Coffee with Chandru - Episode 5: Go-to-Market Tech Stack for the AI Era

[0:02] Hi Chandru, how have you been? Hi Hamsa, doing good. Very busy given

[0:08] all the white coding. Please tell me. Yes, I can imagine. So it's been a while since we had our um coffee with Chandu

[0:16] podcast series and uh I'm really happy that we are having uh finally got the

[0:22] time to do another episode today. Um just in terms of what we have covered so

[0:27] far for the benefit of our listeners. Um our earlier podcast you had talked about

[0:33] um how you define an ICP for um anyone who is uh running a small business or

[0:39] for busy professionals. Um what are the various tools you could use to assist with that and what are the various

[0:46] strategies that someone could use in terms of how you would define the ICPS and approach the ICP in the market. So

[0:53] having said that today we would um focus more on um in terms of how anme owner as

[1:02] when I sayme owner a small medium-siz business owner would approach um

[1:09] launching their products into market right so what is the uh we call it the go the GTM plan right so how do you go

[1:15] about this and that to specifically in today's world where we talking about AI and uh u is there a better way of doing

[1:23] this using AI. So I wanted to um invite you today for the podcast and do share

[1:30] your insights into how best an owner can look into this. Sure. Um we have already defined in

[1:37] terms of when we say thememes a small and medium businesses and uh we also

[1:42] look at uh busy executives who probably even work in MNC's right. I mean they

[1:48] literally are running businesses within a business. Um GTM has gathered I would

[1:54] say recognition and importance in the past few years um as a strategy by itself. Right? So GTM refers to go to

[2:01] market. So for the existing products or services a business might have how do

[2:06] you actually take them to market? How do you actually sell them make revenue? Of

[2:12] course do the customer service support comes at a later stage. GTM is all about how do you actually launch it into the

[2:17] market and start making revenue. So it's in a way uh more amalgamation of your

[2:23] sales concepts, your marketing uh concepts and everything in between right from your copyrightiting to your

[2:29] advertising to all of those skill sets which are quite important. Now we have

[2:36] always had a traditional friction between sales and marketing in the sense of sales is more of a push strategies

[2:42] right and marketing is considered more of a pull strategy and again these two

[2:48] fields have independently evolved over a period of time however for a business at the end of the day it's all about

[2:53] servicing customers making revenue right make it more profitable and sustainable

[2:59] and GTM u today we have multiple ways is of looking at it. One is of course in

[3:06] terms of launching your existing products or services. Second is also how do you actually get feedback from your

[3:13] market your customers and uh determine whether you're going to launch new products and services. So you can

[3:20] understand it's a 360deree loop and uh this very well plays as part of your

[3:26] digital transformation which is very important for businesses operating in the digital age. Right? And of course we

[3:32] are talking about everything in the digital age which everything from the impact of mobile to online commerce to

[3:38] quick commerce to now artificial intelligence and potentially extending to technologies like blockchain and

[3:44] others. However, we mentioned this in our earlier podcast as well that the technology cannot be driving the

[3:50] business. It's only going to support and assist the business. Right? So as with

[3:56] every every other podcast, we will potentially look into some definitions which are there. Right? as I have just

[4:02] tried to do a simple Google search uh over here.

[4:09] So essentially we look at how AI can help themes

[4:17] in terms of getting a level playing field with the uh larger companies by

[4:22] ensuring that you're not incurring too much cost but at the same time you are using datadriven insights you're doing

[4:28] automation and of course now with AI coming in uh using large language models

[4:35] to infuse intelligence in your products and services And uh you could do this as independent

[4:42] like tools you could use to do certain specific tasks or you could do as a

[4:49] complete workflow which means you do multiple tasks combined together each task feeding into the other or probably

[4:56] you look into automation where there is no like clear-cut boundaries between tasks and things actually flow in a very

[5:03] natural way u for your sales or marketing functions. And again to be

[5:08] very clear when we look at GTM there is no differentiation between sales and marketing. It's all one team which we

[5:15] should keep in mind here. And uh if you as I said when we do a quick thing on

[5:22] what is GTM you would see that there are multiple uh definitions and people are already

[5:28] talking about traditional GTM and AI uh GTM and uh we are looking at where you

