Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Today we are talking to a man who has just taught me something that I never knew about the west coast of America. And that is that the water is really, really cold, even in the middle of Summer. And who would have thought, Richard White, who we’re talking to, who I’ll introduce in a moment, living in San Francisco. Who would have thought, living there, that your water’s only 13-14 degrees celsius in the middle of Summer? It’s something that just blew my mind from a water boy as I am myself. But it’s amazing the little things you learn as you have small talk when you start these podcasts. But we’d like to welcome Richard White today. He is Founder and CEO of Fathom or Fathom Video. So the, that’s a free app that records, transcribes, highlights all your calls so you can focus on basically the conversation, everything that’s happening in front of you rather than worrying about tap, tap, tap, tap, taking notes or writing them down. So really cool pieces of tech that we’re starting to see flow into the market pretty heavily. But Fathom, I think, is a great story because it was part of the Y Combinator W 21 batch. Now, for those who don’t know Y combinator, they are essentially, and I’m gonna really paraphrase here, they are a fund that backs entrepreneurs and businesses and has essentially, they have had some unbelievable success stories come out of there. They’ve had Dropbox, we had Airbnb, we’ve had Peloton. Like some really cool brands have come out of Y Combinator. Fathom is one who’s received some funding, if you like, from that group. So they’re also one of only 50 who are part of the Zoom app launch program. So Zoom are investing in them through their own fund, which is pretty cool also. So we’ve got a couple of pieces of really nice social proof here for Fathom. But Richard himself has got a fair bit of experience in the SaaS and kind of tech startup world. He founded UserVoice, which was a platform that mostly tech companies, I think used from startups through the bigger Fortune 500s. Or for us here, ASX style listed companies that they use for managing customer feedback and making lots of great product decisions. It was a serious company, that one, I think, UserVoice, I should say. But when we think feedback tabs down the side of websites, I think that’s something that we can talk about being a part of that. And then on top of that, Richard’s got lots of experience in a whole lot of other areas. But I think those two on its own really, really relevant. And I think you’ll hear today Richard’s got a real passion about designing tools that help user experiences. So there you go. Richard, an introduction for you. Welcome to our podcast. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say today.
Richard White:
Well, thanks for having me. That was an amazing intro.
Ben Wright:
My pleasure. Well, before we get into today, I’ve spoken a little bit about Fathom, but perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about yourself and what Fathom do, and then we’ll rock and roll into today’s content.
Richard White:
Sure. Yeah. So I’m originally a software engineer by trade and kind of product designer. So that was kind of where I started. But at UserVoice, my last company, I had opportunity to, you know, we were about a $10 million business or so. And so, you know, we had sales teams, marketing teams, you name it. I ran every team for a period of time. And one team I ran for the longest, actually, was the sales team and some other podcasts. I’ll tell you all the hilarious, really bad things that an engineer trying to run a sales team tries to do. But it gave me kind of a real appreciation for some of the challenges sales managers have around trying to understand what’s happening on these meetings with my team is having with customers and prospects, especially in the middle of a pandemic or when we’re in a remote work situation where I can’t ambiently overhear people saying things. Sometimes I think as a running a sales team kind of got used to like, oh, if I hear half the conversation, I have some ambient awareness of, like, how well they’ve been trained up, how well they’re running my methodology, that sort of thing. Really hard to do in a remote environment. Really hard to do, especially when people are working from home. So I founded Fathom about four years ago. And it’s funny because it’s an AI product. It’s an AI note taker, as you mentioned. It’s a free product. It’ll join your meetings, take really good notes. Basically, it records and transcribes the entire thing. And then we use AI to take, honestly, at this point, the AI is so good, it takes better notes than I ever could, automatically will fill out your CRM, et cetera, et cetera. But we started this four years ago, before the AI was actually any good. It’s been fun to get a little ahead of the curve and now see the groundswell of AI stuff catch up to our aspirations, if you will originally.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, okay, well, I think that is a good segue into what we’re going to talk about today, which is all around how we’re revolutionising. I think digital comms or digital communication is the key piece here. I think today we’re going to focus less on the AI piece and more on how we’re really changing the ways that we communicate in our nonverbal ways. I think AI is really important. It’s a terrific support to what we do. But look, in my opinion, it doesn’t replace some of the key aspects around selling. However, digital communication is still really important, and that exists both within the AI landscape and also outside of that. So we’re going to spend a bit of time looking into that. But before we do, look, I think we focused a little bit around what inspired you to develop NoteTaker, right? Which sounds like it was hybrid working environments and engineering and a sales environment. I mean, feel free to expand on that. But at the same time, how do you see something like a note taker app or similar starting to revolutionise digital communication?
