Use cases, not just features.
That’s how Simon Ooley, co-founder of Veles, a YC-backed startup reshaping how enterprise sales teams engage buyers, and former sales leader at Procore and Builder, reframes the future of enterprise sales. Instead of selling products, he helps teams sell outcomes—anchored in urgency, ROI, and the real problems customers are trying to solve.
In this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders podcast, Simon joins Vijay to unpack his journey from BDR to founder and YC-backed entrepreneur.
They dive deep into:
- Why traditional sales roles are merging under the GTM umbrella
- How can large teams eliminate inefficiencies in quoting and deal desk processes?
- The power of use case-based selling to drive urgency, personalization, and long-term customer success
Simon breaks down why founder-led sales isn’t just about hustle, but about curiosity, experimentation, and relentless clarity on what your buyers actually care about. You’ll learn how Velus is shifting sales conversations from product features to business cases—and why that shift might be the most important evolution in GTM strategy today.
Whether you’re scaling a sales team or starting from zero, this conversation is packed with tactical insight and a whole lot of heart.
Connect with Simon Ooley on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonooley/
Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijdam/
Listen To The Episode:
From BDR to YC Founder: Simon Ooley’s GTM Playbook for 0 to 1
I always open the show with the signature question, which is “How do you view and define go-to-market?”
Yeah, I’ve enjoyed listening to your podcast, and I enjoyed how your guests have defined this.
I think I take a slightly different approach to go-to-market than some of your other guests. I think the go-to-market, in general, is expanding every day. It’s eating up more and more of the revenue life cycle and everything that people define as marketing, sales, rev ops, et cetera.
I personally define it as, and our business looks at go-to-market as how we show up to our customers. And that is defined, how do we show up as a digital presence? How do we show up as a partner, an implementer, or a vendor? And so we think about go-to-market as how do we show up to those organizations, and what are our use cases that we’re driving for with those customers? So I’ve even expanded the definition.
Yeah.
So I guess I’m a culprit there as well.
No, this is all good. I mean, that’s the fun thing about this topic, go-to-market.
I mean, I was just quickly looking at my podcast history before jumping on this recording, and it’s been going on for four years. I’ve been, I’ve had the good fortune of talking about go-to-market for over four years. And here’s the funny part, right? Go-to-market, the definition is, as you said, it’s constantly evolving, it’s expanding.
And for me, it’s like any software product. I mean, you have a V1 or V.5 and it has to evolve. And the same thing goes with go-to-market.
It has to evolve, not only as a broader definition for the industry, but even the go-to-market for an organization will evolve based on so many factors.
Absolutely. Yeah.
And we’re in the midst of the GTME kind of movement led by Clay and some other businesses that have, I think, expanded that or sped up that evolution quite a bit.
Yeah, so just curious. I mean, this is something. When I started the podcast, this was about four years ago. Back then, GTM and go-to-market were not such a big term or not, as popular as it is today. But just based on that one line you mentioned, I’m curious. I mean, for me, it’s more from a curiosity point of view, like how and why do you say like the GTM concept has, is more popular now with companies like Clay and others?
Like, I just want to get your take on that.
Yeah, I think it’s Clay for one, who we’re a customer of. We love working with Clay. But even if you look at OpenAI’s roles, if you look at Anthropix’s roles, like there are no salespeople.
Yeah.
They don’t have an account executive as a core job title anymore. It’s just GTME.
And so, or GTM, excuse me. GTME is maybe a little bit more Clay-specific. But I think one of the reasons for that is organizations are starting to move more towards, I think, this is like kind of forward deployment type model.
They’re looking at, hey, we’re going to bring on a customer, but our sales team is not just going to close the deal and kind of throw the grenade over the fence to customer success and say, good luck, go and implement that business. Which I think traditionally in kind of 2014, when I started in sales through to the, like 2020, that type of timeframe, there was a lot more of that segregation of those roles. Now it’s becoming far more integrated.
And so I think instead of saying sales, marketing, customer success, I think go-to-market has just kind of swallowed up all three of those functions. I’m happy about it because I think it does turn the focus back on the customer and say, How do we take you to market? And it’s not, how do I get a deal done and get commissioned as a sales rep? And it’s not, how do I implement this customer as an implementation manager? And it’s not, how do I make this customer successful as a customer success manager? It’s like, how do we just take you to market? How do we make you successful as a whole?
Yeah, no, it’s actually interesting. And on a different note, funny as well that you say that and how you define go-to-market, right? So couple of years ago, even a few years ago, and even like a few guests on this podcast, when I talk and ask about go-to-market, especially if they’re from a sales-centric background, they’ll say go-to-market is sales and sales is go-to-market, period, right? That’s a very narrow view.
