether it’s a network firewall, so forth and so on. But when you are looking for, like, what we refer to, there are things which happen digitally. You go to the website or you go to the app and do something there, But then you can have a conversation, which is a human thing. Then you can have a meeting, which is a human and digital thing. Then so so the sources of data are not something that you create.

Alok Sharma:
It has created outside of your own software or your or the kind of things that you have not even done and don’t even track directly. Like, in the case of like, you are tracking conversations, which is so the first thing has to be the data has to be transformed into a manner where you can say, this conversation happened. Now from a from a from a technology perspective, you have to translate that into something that we can identify as an event that happens to be a meeting happened. But if you want to do analysis, which is, 80% of AI is getting the data in the right format. Yeah. Is that how do you say that a conversation or a digital experience or a support ticket filing or angry shout out on a Slack, all of them can be transferred into the same event model so that you can even begin to analyze them. Right? And you are dealing with so many different types of datasets. So that’s a kind of, so that’s what we do, but, that is where the challenge lies in the post sales and the sales sales part of the world.

Alok Sharma:
It is possible to do it, and that’s where the technology has helped us a lot.

Josh Schachter:
So it’s looking at all the different datasets, the different types of data, bringing them together. They’re telling you a story. I mean, basic it’s probably oversimplifying it, but it’s kinda like running a regression analysis in some sense. Right? Of, like, based on all of this input, here is the likelihood, here’s the segment that this customer falls into. They’re they’re in good standing. You know, they’re on on watch out. They’re they’re high risk, and you’re following their their journey through that. Is that correct?

Alok Sharma:
Yes. If I could add, once you convert the data into a common format, so you are looking at, in general, a time series. If you look at a historical time now for everything that you did, but in the same common format. Like, think about a wave graph or or in a, like, in a music album where all the troughs and all the lows are there. All the highs and lows are kind of you can see is in a heart rate kind of a time series. Right? And now you could do interesting things. Like you said, you can find out who which kind of waves are similar, which means what 2 verticals are too similar, what people behave similarly, what are the different types of waves, how people do their journeys. Do they meet first? Do they go into the product first? Are they specific to verticals? Because understanding behavioral insights of, I will say, the organization.

Alok Sharma:
If you think of them as a like, we track a lot about user behavior, but if you start tracking organizational behavior, how they as a if you start to kind of visualize them as an entity, what is their behavior? What is their journey? Is it there something unique about the journeys of a tech sector compared to verticals? We all know that intuitively, but have you have you kind of visualized that? Right? Have you seen the behavior patterns? Once you understand that what they do, then do you start to see that who are the what is the behavior of people who are successful and people who are not so successful with our product? Or let’s say who people who churn or people who retain, People who are very successful in using our products, which are not. So so, yeah, I mean, it’s not, like, you’d start to do the analysis first, but you’d bake the data first.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Alok Sharma:
And all kind of questions can be asked depending on what your business needs are.

Josh Schachter:
So you’re you’re basically, like, transforming the data into kind of a standard plane for each of the customers, each of the accounts, which allows you so, you know, so that it looks like an EKG type of a graph, let’s say. It’s over some application. Right?

Alok Sharma:
And then Begin with the start with.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. But

Alok Sharma:
I think there is there is a there is a transformation that is happening, John and Josh. I have, my background is cybersecurity, but my role was product manager. Mhmm. I manage products. And one of the things, when you start building products is, hey. This is the requirement, this is the data, and this is the UX that would be displayed as. And once you start to define the UI and UX in your side of your product, you are kind of assuming what kind of questions will come to you, so that you are, saying that my customer is going to ask a question. Let me have the UI ready for it.

Alok Sharma:
But I think that underlying assumption is getting broken in last one here. Mhmm. Because if once you have the data, you should be able to answer all kind of questions, whether you have thought about it or not. So think about it as the next evolution where the chatbots, for example. What they’re doing is that you have the data, and can you answer the question on the fly?

Josh Schachter:
Right.

Alok Sharma:
When there is no you have not even thought about it. You have not even thought about it. Can you think on the fly?