Richard White:
Yeah, I mean, I think the other real inspiration for me was like, I hate taking notes. And I don’t think I’ve met anyone that likes taking notes. And I think more than disliking it, I actually think I was pretty good at it. But I found that I’m either talking to someone on a Zoom or Google Meet, or I was writing my notes and maybe I was rapidly switching between them, maybe they didn’t notice I was doing that, but I wasn’t fully present. And I can’t remember the number of times I missed something. I was like, oh crap. I don’t remember exactly what was said there. I think there’s a big part of this, which is these tools like Fathom free us up to just honestly be human again because we’re not obsessed with, I need to artefact this for someone else or for a future version of myself. I don’t take notes anymore. And even though the app generates notes for me, I use them differently than I did my historical notes. Historically, I would talk to someone, type at the same time, block out time after every meeting to clean up those notes, put them in my CRM, go read them two weeks later, not remember what half of it was, try to muddle through that conversation until I jog my memory. Now I have the meeting, I talk to someone, and then after the meeting ends, I just go the next meeting, the thing takes notes from me, it sends me the stuff. But what happens is next time I meet with you two weeks later, I now just go back and watch part of that recording, watch the last minute of that recording. I read the summary, and all of a sudden my brain is like, oh, it’s like I just got off the phone with you from the previous call. I think there’s a lot here where people talk a lot about AI, trying to replace jobs and stuff like this. I actually think in a lot of cases, it’s taking out the stuff that was the inhumane parts of the job and just allowing us to focus on being present, reading each other’s body language, communicating, asking you questions, all this sort of stuff you want all your best salespeople to be doing. And so I think for that reason, it’s, like, pretty free.
Ben Wright:
Okay, great. So what I’m hearing, I think, in essence, is that it’s allowing us as salespeople to listen more. It doesn’t actually mean talk less. In fact, it possibly allows us to talk more as well. But we’ve always been taught two ears, one mouth. But I think what gets lost in that is that we also have two hands. And if your hands are typing or writing, then that can also overrun your ears. So we can very easily get distracted. And look, I’ll be really open here. I am someone that loves having a conversation. I’ll pause. I’ll be open with the people I’m talking with. So I’m going to write these notes down. We’ll write them together to confirm this is what we’re talking about. Bang. I’ve got that right. There’s a piece of that that I really love. I can certainly, certainly relate to the piece around not remembering everything that happened in a conversation, when you go back to looking at it. Let’s step forward, say six months, twelve months, and NoteTakers taken off. And digital communication gets to the point where it is supplementing our verbal with some nonverbal. Right. It’s supplementing it so well that we’re able to have better and deeper conversations with our customers. What else could you see it kicking into from there?
Richard White:
Yeah, I think the really exciting piece for last year was the AI got good enough to take really good notes for you. Before it was like we were mostly just giving you a transcript and a recording and maybe some like, you know, allowing you to highlight some moments. But now it legitimately can just write all the notes for you again, fill in your CRM, that sort of thing. What’s exciting for this year is, I mean, and so that’s obviously great for the rep that’s on the phone, right. That’s on the meeting and whatnot. And so like, I think AI was really good last year at like getting you help for a single meeting. Now we’re starting to push in a thing where I can actually look at multiple meetings and provide some sort of insight or intelligence. And this is where it looked more like an assistant sales manager. It’s your own personal assistant sales manager, if you’re running a sales team. And it can start doing things for you like, oh, you’re doing pipeline review.
