Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We'll just dive into a story in the past pricing or growth story where you learn something and the audience can really take away a valuable lesson.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: I joined as employee number five. We had one client at the time my time building out our global customer success team started landing clients like ge, NRG and a few others.
[00:00:17] Speaker A: Play is more what's going on today, what's working today and we can just riff on whatever we want at that stage. Strategy, growth, all the things that you think would help folks in their businesses.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: I was very hesitant to talk about pricing. I know the good practice is to talk about value point blank. Asked them was like, hey, is there any area in our price that you just felt like was way too low where you're skeptical about? On three of those conversations we had, everyone said that your implementation was so low we actually questioned it. And that came up so many times.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: And then lastly, fast forward to where are things going? Let's take a peek into the future, how things are going to be shaking out years from now.
[00:00:53] Speaker C: Yo, Mike check what's up everybody? You're listening to the Street Pricing podcast. The only show where proven SaaS leaders share their mindset and mistakes in pricing so we can all stop guessing and start growing. Enjoy, subscribe and tell a friend. Now let's break it down with your host and sought after slayer of bad pricing, Marcos Rivera.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: What's up and welcome to the Street Pricing podcast. I'm Marcos Rivera, founder, author and CEO of Pricing IO. Now today's guest is going to be a fun one. This is one of the hottest growth and strategy advisors out there in B2B today. Today with us joining is Ali Mamoudji. Ali, welcome to the show.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Finally made it on the podcast, Marcos.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Excited to finally be on despite everything else, right? Thank you for jumping in here, man. Why don't you take a quick second, tell everybody about you and what you do.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Hey everyone. My name is Ali and as Marcos mentioned, I have a background B2B SaaS. Previous to that I've had a background in investment banking and private equity in the clean tech sector. 11 years building a vertical SaaS fintech private equity platform called Mercatus. We got acquired in 2021, left August of last year 2024 and decided to go on a solo journey to help other startup growth stage SaaS companies. Then my primary focus right now is on go to market strategy. So how do we craft story strategy and sales motion for other growth stage B2B SaaS companies?
[00:02:15] Speaker A: Yeah, and you were like employee number what, seven or eight in that five. Employee five. Five. All the way to a big exit. Lots of things you probably saw in that journey. And I. I hope to unpack some of that here today with you.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Yeah, we made every mistake possible.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: This is going to be a good one. I know it. And I think where people learn most is. Isn't just the successes. Right. It's where they stumble, where they struggle, where they make mistakes. And so let's just. Let's just talk about how imperfect we are today. Why not perfect?
So let me give a really brief roadmap for everybody here listening today. So this podcast is based on the book street pricing, Right. So it's going to be tackled in three sections. We have. The first section is Rewind, where we'll just dive into a story in the past, pricing or growth story, where you learn something and the audience can really take away a valuable lesson. Then we'll bring it to play as more what's going on today, what's working today, and we can just riff on whatever we want at that stage. Strategy, growth, all the things that you think would help folks in their businesses. And then lastly, fast forward. So where are things going? Let's take a peek into the future and let's see, you know, how things are going to be shaking out years from now. Does that sound good?
[00:03:23] Speaker B: Sounds great.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: All right, Ali, take it away, man. Let's open up with a story.
[00:03:27] Speaker B: So just for context for everyone, Mercatus is that place that Marcos mentioned. I was employee number five at the time when we started. My background previous to that was in investment banking and primarily in clean tech sector. So Mercatus was a clean tech platform trying to be Mozilla for renewable energy. So we realize in the private, in the renewable energy space, there's a missing gap between managing complex assets. So an average wind farm you see in the Northwest, have you seen those, Marcos, These large wind farms?
