SaaStr Podcast #216: Dan Reich, Founder & CEO @ Troops.ai On Why Your Sales Team Is Not Working Together The Way You Think It Is
Update: 2019-03-15
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This post is by Harry Stebbings from SaaStr
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Dan Reich is the Founder & CEO @ Troops.ai, the startup that is the ultimate slackbot for sales teams. To date, Dan has raised over $17m in VC funding with Troops from many friends of the show including Felicis Ventures, Founder Collective, First Round, Nextview, Susa Ventures, and even Slack. As for Dan, he is also the Co-Founder and President of TULA, a private equity backed health and beauty business that has developed the world’s first line of probiotic skincare products. Before that, Dan was a Co-Founder of Spinback (acquired by Buddy Media in May 2011, then acquired by Salesforce in June 2012).
In Today’s Episode We Discuss:
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</figure>- How Dan made his way into the world of SaaS with the founding of Spinback. How that led to his founding of the ultimate slackbot for sales teams in Troops?
- What does Dan really mean when he says “account based collaboration”? is this a transition from? In terms of tracking and analysis, how does this change when making the move from tracking individual performance to team performance around an account? What can one do to actively implement this? What is key to a successful transition to this style of selling?
- What does Dan mean when he says, “sales teams are not working together the way we think they are?” What can sales leaders do to actively ensure their sales team is acting in unison? Where do many sales leaders go wrong here? How does Dan think about post mortems when an account is lost or won? How does Dan prevent dips in morale when sharing the loss of a sale?
- With scaling orgs, silos are often created, why does Dan think many silos come into existence? At what stage does Dan really see them become a problem and cracks in the org begin to show? What can leaders do to instantly reduce the effect of silos? How does Dan think about controlling the noise to action ratio with the firehose of data at our disposal today?
Dan’s 60 Second SaaStr:
- What does Dan know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning?
- What is the right time to train your sales team?
- The right way to structure sales comp plans?
Transcript
Harry Stebbings: Hello and welcome back to the official SaaStr Podcast with me, Harry Stebbings @HStebbings1996 with two ‘B’s on Instagram and I’d love to welcome you behind the scenes there. But as you all know, I’m a bit of a SaaS nerd and there’s nothing I love more than a new take on methodology on an existing process or way we work in SaaS. And I was chatting to this guest the other day and he mentioned the term “account-based collaboration”. And being the SaaS nerd I am, I wanted to jump on it and make an awesome episode out of it and how to utilize this method in your organization, and so I’m thrilled to welcome back Dan Reich. Dan is the founder and CEO of Troops.ai. The startup that is the ultimate in Slackbot for sales teams. To day, Dan has raised over seventeen million dollars in VC funding with Troops.
Harry Stebbings: For many friends of the show, including Felicis Ventures, Founder Collective, First Round, NextView, Susa Ventures, and even Slack. As for Dan, he’s also the co-founder and president of TULA, a private equity-backed health and beauty business. This developed the world’s first line of probiotic skincare products. Before that, Dan was the co-founder of Spinback, which was acquired by Buddy Media in 2011 and then acquired by Salesforce in June 2012. Huge thanks, though I do have to say to David Beisel at NextView for the original intro to Dan today. I really do so appreciate that. But that’s enough of me, so now I’m delighted to hand over to Dan Reich, founder and CEO at Troops.ai.
Harry Stebbings: Dan, it is absolutely fantastic to have you back on the show for what I know will be a very special round to you so thank you so much for joining my dulcet British tones again.
Dan Reich: Thanks, Harry, great to be back.
Harry Stebbings: I would though, love to kick off — and for those who maybe didn’t hear our first episode, Dan: how did you make your foray enter what I know to be the wonderful world of SaaS? And what was the founding moment for you with Troops?
Dan Reich: I’ve spent my whole life doing startups. The last software company I started, we basically helped online brands and retailers measure how much money they were making from social networking sites like Facebook. We ended up merging my company with another business called Buddy Media and then ended up selling that to Salesforce. After that experience, and my previous experiences, and that of my co-founders, we all came to appreciate the value and importance of, what we know to be CRM — customer relationship management. We also came to realize just how painful it was to use those types of tools to run your business.
Dan Reich: Effectively, we felt that everyone looked and felt like data monkey, but instead they should have been driving revenue and customer relationships, so we felt that needed to change and so we took a step back and thought about the problem more holistically and asked the question, “What if you could engage with this data and information much like you would engage with a buddy over text messaging?” What if you could literally chat with your CRM, and do so in a more appropriate medium of messaging? So that was really the question in genesis behind Troops.
Harry Stebbings: I do want to start there today, and we’ve been lucky enough to spend some time together and chat a little more between last show and this show. And when we chatted before, you said to me about the rise of team operating systems. And a really interesting one for me being account-based collaboration. I do want to start on some nomenclature, Dan, really. What do you mean when you say ‘account-based collaboration’ in team operating systems?
Dan Reich: Yeah, sure. So if you think about the past few decades of certain innovation of technology, it’s generally been oriented around the individual for productivity and applications. And if we fast forward to today — I don’t know what your Chrome browser looks like, but now we’ve got forty different tabs, forty different priming solutions for forty different things all stitched together with E-mail, which honestly feels a lot like a to-do list that other people control for me and it’s kind of gotten out of hand. And now if you look at a company like Slack, which is the fastest growing business application in the enterprise literally ever, this is where people prefer to spend time, and get work done, and collaborate.
Dan Reich: And the reason it’s more real-time, it’s frictionless, it’s more delightful? And what’s happening now is — in fact, we did research earlier this year — of the companies using these mediums, about 70% of those companies are now creating channels specifically dedicated to managing prospects, customers, accounts, opportunities, and this is really now the place where account-based collaboration is happening. A place where people are coordinating not just with themselves and marketing organizations, but literally across the whole organization. Product, engineering, executives. In order to drive growth, and revenue, and customer experiences for their partners and this is really changing how people institutionalize processes at organizations.
Harry Stebbings: That’s super funny, actually, I couldn’t agree with you more in terms of the integration of accounts. Actually, at the fund here, we create separate channels for each portfolio company, which one-clip labelers and accounting on industry, so to speak. So that’s super interesting to hear. I do have to ask, though, making the move from personal productivity to account-based collaboration; two elements really strike me in terms of defining what success looks like: how does this change when considering quite a big shift, really, from moving from personal productivity to this account-based collaboration method?
Dan Reich: And yeah, you know, it’s a great question. If you think email is the best, last one of communication then this whole conversation’s a moot point. But really, what we’re seeing happening now is that more collaboration and teamwork, up front, in a process for customer acquisition or account ma
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