The Evolution of Sales Enablement in the Age of AI - Yega Kumarappan - Paperflite

Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier where you can find out what really works in B2B Marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. I'm Mike Maynard and today we're going to be talking about sales and development. Sales and development really got a lot of hype a few years ago and I think it's still important to make sure that salespeople are effective and have the right content. So I'm joined by Yager Kumarapran, who's the co-founder of Paperflight and he's going to tell us all about sales and development. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much, Mike. It's exciting to be here. Thank you so much for the introduction. It's great to have you on the podcast, Yager. I'm really interested. Can you tell us a little bit about your career and what were the reasons for you? To actually go and found Paperflight, what were the problems that drove you to do that? Well, I started my career as a developer, so I was sitting cold when I started my career. I switched into different responsibilities. I was running larger organizations, larger teams. I think it's the organization that I worked with where I spent most of my time. It was very entrepreneurial in nature. The kind of projects, the kind of responsibilities that I had. Before starting Paperflight or before founding Paperflight, I was heading technology product. I think it was this sort of New Yorker's heading technology product, I think, for this company called Cognitivement. And we used to work with pretty much all the research agencies out there and in marquee organizations, like say, a Ford or a Lego or a Nike or other, the DDoS of sorts, while the research agencies would work on, you know, what's the future? What do we see coming up in the next 20 years, 25 years for these brands? They work with the brands and our focus was to bridge this gap technologically to see, I know you're predicting self-driving cars, but how does a tech look like within these self-driving cars? And is that even feasible? How much of it is feasible? So we were prototyping all of that technology, proving feasibility. So our exposure was more into cutting edge tech, into startups, into the marquee law, was that the problems at larger businesses were trying to solve and everything that research was putting right in front of us. So all of that put together was, there was a foundational layer for us to think about even building something. And I know you had a question around why this specific problem, why Paperflight? I mean, the reason is this was something that was really close to us because we faced this problem firsthand. As a venture, we were building a specific product within Cognizan as well, which was funded and run as a venture. And this was something very new around crowdsourcing. There's so much material that we had put together, collateral, marketing collateral, sales collateral, and we were trying to distribute all of this to our sales teams, our own marketing teams. And the problem we had was pretty much into distribution really. To start with the teams that were putting this venture together, they were building all of this together, were design heavy. So our output in terms of material, in terms of videos and brochures and all of that were pixel perfect, really good. And we were trying to distribute all of this material. And all that we had in the market was, we shared folders and shared fine systems. And there were a few products in the market, but they definitely did not do justice to how content they're supposed to be distributed or even proving the value of the content. There was a first problem. And the second problem was we didn't know what was the ROI of all of this content that we were building. I mean, there's so much of money that was being put into building all of these videos and case studies and all of that. And when the question came as to what is the ROI of all the material that you put together, there was a big question that we did not have an answer, like a direct answer for. And these products did not sound that for us. So two parts. One is the exposure, the foundational confidence that made sure that you could possibly build something. And when you drill deeper into what do you really want to build, we picked up on a problem that was really close to us. There was something that we had faced in the market. We knew what existed, what did not exist. So that's why you pay for flight. And I think that's really interesting because you've talked a lot about content distribution rather than necessarily purely sales and everyone. And I think that's maybe why sales and everyone had this big boom. And then, you know, kind of fell a little bit out of fashion was it didn't really solve the whole problem. Is that what you saw as being the issue? Amazing. Beautiful question. Actually the way you drafted it. Yes, we did. We did start with with content distribution because content was considered the largest lever for sales and aiming. And yes, we built a whole platform. We wanted to model this based on some of these heavy content platforms like Netflix, or the prime of sorts where there's huge content and the platform makes sure that whatever you're looking for is right there out in front of your eyes. That's exactly how we started. But today, how paper flight is evolved is into a suite of agentic products that help modern sellers pretty much close to so we work alongside the sales set through the lifecycle of a D right from a prospect enters until the deal is closed. So