[00:03:57] Speaker A: I've driven by them. Yeah.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Yeah. And they're super interesting. Like, an average wind farm costs like $150 million. Each turbine's taller than a Statue of Liberty. And they're probably one of the most complex assets to model. And large banks who finance them actually do it in Excel or copy and paste the data within their Salesforce system. So we just felt there was a huge opportunity that there needed to be a software between Excel and CRM to manage these complex investments. And sure enough, that was the genesis of Mercatus is trying to be that operating platform for large, complex renewable energy assets. And I joined as employee number five. We had One client at the time and previous to my time joining, we were actually a services company. So spent my time building out our global customer success team, started landing clients like ge, NRG and a few others and just did your natural startup customer development. Landed a few, really understood the problems, stayed in their offices and built the platform accordingly. So built our customer success team and with my investment banking background, naturally got pulled into series A, series B fundraising rounds. And one big thing is how do we tell the story of where our growth's coming from? And I knew that renewable energy, what if we could capture large complex wind, hydro and residential solar plants? I just had a hypothesis we could do any private investment, whether it's real estate, a private equity company, you know, we had an operating system that captures workable workflow data, capture their models or document room. So I just was very passionate about, hey, there's a broader opportunity to be a private markets platform in general and handle the complexity of that. So I'll pause there, Margos even double click. But then we pivoted in 2016 to become a leading private equity platform and a lot of lessons learned and led our product strategy, product marketing and overall managed our entire go to market strategy for Mercatus.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: You know, this is really interesting because it's a very natural thing to have a hypothesis. Want to pivot, want to maybe expand here. But in these early days where you're kind of doing everything, you're getting up and running, I think a lot of founders struggle with how much do I focus and push and how much do I tap and explore other things and how do I strike that balance? How did you know it was time to start, you know, pivoting or expanding or moving versus just staying like super ultra laser focused on the one thing you knew you did well, one thing.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: That when I led customer success team, we were doing 100k deals, which to me I realized that 100k is a fundraising round for most SaaS companies. So I just found it fascinating as head of Cust or growing our customer success team is that we didn't have governance around sales. And I just found that really interesting and I think people overcomplicate it. Part of me, in startups you do need to just grow at all costs and try to figure it out and it's okay to be messy. I would never go against like, I feel like some startups are overly structured, but you got to find that right balance. So obviously the first few clients, if you looked at all of the early enterprise agreements we signed with them, you would Think we're five different companies at the time, but when it came to our 9th and 10th clients I just felt like we were just still too unstructured and there was no playbook in B2B SaaS at the time. Or I couldn't find it. Like I'd read books like Sales Acceleration Formula and try to find any book around like what's the right way to structure an enterprise B2B SaaS company doing 100k deals and doing 6 to 9 month sales cycles. And I just couldn't find any at the time. So we, I just took a first principles approach to everything we're thinking about. And I remember mentioning to our CEO Haresh who brilliant individual and at the time we're just, I was debating with them like hey, like at some point it's just weird that our sales team is owning pricing and at some point we gotta have governance because these deals are really big deals and from a valuation perspective they have a huge impact so we should get more governance around it. And that kicked off a whole process of, of what is the right way to do pricing and who owns it. Started a conversation, me stepping in and taking ownership of that.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: Got it. And so this is, this is interesting because the, the value of getting pricing right seemed to be going up, right? So you're, you got some deals, you got some momentum, 9th, 10th customers, these are pretty sizable deals. Valuation perspectives and also having a good solid idea of how you monetize or how you can monetize going forward, it does impact valuation. I know this is one of the biggest things I used to do back at Vista. Here's the thing, you got Haresh to listen to you to say, you know what, maybe we should actually put some effort, tension. Not everybody can do that. How did you get Haresh to listen and let you step forward and dig in?
[00:08:38] Speaker B: There was one deal we actually executed and it got over the finish line and to get that deal done we put unlimited users as like the ninth inning thing to get done. And I feel like anyone in enterprise sales I now coach met many of them. All customer success teams have some level of frustration of a lot of frustration to be frank, on how enterprise sales get done. And everyone's just throwing question marks of hey, like why do we do this? And this agreement just to get it done. And I just showed Haresh an Excel spreadsheet of our last five clients and just showing the variance of these contracts. And I just felt like we needed, if this is a bell curve, we just need to narrow the bounds as Much as possible, and especially if we needed to grow a sales team, we just needed to build that muscle. So my advice to anyone, that's like trying to convince a CEO the best way to do it is through not your own voice is through data or bringing the customer's voice within it. So I think that kicked off a journey of a question who really owns pricing at a B2B SaaS company, especially high ticket B2B SaaS companies. And there's so many ways to. A question we always debated as a management team is what is growth at all costs. We wanted new logos. At what point can you discount your way to new logos? And we had very different opinions on that as a management team. So I think that kicked off a process of hey, we got to spend time about this and I don't think our management team are qualified to be the right people making decisions.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Got it, Got it. So all those kind of that sensation all leads up to we need to step and make a change and do something. So let's play it forward a little bit more. How did you tackle this and, and how did you keep everybody aligned? Because I bet you anything there's a one or two sales reps who are like, you know what, I don't need, I don't need any of this. I can close my deals. I know how to pitch. I know how to close. This is just a waste of time.