And then over time, it expanded to include marketing and, of late, customer success. But there’s also one more leg, I mean, a critical lever. How about the product? I mean, if it’s not product slash service, you do not have a winning go-to-market.
Absolutely. I mean, the product is, you know, as a founder now, and I’ll give you a little bit of context on my background. I came from sales.
I was all in like an enterprise quota-carrying sales rep for many years. I either was a quota-carrying rep or leading a sales team for a decade. And so I was always working with the product.
Product was always my better half as it relates to how I win a new business and a new market, and a new region. They were the ones who actually, you know, facilitated me being able to close a deal. So they started to become the backbone of everything that go-to-market really does.
I mean, the product is building what you are going to market for your customer to solve. And so they are the core underpinning, but a lot of people do forget that like product is part of go-to-market.
Yeah.
They are the core piece.
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome.
I mean, this is a great start. Let’s double-click into the topic you just ended your conversation with, which is your career. So why don’t you walk us, walk me and the listeners through your overall career journey, how you got started in your professional life, and what you’re doing and what led you to what you’re doing today?
Yeah, it can be long-winded, so I’ll do my very best to be concise.
But I started my career in SaaS or software in 2013, 2014 as a BDR. That was my first job, straight out of it, and cold calling. I actually call that the Zerp era of outbounding.
Sure.
And I think a lot of people would agree that it wasn’t just the Zerp era of dollars and capital, it was also the Zerp era of outbound. You could send emails, and people responded, and you could increase the volume of that and equally increase the response rates of that.
So it was a great time to be a BDR, but I absolutely fell in love with sales at that point. I had about a year and a half of being a BDR. I identified that there was an area of the business I was in that was underserved, which was the international markets, Asia Pacific, and the UK.
And I was lucky enough to be at a super fast-growing business that was Procore. And the reps at the time were like, they were doing great. They didn’t need to be taking on more deals after hours.
They didn’t need to be taking other accounts. So I basically went to our CRO and I said, hey, I’ll be BDR during the day, let me run some deals at night. And I think as a CRO, having an employee come to you and say, You don’t have to pay me anymore, but I’ll do more work.
That was an easy yes for them.
Yeah.
And so I was able to do both roles, teach myself how to sell.
Fast forward, we went from zero to about 1.5 million in the Asia Pacific region for that company. And we were really lucky to start building out that team while still being in the U.S. Flew out there, opened an office in Sydney, Australia, and the Procore. And we were really lucky in the three, three and a half year span that I was involved with that team to get to about 10 million in ARR and a 70-person kind of boots on the ground office, which was a fantastic journey.
I got that like that bug of building things. Even as a seller, I was quota carrying, but I was kind of leading that team, hiring people in every division. And so I came back, and I was absolutely fired up to build things.
So I asked myself, could I do that with no money? As an entrepreneur going, opening a new office, you’re not exactly strapped for cash. So, you know, you can pay for a big, we work, you can take people out to dinner all the time. And I wanted to challenge myself to do it without money.
So I joined a bootstrap startup as the first non-founding employee, and we were incredibly fortunate. And I was hired on by incredibly smart founders, but we were able to do it in a very similar timeframe, about 3 million in ARR with zero capital invested in the business. And so those two experiences really drove me to want to be a founder, but also in that same vein, we were experiencing so many challenges around pricing and packaging, around the quoting process.
How do we streamline this for large teams? And then also for small. And so it really led me down this path of building a better solution for not only pricing and packaging, but just the rep experience as it relates to product and price. And that’s what drove me to found Belus.
Very cool. Amazing story. I mean, starting off as a BDR and a lot of people get stuck at the BDR stage, and the luck if you go to the next stage, which is the AE, but for you, I mean, it’s not BDR AE, you went further and way beyond.
And that’s the proof point as to why YC actually accepted you in the first place, right? You’re not just a, hey, I’ll do my job, and I do my job, and meet my quota, and that’s it. So it’s that hunger, it’s that curiosity, and the passion to learn is what I’m sensing throughout, and also knowing yourself in the process.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think I came to this concept of like, I think my wife calls it aggressive learning. I get really passionate about a subject, and all of a sudden, I have every book on Amazon about that subject being ordered to my house. I wasn’t an incredibly good academic student.
Early on, I didn’t quite see the value in the syllabus, and if it didn’t immediately engage my mind, I probably failed the class. But I learned that later on, I absolutely got fascinated with how to be better at any specific thing I was doing in the work environment. And so, yeah, I think being really curious is probably the best thing that you can do as an early employee at any business.
Find all the problems and be the solution, and you’re going to go the right way.
Absolutely. I mean, that’s a key thing that you shared, right? I mean, academic performance and doing good in a school or college environment is one thing.
