Steve Bussey, Co-Founder and CTO of Supered, talks all-things CRMs with RedMonk senior analyst Kate Holterhoff. They discuss the complexities of onboarding and user-friendliness in CRMs, the role of professional help in setting up and maintaining CRMs, the potential of AI in automating certain CRM processes, and the importance of privacy in CRM data. Steve also shares his journey from software engineer to co-founder and offers advice on finding mentors and fostering relationships.
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Transcript
Kate Holterhoff (00:12)
Hello and welcome to this Redmonk Conversation. My name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at Redmonk, and with me today is Steve Bussey, co-founder and CTO of Supered. He is an alumni of Salesloft, the second engineer in fact. He is also an Elixir wizard and author of the book, Real -Time Phoenix for the Pragmatic Programmer series. Steve, thank you so much for joining me on the MonkCast.
Steve Bussey (00:34)
Thank you, Kate. Happy to be here.
Kate Holterhoff (00:36)
Awesome. All right, so let’s start with some background. Tell me about your education, your employment history, and what drew you to the CRM space in the first place.
Steve Bussey (00:46)
Yeah, so I went to college, a little state school up in Pennsylvania called Chippensburg. And I was like really sure that I wanted to go and do like postgraduate studies of some sort. Like I had this idea in my head of like PhD would be so cool, right? And I started in my sophomore summer working for this web development agency up in Pennsylvania called WebFX and
It was like website builds and stuff like that. Sort of like the internet agency type of company. But at some point, the founder of that company came up to me and said, Hey, I have this idea for this like internal SaaS product that I want to build. And basically, this is project I want to give to you. And I have all these like big ideas for it. Let’s go make it happen. And we did that. And it was, it was actually really a really cool piece of software. It was sort of like Pardot and CallRail,
In hindsight like knowing what those products where I didn’t know what I had never heard of those products I was just like building things right and then one day I saw them and I was like, that’s what I’ve been building but I got this email one day from a customer that was like This product has helped me get more revenue and get more deals and I was able to get a like another family pet that we’ve been like budgeting for for a while, right and I was like, whoa, that’s actually really cool that
this thing that I built had some tangible effect on someone’s life outside of just like it helped them do their job, right? Cause you have people do their job, but what does that actually do for people, especially for business owners when doing your job better actually means like you can get paid more money or you know, you get promotions and stuff like that. And that’s, that’s actually the moment where I like flipped into this, like, I sort of want to build SaaS products,
I tabled the like postgraduate stuff because I was like, can actually really see myself doing this and enjoying this. and I was fortunate out of college to get the position at Salesloft. And I just, I really clicked with the co -founders and it was a small team at the time. Like it was like less than 10 people when I first interviewed. And of course, by the time you start and everything, and I did like an internship, there’s probably like 15 people, but, I really clicked there. And my,
From the beginning, was like, my goal is to learn a lot and like run my own company one day. Like that’s why I want to like, I want to like found a SaaS company. So everything I did, I sort of approached it from that angle, that level of ownership and that level of trying to grow personally through, you know, just through the everyday work that was doing. And I really enjoyed being there. I was there for like seven or eight years. So was obviously like I really enjoyed the company. And I
finally had a good opportunity to leave and start my own company like a year into the pandemic. And and so I did that and the first company didn’t go too well. We we’d never actually got any customers. So it was like, you know, a little bit of a failure in that front. However, as I got as I was leaving that company and I got intro to my current co -founder, Matt Bolian, and it was
through another company that’s sort of spinning off a software arm. So another co -founder, Brendan Tolleson as well. And I really clicked with them and they’re, they were in this HubSpot space. They were HubSpot solution partners, which is basically a HubSpot professional services company. That’s what they’re, they’re called solution partners. And, we basically went out and said, Hey, let’s start a SaaS company and use the things that y ‘all have learned in this space to create a SaaS product and we’ll see what happens. And,
Basically from there, we changed our product a little bit, but effectively what we were building is a way to do platform adoption. So adopting your CRM or adopting another tool. So a lot of times that means like documenting your processes. Like what is your sales process? Salespeople historically, it’s sort of like a joke almost of like they need a lot of hand holding, getting around the CRM and actually like updating things. And we have built a platform to help do that.
from a documentation standpoint, but then also applying actual enforcement on top of that so that you can make sure that these processes are being followed. And the sort of magic for us is that because we had the solution partner insight, we were actually able to build something that in particular is useful for solution partners. And that’s the bulk of our revenue today.
is from the solution partners and they’re using Supered to build their business to do delivery of their professional services to their HubSpot customers. And the reason they can do that is there’s actually a lot of overlap between a CRM professional services company and say a RevOps admin because effectively they are outsourced RevOps admins. And so they have a lot of the same types of problems. They have to do trainings. They have to do making sure people are actually using the CRM properly and that’s where we can help them out.
Kate Holterhoff (05:30)
All right, so I love this description of your background because I think it really sets the scene for why I invited you on here to talk about CRMs with me because you have this intimate knowledge of some of the most important CRMs today, which is, of course, HubSpot and Salesforce. And so I think it would make sense for us to define some terms because I think we’re doing some inside baseball here. So what exactly what does Salesloft do?