[5:37] are going to have as you're being pointed out here can you have a revenue

[5:42] engine that is faster leaner and smarter and So today with the advent of

[5:49] technologies like AI, it's all possible. You don't have to have too much of human intervention which means you don't have

[5:55] to have huge teams, huge headcounts to do all of this. And you can actually

[6:00] upskill your team members to do more uh insightful and impactful tasks rather

[6:07] than the ro boring monotonous tasks are work work. Um we are also seeing some

[6:13] big trends which are happening out that uh you are moving away from persuasion based strategies which was all the rage

[6:20] from 2012 10 onwards till about now it's going all in terms of proofdriven models

[6:27] which essentially means again your sales and marketing teams have to really learn

[6:33] I mean first unlearn and then learn newer ways of doing tasks or business

[6:38] with their existing customers and potentially with new customers as well.

[6:44] Now when we um look at the definition is of course how does this sort of a

[6:52] strategy help businesses launch market and sell products smarter. There are

[6:58] multiple vendors who actually say that hey you know we can do all of this uh GTM uh tasks uh we can sort of help you

[7:07] with a lot of these um uh sort of workflows and automation and you I'm sure you would be familiar with lot of

[7:13] names already however if you look at uh one more thing in terms of I'm just

[7:18] trying to just go uh I'm sure you can see my screen

[7:26] this term called GTM engineer is now coming up very fast. So it would make sense for SM owners, business executives

[7:33] and of course HR professionals to understand that uh when we call as an engineer they're not literally like an

[7:40] engineer in the traditional sense but more in terms of being a technical professional who can design build

[7:45] automate systems to ensure all your sales marketing customer success efforts are more efficient and effective. They

[7:52] use more advanced techniques like data analysis, AI, workflow automation.

[7:58] And the first industry to adapt it in a very big way is the SAS software as a service industry.

[8:04] Why? It's because people are supposed to learn technology faster especially AI

[8:13] and use it in their daily work, daily tasks. And in a way you look at the

[8:18] reason why lot of layoffs are happening is because people want more of AI

[8:23] powered individuals and they really are trying to recalibrate what their

[8:28] existing talent pool is about right now. Whether it's right and wrong, let's not get into that. That's not the scope of

[8:34] this podcast. But fundamentally it is like saying that you having a go-to

[8:40] market team and this team is going to extend not

[8:45] just sales and marketing but also partnerships even resellers or even going up to the level of let's say how

[8:51] do I actually collaborate with workshop attendees the workshops you might run now this I mean to my limited knowledge

[8:59] this was and is continued to be promoted by this company called clay I'm sure you know that you used clay

[9:06] in many ways and play is now I guess a unicorn um because of the way that they

[9:12] are actually bringing in data and insights to help sales and marketing professionals and now they're saying

[9:19] that they actually empower people to become GTM engineers who can build

[9:25] revenue engines using AI and automation. So looks like it's also being adopted by

[9:32] the latest tech companies like cursor, lovable, web flow, all of them are out

[9:38] over there. So essentially ownersh

[9:44] if they have one or their management team should start looking at two things. One is can I upskill my existing

[9:52] marketing, sales, customer support people into becoming GTM engineers? What are the skill sets required for that?

[9:59] And of course, do I start recruiting such GTM engineers? Now, what is the

[10:04] process of doing all of this? Again, we will probably cover when we look at training and development, learning and development as we go forward. It's

[10:11] important to understand that this is uh a very fast developing concept and in

[10:19] fact if you look at even somebody like um uh what you can call open AI, right?

[10:27] Let me just you would see that open AI

[10:35] I mean contrary to what people say that you know AI will take jobs they are actually advertising for

[10:43] forward deployed engineers. So if called FDEES

[10:48] so what are FDEEs? They actually from an open perspective it's more in terms of how they uh convert research

[10:54] breakthroughs into production grade system but they can also

[11:00] embed these professionals into their customer teams and look at multi-million

[11:07] dollar sort of lucrative contracts. So now you can realize you can have your

[11:13] GTM engineers inside your business. You can also deploy them make them as a

[11:18] revenue center by deploying them into your customer locations or part of their customer teams or remote whichever way.