And similar to your story, even I was not good academically because it’s almost like it’s being pushed onto you, versus later on in my life, I realized, hey, I’m interested in this topic. I want to read more or dig into it more. And by the way, this podcast was started from that hunger and curiosity.
I mean, I want to learn more about go-to-market, so why don’t I start a podcast and in the process, share my learning with the broader community? Absolutely. That was a thesis.
So fast forward to, I think, 2024. In fact, I can take this conversation into so many areas. Let’s actually, I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile and looking to see which one to dig into.
So, talk to us about the builder phase, where you are like the founding salesperson, founding a GTM ad builder, because as you correctly said, having the luxury of a budget and a big brand like Procore is one thing, and building internally within that. But then at Builder, it’s not zero budget, but very close to it. I’m assuming it’s just one.
So talk to us about that. The reason why I’m wanting to go down this path, Simon, is that a lot of the listeners are founders as well. And so for them as founders, how should they do founder-led sales, or in your case, very close to that, ad builder?
Yeah, I think it’s really my experience at Builder, and the founders will probably listen to them and reminisce about how scary it was.
But we were an early-stage business that was just starting to gain momentum, product market fit, and getting really excited about the future, right as COVID kind of completely shut down the construction industry. For those of you who don’t know who Builde is, what that company does, they’re a CRM for construction companies.
Got it.
And so very adjacent to Procore, I think there are a few great learnings we had working alongside a big organization like Procore. And it’s a really great go-to-market strategy if you are adjacent to a large player to be able to really draft off of their success and use that as a go-to-market lever and channel to grow your business. But I think my time at Builder was unique in that COVID hit, and no one knew what to do from a construction standpoint.
Do we send people to a job site? Right. Does our $4 billion a year business just halt and freeze? And what do we do with that capital? What do we do with the job sites? It was a very scary time. I think something that I learned early on is that creativity is king as it relates to go-to-market when you do not have money.
That is the core thing that I learned there. And it was a testament to obviously, the founders who were incredibly creative, but also their ability to just give me leeway to try things. And so early on, some of the things that we focused on were just how do we just make construction people’s lives easier in this crazy phase of life? The PPP loans came out, no one really knew what was happening, and there was like a bucket of cash that was very quickly being sucked away.
And so one of the things we did was just dove incredibly deep into that and wrote up a whole website on how construction organizations should be able to interact with the PPP loan. And I don’t know if that directly correlated to revenue in the door, but I know that all of our customers and all of our prospects thanked us for just doing that work upfront. And so for any founder or early stage sales team that is working at a company that doesn’t have a lot of resources, that can’t spend thousands of dollars or tens of thousand dollars a month on ads or paid advertisement, you just have to be really creative and hungry and just put things out there that are unique and that are fun to do.
Because if you’re not having fun doing early-stage outbound, early-stage kind of marketing, or the umbrella of go-to-market, you’re gonna struggle. You kind of have to just play around, have fun, and figure out what’s gonna work.
Yeah.
So that’s a great insight, right? In COVID times, especially in construction, it was not clear whether the construction management as well as the team, and the labor force, how that would pan out and for how long. It was a big unknown. And what I heard you say, Simon, as the team at Builder and you latched onto PPP as a wedge to deliver value to your ICP and target audience.
Absolutely. It was one thing that no one knew anything about, and everyone was trying to figure out how to survive.
Yeah.
So that was something that we latched onto. I’d also say that there was something awesome, Vijay, in that specific phase. Our ICP was a large enterprise construction.
So there is a report that ENR, as an organization, puts out every year, the ENR 400. Like the top 400 construction companies by what’s considered annual construction volume, the amount of construction they do per year. And so those were our key customers.
Most of those businesses were a hundred years old. Like they’ve been around the block.
Right.
And so we actually went to them and said like, Hey, what do you do in this type of situation? And most of these large enterprise builders, they’re like, hey, this isn’t new. We’ve experienced things like this. We may not have experienced COVID, but we’ve experienced these moments of uncertainty.
Correct. And these are the opportunities for us to take advantage when no one else wants to. Nice.
Warren Buffett said, “When nobody’s buying, that’s the time to buy.” When everybody’s selling, that’s… So I think construction took advantage of that. And so we were able to learn from them and also partner with them in that kind of uncertainty, which was another great play for us.
Understood. And how was the outbound like over there? Like you must have done clearly, I mean, a lot of outbound in addition to putting together all this content, like how to use PPP. So, just walk us through a one-minute spiel on our overview of the outbound.
Yeah. So, I mean, I come from, again, the Zerp era about outbounding. So I’m a cold caller kind of through and through.
And I think when we were at Builder, like email was becoming less and less of a viable outbound option without that connective, like cold calling. So I think there are a lot of fantastic people out there now talking about how to still do outbound, but the 30 NPC guys are great with their outbound cold calling sucks book. I think it’s absolutely true.
