Jeremy Von Halle on this episode
Jeremy Von Halle joined Abridge as VP of Revenue Operations and Chief of Staff to the Chief Commercial Officer at a healthcare AI platform that has grown from less than $5 million in ARR with two sellers to over $200 million in revenue and a $5.3 billion valuation. His credibility comes from scaling the commercial organization to 200 people and building an AI-powered revenue operations engine that serves one of the most constrained markets in enterprise sales: just 300 large health systems.
The core insight is that enterprise AI in sales is about depth, not breadth—using AI to ensure every customer interaction represents the best version of your company, rather than attempting to automate at scale like SMB motion does.
In healthcare's highly competitive enterprise market with only 300 potential customers, there is no room for mediocre interactions. Von Halle's approach flips the SMB AI playbook: instead of using AI to increase outbound volume and guide inexperienced reps, Abridge uses AI to support seasoned operators with deep research, account intelligence, and deal risk identification. The philosophy centers on removing administrative burden so reps can focus on what they do best—building relationships and closing deals.
This episode dives deep into the specific tools and agents powering that engine: an internal AI assistant called Archie that lives in Salesforce and Slack, Attention for call transcription and account planning, Tray for orchestration and data connectivity, and a custom-built RFP completion agent that reduces cycle time from days to under an hour. Throughout, Von Halle emphasizes the importance of centralized AI architecture over individual rep "vibe coding," the foundational data layer that makes all of it possible, and a realistic ROI framework—save time, save money, make money—that acknowledges the 18-month enterprise sales cycle.
What we cover in this episode
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2:48
AI in enterprise vs SMB sales Enterprise requires depth and prep for seasoned reps; SMB requires volume and guidance for newer reps.
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6:36
Finite market with 300 accounts Only 300 large health systems exist; every interaction must be exceptional to compete.
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9:33
Save time, save money, make money ROI framework Three-pillar approach to proving value: reduce admin, avoid hiring, enable next-best-action selling.
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16:33
Centralized AI vs rep vibe coding Centralized ops team builds standardized solutions; reps should focus on selling, not tool-building.
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28:19
Foundational data layer and processes Clean data, dialed-in processes, and documentation enable AI context layers and scaling.
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30:59
Call transcription and Attention integration Attention captures call transcripts and auto-updates Salesforce; feeds golden and rotten deal signals.
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37:40
Account planning with AI-generated discussion guides Quarterly internal calls for every account; Attention creates plan and surfaces key discussion topics.
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41:24
RFP completion in under one hour Custom agent connects to production systems and internal knowledge; reduces multi-day cycle to 60 minutes.
The lines worth sharing
With enterprise, you're trying to accomplish a lot more depth in terms of how do we actually make sure that we're always presenting our best foot forward for every customer interaction.
Jeremy Von Halle · 3:06
People like to buy from people. It's not about having everything be automated, but about removing unwanted administrative things and bringing back the humanity of sales.
Jeremy Von Halle · 3:47
When you go and look in Salesforce and you see a demo happened with no follow up or follow through, you're leaving money on the table.
Jeremy Von Halle · 6:01
I don't think reps want a million different ways to do something. They want here is the best way we've decided to execute the job to be done.
Jeremy Von Halle · 20:11
Common questions from this episode
How does Abridge use AI in enterprise sales differently than SMB sales?
Abridge focuses on depth, not breadth. With only 300 potential health system customers, every interaction must be exceptional. AI preps reps with deep research, account intelligence, and deal risk detection to maximize the value of limited customer touchpoints.
What is Abridge's ROI framework for enterprise AI sales tools with an 18-month sales cycle?
The framework is save time, save money, make money. First, reduce admin burden so reps can spend more time with customers. Second, avoid hiring additional people through tool automation. Third, build toward next-best-action selling that drives revenue.
Why does Abridge build AI tools centrally in Salesforce instead of letting reps use Claude or tools individually?
Centralized builds ensure standardization, consistency, and scalability. Reps focus on selling; ops teams build the tools. Individual reps vibe coding solutions creates brand inconsistency, duplication, and puts burden on frontline to fix tools instead of selling.
What is Archie, and how does it work in Abridge's sales process?
Archie is an internal AI agent living in Salesforce and Slack that reps use to request prep docs, forecast prep sheets, and demo materials. It draws context from Salesforce data and can kick off agent workflows while staying within data governance and security controls.
How does Abridge reduce RFP completion time from days to under one hour?
A custom-built agent connects to production systems, internal code bases, and knowledge repositories. It understands feature adoption, current deployments, and company positioning, then generates 90%-complete RFPs that a human reviews before sending to the customer.
How does Attention help Abridge with account planning and call intelligence?
Attention transcribes all customer calls and generates quarterly account plans automatically. It surfaces engagement by persona, captures golden events (wins) and rotten events (risks), and routes insights into Slack for easy team access.
SEO meta description
Jeremy Von Halle on how Abridge built an AI-powered enterprise sales engine for 300 health systems with centralized AI tools, call intelligence, and depth-first account engagement.
Target keywords
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enterprise sales AI
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Read the full transcript · 62 KB · Jeremy Von Halle
EDDIE0:04Welcome to Go to Market. In this podcast, we share tangible, actionable playbooks from the trenches working as go to market strategy and rev ops consultants for our clients here at Union Square. Consulting and candid conversations with revenue leaders in the market that have been there. Now let's get into it.
EDDIE0:23All right. Today we are going to talk about how a bridge transformed their enterprise sales team with AI and how you're continuing to do so
EDDIE0:32today. My special guest is Jeremy Von Holly. Oh, man, did I Bosch that.
JEREMY0:38Now, you crushed it. So good. All right. I'm so glad to cover that. I'm so glad we covered that two minutes before this call.
EDDIE0:44Yeah, man, we've been talking so much, and it's like I just 30s to ask you how to pronounce your name.
EDDIE0:49Jeremy's the VP of Rev ops and chief of staff
EDDIE0:52chief commercial officer at a bridge, an AI health care platform, and a very exciting one at that. He joined when they had less than $5 million in AR, and now have well over 200,000,000
EDDIE1:032024, and has spent the last two years building rev ops inside one of the fastest growing AI companies in healthcare.
