How to win enterprise sales and ABM in the age of AI with Sameer Shariff

[00:00:00] Sameer: I think Draup has helped us tremendously is buyer intent. Knowing what that, person in that account is thinking and, looking at in terms of, you know, what their next technology purchase or decision or challenge is, that allows our sales account managers to go in and actually have the right conversation and allows our marketing team to send the right messages.

[00:00:40] Amaresh: Welcome everyone really excited to have Sameer Shariff. Founder, innovator, CEO of Impelsys, which is- Sameer has been a good friend of mine for the last, I forget how many years. But I always also admire them as one of the greatest innovators.

He started Impelsys from scratch and has grown this company to be a global enterprise, really focused on customers and customer success. Focused on partners, focused on continuous innovation, and growth, which is important, obviously, for all of us. Today's conversation is really about growth. I'm hoping to learn from you, Sameer, on your growth journey.

I mean, really the story of your growth, how you founded the company, how we grew and, take away the lessons, for all of us, I guess. So looking forward to this conversation.

[00:01:42] Sameer: Thank you, Amaresh. Thank you for inviting me to the podcast. I'm excited to talk about my journey. I think, what we'll talk about today is all about sales and marketing.

But I think what's really really important for us at Impelsys is this journey has been successful over the last 20 years. It's because of our partnerships that we've built the ecosystem of partners to help us succeed with our customers. So we value the Draup partnership. It's a lot more than you guys providing us a particular service.

It's a true partnership in allowing us to figure out. our sales and marketing success strategies. So looking forward to our conversation today.

[00:02:26] Amaresh: Sameer you are very kind in your words and your attribution to us as a valued partner. I really appreciate this partnership and always excited to be working with you personally and also with Impelsys in this growth journey.

Like you said, it's not just growth for Impelsys or Draup, but really enabling our customers success and growth.

[00:02:48] Sameer: Growth and making impact in the world.

[00:02:50] Amaresh: Yep. So let's get started.

[00:02:53] Sameer: Absolutely.

[00:02:55] Amaresh: Today I would love to have a conversation around one topic, growth. I know you've built this company, Impelsys, from scratch and grown it to be a global enterprise.

My- looking from the outside, what I think stands out for me in your journey is first and foremost, customer centricity, but really how you are so data driven, right? In all- and intentional in all your decision making and leveraging. You've been at the forefront of leveraging new age technologies.

Always. You always, like, you never shied away from experimenting and innovating. Absolutely. So I'd love to, start by just hearing from you, learning more about your growth journey.

[00:03:44] Sameer: Definitely.

[00:03:45] Amaresh: Growth journey, around Impelsys.

[00:03:48] Sameer: So, thank you for inviting me, to the podcast. I think, fundamentally as an entrepreneur, I always believe businesses-

business is very simple and it can be in- we're in high tech, but the fundamentals of all businesses is about relationships and I think we value the Draup relationship tremendously, but you're right. It's my journey at Impelsys as the Founder and CEO has- it's been a phenomenal journey.

It's a journey of learning and continuous learning. I, I remember when I started as the individual Founder, it was just me going out and selling. As we slowly started to grow and, built a sales team, it was still spreadsheets, that we put our sales and, data into track.

So it got that. Then the, then the CRMs came along and we're like, okay, we've got to manage that better. So we started pouring, move from spreadsheets to the CRM side and that gave us, you know, a level of management of how we were executing. As we evolved there, initially, it was just CRM just putting data, but then, leveraging the CRM to really help us figure out how to do our sales.

As that evolved, we saw multiple types of companies that can aid in our sales and marketing strategy. So that's, we saw that what we got, we had great data,

but how do we now, get other tools to incorporate? So we started, leveraging other technologies, Draup was one.

I must say that before Draup, there were other vendors that we brought in. I think this is one of the values that. We value from Draup is that, it didn't work out with other vendors. It was more transactional, I believe. But I think our relationship, it is a tech relationship, but under, underneath the tech, there's people, the Draup team and our team, how do we engage?