Steve Bussey (05:55)
Can I start with defining CRM? Cause I think that’s also really important. And, and a lot of people, especially in the development space, I feel like they actually under appreciate what a CRM is, especially I’ll use like Salesforce as the classic example, right? Cause there’s like jokes about Salesforce in the developer community. And the thing that people don’t often realize is that the CRM is the codification of business.
Kate Holterhoff (05:58)
I love it. Let’s…
absolutely. Please.
Steve Bussey (06:19)
processes and in particular, anything in the business can be expressed in a CRM instance. You could take your dev process and maybe you wouldn’t want to do this, but you could put it in a CRM. You can do that for sales, of course. You do that for customer success, of course. You can do that for support. And so basically you can codify your business through your CRM. And Historically the trope is that
Well, that’s the system of record, meaning it’s almost like a database of your business, which I think it’s underselling it a little bit because it’s more than just a database. it is in particular with platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot. You can actually write custom code to do things for your, you know, to power your business processes. So it’s more than that. But then you have these things called system of actions, which is basically where do I go to actually do the work And that’s where Salesloft came in. This was in 2014.
the space was even though CRM was developed, it was still developing in this concept of like the system of action. And basically Salesloft is a place for people that are doing outbound or inbound, outreaching and letting them scale that process in their organization. So, you know, if you have two salespeople, it’s pretty easy to say, here’s our messaging, here’s how we’re going to structure our sales process.
It’s a little more difficult when you have 50, 100, 200, or you’re a scaling organization that’s adding like 10 people a month to your company And that’s where Salesloft comes in. And basically their whole thing is like for this role for, you know, for inbound and outbound communications to prospects, you can do everything through us and then we’ll sync back to your CRM. And that’s, where Salesloft I would say planted the flag and, and the space didn’t exist
when they started and the space is now called Sales Engagement Platform. So SEP is the acronym for that and it has taken off. mean Salesloft now. I mean, I don’t know what the revenue is. I haven’t been in the company for a few years. I would say probably easily over 200 million. It was 100 million when I left Outreach is another company that’s in that same space at, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of ARR. So this space has resonated with with sales teams.
Kate Holterhoff (08:36)
I agree with you that it’s hard to overstate how important this is. And you also mentioned RevOps, which is sort of an umbrella term. Can you talk at all about the relationship between CRMs and RevOps, or revenue operations?
Steve Bussey (08:47)
Yeah, so RevOps, revenue operations exactly. And also people may have heard sales operations in the past revenue operations is just casting a bigger umbrella if you will like making the department bigger, you know, in a larger org but but the but the general idea there is all right, codification of your business processes that sounds that sounds a little scary. Like there’s there’s some like work to do here and that
that there is work to do there, right? There’s work of maintaining that and getting it set up. And that’s where the revenue operations professionals come in, where they’re able to actually set up everything, get, you know, let’s say you’re sending up a new tool, making sure that that tool is talking properly to the other systems as a whole. And basically, they’re a supportive role for the sales team, for the customer success team, for these other roles in the organization, and a good RevOps person will,
bring back positive ROI to the organization just by improving these processes and, streamlining things for other people in the organization.
Kate Holterhoff (09:49)
And so just in terms of like what makes a CRM successful, I’m hoping we can talk about the future of CRMs here in a moment, but what does a CRM need to do? Like what is the bare minimum that a CRM does to help enable the sales folks at a company?
Steve Bussey (09:54)
Mm -hmm.
Yeah. you know, focusing on sales is good just because there’s so much stuff that you could focus on. So let’s focus on that, but you have to be able to express your deal process through that. all right. What is the process for reaching out to somebody for tracking them through the sales process, post -sale, how are we going to track them and track the life cycle of the customer then. And so you have this like base foundation of, people often think of CRM as like, you know,
database, a place with like tables and record views. And it is that in some respects, right? It’s like, we need to be able to store all the data that has happened in our sales process. And then we also need to be able to express the deal process that we want to have. And that might mean like custom coding, that might mean, you know, you’re able to actually use the things natively built into the CRM to fully express what you’re looking for. And that varies company to company. So it’s so hard to say, but like,
Generally, you know, obviously the native tools and a lot of these platforms are quite good where you don’t necessarily need to do custom development
Kate Holterhoff (11:10)
Now that we’ve established what it is that CRMs actually need to accomplish and are accomplishing today, what would you say is the state of CRMs? I mean, I’ve read a little bit about automation, a little bit about AI, I’m interested in your perspective here. you know, these systems uniquely exist at the intersection of business and technology, which, means that the end user is often less technical, but these systems are becoming, more more sophisticated. So I’m curious, what do you consider to be the most exciting technical innovations in this, customer management space?
And by that I mean like how is technology making nurturing and maintaining relationships with potential and current clients better?