EDDIE1:10They raised a $250 million series D in February of 2025, and then $300 million more in their series a E from A16 Z just four months later, nearly doubling their valuation to $5.3 billion. So this is a company operating at serious scale, and we've had a few guests on our show from other really exciting companies that have shared how they've used AI to revolutionize more SMB transactional sales, like Kyle Norton talking to us about how to sell to single restaurants.
EDDIE1:44And today we're going to talk about the opposite end of the spectrum, how we're using AI or not we, but how they at a bridge are using AI to transform their go to market with enterprise sales. And I'm really excited to dive into this and compare and contrast what we've had on other episodes. So without further ado, Jeremy, thanks for joining us today.
JEREMY2:03Thanks so much for having me. That pleasure to be here. Yeah.
EDDIE2:07So I want to start with the why. And I also want to preface this for our audience. So we're going to talk high level about why you're doing this, what you're doing, what your goals are. And then we're going to dive into very specifics, which is new for this show, about the specific AI tools and AI agents that you're building a little bit high level about how you've architected them and the benefit that that's bringing to your sales team and possibly to other areas of go to market, like marketing or customer success.
EDDIE2:34So let me start with the why everybody wants to implement go to market AI everywhere. But what's the justification for it for you? Why has this been worth your time in the company's time to do all of this?
JEREMY2:48I think that's a great question. I think particularly when you sell into the enterprise space, and for us, we have a very finite market. We're selling it to health systems. There's so many there's only so many bites of the apple. So we want to be very intentional. I think there's a lot of different AI capabilities and functionality you can do, particularly SMB.
JEREMY3:06Let's talking about like scale from a breath perspective. But what we're trying to accomplish here is a lot more depth in terms of how do we actually make sure that we're always presenting our best foot forward for every customer interaction that we have? So for us, I think what that really means is like, how do we prep our frontline commercial folks and their managers to to nail every interaction?
JEREMY3:29So how do we make sure they're the most, well, perhaps most well researched that they understand what exactly need to accomplish and then understand how they could deliver the kind of best holistic, end to end customer experience throughout that, I think so often or not, people forget that, you know, this is the adage that people like to buy from people.
JEREMY3:47So it's not necessarily about having everything be automated, but just really teeing up and bringing back the humanity of sales and what that means to actually interact with customers by removing all of the unwanted administrative and kind of tedious things that they don't like to do anyway. So it's pulls them around for what salespeople are really great at doing in general.
JEREMY4:08Hopefully that makes sense.
EDDIE4:10I think it does. And, you know, one way that I think about this is in SMB, where, you know, virtually every salesperson starts, you're learning, you're not exactly sure what to do, and you have to do it at a very high volume. And so I think automation creates a really great opportunity to say, okay, how do we increase that volume?
EDDIE4:25How do we help them move faster and do more? And also how do we guide reps that maybe don't necessarily know exactly what they're doing on the right things to do with enterprise? It's the opposite. You have reps that have years or decades of experience. They know what they're doing, but what they're doing to win these big deals is oftentimes a serious amount of research and prep.
EDDIE4:45And on top of that, even for a wrap with 20 years of experience that's closed tens of millions of dollars of deals, they aren't perfect and they don't always remember the perfect thing to do. And so it seems that there's there's an opportunity to present them with reminders to say, here are the most important things to do in this deal.
EDDIE5:01And also, here's all this prep that the system has done for you to save you time and make you more effective.
JEREMY5:08Totally. And I think the other thing we forget about is that enterprise sales team sport. So it's really just the enterprise seller on the call. So it's also about giving the tools to that seller to really enable all the incredible support that we have, whether it be solution consultant, a clinician or someone else that's coming to that call to really Taylor and deliver the best experience to the customers that meets them where they're at.
JEREMY5:27So like we were talking about, you know, if you had a customer, how do we ensure that we ingest the prior calls that happened, really isolate to understand what their hopes and goals are for that conversation to really incredible prep doc for all the folks that are joining have that be executed and have a great process for executing the follow ups and next steps.
JEREMY5:45So there's constant forward momentum. I think the thing that like I appreciate the thing that is worst is when you go and look in Salesforce or whatever CRM and you know that someone had a demo and then you see no follow up or follow through, what happens? You're like, this can't happen. It's like you're just leaving money on the table.
JEREMY6:01So making sure that all of that kind of through line is connected, I think is really important.
EDDIE6:06I mean, you just struck a nerve. I mean, I inherited accounts from a good friend of mine at Salesforce, I think multiple times, and I can't tell you how many issues a great salesperson, but just didn't take a lot of notes. And
EDDIE6:17I can't tell you how many times I'd open up an account and it's like it's higher executive team.
EDDIE6:21And then there's just no notes I don't like. This is great. This is great. You met every sea level executive in the company, and there's no notes that I have to go by. This is over ten years ago. So we're going to talk about some of the things you've done to solve that problem. But before we do, I'd love to paint some context for the audience.
EDDIE6:36Could you tell
EDDIE6:36tell me a little bit more about your go to market? What are the main channels in ways that you get opportunities for your sales reps in the first place? And what's the good market team look like? Just like rough size. How many sales reps do you have? That kind of thing?
JEREMY6:48Yeah. So across our broader commercial organization, we have probably 200 people split amongst both the kind of sales department. But then also we've got an incredible post-sale team which we call partner experience, which consists of partner success, which is effectively an up level customer success function, clinical success and implementation, as well as support as well. So it's a fairly large organization from a seller perspective via roughly 40 sellers that cover the full the full market, with roughly 10 or 12 of them really focused on the the upmarket strategic accounts.
JEREMY7:26So that's grown significantly. Like we said when I joined, I think we had two sellers. And to partner success folks and I don't think anyone else. So it's been a really great journey to scale and try to figure out how we can create a best in class experience for our customers and their clinicians.
EDDIE7:42And what's the what are the main ways that you get opportunities to do that? How do you guys generate a pipeline?
JEREMY7:47So we are definitely very event driven. Generally we we host a couple of our own kind of tentpole events, which is really great to interact with both customers and prospects, as well as a lot of events throughout the country, both larger and smaller. We also find like healthcare is a very it's a very small. So people are jumping kind of between those different organizations and move.
JEREMY8:12So lots of referrals, word of mouth, other just like smaller industry events. We work with a couple different organizations that host, you know, more thought leadership related content. We do have a significant amount of inbound in fact, like for the like prior was a giant source of people coming to us, which was such a privilege. And I think for any person that has experienced the pain of not having that, you want to make sure every single inbound thing is taken without us care and I'll be anything just by the wayside.