[11:25] But you you get the idea right you you now have these sort of engineers on both sides. Now again as I said probably

[11:32] engineers are overused term here and probably they're using it because there's a lot of technology and

[11:37] automation out over here but there's nothing to be scared for professionals. So if somebody really is wanting a

[11:42] better job and you know how they would want to you know uh really progress in their career go for better salary

[11:48] things. Yes. And FDE forward deployed uh engineer is probably a very good um uh

[11:55] career path. So I I do see here uh OpenAI is uh probably recruiting for

[12:02] MDs in Singapore where they say you'll embed with customers understand the domain co-develop solutions using of

[12:09] course open AI technologies right at the end of the day you are really trying to push your products and that's where it

[12:16] makes tremendous sense for a very very new and nent uh industry like AI where people are really not clear as to where

[12:24] they will you um use um the AI technologies as part of

[12:30] their business flows or workflows. So let me take a pause. Any questions

[12:36] till now? Um so thanks Chandu for sharing this uh

[12:41] concept of a GTM engineer and you should have one of them in your team uh when

[12:46] you're looking at going to market. But uh from the perspective of anme owner,

[12:51] how can we simplify this whole process? Is there uh any specific AI tools that

[12:57] they can use which can help them achieve GTM easier using this technology?

[13:03] So we do have our uh very uh well-known names right uh your chat GPD to your

[13:12] anthropic claude probably Microsoft copilot all of them are with a single

[13:17] intention of getting people to be self-sufficient. So while we say forward deployed engineers or go to market GTM

[13:24] engineers we are forgetting that the SM owners themselves can upskill themselves

[13:29] can become FDES and which is the case in many places because they usually work with a handful of customers the owner

[13:34] and his probably management team are actually know on the field working with so it's very important that they

[13:41] themselves learn these various technologies and tools now as I mentioned earlier the field is evolving

[13:48] so one of the things that we did for example was with the relaunch of smart my AI. I mean earlier when we did about

[13:54] few years back we were more worried about workflows and how do we sort of on a very deterministic basis um provide

[14:03] solutions to clients with the advent of AI now we have white coded and created

[14:09] an enterprisegrade platform and as you can see here we say that we would want

[14:14] to provide all the tools to eliminate busy work. So our objective is to say that hey can

[14:20] we actually stop the chaos and uh you know don't have to do any coding and

[14:26] setup and you can actually scale your business without scaling your team right uh as I said you don't have to boil the

[14:32] ocean you learn the tools and probably get started off with and our objective

[14:38] has been that um it should be so simple that you don't have to break your head trying to learn things like prompt

[14:44] engineering I see a lot of people advertising for prompt engineering and of course I would also how to train people on prompt engineering. The way I

[14:51] see the market go going forward is your learning and development itself is going to be part of execution. It is not a

[14:58] linear process anymore. What I mean by that is you're going to uh adopt a tool

[15:03] like smartmy.ai and you're going to start using the tool. The tool is going to intelligently

[15:10] learn from the interactions and is going to be an assistant as you move forward. Whether you are an expert in marketing

[15:15] or sales doesn't really matter. And it provides you enough of assistance

[15:21] 24 by7 whether you want to complete a task or you're just brainstorming or you

[15:28] want to do something stop today then after a few days come back and do this is a very natural way how we do things

[15:34] right uh we don't like sort of open up a technical manual and uh do things like a washing machine or so that's not how

[15:40] humans work and that's precisely how we would want to uh people to start using

[15:47] AI. Now while I do use the term here let's say in smart me let's say like we

[15:53] are giving AI tools it's not to be confused with what traditionally or tools uh let's say like a Microsoft word

[15:59] or SAP ERP or an Oracle database. Our objective again as I mentioned is not

[16:05] for technology to be at the forefront. Technology should be more of an enabler

[16:11] here. So to just uh show you in terms of the u

[16:19] uh product itself just give me a second. Okay, I'm sure you can see my login

[16:27] screen out over here. So what we are obviously trying to you know do here is

[16:34] let me just take a quick second to log in.

