Welcome to episode fifteen of the SaaS Backwards podcast, where we interview CEOs and CMOs of fast-growing SaaS firms to reveal what they are doing that's working, and lessons learned from things that didn't work as planned. 

You can listen to the full episode directly below via Spotify, or visit SaaS Backwards on Buzzsprout or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Perils and Triumphs of SaaS Bootstrapping (with a Pivot) with CEO of Enablix Gaurav Harode

Gaurav Harode, CEO, Enablix

Edited for clarity and readability 

Host, Ken Lempit:
Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps us CEOs and CMOs to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Gaurav Harode. Today we'll be talking about his sales enablement, SaaS called Enablix. Gaurav, hi and welcome to the podcast.

Gaurav Harode:
Hi Ken, thank you for having me.

Ken Lempit:
You're at a really interesting time in your company. Before we dig in on the company and the situation, tell us a little bit about yourself and then a little bit about Enablix.

Gaurav Harode:
Enablix is a sales enablement platform, and we started in 2016. My primary background has been an enterprise software sales and product management. I’ve spent most of my time in the financial services industry selling software to big banks for fraud and money laundering prevention. And one of the things that struck me was whether you are a big company or a small company, content has become important for enabling sales teams.

And that part was the genesis of starting Enablix. We initially started Enablix as a knowledge management tool. To be honest, I didn't have that much visibility into the sales enablement industry. But as we started getting customers and helping marketing teams enable the sales team, we moved on positioning into the sales enablement space and have been doing that for four years.

Ken Lempit:
Yet another founder of a SaaS company who was actually not a technologist or a software guy.

Gaurav Harode:
Yeah. I'm not a technologist. I've done a little bit of coding back in early 2000, but I understand technology. I have not coded in the last 18 years.

Ken Lempit:
I think that's really an important, maybe even a leading indicator of success here, that knowing the business problem, relating to the users, and solving the problems they're having in the field might be more important than knowing how to be a great keyboardist on the programming side.

Gaurav Harode:
That's right. I’ve always seen myself as a product person. I’m interested in how you can make a better user experience, not necessarily from the UX standpoint, but how you can make it easy to improve productivity and add value to their communications. And that's what was sort of attractive for me when starting an Enablix. And I'm also of the opinion that for the majority of the cases, you need a strong technologist, but if you are not building the next Google. There is a lot of technology around us, you just need the right co-founder or the right partner to sort of like implement that technology.

Ken Lempit:
I think we're sort of uncovering the idea that you can have a founding idea and really understand your potential customer pretty well. And then you can find the partner to help you build your vision.

Gaurav Harode:
Yes. Exactly. I'll say that it is hard for some folks to find a partner. I was lucky that I'd worked with some really strong technical architects. I was able to leverage that relationship, my time at Oracle, and the relationships I've built. And that helped me build Enablix to the point that where we are at. But yeah, that would be the playbook I would follow.

Ken Lempit:
It makes a lot of sense. You started out a little bit different than what the product is today. How did you go from your initial vision of being sort of a productivity and knowledge management tool to realizing that the future was in helping salespeople?

Gaurav Harode:
There were two drivers for that decision. The first thing we noticed is that there were a lot of knowledge management tools and the space was already crowded. You would see things like Confluence or there are other upcoming vendors. Notion is one of the upcoming vendors, Evernote is seen by some people as knowledge management within teams and companies. I think that was a great horizontal play, but there wasn't anything specific for sales and marketing from a knowledge management standpoint.

We asked, "Why not target the marketing side of it?" Because that's what our background was.

Number two, we realized that people don't pay that much for improving the productivity of an engineer, but people pay a lot if you are helping the productivity of your customer-facing team. Which shouldn't be the case, but that's the reality of the industry.

A sales rep’s time is more valuable than a developer's time or even a product manager's time. There wasn't a portion of it to focus on their sales rep’s productivity and get paid premium dollars for helping them to be productive.

