The LeanScale Podcast · Episode 136

There Is No APAC Playbook: Going International, Then Walking Away

Bhavik Vashi on opening APAC twice for Anaplan and Carta, the two things US companies miss abroad, why the best partners won't take your call yet, reversible and irreversible career doors, and why AI will transform in-person selling in the real economy

Bhavik Vashi · Chief Revenue Officer, Siro · Siro Hosted by Anthony Enrico
Published Updated 00:51:24 44 min read 8875 words
GTM Strategy AI in GTM Sales Enablement Sales Leadership Pricing & Packaging
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Executive Summary

The one-paragraph brief, extended

Why this conversation matters — and who should spend the hour.

Bhavik Vashi is Chief Revenue Officer at Siro, an AI sales performance platform for people who sell in person: home builders, dealerships, home services, multifamily, senior living and medical aesthetics. He started as an accountant at KPMG, joined Anaplan at Series B in 2013 with the title Model Building Guru, and left a decade later as general manager of Asia, after the 2018 IPO and the $10.4 billion Thoma Bravo take-private in 2022. He then built Carta's international business from zero across Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa. Earlier this year he left Singapore, his home of ten years, and moved his family to New York to run revenue at a Series B company.

The first half is a practical briefing for any US company thinking about Asia. Bhavik has seen the usual approach twice: a board member says go international, the company ships a couple of US employees to Singapore, and they sell some early deals on the strength of the product and brand before the business stalls when it has to scale. He says US companies miss two things. The first is shared experience. Selling in America, you already share a lot of context with your buyer, and abroad you share none of it. The second is unit economics. Software has always been priced against the cost of labor, so charging US list prices in Indonesia or Thailand, where labor costs are fundamentally different, looks poorly researched.

His central point is that the phrase APAC playbook is a misnomer. The region is more than 50 sovereign countries, each with its own tax code, laws and leadership. He gives three checks: whether your problem is regulated (fintech, legal, tax, sustainability), which segment you serve (most enterprise opportunity sits in Japan, Korea and Greater China, while Singapore has only six to eight companies most vendors would call enterprise), and the cultural nuance of each market. Singapore and Sydney are where most companies start because their legal environments feel familiar, not because the big accounts are there. On partners, he says the ones you want, such as Samsung in Korea, have no reason to commit to a vendor with no history in the region, and many of the ones who want you are arbitrage plays. His advice is to prove a direct business first and let the right partners emerge.

The second half explains why he left. Reading the viral essay Something Big Is Happening convinced him that AI was changing how everyone will live and work, and that he could not be close to that change from Singapore over the next few years. He describes it as a door that was closing, while another APAC role would always be available. His thesis on AI in go-to-market is that for digital GTM it will be somewhat incremental, a continuation of years of instrumenting the funnel. For the real economy, where many businesses are still digitizing, the adoption curves overlap and some will skip a stage entirely, so the change will feel transformative.

He then walks through how Siro works around the in-person moment: a briefing before the appointment built from forms and intake calls, a recorded conversation with real-time coaching during it, and afterwards a one-click follow-up, a debrief call and automatic CRM updates. He says 99 percent of consumers agree to be recorded when asked. Siro describes its job as run, evaluate and improve, and says it brings the science so sellers can focus on the art. The episode is most useful for CROs and founders planning international expansion and for leaders of in-person sales teams.

Key Takeaways

15 things worth stealing

The load-bearing ideas, each with the business implication and who should care.

01

There is no APAC playbook

Bhavik calls the term a misnomer. Asia Pacific is a region of more than 50 countries a company might sell into, more once you add the Middle East and Africa, and each is a sovereign country with its own tax code, its own laws and its own leadership.

Why it matters: Plan international entry country by country. A single regional playbook built from the US motion will hide the differences that decide whether you can sell at all.

Revenue ExecutivesFoundersSales Leaders
02

Shipping US staff to Singapore gets early deals, not a scalable business

At Carta, a board member said cap tables and venture are not US-only, so go conquer the rest of the world, and the company sent a couple of US people to run around Asia selling deals. A great product and brand did create initial traction and early adopters, but the business ran into familiar problems when it tried to become sustainable, scalable and fast-growing.

Why it matters: Early international wins can come from the brand alone. They are not evidence that the go-to-market will scale, so don't treat them that way.

FoundersRevenue Executives
03

US companies miss shared experience abroad

Bhavik's first point is that every buyer is a reflection of their own life experiences, and value exchange depends on understanding their perspective relative to yours. An American company selling in America already shares that context with its buyer, and takes it for granted. Overseas there is none of it, and that is where a lot of international go-to-market falls apart.

Why it matters: Sellers and leaders need time in the market, talking to customers, before US messaging and process can be adapted. Anaplan's Asia business worked better partly because Bhavik lived there and spoke to customers every day.

Sales LeadersRevenue ExecutivesMarketing Leaders
04

Unit economics change the ROI case in every country

Software has generally been priced against the cost of labor it displaces. When labor costs are fundamentally different in the market you are selling into, the whole return-on-investment calculation changes. Charging US list prices in Indonesia or Thailand looks silly because the math behind them no longer adds up, and buyers read it as dismissive and poorly researched.

Why it matters: Localize pricing to the local cost of labor. Bhavik notes this was most glaring in the SaaS era, when the marginal cost of software was zero; AI-native products whose cost of goods scales with usage have different pricing dynamics, but the point broadly still holds.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesRevOps Leaders
05

Check regulation, segment and culture before choosing a country

Bhavik gives three checks. First, whether you sell into a regulated problem such as fintech, legal, tax or carbon credits and sustainability, where local rules shape what you can do. Second, which segment you serve, since enterprise and SMB lead to different countries. Third, cultural nuance: ways of working, organizational politics, direct versus indirect models and how trust and credibility are built.

Why it matters: Highly regulated markets such as Hong Kong, China and parts of the Middle East have higher barriers but also higher potential rewards, so the choice depends on your business rather than a default region list.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesSales Leaders
06

The enterprise accounts are not where most companies land

Most enterprise opportunity in Asia Pacific is in Japan, Korea and Greater China (China, Taiwan and Hong Kong). Singapore has only six to eight companies that most vendors would classify as enterprise, Australia only a handful, and you have to combine all of Southeast Asia to reach 25 or 30 substantial enterprise or strategic accounts.

Why it matters: Singapore and Sydney are beachheads chosen for familiar legal environments, a common-law framework and the chance to hire a local leadership team. They give a company the confidence to try for Japan, Korea or Greater China, which are the hardest markets for language, culture and regulation.