[16:46] So you would see that uh we have implemented all the security features for the

[16:52] you know people to actually start logging in and start using smart me. Of

[16:58] course it's my product but I'm just using it as an example today to talk about like say a go to market. Um

[17:07] now it's not like a traditional software product. As you can see as soon as I have logged in it has recognized who I

[17:13] am and it starts customizing as to saying that what exactly is urgent for

[17:19] me today and we clearly say we don't require any AI experience precisely what an owner would love. You just have to

[17:27] inform in terms of what task you want to do similar to how you would have an assistant sitting right next to you

[17:35] just to help people. We say, you know what, we could ask the AI to help get more customers, probably follow up with

[17:42] leads, maybe check a new contract which has come into the inbox or probably create content and write blog posts. You

[17:50] could do any of these and it's a very simple sort of an interface which is out over there. The objective here is as I

[17:59] said is not to overwhelm people by all this hyponai and uh get them to fill up

[18:05] a lot of fields and forms and do this workflow and do the onboarding for several weeks or so. As you can see we

[18:11] just logged in and you can just start getting productive like you're looking at outcomes here. You're not looking at

[18:17] a traditional learning curve which probably you know if you plot a graph

[18:22] the learning curve goes like this. There's no learning curve here. It's zero. And you can start getting being

[18:28] you know productive. So for example, if I say um uh I want to

[18:35] write a blog on my new

[18:40] product and probably publish on my website. I click on start creating.

[18:46] You'll see in an instant it actually has opened up your blog tool. I didn't go and click and say like

[18:53] hey I want a blog. Where is it? I know there are five clicks before I get in. And you also see that it has already

[18:59] started populating before you even come here. So your productivity levels are

[19:04] quite high because all that you do is just state your intentions. And of

[19:09] course if you still want to customize it, you have a lot of target audience and things like that. But the way we

[19:15] have structured this is that AI intelligently starts helping you with your boring and monotonous task. Again,

[19:22] as I said, we are not trying to replace a marketing team by saying I will do the blogs. We are only mitigating all of

[19:29] that extra irritation of saying that, you know, I'm I need to think on my ICP, I need to think about where is my

[19:35] business. Um, in fact, Maya over a period of time learns how this business

[19:42] is, your business is, how is your interaction, how's your brand, and then the output starts, you know, coming in.

[19:48] So, so this is this is really looking amazing. Uh, so I still wanted to ask a

[19:54] few questions because you talked about ICP and everything he's done. You can um define all of that here. But from a

[20:01] marketing perspective and typically marketers would look into more depth for a specific blog for example the SEO and

[20:09] etc. So when you talk about using the AI to do all this kind of um content

[20:14] writing for you, does it take care of these aspects?

[20:19] um you have to add more details here.

[20:25] What we also have done is we have ensured that your so for example I have

[20:31] logged in right. So let me go to my profile settings and you would see here

[20:40] it has intelligently filled up lot of details

[20:45] like I'm the CEO of wise right did you see at any point of time I

[20:51] inputed the values of wisely wise.com did I mention anywhere that my business

[20:56] model is SAS or did I say anywhere that my technology or did anywhere did I type

[21:02] this saying that company description is this is what wisely wise does. So it

[21:07] intelligently finds out once you log in about yourself and your company and it

[21:15] allows you to adjust and refine this data as you move forward. So it's not like oh the AI has found out you are

[21:21] stuck to that particular set of data and you can feel free to add more

[21:28] details as you go forward. So to your precise question, so what do you see here? I

[21:35] mean I'm sure you are teaching in digital marketing to many people. You would see that it has also looked into

[21:42] details researched on Wisely Wise and said that hey you know what Wisely seems to be targeting SAS companies,

[21:49] tech startups, digital agencies and education which is true

[21:55] and we also are looking at some key products and services which is around business intelligence and AI content

[22:01] generator. It also comes up with unique value propositions like personalized AI that

[22:08] understands your business conduct which is what smart my is about. Then we are also looking at analytics

[22:14] and performance tracking. Now as a marketer you can still come and add more data, change the data, refine whatever

[22:20] you would want to and you could state your market position,

[22:26] right? So you can see the control of what the AI learns about yourself and

[22:32] your business is with you. You can change it. You can delete it or you can add some more stuff. However,

[22:38] it takes all of this details intelligently learns over a period of

[22:44] time so that it can actually um

[22:51] what you can call um come up with better results for yourself. Wow, this is

[22:56] amazing. I think this will be very useful for uh SN owners who are

[23:01] listening today. This this is amazing. So I showed you that in terms of the