JEREMY8:45We are continuing to stand up. So a more robust outbound motion, particularly as we spend to more business lines and buying groups as well.
EDDIE8:54Yeah. And I think on our prep call you mentioned ABM as well.
JEREMY8:57Correct. Yeah. Doing I seem like the evergreen like digital targeting but then also like a lot more bespoke regional or even just 1 to 1 structures as well.
EDDIE9:08Awesome. Super opal context. So I think we may have covered a little bit of this, but my biggest first question is just like what's the North Star? What is the main thing that you're trying to accomplish with the tools that we're about to dive into? And how do you view that? You shared a lot of context around this with me on our prep call.
EDDIE9:29So maybe if you want to just dive deeper on what you've already shared, I'd love to hear more of it.
JEREMY9:33Yeah. I mean, the way that I've always operated and the mandate I give to my broader ops team is like, it's first of all selling. And I you selling very broadly across all commercial functions is exceptionally hard. No surprise there. It's one of those things where you could do every single thing right and still get a no. So like for us, and the way that I internalize it, it's incumbent on us to provide the best selling experience, which can then in turn provide the best buying experience to our customers, because ultimately, that's a lot of the time where people choose to buy.
JEREMY10:06So what that means is, like the technologies, the tools, the processes that we enable need to be simple, intuitive, easy to execute. They need to really help folks save time and do the things that I think are most core to their function. And then ultimately, for both sellers, manage and upstream, give them the insights they need to be able to actually execute at a higher level.
JEREMY10:28So where should they be sending their time? What are the things that they need to think attention to? Where the the gaps that need to be kind of closing? I think those are kind of the core pillars that I focus on.
EDDIE10:40Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think you talked about sort of like saving time, translating into, you know, eventually generating revenue. You know, obviously if reps are spending less time on admin and they have better Intel, then they come to calls and meetings more prepared, potentially have an opportunity to do more of that sales activity and be more effective at the same time.
EDDIE11:01But with your sales cycle being an enterprise sales cycle, obviously it takes a long time to actually see the results of that, and so I'd love it if you just share with the audience, because I'm doing this question from crows all the time is like, when and how do I get an Y? And it's like, first of all, how do you define ROI?
EDDIE11:15Are we talking revenue? And if you've got like a two year sales cycle, it's going to take some time to see that, you know, that ROI. But you can also see leading indicators of that as well. I'd love to food share your perspective on that.
JEREMY11:26So sending some context I think Royal is important for any technology or any company is selling to another company. And one of the things that we've anchored on is just kind of through a arc, which is save time, save money, save lives from us to the health systems and the clinicians. And we've kind of adapted and borrowed that as which as I wish I could say that our go to market teams could could, I could help save lives.
JEREMY11:48I don't think that's the case. But the way that we've adapted that is really save time, save money, make money and that kind of arc. And we kind of have to earn the right to go upstream for that. So like you said, with the 18 month sales cycle. This is where I get really dubious when you hear people like, hey, they increase their close rate by 15 x in 30 days, I'm like, that just doesn't jive in terms of what actually is possible.
JEREMY12:10I think a lot of organizations to have spent in US included, like spent the last few months or maybe even a year understanding, like what you can do and that kind of changes. But like starting to get your bearings on, like, what are the things that are going to be most used for beneficial and what things that are can scale.
JEREMY12:27But for us like save times, this first pillar, how can we take off this administrative things that Tela shouldn't be doing and repurpose that to be able to spend more time to be able to? How can we increase that time spent with customers and less time filling out things in their CRM, less time having to generate a proposal to editing any type of document in terms of the save money piece, I think this is where we go into like our own kind of vendor and tech stack consolidation.
JEREMY12:53How could we avoid having to hire more people, because we can start to have tools and systems that either augment our own work. Our organization, for instance, doesn't have a traditional Salesforce admin. That's not something we need because we can live on other tools and things that can help do a lot of that for us. But like you said, for the kind of like longer term, it's like setting some of those building blocks.
JEREMY13:14If you're helping wrap, save time, if you're helping them for helping save money for the organization or creating them, be helping them be more efficient. I think we can start to really grasp other things and making more money. And for me, what that means is I think the Holy Grail. I think a lot of folks are actually trying to hit on as a next best action.
JEREMY13:33How could we be really pointed in terms of what is the next best thing a rep can do across the board to help get that customer to the place that we want them to?
EDDIE13:43Yeah. I mean, that's something that resonates with me a lot. I mean, I started my sales career.
EDDIE13:48Let's see. Do I count vacuum cleaners? I don't know, that was like before college, but I still had cars in college. And so I was literally selling on my feet. And you had all these things that were running through my head as I was trying to learn how to sell.
EDDIE13:59And I remember my, my manager grilling me. Did you ask this? Did you ask that? Did you ask that? Right. So fast forward many, many years and I'm at Salesforce and I open up the CRM and it's basically here's all the major questions that you need to ask right there in the opportunity field. Set. Right. And now with our with AI we have the opportunity to take that many steps further.
EDDIE14:19So like for example, when you do your prep doc, you're able to architect that in a way to say, we want to make sure that the AI asks all the right questions and gives all the right answers to our reps. So they come to the meeting prepared instead of having to ask themselves, or maybe look at a document or a Salesforce page layout and remind themselves, oh, these are all the things that I need to look for in my account research.
JEREMY14:42Totally. And I mean, especially at enterprise sales, one of the most embarrassing things you can do is continue to ask a question you already know the answer to. Like it just there's there are things that we need to do to show up and to level up how we capitalize on the valuable time that we get with these executives.
JEREMY14:57So, like, how do we again, make sure that anything that being very clear about what the meeting is for, number one like that should not be intentional and like the outcomes that we're trying to drive and inputs that lead to those outcomes. And how do we ensure that, like we're only focusing on the things that are really going to move the needle.
JEREMY15:12And then I think for us, one of the things that have been most helpful is to just really build that QA layer. So like have something that really starts to analyze these different interactions to understand, okay, what went as inspected or which are the things that we should flag for managers to be like, hey, just so you know, there's a call that didn't really meet the rubric that we have.