Steve Bussey (11:44)
Yeah, that’s a great question. So just in general, as the space has matured, the platforms have gotten a lot better. And so oftentimes you can fully represent your processes in these platforms. However, sometimes you can’t. And so then you have like these like pivot points, right? Where, all right, do I just live with it? Do I customize it with like an internal
employee that’s able to actually manage the CRM for me. Do I outsource to a RevOps outsourcing company that that’s going to do this for me? Or do I maybe use like a purpose built CRM? And so I think one of one of the trends and this this will always this has always happened. But you do see this popping up more in the edges now are like what we call vertical specific CRMs. So let’s say that you’re like a roofing company, right? And
Alright, how many roofing companies can there be in actually a lot and how much money do they make a lot right? There’s actually a lot of business in that vertical and that’s just a very niche small vertical right and so. It’s feasible that you have these new platforms that pop up that are sort of you know the CRM 4X and so that is one of the trends that that happens is is you have these vertical specific. Buildouts that’s.
One thing that Supered is actually helping with, like one the things we talk about for our partners is helping them, be the experts in their niche and actually let them use HubSpot to do that using our platform to enable and empower the things that they’re doing. But you also have them popping up as standalone CRMs. Now, obviously the biggest thing with anything right now is AI. So it’s like, that is obviously,
making its way into the CRM space. And that’s making its way in the surrounding products, you know, products like Salesloft, but even, you know, products like the 2014 Salesloft, right? The, the, the, the small startups that are coming into the space are able to have compelling offerings, I think around AI, particularly around, like you often see this in like meeting software, is the big one, like Gong, this, this piece of software that does meeting intelligence, like really pop.
you know, popped up during the pandemic because now meetings were so much more important and doing AI things with the meetings was so important, right? And so I think you’ll just see more of that. I mean, there’s obviously like some hype to AI stuff where it’s not always, delivering the ROI that people hope it will. However, I do think that there’s a lot of good opportunity for it.
around the CRM space, mainly because again, the CRM is the codification of business processes. So if you’re looking to use AI to affect your business more holistically, like the CRM makes sense as a place to integrate AI versus, you know, like a point solution where like, well, I want to use AI to improve my, you know, very specifically my customer support processes. Well, that’s like one small thing that you can affect with it.
but you can also find other places to maybe have more holistic impacts. And I don’t know what the like, it’s still developing. So a lot of this is like, you, you, you’re seeing the announcements last year and this year, and I assume in the next year and then a year after that, who, like, it probably, it’s not a trend, so I don’t think it’s going to go away. but you’re definitely seeing people pick that up right now. I expect at HubSpot’s conferences in like a month.
and less than a month it’s this month and I expect that will be a big part of their announcements just because of course it will be.
Kate Holterhoff (15:33)
Of course it will be. I mean come on Steve, you don’t have a crystal ball you can’t see 10 years in the future and tell me with great certainty what’s going to be happening? I can’t believe it.
Steve Bussey (15:40)
I can tell you this, think, I mean, I truly do think this. I think fundamentally the role value proposition look and feel of the CRM is not going to change that much in 10 years. And it hasn’t changed that much. Like looking back 10 years ago, it’s more advanced. It’s more out of the box. It’s more integrated. Everything’s more integrated, but fundamentally, and it looks better, like the, you know, 2014 styles look very dated now compared to the to the new styles. But fundamentally, it’s sort of the same thing. And I think that will also be the case because it’s used to power businesses and the business like businesses themselves are not fundamentally changing how they operate. So I don’t think that the CRM will fundamentally change its appearance either.
Kate Holterhoff (16:30)
All right, I mean think that qualifies as a hot take. That’s good. Let’s hone in on the subject of data here, because I’m looking at Supered’s homepage and it says, have confidence in your HubSpot data. And it seems like the subject of data is one that’s just like essential to making CRMs work as well as they possibly can. So, one of the exciting things that I’m hearing about automation in CRMs is that with these enhanced capabilities, you’re able to make sense of vast amounts of data on customers and leads that in the past, analysts just weren’t able to do. So, are you seeing new capabilities in the analysis of customer management data that you are tracking or that maybe Supered is empowering users to leverage.
Steve Bussey (17:12)
Yeah, so that’s a great question. Where we sit on this equation today is on sort of the input of data. Because. You know they you know garbage in garbage out is one of the tropes of like data analysis and historically one of the sort of jokes about salespeople is that they don’t update the CRM or they don’t. They’re not recording the right things. It’s like it’s a true statement so it’s not just a joke but.
One of the things in, and this goes for any CRM, I think it’s the same, like not any, but like I know it’s the same for Salesforce. It’s definitely this way in HubSpot. Basically you can have, let’s say like a deal record that there’s something wrong with it. Like the salesperson hasn’t followed the process and you need like, ideally you want to fix that because your hypothesis as a sales leader is that by following this process, we’re going to close more revenue and we’re more likely to close a deal. So we want people to follow the process.
and, and we want them to record things along the way, not necessarily for data analysis. Like we want it to record it so that we have it for the future for ourselves, but by recording it, we know they’re following a process and there’s also potential when we have clean data that we can actually do data analysis on it. And the thing is like, you can come to that record to come into that deal record that has problems with it. And everything just looks fine. And it’s like,
As a salesperson, you would have no idea that there’s something wrong with your process or something wrong with how you’ve collected some data. And so what one of the features that we built to help empower this, and I’m excited to do more with it is basically we let, users of Supered define these rules. We call them process rules that are, you know, logic based rules for when something is not the way it should be. And you can then put messages in.