our agents, if I were to put it in a certain structure, we start with prospect intelligence, which is when a prospect comes in, how much do we know about the prospect, the organization, the individual background, the problems that they face, what have they worked, what is their social presence at all of that put together, what are their priorities, all of that goes into the prospect intelligence, the buying power, the size of the organization. Everything is something that the prospect agent takes care of. And then we get into the content intelligence, which is where the entire knowledge of the organization that you represent as a sales set decides on. So that's very foundational for us at this point because that's again another problem that we started with. So we were very strong in that area of bringing together disparate sources of content information knowledge from, you know, from actual conversations from material that was was prepared all of that together and making sure it is it's available. It's accessible in a very structured manner so that that's your content intelligence part of it. That's what the content agent does. And then we have the conversation intelligence of the conversation agent, which kind of works through the cycle with the same steps right from your initial discovery call to the follow conversations, helping you figure out how do I handle an objection, how do I negotiate, how do I handle the pricing conversation. So there's all of this conversation intelligence around how do I nudge this deal forward, how do I move forward. And then we have the deal intelligence because we kind of work alongside the sales set through the through the life cycle. We keep track of everything from how the first conversation was what kind of email communication happened, what kind of content was shared. How was the content engaged with what areas do you think the buyer is interested in? What is the buyer behavior in general? How many stakeholders do you have? There's a right amount of number of stakeholders that you have for a deal of this size, a deal in this industry, in this region, what's the deal behavior generally? So we have all of this metadata and telemetry available that we're going to predict what is the confidence level that this deal will actually go through. And how has that number either moved up or moved down because of certain activities, like for example, you may have shared a bunch of collateral with your buyer and the buyer has not has not opened it has not engaged with that content at all. Usually what happens is the sales step over the follow up conversation would ask me, I sent you all of this material, did you get a chance to look at it? That's a first question in this very natural. But in that case, we get to know what did they really look at? What are they really interested in product A, product B? Is it the pricing? Is it the legal contractual term? Is it the security part of it? What are they interested in? So it gives you so much insight that I'm able to tell you, hey, you know what, this deal is not heading in the right direction. You might want to schedule a meeting immediately and you might want to reach out to other stakeholders who might be required to get this deal through. You know, that's the deal intelligence part of it. That's a deal agent that takes care of the entire workflow until the sales of closest to deal. Now, one piece that we felt other than orchestrating this whole sequence, one piece that could, that's very critically in this whole sequence is also, how do I prepare the rep? We're talking about tracking the deal itself, working alongside the rep. But am I helping the rep? Am I making him a better person, a better person? How am I coaching this person? And that's where AI kicked in compared to traditional coaching that always existed, which was, you know, consider a rep onboarding here at this point in time is a sequence of slight stack and material and a bunch of questions that you answered to certify yourself. And you know, I'm ready. I can get on the call quite possibly war or two role plays with your managers to really figure out if you're ready or not. And that's it. And then we also discount this whole knowledge decay factor because onboarding happens once and then how much do you train them over and over and over again? Now, this is how the current sales training products work. And when we put AI into this coaching and when I apply the foundational information that we have about how the bill is actually progressing, I'm going to go to coach the rep on specific topic on specific. products or I mean could be product knowledge, could be industry knowledge, could be the sales kill in itself, the framework or how do you negotiate or it could be just something like pricing negotiation or how do you handy this competitor that was brought up in the conversation. So you will have to sharpen your skills on on a specific aspect of this competition. So that information at that right moment during the course of the deal makes a world of a difference in how the the deal gets to gets to be closed successful. Also what you're noticing is that this is very interesting concept of of this learning overhang which is a rep can never be completely fully prepared. There's only so much that you can store within you. So there's always a lot of knowledge which is overhanging that you don't have. It's on on the top of your mind but if it's available exactly at the right moment it could completely change the game which is exactly where the AI coaching platform kicks in connecting all of these