JEREMY15:32Like, you should take a look at it and see what we need to do differently and then start to drill up those same. So we can kind of continue to iterate for some of those components as well.
EDDIE15:39Cool. Yeah. And I think capturing data from calls is going to be one of the first things I ask about in a moment when we dive into things or dive into the specific tools. But the next place I want to go is just talking high level architecture. So you and I have talked to offline a lot about how do you scale this across such a large team.
EDDIE15:58And I think the thing that I'm running into is you see these posts on LinkedIn every single day of like, I replace my entire sales team with cloud code or whatever. And it's like, that's really cool that you have your entire go to market running on a laptop, because your organization does $250,000 a year in revenue. And yeah, this, that and the other.
EDDIE16:14And it's like, that's cool. That's that's great. Also, like I booked a bunch of meetings is not ROI, but you're you're operating at a different level, not just from a different revenue level, but also just like the size of team, you can't
EDDIE16:29you can't have stuff running on a laptop. Like tell me a little bit more. At least that's my opinion.
EDDIE16:33Feel free to disagree, but tell me a little bit about how you thought about architecting this.
JEREMY16:37It's I agree, and there's stuff that I'm still kind of reconciling with. But for us, I think some of the things that we needed to be true, particularly working healthcare, is, first of all, we need things to be very secure. We need things to be standard and things to be scalable. And ultimately we need things to be highly trustworthy.
JEREMY16:52So we need to have the proper guardrails and things that happen alongside it. I mean, if you go into a customer call and the prep is all like hosannas or something else, like that is where the history of the account is all messed up. That is a big risk. The other thing that I think I think a lot about is like, what is going to provide the best rep experience and help us get the adoption that we need.
JEREMY17:14I just, you know, I see a lot of people, hey, I'm doing all this stuff in cloud code is like, okay, but like how that's a very singular experience, like you said. Like, how do you actually make sure these things are all standard. So we decided to take a different approach. We are heavier users of cloud code, but we've started to embed a lot of that functionality within Salesforce itself, developing either custom components and things that we've all had developed, but also enabling a lot of the agent workflows to be kicked off either in Slack or Salesforce so that the execution could be monitored.
JEREMY17:45But also we can confirm that it's being like they're using our prompts and the context layer that we've developed over our Salesforce data. So it actually generates the way and gives them the information. That's correct. The way that manifests is we have a an agent called RG, which allows reps to ask any question about it. They can ask me about the chatbot lives and Salesforce lives in slack.
JEREMY18:07They can kick off any type of genetic workflows prep docs, forecast preps, demo prep sheets, anything like that from that. So that's been a very, very helpful thing. But I'm curious to you, it's like there's still a lot of power and having like the cloud desktop app or whatever going on, I just get worried that context matters. And when you're just in that section and can't see the visual, okay, here's the buying group are the different people.
JEREMY18:33Here's the different. Like how like I just want to make sure we're triangulating all information correctly.
EDDIE18:39Yeah. And I think it's a challenge that I'm constantly thinking about in my head. I mean, I spend a lot of my time just sitting inside of cloud, whether it's on the web browser or the desktop app. But when I think about how would I scale this across dozens or hundreds of reps? I like the way that you've architected things.
EDDIE18:57I mean, first of all, it's like I've kind of stopped believing that Salesforce needs to be the single source of truth for every data point in the organization. I've I've learned the hard way where that has its limits, especially with large data sets and data sets that are not necessarily like central to the sales process. But that being said, you know, you're obviously able to provision licenses to to salespeople and control that security, control what they can see.
EDDIE19:21And by extension, I imagine that when they're asking the AI, you're able to control what data they can access. They probably can't ask questions about things in Salesforce that they shouldn't be able to see. And that just seems like a much more scalable architecture to me than trying to figure out, like, how are we going to build this, where each rep is logging into Claude and trying to work inside a cloud, not to mention like the, you know, the protocols, like the prompts, this, that and the other output.
JEREMY19:48Like, I don't know if you've seen but we've, you know, reps will be like, hey, made this pricing proposal sheet. And like one looks completely janky in a different way. It just it's kind of undermines the brand and the experience that you're trying to do. If you leave too much of that to just whatever Claude decides. So I think having more agency and a point of view on how this should be like also reduces some of the decision fatigue that exists.
JEREMY20:11Like, I just haven't been believer. It's like I don't think reps want a million different ways to be able to do something they want. Here is the best way that we've decided to be able to execute the job to be done. And like, here you go. It's repeatable and it's less kind of like confusion in terms of what they actually need to do to continue to get on their way.
EDDIE20:28I think that that's another big thing for me. I mean, so I went from being a number one in a startup that sold a solution to private equity on top of the Salesforce platform to being a Salesforce A and the biggest difference that I saw was just taking like so much like thinking and mental work away for me when I transitioned from this startup to Salesforce, where Salesforce is just like, hey, you have a very narrow job to do, and that job is hard enough, and we've done everything else for you versus the startup where it felt like I had to figure out everything by myself.
EDDIE21:02Like, who do I call? What do I say to them? What is the messaging look like? I had to create the marketing materials myself. I mean, this is an extreme example because there was an like sales team of one. But I see this with so many companies, even quite sizable companies. And you know, the the comparison here, it's like you want salespeople doing what they do best, talking to customers and everything else that you can take off of their plate that doesn't require any thinking of, like, we've identified the right accounts for you to talk to.
EDDIE21:31We've done the prep for you. We here's what's resonated here are the use cases. Here are the stories. Here's everything that you need to walk into that meeting or get that meeting. That's a to me, like just such a game changer, not just from an organizational level, but from a sales perspective. It's also like, for me, if I was still looking for a job, it'd be the number one thing I'd be looking for if I wanted to, you know, risk half of my income on, on, on a company that I might work for.
JEREMY21:57I completely agree. And just going back to like thinking through, it's like there's certainly going to be a spectrum. And there certainly are some incredible sellers out there that are super AI build and have that muscle that they want to do. I just don't think that should be the expectation. Like, like I think we can work and enable with them and help innovate on ways that move us all forward.
JEREMY22:16But I think for like the if we're to think of it, to like that middle cohort, like just being like allowing them to leverage AI and the best ability that's simple and helps do their job well. I think it's the key. And getting people kind of into that middle bucket, I think is going to be the the opportunity of itself and helping folks get comfortable with that new workflow.