But cold calling is still, I think, the best way to reach people is to get on the phone and have a conversation and be a human being. And so at Builder, that’s exactly what we did. I think we’ve also had a great partner in Procore in being able to draft off their success and engage with their client base.
Yeah.
And in-person events for construction were also great. So we basically took a three-pronged approach.
We were a fantastic Procore partner, we did cold outbound, and we went to in-person events. And those were our three ways to really get in front of people and show them the value we could provide.
Got it.
So, just double-clicking on cold outbound and cold calling. So did you have like an auto-dialer? I just wanna get into the tactics. Like, how did you really do that and when at it?
Yeah, we didn’t do parallel dialing at that time.
I’m really, you know, I think parallel dialing is really exciting because you can just get so much more throughput. But I also am always hesitant about quality over, or excuse me, quantity over quality, is not always the right approach. And so at that time, I think, you know, we were on kind of the standard stack.
It was Salesforce, outreach. We had, you know, Zoom info, and we kind of just ran that standard play, but we just really approached the messaging with a lot more strategy, a lot more thought into that. We didn’t try and recreate the wheel as it related to the tech stack.
Got it.
Those were tried and true tools, and we just kind of jumped on the back of those, and then really focused on how we get the message to the customer.
Understood.
Very good. So, coming back to our bigger story over here, you did your thing, what you had to do at Builder, and then you got that founder, entrepreneur edge biting hard at you, and you applied to YC. So tell us about that story, and how did that came about?
Yeah, so my co-founder and I both worked at Procore together, and we knew we wanted to found a business together.
It took us a lot longer to finally bite the bullet. So hindsight’s 20-20. We probably would have started it sooner, but we threw our hat in the ring for YC with the expectation we would not get in.
I think everyone probably does that because of their low acceptance rate. But I think we had a really unique story. We had some incredible proof points to say this was a real business, and we were building it as a kind of hobby until we realized this was an enterprise product we really needed to go all in.
Nice. And so we applied to YC. There are a million YC application stories, but it’s a very high-pressure time.
YC is all the YC group partners, and we were really lucky to have a great set of YC partners as we went through YC. They do not kind of beat around the bush. They’ll tell you exactly what you need to do to be better.
You only have three months with them, or even less. It’s such a short period of time that you’re actually with the YC partners. They just try and push you to be as good as you possibly can.
We applied to YC. We had a less than 10-minute interview.
Sorry, just on that, so YC partner, is that the thing before applying to YC, or is it part of YC?
So, yeah, so YC runs their cohorts.
You have group partners. So you have people who are working with you. And so one of those group partners is gonna choose your application.
Got it.
And they’re gonna be kind of like raising their hand to say, like, they want you to be part of their group.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, we applied to YC. We did our 10-minute interview. I think anyone who’s gone through YC knows that the interview is super high stakes, very scary, and super fast repetition questions.
Like you don’t have a lot of time to build rapport. That’s not why you’re there. And then that meeting ends, and you look at your co-founders, and you say, I have no idea how that went.
Yeah, absolutely. I think when we came out of that meeting, I turned to my co-founder and said, I ruined it. I ruined it.
There’s no way we’re getting picked. And he turned to me, he said, I think that went great. Okay.
And he’s always the more conservative of the two of us. So I felt, but it’s a very fun experience. I think everybody who has the opportunity to apply should.
Yeah.
And the ability for them to really put you in a place to build and be creative is incredible. So it was a very fun experience for us.
No, fantastic. And I’ve had the good fortune of hosting YC founders in this podcast, but I think, not I think, I know for a fact, you are the first person who actually revealed a playbook that was not revealed until now, which is working with a group partner before applying for YC.
Oh, I’ll correct you.
So our group partner, the first time we met him, was during that 10-minute interview. We didn’t work with any group partners beforehand. You can, I mean, I think this is super broadly known, but there are existing YC alumni who always post on LinkedIn pre-batch, like, hey, do you want to meet with me for 10 minutes and talk about it? I think I did that four or five, six times.
I talked to as many YC alumni as I could prior to going into that interview. But yeah, no engagement with the YC group partners prior. That would be awesome.
I would love that, but I don’t think with the engagement.
I understood that. That’s what I was wondering.
I mean, is that like a prep school for YC, a formal prep school? Obviously it’s not there.
No, definitely not. I think you have to be really innovative to get as much information as you can. But there, I mean, there’s 4,000 plus alumni. You can always get them on LinkedIn.
Yeah, for sure.
So the other question is, actually, let me hold on to that question because I want to dig into what you do with your start or what your startup does rather. And your startup’s name is Veles. So, tell us about Veles, who you serve, and what is the property you’re looking to solve broadly in the industry?