[00:10:29] Speaker B: I would say our management team was so committed of our success. And like when I look back at Mercatus is probably one of the best teams I've ever been on. It's just there's a maniacal focus on just growing the the company. We all respected each other, but there was two trains of thoughts of lowering the price and trying to get as many blue chip logos as possible. And there's a other Steve Jobs approach of hey, I think we should triple our prices and go the viva direction and just maximize the valuation on every single deal since it's such a small tam Sam within our segment and I felt like the answer was somewhere in the middle. So I, I know to step into this across our head of sales and our CEO and our head of customer success. Um, I typically read books and just share the books and like summarize. And one of my secret weapons with our company was to be our internal cliff notes person of I read a book and just summarize and provide my insights of what actions to take. And I was struggling to figure out who would have this answer. So I would just do reach out to private Equity folks of if there's anyone that people know about. And I think this is a selfish plug for Marcos. But as tapping my B2B SaaS network I did not want to talk to anyone that wasn't doing enterprise B2B SaaS and ideally was familiar with the private equity platform and chatting throughout my network. Marcos's name actually did come up in 2019 and we started, we kicked off a conversation I believe in the summer of 2019. And yeah we, we had a lot of fun and we could talk about the transformation that happened from there.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: Oh I remember that I was into WeWork at that time. I came, I was like I'm sitting in the WeWork and that's back when it was all fancy with all like the, the food and the snacks and, and the, the pretty decor and like you know, the pink pillows and everything. I remember that convo man. And it was a, it was one of those things where I think at the stage you were in most companies they, they still ignore packaging, pricing. They don't quite see it as, as, as an additive to their valuation and to their motion and things like that. So that was, that was amazing. You wanted to give the quick one to there because there was so much learning. It's going rise it in one podcast, the big one too for everybody. You know the big takeaway for Haresh and you.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: This was a massive inflection point that 2019 and give Marcos a lot of credit. But there's a lot of things happening where at that point we're dabbling private equity investors. So when we raised our series B round one of our lead investors actually introduced us and try to help us with our hypothesis that we should break into private equity. And the moment we did it was just such a no brainer our sales cycles. There's a whole different buyer within private equity or willing to willingness to pay versus energy company at large utility firms. Right. So our blessing of pivoting to private equity combined with hiring you Marcos in the summer, the summer of 2019 to kick off with us. And I would say there's so many learning lessons we could spend time on it and I would say a few things is just I thought we would spend a lot of time on Good, Better, best and trying to figure out the right pricing structure. I I'll probably go this whole podcast not even talking about good, better best or numbers and I just imagined when we'd kick off work we'd have a massive Excel spreadsheet, we'll do massive pivot tables and we'll build a bunch of supply and demand curves to figure it out. But I would say what the biggest takeaway the first week we kicked off work with you, I had no idea when loss existed. Like you could actually talk to customers and actually get feedback. So we kicked off work and the first thing you said, hey Ali, pick five customers and let's shoot out an email. Let's get them scheduled this week. And I was like, there's no way I could reach out to clients and say we're going to talk to you guys about pricing and have that conversation. But sure enough, every email I sent our clients were willing to chat about pricing. And that was such a game changer in my own career. And you kicked off the win loss practice. And ever since, for the last 10 years I've been doing that as a weekly to bimonthly habit of actually speaking to clients. And that practice alone just opened up so many more benefits of taking a lost clients and speaking to them and transitioning them to a win client.
One of my favorite examples of the benefits of a win loss is you and I were on a call with a client at the time and I was very hesitant to talk about pricing. I know the good practice is to talk about value.