Those were the two sort of indicators for us that we should move into a marketing side. We ended up supporting the marketing use cases, and the more we learned from the customers, the more it was a natural progression.

Ken Lempit:
For an early stage company (and we've heard this with a couple of the interviews we've done so far) it’s really important to be listening to the feedback. You build your first idea, you build your first product, you bring it to people who might buy from you, and then you have to really be willing to listen to the feedback they offer.

Gaurav Harode:
Exactly. The first year we just had two customers. In the early stages, not only are you listening to the feedback of the customer, depending on what your sales and go to market model is, we were also listening to the feedback from prospect practitioners. We would say yes to any meeting, right? We knew that if somebody was not a buyer, but they were a practitioner and they had worked in marketing space, even if they were an independent consultant, we would welcome their feedback. And that helped a lot. It's interesting that when we started out, we had a certain user interface and we kept getting this feedback from prospects, as well as from these practitioners saying that, "Hey, you know, you are selling to the marketers."

This UI is good, but it's 2010ish UI. We are now in 2016, 2017, going into 2020. Marketers are exposed to all different kinds of appealing user interfaces. You may want to consider that. That was just one feedback, which helped us a lot. There were several others since the software.

Ken Lempit:
You to be willing to hear your baby isn't pretty, huh?

Gaurav Harode:
Exactly. And it wasn't. At the time when we got that feedback, I think I've increasingly learned that the more we are closer to the product, it keeps increasing your risk of losing your eye of what is needed versus what you think is needed.

Ken Lempit:
I want to make sure we tell people exactly what the product does, because I think that it answers a real desire among marketing and sales people to work better together. We talk often about pain points in our messaging and marketing work, but this is almost a longing that this product answers. I'd love you to talk about that and exactly how the product helps answer that real desire for these teams to work better together.

Gaurav Harode:
Sure. What happens in today's B2B companies is that you have the marketing team, you have the sales team, and there is a lot of chatter back and forth going on between them. Companies are investing in training, slack channels, and pushing content out to sales reps. The challenges is that it’s all over the place sales reps don't know what should be done with it.

A majority of companies are investing in what we call scripted enablement.

If you are marketer, you will have a weekly zoom call with your sales team or biweekly zoom call, and you will just do an information dump on, "Hey, this is the new stuff that we have working. These are the new campaigns that we're running. Here is the messaging change. Here's the branding change."

It's all in calls and live communication, which is not bad, and I think it's needed because that helps with alignment. The problem is that we all know how little of that is retained over a certain period of time.

So then, sales reps go out in the field and they face situations.

• They face their prospects; they face their buyer, and they need information.
• They need to send that introductory material.
• They need to send information on how they are different from a certain competitor.
• They need to answer buyers' detailed questions.

All these are difficult to script, right? Because every buyer is unique. And that's where, what we call a “situational enablement” sufferers. They don't know whether the content exists. If they think that the content exists, they go on slack, and request something.

It's all this asynchronous mode off information. And with Enablix, what we are doing is giving organizations that opportunity to complement their scripted enablement with supporting like just-in-time unstructured enablement. A sales rep can say, "Hey, I have a buyer who is looking for certain information. I know X, Y, Z, about the buyer, let me share the right collateral with them." And they can do that without talking to a marketer or a PR person. And then that is an analytics part of it, which informs the marketing teams and then enablement teams on how it's going.

The goal is to just help sales reps to be better information brokers within the organization for their buyers, so that they can help the buyer solve their purchasing VIN and hopefully win more business.

Ken Lempit:
There are a few things in there that we should unpack. There's buyer enablement versus sales enablement--the rep being an information broker and truly helping the buyer make a good decision. And then there was something that you sort of alluded to in that there's an interactive or a conversation within the organization to get the right content into the sales person's hand. Is that correct?