Yeah, I’d love to, and I’ll keep it short because I really enjoy just talking about the tactics.
But Veles is basically an enterprise workspace for sales teams to bring together the real use cases that they’re selling, the pricing for their product and packaging, and the ROI narrative around that. So really trying to bring sales teams back to kind of first principles and basics and understand what the actual outcome is that your customers’s coming to you to solve.
Right.
So we’re trying to move sales teams away from just selling the value language that is put together for the product or the bundle that they have to sell, and really trying to switch the paradigm to focus on what are you coming to us to solve? What are those use cases? And what is the offering that we can put together to solve that use case? And so Veles kind of holistically is a use case-based sales motion that focuses on an intuitive pricing and packaging, pricing calculator, and an ROI kind of use case builder that ties that fully together. Yeah, no, this is great.
So I just want to double click on what is your unique story? Clearly, there’s a unique story, and that’s why YC funded you, because I’ve had the founders of Aligned and the founder of Accord on this podcast. And just from a surface level, I’ve not done any deep research. From a surface level, there seems to be a lot of overlap because at the end of the day, you’re trying to figure out how you, as a seller, how do you work closely with your buyer and the buying team and then walk hand in hand, right? So I’m just trying to understand.
So help me and the listeners understand, like what is your pitch and the wedge that YC saw in you, and how you’re going to win at this?
Yeah, I won’t speak for what YC saw in us because I think that’s still unknown to me. I appreciate the fact that they picked us, but I think, you know, I look at sales from the lens of why or what a customer is looking to solve. I personally don’t feel like any AI agent, any credit, any token, or any product bundle inherently has value to any customer by itself.
Right.
So if we think about it, I am selling 1 million tokens to a customer, 1 million tokens means really nothing.
It doesn’t have any inherent value until you associate those credits with a use case that the customer is looking to solve. And so if we think about sales in general, let’s just break it down into its kind of components, its basic layer. A customer is coming to you to solve a problem.
If there’s no problem, there’s no reason for them to be in this room. There’s no reason for them to have this conversation to do this demo. They’re coming to solve a problem, and that problem is your use case.
So it is not your product that is the solution, really. It’s you’re coming in and you’re solving a problem for that customer. And I think if you break it down to that basic layer, every sales motion will have more urgency.
It’ll have a higher value. You’re gonna be able to provide ROI to that specific problem in a way that is believable, not a grandiose 11X ROI on this, everything you could possibly do with my product.
Right.
And so that’s kind of our unique edge is we’re looking at organizations and saying, hey, you have an incredible set of use cases that somebody would come to you to buy. Let us help you really clearly identify those use cases early on in a sales cycle and drive urgency value and ROI as it relates to each use case that someone’s coming to you to solve, instead of trying to approach everything as a one-size-fits-all product and packaging exercise. And it’s become incredibly valuable to not only help a lot of AI-based businesses, credit-based companies sell more, but it’s also kind of redefining how they deliver their offering.
I’m selling these three use cases. You can then take those three use cases over to customer success and say, these are the three things they want to accomplish with our product.
Yeah.
They can go and deliver on those three things. And then you can come back together and say, hey, we’ve delivered on those three things. What else can we help you solve? What are the other pain points you’re feeling? And so there’s a much better identification of why it’s based.
There’s a much better way to upsell and cross-sell all of your products and packages when you’re focused on them. It’s specifically focused on what they need to solve.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, this is one thing, I think that’s a key principle for any sales. And for me, just a side note. So I am like a strategic growth operator or a go-to-market architect where I work with these doing 10 million over, understanding their go-to-market challenges, and then putting together either a workshop or a proposal, or an engagement.
So, for me, very similar to what he just said, Simon, it is all about building a business case. So they are coming to me to solve a use case. And in my pitch, air quote pitch, I mean, for people who are not seeing the video, right? And a proposal, it’s a short proposal.
I keep it very intentionally. It has to be very short. It’s a two-pager business case.
And the first is around the problem set, why they came, and what is the problem that they’re looking to solve, the cost of inaction. And then there’s the pricing. What is the investment required to solve that problem, and what will they get once it’s solved? And tying the ROI, like either a three, five, 10X, whatever that thing is, is super critical for that buyer to champion your product or service internally.
And given, I mean, Zurb days, it’s way behind, but given today, where each and every buyer has to prove to their finance committee and the CFO, it’s super, super important. And that’s how I’m seeing connecting the dots based on what you just said, right? How are you helping the salespeople in building that ROI in a business case for the buyers?