Revenue ExecutivesSales LeadersFounders
07

Prove a direct business before counting on partners

Bhavik splits partners into two groups. The ones you want, such as Samsung as a distribution channel in Korea, have little reason to give mindshare to a vendor with no reputation or history in the region when they have worked with local providers for 30 or 40 years. Many of the ones who want you are arbitrage-style intermediaries offering an easy off-ramp into APAC. Some are good, but he says if they were really that good they would be doing it for tier-one companies.

Why it matters: Unless you have an exceptional brand or connections, you can't start from zero with partnerships. Hire a strong zero-to-one team, build direct traction, and the right partners will emerge once you have momentum. The exception is companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which are big enough that partners want them anyway.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesSales Leaders
08

International markets are relationship-driven, but each builds relationships differently

Bhavik says the one thing all these international markets have in common is that they are very relationship-driven. How those relationships are built varies a great deal from country to country, which adds to the complexity.

Why it matters: Budget for people on the ground who can build trust locally, and expect the method to change from market to market.

Sales LeadersRevenue Executives
09

Weigh career moves as reversible or irreversible doors

Bhavik was getting strong offers to open APAC for other companies, and expects those opportunities to keep growing for decades. He judged that each further APAC role would make him more valuable in that niche and make a move like this one harder. That door was slowly closing, while the APAC door would stay open.

Why it matters: When choosing between offers, ask which option will still be available later. Take the one that is closing, if it matters to you, and leave the one that will still be there.

Revenue ExecutivesSales Leaders
10

AI will be incremental for digital GTM and transformative for the real economy

Bhavik sees AI in digital go-to-market as a continuation of a long trend of instrumenting the funnel, from top-of-funnel martech through customer success. AI pours gas on that fire, and he points to a Salesforce and Anthropic partnership as a sign that systems of record will feed agentic workflows rather than disappear. In-person, real-economy businesses are different: many are still digitizing, so the digital and AI adoption curves overlap and some will skip the first one altogether.

Why it matters: The gap between current state and future state is far larger in the real economy, and he says very few software companies are building for it.

FoundersRevenue ExecutivesSales Leaders
11

The in-person moment is the common thread across very different industries

Buying a house, a car, a medical aesthetics procedure, a new roof or a high-end retail item share traits: a high ticket, a big and emotional decision, and an in-person meeting that buyers want even when it is not strictly needed. Companies spend heavily on leads to get people to that meeting, and the meeting itself is a pivotal moment in the deal.

Why it matters: Siro is a horizontal product with a verticalized go-to-market, built around optimizing that moment, with industry-specific nuance handled as last-mile configuration by customers.

Sales LeadersFoundersRevenue Executives
12

Before, during and after: how AI supports the in-person seller

Before an appointment, Siro builds a briefing from online forms and any intake call with the receptionist. During it, with consent, the conversation is recorded and the seller is coached in real time, for example to follow up on something the customer mentioned or to clarify a statement that didn't line up. Afterwards it drafts a one-click follow-up, can call the seller for a debrief on what went well and what to improve, and fills in the CRM fields in Salesforce or HubSpot from the conversation.

Why it matters: The aim is to remove the admin and the preparation gaps so the seller can focus on being human and on the art of selling.

Sales LeadersRevOps LeadersCustomer Success
13

Expect every in-person sales conversation to be recorded

Bhavik believes recording everything is close to inevitable because the value outweighs the privacy concerns, as happened with social media. Across Siro's customers, consent to record is obtained 99 percent of the time; less than one percent of consumers decline. He tells customers to always ask for consent as best practice, even though he says 38 or 39 US states only require one party's consent.

Why it matters: Teams that sell in person should plan for recorded conversations as the norm, with a consent step built into the process.

Sales LeadersRevOps LeadersRevenue Executives
14

Coaching at scale should be personalized, not generic

Beyond running the business, Siro covers evaluation (analytics, scorecards, reporting) and improvement (personalized coaching plans, role plays, training and certification). Bhavik says the step change is that coaching happens every time, proactively and personalized to each seller's strengths and weaknesses, because the system holds user-level memory alongside organizational context.

Why it matters: He says this was impossible before AI. It is what a sales manager is supposed to do with every rep after every meeting and rarely can.

Sales LeadersCustomer Success
15

A seller's record can become a living resume

Rep turnover in these industries is high, partly because of a wide gap between top and bottom performers and partly because people move around. Bhavik suggests Siro could become a canonical record of who someone is as a seller: their strengths, weaknesses and proof of what they have done. Unlike LinkedIn, which is what you write about yourself, this would be based on the recorded work.

Why it matters: Siro frames in-person sales as one of the most accessible paths to financial freedom, needing no formal education, and better tools and coaching widen that path.

Sales LeadersRevenue Executives
Frameworks Discussed

7 named models

Every framework Jimmy names, defined and time-stamped.

Reversible and Irreversible Doors

03:24

When weighing a career decision, separate the doors that will stay open from the ones that are closing, and walk through the closing door while you still can.

Bhavik believed APAC opportunities would only grow over the next 40 or 50 years, and that each further APAC role would make him more valuable in that niche and less able to try something completely different. Moving to New York to take part in the AI moment felt like a shutting door, so he chose it and left APAC as the door he could return to.

The Two Things US Companies Miss Abroad

07:42

Shared experience and unit economics. US companies selling at home share context with their buyer and price against US labor costs, and neither carries over to international markets.

Value exchange rests on understanding the buyer's perspective relative to your own, which American companies take for granted at home and lack abroad. Software has been priced against the cost of labor, so when labor costs are fundamentally different, the ROI calculation changes and US list prices in markets such as Indonesia or Thailand look poorly researched.

There Is No APAC Playbook: Regulation, Segment, Culture

10:55

APAC is more than 50 sovereign countries with their own tax codes, laws and leadership, so entry decisions should run through three checks: is the problem regulated, which segment do you serve, and what cultural nuance applies.

Regulated categories such as fintech, legal, tax and sustainability depend heavily on local rules. Segment decides geography: most enterprise opportunity is in Japan, Korea and Greater China, while Singapore has six to eight enterprise companies and Southeast Asia combined has 25 to 30. Culture covers ways of working, organizational politics, direct versus indirect models and how trust is built. Singapore and Sydney are common starting points because of their familiar legal environments, giving a company the base to try for the harder, larger markets.

Partners You Want vs Partners Who Want You

15:17

In a new region, the partners worth having won't give you meaningful mindshare yet, and many of those eager to partner are arbitrage plays, so prove a direct business first.