HubSpot page itself to say, Hey, your deal is three weeks from closing, but you don’t have a champion labeled contact and you don’t have, you haven’t had a stakeholder meeting in a week. Like there’s something wrong with this. Maybe you should evaluate, the deal and we let them define these rules and put them in the record page and other places. And the goal is that by showing the salesperson
like, there’s something wrong. Now they know that they should fix it. They know that it’s actually like that they don’t, it sort of is removing excuses to not fix it. It’s like, I didn’t know about that. It’s like, well, you didn’t know about it. Now let’s address like why it isn’t updated and make sure it gets updated correctly. Now on the other side, then you actually have to do something with that data. To be honest, I’m actually not fully clued in to like the different.
platforms that are coming up in this space, like analyzing your data holistically. I think a lot of the platforms that I see are telling you where there’s problems. Like that’s the idea of like a deal board or a zero board where you you know you have 10 problems with your deals. Let’s get that down to zero. But I’m not too clued into like what platforms are coming about for analyzing that data. I assume that there are some but I’m not I’m not too clued into that.
Kate Holterhoff (20:23)
Yeah, and that’s totally fine. I think what’s exciting about products like Supered is that it’s cleaning up the data for this later analysis, which is such an important part of BI tooling and any sort of analytics that folks in the RevOps space might want to look at before they make important decisions for the business itself. So yeah, so you’re doing good work. And I think what else is striking me about your characterization of what you do at Supered is that it sounds like documentation.
which at RedMonk we love talking docs. I have a humanities background, so explaining what it is that you did in a code base or just communicating across an organization I think is absolutely essential and something that maybe gets sidelined. And so I think it’s really cool that you’re saying, hey, documenting our process is actually essential to the business outcomes with HubSpot.
And so we’re going to enforce these rules and this is actually going to help everybody. This is actually going to make us run more smoothly and everyone’s going to be happier in the end.
Steve Bussey (21:22)
Yeah, exactly. just, I think this is cool about our documentation because this gets into like the problem with documentation. I think there’s two major problems. The first is I didn’t know that thing was documented. So there’s like the discovery of documentation, which is its own problem. Even for Supered, like you still have to think about that. And it’s, you know, there’s no magic that’s going to like perfectly give you the documentation exactly when you need it. It has to be sort of set up that way.
But then you also have like I don’t have time to document which is another problem. That’s probably the biggest blockers like You’re not even getting documentation written because people don’t people don’t view a lot of people don’t view themselves as good writers is one thing I’ve noticed like I’ve written two books now and So my second book just came out From Ruby to Elixir But thank you. Thank you. And every time I talk to people about writing a book They’ll be like, I’m not a good writer. I can never do that and
Kate Holterhoff (22:11)
Congratulations!
Steve Bussey (22:19)
I think a lot of people that’s like the up prevailing attitude is like not not being good writers, which I don’t necessarily buy. I I think it’s probably people are like hyperbolistic about that. But with Supered the sort of approach we take is I think this is really cool. You can. Tag like words on the page where documentation should be attached to and then little icons pop up next to that. So like let’s say I’m in Stripe and I’m doing a like
custom subscription set up for my customers. Like we have very specific things that we want. If you’re doing that, like there are specific things that are going to help you do it properly. And we have that documented in a card and we have that card attached to the word subscriptions inside of Stripe. And so there’s like a lightning bolt icon next to the word subscriptions that when you click it, it tells you information about how you should probably set up this custom subscription that is like why you’re on that page in the first place.
And that’s really impactful because it brings the documentation to the users of software rather than making the users of software go to the documentation because it just doesn’t people just don’t they’re not going to do it in that case unless they’re told to.
Kate Holterhoff (23:36)
That’s right. Yeah, make the right thing the easy thing, correct?
Steve Bussey (23:40)
Yep, exactly.
Kate Holterhoff (23:41)
Huh, yeah, that makes sense. I think it’s also interesting is, yeah, again, CRMs are in this sort of funny liminal space between tech and business and marketing and all these sort of things that aren’t considered within the sort of engineering space. And yet, we’re seeing sort of the need to communicate between these areas and also the same problems coming up, right? mean, documentation is something that I talk about with lot of engineering leaders, and yet here it is as something that we need to be talking about.
Steve Bussey (24:03)
Mm.
