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 you have pure later quartz aspen rogers mondo i'm just looking at this now versature relation edge so i mean you have at least 10 customers here at least 10 enterprise customers you have listed we have a number of customers yes again i don't want to dig into your private stuff i'm just literally trying to respect you and say this is what's on the website you have at least 10 listed here yep we have at least that many is there a sector you're focused on specific like is pure later and going deeper into that space a focus for you are you really serving anyone that needs the sales intelligence tools uh that's a good question i think we've decided we're going to really double down hard on just two industries i think we've maybe gone a little bit too broad uh i think the two that are the most promising are probably the transportation logistics and probably the broad technology sector they just have higher adoption ratios in terms of you know they usually have a lot of data as well and they're not they're not still working through um understanding data science or advanced analytics like they're kind of ready to take the next step right and that's what's really important with with finding the right kind of customer they need a lot of data and they have to have a fair bit of process discipline in culture so they've got more data quality that's been optimized now this makes a lot of sense now you mentioned the importance of being bootstrapped and you saw it firsthand being a former vc so are you bootstrapped today or have you raised capital we're just starting to peek out um you know there comes a point where in order to scale faster you need you know even deeper uh you know resources so we are uh starting to do our pitches and and get out and be visible um you know haven't uh i would let's put this way there's never enough time in the day to balance being an operator and uh raising uh you know capital but we are poking our head out nathan and hopefully over the next six to 12 months we'll have secured our our first round and take me into your head a little bit again you saw both sides of this so when you go out and think about how much is the right amount to raise how do you think about what that amount is what's right for you guys right now i think probably a raise between two to three million is probably a good target um you know typically you can't get a firm man unless you're raising at least a million right so we've kind of got an overall goal we don't you don't need a lot of capital i just want to be able to scale up harder um in terms of sales and marketing and you know definitely the series b round would you know probably be a much bigger injection i think you have you know this stage you're wise to to build it out more validate more make sure you've got a well-oiled machine that can be repeatable in terms of your sales coverage and that's one of the hardest things right do you have that do you have at least one full-time ae that's like hitting a quota you're comfortable with scaling around that same model um we have a name when we have an am we actually cut few people in sales now i don't think that it's in that repeatable zone i think that's the one that we're still figuring out hard right um sometimes there's so much sales dna in the ceo and founder right and that's also translating i can't be in all the sales calls right so yeah that's that's so what we have learned a few things we've learned that because to sell ai and advanced analytics you have to hire probably an engineering base and also an mba is is not a bad idea because the kind of people that we like to hit we don't sell low right so these decisions usually have to be able to you know have a good discussion with a vp of sales or a cro and um a traditional bdr they're not going to be able to do that right dr dr cindy this is exciting yeah well we look forward to watching you go out and get the raise done i also love it if you stay bootstrapped and you go to four five 10 million revenue and come back on and give us an update but in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book oh you're making me think um i may be good to great i know that might date myself but i do like them that's a good one number two is there a founder you're following or studying [Music] oh i think everybody's well at least i'm watching elon musk not just you know and i obviously steve jobs i mean i think everybody followed i still follow bill gates i still follow the google guys i mean you know in terms of new new folks that are emerging well i think the uber story with ceo leadership or the challenges was an interesting one to follow number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business favorite online tool for building a business well i guess i use salesforce every day so i guess that's a good answer that's a good answer number four how many hours of sleep do you get uh last night i think i had four and a half i i had a proposal to work on so i jumped out at 4 30 and think my husband was a little bit upset but i yeah so it varies but i usually try and get at least six seven hours but it does vary if there's some things crunching or your head's uh you know exploding and dr cindy what's your situation sounds like mary any kiddos running around yeah we have two kiddos uh they're they're still running around but they're definitely they don't need uh much babysitting anymore and can i ask you how old you are no you can't well i asked that question because it gives people other other inspiration other people with two kids or married can jump on and do it but if you don't want to share that's totally fine uh last question like even my mom doesn't say that uh and she's in her early 80s and we always say we're 16 uh you know and holding all right last question take us back to your 20 year old self what's something you wish that she knew my 20 year old self wished something that she she knew that i didn't i don't know now and just something you wish you knew when you were 20. i wish i knew back when i was 20 how explosive technology was going to be because i think i would have spent more time i did some earlier programming but i i think i would have stayed deeper in the tech stream um before going into the business stream but you know obviously i've kept learning but yeah i think that would be one thing i mean it's just pervasive right so you don't understand tech you know you're probably uh a relic guys there you have it sales choice.com helping you get deeper insights into your sales pipeline your funnel and closing how your sales people are performing she launched the business back in 2013 boots dropped up to today but looking at raising call 2 to 3 million in the next 12 months we'll see what happens she's serving at least 10 customers and she's averaging right now about a hundred thousand dollars per contract so very much an enterprise motion you can assume from those numbers that they're north of a million dollar run rate at this point their team of 20 as they continue to scale cindy thank you for taking us to the top thanks nathan really appreciate the time and my apologies for being late one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it 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