A major distribution partner such as Samsung in Korea has no basis to prioritize a vendor with no reputation or history in the region over providers it has worked with for decades. Intermediaries who offer an easy off-ramp into APAC are sometimes good but often not. Bhavik's advice is to build a strong zero-to-one direct team and traction first, after which the right partnerships emerge in a way that fits your industry and product.

Overlapping Adoption Curves

26:04

AI will be incremental for digital go-to-market, which was already instrumented, and transformative for real-economy businesses that are still digitizing, because the digital and AI adoption curves overlap for them.

Digital GTM has spent years instrumenting the funnel from martech to customer success, and AI accelerates that trend. Many in-person, traditional businesses are still moving from paper ledgers to the cloud and to applications, and some will skip that stage and go straight to AI. The difference between their current state and future state is much larger, which is why Bhavik joined a company building for them.

Horizontal Product, Verticalized Go-to-Market

28:51

Sell one broad set of capabilities by packaging a subset into a solution with a tangible business benefit and ROI for each industry or function.

Anaplan, which Bhavik describes to his grandmother as Microsoft Excel on steroids in the cloud, served every industry and department. Carta applied one suite to founders, investors, asset allocators, law firms and tax firms across asset classes. Siro does the same across in-person industries, because they have more in common than not, with industry nuance handled as last-mile configuration by customers.

Run, Evaluate, Improve

35:34

Siro's model for an end-to-end sales performance system: record every conversation, then use AI to run, evaluate and improve the business.

Running the business covers preparation briefings, real-time in-meeting coaching, one-click follow-ups, debrief calls and automatic CRM updates. Evaluating covers analytics, scorecards and reporting. Improving covers personalized coaching plans, role plays, training and certification. Bhavik summarizes it as bringing the science so sellers can focus on the art.

Best Quotes

19 lines worth clipping

Pulled verbatim. Copy or share any of them.

“The reason that I decided to forego most of those and do the very unconventional thing, which was move all the way across the world to New York, a city that I've never lived in before, and to participate in this AI moment over here, was just this concept of reversible and irreversible doors.”
Bhavik Vashi 03:04
“It is a tale as old as time, and I have lived through it kind of twice.”
Bhavik Vashi 05:06
“When American companies built in America, selling in America, you already have that shared experience, generally speaking, with your buyer, but when you go internationally, you don't have any of it, and that's where a lot of this stuff can fall apart.”
Bhavik Vashi 08:18
“You try to go into Indonesia or Thailand and try to charge your U.S. list prices, kind of look silly, because the math upon which that's built doesn't add up anymore.”
Bhavik Vashi 09:15
“Fundamentally, there is no APAC playbook. There is no international playbook. That's a misnomer at the get, because you've got 50 different sovereign countries you're selling into.”
Bhavik Vashi 11:50
“Singapore only has six to eight companies that most companies would classify as enterprise.”
Bhavik Vashi 13:15
“So why all of a sudden is Samsung going to become a huge distribution channel for you in Korea?”
Bhavik Vashi 15:45
“The one thing that all of these international markets have in common is they're very relationship driven.”
Bhavik Vashi 16:15
“I don't think you can start from zero with partnerships unless you have some crazy brand or some crazy good connections that have facilitated those partnerships for you. I think you need to get out there and prove a direct business.”
Bhavik Vashi 17:31
“It's a moment in time, this is happening, like I want to participate.”
Bhavik Vashi 22:41
“This is a moment and you kind of choose to be part of it or not.”
Anthony Enrico 23:05
“I think the change for go-to-market on the digital side will be somewhat, and I'm really zooming out to say this, somewhat incremental. Like, it was already happening. It will just continue to happen.”
Bhavik Vashi 25:33
“Some of them may just skip the first one altogether and just go straight to the second one, right? It's going to feel absolutely transformative for these businesses.”
Bhavik Vashi 27:05
“My simple grandma explanation of Anaplan is like, hey, this thing is like Microsoft Excel on steroids in the cloud.”
Bhavik Vashi 29:40
“Sales is an art and a science. We kind of all generally get that. Okay, so Siro brings a science so that you can focus on the art.”
Bhavik Vashi 35:44
“It's like this real-time, almost like an earpiece, you know, just helping you be the best that you can in this pivotal moment.”
Bhavik Vashi 38:48
“Literally 99% of the time consent is obtained.”
Bhavik Vashi 42:54
“We want to make in-person sales the most accessible path to financial freedom.”
Bhavik Vashi 45:52
“Like a LinkedIn is like what you write about yourself, but Siro's got everything for you.”
Bhavik Vashi 49:19
Practical Advice

What should you actually do?

The playbook, split by the seat you sit in.

Revenue Executives

  • Plan international expansion country by country. APAC alone is more than 50 sovereign countries with their own tax codes and laws.
  • Don't read early international wins as proof of a scalable motion. A strong product and brand can carry the first deals.
  • Localize pricing and the ROI case to the local cost of labor rather than carrying US list prices overseas.
  • Use Singapore or Sydney as a beachhead to hire local leadership, then set a deliberate goal for Japan, Korea or Greater China, where most enterprise accounts are.
  • When weighing a career move, ask which option will still be there later and which door is closing.

Founders

  • Before entering a region, check whether your problem is regulated locally (fintech, legal, tax, sustainability) and how that affects each country.
  • Match country choice to segment: enterprise opportunity in APAC sits mostly in Japan, Korea and Greater China; Singapore has only six to eight enterprise companies.
  • Don't plan to start from zero with partnerships unless your brand or connections are exceptional. Prove a direct business first.
  • Be skeptical of intermediaries selling an easy route into APAC. Qualify them the way you would a hire.
  • If your product is horizontal, package a subset of capabilities into an industry-specific solution with a clear ROI.

Sales Leaders

  • Put leaders on the ground who live in the market and talk to customers daily, to find where US and local go-to-market overlap and diverge.
  • Hire experienced zero-to-one builders locally and qualify them carefully to form the core team.
  • For in-person teams, prepare sellers with a briefing built from forms and intake calls before each appointment.
  • Record in-person conversations with explicit consent, and use real-time prompts and post-meeting debriefs to coach every rep after every meeting.
  • Build coaching plans around each seller's individual strengths and weaknesses rather than generic training.

RevOps Leaders

  • Map conversation data to CRM custom objects and fields so updates such as products, next steps and close dates are extracted automatically.
  • Build the consent step into the in-person sales process even where single-party consent laws don't require it.
  • Model international ROI and pricing against local labor costs, and account for usage-based cost of goods in AI-native products.
AI Takeaways

How AI actually changes GTM

LeanScale's signature read on the AI-in-GTM question this episode wrestles with.

The thesis

AI will be an acceleration of an existing trend for digital go-to-market but a step change for in-person, real-economy businesses, where digitization and AI adoption are arriving at the same time. Bhavik Vashi left a decade-long APAC career to build for that market at Siro.

