The X Factor, AI For Sales Intelligence With Jason Hubbard
In a world with information overload, it can be very difficult to know which ones to trust. Particularly if you need accurate data to drive your company's growth, sifting through the ones you can use and really give you the results is very important. Fortunately, with companies like Salesintel.io, finding the right data has become easy. In this episode, Chad Burmeister talks with Jason Hubbard, the VP of Growth at SalesIntel.io, about using AI for sales intelligence. He shares with us the X factor, the good gas in the tank, that fuels a business' growth. He also dives deep into how AI plays an important role in the way they identify accurate and clean data.
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The X Factor, AI For Sales Intelligence With Jason Hubbard
Jason Hubbard, VP Of Growth At SalesIntel.io, On The X Factor For Scale
I’ve got Jason Hubbard with me. He is with SalesIntel and you're in for a real surprise. Jason, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here, Chad.
What an incredible joining of forces that you have done with SalesIntel. You had said Jason, you were with the company that did digital marketing, growth strategy for companies, and now you ended up at SalesIntel, helping them fuel their growth. What is it about SalesIntel that caused you and your business partner to join the business?
I've known Manoj, who is our CEO and Founder for years now. We've been good friends and watch both of us move through the industry for a while. When I started my growth agency, he and I reconnected and he let me know what he was working on with SalesIntel. I saw the need in the marketplace for reliable data partners to drive it up. I've been a consumer of other products and vendors in the marketplace for years. I was very familiar with the marketplace. I was excited by what Manoj was working on. He engaged with us as a client, he worked with us for a couple of years and then we came to an agreement for him to acquire my agency for myself and Ariana, one of my employees to come in-house full-time. It was great to be part of this journey with Manoj from day one and then make the transition over to working full-time with them.
I've seen data over the last 15 to 20 years. Back in the early days, it was a jigsaw. I remember being at WebEx in 2005 and I got an email. I'm on a phone call from this guy. I was like, “How did you know I'm on your website right now?” He goes, “I'm calling to walk you through the app. You're with WebEx, why don't we jump on a screen share?” I was amazed. It was an instantaneous five-minute lead response time. I ended up buying and then I negotiated a tough deal with Garth Moulton, who I know has also been part of either the Board of Directors at SalesIntel in the strategy parts of the conversation. This is a real product, a real company, and I'm glad to see people you guys join the business.The title of nowadays conversation is the X-Factor, AI for Data Intelligence. We'll credit that to Ariana because she helped us come up with the name. If you think about it, if you have bad gas in the tank or you put the oil in the wrong place, you're going to have pings in your engine. I had a very little mix of one extra quarter of oil and one was a 5W-30 and one is 10W-40. The engine was starting to grind a little bit and that's a huge risk to the machine. I think what we're going to get into with you is, what's the business value of having good gas in the tank? What is the X-Factor and how does AI play with data intelligence? Jason, I ask this question to everybody who attends the show, tell us about your company and how do you leverage AI in your platform?
SalesIntel like we talked about briefly, we're a data provider and data partner for B2B businesses. In a nutshell, you figured out who you want to go after, even if you're trying to figure out what companies or accounts you want to target. The crucial piece to any effective strategy is having the information on what are the companies they want to target? What are the buyers that those companies want to target? How do I get in touch with them? Those are things like email addresses, direct-dial phone numbers, and physical addresses.It’s one of the interesting things that we've seen. In history, direct mail is making a comeback as we clogged a lot of these digital channels. No matter how much you have at any of those processes, campaigns, or anything dialed in, if your data is not accurate, if you're not getting the right information, the right collateral to the right people and it's landing in spam, it's being bounced, it's being delivered to the wrong address, or that person's no longer at the company, that's what you talked about putting bad fuel in the tank.