Great, I can look through all these deals. I can actually ask the AI questions without having to go ask the rep can, it can create a summary across all the deals. This is actually a feature we just actually launched today where I can look at all the meetings I had with the customer and I can give me a summary across all of them. Here’s where the pain points, here’s their rejections. All this stuff. Again, normally like this meta note taking that I might want to jump into when I’m doing a pipeline review.
What it also can do that we’re starting to experiment with. I think it’s cool. It’s almost like a lot of the coaching stuff, a lot of, I think every sales manager I ever talked to is like, we never have enough time for coaching and training. We never listen to as many calls, even if we do record calls in our team, we never listen to them as much as we want to. Or we maybe I listened to one on my way to work and on the way home sort of thing. But like, it’s a lot of work, we had a lot of other things going on and we’re now getting this point where AI, and we’ve been beta testing this and it’s been really successful you know, if you’ve got some sort of sales methodology and you’ve got certain things you want your reps to do on every call and make sure they hit, you know, you want them to diagnose in between, but you want them to run a process. The AI can actually watch that call and have almost, you know, hey, look, they did great at points a, b, and c, but they kind of missed f. Oh, it looks like Tim on your team is consistently missing asking the impact question sort of thing. And I think that’s really cool. This idea that we can get to the point where, oh, great. We can identify opportunities for improvement without having to put in the hours and hours of legwork you have to do historically to go listen to a bunch of calls and let’s be clear, like, listen to a bunch of your sales team calls, it’s like, probably not anyone’s favourite part of the job, right. But it’s like super important. And that’s another great thing to like. Let’s offload the bulk of that to the AI. The AI can point to the moments, then you can just watch, oh, okay, let me go in and see. Tim struggled with this objection. Oh, okay, let me go in and watch that. Oh, okay. Now I’m watching two minute clips, not 30 minute clips. And I’m smarter. And also, I’m a little less stressed than I was before.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, yeah. I think there’s a pace in there around time management. And look, I’m a huge believer that in today’s world, we have more to do than we possibly can. So we simply can’t get through our list of tasks that we could. When I’m 41, I started in the workplace 21 years ago, and I remember distinctly that when I would go on leave, I’d get my emails down to zero. I’d have an out of office voice message on. And that was about all I had to worry about. There was no social media, there was no project management tools, no slack, nothing along those lines. And it was a much simpler existence. And if you go back 20 years before that, people will say, well, gee, we just had phones, there were no computers, no emails, and it was simply done via phone. And because now we have just so many channels of communication, our focus and our time management become more and more important. In fact, I did a session yesterday with a brilliant team, and we focused purely on ease and impact around how they could get things done. And what comes out of that is that some of the nice to haves that don’t give immediate impact to a business, ie. coaching. Coaching doesn’t always translate to immediate results. Reviewing pipelines and taking a synthesis around why your customers choose you or they don’t choose you don’t always lead to immediate results. What’s happening is that they’re being replaced by some of the urgent tasks where the early bird gets the worm or the urgent bird, as Sam McKenna says, gets the worm. I love that one liner. So I really like what you’re saying there, that if we can use some of the tools available to us to give us that summary, to take that approach that says our customers are choosing us or aren’t choosing us because of this. And here’s the summary from all these notes. Right, Ace.
The other piece that I really like is if we can use it for that coaching piece. But I think what’s really important on top of that is that as leaders, we actually have to set up the coaching program first. We actually have to set up the ability to synthesise logical arguments or why customers choose us or don’t choose us first. So if sales leaders, if we can get that done, we can then take advantage of these tools. So there’s that little bit of baseline work to do that will give you so much joy down the track if you get it right. So I think that’s a really good perspective, Richard, thank you. What about from a note taking point of view? I just really specifically talk about using automated note software. How does it handle the nuances in human voices? Right. I have a big, a strong Australian accent with dulcet tones, and sometimes these systems don’t quite line up beautifully for me. How are we working through that as a challenge?