Agent & automation ideas

  • A pre-appointment briefing agent that combines online forms and intake-call notes into a summary for the seller.
  • A real-time in-meeting coach that prompts the seller to follow up on details the buyer mentioned or to clarify contradictions.
  • A post-meeting debrief agent that calls the seller to review what went well, what to improve and any compliance items missed.
  • A CRM extraction agent that maps conversation content to the customer's custom objects and fields.
  • A quote-building agent that drafts a quote from details captured in the conversation, such as blind measurements.
  • A market-entry research agent that compares target countries on regulation, enterprise account count and labor-cost-adjusted pricing.
Operations Takeaways

By function

The same conversation, filtered for RevOps, pipeline/marketing ops, and customer ops.

Revenue Operations

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Pipeline & Marketing Ops

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Metrics Mentioned

The numbers, with context

50+
Countries in Asia Pacific

Sovereign countries a company might sell into, each with its own tax code, laws and leadership, which is why Bhavik says there is no APAC playbook.

6–8
Enterprise companies in Singapore

Companies most vendors would classify as enterprise, which is why Singapore is a beachhead rather than the main enterprise market.

25–30
Enterprise or strategic accounts across Southeast Asia

What you get only by combining all of Southeast Asia, compared with Japan, Korea and Greater China, where most of the enterprise opportunity is.

99%
Recording consent rate

Share of Siro customer appointments where the consumer agrees to be recorded; less than one percent decline.

38–39
US states with single-party consent

Bhavik's estimate of how many US states do not require telling someone they are being recorded. Siro still advises customers to ask.

$10.4 billion
Anaplan take-private

The 2022 Thoma Bravo deal, which followed Anaplan's 2018 IPO.

About a decade (from 2013)
Time at Anaplan

Joined at Series B as a Model Building Guru and left as general manager of Asia.

10 years
Time in Singapore

Bhavik's time in Singapore before moving his family to New York to join Siro.

15–20 people
Anaplan's local APAC team when he arrived

The team built around three acqui-hired consultants that Bhavik immersed himself in.

About 15
Years in B2B SaaS go-to-market

Bhavik's career in go-to-market, from Anaplan through Carta to Siro.

Entities

Companies, people & tools mentioned

Auto-extracted and linked into the knowledge graph.

Companies

SiroAI Sales Performance / Conversation Intelligence

Bhavik's employer, where he is Chief Revenue Officer. A Series B AI sales performance platform for in-person sales teams in home services, home building, dealerships, multifamily, senior living and medical aesthetics. It records every conversation with consent and uses AI to run, evaluate and improve the business: pre-meeting briefings, real-time coaching, one-click follow-ups, debrief calls, automatic CRM updates, scorecards and personalized coaching. It is hiring across functions.

00:00 · 27:35 · 35:34 · 40:06 · 42:49 · 48:11Company →
AnaplanEnterprise Planning Software

Where Bhavik spent a decade, joining at Series B in 2013 as a Model Building Guru and leaving as general manager of Asia, through the 2018 IPO and the 2022 take-private. Anaplan built its Asia Pacific business by acqui-hiring the top three people from a small local consulting firm, though the region still ran on US-centric strategy, policies and pricing. Bhavik describes it as Microsoft Excel on steroids in the cloud: one product serving every industry and department.

00:25 · 04:30 · 05:23 · 29:30Company →
CartaFintech

Where Bhavik built the international business from zero across Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa with full P&L ownership. Before he arrived, a board member had pushed the company to go international and it sent a couple of US staff to Asia, which produced early traction but ran into problems scaling. Carta sold one suite of capabilities to founders, investors, asset allocators, law firms and tax firms across venture, private equity and private credit.

00:48 · 06:50 · 30:27Company →
KPMGProfessional Services

Where Bhavik started his career as an accountant.

00:25Company →
Thoma BravoPrivate Equity

The private equity firm behind Anaplan's $10.4 billion take-private in 2022, which Bhavik went through.

00:39Company →
SamsungConsumer Electronics / Conglomerate

Bhavik's example of the kind of partner a company would want in Korea but is unlikely to get without reputation, brand or history in the region.

15:45Company →
AnthropicFrontier AI

Named twice: as one of the few AI companies big enough that partners in Asia will want to work with them, and in a Salesforce partnership Bhavik cites as a sign that systems of record will feed agentic workflows rather than be replaced.

16:05 · 25:20Company →
OpenAIFrontier AI

Named alongside Anthropic as one of the few companies big enough that international partners will want to partner with them.

16:05Company →
LeanScaleGTM Operations

Anthony Enrico's company and the producer of the podcast.

00:00Company →

People

Bhavik Vashiguest

Chief Revenue Officer at Siro; previously GM of Asia at Anaplan and MD for APAC, Middle East and Africa at Carta.

Chief Revenue Officer, SiroProfile →
Anthony Enricohost

Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast.

Co-FounderProfile →

Tools & software

ChatGPTAI Assistant

Bhavik's first exposure to generative AI, which he remembers as impressive but prone to hallucination at first. He also notes how much ChatGPT now knows about its users.

Website ↗
PerplexityAI Search / Research

An AI search tool Bhavik adopted early, telling friends he no longer used Google for anything.

Website ↗
SalesforceCRM

Cited in a partnership with Anthropic as evidence that SaaS is not dead and will feed agentic workflows, and named as one of the CRMs whose custom objects and fields Siro fills in automatically from conversations.

Website ↗
HubSpotCRM

Named alongside Salesforce as a CRM Siro updates automatically from recorded conversations.

Website ↗
GranolaMeeting Notes

Bhavik's example of how widespread meeting recording has become: everyone is using Granola for everything.

Website ↗
Microsoft ExcelProductivity / Spreadsheet

The reference point in Bhavik's simple explanation of Anaplan as Microsoft Excel on steroids in the cloud.

Website ↗
LinkedInSocial Platform

The contrast Bhavik draws for a seller's record in Siro: LinkedIn is what you write about yourself, while Siro holds the evidence of the work. He also invites listeners to message him on LinkedIn about APAC.

Website ↗
Methodologies referenced Acqui-hire a local nucleusUS–international Venn diagramBeachhead, then audacious marketDirect first, partners laterIn-person sales cycle with AIConsent as standard practice
Related LeanScale Services

Where this shows up in the work

Sales Enablement Build

Stand up a zero-based, sales-academy enablement motion sized to your span of control and sales complexity.

Siro's model of real-time coaching, debriefs, personalized coaching plans, role plays and certification is the enablement motion Bhavik describes for in-person sales teams.