You point blank asked them was like, hey, is there any area in our price that you just felt like was way too low where you're skeptical about. And on three of those conversations we had, everyone said that your implementation was so low we actually questioned it. And that came up so many times. And that's a good example where management teams just don't have the answers because we all had a belief that your implementation should be 25 to 50% of your license. You can never go higher than that. And sure enough, our clients were expecting us to be like 150% the actual license price. And we would not have gotten that answers unless we did that when loss interviews. And that's something that automatically doubled our deal size is just by doubling our implementation prices. So that's a clear example of just the power of just talking to your clients. And I could go on and on. The benefits of positioning marketing, figuring out how to lower your LTV or increasing LTV CAC ratios by asking the right questions. So it's been that habit helped us in so many other opportunities after you trained us at muscle.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: Yeah, that was a big illuminating moment too. One, one thing that I always remember is there, there is a tendency to be kind of scared talking to your customers about these four fear of, you know, you're Gonna, you're gonna make them upset, you're gonna make them uncomfortable, they're not gonna, you know, tell you anything. And the truth of the matter is customers are perfectly fine talking about things like value. And what do they find, you know, confusing in the pricing model or what do they find, you know, weird, cheap, misaligned, whatever they're willing to tell you and you just have to ask. And I think there is a lot of fear where I say, hey, are you scared? And hiding behind a spreadsheet because oftentimes they'll dive and they'll do infinite curves and analysis but avoid talking to the actual customers and or prospects cause win and loss, both are valuable inputs into that perception. And the better you understand that. And then that follow up of, well, why is that? Tell me more can actually lead you, I think, to a better outcome than any spreadsheet or analysis curves.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Yeah. And something you've taught, taught me is like, it's important to be very. I see a lot of folks and I watch a lot of my clients now's win loss interviews. And I would just say they're overly structured and informal and the magic happens when you ask them to double click and go down a rabbit path. And I would say one feedback I have for others, like it's better off to ask three questions to a client and go very deep on those three questions versus getting through your eight to 10 questions. So I'm a big believer. Three questions and going deep on those is the right way to go about.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: Yeah, here, here. Going deeper is definitely more value than broader for sure. And you have to be prepared. Listen, most folks will be, will be fine and tell you what they think. Someone thinks your pricing model sucks and they want to tell you you should be prepared to listen, not be defensive, not try to, you know, come up with arg points or tit for tat. Just, just listen. Good old fashioned natural kid curiosity. So yeah, big one there. So let's play it forward a little bit more.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: So then one of the biggest value you could also bring by doing a pricing project is actually getting alignment as a management team. So we all flew to San Diego and I would say that was a pretty pivotal moment where we actually dedicated a full day, not an hour call between busy meetings, but a full day within a area outside of your current day to day offices. And I would say pricing is important enough where you should probably dedicate a day or two to spend an offsite. Because I'm a big believer in Marcos. You know, I talk about this a lot But I feel like you can't separate strategy and pricing. I just think in positioning, I think they all go hand in hand together. And if you're ever having a strategy or positioning debates of where you want to go and which fence do you want to point at to hit your home runs, pricing has to be a natural component within it. So having your forced our hands of actually having the pricing discussions, I think we naturally did it in, I believe the December of 2019 during the Christmas holidays to clear our minds, to really figure out our 2020 strategy. Who knew we had a pandemic coming our way. But I would say it was a really pivotal time of us getting very aligned as a management team. So by the time we left San Diego, there's a clear line of sight. And yes, we came up with the good, better, best. We did show everyone the data, but we all started speaking the same language of where we want to go to get together. And I would say that's the benefits of actually bringing someone outside and have an outside perspective and comes with a bunch of domain expertise of helping us do that. Looking back on it, I don't think we could have done that ourselves, to be honest.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: And if, you know, leaving from those sessions, I think it was two days we spent together. Right. You guys will probably get back at the airport. What did they say? What did they say about the sessions or the value of the sessions or anything?
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Yeah, there's just a lot of insights about showing the data and showing the customer interviews and just doing the work. Another thing we did was survey our clients and I'll just rattle off for essence of podcast of like some aha moments and this sounds so silly. There's going to be someone listening at a big company and saying I can't believe you guys didn't do this. But I know there's a majority of people that are listening to this podcast are similar to Mercatus but simple things that clients were saying. This one feature was amazing for us and we didn't have a name for it. Like we, we just called it Excel Connectivity. But clients could connect their valuation models into the platform. And we didn't think it was all that like. But that was a secret sauce over other private equity softwares where you had to disconnect your valuation models. And anyone in private equity knows the valuation models is the secret sauce. That's, that's the platform is what's in those models. So our ability to connect the actual models themselves, not import data. But keeping the governance of the Excel models was a really cool thing. And every one of our clients said they really highly value that feature. And we didn't have a name. So just putting a name to the feature, we called it Model Sync. We didn't spend too much time coming up with that, but the second we named that feature, people started valuing, valuing a lot more. And it was a clear differentiation. I'm a big believer and I think the greatest value add I've ever added, Mercatis, is that I hate friction. I hate friction in sales cycles as much as possible. And as someone that never had a formal sales role, I would like to say I do have sales have tremendous respect for me because all I'm trying to do as a head of product strategy is to make sure my strategy works out. And the only way I could prove my strategy works out is to make sales success. And removing friction in the B2B sales space is my number one place for opportunity. So one thing I think I did creatively was to look back at all existing contracts and to see where people redlined the most. Because I noticed in our CRM Salesforce data that when we got to stage four, our biggest gap in our sales cycle was actually from stage four to stage five. And I was just like, why is that taking so long? A client actually made a decision to buy our platform.