pieces together. So it's a bunch of agentic products that live with this answer to the lifecycle making sure you're coached, making sure the deal is tracked. It kind of makes sure you have the guardrails nudging the deal to in the right direction making sure it gets it gets closed. That's what they do right now. That's a very comprehensive range of features. It's interesting. I mean in the early days of sales enablement we saw a lot of marketing teams buying sales enablement products and it was basically a way to throw content at the sales team. So we've generated this presentation. We want the sales team to use it. Let's have a tool that forces them to use it or makes it easier for them to use it. Presumably now with the evolution of the tools and the complexity and features of paper flight you're actually seeing more of a sales team purchase for this area and people sales people are buying it because it helps them rather than marketing people buying it to kind of force sales people to do what they want. Good question again. It depends on the structure of the buyer organization. What we're seeing is there are some mature online visions where sales enablement in itself is a function and you have budgets and you have you orchestrate a certain set of tools and processes and all of that. In those cases the sales enablement function becomes a direct buyer for us. In organizations where this function does not exist it kind of becomes a shared responsibility but it leans more towards a marketing organization because you control the source of it which is the knowledge to content and then the ability to orchestrate. But what we're seeing now is shifting more towards the sales organization because we see this tilt from marketing into more sales with AI kicking in because you see a direct impact of sales enablement on the revenue on how deals are actually being closed and how efficiencies are brought in. So we see more of sales organizations looking at this entire platform because it's a bunch of agents that work with their teams and it helps them meet their targets but way better than how it has always been. And that's always a big motivator for sales people isn't it? Yeah. I'm interested you know you talked about getting customers or prospects to engage with content. There's been a lot of research showing that customers are spending less time actually talking to sales and more time doing their own research. Is this way you see a tool like paper flight really helping because you're helping the sales people provide the content that's going to push prospects to become customers? Absolutely. Absolutely. I said it also goes back to the learning or hand which is there's a lot of knowledge that you might not be able to store and it becomes very difficult for you to pick the right information at the right time. It's always hard and if there is an agent which is helping you serve the right information exactly when you're on a call. Like if I'm on a conversation with you and if you ask a question and I don't have the answer for it and if I have the answer pop up right there it helps us. Absolutely. Yes. I think you're solving a lot of problems as well with this product and I'm interested you know in terms of B2B organizations where do they struggle in this whole process of creating and distributing content? Is it around the creation, the distribution getting in front of the prospects or is it measuring the impact and knowing what's worked? What's the biggest challenge? I think it started with creating great content. I would say the problem at least before I kicked in the largest problem we had with creating great content. I mean the content has to be really good. It could be a video, it could be anything. But then with so much of content creation happening with all the AI platform, creating great content is not a challenge as much. I mean it's still become a struggle to stand out because everybody's, it's a level of feeling, I mean everybody's creating great content at this point in time. I think it's all about distribution today because it is somebody who holds the distribution controls everything because creation is really easy or at least tech has made it very easy but distribution is the challenge and whoever masters distribution wins it. But I would still not, I know you talked about is it creating great content? Is it distribution or is the impact on revenue? I would still not discount the revenue impact part of it because that's the end goal. I mean that's everything, measuring its impact on revenue has always been this trend. So products and platforms that help you figure out what's the ROI of content wins. I mean that's the most critical problem that you can get solved. I think that's a larger challenge, there's a larger problem. But other than that between creating great content and distributing content, I think distribution wins. That's really interesting and I think clearly shows how marketing themselves have changed over the recent years. I just want to take a slightly different out of Yager and talk a little bit about how you're growing paper flight and we're always interested to know when we have people on the podcast, how they approach marketing. So at a high level what's your marketing strategy for paper flight? We are a 100% inbound organization which also means that for us, the customer, the customer experience, customer reference is a huge growth engine for us at the paper flight. So we promote our customers. We make them the celebrity. It's very important. It's the experience that they go through and how do they see you value