AI for GTM

Agents and workflows that multiply operator throughput — the 'make humans superhuman' thesis, operationalized.

The episode covers AI across the sales cycle: briefings, in-meeting coaching, follow-ups and automatic CRM updates from recorded conversations.

Frequently Asked Questions

Straight answers

Generated from the conversation, marked up for search and AI extraction.

Is there an APAC go-to-market playbook?

According to Bhavik Vashi, who opened Asia Pacific for both Anaplan and Carta, no. He calls the term a misnomer because APAC is more than 50 sovereign countries, each with its own tax code, laws and leadership. Instead of a regional playbook, he suggests three checks for each market: whether your problem is regulated locally (for example fintech, legal, tax or sustainability), which customer segment you serve, and what cultural differences affect how you build trust, work with partners and sell directly or indirectly.

What do US software companies most often get wrong when expanding internationally?

Bhavik Vashi names two things. The first is shared experience: a US company selling in the US shares a lot of context with its buyer without realizing it, and abroad it shares none, so it has to learn each buyer's perspective. The second is unit economics: software has been priced against the cost of labor it replaces, so when labor costs are very different, as in Indonesia or Thailand, charging US list prices breaks the ROI case and looks poorly researched to buyers. He also warns against the common approach of sending a few US staff to Singapore and hoping for the best.

Should a company start in Singapore or Sydney when entering Asia Pacific?

Most companies do, according to Bhavik Vashi, because both have legal environments that feel familiar to US and Western European companies, and there is enough business to hire a local leadership team and build confidence. But they are not where the large enterprise accounts are. Singapore has only six to eight companies most vendors would call enterprise, and all of Southeast Asia combined has about 25 to 30 substantial enterprise accounts. Most enterprise opportunity is in Japan, Korea and Greater China, which are harder markets for language, culture and regulation and are usually the next step after a beachhead.

Should you use channel partners to enter APAC?

Usually not at first, according to Bhavik Vashi. The partners you want, such as a major distribution channel like Samsung in Korea, have little reason to commit to a vendor with no reputation or history in the region. Many of the partners eager to work with you are intermediaries offering an easy route into APAC, and while some are good, many are not. Unless you have an exceptional brand or connections, he recommends hiring an experienced local zero-to-one team, proving a direct business, and letting the right partnerships emerge once you have traction.

How will AI change go-to-market for in-person, real-economy businesses?

Bhavik Vashi, CRO of Siro, expects AI to be somewhat incremental for digital go-to-market, which has been instrumenting its funnel for years, but transformative for in-person businesses such as home builders, dealerships, home services and medical aesthetics. Many of them are still digitizing, so the digital and AI adoption curves overlap and some will skip straight to AI. In practice that means AI briefings before appointments, real-time coaching during them, and automatic follow-ups, debriefs and CRM updates afterwards, so the seller can focus on the human side of selling.

Will customers agree to have in-person sales conversations recorded?

Almost always, based on Siro's data. Bhavik Vashi says consent to record is obtained 99 percent of the time across Siro's customers, and less than one percent of consumers decline. He expects recording of in-person sales meetings to become the norm because the value outweighs the privacy concerns. Siro advises customers to always ask for consent as best practice, even though, by his estimate, 38 or 39 US states only require one party's consent.

What is the reversible versus irreversible doors framework for career decisions?

It is how Bhavik Vashi decided to leave a successful APAC career in Singapore for a CRO role in New York. He sorted his options into doors that would stay open and doors that were closing. More APAC leadership roles would keep coming for decades, while each one would make a move into a completely different role harder. Joining the AI shift in New York felt like a closing door, so he chose it, knowing the APAC option would still be there.

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00:00Intro: from KPMG accountant to Model Building Guru to CRO 01:25Walking away from APAC: reversible vs. irreversible doors 04:42Shipping US staff to Singapore, and the two things US companies miss 09:55Regulation, segment and 50 countries: there is no APAC playbook 14:57Partners you want vs. partners who want you 18:45"Something Big Is Happening": why he moved to New York 23:05AI in go-to-market: incremental for digital 26:04Transformative for the real economy: overlapping adoption curves 28:43Horizontal products, verticalized go-to-market, and the in-person moment 34:51How Siro supports sellers before, during and after the meeting 41:37Will every in-person conversation be recorded? 45:36In-person sales as a path to financial freedom 49:46Wrap-up
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Broken into chapters, searchable, verbatim from the audio. Speakers inferred (not diarized).

Transcript as markdown ↓ Whole episode as markdown ↓
00:00Intro: from KPMG accountant to Model Building Guru to CRO

0:00 My guest today is Bhavik Vashi, Chief Revenue Officer at CIRA, where he's building the

0:08 go-to-market for AI sales performance aimed at the part of the economy almost nobody in

0:13 software is serving. Home builders, real estate, auto dealerships, home services, medical aesthetics,

0:19 the trades. Bhavik has spent 15 years in B2B SaaS go-to-market and his arc is one of the

0:25 more unusual ones I've come across. He started out as an accountant at KPMG, joined AnnaPlan at

0:32 Series B with the actual job title model building guru, and left a decade later as general manager

0:39 of Asia, having gone through the IPO in 2018 and the $10.4 billion Tamabravo take private in 2022.

0:48 Along the way, he moved to Singapore, stayed for 10 years, and then did the whole thing again at

0:53 Carta, where he built the international business from zero across Asia Pacific, the Middle East,

1:00 and Africa with full P&L ownership. Earlier this year, he walked away from all of it, the region,

1:06 and the reputation, and the recruiter calls, and moved his family to New York to run revenue at a

1:12 Series B company. We get into why he left, what actually breaks when you take a US playbook

1:17 overseas, and his thesis on where AI belongs in a sales conversation and where it never should.

01:25Walking away from APAC: reversible vs. irreversible doors

1:25 You spent 10 years building something in Singapore that most people in our world would take in a

1:31 heartbeat. The recruitment inbound was coming in, companies were calling because they needed

1:36 someone who could open up APAC like you, and then you left. Walk me through what you were thinking.