Josh Schachter:
So it’s not just like the you’re you’re not you’re not you’re not putting in you’re not inserting the business logic and creating the rules in advance. You’re learning from the data based on what it observes, and you may not have thought of what it’s observing.

Alok Sharma:
Yes. Exactly.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. So, that makes sense. And I’ve seen your product. We’ve used your product. Mhmm. Visually, I’m a very visual person, and I just want folks that are listening to be able to visualize what Funnel’s story is. You know, I don’t want people to come out of here and say, okay. Well, is it like a CS platform? Is it like a Mixpanel, analytics platform? What? So explain a little bit about, like, the use case and the way that it works, maybe, if that’s a fair question for me to ask you.

Alok Sharma:
I will go now to the shortest answer that, I think we have found kind of interesting positioning where we believe there is a need for a business intelligence platform for the customer success and in general post sales teams.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Alok Sharma:
Because most of the CS tools are very much task driven. Yes. The whole idea of insights, whatever limited insights are available, is to do tasks. But they’re in this post, high interest rate period. When the post line and bottom line are under pressure, the question is, why are you doing what you’re doing? And what you can what are the insights that you have to present that? If you’re not using AI to make those decisions, I mean, I don’t think your, the the heads of the organizations are, allowing you going to allow you to kind of just spend money because you have the budget. So that’s the problem we are trying to solve is to give the leadership and the ops team intelligence to make a decision about what you can do, whom you should contact, which are the customers, and all kind of questions that we just discussed.

Jon Johnson:
So one of the things one of the and I’m curious if this is, also what you’re seeing, Josh, in your role. I’m seeing a a segment of CSMs that are required to almost have kind of, like, a a little bit of a data scientist hat as well, especially as we’re getting into these scaled and and at scale motions where it’s not just task driven. It’s really strategy thinking about, like, looking and analyzing cohorts of user users and data, data mindset. Right? Is this is this something that you saw as a trend in Pulse? Are you, you know, I’m kinda used to just talking to people and

Josh Schachter:
I I think

Jon Johnson:
Alok has a sale, but

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. No. I think Alok has a very interesting view on this because he shared it with me before. I think his view is that we want to aspire to get there. Because what you’re saying, John, is that CS folks are able to be more strategic. Yeah. Use their time for for analysis. And I don’t know.

Josh Schachter:
Have we gotten there fully yet? Because I’m Not even close. No. No. No. No. Not even a little bit. Not there’s there’s a desire, though.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this I you know, I brought in I should say, our scale team brought in Pendo as a tool about 2 years ago, and I was able to get access to it for the key accounts that I manage. And and I spent, like, a good part of last year just, like, looking at trend lines and just saying like, oh, I wonder if as I assume this, but also, like, show me something that I don’t know and just kinda overlaying those experiences and those journeys and understanding where they’re coming from to be able to understand, like, what success actually looks like. Not just

Alok Sharma:
Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
This aspirational journey map that we mapped out 9 months ago, but, like, no. No. No. Here’s the cohort of customers that do all of the things, and they’re doing it today live on-site. And here’s the story. Right? So that it allows you to make a decision based on whatever you’re applying to. And I and I love what you’re talking about, Alok, because this this, like, very much resonates with, I think, what I hope is a trend that we see more in functional CSMs, not just in CS leaders, but in in active CSMs that are actually making these decisions and using tools that are either AI driven or LLMs that that, like, really help them identify, like, what where is the customer, and how do I get to success with them right now?

Alok Sharma:
I think you, make a point about Pinto, and I I think I have a strong opinion about it. If you if you don’t mind, I’d share that.

Jon Johnson:
Oh, yeah. No. They’re, they’re right behind me. Like, the building is right behind me, so say it loud enough, and maybe they’ll

Alok Sharma:
It’s not about generally about Pendo. It’s more about, apologize on the behalf of my product management community, where I belong to, that we are pushing our tools to the go to market teams, and that’s not right. Yeah. And the reason is this. I think I would agree

Jon Johnson:
with you on that. They’re not designed for go to market teams.