Any opportunity to condense that would be value add and any friction you can move in the enterprise sales agreement is definitely worth it. And that's one thing I'd recommend the moses especially doing 50k to 100k average deal size is just like the sales deck where everyone just bloats these decks over time. The sales agreement is actually the same thing. We're legal. It gets passed around. It's originally a 12 page agreement, then eight years later it's a 34 page and ours was at 72 page. And that was an example. I spent a lot of time reducing that. And our, our pricing proposals, when we actually talked about pricing was like 15 pages. And we're dealing with private equity professionals who did not want you to pitch them a 15 page sales deck. So we actually converted that to a one slide deck of a table of this is our pricing. And I would say those small tweaks is a compounding effect that really impact the sales cycle. And talking about getting legal teams involved and rescheduling for next week to make sure it works on everyone's calendar. If you could reduce two or three of those legal team sessions to review those enterprise sales agreements, it goes a long way. Team.
[00:22:59] Speaker A: I want to take a quick pause here to ask you for a huge favor that'll mean a lot to me. Please review and share the show. Share it with your team, your friends, your peers. Not only will it help them stop the guesswork in pricing, but it'll also help you and increase the chances that you'll take action and change for yourself. All right, much love. Now back to the show. That's how scale happens, is finding those bottlenecks. But you have to look first. Right? Find the bottlenecks and start to find ways to dress and reduce those down. A 72 page agreement is a little. That's a little bit.
[00:23:30] Speaker B: It's a lot.
[00:23:31] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a lot for somebody to, to consume and digest. Right. But I also think that it's the, it's, it's never really the silver bullet per se, but it's all these small changes that accumulate and sort of lead you to do things a lot smoother and faster. And then the more you do them, the better you get. Right. You win. You truly do win.
One of the things you said earlier that really stayed in my mind was that strategy. So I'm going to move us from rewind to play and I want to talk a little bit about strategy. And they're, to me, inescapably linked in my mind. Pricing is the ultimate expression if you think about it. And so I don't think there's really separating them out. That's the first place I always dig in whenever someone asks me, hey, my pricing's busted. It's not working. I'm like, all right, let's talk about your strategy. What are you trying to do here? Right. So I want to get into today. You're talking to different companies. There are different stages. They're running into different roadblocks. They're, they're struggling, they're. They're scared, they're frustrated. You know, what is it around strategy that you think is holding a lot of these, these founders, these entrepreneurs back?
[00:24:30] Speaker B: It's something I think a lot about. So I would say to me, great strategy is trying to be the only. Only is better than different. Different is better than better. And I would say we all see the Gartner charts of all the logos in a space. So I would say it is super critical in this world to know how you're uniquely differentiated. People really struggle telling that story and they think it's better off to rattle off five or six things. They're better at very concretely telling a story of what makes you unique and just an Example of the disconnect of clients. I see in the same thing at Mercatos of like my my opinions on I see a lot of clients pricing Kia products at Mercedes prices.