1:43 Yeah, first of all, thank you for having me. It's fun to have this chat. Just hearing you give the

1:51 intro was an interesting reflection on my professional journey so far, starting from

1:57 Model Building Guru, which is a title that I don't hear very often anymore, but reminds me of the

2:02 very humble beginnings and some of the best days as well. To your question, yeah, this was not a

2:12 straightforward move. This was a very thought through, hopefully good move, but certainly an

2:22 intentional move. It was particularly difficult because at the stage that I'm at now, and the

2:30 stage that the world is at, Asia Pacific and international markets are just becoming increasingly

2:36 exciting. Every AI company and increasing number of AI companies are all expanding to Asia and

2:46 international right now. I had started to become somebody that companies look to, to say, "Okay,

2:54 we need to set up an APAC, go to market." There's a handful of people in Singapore and maybe Sydney

2:59 that are really good at doing that. Having done it twice, I think it started to get some really,

3:04 really interesting and compelling offers. The reason that I decided to forego most of those

3:11 and do the very unconventional thing, which was move all the way across the world to New York,

3:17 a city that I've never lived in before, and to participate in this AI moment over here was

3:24 just this concept of reversible and irreversible doors that I've thought about throughout my career.

3:30 The simple premise is I felt that if I took another APAC gig with each subsequent gig that

3:40 I would take, I would become more and more valuable in that role and in that capacity.

3:45 Frankly, I believe in the region so much that over the next 40, 50 years, I don't think those

3:51 opportunities are going anywhere. I think if anything, they're just going to get more and more

3:55 interesting and compelling and impactful, and so I could see myself just spending the rest of my

4:00 life there. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, and I may someday end up deciding that that's what I

4:08 want to do, but it certainly felt like it would become harder and harder for me to make a move

4:16 like this, come to this side of the world, try something completely different, and that's just

4:22 something that I felt was more fleeting, slightly a shutting door, if I will, that I just felt like

4:30 right now was the right time to walk through it. Yeah, I think if you have Anipline and Carta

4:37 opening up APAC on your resume, that door is always going to be open, so I think that makes

04:42Shipping US staff to Singapore, and the two things US companies miss

4:42 a ton of sense. Before we get into everything you're doing at Ciro, I know a lot of companies

4:47 that are trying to go to market in Asia, and I've seen the playbook where they just ship over

4:55 somebody from the US to Singapore, never lived there, never done sales there, never gone to

5:00 market there, and then they're just hoping for the best. For any company that's trying to go to

5:06 market there, what do they need to know and what do they need to do? It is a tale as old as time,

5:13 and I have lived through it kind of twice. I would say with Anipline it was certainly better.

5:23 In Anipline, we had Aqua hired our way into our Asia Pacific business with a small local

5:31 consulting firm where we took kind of the three top guys and they became the nucleus of our APAC

5:37 office, but yet very much still subject to US-centric strategies, policies, procedures,

5:49 playbooks, pricing, and so on and so forth. Then there was that tension that most leaders

5:56 in international markets would feel, and then obviously I went over at the time being new to

6:01 the region, to be honest with you, and kind of got the best of both worlds. I was able to understand

6:06 what we were trying to do from a corporate perspective, and I had seen how much success

6:11 we'd had in the US for three years of hyper growth and trying to figure out what elements of that

6:18 would apply, but at the same time immersing myself into the local team, which was already about 15,

6:24 20 people, and literally living there and speaking to those customers every day to really figure out

6:32 this Venn diagram between the US and international and where's the overlap, and then where are they

6:40 actually quite divergent, and where does it force you to change the way that you go to market,

6:45 which I think was invaluable learning for me, and it was very helpful my second time

6:50 when I was at CARTA where they had basically made that mistake. They had sent a couple folks from

6:55 the US out to international board meeting. Somebody said, "Hey, you guys need to go international."

7:01 Cap table's venture private equity is not a US only industry, so go conquer the rest of the world.

7:07 They said, "Great, we'll ship a couple of our people out there, start running around Asia and

7:13 selling deals," and of course there was some of that. You can definitely create a certain level

7:18 of initial traction because you've got a great product, and there's a brand, and you'll get your

7:22 early adopters, but yeah, it ran into some familiar challenges when it came to scaling the business,

7:29 making sure it was both sustainable and scalable, which is hard, but also fast growing.

7:36 What those things are, man, I could spend like an hour unpacking all of that,

7:42 but I think the simplest explanation is probably twofold. One, everybody as a person is a reflection

7:49 of the experiences that they've had in their lives, and just that deep appreciation for every

7:54 single person that you are now interacting with to hopefully create some genuine value for them,

7:59 their business, and along the way, sell something and make a buck for your company as well.

8:04 That value exchange is deeply built on the premise of understanding their perspective,

8:10 their lens, and their life experiences relative to yours, and I think that is the

8:18 piece that gets taken for granted when American companies built in America, selling in America,

8:25 you already have that shared experience, generally speaking, with your buyer,

8:29 but when you go internationally, you don't have any of it, and that's where a lot of this stuff

8:33 can fall apart. The second, which is maybe more business or economics in nature, is unit economics,

8:40 right? Generally speaking, and software was displacing the cost of labor, and when the cost

8:51 of labor is so fundamentally different in the market that you're selling to, then the entire

8:59 value proposition or the return on investment calculus for a discerning pragmatic customer

9:07 is very different, and a lack of acknowledgement around that is generally just seen as like

9:15 dismissive and poorly researched, but it is one of the pieces that most people miss. You try to go

9:22 into Indonesia or Thailand and try to charge your U.S. list prices kind of look silly because the

9:29 math upon which that's built doesn't add up anymore, and in the SaaS days, the incremental

9:35 cost of software was zero, so it was particularly egregious. Now with AI native companies, you could

9:41 argue that, you know, obviously the cog scales with the usage and stuff, so the pricing dynamics

9:46 are a bit different today than they were when I arrived, but broadly speaking, still very true.

9:51 So these are two very, very kind of simple high-level things that I'd call out, but like I said, I could

09:55Regulation, segment and 50 countries: there is no APAC playbook

9:55 spend a long time talking about how to do APAC go-to-market. Yeah, and without giving the entire

10:03 dissertation on it, just a couple things that I'm curious that come to mind, and I'm sure people

10:09 listening, if they're thinking about going to market APAC, they've never done it before, they're

10:13 considering it. I'm sure first, let's say, is your product even going to make sense in the region?

10:18 It's like doing that type of market analysis, but then it sounds like Singapore, Sydney, those tend

10:26 to be the beachheads that give you access. Are there any considerations about, okay,

10:33 which one you go to start and why, and then are there any general regulatory or cultural things

10:41 you need to have considerations for in your marketing and sales process that might be different

10:46 than how you're going to market in the US? Yeah, it's very company-specific. I'll try to give you

10:55 a couple really useful checks that any company can do. So first thing is, are you selling into

11:04 a problem that is at all regulated, right? So if you're fintech, you're legal, you're taxed,

11:15 maybe even carbon credits and sustainability, there are a lot of areas where your ability to

11:23 go to market is going to be significantly influenced and impacted by local regulation,

11:30 and that is a beast, because Asia Pacific is a region of more than 50 countries that you might

11:39 feasibly want to sell a customer in, and especially when you expand it to cover like the Middle East

11:45 and Africa and some of the other regions that I was responsible for, and so fundamentally,

11:50 there is no APAC playbook. There is no international playbook. That's a misnomer at the get,

11:58 because you've got 50 different sovereign countries you're selling into, each with their

12:02 own tax code, each with their own set of laws, each with their own leadership. So that's a big one,

12:08 and that will influence your decisions. Markets like Singapore and Sydney, for example, are

12:16 generally more agreeable with either a common law framework or just a legal environment that

12:24 is more similar or familiar to the US or to Western Europe, which is why people start there.