Richard White:
Two things in that, I think one of the first things we built was kind of like transcription. Right? And I think I always said to our team, no one wants a transcript, but the transcript is kind of the foundational artefact to build everything else. Right. You can’t build good notes without a good transcript. And if you go back five years, this one place where we’ve had big strides, you could get decent transcription, but only if someone spoke very, from an American perspective, they would call it unaccented English, which basically, if you don’t speak American English, like, it’s going to kind of screw it up. One of the things that the advent is rise of AI has done is like the new transcription models are so much better, there’s so much more because they’re trained on everyone around the world. They’re not just trained on Americans anymore. And so it’s really good at picking up any accent from anywhere. So that’s one part. The other part is, it’s kind of funny. We started this company four years ago. I remember I put AI and our company name and all our investors yelled. All my investors yelled at me. They’re like, no one likes AI. I was like, no one likes this AI from four years ago, though. I’m like, they’re going to like what’s coming, right? Sort of thing. I say that because one of the first things I asked for was, can the system start figuring out sentiment? Can understand. For example, just pull out I want to know when there’s a really positive moment from a sales call or really frustrating moment from the sales call. And the original way everyone tried to do this is they’d generate a transcript, which again, five years ago, not that quasi accurate, again, if you weren’t American English, even less accurate. And then based on that text, they tried to do sentiment analysis. But as you and I know, tone is everything in sales, right? And so I can say, yeah, we’re going to buy in a couple different ways, some of which definitely mean I’m going to buy and some of which mean I’m never going to buy your product, right? And so this is the other thing, only recently now, really in the last two months we’re now working on stuff where we’ve got AI models that can understand tone. We tried to do this four years ago, and the only like data set out there you could train on to try to figure out tone was based on the American sitcom Friends. You can imagine if you try to apply like that over the top kind of bombacity to a sales call. It doesn’t get it because everything’s a little more subtle, but now it truly can do it. So I think it’s a really cool advent that the systems now will understand tone and inflection and what these things mean.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, well, four years ago with Friends, it would have just been all around sarcasm, wouldn’t it?
Richard White:
Yeah, it didn’t understand anything.
Ben Wright:
That would have been some funny summaries to look at. That would have been cool. Okay, great. Okay, so that’s coming along and I’ll ask you about privacy first. I’ll just share an insight. For me. At the moment, I don’t record my coaching calls, and now these are calls where I’m working on sales strategy with a larger business or a midsize business, or even individual business owners. And the reason I don’t record the training calls is because I feel that I’m more likely to get an open audience on the other side, because there’s a little part that says this is being recorded. We always used to say, if you email it, it’s forever. If it gets recorded, it’s forever as well. How do you handle concerns around privacy or perhaps calls being leaked or hacked into?
Richard White:
I mean, one is, if you’re building a company like ours, we did all the security stuff you usually do way later in the company lifecycle on day one. So you have to, because if you have one breach ever, it’s over kind of thing. So one is you got to take security privacy super seriously. I think you bring up one of the things that I think we kind of figured out before the market, which is that people actually are far more okay with being recorded than I think most people think. And it actually changes a bit if they also get access to the recording themselves. If you say, I’m going to record you, and maybe you made a weird face or you said something you regret, da da da, I feel less comfortable. But if you say, I’m going to record you because I got this AI that takes notes from me. And by the way, do you want a copy of it afterwards? They’re going to go from neutral to enthusiastic. Yes. And oh, by the way, like you said this to me at the beginning of the podcast, we give you the same tools, just like, hey, if you say anything you don’t like to be on the recording, let me know. We can redact any part of the conversation. And that was something else we built into our app, that most of these tools that a lot of sales teams use, some bot would join the meeting and it wouldn’t leave until the meeting ended and you had no control over it. We actually have to follow you into the meeting. You could any point tell it to leave, come back in. We also want to make sure everyone on the call felt in control of, like, hey, occasionally there are things we really want to go off the record on. Great, take it out. Let’s have that chat, let’s bring it back in afterwards.
But I think the bulk of what we’ve seen is that when you give people the option to get the access recording, they really like it. And I think the other thing we’ve seen is, I think, I don’t know if you all have this in Australia, but in the States, like, every 1800 number I’ve ever called for customer support has this line of, like, this call will be recorded for quality assurance. And I think it’s done something where we just kind of like, I like, hear that and I don’t think anything about it ever.