<blockquote>The engine is only going to run as efficiently as the fuel.</blockquote>
That engine is only going to run as efficiently as the fuel, the data that you're pumping into it. On the AI side, AI is crucial to how we do what we do. We leverage a ton of different inputs as far as data sources and signals for us that we use to build out our database. We run all of that through an AI engine. That goes through and it processes all of that information. What we wind up with that we've got to get our arms around is a signal versus noise problem. We have too many data sources and too many signals coming in.The biggest challenge is how do you figure out which signal and record of you is the right one. Which company are you truly at? What's your actual real phone number? Trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. We use AI to do that, which gets us to around 70% accurate. We layer on top of that a human element where we have a team of researchers that go through and hand verify all of that machine process data. That's what gets us from that about 70% accuracy up to the 95% that we guarantee whenever we publish it to the portal.
That reminds me of the US Postal Service versus Federal Express and I’ll tell you why. I had a customer called U-Haul and they had 18,000 shipments that would go out. These were license plates with expired tags. They would have to catch the truck on the other side. When you use the postal service, there's no guarantee of overnight delivery. It could be 5, 7 or 1 day. You would never know. When it missed the truck, bad things happen. They had to ship it back. The bad physical move of information. Now, we're moving into the digital world with AI. By shrinking the time, it took from five days down to overnight delivery, they had 18,000 packages go out. The 96% or 97% of them would meet the truck and be able to get on. The difference between 70% postal service in 95% to 97% FedEx overnight, it makes all the difference in the world.
Talking about the fuel in the engine. In particular, you start dealing with automation and artificial intelligence and stuff like that. Counterintuitive for a lot of people, the more important the data becomes, anybody who's had any a marketing automation fail knows how catastrophic that can be if your data's not accurate. If you're running things at scale in an automated fashion, but you're pumping in bad information about data that it's acting off of, then that can wreak havoc.
I'd like to connect with people who are on this show, where'd you grow up? Where'd you go to college? Tell us a little bit about it, Jason.
I was born and raised in a small town in Western North Carolina called Boone, where Appalachian State University is. I left from there to college. I did my undergrad at Davidson, which is where Steph Curry got his start. It’s the only reason why anybody knows anything about Davidson. I studied History and Philosophy for my undergraduate there. I came to the University of Tennessee here in Knoxville, where I still am. I'm all but dissertation for a Doctorate in Philosophy. I got an MBA in Marketing and Entrepreneurship. In a nutshell, I spent my twenties in college.
You've checked a lot of boxes. It sounds like on different career paths. My next question helps to uncover that. I can still have some vivid memories when I was 5 and 6. Not a lot of them but a few that are those moments in life where you go, “That's what I want to do in life.” What were those things for you that led you to where you are now?
I can say it led me to where I am now. My passions when I was little were space and dinosaurs. I was convinced I was going to be the first astronaut paleontologist. I can't say that it led to anything close to where I’m at but those were my passions.
Sales Intelligence: The crucial piece to any effective strategy is having the information on the companies that you want to target, their buyers, and getting in touch with them.[/caption]
You fly to another moon that we don't know about, you dig, and look for maybe alien dinosaurs. I can't say it was well thought out.If all this AI continues and Elon Musk has his way, then I think we'll jump in a spacecraft and go anywhere we want so you may be able to do that. Let's dive in on these webinars. Typically, we stick with questions, but the power of combining two platforms is so huge. I thought it would make sense to spend a couple of minutes and dive into the combination of the X-Factor, which clean data, 95% accurate human-verified and the ScaleX Factor, which is reaching out to companies at scale and it's important to have good data. Why don't I start by sharing what's important to me? When I was going out and looking at the data market, there's a handful of providers that I would ever consider.InsideView is a good company that helps you with market sizing and market fit.
There's only a couple of real choices when it comes down to accurate data. What I’ve seen in the market with the recent consolidation is that there's some fluff around the platform fee that I see with some of these providers makes me wonder. I don't charge a platform fee, I charge access to ScaleX. As part of that, there's an email component. There's a LinkedIn outreach, there are pay-per-click ads, there are different features and capabilities. If I were to come in and say, “It's going to be $2,000 a month to participate in the platform and then you got to pay money for all these other features.” Forget about that. What I love about SalesIntel is they offered data as it's meant to be packaged on a per unit basis without a platform fee. The most important things when I was making my decision are number one, I had to have enough data. The universe has to be big enough. Number two is that they have to have direct-dial phone numbers. A big part of what we do for our customers is phone conversations. We leverage Agent-Assisted Dialing and the difference between good data and bad data, the X-Factor, is it might take 40 dial attempts, even 50 if you're going through switchboards and it adds drag to the machine whereas if you have direct dial numbers, it might take you 18 to 25 to one dial the connect. Think about it. If you're manually dialing people in a day and it takes you 40 versus 20, that's four hours of work versus two hours of work.