[23:06] blog post uh which we were actually uh looking at. So like for example,

[23:13] let's say I I'm not comfortable chatting and finding out about the tool. I I like clicking on stuff. Fair enough. You

[23:19] would see that you can really come in and take any of the business tools,

[23:25] marketing tools, sales tools. We have hundreds of tools coming up and each tool has a specific workflow behind it

[23:32] and each of them starts learning about you over a period of time, right? So we already saw things around

[23:42] uh blog post, but you can also for example write email campaign generators. So if I click on it just sorry uh if I

[23:50] actually look at uh some of the tools which we just looked at it like block

[23:55] generator or the other tools the objective is that the results are going

[24:01] to be u something which is uh very personalized and customized for your own

[24:07] uh uh what you can call usage and over a period of time it allows you to actually

[24:14] um uh what you and call uh make it more automated. As you can see, we're not

[24:21] rushed into automating the entire process. We definitely want to build the trust

[24:26] over a period of time and then we would want to actually

[24:32] uh allow for an end to-end automation. Uh nobody wants to let the AI run right

[24:37] from day one in terms of how the whole thing is going to happen, right? So that is going to be a very important aspect

[24:45] in terms of u what you can call uh u

[24:51] the difference from using a traditional chbd is going to be out over there.

[24:59] So a chipdity doesn't really learn from your interactions. It doesn't hold any I mean of course you can store something

[25:05] called memory and things like that but it's not a continuous process. It's a manual process. Whereas what Maya does

[25:10] here is is more continuous over a period of time. Right? So if you take this

[25:15] example, you would see that uh you know here you would see that you can actually

[25:21] go in and uh do a lot of work on your existing blog posts right it also helps you in terms of if

[25:28] you are stuck I don't know what to do you can start off with any of these content which you have and more

[25:34] importantly it can also help you with more than 100 plus global languages not necessarily only English it could be

[25:40] French it could be deutish it could be Hindi it could be Mandarin it could be any those right and this whole process

[25:49] you could sort of uh keep in your mind in terms of what exactly it needs to be

[25:55] done. So let's say I just say w coding and let's say I'm focused on the

[26:00] industry called technology. Uh let me just click on this.

[26:06] U it's creating the block content based on the inputs very minimal inputs I have actually given out over here. So the

[26:15] objective here is that uh it should uh customize as much as it can based on its

[26:21] understanding of who I am, what is my profile and things like that and then it

[26:27] actually comes up with an output as you can see on the screen it's come with a very

[26:34] basic sort of an output because my input has been very very low

[26:39] right so I could for example decide to copy this or email this to myself or I can download it. But let's assume that I

[26:46] want to Hey, you know what? I'm uh I want to do some editing. You just click on it. You should be able to edit

[26:52] whatever you want out over here, right? And specifically for SEO, I could just

[27:01] click on my content analytics and you'd see it actually gives me specific like saying, hey, what is the word count, how

[27:07] much time it takes to read, right? And we already using your SEO

[27:14] onpage formatting in terms of your H1, H2, the key phrases. You would see that

[27:20] it actually repeats the key phrase like V coding in many of the H1 and H2s. So you don't see even experts will be

[27:27] tired if every day I have to remember what I to write in a blog. That's a point. But if I give all the power to

[27:34] the human who is generating it and uh you know I can actually allow them to

[27:39] sort of use it as a workflow and you'll see on the right top you have something

[27:44] called draft and I can p say I can publish it or I can archive it. I'm just leaving it as a

[27:52] draft out over here. Right. And you would always be able to you know sort of

[28:00] um find out more insights in terms of uh if

[28:06] there are some tasks that you have done like we did m w coding and then it

[28:12] starts showing up as probably a pending task. Now you may schedule it and then over a

[28:18] period of time you could come in and say that I would want to complete this task.

[28:23] Right? So the objective of showing this smart Maya and this AI and this GTM task

[28:30] is that you now have the power of an intelligent system not just a dumb

[28:36] computer system. It just outputs whatever has been programmed into it. But it can in many different ways. It

[28:43] can actually help you in terms of like I could actually u chat and find out you

[28:52] know things like how many tools do you have and it's very specific to the sort

[28:58] of data you have or what Maya has at that point of time. So you would see that it immediately

[29:06] puts an answer saying that hey you know what I have got five four tools which are important to you probably as the CEO

[29:11] of a business right so the assistance can be in any

[29:17] you know different way and our objective as I said is to ensure that you are

[29:23] having hundreds of tools available at any point of time.