Gaurav Harode:
Yes. I believe that marketing teams have a scripted view of the world. They define the script of the sales funnel. They define who your ideal customer profile is, who your buyer personas are, and then create collateral matching to that buyer persona.

But if anybody has been in sales knows that those definitions only go so far when you actually connect with people.

I may come across a buyer and their profile will only match maybe 60%, even though they are head of marketing. And I have a buyer persona of marketing leader, there will be like a 50 to 60% match. But then there are that 30, 40% of the context, which is different, right?

And as a sales rep, I know the most about that buyer. Once I have talked to a prospect, I know them more than anybody else in my organization, right? Because we have exchanged information. I have asked the right question.

Many companies are focused on trying to make sales reps the subject matter experts, but in my opinion, that’s mostly impossible. Yes, they need to know about the product, but they are not a user of the product. They are the seller of the product, right?

They should be aware and they should know how to broker the right information because you already have experts in your organization. The sales rep is the view for that buyer into your organization. On your buyer, good technology tool information so that they can understand the context of the buyer, the specific context, and connect it with the right information.

Ken Lempit:
The idea that the sales rep is going to be his or her own sales manager, his or her own subject matter expert. And also by the way, really good at connecting with people and helping them see the value proposition. It's just too much of an expectation, especially for a complex sale.

Gaurav Harode:
Exactly.

Ken Lempit:
If it's a simple sale, then sure. Almost anybody becomes expert pretty quickly. But if it's an enterprise or departmental solution of any weight, it's unlikely that the salesperson can be a power user of it. And a great salesperson.

Gaurav Harode:
Exactly. You cannot script that. This morning, one of our prospects asked us information about a competitor. We have never come across that competitor before, and we don't even consider them as competitor.

There are always these unstructured situations that come up. We try to put it in a category like, "Hey, the buyer comes into the awareness stage. Then they go into the negotiation proposal stage." I mean, everything is so linear, right. And everything is step one, step two, step three, step four. In reality, your buyer comes in at step one then goes to step two and then another person from their organization and their step one, because it's a bind by community.

Now you have three or four different personas entering at different stages with their own biases and contacts. And I think that they're sitting on an opportunity to really increase their VIN ratio, speed up their pipeline, if they enable their sales reps properly.

Ken Lempit:
Awesome. Let's move on to the state of the business. You're bootstrapping this business.

Gaurav Harode:
Yeah.

Ken Lempit:
And I'm sure there are a lot of people out there that feel your pain. It takes a certain amount of bravery, to be willing to do that. I'm really excited actually about how far you've come. Tell us a little bit about the state of the business and who you compete with and what you're seeking in terms of financing. What's going to finance the next leg of growth here?

Gaurav Harode:
Sure. We started in 2017. We had two customers at the end of 2017. Today we have 20 customers. We believe we have a product market fit. We believe we have carved out a niche. We know who our ideal customer is. We have a pretty strong customer success track record. We know that when we sign a customer, how to drive success for them and what the playbook is, but we have hardly touched on the marketing side of it.

Most of the deals that we have sourced have been outbound by finding the right companies and engaging with them and then winning the business. But we are turning a corner where we are sort of establishing a micro brand. If you look at sales enablement space, the challenge that we have with sales enablement is that it's a very broad term.

You could say that Zoom is a sales enabler because it helps salespeople enable their day-to-day work. Then you have all these enablement technologies and training and coaching is one more area, which is a big part of enablement, which we don't do.

So we focus on the sales content part of enablement. The top 3 players in the space are HighSpot, Showpad, and Seismic. In fact, HighSpot recently announced a $200 million series E at a $2.4 billion evaluation. The next two Showpad and Seismic have both raised more than $150 million. You are looking at these three highly capitalized, well-funded companies, and then we enter in this space and we have a war chest of dollars to spend on marketing and stuff.