So that really worked. And I think that's a- that's a key value prop that Draup has. You've got world class tech and it's got all the latest bells and whistles, but you've got passionate people who really care about building success, right? So, bringing partners like that into the equation.

So now, brought that and we've gotta- and we'll talk about our strategies there, but now we're, there's another set of revolutions that is coming, which is AI. So there's a- we're excited about how do we leverage that. So from, spreadsheets now all the way to a fantastic platform that has multiple components to it.

Then now adding that AI layer, it's come a long way. So left- we'll talk more about that, how we've done it and how we've evolved in how we sell our solutions. I think just for our audience, Impelsys is focused, it's an IP led services organization that helps primarily in two key markets, which is education and healthcare.

We help our customers in their whole digital transformation journey, but deep into healthcare and education. So it's a B2B play. We're focused on enterprises. Not small, but mid to large enterprises in their digital transformation.

[00:07:36] Amaresh: Fantastic. thanks for sharing that story. It's, really fascinating.

I've been watching your growth journey, both you personally and also your company. Interesting that you brought up AI in almost the second or third sentence. So our belief, as a technology company, data driven company, AI is nothing but data plus models plus compute. We start with large data sets. What's most, relevant for you as a partner is how we model on top of the data to bring to life real time actionable insights, right?

That you can then, leverage. Absolutely. To go to market, help your customer, help solve your customer problems and feed on top of that, right? Feed on that to grow together with your customer and partnership. You mentioned partnership right after that. You're absolutely right. Even when you see

AI is nothing plus- but data plus models plus compute the human curation, the value of human curation on top of the data, to contextualize it, for you healthcare and education. Yeah. So to understand your context, in an automated scalable way and provide those, actionable insights to you.

I think is where the value is.

[00:09:14] Sameer: I think.

[00:09:15] Amaresh: So we'd love to hear, yeah.

[00:09:16] Sameer: I think you touched on some good points. I think, they're, AI is such an in thing today. What we tell our customers is, let go of the noise. There's a lot of noise happening. Guess what? AI, it's serious.

There is an AI revolution that's happening, just like the internet revolution or the mobile revolution. What we tell our customers, this revolution is an evolution. It will not change overnight. It's going to take time. But we have to, we can't ignore it. We've got to adopt to it, and I think, that's what we're doing also.

This is what we tell our customers for their digital transformation, but internally we're doing this, we're looking at it as an evolution. We have to leverage all these technologies, to help us win. So I think, so on one side, we are engaging, but the other key piece in this, and what we also tell our customers is that we can't do this alone. Because it's, it is- there's so much happening and it's so fast.

How do we optimize, AI in, let's say for us, our partner in sales and marketing is Draup. So we need these partnerships across our enterprise. Just like we tell our customers that they need key technology partners to help them maneuver and navigate through the AI revolution. So I think in our sales and marketing, we have our ideas.

We are, we have our overall marketing sales strategy. We have our ideas on how we're using our platform, then how to use the latest and greatest AI tools and, methodologies to optimize what we're doing to our strategy, but doing it alone is like you might, it, we don't know, it's just one plus one is three versus us doing alone and that's where we see value

in our partnerships with Draup. Because- and that's the fantastic thing about our relationship. It's not that you've given us your product and you've left, right? You've given us your product. You understand with your account team, we're working with our team, where you're understanding our marketing and sales

goals, understanding our products and really working with our head of sales, head of marketing to figure out how do

you Draup helps Impelsys get to our sales and marketing goals. In that journey, it's the whole AI journey together. So I think, and so I, I tell, we can't get, we can't get scared of AI, but we've got to utilize it and you utilize it, in the right and smart way.

[00:12:26] Amaresh: That's great. So our hypothesis is,

like you said, we don't come in, give you data and walk away. We think, that's just part of the puzzle, right? So we like to think that we help you at multiple levels. We help you formulate your strategy. When I say we, it's Draup and other, AI intelligence platforms. One strategy formulation you have a roadmap, leads to a roadmap.