[29:28] So you could even do click click and you can come back and say like I would like to look at all my uh sales processes and

[29:36] uh sales tasks and uh I I don't want a workflow. I don't want intelligence. I just want to use a tool for that moment.

[29:41] I want to do some task and move out. Yeah, fantastic. You could come here. It could be everything from if I do lead

[29:47] management and there is is there a way to do let's say an account segmentation.

[29:52] Is there an thing to do account intelligence? I could do out over here. you could potentially ask all of these

[29:58] questions and you could, you know, sort of use these tools as well,

[30:05] right? So, for example, when I'm actually looking at

[30:10] I just told you about account intelligence, you'll see it has actually opened up an account intelligence tool

[30:16] here. What does it mean? If I actually input my account detail, let's say my

[30:22] account to whom I'm selling is Microsoft, I could put my context out

[30:28] over here and I would uh be able to get an analysis in terms of the account

[30:33] itself. So it you don't have to learn prompt

[30:38] engineering. You don't have to worry about uh whether I have to use a free version of Chan GPT. You don't have to

[30:47] be an expert in a sales process or a domain uh let's say like digital

[30:52] marketing you start using the tools and I'm sure as you keep looking at these tools working with these tools you also

[30:59] are learning along the process that's what I mentioned the way training and development learning and development is

[31:04] changing is that you execute and learn along with the AI and the AI continues to be an assistant probably over a

[31:11] period of time there are we have in smart maya intell igent agents which do

[31:16] end to-end processes which means I could say hey you know what create for me some four LinkedIn posts every week uh based

[31:24] on the recent trends and generate and keep it for my approval smart Maya can do that

[31:31] however to build your trust to I mean it takes some time no before you get used to this sort of complete automation

[31:38] so that's where you have to be very careful in terms of uh how you're trying

[31:44] to use AI So some people are trying to use it as a magic bullet where I'm trying to solve

[31:50] everything using AI and end to end. Some people are still being cautious and uh

[31:55] we are trying to take a middle path saying that start executing start using it and with AI you should be able to

[32:03] improve your you know go to market it can be significant it can reduce you don't I'm sure by now you realize you

[32:08] don't require a huge marketing team headcount cost uh your existing marketing team doesn't have to feel very

[32:14] pressurized saying that I I need to do two blog post I have to do four LinkedIn post I have to do five social media

[32:20] posts every week It's very tough for me to do. Now they do more of uh approval

[32:28] process more about inputs in terms of what your business is and you are getting more

[32:34] intelligent outputs which they can review they can schedule and they can as I said probably post it uh into these

[32:41] various social channels or whatever right I just mentioned a few things in terms of content generation but it is

[32:47] true in terms of analysis I could upload a CSV file with my sales data and ask

[32:53] Maya to Okay, what do you think about it? How do I make it better?

[33:00] Right. So, thank you Chandra for sharing and also showing us how smart Maya AI

[33:06] works and uh it's amazing. It's actually a very powerful tool that you're giving in the hands of SN owner and his team uh

[33:14] members as well. So this I think is a fantastic tool which um can really

[33:21] assist an SN owner who's extremely short of time and really still needs to go and

[33:27] execute the uh GTM needs to have those blog posts going out need to do the accountbased um analysis etc. So uh a

[33:35] lot of features inside this particular tools. Thanks so much for sharing and um I would of course uh request all the uh

[33:44] listeners here to go ahead and try smarter.ai. We will share the link in the description of this podcast u for

[33:50] you all to go ahead and try and explore um in your day-to-day workflows as well.

[33:56] So having said that, thank you so much Chandra. Today a lot of insights about uh GTM which is so important for any

[34:02] business and uh of course uh in terms of how you could use AI in this particular environment including a tool like Smart

[34:09] Maya AI uh which owners can really take advantage of and execute um their

[34:16] day-to-day uh work uh very seamlessly along with what they need to do right on a daily basis. So thank you. Thank you

[34:23] so much for the insights. I'm sure everybody found it very very useful and um until the next time we meet again

[34:29] with another interesting topic. Thank you so much. Uh take care. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye. Bye.