Kate Holterhoff (24:11)
all folks involved in the sales enablement process. So we’ve been tiptoeing around about sort of jokes around CRMs and, complaints that folks have and, I guess the issues that have sort of lingered for the past, 20 years since, Salesforce first introduced us to the SaaS world, right? And so one of the things that comes up again and again is that integrating
these CRMs with a number of outside apps is absolutely essential. And then also customization is something that folks want, but isn’t always easy to do. And so I’ve heard CRMs compared to German cars, which run great, but you need to have a very good mechanic in order to keep them working well, right? And so the idea is that you wanna make sure that you’re maintaining them so that they don’t become legacy, but you also wanna make sure that they are set up correctly. And so then that brings in all these problems of like onboarding,
and having the right skills set amongst users so that they can maintain it in a way and so that there isn’t just garbage in garbage out. And it sounds like Supered is really doing some good work in ensuring that things are running well. But I’m interested in this idea of integrations and customization and making sure that these things are maintained. Are there ways that CRMs are improving that? Is that part of the future of CRMs that instead
of making onboarding so challenging, right? There’s always this sort of ramp up process. If we think of like the success of Trailhead, which is Salesforce’s certification and badging program, which is a lot of fun. I’ve got it on my phone. I can’t say enough good stuff about it. But I think what it evidences is that you can’t just go into Salesforce and just use it, right? You have to understand things. The same thing with HubSpot. Is there any way that CRMs can make things a little bit more
Steve Bussey (25:53)
Mm -hmm. Yep.
Kate Holterhoff (26:02)
more user friendly so that there isn’t this huge ramp up so that users don’t come into a legacy CRM and say, my God, there’s all these things that are broken. And that they don’t need say a German mechanic to maintain their German cars. That they don’t need someone behind the scenes making sure that all the knobs are turned just so so that everything works so that there’s not dragons hiding in the glove box.
Steve Bussey (26:27)
Yeah, that’s a good question. There’ll probably be a hot take in this one too.
Kate Holterhoff (26:30)
good.
Steve Bussey (26:33)
I think there’s a, like part of the answer is picking the right base, platform has a big impact on that. I personally like am bought into the idea that HubSpot is an easier to use CRM than Salesforce is and that it generally gives you a better process out of the box in a way that you could just go in and use it if you were a small business. Now, should you? That’s another question, but can you? Yes.
So that gets into the next part of like, should you and and is it it should it be a goal that you should be able to or go in and just start using the CRM and you know, I think I think for like a like resource constrained business just going in using the CRM is what you should do like it’s better to have something and to better be tracking behavior and actions than not. However, once you actually get to the point where you’re having revenue and you’re having employees, I do think that
Making sure that you have everything set up the right way that you’re using it the correct way is important enough that professional help is often needed. And a lot of that is because if the CRM, if like my hypothesis is that the CRM is or my, my, my, my statement, I don’t think it’s a hypothesis. My statement is the CRM is the codification of business processes. Like you sort of do need some help, professional help at a point to be able to actually bring this to your users. Now,
Should you need continual professional help? Probably not. If you’re wanting to make changes to the process all the time and try new things, then yes. But generally, you should be able to set up for a point in time, like our process is X, here’s how we do it. there’s different ways of going about getting that done. In HubSpot ecosystem, and the people that we help support are the solution partners.
I do think that they bring a lot of value to the table because they’re able to bring their experience in and do all the things that need done for often reasonable costs in the grand scheme of things. I think that’s a good thing. It’s good to have that professional help. I don’t think that it’s going to get less confusing because I don’t think it’s like a technical problem. Like I don’t think it’s like, and
This is where people like developers, especially this is like one of my pet peeves. People be like, you know, Salesforce is built so bad and, HubSpot is built so bad and they’re so confusing and that, and then the, and you even see things like I’ll build my own CRM and you have like, you know, small CRMs that pop up and whatnot. And I think a lot of people get stuck in the same trap of thinking that it’s a technical problem and that someone is just messed up along the way and they can do better. And I just don’t think, I don’t think it’s a technical problem. I think it’s a.
process and people problem at the end of the day, which is not something that is going to become simpler over time. If anything, it’ll become more challenging because you have more tools, more integration and more settings because you know, the way you solve this problem is you make your platform more extensible by having settings and having custom integration options available to you. Like HubSpot just released within the last year, released their React platform where they’re basically saying
You can build react, you can write react components to modify the CRM behavior, which I think is a, is a good step for them in terms of front end integration. And they have more settings around how to do things. Right. that work, all that requires expertise to do. And so you extend your platform capabilities at the cost of needing expertise and, and, and you can remove that to some point, but also people want those features. People want the things that take expertise. And so I don’t think it’s going away.
Kate Holterhoff (30:22)
I love it. I especially enjoy the quips about HubSpot being one of the easier ones to use because that’s not always the stereotype. think folks, and of course the idea of rolling your own is one that comes up often. That someone’s like, this is just a big database. I can do better than this, right? And then they end up with this mess that ends up being passed along to later employees when they leave the company. So yes, absolutely. I think it’s interesting to think through the people problem issue.
as well, maybe especially in relationship to AI, because I think what a lot of folks are hoping for out of AI is to automate some of these people problems. Like don’t want to be doing these sort of data entry issues. Now I can just upload a spreadsheet and ChatGPT can do it for me. And maybe that’s a little bit what Salesforce’s Einstein is hoping to do, is automate some of these. I I know that they had some automated emails that they can write up for you.
instead of authoring a JIRA ticket, you can have AI write it for you. I these are some of the easy solutions. But maybe there’s, you we can go up a level and say maybe AI could handle some of these process issues as well so that humans are no longer, doing their own thing either through, you know, forgetting the processes that have been agreed upon by the organization, but also just, integrations and some of the maintenance things. I mean, maybe that’s where AI is going to really change the game.