We also help you execute, right? Execute. All the way to success. And what I mean by that is, we come in, understand your use cases, your strategy use cases, and then, understand down to your target audience, your product positioning framework, your target audience, and then help, use data, use AI to really hyper contextualize and help you look at your market, not just as a whole, but if you have a hundred customers that you're working with, really drill down to the individual level, almost like mass customization.

[00:13:41] Sameer: Absolutely.

[00:13:42] Amaresh: Really go down to each customer, each account and provide you the context to have a meaningful, impactful conversation.

[00:13:50] Sameer: Yep.

[00:13:51] Amaresh: And build a partnership, right? Help you build a partnership, help you win and grow, right? We'd love to, having said that.

[00:13:59] Sameer: Let me, so before I think, we've done a lot, I think from a strategy standpoint. Let's say pre-Draup and post-Draup pre- Draup our strategy was quite wide.

[00:14:15] Amaresh: Yeah.

[00:14:15] Sameer: It was there, meaning shoot everywhere and try to, hit a few, targets, right? And, I think post understanding and when we saw Draup and

saw the type of data that you had for, accounts, specifically within our verticals, healthcare and education, we're like, wow.

What we realized, not only Draup, but realize that we were doing too much. We don't need to do too much. We need to just focus. So we looked at our whole business and we said, look, yes, a majority of our revenues comes from our core existing customers. And within those existing customers, there's

a set of them that provide us a bulk of them. So what we need to, and we do us as a company, we do great in building those relationships. But what if we can add multiple more layers of data around those customers so that we really understand those customers really really well, we could be. Two, three, four X more successful.

So one thing we did is say, okay, let's focus on get some of our target customers and let's leverage Draup to figure out how, what our strategies around them is number one, number two, for our new business, new customers, instead of just going super wide, let's pick a list of customers that we would like in our markets.

Let's use the Draup intelligence to see, okay, so get a list. Start doing research through Draup and figure out and now prune that list to a set. We've said that we're just going to focus on them. Because, we talked about relationships. We believe at our, at Impelsys, it's all about relationships.

And if we can build a relationship with these customers, even these new customers that we don't have, but start engaging with them. Over a 6, 12, 18, 24 months, they would be comfortable with us and then we could win. So I think Draup has given us the tools and the intelligence to, to support this new, very very focused tactical strategy for our existing customers.

And our new customers and we're, and I think we're- and then, working with your team, you guys understand it to tell us, okay, how do we fine tune our strategy even further? Then how do we use all the bells and whistles, AI and all that to make sure that we can succeed. So it's, it's been a year since we've been doing it.

We've already, this year we're seeing that success. As we're budgeting for next year, right now, we're seeing that, that target list of new customers, we've gotten pretty decent amount of success of making inroads into a certain percentage. So we're moving them, we're moving certain accounts out that we haven't had success bringing in some more accounts and, moving the ones that have we've

had success into that, next year's bucket and we're going to continue to focus there.

So again, really, targeted, precision, and really, understanding, these accounts because in today's world, just sending out emails does not work. We need to understand the organization across, understand that individual in that organization. Understand his network within that organization, make sure we target his network, but also that other phenomenal thing that I think Draup has helped us tremendously is buyer intent, knowing what that person in that account is thinking and, looking at in terms of

you know what their next technology purchase or decision or challenge is that allows our sales account managers to go in and actually have the right conversation and allows our marketing team to send the right messages. It's a phenomenal innovation- evolution of marketing and sales versus when I was starting my company where I would just blindly go in and saying, hey!

The only, only thing I had was he was a publisher and he was the CTO versus today, it's very precise. I think for us to scale across the world and for us as an enterprise to be successful, we need to empower our sales team with that data. For them to be successful, empower that sales team with the right marketing strategies from the marketing team to actually, get that support

so that salesperson is successful.

[00:20:00] Amaresh: Yeah, I totally agree. In my previous life, I used to work in a larger enterprise.

[00:20:05] Sameer: Very large.

[00:20:07] Amaresh: Kind of.

[00:20:08] Sameer: Yeah.