EDDIE22:36Well, this gets into the whole like centralized versus sort of organic AI build stuff. Like, like I mentioned, we had Colin Norton from owner on our podcast previously. He's put out a lot of content on on AI and go market. I don't know if you're familiar with him or his content, but he published something, an article that really resonated with me where he was talking about how do you compare the centralized approach of having a team or an engineering team or what have you, that is centralized, thinking about building solutions like those that you're sharing here on this podcast versus having like, for example, salespeople just vibe coding their own solutions across the org.
EDDIE23:10And he talks about the advantage of, of course, like salespeople or on the front lines. They know what the problems are, they're facing what they need. And if they can go into Claude code and vibe code a solution, that's cool. But I think he makes the argument, and I would certainly make the argument that you just can't compete like you're a sales rep with a very limited amount of time and very limited, limited technical prowess versus an entire team of people that are solely focused on this.
EDDIE23:35That team is going to build much better solutions, especially if they take feedback from the front line to develop those solutions.
JEREMY23:43And I think that's kind of what you just said on is like, I feel like that's more of a symptom of the frontline being disconnected from the ops team. Like, I think it's like such a privilege when your frontline will be like, hey, have this idea, like, what do you think about that? And then there's been enough trust and build up where, you know, there's they we can then deliver back like, hey, that's awesome.
JEREMY24:07Like, let's scope that out. The more you can kind of build that flywheel, the greater opportunity we have for collaboration, because some sellers are have some incredible ideas and they're only doing it because no one's listened to them or they don't feel like anyone will actually do it. How do we continue to drive those wins to help them feel like we're giving them, giving them the tools that will allow them to be more successful?
JEREMY24:27So I think it's like I always have found, like if you're not getting complaints or not getting people telling you to do things and you don't have a close enough relationship with the front line, it's like, I want to hear, warts and all, what they think, so you can collaborate and making it better.
RACHAEL24:43Quick pause. Everything we talk about on this show. Diagnosing go to market ops. Prioritizing projects for revenue. Impact processes. Metrics. Insights. Building a predictable go to market engine. We've built frameworks for all of it. They're free and undated on our website. Union square consulting frameworks. The link will also be in the show notes, so make sure you check that out.
RACHAEL25:06All right. Back to the episode.
EDDIE25:08All right. I'll ask one more high level question, and then we'll dive into the specific things that you're building. And that question is this how do you think about iteration? Because I can totally see a wrap going in and vibe coding an MVP. But then how many times do you have to iterate on that before you get it right?
EDDIE25:24And that to me seems like the biggest difference between what, you know, a team like yours can do and what a rep can do by themselves where the wrap is built, this MVP, but then it's broken, it's hallucinating, it's not doing this on the other. And it needs just be curious in your opinion on that.
JEREMY25:38Yeah I mean I think the way that we we've tried to architect our things is we know there's going to be a certain like 10% final mile. That would make it special. Like our goal is how do we get it to like 90% or 85% of the way there? I, I personally don't believe particularly enterprise sales like you can that you can avoid a human in the loop.
JEREMY25:58Like I do think that's really important. Like we can't risk something going out that ultimately we don't feel comfortable putting your name behind. So I think for us it's like, how do we take on as much as we can upstream to get it to that final step? Or they just doing small tweaks? So the way that we've done it is that there's an output is very standardized, very structured, and there's an ability within the interface to be like, okay, what do you want to change about this?
JEREMY26:23And it can make some tweaks. But ultimately, like, you know, we're looking for like 1 or 1 revision or so I know for ourselves. Like even what a bridge does is ultimately we're trying to have an effort reduction of doing it by 80, 90%. So how do we reduce the effort to actually complete something significantly if we're going through 15, 20, 30 revisions?
JEREMY26:45That's just not very helpful.
EDDIE26:48Well, I meant more 15, 20, 30 revisions of the actual like AI solution or AI agent. Oh.
JEREMY26:55Like for actually putting it together. Oh, I mean, yeah.
EDDIE26:58Versus like a rep that builds something over the weekend. How do you contrast that to like what your team has built and how much effort it took you to get it to where it needs to be?
JEREMY27:07I mean, I think there's some sausage making that like the like, I think there's a certain amount of sausage making internally that we need to pressure test. So like when I'm building something, I'm going through a ton of different iterations to try to get it and dial in. I think the way that we approach is to have some like sales channels, like sales tax champions, that we could deploy certain things for who we feel confident will give us the right feedback before we just like hard for it, get some signal and things they would want, or get some feedback on what things that they feel like are must have.
JEREMY27:35And then we would sequence it that way. But like I do feel like, you know, our teams need to become way better at like quickly iterating, quickly figuring out like, but before you like put the you don't want to put the onus on the front line to figure out your own shit, if that makes sense. Like, I don't want to burden them to like, fix a product that I just need to think through more.
JEREMY27:59So I try to make sure that we take on as much of the sausage making as possible.
EDDIE28:04Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. All right, let's dive into it. I've got a whole list of things that you have shared with me that you've built, that I can go through. And
EDDIE28:13I was going to ask you which one you wanted to lead with. But actually, what I want to lead with is the foundational data layer.
EDDIE28:19Tell me if you disagree, but my feeling on all go to market, especially AI, is that we have to have the foundation in place. We have to have our processes defined. We have to have our data structured. We've got to have our systems put together in a way that supports building on top of that. So I'll stop there and I'll ask if you disagree.
JEREMY28:39I mean, I think that's the biggest key is like a is not going to fix like broken internal processes, like asking to fix like a I mean, it can help, but it's not going to fix like broken data layer. Are you going to continue to find things around that? I and I don't take this for granted like at all, but the privilege of joining a company really early is that I had to have a I had a great opportunity to build the tech stack basically from the ground up.
JEREMY29:02And I've spent many years having to drink and sign stuff. But the, the I feel so grateful that would be able to build in a way that I feel like has given us an edge here where our data super clean or as it possibly can be. But we've got pretty dialed in processes and documentation, everything else which helps significantly, particularly as you start to build that out, because then the context layer on top of it makes kind of the magic happen.
EDDIE29:26So how have you built that like foundational data layer like first like what are just the the basic non. I tools and things that you've done to sort of like build out that data layer and then have you used AI to make that data even richer and better.