Alok Sharma:
And the simple thing is this. When you are in engineering or you’re in products, we have a different attitude to data. We are, exploratory. We want to look at a lot of spreadsheets, and we have enough time to kind of identify patterns, snakes, letters, whatever you want to, look at the data and identify patterns with. We have enough time. We are what you call diagnostic not even diagnostic, exploratory, figure out patterns so that we can solve big strategic problem. And then if you go to go to market team, they really don’t care about how the mouse moved from this left to right. I mean, you care about whether the account moved ahead with whether towards the purchase, towards the adoption, towards the retention.

Alok Sharma:
That’s what you are looking for. So you are very diagnostic and prescriptive. What is what is happening, and how do I get the person to move to the next stage? And we have a persona conflict. Kendo, is a great tool, but it it is designed for product engineering and UX audience who are exploratory. Yes. You can abuse it to make it work for you, but that’s kind of lazy thinking on the product teams to push it to the audience which is not designed for it. Like, I’m just saying.

Jon Johnson:
No. I love this. I love this. No. No. It’s I I mean, as as, like, a Pendo user that I use every single day, like, the feedback that I’ve given is, like, it’s very clear that this is not designed for a CSM. Right? And so

Josh Schachter:
John, will

Jon Johnson:
it will

Josh Schachter:
it pick up on insights that you haven’t like, do you have to actively look for the insights, or will it give you it it won’t surface things that you’re not looking for already?

Jon Johnson:
They’re starting to roll out a bunch of AI suggestions like everybody else. Like, that’s kind of the new thing right now is I think that’s gonna make it a little bit easier because CSMs also don’t really know where to look. Like, that’s the other downside. And so this is actually what I’m this actually kind of led me to this kind of big assumption is that I go to the Pendo conference every year. I I live in Raleigh, so they’re, like, kind of the home home tech company. And I I just go to all their events. I really do love their product. But to your point, they’re really not designed.

Jon Johnson:
They don’t speak to revenue even in the same way. Like, you we’re so used to talking in numbers, and it’s not that. It’s just clicks. But what that actually kinda has led me to to, I think, dig into a little bit is, a, the product needs to meet the CSM, and the CSM needs to meet the customer need. And right now, our customers need us as CSMs to be far more strategic in how to bring them into an ideal state. And we have, I think, in general, have lost have kind of been lost in the data because there’s so many tools and there’s so many things that we have to pay attention to that it’s very hard for us to really carve out time to analyze and be strategic in our outreaches, which brings us back to your tool, which gives you I mean, even even, like, you know, what what is it like your pitch is like what’s I’ll give you journeys in 5 minutes

Josh Schachter:
or whatever,

Jon Johnson:
your your pitch is on the page. Oh, build your account funnels in just 5 minutes. Right? Like Yes. Right there, it’ll tell you what they’re currently doing so that then you can start saying, okay. Well, here’s where we need to move, and here’s where we need to stay. And I think that’s the biggest problem is that we just kinda come in saying, oh, I don’t know. Shit. Anything could happen.

Jon Johnson:
But what your tool does, if correct me if I’m wrong, is it really kinda gives you that target of where they’re at. And then you as practitioners get to go in and say, okay. Well, this is we need to move the needle x, y, or z in this place.

Alok Sharma:
I will yeah. Exactly. But, if I were to rephrase that, I will say data is already all there. Analysis is all there. I am talking in your language in the world that you live in, and the problems that you have and guide you and provide analysis in the way your teams can consume. I I’m not I’m not talking in a foreign language to you. I think that’s one of the single biggest issue about, I think I empathize with CS, a word actually, that, a lot of time and, they’re they’re passed on tools, which are not designed for them. Like, both RevOps and products are passing on tools which they do not talk to their land.

Alok Sharma:
I mean, we don’t have to recreate all the things. There is no not always that need for a new technology to be created. Yeah. Sometimes you need to understand the persona, of that word. Yeah. You are absolutely right what we are doing.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Nothing, John. I can keep going. Yeah. I got more. Alright. So, Alok, I No. He answered me.