Absolutely, and to kind of tie it back to the first thing we talked about, where product is also a big part of go-to-market, when the entire organization turns and looks through the lens of use cases, it’s so much easier to identify which use cases apply to which customers. If a new business comes in and is asking for the same use case, the majority of your business is the reason why they came and purchased your product.
All of a sudden, you have the best reference customers, and you have the best ways to engage. Your product team also knows what use cases they’re coming to buy your product. That drives better product decision-making.
So everything is really tied around why somebody comes to your business. And I think we’re starting to see it. I went to an incredible revenue conference in New York recently called RevFest, and they’re gonna do it again next year.
So anyone who wants to go should definitely go. It was world-class, just one day. But I did a little bit of prep to meet all these companies that were going to this conference.
Out of all of these businesses, it was like 95, 96%, there were only like four or five companies out of the entire thing that I looked at, all had the concept of use cases on their website. So on their website, already, you go to the homepage, you hover over use cases, all these incredible ways that someone could use their product. But when you go into a sales notion with them, they’re like, Here are our products, how many users? They’re not pulling it all the way through, but we’re getting so much closer.
Use cases are the reasons why people come to your product to buy. And if we can have the entire sales notion that way, we’re gonna learn more, we’re gonna sell more, people are gonna be a lot happier, less churn. Every kind of main metric a business cares about goes up.
And so I’m really excited about this. I think it’s gonna be a new phase of go-to-market and selling in general.
Yeah, for sure.
So, just double-clicking, so who are your buyers? Who are the buyers of Velas, and how do they use them? How do they use it?
Yeah, so we, as a business, really focus on our core competency, which is enterprise SaaS. So our core market is gonna be large enterprise sales teams. Usually, if we look at our current customer base, somewhere between 100 sellers to our largest company has closer to 3,000.
And we really focus on those larger teams because there’s so much value in the small tweaks that we can do with that team, because it’s exponential. With that being said, we do have sales teams of five people, and those are in our ICP. We don’t go outbound to those businesses, but they have come to us, and they’re still a great fit.
But our ICP is a large B2B enterprise sales, and they’re using us in a few different facets. So they’re using us for this use case building exercise, where they can identify either from call recordings or through templates that their marketing team and product team put together. The use cases that the customers’s coming to them for.
They can estimate the number of credits or other product packaging that’s going to support that use case. And then we have a pricing calculator that helps them put together slide deck presentations or other types of pricing presentations, and then integrate this fully into their CPQ. If you kind of think about it, you could have a gong or a flurry-type call recorder, and we’ll take that transcript all the way through to your CPQ and your close one deal.
Understood.
So that’s a good segue into the next segment, which is the go-to-market success story and a go-to-market pivot story. So we’d love to get your insight and learnings from both the go-to-market success story and a go-to-market pivot story, ideally from Willis, if you can share that.
Yeah, I think I have two that come to mind, or one for each of those questions. I think the success story comes back to the first thing I said on how you define go-to-market, which is how you show up for your customer. When we first started the business, we were focused on the pricing aspect because we felt the pain with Salesforce CPQ and Zora CPQ in our past lives. We knew that as a seller, I wanted to present multiple options, present multiple ways for my customer to buy my product, and not just be an order form generator over and over.
And what we learned early on is that the way that we showed up for our customers was actually the best go-to-market channel for us. Pretty much every business, every large enterprise that has come on board with us has been referred directly through a referral. And so when we show up and we say, hey, why are you using our product? What is it that makes our product something you log into every single day? We started to identify those use cases, and we started to identify how our product shows up for our customers.
And then we continued to kind of poke at that. And I think one of the benefits of a founder-led sales org or coming from being in sales is you’re not afraid to ask a lot of questions. And you’re not afraid to ask more confrontational questions, not in an angry way, but like, tell me more about that.
Why is it that, like, I always loved the Sandler selling method? I always loved to disqualify things. I didn’t want to waste my time on things that weren’t real.
And so part of my product questions and product discovery with our customers is like, what if I took that away? If I just deleted that out of the app, would you be mad? And that led to really identifying use cases. And then to your second question, like the GTM pivot, if you will, I wouldn’t say it was so much of a pivot, but it was really identifying that, like, hey, everyone’s really enjoying the pricing workflow that we help large enterprise teams with. Now, everybody really wants ROI.
And so I think the holy grail of a sales rep is here’s pricing, but here’s exactly the ROI that is believable to their customer. And so we went down this path of identifying, well, ROI in general, a large-scale ROI exercise is two, 300 questions. And it has to do with every little, you know, tiny bit of my product.
If you use all these products, the ROI is 20 X. And I used to go through those exercises with my customers in past lives. And at the end of it, it would have this incredible graph that would just show paying for itself 200 times over. Their eyes would glaze over, and they wouldn’t really care about that ROI at the end of the day.