within their organization and how do we distribute that message to the rest of the world is very critically for us. I mean, there is whole runway series that we started like three years ago where we would shoot some of our customers in their home ground like walking into their office while they're working on the application, talking to the teams and pretty much make a five minute video out of it. Meet them, meet them, the celebrity. This is a docking professional, DOP and videographer and lighting and all of that stuff. And make sure it comes out like they are the celebrity of that whole episode. And that's actually worked really well for us. It goes back to distribution, goes back to great content and it goes back to putting the customer at the center. So for us, the largest growth engine is our customers, is the experience, is the value that they see in our product. And the interesting thing, I mean, you talk about it all being about customers, but you're very much an international business, you're selling to large global enterprises. I mean, did you have to design that kind of capability for international expansion from day one or was that something that just grew as you acquired bigger customers? We've always built paper flight for the international user base. We were very clear that we're not a cheaper alternative. I mean, it comes with, it's own good and bad because it does put a lot of pressure on us to lead the way. I mean, it's not, we cannot follow competition. That's our option in that case. It does put a little bit of pressure on us, but we enjoyed that because even when we started this whole Netflix style of content was something that was introduced to the industry for the first time, nobody seen something like that. All of our users were exposed to only folder structures and we've enjoyed that journey. We've built a narrative that way. We've been very clear from day one that people flight in the Eastern Asia, we will lead the way we will solve the problem and not follow competition. It's never been about the feature parity or the feature list versus the actual problem we saw and the value we bring to our customers. Yes. I mean, that's really interesting. I think kind of thinking big from the start has definitely helped you in terms of that growth. I've come to a more general question. I'm interested. Is there something that is happening within B2B marketing? Some kind of shift that's not appreciated that CMOs should be paying more attention to in your opinion? I can tell you, I think all of us agree. There's a lot of attention on AI and adoption of AI with products that are springing up every second. But I think CMOs and CROs should actually be conscious about the sovereignty of their knowledge as they want to mean by that, which is AI is a generalist. What's important at this point in time is it's about figuring out the ability to capture the passive knowledge that they have as an organization because that's what makes them stand out. That's what defines them. The ability to capture that tacit knowledge into a set of a set of weight, put it in the body that that you can control. What I mean is the products should be or the solutions that you pick should be more inclusive of the context that they can deliver value. But if you're going to pick a plug-in product because I found the NEI solution which is actually building a landing page for me. It is helping me draft an email. It is it's preparing a PowerPoint slide stack for me. If you're going to pick those products, I mean it might not solve the actual problem which is also why organizations are finding very difficult to do to identify value from these products because because it's a it's a plug-in product versus we need to be conscious about what's our process and what have we built and how are we building on top of that tacit knowledge and how are we connecting all these pieces together. Do they all come come out together, conveying one message, one flow is very important. I think that's an area that we don't focus a lot. There's so much of distraction on the other side. So we find the other products out there. That's what I see. I think that's fascinating because I mean we've seen it in you know PR for example where two different companies have submitted basically the same article to a publication obviously because they both put roughly the same prompt into chat GPT and got roughly the same content out. And I think you're right. I mean getting that out for each the what everybody else is getting is not really going to differentiate anyone going forward. But but you know what you're saying is getting your organization's knowledge that what makes you unique and special today. And that's what can make AI deliver better results tomorrow. Is is is that a good summary? Yes absolutely yes. It's for us to see on so that there's a lot of stuff that's changing which is you know I think from even for CMO and CIO stand point there's a lot of but mindset chains that needs to happen. There are workflows that need to change. There is there's work, work structure, roles, everything is changing. So we and there has to be a local focus on new frameworks of work which really combine or stick all of these pieces together all these different products that you're talking about. Make sure it works for you and it not been you just use this use the pointed solution one at a time of sorts. Yeah I think that's a great point. Yegas has been really interesting and before you guys a couple of questions we'd like to ask everybody around advice. So I know that you're not a specialist marketer but