Initially when we entered, I would say that we were completely ignored. I come from Oracle, I was never exposed to the traditional digital marketing and in the early days that helped us. But later on, I think we were a little slow on catching up on the whole marketing thing. We compete with these players. The thing that has been working for us is that sales enablement is no longer a big company problem. Sales enablement, like 50-person companies, companies with 10 sales reps, 20 sales reps, they are struggling with content and enabling the sales team.

We have been able to target a small and midsize market sector and play off to that market sector, with unique capabilities that some of these big vendors cannot offer from a feature function standpoint, from a deployment standpoint, or just from a customer success standpoint.

Ken Lempit:
That's a good path to follow helping younger, smaller companies to accelerate their growth. If you could track along the lines of a HubSpot, for example, that would be just fine. Like Zoho. There's history in the enablement or marketing and sales automation space to target the SMB, as they call it, with a software that they can feel the ROI. And I think you make a really good point. If I've got 15 sales reps, I'm probably building content for them. They're all seeing different scenarios play out and we need to make sure they have the right content to help them move along a buying by committee situation. And that's likely their scenario. But you've been bootstrapped and you're going to go out and start to try and get some money. Right?

Gaurav Harode:
Exactly. Earlier last year, we ruled out the opinion that we could bootstrap our way through this and not raise any money, and I think the thing that informed that opinion was that we were trying to follow the product-led growth model—build a great product, do proper digital marketing, and customers will come in, sign up for our service, and then pay.

We realized that we were wrong in that approach.

And in that hypothesis, we missed the point that we are not selling to marketing, or we are not selling to sales. We are selling to both sales and marketing. In fact, our sales enablement platform is the only tool for majority of the organization.

We have both sales and marketing use that tool on a daily basis.

If you look at it, sales normally uses a CRM and marketing uses marketing automation. Marketing may use some other branding and creative like Adobe Figma. Maybe they use Salesforce or SalesLoft to do outreach and optimization. But rarely (other than slack, Microsoft or Google), there's no other app that sales and marketing uses together.

Ken Lempit:
That's a really great pitch right there. And I think, I talked about it before. There's the true longing between these organizations to figure out how to work together.

Gaurav Harode:
Yes.

Ken Lempit:
It’s not just a pain point. It's not a need. It truly is a longing. I think that's a really powerful proposition for a potential investor. You're looking for seed money to propel growth, right? What are those funds going to do for you?.

Gaurav Harode:
I think 80% of those funds are going to be just demand gen. Our challenge is that companies just don't know that we exist. We are dwarfed by these three big giants in our industry. And they have been around for much longer than us. Plus, they're very well-funded.

We come across our prospect, they are the ones who look at us on G2 crowd and they spend those extra five minutes to look at, "Hey, are there other options?" And then come across Enablix and say, "Oh, there is ", but being a marketer, you can understand that not everybody spends that extra five minutes to dig deep.

We need to get our brand and name out. I think we have a unique value proposition, which allows us to target the mid-market sector and really drive growth from there. Demand gen would be the majority of what we will use the funds.

Ken Lempit:
That's a great place to be where you can say to potential investors, "Hey, I've got a product. I have product market fit people using my product. I've got reasonable ARR for where we are in the life of the company." That's pretty exciting. And I think there's something you touched on. I just want to underline for people that have listened this this far, which is that product led growth. The freemium model is not necessarily a fit everywhere. If you could just elaborate a little bit on that point.

Gaurav Harode:
I'll be the first person to admit that I'm enamored by product-led growth.
When we started Enablix, we only thought of product led growth. We thought, "Yeah, people will come and use the product."

I had read a lot of material on product-led growth. The biggest fundamental value of it is value of realization. When do you realize the value? If you and I are in an organization of a hundred people and we download slack and start using Slack--that's immediate value. I don't need the remaining 98 people on the organization to use Slack for me to realize that value. We immediately start using that thing. If somebody is using Canva as a design tool, they sign up, they create their first postcard or infographic and that's immediate value. They didn't even have to take their credit card out. And they'd realize that value.