Jon Johnson:
He told me I had a great question. That’s all I needed.

Josh Schachter:
It was a great question. Here’s another one. Alok, tell us a little bit about your belief around traditional customer success platforms.

Alok Sharma:
Oh, that’s a loaded question.

Josh Schachter:
That’s why I asked it.

Alok Sharma:
I I actually it’s it’s, it’s noon at the place where I am, and I thought that I will go back to your first question, if you don’t mind, about the food.

Josh Schachter:
The food? What was the food? What was that? We what what what’s for lunch?

Jon Johnson:
Question. What was his favorite food at Pulse?

Alok Sharma:
Oh, I mean, you were talking about what we’d eat at the Pulse, so I thought that,

Jon Johnson:
I love it. Go

Josh Schachter:
ahead. Do it. The brownies were really good.

Alok Sharma:
The brownies are really good. We actually co I and Josh co hosted Tech First, and I individually hosted a Pulse, happy hour, and we also hosted a dinner for my team. But it’s interesting. I just wanted to mention it from my own that I am a big foodie, and, I brought it into how I’m approaching customers. So my biggest route to meet the customer success leader is on dinners. Yeah. I have now organized 13 dinners in last 3 months and met almost 120 to CS leaders. And I always start with this.

Alok Sharma:
You meet me if you like the restaurants and enjoy the food. I want to earn not because of my product, because of the food I have because I spent almost 5, 6 days just to choose the restaurant, choose the menu. Yeah. And I said, I just wanted to mention it because this is something that kind of I enjoy, and I, it was in my mind that I had to respond to Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Just don’t, don’t don’t share that story too much with the VCs when you go to raise your next round I know. And they start asking about your cost of acquisition. But, but, yeah, I mean, we’re still gonna

Jon Johnson:
go back are $10,000 meals

Josh Schachter:
for Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Alok Sharma:
But, actually, it’s it’s much cheaper, actually, for cost of acquisition also. If you think about it, like, from from a CAC perspective, but we can discuss it separately. That’s that’s another option. Calculated, and, I found it much cheaper, interesting.

Josh Schachter:
That’s great. That’s great.

Jon Johnson:
That is kinda like the typical like, that’s you know, if if I’m having trouble getting people into a meeting, I’d somehow find an assistant that tells me their favorite restaurant or, like, the restaurant that they’ve never been to, they’ve always wanted to go to, and I make reservations. And we did this with, with of our customers up in New York last time, Josh. I was up there and went to this incredible, like, Michelin rated Israeli restaurant, somewhere in the city. I still don’t really know where it was because I’m not from New York. And they showed up on time and they ate all of the food, and we’ve had a great relationship ever since. And it’s I I really like the way that you phrase that. Like, come hang out with me because you you would like this food and you wanna, like, experience this thing, and then we’ll talk about work. And that’ll that’ll come.

Jon Johnson:
I know that I can solve your problems, but we’re not gonna talk about that first. Like, that’s

Josh Schachter:
a really

Jon Johnson:
But, Josh, there’s

Josh Schachter:
a difference there. There’s a difference there because I know your budget versus our budget. And so, like, Alok and I don’t have the luxury of inviting you to a Michelin Star Israeli restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. You know, we’re talking more about, like, there’s Chick Fil A, the Upper West Side. So

Jon Johnson:
I think it was off Washington Square Park. So, like, let’s Yeah. Put it into, like okay.

Josh Schachter:
Okay.

Jon Johnson:
No. Anyway It’s all good.

Josh Schachter:
We did have a good story about the breakfast that we jointly hosted. We we had a, really great showing. I think we booked it for, like, 15 to 20 people. We ended up getting, like, over 25 people. We ran out of of seats. Everybody’s really engaged in conversation. Alok thought it would be great to do a breakfast. I was like, well, I would still be asleep if I was an attendee, but let’s give it a shot.