And so our pivot moment was, wow, ROI is not as important as we thought about as we look at a grand scale of a sales motion, but it is incredibly important when we think about the specific use case. So it all really came together. Use case-based selling, in my opinion, is how enterprise sales teams will sell moving forward because ROI matters, value engineering matters, and pricing matters as it relates to the specific use case and not a whole grandiose kind of product offering.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that definitely resonates, use case-based selling. So I wonder if WCAG can make it even more concrete for the listeners.
I mean, as a concept, I get it, use case-based selling, and even the concept of jobs to be done, and how do you simplify the whole thing? I get that. But if you can make it even more real with an example, that’d be awesome, Simon.
Yeah, I’m more than happy to give the Veles examples. I think we were able to quickly identify use cases that people really cared about when they came to us, which, for a large enterprise sales team, automating the deal desk is super important. And it’s not to replace deal desk teams.
Deal desk teams are incredibly valuable, so we’re not replacing a single deal desk person. But if we could really dive into all the steps that make deal desk a friction point in sales, if you can identify all of the stocks compliance that needs to happen to ensure deal desk is working effectively, one of the biggest use cases is minimizing the number of deals that need to go to deal desk that shouldn’t actually be in deal desk.
Got it, yeah.
So deal desk is a great strategic lever. They are gonna help your sales teams build the correct deals for your enterprise partners, but your SMB and your mid-market deals probably shouldn’t be in the deal desk as often as they are. And so one of the use cases that you come to Veles for is that we really want to eliminate the wasted time our deal desk team spends on SMB and mid-market deals, because really, they should be going through their manager, getting approval based on a very clear set of boundaries.
That’s a great use case, but also our sales teams are spending an insane amount of time building out manual presentations and slide decks. They’re spending a lot of time in Salesforce CPQ before the deal is real, before we’re actually getting an order form generated. Yeah.
And so all of these kinds of disparate, but difficult steps are wasting, on average, about 30 to 50 minutes per deal for a sales rep. And most sales reps are doing 40 deals a month. So it’s a significant amount of time that a specific use case could solve for.
Got it. And you can clearly show the ROI just based on the time numbers that you’ve shared, right? If you imagine both for the deal desk and for the seller, if you can cut down for the deal desk, it’s like the number of deals showing up at the desk; you cut that down and times the number of deals and the hours, you get the ROI. And same thing for the sales rep in making sure that they prioritize and work on the right things versus jumping two, three steps ahead for tasks that are not relevant yet.
Absolutely. And I think of the use case piece as well, if you know why your customers are coming to you, then you also know what you should be focused on from a sales rep’s perspective.
Yeah.
If there’s a use case that just doesn’t have a high success rate, then you can start to filter out those deals. You can take that Sandler selling method that I’ve been such a fan of in my career, to really start to spend time where you need to spend time to be successful.
Yeah.
So, can you repeat that sales methodology that you just mentioned?
Sandler selling.
Sandler selling. Okay, got it.
I was not aware. I’ll definitely check that out for sure. Yeah, it’s great.
They have some great books, and they have great courses you can take. I haven’t taken any of the courses, just as an FYI, but I do love their books. Yeah.
So, going back to something that you mentioned earlier, getting your customers for Veles, it’s mostly through reference, which is how it should be. That’s a validation of how sticky the product is. I mean, an early indicator of product market fit.
But obviously, for you to get a reference, you need your first set of one, two, three, four, five customers. So, how did you land those first five customers?
Yeah, we were really lucky in the early days to actually land a large enterprise. And I don’t think it’s a shock if both my co-founder and I worked at Procore, so they would be one of our first customers.
But I think that there’s a significant amount of pain around the Salesforce CPQ and Google Spreadsheet tech stack that lives in most enterprise sales teams. I think for a lot of your listeners, they’re probably gonna go, well, that’s exactly our tech stack. And that’s not shocking because Salesforce CPQ is a super important part of your business.
And any CPQ, if it’s new.io, if it’s deal hub, if it’s Zora, all these CPQ tools are incredibly important. Do their job, which is revenue recognition, subscription management. That’s a huge part of running a large SaaS business.
But what it leaves in the wake is a lot of really frustrated salespeople because they don’t need to spend that time generating an order form just to get initial pricing out. And so we’ve actually found that through Outbound and also just through that kind of network, once somebody experiences Veles and they use the pricing calculator and they use the case builder, it’s almost like I can’t go back. It’s like, I can’t unsee this.
And so we find that when we work with really large organizations with thousands of sales reps, there’s always gonna be churn within the business. And as those people leave and they go to other organizations and they realize they’re using Salesforce CPQ and Google Sheets, it’s pretty inevitable within the first few months, we get like a LinkedIn message or something saying like, hey, we should really solve this over here. And so that’s just been really fantastic for us is landing those first few big customers and then working through those sales to really make their experience better.
