From building a Conversation Intelligence SaaS to getting acquired by Clari with Shruti Kapoor of Wingman
Sales team is closer to the customer's problems.How do we bring the marketing and product teams closer to customer problems, so that they feel the voice of the customer? Voice of the customer is really valuable. It's very hard to get access to it, and even if you get access to it, it's a pain to gain insights from it, and then scale it up.This is the pain point which led Shruti Kapoor and her co-founders Muralidharan Venkatasubramanian - Head of Product and Srikar Yekollu - to start Wingman, a conversation intelligence SaaS.Wingman acts as the single source of truth for all types of interactions between sales teams and buyers including emails and calls.It analyzes them and it gives the ability to deep dive into these conversations and provide the larger analytics and intelligence, to improve revenue.Their 1st million revenues came in around 2.5 years, and 2nd million in the next 6 months. They’ve also been part of Ycombinator and SaaSBOOMi GrowthX. Wingman recently got acquired by Clari. Tune in to this episode to gain insights on right time to get acquired, nitigrities of valuation from the standpoint of acquisition and fundraising, the AI piece on strengthening revenues, how personal branding for you as a founder helps and more.1:31 - What’s Wingman?3:07 -Why Wingman welcomed the early acquisition by Clari - 3 key factors3:22 - Figuring out the valuation 4:32 - Valuation multiples by Private Equity companies7:15 - Valuation multiples during fundraising versus acquisitions10:03 - VC valuation v/s PE valuation12:19 - What does it mean if a VC is giving a 20x valuation multiple?15:43 - The idea of Wingman and how did the founding team come together?21:06 - Using AI to gain sales intelligence from sales calls using Wingman24:55 - Funds raised and investors25:31 - Rationale for high pricing, is it a sales barrier?29:18 - ICP of Wingman30:56 - SaaS pricing insights for Indian market31:31 - Change in org structure after acquisition34:45 - Wingman’s go-to market model35:50 - Creating proxies of trust - personal branding as a founder36:40 - How to increase average ticket sizes 39:46 - OTE v/s sales quota