[00:20:08] Amaresh: I still remember I used to have multiple days in a month when, I would have a stream of technology and IT services companies walk into my office and everyone had the same story saying I can do anything under the sun.

I can do it better than anyone else and I can do it cheaper than, everyone else. End of the day, I would be sitting there scratching my head saying, I have these two problems. Who do I go to? Because everyone's the best. Everyone's the

cheapest. So what I think, data and AI, and this contextualization has helped us do is really walk.

Now I can walk into your office and say, Sameer, I know you have these three use cases or problem areas. Here's how I can help you with these better than anyone else.

[00:20:59] Sameer: Absolutely.

[00:20:59] Amaresh: This is what I can do for you with the impact with, whatever I think is impact would be impact for you. Yeah. I think, that's a contextualization at a personal level.

I think which is, which is what you're talking about. One of the thing you mentioned is for every B2B, especially as a scale, 80%, we often forget that 80% of our revenue comes from existing customers. Absolutely. 20% is from new.

[00:21:29] Sameer: Yep.

[00:21:29] Amaresh: When you're working with partners. You often say, can you help me find new customers?

[00:21:34] Sameer: Yeah.

[00:21:35] Amaresh: One of my friends, is at, again, at a very large fortune maybe a hundred company, put it best. He said, and this is for his largest customer. He said, what I know about them is twice a week coffee chat, coffee conversation I have with my stakeholders, customer stakeholders. I'm really, at the end of the week, I'm really not sure, if they're just giving me the news that they want me to hear.

I don't know how much of that is fact versus hypothyses. I don't, I come out of this conversation, not really knowing where the next growth areas or the opportunities are. I think what a data sales intelligence platform now allows us to do is step back, look at the data, apply our thinking, human thinking, human curation.

Plus the machine learning and AI models to extract the insights, right? If you look at a seller's journey, it's really five or six things. If you want to go sell to a banking and financial services vertical, I need to understand the current top trends in the industry. Step two, like you mentioned, I want to understand the business intentions and the investment priorities of the 10 companies

I'm targeting. Step three is in each of those 10 understand what opportunities exist for me. Then step four again, like you said, who do I go have those conversations with? Is Sameer the right person, to talk, meant to have a conversation about data migration or healthcare?

[00:23:16] Sameer: Yeah.

[00:23:17] Amaresh: And education in your case, because this then allows me to walk into your office, have a coffee conversation with you and say again, come with you with a very context, rich, relevant set of value attributes, right?

That helps you in a growth journey.

[00:23:37] Sameer: Yeah.

[00:23:38] Amaresh: So, it's amazing.

It's amazing to, hear you, we as a data company-

[00:23:46] Sameer: I think what they see, the thing is there's so much innovation that's going to happen. I believe that, all the things that you said, imagine if that salesperson could have an agent.

His virtual agent that actually supports him and all of this data. So when you have that coffee conversation with your customer, before you engage with them, that agent tells you, okay, here's, the 10 things that, he's challenged with today. Here's, a couple of things that would align to our value proposition to him. Here's how we could help him. Imagine if that

salesperson had this agent, which I think where Draup- Draup isn't, in, I think that's where you will evolve to is you're going to be our partner in sales and marketing where, and I think where the product is evolved will be that you will be an agent for each one of our sales guys and you'll be agents for each one of our marketing guys.

So that now that salesperson goes into that coffee conversation with such incredible data and intelligence that conversation for him with our customer partner there would be such high value for the customer partner that he- that customer partner would, is going to be looking forward to every coffee conversation.

[00:25:08] Amaresh: Absolutely.

[00:25:09] Sameer: That's the kind of value that we have to innovate to. So I think it's really important as an enterprise and as an organization, you talked about, you said that, I've continuously innovated and I think. for any business to succeed, innovation in every way is super key.

So in marketing-

[00:25:33] Amaresh: Innovation in product, innovation in go to market.

[00:25:35] Sameer: Innovation in marketing, innovation in finance, innovation in HR, in every aspect of your enterprise, we have to continuously innovate for us to, continuously. You talk about growth for us to grow. So this AI revolution, which will be an evolution, working with Draup to say, okay, can we create these agents? Because in my day to day today, I look at, I use a couple of AI tools. It seems like I'm doing this more and more.