When your agent-assisted dialing, I can get 8 to 10 conversations an hour instead of 3 to 4. The difference is massive when it comes to direct-dial phone numbers.The third piece is, a big part of our strategy for our customers is using LinkedIn. We did a customer case study. ClicData had a 56% reply rate through LinkedIn. By having the LinkedIn URL is part of the data record, it was huge for us. The other providers in the space we found did not have the ability to execute LinkedIn URLs were SalesIntel does. The size of the database, the direct dial numbers, the LinkedIn URL, if there's one more piece, it's the trigger events. I love that with SalesIntel and the technographics. That's all built-in now. I want to say, “I want to go look for all the Salesforce customers that are 50 million to 200 million.” “No problem.” I wave a magic wand. There's my list. It’s easy as that. Combining good data and the X-Factor and ScaleX is good data. I'm excited to be partnered with you guys. Any comments on our ability to partner? I know this is a new partnership. What are the other things that I should be thinking about when it comes to the data that I'm getting from SalesIntel?
The exciting piece of working with something like ScaleX is for a lot of people, they want to have to use 3 or 4 different platforms to try and get the functionality that you guys have built into this. The key to it though like we've talked about, is that accuracy. What we've seen at least for me, in particular, is we've had this influx of new technologies and new platforms. We had the democratization of marketing automation and went from being with the very large enterprises to being a central piece of everybody's tech stack. You've had the proliferation of sales enablement platforms like the sales loss or outreaches in the world. The end result of that was most people relied on being able to automate things and do things at a scale that they never could before, but throwing however much data, they could get at it and then hoping that something would come out the other side of it. We're bearing the fruits of all of those things that we did.Their inboxes are full. It's hard to get people on the phone. You've even got things like legislation that are coming out to try and prevent robodialing. It's become harder and harder to break through that noise. Sales and marketing have gone back to 101. You've got to be able to target accurately. You've got to have good content that's going to connect with the right people. You've got to be effective at getting it in front of them because the gatekeepers of the world, the Googles of the world, have become merciless and cracking down on people that do that spray and pray strategy. It used to be you can load in some was 60% to 70% accurate. You can deal with all of those balances and keep rolling. That's going to kill your domain reputation and your ability to be able to do any email marketing campaigns. It became a different world. If you can marry platforms like ScaleX and all that you can do with it with the right accurate data that you need to be effective, then it can be a powerful tool.
<blockquote>Inaccurate data is like putting bad fuel in the company’s tank.</blockquote>
Let's do this since this is a new partnership, our normal platform, and this has been in beta mode. It's been road-tested by at least a dozen customers. By the time you see this, you will be able to purchase this platform all-in for us to handle your email, your LinkedIn outreach, your pay-per-click ads, and your retargeting. When someone comes to the website, all-in for $3,000 per month. We're going to throw in 1,000 leads a month at no additional cost from SalesIntel as part of that package. Buy everything from ScaleX, get the data free as a carry-on, and let's change the world here together, Jason.
It sounds great to me.
It's great to have you on. Jason, it’s great to get to know you. Welcome to the company. I'm glad you're there. I've seen the newsletters and I’ve seen what you guys are doing there. SalesIntel is going to be a force to be reckoned with and I'm happy to be partnered with you guys.
Thank you so much for having me.
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About Jason Hubbard
SalesIntel provides the most accurate and affordable contact data available for sales and marketing teams. Find the exact data you need to start the conversation with prospects and close deals. Try our data for free with our amazing Chrome Extension, RevDriver: salesintel.io/chrome