I'm always interested you know what's the best piece of marketing advice that someone has given to you. Always tell yourself that that you're selling the best product or the solution that's out there. I do feel this also if he marketing and what you market need not have a bearing. My marketing as and the signs as as as an engineering as an aspect is very different from what you're marketing. Of course the the longer term success is dependent on both these functions delivering their best. Of course marketing function has to do very well and the product that your marketing has to also be the best. That's that's the most ideal situation but at a market there if if I was if I was a market if that was my my job if that was that was my proficiency I will have to understand what I'm selling but I have to tell myself that I'm selling the best product out there for this for this target market that I'm taking this out too so that gives me the confidence to go all out and and positioning is everything and it's a it's kind of a spiral because you position I mean you might have a mediocre product you position that you're well you get amazing customers the product evolves and then and then you're positioning you walls and then your product evolves and the positioning you wall so that's kind of it kind of has a as a flywheel effect but if I if I tell myself if I really go back and figure out oh this is a product that you know these are areas of weakness it's okay it's kind of an okay product and that's what I tell myself my marketing effort in itself is not going to be the is not going to be out of the world it's not going to be larger than life I will be constraining myself so I have to tell myself that this is what I'm selling but eventually it'll fall in place that's what I believe I love that I think that's it's slightly different from what a lot of marketers would say but that makes it really interesting the other question I'd like to ask you we've talked a lot about how things are changing so rapidly and how technology particularly AI is impacting marketing so if you were talking to someone who maybe just graduated was starting their career in marketing what advice would you give them right you said that a lot of things are changing one one larger change that I'm seeing Mike is it's a kind of kind of people that you that we're following at this point let's take the the Demis the Sabet who who had deep mind or the taru who had clad or you all or you know all of them what we see even Elon for that matter what we see is they are neuroscientists they're they are physicists they're really deep domain experts they're all PhDs and and these are names that we're actually looking up to for how they want to how we want to shape the rest of the future it's not I think that's not as much focus on on the business men or the or the technologists or the college drawouts are the there's not as much focus as much as we have on these PhDs because they're they're pretty much defining what's what's happening what this means at a deeper level is there's a lot of emphasis that that we're giving to understanding humanity and human behavior in itself so I would think it's not just a technology it's not it's not just it's not just a product and the solutions and all of that when you start off you know in marketing as a career marketing always has as a light on human psychology to to a larger part it is only a lot more than what it used to be right now so be aware of the fact that there is a shift from from technologies and products it's not about the tech stack anymore it's about it's about your approach it's about your taste it's about your vision it's about what do you what is your skill your specialty as an individual that actually makes a huge difference so I think it's it's very important to take that time to recognize your your strength your specialty and and build on it and it's not just a tech the roles in itself are blurring I mean even from marketing standpoint you you would have you would have somebody writing copy you will have somebody doing design you will have somebody doing the growth marketing part of it someone manages all the channels partnerships and this this is how it goes but what you see all these roles are actually blurring and the most part of it can be run with AI agents versus what what we define or what will have you stand out is is your individuality so take that time to recognize what your strength is what you're taste and and how do you want approach taking a product to the market and then use these tools to enable you that's what I should I love it that's amazing advice and really I think positive for people coming into the industry yeah get this has been fascinating we covered a lot I'm sure there will be a lot of people listening who want to look into a paper flight a bit more find out a bit more about the product so what's the best way for them to find out more and maybe get some questions answered absolutely on peopleflade.com is definitely one place and I'm super active on LinkedIn so anybody anytime any message is I do respond to messages on LinkedIn that's awesome yeah girl it's been fascinating it's been a great interview thank you so much for being a guest on B2B marketing technology thank you my viewers it was a pleasure thank you thanks so much for listening to marketing B2B Tech we hope you enjoyed the episode and if you did please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application if you'd like to know more please visit our website at napierb2b.com or 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