Josh Schachter:
And I was wrong because everybody was really, like, day 2, and they were up in spry and engaged in conversations with each other, and it was awesome. And then I got a little bit nippy with the service talking about customer

Jon Johnson:
But that’s also, like, the most normal

Josh Schachter:
for you, Josh. What’s that? That’s usual. Yeah. Yeah. My Larry David came out, but, you know, there weren’t seats and enough seats. And there were multiple things of cream cheese, but no butter. And the bagels were not were not split in half for people, and they were running out of scrambled eggs. And I’m looking for this guy, and it’s private air, and you can’t find him.

Josh Schachter:
So I walk into the employee section. I’m I’m like, hey. Excuse me.

Jon Johnson:
When you

Josh Schachter:
have a when you have a second, like, do you mind coming out and assisting us? We got it all sorted. We got it all sorted.

Jon Johnson:
Love that.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Well It’s

Jon Johnson:
so good. Well, I mean, we do we we did that thing in DC, and didn’t we not have plates? Like, that wasn’t that like, you just, like, go into, like, full on, like, dad mode where you just need everything to be it’s good for you. It’s a good founder.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. It’s good for my my

Alok Sharma:
I think in post COVID era, what I realized is that, it’s still that, bounce off of people who want to meet in person is still going strong, and that is driving, a lot of this still that desire to our meeting. I mean, look. I come from cybersecurity, as I was saying. And in that world, like, typical CISO will buy 40 5 products that we calculated on a app. It’s much more than a CS leader. So those guys get bombarded with the dinners and invite, like, every day. If they have to eat out every day outside, they will. That’s how much of cybersecurity budget is invested.

Alok Sharma:
But here, I think the opportunity was that, that it is not that a crowded market, and, their need to talk to each other was there. And especially in a turbulent time, they wanted to meet each other. So it was not something that I planned it out, but when I started to reach out and I saw that, it people were generally saying yes. Like, I had a, like, 80% yes late, and at that point in night that you are tapping into something which exists, you’re not creating something. I mean, I wish to give my name to it, but that is was something kind of saying, I don’t know how long it will last. Maybe it’s already expiring. But that’s the mindset I came from. I didn’t want to kind of over exaggerate that, but it’s

Jon Johnson:
just Yeah.

Alok Sharma:
You tap into things.

Josh Schachter:
But we are gonna go back a little to my question about your your beliefs and the theories, around traditional customer success platforms. We weren’t that that detour into food wasn’t for nothing. So let’s go full circle and tell us what you think around traditional CSPs.

Alok Sharma:
I think, my sense is that I looked at the problem. I I looked at the CS platforms and asked the question without even realizing that was a problem. So in in early part of this year, one of the leaders I was talking to, and he was at the last security company, which is, actually world’s top 3, like, almost up north of $50,000,000,000 in valuation. I talked to the CS leader there. They said they brought a CS platform, and they it had taken them 9 months to just implement it. And and and after that, it had created so much work that they had to hire a bunch of team just to finish just to kind of take care of the task that the system was creating. So it’s a it’s a it’s a these platforms are a product of the age of what we call that, you know, zero interest rate phenomena age, where you where your CEO will tell you that I want to hug all the customers from all side. Don’t worry if they’re getting squeezed out or not.

Alok Sharma:
Just meet them every time, every portion that you get. I I want them you to kind of take them to dinner, lunch, and meeting, everything. And that required a man force. Like, that required a human workforce, which basically, you would hire 20 CSMs. You have 200 CSMs to just do their job. So if you have plumbed so many tasks, you will do those things, and that worked well till 2021, when the music stopped. And now you have so high interest rate. Everybody’s evaluating what is the top line, what is the bottom line.

Alok Sharma:
If I could just go from a bottom line perspective, Why you need so many people? Why are you actually having to meet so many people? All these questions get answered, and I think that is the single biggest issue. Once I’ve when I met people at these dinners, they said, our bosses or leaders are asking this question that I do not understand customer success. Like, there’s no theme of why you hire people so many. Why you what is the role? How do I measure productivity? How do I connect what you invest into the revenue? Right? And the challenge here is the platform stills the way they have been sold over the years. These platforms are about still, this much this many customer, these many people. There is a direct correlation Yeah. Which is broken. Right? And that’s, I think, what’s the problem is.