I see clients selling a platform strategy but when it comes to the sales proposals they're all menu Cheesecake Factory a la carte. And that's just a good example where it just feels incoherent of what your strategy is. And to me in private equity software I believe a lot of enterprise companies unbelievable friction in the sales cycle. And to me the sales cycle is also the product and any way you could differentiate if you're going to sell your low friction easy to use improved UX which was our value prop at Mercatus. I also wanted that reflect in our sales process. For example, I wanted our proposals to be effortless. I almost wanted our POC is to be very quick, very efficient and are there tools we could use to do tailored demos that we didn't have to wait two to three weeks when when it came to our pricing I wanted to keep it to three three lines only that people could easily open up and people don't understand emotional impact of actually sending a proposal and someone has to click that agreement and it's like nine pages and people have to like feel that emotional burden. Marcos, you probably went through a bunch of legal agreements. You've you look at you're trying to just get that emotional pain of what that price is and people don't think enough about that of how they deliver that sales proposal on how do you alleviate that as much as possible. And I think that's what I love about strategy is pick what makes uniquely you as entity and make and reflect that all through the way you communicate as a company and the way you deliver.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: I love that. I love that because the only is better than different and different is better than better. There's an interesting thing in that and that if you can stand up and say I'm the only one that does this or can give you this without that or those kind of things. I think it does it actually solves a lot of problems downstream. I think a lot of the complexity in sales cycles in contracts and that friction does come from you know trying to figure out ways to close a deal or to win a client or a customer. When you don't have only or different or better where you're just. It's hard to really prove why you over something else. And so you start introducing all these other areas to try to figure that out. And it. It just makes things A lot more complicated. And I think your point earlier, I'm struggling. I wonder if I agree with you or disagree with you on the sales process is the product. That was a very bold statement you just said. And I, I, I'm, I'm gonna agree. I'm gonna agree. And the reason why is because when I think about a lot of the folks we, that, that we've worked with in the past, these are brilliant. They're, they're builders. They love solving a problem and they'll, you'll have a, a product that they want to put out into the world, but they haven't really thought through how someone gets, is introduced to it, understands the value of it, thinks about how they're going to change their behavior as a result of it. Like, all these things, real human things that need to happen for someone to buy something adopted and start using it, they don't really think about all that. They sort of, in their mind, have this end state of the euphoric, you know, vision of here's your world is so much better now with it. But there's a lot of little steps to get from, you know, sitting here today in Excel to now sitting there and, you know, launching a marketing campaign in HubSpot. Like, there's a lot of these little steps, and I don't think people think through them. Yeah, I think you're right, man. I think the sales process, yeah, just.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: A great example of this. And I love companies when I see it happen.
I believe I flew into San Diego to come hang out with your team. And you know, when a Southwest person, like, just has to make a funny joke or comment, like, no one had to tell them they had to do that. But, like, that's a good example of being unique and different. That just transitions. Another great example is I took the kids with the family, we went to Disney, and when we parked our car rental car and got into the shuttle, the driver was already in an entertainer dressed up as a mascot. And I was like, man, that's a great example that we're not even in the park and their product is showing within it. So I personally would just love to work for companies where they think through the whole journey for experience. I do think the whole offer really matters. It's a great way to differentiate, especially in vertical SaaS companies. I feel like, of all places, they have the greatest room for improvement.
[00:29:19] Speaker A: That's right. So how can you think of in your business setting, what is your goofy suit in the, in the parking lot? Shuttle. Right. Like, what is that? Right and so I think a lot of people, again, go straight into the product and features and they dive into, you know, the long checklist of features that they have and don't have. And that's also how they plan out their roadmaps too, is like, well, we have these nine features. We need these three features. So let's build out these three. But I think taking a step back again, that, that experience, from the moment they even discover or even realize they may need you all the way to the point where they're using you happily and wondering, what else can you do? Right? Like, it's a much broader journey than just that. Man, I love it. I love it. I think that's a big lesson for a lot of entrepreneurs, is sort of broadening, broadening their thinking. If to play this a little bit more forward now, right, let's think about where things are going. The world is changing faster than we can keep up, right. You have all these, these AI models that are, you know, that are coming out. I think, you know, world is almost getting used to economic uncertainty as we keep shifting from thing to thing, Right. But I'd love to hear from you, like, when you think of. As the world changes, how do people, and I'm thinking Mostly founders, entrepreneurs, SaaS, leaders, operators, you know, how do they, you know, really just ground themselves in. In good strategy that leads to growth without just getting lost in all of the minutia and in the mix that's happening. What do you think?
[00:30:40] Speaker B: I. I have an issue with a lot of B2B SaaS companies on the way to communicate. And I would say if I go to any B2B SaaS company's homepage, it's very probably 90% of the time, I just don't know what the heck they're saying. And there's a book by Emmy Stratton called Make It Punchy, which I feel like all B2B professionals should read, but she has a point, like, you should only use words you actually say in a barbecue with friends.
And so many words like, we would never use the word implementation at a barbecue. We would never use the word transformation within a barbecue. And just so interesting. I feel like I'm the only one witnessing this and no one else sees this, but it's everywhere. And I just feel like people just need to talk more human in a B2B SaaS world, we need to remove friction in the sales cycle. That's something I see a lot within the coaches, within the clients. I coach is we just assume sales cycles need to be nine months on it and I just feel like there's needs to be a more sense of urgency of being maniacally focused of how we deliver value faster to our clients and super fast with AI. I'm not your AI expert but my goodness, how do we leverage AI to deliver value faster for clients faster POCs? I'm also seeing a trend where I'm seeing customer success managers now have a tool that makes them phenomenal product managers. I'm personally saying witnessing the great Companies and vertical SaaS their customer success managers are actually becoming phenomenal product managers. And being to take a client's requirements and being to whiz up a POC requirements to validate where certain buttons should be is a really fascinating area to be. And just that time crunch of the whole product development lifecycle changing on expansion strategy has been super interesting unique to see.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: I love all that. Let me flip it around though. What are you scared of? What are you worried about going into the next three to five?