Or not, I don’t know. Do you have a sense of whether AI could function at that level?
Steve Bussey (31:55)
think it can, especially at the data entry level, I don’t have to like sit down and think and wrap my head fully around that particular problem of like, if I was to fully automate that, like from a from systems perspective, what is the actual problem that I’m solving there? Like, do I have the data for it? Do I have the input?
Cause you know, some things are basic. Like you didn’t record who you’re in the meeting with. Well, that’s a soft problem because you’re, you know, that’s something that you can fully automate. But if it’s like, you are not following the process of getting stakeholder buy -in because it’s hard and because you think you don’t need it and because you’re in and you’re wrong probably. And then you’re going to wonder why your deal fell through and, you’re going to blame the customer when it was really, you didn’t do your work that you’re supposed to do, but like,
AI might be able to help you there in terms of like, Hey, we don’t see the signals that indicate that, that this deal is going to close. I don’t think they’re complicated signals. So I think like, don’t necessarily believe that AI is needed to do it, but let’s just say it is there like in the background running. I think that’s a place that it could, it could contribute to, but it’s not going to be like, Hey, let me go fix that for you. Right. Because again, that’s like, you didn’t loop people into your sales process, you know,
AI is not going do that for you. You have to do that work. and so I think it can, it can help solve certain things, but not everything. So you’ll see like more of the mundane tasks taken care of over time. Like that’s, I’m assuming that that’s what like, when you mentioned like uploading spreadsheet and having sort of like Einstein will take care of stuff related to that. I assume that it’s more of like mundane tasks, making sure that the, that the base level of data is, is, is clean and entered. but you can’t solve everything like
you know, if you’re a salesperson and you’ve been Slack DMing with your stakeholder or sending text messages and you’re just like, I’m just not going to enter this into the CRM because I don’t want to. like I don’t know that AI would help there. So that, some of it is like, it’s a mix of again, of like people and, and technical problems, but there are definitely technical problems that AI can help with integration wise. I would be surprised. I’m a
I’m not like a full skeptic of AI stuff, but I’m like a little bit of a skeptic and I would be surprised if AI came into place that makes it materially easier to integrate beyond just like answering questions like what API should I use to to connect this data together? But like the actual process of integration is often again, very business specific. So it’s like, all right.
We want, we want to work this way. We want these things synced and maybe AI will help somewhat there, but I’m again, I’ll just be a little surprised by it.
Kate Holterhoff (34:50)
Yeah, that skepticism is healthy, that’s fine. I’ve spoken to a few folks who are convinced that we’re gonna have AI at every level of the software development life cycle, and I am also like, really? I don’t know if we’re quite there yet. That seems a little bit far -fetched, but hey, you know, again, neither of us are time travelers and can say for sure, but there’s a lot of optimism about what it can actually accomplish. But I think a thing that we are seeing it do, which is sentiment analysis, kinda helps us segue to another thing that I wanna talk about in relation
Steve Bussey (35:07)
Yep
Kate Holterhoff (35:20)
to CRMs and some of the the integrations and the capabilities that it has. so, and that’s privacy. And I’m interested, how is it that these CRMs can help protect potential clients and customers’ privacy? And so what I mean by that is, if a company has a CRM and they want to use, yeah, so one of these automated sentiment analysis tools, or if they want to track using say cookies or some other sort of software, where
a potential customer is going online, where is the line in terms of maintaining the privacy of folks who CRM users are hoping to have become customers at some point? Is there a hard and fast way that we can decide what data should belong to the individual or company and what data is free to be leveraged in terms of sales?
Steve Bussey (36:17)
Hmm, that’s a tricky one. It’s very dependent on. It’s gonna be very regulation based, so which means it’s very dependent on where in the world. Obviously like Europe has a different level of regulation. I just remember like years ago. This is like hack College hackathon scene, right? So like 2013 I don’t even know. I was at a hackathon and one of the tools was like a database where. The central idea was.
users have to give permission to access the data itself. So it’s like they actually have the key to the data, if you will. And you, as the SaaS provider, actually don’t have the key to the data. You would not be able to see or access or change the data without their permission, right? And it was such a foreign concept to me because they were like, hey, this is to comply with regulations in the EU.
I wasn’t living in that world yet of like understanding what that meant. So it’s very foreign to me. Right. So I know that there’s like there’s often there can be big shocks between US based companies and EU based companies around what that looks like. Now I guess there’s questions around like should you know who does the data belong to what is allowed. I do feel that
If someone like everyone has the right to not be contacted by you, if you tell them to stop. that’s like always like, there’s like some base foundations of like, if, if someone actually like everyone needs the ability to opt out of something. now people don’t always make that easy, but I believe that that’s like a base thing that everyone should be able to do. they should be able to tell you like, you know, don’t contact me again. Don’t do X.
I don’t want this call recorded. I like don’t want this meeting transcribed whatever it might be. But at the same time you have some base things like let’s say like someone’s LinkedIn profile. It’s like all right. How are you reaching this when I was a Salesloft is one of big things that would happen. It’s like how are you reaching out to me. And it’s like well your email is your first name at company dot com. Right. So I don’t I don’t have a magic data source.