Yeah.
So that’s our early go-to-market. I mean, coming back to the whole go-to-market concept and what this podcast is about, go-to-market is always evolving.
So your early go-to-market, yeah, you go to your quote, quote, friends and family, and get your first set of customers. After that, it’s a referral. And so, how do you see well as go-to-market unfolding over the next six, 12, 18 months?
You know, I will preface this answer by saying, I don’t know, because this market is changing so fast.
Yeah.
I’m really bullish on some of the go-to-market tools like Clay. I think that we’re able to do so much more with smaller teams than we used to in 2015, 2016, right? The answer then was to throw more bodies at it.
And at the time, that was the right answer.
Yeah.
I’m not so sure that’s the answer now.
And so our organization, you know, we really love to be lean. We like to be the smallest team we can and do the most with our time. But we also are solving a super hard, like we’re in the hardest parts of the business, pricing and packaging, logic, deal desk rules, compliance, like everything is really important to get right the first time.
So we don’t take a growth at all costs approach to this, but we do try and grow as fast as we possibly can. And I think we’re gonna continue to use as many tools and AI to do that as we can, while making sure our approach is very human. So it’s not a great answer. It’s a more pie-in-the-sky answer, but I think you gotta keep approaching it that way because the market’s changing too fast.
Yeah, I mean, that’s a good validation, right? I mean, that’s, I would, I’m actually surprised when people say, hey, this is the exact go-to-market motion that we’ll play out in the next 12 months, especially in these times. I mean, with the way that AI is changing go-to-market tasks across the board, there are a lot of unknowns.
You cannot be fixed anymore. And so I, yeah, it’s not a pie in the sky answer by any means. And especially given your early stage and you’re still growing and figuring out your way, your point, you’re totally spot on in terms of, you will have a hypothesis that you want to test in the next, what? Two weeks to 10 weeks or 12 weeks.
And then you just iterate.
Absolutely. I think one of the best things you can be as a founder is okay being wrong.
Yeah. I’ve learned that time and time again because I’ve time and time again been wrong. And I think that, like, I think being wrong is good because you’re proving something, you’re testing something, and you’re iterating and changing.
Being wrong and not changing is the worst thing. Ah, sure. And so go-to-market is one of those.
It’s just awesome to see what organizations are doing and to jump on the things that are working and to be okay with the things that aren’t.
Fantastic.
So coming to the final portion of this podcast, I know we can go on and on on so many topics, maybe a follow on for podcast later, but yeah, coming to the last couple of questions for you, Simon, like who do you think, or what do you think are the key resources of the people or mentors or like podcasts, events, books, what really shaped you to what you are today?
Wow, that is a, I could do a whole podcast on that, I think. But, you know, I was really lucky in the early stages of my career to have great mentors.
I had people really pushing me to understand that, you know, how you show up every day is equally as important as the results that you put out. And so I think that really helped me early on. I thought a slew of sales books and a slew of product books, and crossing the chasm, and all these fantastic books.
So, people who have done it before were super helpful in understanding how to run a business. And then I would just say like, you know, I was a stretch hire even as a BDR and as a seller and as a head of sales, like I think that being able to put yourself in risky situations and being honest about the fact that you don’t know, but you’re excited to find out is maybe the best thing you can do in your career. So I don’t know if that’s directly the answer, but if that’s something I could tell myself, I would be even more of that as a 21- 22-year-old.
Yeah, you actually segwayed into the final question, which is exactly-
Oh no, sorry.
That’s fine, I’ll still give you a chance to expand and double-take on things that you didn’t mention. So, going back to that, right? So, if you were to turn back the clock, what advice would you give to your younger self?
I think the advice I give to my younger self is to be even more inquisitive about the problems that other people feel.
As an early seller, my core focus was closing deals. I mean, I was just, I felt it was human chess. I thought it was a fun interaction between people.
And I still feel that today. But if you ever want to start a business, if you ever want to be a founder specifically in tech, because it’s just so competitive, you have to know the problems that you’re solving better than anyone else. And so as an early-stage tech salesperson, if I double-tapped, if I were to go back in time, I would just ask everyone in the org what problems they feel.
If you can learn your customer’s problem, then you’re going to be successful because nothing will prepare you to be a founder. There’s you can read enough books to know what to do once you start your own company, but you can also learn how to solve somebody’s problem. Fantastic.
That’s a great note to end the podcast. And that’s a recurring theme, by the way, as Simon Waddy has mentioned. Across the board, people always emphasize, if you spend time in knowing about the problems that you’re solving for your customers, that is the number one way to win as a business, right? So, thank you for reiterating and emphasizing that.