I think just certain parts, like we just habituate it and now we’re just used to being recorded. And so I think there’s a lot of folks who said, oh, more people are going to talk differently unless they’re talking about like state secrets and legal things, especially on sales calls. I find that people are pretty candid regardless.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, yeah. Really good logic. And I suspect if we tie that to, let’s say, ten years ago, you sit down and say you’re going to be doing most of your sales calls over video, or half your sales calls over video or percentage over video. I think people would have said, no, we’re never ever going to get out of face to face. And it’s funny how the world changes. So there is a change in perception that comes with that. Great, great, excellent. Good insight. Thank you.
Okay, so question I love to ask everyone that comes on the show, and I was telling you beforehand that what are we? This is episode 81. Across the 30 or so times I’ve asked this across leaders, I’ve actually never had the same answer. Pressure. No pressure. Right. So you’re a sales leader now wanting to turn the growth tap on for the next twelve months like it’s an established business. You really wanted to turn the growth tap on and drive. It’s very much at the front of minds of sales leaders at the moment. What’s one thing you’re focusing on with your team to get that growth engine humming?
Richard White:
I’m going to give you two, actually, because I think one is efficiency and one is top of funnel. And I think, like you said, established business. So an established business, I think about attacking both at the same time. Earlier I would have only thought about, yeah, earlier in the business I would think only about top of funnel. And I’m like, we’re not going to worry too much about efficiency. We’ll worry about that when we get to 10 million. We already covered the efficiency piece, which I really think is being maniacal about making sure the salespeople are selling and not being data entry technicians. I think so much of this is not only just taking notes, but all the fields we got to fill in the CRM and all we’ve overloaded our teams with a lot of this extraneous work that helps give us as managers comfort and visibility, but doesn’t necessarily help close the deal. I don’t think that stuff can go away, but I think there’s now tools like Fathom that can help you automate that. Right. So I think I’m constantly asking my team, what do you find that’s just like a low value use of your time? And now with AI, you can, like automate things you couldn’t before, not just Fathom, but like there’s a whole suite of tools, Clay and stuff like that, where it’s like the AI can make judgement calls, right? Which is the thing that classic things, you know, classic things had to be like, if it equals this, then do this.
So I’d say we’re staffing up a whole ops team that is AI native. They all have experience using LLMs, and they go airdrop into our sales team, into our support team, and they start asking them, what is the thing you do a lot that feels repetitive or low value? And then can we build out some internal AI automation? On the same note, for top of funnel, I think AI outbound has gotten really good. Like the messages you can send. You think about the time an SDR used to spend to research a prospect and write this thing and read their LinkedIn. Yeah, I can do all of that in 10 seconds and write a way better email than that rep ever could. You can feed it a lot of context about who that prospect is. And then they can grab even more context from just looking at who they are on the open web. And I’ve been blown away. Like, the results we’ve gotten recently from AI powered outbound with tools like Clay and stuff like that is really, really impressive.
Ben Wright:
Love it. So we’re getting efficient at the front end, making sure customers are spending more time, so salespeople are spending more time with customers or delivery people are getting on with delivering. And look, the top of funnel one’s actually a variation of that is we’re making sure that we’re using the tools around us to save time, but improve the quality of our interactions with customers. Awesome. Love it. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Richard. Lovely to have you around today. So, Richard Wright from Fathom, can you tell people listening, where can they find you if they’d like to get in touch?
Richard White:
Sure. Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. You’ll see Richard White on LinkedIn under Fathom. I’ve got this big kind of bitmap looking like, look at an eight-bit anime character. That’s my avatar. Why? I don’t know, but I’ve stuck with it. So, yeah, send me a message in there. Love to hear from you.
Ben Wright:
Excellent. Great. And if anyone wants to check out Notetaker, they go to Fathom.AI. Have I got that right?
Richard White:
Fathom.video, actually, Fathom.video.
Ben Wright:
I’m glad I asked that to confirm. So Fathom.video. If you’d like to look at a free note taking app to help you save some time when you’re dealing with customers and I think they get some better outcomes. Awesome. Well, thank you very much Richard. Lovely to have you today. For everyone listening, please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
E81 Revolutionising Digital Communication with Richard White
