How SalesChoice CEO Cindy Gordon grew SalesChoice to $1.5M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is dr cindy gordon she's the ceo and founder of sales choice an ai sas company for b2b sales and winner of the 2018 digital transformation award for ai disruption a former venture capitalist accenture partner xerox gm and citibank vp she's the 2017 sarah kirk entrepreneur year and kata ceo innovation winner and the 2017 startup canada entrepreneurship award at both regional ontario and national levels dr cindy are you ready to take us to the top uh well nathan with your leadership i'm ready to go all right that was a that's a heck of an intro you've won a lot of things let's see if that's translating into business success here what is sales choice doing is it a peer play sas business uh it is a pure place sas business uh we mainly focus on um analyzing salesforce data sets to predict sales forecast outcomes uh with trusted ai practices interesting so does that mean your main growth channel is the salesforce app exchange where salesforce you know installations add you on top yeah yeah we're only integrated with the app exchange at this point although we have an open api walk me through that you know it can be nice to be attached to a whale but it's also risky if salesforce acquires when you're competitors they say cindy you can't be in our store anymore hasta la vista and you go what the heck do you ever worry about that risk uh i don't know if that happens too often i think within the ecosystem uh i mean i'd love to hear your perspective but i haven't heard those stories i think it definitely opens up um a channel you know challenge where you have to then continue to be sub-optimal in the salesforce channel and obviously you know integrate into other channels and um but i don't know if you'd be booted off i think that would have an impact on uh on your business i don't think they're that unreasonable well walk me through the back story here right so so you launch the business um obviously folks are paying you for your tool to get more insight into their sales pipeline what are they paying on average per month to use the technology uh we're priced at fifty dollars uh canadian so we're not a premium provider um you know a lot of the times there are some customizations just given that we're only going after mid to large enterprises so there can be some ps drag um you know ai you know will always have a few different config points right it's uh not like a consumer outplay right there's a lot of focus on ensuring that the model is stable it's you know reliable that you also aren't going to get data drift there's increasing security uh you know aspects as well are going into the uh the audit side of these models and so when you say 50 per month i assume that's maybe per seat but on average when a new logo signs up what are they paying on average per month all in would you say uh well obviously in terms of target work we're getting we're looking for an average uh transaction about 100k uh on an annualized basis is kind of our sweet spot got it would you say that's a fair average today or that's what you're striving towards in the future i think we're still learning in all sincerity nathan um you know because you know we started off just doing the opportunity scoring and the forecasting uh but we've pushed beyond that like so our software is you know only three key strokes you know and so that's quite remarkable so our ui is very clever um and we've moved into the behavioral analytic insights where we're doing psychographic profiling uh sentiment mining so exposing the emotional intensity through nlp methods so i wouldn't want us to uh just say uh forecasting i think our visions very much now around ending revenue uncertainty and all its dimensions and and so it seems like every time we build something we see another additive aspect to increase the model um and it's you know it's it's endless right you know so dr cindy just to be clear you're moving upstream your average is not yet a hundred thousand dollar acvs maybe you're only doing maybe four or five grand a month per account but you are moving upstream as you add on these additional features is that accurate no no we basically are averaging a much higher ratio than uh in 4k a month on our clients okay so you're already at like a hundred thousand dollar acv average across your current base it's not just a goal for the future yeah oh i see i like to get a sense of where people are moving are you trying to basically go deeper into your current base move more enterprise or open your top of funnel and actually serve more customers at lower rpoos um i don't think we're going like first of all our the kind of use case that we have it only will really work well with mid upper mid market and large enterprise so we're not a small business play at all yep okay fair enough and tell us the back story here when did you launch the business i launched the business in terms of uh this model about 2013 or the end of 2013 and then we did a patent filing that took us a year took us all to assemble our engineering team so we started to come into the market probably around late 2014 early 2015 would kind of be the the time horizon where we felt we had a good base and you know it's giving um getting people to pause and sales has always has been an interesting dynamic i think gartner group's done some great work on increasing the visibility of advanced analytics on large data sets but you know you can certainly see that in every sales cycle you are educating the clients very much so dr cindy when you say patents that sounds like you're really heavy engineering what's the total team size today and how many engineers i don't disclose all our engineers only because of all of the folks that are out there to poach them so well not their i don't i don't want their names i'm just curious how many you have yeah no i don't disclose a lot of that detail i mean a lot of that can be seen on owler and things like that or checking out but i don't usually disclose uh too much on the privacy of the company at this point what does owler say uh i don't know i'll let you check you're gonna make me do the work here live so we should pause while i go look up the number one hour and then read it back to you if you want um okay let me go do that then give me a second no it's just that we're privately held nathan and uh i think that's something no i'm not i'm not asking for private information this is you just mentioned out i mean this is public eller's public right linkedin says you have four we're all we're all up all in we're probably about 20 here if that's helpful i just won't go well it's exciting that's exciting right i like to a lot of people say you know they're ai and machine learning but they have one engineer and i'm going ah yeah that's baloney though for sure yeah fair fair enough now tell me more about how you got this going early on it sounded like you were really in build mode for two years pre-revenue back in 2012 2013 how did you fund this early on was it your own capital or how did you do that yeah no it's uh it's my own capital um our families i mean i haven't been privileged to had a number of good successful careers so you could take a little bit more risk right there's also being a former vc obviously if you can bootstrap that's in your best interest for your valuation and the dilution and so i've kind of seen all of that in the good bad the ugly so that was very much a purposeful strategy was to see could we build it could we actually start to secure revenue could we start to sell fund uh you know make some sacrifices along the way uh make sure that the the engineers are well looked after and and we've been able to retain our talent which has been great right so now we're at the stage where it's a matter of okay time to scale up you know further and also differentiate um it's a fast-moving market um that's why we're probably streaming more in the advanced behavioral analytics side of things because we've got our predictive layer built we've got our prescriptive coaching insights layer and now we're adding on you know the advanced sort of behavioral insights which is which is interesting but you can't get there unless you get the solid foundations and you know that the data will have the insights that you need to drive to that more guided selling actionable so you're not just you know surfacing crap it's so easy to surface crap with these ai agents enough and sales people have zero they have zero patience so if you're not delivering value from the get-go you know you know it won't it won't last so dr cindy you get this to market in 2014 i assume maybe you sent your first customer that year as well you now have six seven years of growth under your belt how many customers are now serving today i won't disclose that nathan again we're privately held that's information that i don't disclose i'm sorry no problem are there any logos you put on your website where you feature case studies that you can talk about yeah of course uh pure later would be our largest account we have how do you say that sorry pure what pure later would be it's a two billion dollar company um so that's one of our largest accounts where we're you know running all of their uh insights for you know all channels um in the company and and uh very referenceable so yes it's on our website um with a great deal of pride yeah no this is great i mean so yeah if...