Alok Sharma:
I mean, if I go to the numbers thing, like, I in month of May March, sorry, I was at chief customer officer conference in, New York, and I did a small presentation. I said, if you have, let’s say, 15 playbooks and, in a traditional CS platform, and if you have, let’s say, 10 steps each, or you can say 10 playbooks and 15 steps each, and you have 100 customers, you will create 15,000 tasks just by the plain multiplication of it. If it requires 33,000 tasks per human being, you can do it. You will require 5 people. You already that platform itself will create up, investment of almost a quarter $1,000,000, taking 150 k as a average, expense on 1, full time engineer to do that job. And the question from a leadership perspective is why. Why do I need to do that? Why do I need to hug all the people? If people are doing the adoption right, if they’re doing right, why do you need to ping them every time? And why do you need to ping everybody every time? Like, why when do you need to talk to them? Why can’t why don’t you know that? I mean, in the sales side of the house, that problem was addressed a long time back.

Jon Johnson:
Long time ago.

Alok Sharma:
They care a lot about signals. They care a lot about when the market when the customer is hot. They are always qualifying those things. That kind of qualification does not happen, and the CS platform don’t help. The technology have not doubled that way. I mean, Josh, like, one of the things that you guys are doing, I’m pretty, like, big fan of you guys is that that telling people, like, what is when the signal is there. We know that whether you are in sales or whether you’re in post sales, talking to people at the right moments is the key. And talking to the right people at the right moment is the key.

Alok Sharma:
But you tell me about one single CS platform exec which is existing, which even is they’re thinking about solving these problems.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. When I I

Alok Sharma:
Without the yeah. Go ahead.

Jon Johnson:
No. I mean, I like I’ve I cannot agree with you more. I mean, there I like, I I am so on like, onboard with with the way that you’re presenting this. And and I am so I’m so sick and tired of these tools that are just like it’s like a contact center. Like, it’s just a list of it’s just a list of customers and tasks. Like, we have Salesforce. We have Monday. What the fuck are we doing spending $250,000 on a task management thing when it doesn’t actually give us any insights? We live in the golden age of true insights with big data.

Jon Johnson:
And nobody yet that I have seen, and I know you’re working on this as well, has, like, truly, truly understood Salesforce. Everybody’s in Salesforce. All of that shit is already there. Why do we need to duplicate it with a different layer and a different color and a different UI just to do the same thing. Right? Yeah. When we have this incredible amount of data from our users, and we have tools that will allow us to, like, visualize our customers in a way that we just don’t do right now. You’re right. Nobody’s solving this.

Jon Johnson:
Like, it’s all just marketing and sales bullshit that people are making tons you’re right. Low interest. Fund off of. Not to hate Do not. But, like, I know there’s some good things. But, by and large, like, I really I really love the way, especially as a founder, that you’re talking through kinda revision visualizing what a CSV could be. And I’m curious what, like, those folks that have been in these CSPs for, like, 10 years, when they do come onto your platform for the first time, are they like, oh, this is, like, Greek to me? It’s a whole new language. Right?

Alok Sharma:
I mean, yes and no, because I think this is also a generational shift. I mean, if you the thing about people is that unlike the technology, people are take a lot of time to change. If you have been, grown up in an ideology, if you take out that ideological approach, is is a hard thing. It takes time. There are early adopters who will make change, and then the pressure will, emerge. And then that’s the scope of every startup that we keep on poking, keep on poking the bear before the bear starts to respond back in a significant manner that something happened. So the reaction is what you will expect from people understand it, but people also get nervous, which is the reaction to AI also. Oh, AI will transform the way that I am doing.

Alok Sharma:
Can I stop it? Can I become an ostrich? And don’t want to respond.