12:31 That's one piece of it, but there are some really regulated markets, Hong Kong, China,

12:37 obviously being one, even parts of the Middle East that have Sharia law and things of that nature,

12:42 where yeah, the barrier to entry is a little bit higher, but so is the potential reward

12:47 if you do it right, and so you should really think through what makes sense for your business.

12:53 The second piece is which segment do you serve? Are you fundamentally striving to serve enterprise

13:00 customers, mid-market SMB? Those will lead you to very different countries as well. Most of the

13:06 enterprise opportunity in Asia Pacific is in Japan, Korea, Greater China, across China, Taiwan,

13:15 Hong Kong are the three biggest enterprise opportunities. Singapore only has six to eight

13:24 companies that most companies would classify as enterprise. Australia only has a handful as well.

13:30 You have to lump all of Southeast Asia together to get to 25 or 30 meaty enterprise or strategic

13:38 accounts. That's a big part of it, but at the same time, the countries I mentioned are

13:46 the hardest to go to market from a language perspective, first of all, culture, regulations,

13:55 the mixed bag, but just general nuance, cultural nuance, I'll call it, even the ways of working and

14:02 organizational behavior and politics, direct versus indirect models, selling yourself,

14:10 going through partners, how you establish trust, credibility, brand, et cetera.

14:16 These are tradeoffs that you have to think about, and maybe most companies get comfortable starting

14:20 in Singapore and Sydney, again, for the first reason and the second reason that there's enough

14:25 to get something going, to get comfortable, to hire the leadership team and the local talent,

14:29 to then give you the conviction and the confidence to go try a big audacious goal like conquering

14:36 Japan or Korea or greater China as a market. And then the last one I kind of touched on there,

14:41 which is, yeah, these are, like I said, this is back to every person you deal with as a product,

14:47 some total of the experiences they've had, and all of these are just massively, culturally and

14:53 philosophically sometimes different countries. And so you've got to figure out where you could

14:57Partners you want vs. partners who want you

14:57 do that mapping. Do you recommend trying to navigate through partnerships if you're initially

15:04 going out? I imagine it would make it easier for things like hiring, language, those type of

15:11 aspects. Does that tend to be the path of least resistance? If you can find the right partners,

15:17 then yes, I think finding the right partners is difficult. Again, grouping them into broadly two

15:23 categories. I would say you have the partners that you probably really want, but it's unlikely

15:31 that you're going to get meaningful mindshare and strategic alignment with those partners because

15:38 you have no reputation, brand, credibility, or history in the region. So why all of a sudden

15:45 is Samsung going to become a huge distribution channel for you in Korea? Like, on what basis

15:52 are they going to partner with you versus software companies, service providers that

15:58 have been there for 30, 40 years in the region, right? And maybe your tech is better, maybe your

16:05 product is better. There maybe are a few companies today like Entropic and OpenAI, which are just

16:10 big enough that everyone's like, okay, yeah, no, I get them. No, we'll partner with them, right? But

16:15 if you're not in that bucket, like it's going to be pretty tough because it's a very relationship

16:20 driven industry across all these. The one thing that all of these international markets have in

16:24 common is they're very relationship driven. How you build those relationships, very different,

16:28 which is also complex. But so that's the reality. And then there's going to be a host of people who

16:33 want to partner with you, who may not be the partner you, the people you want to partner with.

16:39 There are unfortunately a lot of these, I won't call them exploitative, but kind of just

16:46 kind of arbitrage-y type partners who are like, hey, I'll help you go to market in APAC. Hey,

16:52 this is my whole business model. Like, I know people, I can connect people. I know the strategy.

16:57 I'll be like your easy off-ramp. And some of them are good, don't get me wrong, but a lot of them

17:01 are not that good. Because again, if they were really that good, I don't know that they'd be

17:09 running a services business to help like those kind of tier two, three, and four companies expand to

17:15 APAC. They might do it for a tier one company themselves. It generally tends to be more

17:24 valuable for everyone involved. So yeah, it's tough. I think my experience, I don't think you

17:31 can start from zero with partnerships unless you have some crazy brand or some crazy good connections

17:37 that have facilitated those partnerships for you. I think you need to get out there and prove a

17:43 direct business. And there are a great number of like zero to one, one to 10 people out in APAC.

17:50 Some of us have, like I said, I would have made my career off of doing that because, hey, I love

17:54 building so much. And two, you know, the more you do it, the more muscle memory you develop and

18:03 kind of grow to love it. And there's a lot of those folks out there. So it's not too hard

18:07 to find, you just got to qualify and make sure you get a good core team. Then once you have some

18:12 traction momentum, the partnerships will start to reveal themselves or emerge in a way that makes

18:17 sense for your industry and your product as well. I was going to say the old playbook would have

18:22 been Kalbabik, but I guess that one's off the table for the foreseeable future. I'm still always

18:28 happy to talk shop on APAC and international. I have like accumulated a strangely useful amount

18:36 of information and connections. So wherever I can be helpful, I try to be.

18:45"Something Big Is Happening": why he moved to New York

18:45 So you built up an extensive amount of experience. And like you mentioned,

18:51 you could have continued to just build your entire career off of that. And it's not slowing

18:56 down. So there's plenty of opportunity there. What did you start to see? Because obviously,

19:02 there was a massive shift in go to market between how we did things in the 2010s to what post COVID

19:09 looked like and everything today with AI. What trends did you start to see that made you think,

19:16 hey, there's probably some really good opportunities brewing right here.

19:20 I mean, it's probably what many of us have felt like this feels like a very collective experience.