[00:32:36] Speaker B: Something I witnessed. So for context, our company Mercatus got acquired by State street in 2021 and spent three years integrating our softwares. There's a lot of technology out there and I would say something I witness at State street and it's probably at a lot of companies is that they're in between, they're half baked across a bunch of technology product projects where I feel like large enterprises always 50% through multiple implementations and it's just something I just witness across a lot of clients. I see. And at what point is more technology more helping us and what's the right strategy of expediting the half baked implementations or the Frankenstein tech stacks that a lot of these enterprise companies have. And I do see that a lot of waste happening in that space and super interested of how AI will either solve that or actually exacerbate a lot of the issues I'm seeing across these large enterprises.
[00:33:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting one. I wonder people are talking about, you know is. Is the world kind of heading towards this cliff right where we end up with, you know, I'm not just saying Skynet and like robocops and things like that but you know, you could see the, you know how the proliferation of something can spread and, and it may not actually be a good right where more starts less. I heard a quote from someone who said I'm actually not scared of, of AI, I'm actually scared of what humans will do. And that could lead to just again proliferation to the point of we start progressing, we're regressing It'd be interesting to see how all this kind of plays out in the future. We don't have a crystal ball, so we have no idea.
[00:34:14] Speaker B: Because I'm thinking like what a great opportunity for Excel marketing strategy come back in, right?
It's a simple Excel spreadsheet like solves.
Watch us all go back in 10 years to an Excel spreadsheet.
[00:34:27] Speaker A: I talked to a guy and he, he was, he kept talking about the pendulum swings, right? It's actually we, there are more pendulum swings in our life than we think. And so when you go too deep in, you know, this happens in pricing all the time too where you'll see, hey, everybody wants to be transparent and everybody's publishing their pricing. Then all of a sudden it swings back to, nobody's saying anything and keeping their, you know, everything's contact sales on their, on their, on their websites. Pendulum swings are natural human behavior is what he says. And so we could go this swing into AI and then if it gets too much and we'll swing into a good old Excel spreadsheet and just keep it simple and move on, right? So it'd be funny how all that plays out. Ali, man, you're, you're a huge brain on a lot of these, these problems. What you've seen in employee number five to like what a nine figure exit going through all those growth points, all the changes pivots the you know, the scary moments and you're, you probably, you know, shaved a few years of lifespan in some of those nervous, no doubts. But somebody who says, you know what, yeah, that sounds like a roller coaster ride but I'm up for it. I want to change the world. I want to put out a product, I want to get acquired, I want to do these things. Can you give me like your biggest, you know one because you're so smart. I'll even give you two biggest one, two pieces of advice for that, for that SaaS entrepreneur for that, you know, growth minded, partially crazy individual who wants to go through this journey. What is the big two or one piece of advice you want to.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: It's always the messy middle. Like there's a book on this I believe a former Adobe professional creator. I never read the book because he said it on a podcast on you never you.
When we started Mercados to when we exited, we always felt like failures or we always, never became easy. And I would think when I was at Mercatos, I always thought the flywheel will get going. And I think a lot of people feel like they're Overworking as there's going to be a flywheel that happens, that things get easier, but you just deal with bigger and better problems on it. So just we'll let people know that it's okay, that it's hard. I think that's what's important for people to go in. I think that journey, I think that metaphor works for any type of company, any entrepreneur journey. I'm seeing that across a lot of clients I coach now is like don't, don't ask for it being easy. Like embrace, embrace it. Because there's a lot of growth opportunity that comes through it. Another thing I just let people know is that the people really matter. Like it's funny of the stressful meetings of losing a massive clients to having panic attacks and dealing with all the stresses of growing a global team through getting acquired. I wish I spent more time with the people. Like, you know, things I remember the most are actually the laughters at the dinner tables. It's the relationships we build. So I would say if you're going through a messy journey or a gnarly sass growth story, just make sure you take the time to spend the time with the employees because that's what I really do enjoy. And I've been fortunate to be really close to the team I left at Mercatos. And so I just. People should spend more time with their people.