I just sent an email to there and I like and it was and your email server told me that it was a valid address right. And so there’s questions are like should sales teams reach out to those people right. If they got their email that way.
You know, I would say like, yes, I would say like that that was in like a healthy boundary to me of being acceptable. I think some people would say no, no one should ever reach out to anyone without consent. But those people, I don’t think that that’s a realistic worldview of like how does software get purchased? How do things get made? Often people that say things like that benefit from the system and are also able to wash their hands clean of it because they they’re in like the development world or they’re far enough away from it where they’re not doing it, but their company is or or the
the way that they’ve gotten their money is through systems like that. So I I approach it with like a degree of, like I do believe, I’m not like companies should be able to do whatever they want. At the same time, I think there is, like it’s acceptable to do things, like reaching out to people and keeping track of like if I start emailing you and we’re having a conversation, like I think it’s okay to be like, all I’m going to like.
keep records of this. think that that’s acceptable unless someone says like do not keep a record of this. Then you get into like all right what’s you maybe I like you shouldn’t do it then. Who does the data belong to. was I was saying like the data belongs to the company at the end of the day. Like not so like let’s say you’re on like a CRM right. I don’t think the CRM ever owns the data and I don’t think it most I don’t know of any of that would claim to. So it’s like the data is owned by the company and they’re responsible for that data.
There’ll be interesting questions as, as like regulation progresses over time of like, let’s say someone sends a no contact order to the CRM itself. And they’re like, I don’t want any of your users to ever contact me. Well, then I think, I think like that is a problem that will have to be solved via regulation like if that is the way that, you know, the legislation wants it to be, that would have to be like expressly dictated via the regulation because you get into questions like who does this data belong to?
Like if it’s not your data, do you have the ability to say like you can’t use it for this purpose or like you can’t use our platform to reach out to this person. But by even doing that, I have to acknowledge that they’ve given this like no contact order to you get into these like weird situations. I don’t think it’s like a cut and dry thing. Hopefully that’s not too rambly. I think it’s complicated. Like it’s not and it’s like I believe in like respecting what
like privacy’s people have and respecting the like legislation that’s out there. And I also think it’s very complicated.
Kate Holterhoff (41:14)
I appreciate the honesty and I would just say bold of you to assume that our legislators would get involved in any sort of regulation around technology.
Steve Bussey (41:20)
I don’t think our legislators would just be very clear. The legislators that have made it clear that they will get involved are EU legislators, right? And so US based companies often might just say, well, I ignore that and I don’t do anything with that. We have a lot of EU customers, so it’s like because the HubSpot ecosystem is is more EU centric than would be expected. And probably because like they do things that. That.
regulate well there so people like in that in those countries like use it because it’s easier to use from the right from the regulation perspective But yeah, he like EU is only going to do more so they like US will probably Not do anything like federally I would imagine but they will do things at the state level like you even see that with like California and and other states not just California so like California’s doing this thing, know the rest of the country’s not it’s like there’s like Eight or ten states that have all done things and they and they and I think that that will happen more
I don’t expect anything necessarily like federally, but I do think that EU will just get more and more over time. And then, you know, people will have to figure out how to adapt to those regulations.
Kate Holterhoff (42:33)
Yeah, all right, fair enough.
I have one last question and it has to do with being a co -founder. Supered isn’t your first company, but I, you know, we’ve known each other for a long time back when I was a front -end engineer. So I’m curious about this transition that you’ve made to, from a software engineer to a co -founder. And you mentioned in your bio that you always had this as an ambition, but I imagine that you have learned a lot of lessons along the way.
So I’m curious, what helped you to prepare for this shift and what lessons have you learned that might be extensible for other folks who want to do what you have?
Steve Bussey (43:15)
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I was very fortunate with Salesloft to have two people that I looked up to on the technical side. So they’re both co -founders, Rob Forman and Tim Dorr, and they’re very different and sort of the roles that they took in the company were very different. They’re both technical co -founders, but they sort of diverged path -wise around what they did. Right. And so on one side you had Tim, who was, I used to call him like a unicorn developer where
He could do back end front end design. He could do it all. And I tried to like when you have that type of person around just trying to like be in their sphere and do things. I would you know I would build things and send them to him for his thoughts around and then he would like sort of rip the front end apart a little bit and be like this is this is this would look a lot better if you did XYZ right and I’d get so mad I’d get so mad about it because I was like I spent all this time on it and all this stuff right but it’s like at the end of the day is like it doesn’t
You know, it didn’t look good. Like you’re still developing these skills. Here’s things that you can do. And over time, just by like practicing and having his input on things that helped me a lot. My, my goal there was I want to be able to build the entire platform myself, because if you’re looking at startups, historically, one of the largest expenses early is engineering headcount. like I think if with all the product that we have,
built, a lot of people look at that and they’re surprised to see that like two people built that. And now there’s a third, but it’s like they expect there to be 10 or 20 engineers simply because we’re able to use our experience to leverage a lot and build things quickly and well. they’ll be like, like, we get compliments on it. Like we’ve, we’ve, we’ve had a lot of success in the space, I think, because of this. So that was like having, having Tim there to learn from.