JEREMY29:40Yeah. Salesforce as our CRM lot lot. Most of the data lives in that layer. We use tray as a lot of our orchestration and helping connect some of the other systems to make sure that it's all connected. You know, I think from there we've been able to build like certain skills and contacts on top of it to make sure that this is what was the challenge is that there's like jargon and things about how people say something.
JEREMY30:05So someone's like, hey, what's my RR? For this particular account, we need to make sure that the answer is like repeatable. And it doesn't get like crazy different variances or who's the rep for this? If they're saying rep, what does that mean? As I connect to the right field, like there's just certain things in terms of how people discuss in sales and then go to market that we had to like, really make sure we dial it in so that the answers that we're getting were actually successful.
JEREMY30:28And that took a little bit. We still find a good thing that's that's not quite right or what happened. And part of that's like allowing that feedback loop. So for all of our responses there's like an outbreak thumbs up thumbs down with the comment box. So people see some that we can continue to dial in and see what happens.
JEREMY30:44But it's a it's a never ending process, I will say as well as businesses get more complex, it's one thing you have to continue to pay attention to.
EDDIE30:52And you guys are recording all your calls and translating those transcripts into actual Salesforce Fields and opportunity updates.
JEREMY30:59Yeah, I we are we use attention who've been great partners for us. I think they've had functionality way before others in terms of the robustness of both their AI layer, but also access to their MCP. And it's allowed us to do some incredible things, both the gas and the automation. But like for us, like one of the basic consumers of that is actually a product team and our commercial insights team, which use it to aggregate way more micro themes in terms of what we're saying and objections things and how that is stilled and then routed to the appropriate channel within slack and things like that.
JEREMY31:34So it's been a huge game changer for us. But I also think for an engagement perspective, we can see break down that call. Like who was on it, like most individual like persona themes on that. So I think that's something that has been very helpful for us. Build it, tease out like, okay, do we actually have engagement for this one person because they're on a call or they're but like, are they saying anything?
JEREMY31:58Is it and what are they asking for is a nice kind of delineation.
EDDIE32:03And then I imagine you're also capturing emails and somehow translating that into lots of different things, including Salesforce Fields.
JEREMY32:10Yeah, emails. You know, the I mean, part of this is like we I think we use we flow for a lot of our email capture to make that memorialize and events as well. And then we're also capturing other what we call like either golden events or rotten events. So rotten events are things like they mentioned, a competitor or their champion turned over things like that that helps cycle or like or golden events or it's like, hey, they, you know, greenlit this thing, or they're going to do a case study or an announcement, things that we can help calibrate from a sentiment perspective as well.
EDDIE32:46And then when you just think about, like the number of accounts you're going after, I think you shared with me on the prep call like it's just in the hundreds, right? You're not even going after thousands of accounts from a sales perspective.
JEREMY32:55Yeah. From like an enterprise
JEREMY32:57perspective, like health care system. There's only only 300. And so total large health systems, obviously there's a very long tail and folks that we're privilege to serve there. But when you look at the entire market from the upmarket, larger health system approach, there's you have to put the up 300 or so.
EDDIE33:11And are using just basic tools like zoom info to or proprietary or sorry, not proprietary, but industry specific tools to get those 300 or using other tools to enrich the data.
JEREMY33:22But then a combination of like other waterfall enrichment too, from, you know, we try to prioritize, like hearing it from the health system themselves. So we kind of have some logic in terms of which things to actually use and then try to make sure, like I think like we were talking about like dialing in the kind of efficacy of your data, I think, so important, and I think we're talking about this too, is like, if you're a healthcare leader right now, sorry, if you're a red ops leader right now in this day and age and your data is still jacked up, like you have to question like a lot about yourself, particularly with all the
JEREMY33:53amazing tools and technologies we have today. Like it just there's there's no there's no really good reason for that anymore. It's it's crazy to me when I hear that.
EDDIE34:03It's interesting because I actually have the opposite view on that. And the reason, the reason for this is just because when I worked at Salesforce, certain aspects of our data were just an absolute dumpster fire, right? And it was frustrating. But then I looked at it and I was like, is this really impacting revenue? It's like, for example, like Salesforce, I think like had accounts pretty dialed in, but then like you'd have like 8 million contacts.
EDDIE34:25Now, I wasn't on the marketing team. So I don't know how that having like seven different like contacts for you specifically might affect marketing. But on the sales side, it felt like this is annoying and this is a mess. But of all the things that Salesforce could be doing right now to drive revenue, is this the number one thing that needs to be fixed?
EDDIE34:44And so the way I tend to think about this is because I've struggled a lot of times with clients or prospects that come to us and say, like, we need to clean up our account hierarchies, or we need to clean up all of our data or contacts, etc. and just like, okay, but look, what's the priority? Is the priority that you want to generate more pipeline and close more pipeline via an outbound motion?
EDDIE35:02If so, what specifically do we need to do with outbound in order to achieve those goals? And then if that necessitates going and cleaning up all the contacts and Salesforce, then so be it. But if not, I don't want to waste an ounce of energy trying to fix that problem that's not inhibiting us from reaching our goals.
JEREMY35:20I mean, I, I think that there's like within each of those objects, like cleanup stuff, like, sure. I don't think that does. But I think like the how you would actually execute go to market at scale if your data is jacked up, like you can't reasonably pull an account list with and be able to sort down by the core persona that you need for a particular campaign, you're not going to be as successful if you can't hold reps accountable for saying, hey, this is your account patch.
JEREMY35:44And like, here's the core people that are like that you need to be able to focus on within that territory. I think that we're also not setting them up for success or holding them accountable to making sure that they prospected it appropriately, like your data is a mess. And we know that like some of these, some of these motions are super core to success.
JEREMY36:01And like, you know, we're what, like how do we even create the right visibility or accountability for it?
EDDIE36:08Yeah, that's absolutely valid. I also think it just kind of depends on where you're at in your journey, like you've had a long time to to perfect your go to market and where times sometimes coming into a situation where things are pretty messed up and we got to choose our battles and figure out what to fix first.
JEREMY36:21Yeah. And I don't think it's like, hey, this is your peas, your, you know, thing. But I think given the fact that we have all these AI tools and stuff and you're still complaining about your data, like you can go like it should be something you could figure out pretty quickly. Like it shouldn't take months and months to fix anymore, like it did before.