I realized that I, I have a problem set. I know what the, what I'm going to do to answer, respond to that problem set. But what I do now is I then go to my AI chat bot and say, give them the situation, give them- it knows that I'm the CEO, I'm the Founder and give them the problems and ask it for a course of action.

That course of action gives, I'm not going to follow that course, but it gives me a little bit better intelligence on possibilities. It makes my decision that much higher quality.

[00:26:56] Amaresh: Yeah.

[00:26:56] Sameer: I believe that, giving our sales and marketing guys, these agents that can help them make them better.

[00:27:03] Amaresh: Yeah.

[00:27:04] Sameer: Would be tremendous, and I'm, we're going to work as partners towards that.

[00:27:10] Amaresh: I think the evolution, as you said, is abstracting a lot of this data sets, complexity, and really coming, to you with a set of, recommendations. As a data company we really start with global labor data sets, firmographics, technographic, signals, market signals. Really abstracting understanding, applying models on top to come to you and say, look, I know who you are.

I know what you're focused on, what your strategy is and roadmap looks like, and say, look, here are five recommendations for you. I think all our effort through these co-pilots agent AI is really, leading us to having an automated scalable way of saying, look, Sameer, today, here are five things for you to do today.

[00:28:07] Sameer: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:28:09] Amaresh: That's, really, I guess nirvana or, what success, desired outcome would look like.

[00:28:16] Sameer: But I think what's super key in, we can bring the best technologies and the best strategies, but at the end of the day, what matters is results. So in your strategy, if you don't have metrics and key KPIs to measure your, outcome. Then, you're going to fail from the start.

So I think for us, it's the conversion rates for sales, right? It's how do we increase it? And we've seen it that our conversion rates are increasing. Is it time to close? So I think for all sales and marketing organizations, KPI driven strategies.

[00:29:02] Amaresh: Yeah.

[00:29:03] Sameer: Executing on your, business with tools like Draup and then measuring response

and the success to make sure that you are getting the ROI, not only on the cost, but the time that you put in and then you can fine tune and keep on innovating. So I think, again, it's all around data, having Salesforce as a platform. Having all the other components plugged into it, and then getting the data and then seeing.

Okay, we initiated a conversation day one, day 90, we closed and out of the 250 X opportunities, we closed X and that's improved over time. We're doing a good job.

[00:29:51] Amaresh: Yeah. One side takeaway for me is to go back and make sure every person in the organization, not just the go-to-market or the front end people, but every person in my organization has a KPI that kind of, metric, right?

A dashboard.

[00:30:09] Sameer: Everyone, right?

[00:30:09] Amaresh: Every person. I think it's so important.

[00:30:12] Sameer: Absolutely. I think another, I think one more piece is, how are they using AI to impact that KPI?

[00:30:21] Amaresh: Absolutely.

[00:30:22] Sameer: That's an exercise that we're, starting to formulate of, how do we, everyone has their goals.

Every department, HR, finance, engineering, marketing but how do we now, what do we do on the AI side to speed up or strengthen and make sure our success rate on the KPI is really, strengthened?

[00:30:50] Amaresh: So Sameer, this has been really fascinating and I have three takeaways from this conversation, including some tips on how to hold everyone accountable to using more AI and leveraging AI to get better at, get better every day.

So Sameer, once again, thank you so much.

[00:31:10] Sameer: Thank you.

[00:31:10] Amaresh: It's been a really interesting conversation. I really appreciate you making time.

[00:31:15] Sameer: I think, it goes back fundamentals of any business, it's about relationships and I think we, Impelsys and Draup are great partners, and it's a win partnership. I think we have our values, similar values in what we want to do.

It's passion about what we do, creating success and making impact and creating success for our customers. So I think, looking forward to continuously innovating together and, just winning.

[00:31:46] Amaresh: Absolutely.

[00:31:47] Sameer: Thank you so much.

[00:31:48] Amaresh: Thank you.

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