[00:37:36] Speaker A: I love it. I'm going to make a quote just from what you just said, man, that Messi is okay, but savor the day.
[00:37:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:42] Speaker A: Everything you just said, right. You gotta go through that. I love love talking today, man. Thank you for all those big tips, really. From the trenches. I think folks can take away and apply. But I do have one more question for you. All right, so don't leave just yet. I need to understand a little bit more about Ali. The human, the person, the regular, the regular Joe in Houston. Give me a sense for what was your favorite jam, your favorite song growing up, Whatever it is that you can listen to over and over that lights.
[00:38:08] Speaker B: You must have changed this. Where's the rap songs?
[00:38:11] Speaker A: I said, look, if it's a hip hop, you get both bonus points for that one, man.
Because I love hip hop but doesn't.
[00:38:16] Speaker B: Always have to be give me that rap songs. I don't like this. Pick your own song. So I'm a die hard Houston Rockets or Houston sports fan. So I was born and raised in Houston, lived in New York and Austin, but came back to Houston because I just generally love the city and I'm a rare Person saying that. I get it. I get made fun of all the time for my New York friends.
But you have to know Fat Pat Marcos.
[00:38:42] Speaker A: I do know Fat. So, by the way, Fat Pat, I'm gonna think of. There's actually three or four other out of Houston that I'm a big fan of. Wasn't Paul Wall out of there, too?
[00:38:53] Speaker B: Paul Walls from Houston.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah, I remember that. So he had a lot of. A lot of good folks from Houston.
[00:38:57] Speaker B: As a few other. Yeah.
In 2018, Fat Pat dropped tops. Drop in Houston.
And it's around the area that I grew up. And that song was an anthem. And that song was played literally five times a day throughout my middle school and high school years. So anytime that song comes on, that becomes like a natural anthem. And I hope someone just asked their Amazon device to.
[00:39:24] Speaker A: To.
[00:39:24] Speaker B: To play that right now, because that song just brings back. I couldn't say the. A word or it actually happened right now.
[00:39:32] Speaker A: You can stay here, man. You can. But Fat Pat, you're probably the only person I've ever. I've done so many of these to even bring up Fat Pat. That's fantastic.
[00:39:39] Speaker B: It's just top straps. It's like a Houston anthem, and you hear it everywhere you go, and it's like, really a rally song for Houston. I'm not a big rap guy, but I know Top Strap.
To give you another answer. The song I listen to probably the most, I've been really into neo soul guitarists, and there's a person named Melanie Fay Faye that I think she's the most brilliant guitarist out there. And she plays neocell, which is like soft R B and just such a unique tone. And when I hop off on this, I'll ask my devices to put on a Melanie Faye guitar solo. So that's what I listen to probably once I write every day. And that's the song she's playing in my background all the time drops Neo.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: So and it.
[00:40:24] Speaker B: That.
[00:40:24] Speaker A: That's the thing, right? You never know what folks listen to. And then that just gave me another, deeper glimpse into you, my man.
[00:40:29] Speaker B: You're gonna play Top Strap right after this, aren't you?
[00:40:32] Speaker A: I am.
[00:40:32] Speaker B: Good.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: I'm gonna. And. And I'm gonna look for Melanie Faye as well. I look for both. We actually take every song and we throw it on a playlist. So everybody listening to these podcasts.
[00:40:39] Speaker B: I enjoy the playlist Houston and everyone's playlist.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: Dude, man, thank you so much for coming in here, dropping so much knowledge for the audience today, and I would love it. If you come back in the future, you'd be willing to come back.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: I would love to.
[00:40:52] Speaker A: Beautiful, beautiful team. That was Alimamuji here. Follow him on LinkedIn. Go subscribe to his newsletter the Moat. Lots of chalk I think just real cut through the BS type of advice, type of frameworks, things you can actually apply to help break you through, help you grow. I think that all these lessons and everything he went through again from a from an early stage employee startup, the private equity IB background to then the acquisition and then from there seeing the insides of so many companies and how to help them unlock all these things I think can help you. So please don't just sit here and listen to this and giggle. Go back. You got to make a plan, get in the lab and do something to help you get forward to help you prove by 1%. All right. So remember, you want to stop guessing and start growing.
[00:41:39] Speaker C: Until next time, thank you and much love for listening to the Street Pricing Podcast with Marcos Rivera. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And don't forget to like and subscribe. If you want to learn more about capturing value, pick up a copy of Street Pricing on Amazon. Until next time.