JEREMY36:37Like you should be able to accelerate and fix it sooner.
EDDIE36:39Yeah. Awesome. So the next place I want to go with this is just diving into some of these other specific tools you mentioned attention and Webflow. Which tool do you want to dive into next? I've got a whole list here, but like what are you most excited about right now?
JEREMY36:55Yeah, I think, you know, I, you know, Trey's been a huge help to us to, in terms of helping us build like an appropriate Salesforce MCP that layers in the proper context. But I think, like what we've been really excited about is just like, how do we actually start to leverage these tools to building things that help the frontline?
JEREMY37:15So some examples of things that we're doing, you know, I think account planning get a bad name. I for one thing, account planning is really important, particularly at enterprise level, to help uncover and align teams. I think account planning can could be the bane of a lot of folks existence. It feels like busy work, the way that we've tried to bring this into a more productive era is by leveraging attention for internal calls.
JEREMY37:40So what we'll do is we'll tee up like each quarter, like, here's the account planning deck. It's almost like a discussion kind of guide amongst our partner success, our sales and other kind of organizations to guide a conversation about. They can't what are they doing? Well, what are the things that need to improve on? Where are the risk?
JEREMY37:57What are the things opportunity discussion. And then all of the.
EDDIE38:00This is an existing customer.
JEREMY38:02This is an existing customer or even a prospect to sometimes for existing customer. We do this for across every single one of our customers every single quarter. And then what we'll do is at the end of the conversation, attention will take that entire thing, generate the account, plan appropriately, call everything out and document it within Salesforce, which then helps us then be able to aggregate all of those insights across every single one of our customers.
JEREMY38:24What do we think are the things that are blocking growth and retention? How does that change by the different segment? Are there anything that you change this quarter than last quarter creates a really rich data set with a lot of really both quantitative and qualitative insights, while also facilitating more discussion instead of people just typing something. At the end of the day, that's been a really cool win that we've been able to do, leveraging attention.
EDDIE38:47That's really cool. Are you using AI in any way to prep for that meeting?
JEREMY38:52Yeah, basically. Basically the entire prep is created like essentially a prep generated, meaning the discussion with the guide. So people like they're looking at things that make sense, like how is their adoption of their usage, what's going on, anything that's happened, what competitors that are using. So it takes on like the stuff that you might be doing if you didn't have that, like, okay, let's call.
JEREMY39:13So this accounts using what competitors are there again and takes away all of that, but hopefully focuses on the things that are actually going to drive the account forward and become healthier by us discussing what are the plays and things that we could do to to drive greater impact?
EDDIE39:26They're great. I want to dive into this one one. One more, click more. Where do you get all the data? Obviously Salesforce. Where else are you getting data to inform that discussion?
JEREMY39:37Yeah, I mean Salesforce, our own calls and things and to like for us like the what I have always try to to to do is build your own proprietary data set. So is a part of the sales process and other things. The discovery questions we force like essentially gating of things be able to collect information which the vendor stack look like, like anything that's really important to your business that you can't by or just can't buy with a reasonable level of fidelity that can also be auto uploaded based on different workflows and things to attention.
JEREMY40:07But we also use Definitive Health Care as an example, which is like very healthcare specific, but a lot of it comes from kind of a triangulation of our own data or supported by other third parties.
EDDIE40:21And do you have anything where you just have claw going and like researching the website or looking for news updates or anything like that?
JEREMY40:28Yeah, I mean, so we have something that runs every single morning across every one of our 300 accounts, and it puts a slack kind of into slack. And it basically threads. I hear the latest updates on any account that's hit with the links to different articles that people can do in the tags, the sales rep and the partner success rep about that too, which is just nice to stay on top of it.
JEREMY40:48We can't be surprised if anything come out that way.
EDDIE40:52Awesome. I think another thing that you mentioned in one of our prep calls was RFPs.
JEREMY40:58Yeah, it we have, you know, a RFP or five could be super gnarly because it could be really long. The the team that kind of restructured. And this is where you get into this like build versus by. We used a partner initially when we didn't really have the internal capabilities to have public celebrate it. That customer, we started to realize and this is kind of where it's like build by and pilot against them.
JEREMY41:24Even when you did buy them. It's kind of this new kind of evergreen thing that's going to be happening. But our director Systems consulting on Get rebuilt that tool internally, and it's just been a fantastic because first of all, the tool can connect to a lot of our production systems and understanding where things are at today. A lot of our internal knowledge and kind of walk through the entire end to end completion of a RFP.
JEREMY41:50I think it might used to take a couple of days to complete and now has gone in in under an hour in terms of being able to get it into at least 90% fidelity, and also designed in a way that actually looks really nice to, which is awesome. Nice.
EDDIE42:05That's cool. And then you still have like a human in the loop reviewing it before it.
JEREMY42:08Goes out. Yeah. We don't want to take anything to chance that way. So everything gets reviewed by a human.
EDDIE42:14What's the basic tech stack and data sources that you're using for that solution?
JEREMY42:19Yeah, that actually piggyback on some of our internal systems and how we because there is some engineers. And this is what's also nice, working at a native company, as you see folks on the engineering side doing really cool things. So they actually had built this agent that folks use that help either source problems or write code or anything else.
JEREMY42:39So we actually piggyback off of that, knowing that we would then, because of that agent itself, knows what's in the code base. They know what features are live. It knows so much. So either good idea is like, actually, this thing is way more powerful than anything we can give it. It's way more powerful than us, just, you know, giving it a notion database of what our like feature sets are.
JEREMY42:57It's just like actually knows what's been my use, like how adopted it is or whatever else. So you started to work with the engineer who built that to modify our own version, that output more RFI sales centric collateral and content. Cool.
EDDIE43:15What next? What should we talk about next? Do you want to talk about like forecasting? Yeah,
JEREMY43:23Forecasting also could be something that is challenging a lot of folks. What we did before people by other off the shelf tools and things for us. I think our kind of mandate is we've been leveraging really only forecast module through Salesforce, but then started to build our own components over it to look at how is the forecast changing core over quarter it?
JEREMY43:49We've got some additional views there. But what we did specifically for this is to try to empower the frontline managers who were responsible for rolling up their forecast with the view that they can do so. We have an agenda workflow that managers use before their forecast meeting that I'll go through all of their reps book of businesses, call it the ones, particularly in the forecast, where there might be an additional risk where things that they might not have been on calls.