Jon Johnson:
Stick your head in the sand. I love that. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
And I’m sure that

Alok Sharma:
all of you have seen that you want people to become if you think about this, like, it’s not in the words of what the customer. It’s also about a person whose job is to just finish the checklist. And he realizes he or she who’s working on the checklist in a creative, like, a playbook task. He’s saying, I do this checklist and half of them are based because they don’t respond. They don’t pick up the call. There is nothing happening, and I’m just doing tasks meaninglessly. Everybody, even from my work quality perspective, I would like to do things that matter Yeah. That bring me a satisfaction that I was able to make a change.

Alok Sharma:
And if the technology can help me provide those insight so that I can emerge as a hero, even as an employer, I want. But that will take time. So the younger generation, the people who are in start ups, people who are visionary in bigger companies, they are we are finding them kind of more interested and ready to adopt. But I think, it will take time for the rest of the and one one thing, if I may mention, I think I and Josh had a brief conversation on about it. And this is, I think it has to be said that having dealt with customers on cybersecurity side, also on the salespeople, I think CS leadership is lot more differential compared to other leaders inside any org. And what that mean and let me explain that. What I mean is that if you do not like a status quo and if you want to make a change, a lot of leadership is about getting, doing, having the influence, permission, access to carry out those changes. If we have a status quo, like, I think Nick Mehta yesterday posted on LinkedIn that 52% of, the 52% of the organization to the to whom they have sold the software at a leadership change at the top level.

Alok Sharma:
52% in just 5 5 months of this year. That’s that’s just such a large number of transition. But why that is happening? Is it is it just economic headwinds, or is it that there is very same level of leadership that is not ready to to adapt to the change and be able to drive those things inside the organization?

Jon Johnson:
That’s it.

Alok Sharma:
Technology cannot solve technology cannot solve the leadership issues.

Jon Johnson:
No. And I I’ve got a I got a thought on this too, and I think I know why. I really think that it it truly is because most leaders in CS have been, like, of like, had an aversion to actually tying to revenue. Like, true, true dollars and cents. And it’s changed so many times over so many years that we’re revenue. We’re not revenue. We’re this. We’re that.

Jon Johnson:
We’re the other thing. That there has been no, like, stabilizing force. You talk about the sales example where it’s like we had exit criteria for 35 years on a sales pipeline, yet we don’t have any of that shit with customer success. And I think as soon as we’re able to tie it to maybe not like a dollar on a PO, but, like, actual actually, like, referenceable dollars and cents that are coming in and the ROI that we’re proving, and we have the same, I think, voice at the top for a number of years, we’re we’re gonna continue to have that argument where it’s just nobody’s gonna have, like, the buy in or the confidence maybe because they’re not tied to revenue or because they’re not owning a a number, for them to be like, well, I can’t really speak up because, you know, I don’t wanna really wanna rock the boat too much. But, like, if you’ve got $30,000,000 in pipeline, you’re like, I’m gonna rock the boat as much as I fucking want because what are they gonna do? Right? It’s just just a different there’s a different ego, I think.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. It’s actually I mean, there there is this wave coming that that CS is getting closer and closer to revenues, and it needs to be that way. And we talked about this with Nick, right, a couple of weeks ago. It needs to be that way, and I think it’s happening. I think it’s happening. You’re seeing this merger of of CS and account management, and it’s it’s what you’re hearing more and more of. You got Rod Jerkis’ book, Great Reach, about the framework of of getting closer to revenues. So I’m encouraged by that.

Josh Schachter:
And when that happens, then all of a sudden, the software is not just gonna be a contact center with follow-up tasks. It’s going to be something that’s more interesting that is enabling folks to to get closer to revenues. Alright. Alok, you’re off the hot seat. Thank you for joining us. It was wonderful to hear about your background, about the origins of Funnel Story, about your thoughts on food and on conference marketing and on CSPs and all the like. John, you were good. I was alright.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Alok Sharma:
You’re

Josh Schachter:
alright. Thanks everybody for listening.

Jon Johnson:
Thank you guys so much.

Alok Sharma:
Thanks, you guys. Thanks a lot. Thanks for inviting me.