Shani Shoham is the Chief Revenue Officer at OpenObserve, the open-source observability platform, where he owns both sales and marketing and still does his own prospecting every week. Over about 15 years building go-to-market for developer and infrastructure companies, he scaled WekaIO from $1M to $30M in ARR, served as President and CRO at Testim through its acquisition by Tricentis, and founded 21 Labs, which was acquired by Perforce. A computer engineer by training (Technion) with an MBA from Stanford GSB, he moved from engineering into sales and marketing early in his career after an offer from Cisco. He runs eight to ten go-to-market experiments at a time, is known for conference booths people remember years later, and has interviewed more than 500 sales reps in recent months.
“I think it's fatigue. Prospects pay attention to one channel, then everybody starts using that channel, and that's the reason that it stops working.”
“Nowadays, I feel overwhelmed with the amount of events that I get invited to. And so, yeah, I think every channel works until it doesn't.”
“At every moment, I run about eight to 10 experiments, and I know that majority of them will fail, but one or two of those experiments will be successful.”
“One thing that AI is not going to be able to replace is that human connection, and I call that EQ.”
“Listen, if I wanted AI to do that, then I would just buy an AI SDR.”
“That's the level of diligence that I think people need to do nowadays in order to stand out. Because we're all getting bombarded with AI-generated emails.”
“I think it's about creating a memorable experience. It's about creating something that would feel different.”
“If you're just like anybody, then it's the same thing. You'll send an email, it will go to the void, and there goes your ROI on the conference.”