JEREMY44:13I think when managers are on calls, they know, but there's a lot of things that are happening. So kind of calling out attention to things that they should be paying attention to that might not have things that they could pull in or pull out. But I think and even in sales before, like, how awkward is it when you're in your forecast call and your your VP is like, okay, I bought this account and you're like, I don't I don't really know.
JEREMY44:34Like that never happens because we're able to prep them and make sure that they feel empowered. They've got the kind of full breadth of information that's going to happen within their forecast call. And I think ultimately make sure that sales managers feel like they have a better handle on their book of business.
EDDIE44:48And how do you do that? I mean, again, like without getting too deep in the weeds on the architecture, like what tools are you using and how have you architected it to look at the opportunities and identify specific signals that might, for example, present a risk in a deal?
JEREMY45:01Yeah for sure. So it's looking we have a couple of like our own kind of risk scores that we've developed that looks at in terms of fragging some stuff, but it also comes all of the calls within each of those opportunities to understand anything that's happened in terms of what's happened or the absence of calls or things don't like, haven't moved.
JEREMY45:21We benchmark progress on sales stage progression contracting signals to you in terms of where we should expect it to be, and then any type of like word of mouth, like I guess from the horse's mouth, like, did the person raise a flag about something happening or anything else that was important? So a lot of it just comes from the data that we've been able to embed within sales, conversational data, all of our email data on kind of like holistic benchmarks against that particular segment as well.
JEREMY45:51The architecture itself is a combination of just obviously, I think that's a combination of Trey and Claude code, with managed agents being a huge component of that, because that's allows us to host everything in the cloud in terms of being able to execute some of the work flows at scale.
EDDIE46:13Yeah. That brings up another question that I'm curious about, like beyond Salesforce, like where, where and how do you store a lot of the data that's powering all of these things?
JEREMY46:24We have we have data that's in a data warehouse. We've got a few other tools that we can connect to as well. But I think for us, we've been able to create the right ETL and reverse ETL layer and into Salesforce, where we can get a lot of the summary information, like, obviously, we're not using Salesforce Data Warehouse, but we can get some of the key information that would help drive things like customer health or adoption or usage into that.
JEREMY46:50So it becomes a lot more simple for us to run things on top of it.
EDDIE46:56And you mentioned notion, do you guys use that for anything?
JEREMY46:59Yeah, we use notion for a lot. That's connected to. I think for me, some of the things that I'm there's some of the things that I'm looking for in terms of next steps, which would be like, how do you make the note taking process more consistent across reps, like some people do, a notion some people do on their notepad?
JEREMY47:15Like just a lot of stuff just gets lost in the ether and there's really no consistency. I think folder structure is also one that's like top of mind. It's like, how do we make that more simple? Because I don't know if you've ever inherited account and you don't know like which pitch. Just a lot of stuff everywhere. I think there's some opportunity to make that a lot better notion for us has a lot of really great enabled materials.
JEREMY47:36We're thinking about how to use a lot of our positioning and battle cards, and surfacing that up more regularly to for contextual things.
JEREMY47:46And notion has a lot of like internal meeting doubts and things like that.
EDDIE47:51Okay. And so it's like ultimately your note taker.
JEREMY47:54For internal meetings, I mean, attention does almost all of our external calls.
EDDIE47:59But I mean, like when you have a rep that wants to just like take notes by hand. Like I have, for example, I don't know how many people do this anymore, but like I have all my calls recorded and I'm also always taking notes by hand at the same time. And we were using quip for that. And then they just like, killed that entire product.
EDDIE48:14So we're actually like out in the ether trying to figure out what to do next.
JEREMY48:18Like, what I would love to do is either you can certainly do notion, which we do. I also like want us to be able to just like a wrap, take a photo of their handwritten notes and then send it to Archie and then have it then upload and transcribe it somewhere. But this is where I was like, I don't think we've quite solved it.
JEREMY48:31Clip kind of did it. A few others like like how should and people take notes and just that's one of those things that are highly personal that like everyone's going to have their own preference. And I feel very like that's not what fun thing to try to mandate. It's like, here's how you're going to take notes. And it's like, I don't know if that's the best use of our time either necessarily.
EDDIE48:50It's it's interesting because I saw like I, I saw an example of this. So like I said, I worked at Salesforce as an AI. I've also sold alongside hundreds and hundreds of acres at Salesforce as a partner. And especially when they were like, really, you know, head first into quip, I would get these quip notes from AI's and I mean, like hundreds and hundreds of them, and they always follow the exact same format.
EDDIE49:14And so it's really interesting to see across like teams from New York to San Francisco, how they're asking the same questions and putting the same answers into their handwritten notes. Yeah. Which is really helpful for me. Like Casella with them, obviously.
JEREMY49:26Totally. That's where it's like I think there's some like last mile stuff of like, how do you get some of these? Like how do you get some of these notes and things that happen and some of the other contexts that just lives in people's spread out on people's desks between notepads and sticky notes?
EDDIE49:40Yeah. And it's also each person is going to be very different. Whereas like, I'm like, I have pages of notes after every meeting and other folks who have like 1 or 2 bullet points, and it's a highly personal thing. But anyway, we are running up on time. Jeremy, thank you so much for sharing all of this. This is the first time I've done a really technical discussion like this, and it was really fun for me, and I think it'll be really fun for the audience.
EDDIE50:03If people want to learn more about you, reach out to you. Where can they find you?
JEREMY50:07Yeah, I not the biggest poster on LinkedIn, but certainly will respond to DMs or anything else. But we are always happy to share and to collaborate and would love to have folks to to push the envelope with us and help our help our sellers execute what they need to do.
EDDIE50:24Very cool. Well, thanks for joining me today.
JEREMY50:26Thanks so much. ID appreciate it.
EDDIE50:29Thanks for listening to the episode. If this resonated. Please give us a five star rating and a follow. It helps us reach more people, and you get our latest and greatest content without having to search for it. And if you're looking for hands on help and go to market strategy and or rev ops, please reach out to us.
EDDIE50:43We help our clients with everything from annual planning to improving processes and go to market, implementing systems to support those processes and go to market AI. We're always happy to offer a free consultation to help you identify the best opportunities to improve your go to market engine, with or without our help. You can find us at Union Square consulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