was really important to me because he helped me solidify that I that you can do the whole stack and there’s nothing wrong with doing the whole stack and you know sometimes people I talked to that are looking at doing full stack they’ll be like you know all right I’m thinking about this and I’m trying to decide back end or full stack or you know maybe moving in from the front end world and
I often tell them like you will get a stigma around full stack that you’re like not as good at either of them or something like that. I actually don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s like a healthy attitude either. So anyway, I think I think it is it’s important to be like you can do everything if you if you practice it and get good at it. And that was really important for me as I was developing my skills and having someone there. And then on the other side, the other co -founder, Rob Forman,
Over time, he sort of transitioned more into like the business sphere, if you will, around sort of like, like chief operations role. And, that was really inspiring to see because, and it’s important to say like Salesloft had a very good culture, a very intentional culture. some people might, you know, some, people are cynical things like that, but I can say like it’s possible to do well and.
I think that it was done well at Salesloft. A lot of that was because of Rob and Kyle, the other co -founder. But just having that person there to be like, all right, this is any, and Rob’s an investor in Supered and I meet with him frequently to ask about things. And so having that person that you can ask business related questions to or understand different business related things is really useful. So Rob was that for me. I was just.
It was very lucky. I feel very fortunate to have my first role out of college was a company that went from, I was there from zero to a two billion dollar exit. And the people that I met were very inspiring and very, people that I was able to learn from. And so I just like, I recognize that’s not possible for everyone. And I was very fortunate and very lucky. So I also acknowledge that.
Kate Holterhoff (47:21)
I love it. I think that’s a really good way of framing your personal journey, but also including some extensible lessons for other folks. And I think you have a lot of humility about this though, because I know how hard you have worked on this. And so I understand that grit has a lot to do with it. But yeah, to sort of summarize what I was hearing, it sounds like mentors are extremely important, fostering these relationships, making sure that you
ask questions when you have them and maintain these dialogues and folks want to help. I think it says a lot about you and your drive and your vision that you were able to take these these relationships that came to you maybe partially on luck but also on your abilities and then steer them towards doing something that you’ve been imagining doing since you were an undergrad.
Steve Bussey (48:04)
And I’ll give one like tangible, like actually tangible, because the other thing was sort of like find mentors and people you look up to, but like one tangible advice or a mentorship. A lot of people maybe don’t do this as well as they could. It like the best thing you can do in like the mentor relationship is when you ask for advice about something, then follow up with like, Hey, I tried X and here’s how it worked out for me. Right. Like,
give them that feedback back of like, I’m trying this out. I’m taking our lessons, applying them. Here’s what I learned from it. It worked. It didn’t work. it’s just a very small thing. Like just doing that check back on them, on the, on the conversation. but that, like that is what helps really build that mentor relationship. Cause they know, like if they’re, let’s say they’re mentoring 10 people, you might be the only person actually doing that. Like I think, I think it’s actually more rare than not that people do that.
And so that’s a way to like stand out and basically foster that relationship over time.
Kate Holterhoff (49:03)
Wow, yeah, that’s helpful. I like that. And I like that it…
transforms that relationship from just being a sort of, I’m taking what you have to give me to being more of a dialogue and cyclical then. like, we’re gonna iterate on this together. We’re gonna learn as a group. And take the lessons that I have suggested to you and see if they work in practice or work in your particular use case, right? I mean, the it depends situation is just kind of across the board, That, you know, you can’t avoid the fact that one little thing might change the outcome. So, yeah, okay. All right, so this has been such an exciting conversation. so I want to give you a moment to do any plugs that you might have. What sort of socials are you using these days so that folks can follow you and the work that you’re doing at Supered? And are you talking at any conferences this year or next?
Steve Bussey (49:32)
Mm
Yeah, so I’m mainly on two different I’m only on Twitter and LinkedIn. So I sort of keep all my like Supered stuff on LinkedIn just because the audiences are different between the two platforms for me. So LinkedIn, you know, people can search my name, Stephen Bussey. I’m not sure like I’m not sure how to best give like a LinkedIn page. Right. And I should probably have a better slug than I do because it’s like it’s like LinkedIn slash.
in slash Stephen Bussey software engineer or something like that. anyone can can connect with me on there. It’s helpful if you put a little note on that if you ever do that because I get a lot of connections that are very clearly bots and stuff. So and then on Twitter, which is where more of my tech audience is at, that’s Yoda with four O’s and four four A’s. There is a story behind that.
but that’s the Twitter handle I use. And that’s where I talk Elixir and just different tech things are sort of on that platform. And then Supered related things are more on LinkedIn.
Kate Holterhoff (50:58)
Amazing. All right, well, I will include those links in the show notes. I have really enjoyed speaking with you, Steve. We’re to have to have you come back on to talk more about Elixir and Phoenix on a later show. Again, my name is Kate Holterhoff, Senior Analyst at Redmonk. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, subscribe, and review the MonkCast on your podcast platform of choice. If you are watching us on YouTube, please like, subscribe, and engage with us in the comments.
Steve Bussey (51:01)
Perfect.
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