The challenge with sales enablement, because it's a sales and marketing combined app, it comes with its own undercurrents in the decision-making buying process. And as marketers is not just going to stumble upon or to Enablix, try using it and make a decision that, "Yeah, this is good to go." Because they don't realize the value until the content is in there. They don't realize the value until the sales team starts using it. They don't realize the value until they see feedback from the sales team.

These things could take weeks, months depending on the setup of the organization. Automatically, if I'm a marketer and I'm bringing a tool like Enablix, I need buy-in from marketing leadership, I need buy-in from sales leadership. I need buy-in from sales reps. And there goes the product led growth model. It's not going to disappear, at least in today's day and age. It's not conducive to product-led growth.

Ken Lempit:
I think this is really important learning. And I have to believe there are other software company founders who are, like you (and I am enamored of product led growth) and think that firms like OpenView, who are really banging the drum leading the way and the research, and kind of helping people understand how to manage a software firm through that model.

But it doesn't fit everywhere.

And we need to, as early as possible, recognize what our go-to-market models going to be and what our pricing and packaging has to be to be successful. You could waste a lot of time on product-led growth if it doesn't go.

Gaurav Harode:
Absolutely.

Ken Lempit:
And the two things that are limited in almost every startup are time and money. We can't afford to waste either of them.

Gaurav Harode:
I think with product-led growth, also, what we’ve seen is that if you are crossing organizations and if the use case is not completely well understood, it’s probably not a fit. In our example, I think a lot of companies still don't understand what sales enablement is. And if it's not well understood, and you’re you are crossing the organization (selling something which goes across a couple of departments) then I don't think that the current status of product-led growth is there where it needs to be. Maybe that will change in the future. And hopefully it does, but yeah.

Ken Lempit:
Fair enough. I think it's a great place to land. We've uncovered a lot of really valuable insights for potential users of Enablix and also possible people that want to follow in your footsteps. Crazy idea of starting a software company.

Gaurav Harode:
Really crazy.

Ken Lempit:
I did a podcast interview myself. I was a guest and the topic was manifestation that I brought in. And I think as a software founder, you have to be willing to believe you can change a small part of the world, don't you?

Gaurav Harode:
Exactly. We always believe. A lot of people ask us, "Hey, who are your competitors?" And we said, our biggest competitor is human behavior. It's like the kitchen pantry analogy, right? The sales and marketing world today is used to living from produce, which is spread across the house. They had started in a single place. Some of it is in one corner of the house. Some of it is in another corner of the house and wouldn't it be great. Imagine living in a home without a kitchen pantry. The whole household will go crazy. And that's what's happening with organizations like there is no kitchen. There is no content pantry. There is no single place. And the whole organization is just myopic, tactical, focused on what this month is happening and the sales reps are going crazy. We need to bring those dots together and that's what we are doing at Enablix.

Ken Lempit:
Awesome. How do people learn more about Enablix?

Gaurav Harode:
They can go to Enablix.com, or follow us on LinkedIn. Follow me on LinkedIn. I post a lot about sales enablement regularly on LinkedIn.

Ken Lempit:
Excellent. Well, I want to say thanks very much rather. This was an amazing interview actually. And I appreciate the time you shared with me and our listeners, and I want to say good luck to you, and I believe you're going to make it. I think you've got what it takes. Thanks so much.

Gaurav Harode:
Thanks again, and thanks for having me.

Ken Lempit:
All right. And if people want to reach me at the end of the podcast, my contact information will come up and have a great day. Everyone.

Thanks for listening to the SaaS Backwards podcast brought to you by Austin Lawrence Group. We are a growth marketing agency that helps SaaS firms reduce churn, accelerate sales, and generate demand. Learn more about us at www.austinlawrence.com. You can email Ken Lempit at kl@austinlawrence.com about any SaaS marketing or customer retention subject. We hope you'll subscribe, and thanks again for listening.