19:27 So it's probably not particularly unique, but I had kind of lived and operated in the

19:35 predominantly in the pre AI world still. And so when I, I remember when I first, you know,

19:42 use chat GPT, I was like, holy shit, this is really cool. And then it's like, okay,

19:46 but this is really cool. And a lot of cool things happen. We are coming out of like blockchains and

19:51 NFTs and other theoretically cool things. Not those that I understood as much or nor did I get

19:58 as much immediate value out of them, but it was it was a, it was kind of coming off the back of

20:03 COVID back of those things. So you kind of there was a maybe an inherent skepticism to some degree,

20:09 they're kind of like, okay, cool. And it would hallucinate. And it was obviously not amazing at

20:13 the first pass, but kind of kept my eye on I was somewhat of an early adopter. I remember being

20:19 like the first one in some of my friend's circles or just like in my common life, being like, oh,

20:24 you can chat GPT or I remember I started using perplexity really early when they tried to come

20:29 up with like a better search. And I was like, guys, I don't Google anything anymore. This

20:32 thing is way better. And some of this, some of these other things, and then it started to see it

20:39 really permeate into the workplace. And that's when I was like, yeah, this makes sense. Like,

20:46 as this will be a consumer revolution, it'll be a big time B2B revolution here. And right around

20:55 that time, there was this blog, maybe as an article read it something someone posted called

21:01 something big is happening. I think that was the title went viral, I think, and I found it,

21:06 I read it, I remember reading it in my bed with a cup of tea with my wife. And I was just like,

21:12 oh my god, this guy's right. Like this, this is just this is just true. Like, if you believe

21:18 that this stuff is going to change the way that we all live and work and interact with each other

21:24 over the next 2030 years. Like it's happening right now, we are living through it. And just that

21:31 awareness of that fact made me realize that I had this unique opportunity to hopefully steer my own

21:41 career in a way that made me feel as close to this change. And as involved and aware and educated

21:49 about this change, that's going to dictate the rest of my life and my children's life. I have

21:53 two young boys, like I just knew I needed to be a part of it. And unfortunately, there is no way

22:03 or there was no way to be a part of that in Singapore, to the extent that you could in

22:09 Silicon Valley or New York right now. And that was that was just true. And I felt it would be true

22:15 for at least the next couple of years. And the opportunity cost of that those couple of years

22:20 felt very high, given the rate of change. And that's when I kind of made this mental decision to say,

22:26 okay, right. It's like if someone told you, like you can go back in time and buy like real estate

22:31 in New York, in like the early 1900s, you'd be like, man, I wish I could go back and do that. It's

22:37 like, well, this feels like that moment to like, hey, I wish I went back to 2025 and just jumped

22:41 into the AI thing. Not because I'm guaranteed going to, you know, be successful or make money

22:48 or anything of it's just like, it's a moment in time, this is happening, like I want to participate.

22:53 So it was it was really that simple. And then it was just more about like, figuring out how and

22:58 what and why and when and personal stuff and professional stuff. But yeah, the strategic level

23:05AI in go-to-market: incremental for digital

23:05 I made up my mind. It makes a ton of sense. And I obviously fully agree with that. This is a moment

23:14 and you kind of choose to be part of it or not. In the context of go to market, where do you think

23:21 the biggest impacts will be over the next couple of years? We're starting to see a lot of them. I'd

23:28 say this year was when like, I'll call it more early adopters really starting to leverage real

23:35 use cases. But where do you see this going and go to market over the next couple of years?

23:40 Yeah, I, first of all, you know, obviously, it's hitting all functions across all industries

23:49 right now. It's doing it at different rates and differing levels of adoption, which tracks to how

23:57 technology adoption curves tend to go, you've got your early adopters, you cross the chasm,

24:02 and then you'll have kind of this, this long tail as well. On the go to market side,

24:08 I think the I call it like the instrumentation of go to market has been this trend. Most of my

24:15 career even, which is, you know, quite a while now where we've been trying to really streamline the

24:22 way that we everything from, you know, sourcing and kind of top of funnel like, obviously all the

24:31 martech that came out to try to get the pipeline in the first place and to reach audiences and

24:35 consumers and then just like instrumenting them through the funnel and all the way to the kind of

24:41 the middle of the bow tie and then beyond as well. I spent a large part of my early career in customer

24:46 success and how do you kind of engage those customers and create a lifetime value of that

24:51 customer to offset your CAC and beyond and so all of that instrumentation had already been happening.

24:57 We already had tools and software for everything pretty much to varying levels of efficacy and AI

25:04 is just like pouring a lot of gas on that fire and then obviously forcing you to rethink the tools

25:10 you use or how they are built or why they're built the way they are and we're all kind of figuring

25:15 that out right now. There was this overreaction of like, okay, all the SaaS is dead and it's like,

25:20 well, actually, hold on a second. Looks like Salesforce and Anthropics just did a partnership.

25:23 Actually, Salesforce is going to feed a lot of these agentic workflows and it's just going to

25:27 be more like headless with agents running around grabbing relevant data and context and like I

25:33 think we're going to still see how it plays out but to me this is just, I think the change for

25:40 GoToMarket on the on the digital side will be somewhat, and I'm really zooming out to say this,

25:47 somewhat incremental. Like, it was already happening. It will just continue to happen.

25:53 Maybe it'll be my selling agents against your buying agents and it'll get really weird but like,

25:59 it still feels like a continuation of what was happening already where I think it could be

26:04Transformative for the real economy: overlapping adoption curves

26:04 potentially transformative is this kind of that long tail of adoption curve because you basically

26:12 have these overlapping adoption curves of people who are just kind of coming along for the ride

26:18 when it comes to digitizing, first of all, like I went out to Indonesia and Thailand and India,

26:25 the markets I started like, a lot of receipts have been written down on paper, so a lot of

26:29 cash hand transactions have still happened. I've seen people keeping little ledgers,

26:33 like that world still exists largely in many of the markets. I've seen it firsthand

26:39 and so like these people were just going to be brought along for the ride of digitizing,

26:45 storing and computing then in the cloud, then having some kind of application which is basically

26:51 like an interface to a database, like all of this was still, is still, was still happening

26:58 for these in-person traditional real economy businesses and now AI has come and it's like,

27:05 it's almost going to be this overlapping curve and some of them may just skip the first one

27:09 altogether and just go straight to the second one, right? It's going to feel absolutely

27:15 transformative for these businesses. It's going to feel like night and day, like and I'd be

27:22 kidding myself, I knew exactly what it's going to look like but I know that the delta between the

27:28 current state and the future state is so much bigger there which is a large part of the reason

27:35 that I was attracted to the zero opportunity which was this, which is basically that. It's like

27:39 building kind of the end-to-end sales performance system for these traditional physical real economy

27:47 businesses to accelerate their journey on this AI adoption curve and that to me felt very obvious

27:57 but also like very exciting because like I said, I don't know exactly how this plays out. We might

28:03 be part of defining what that looks like and that's really exciting to me. It feels very early

28:11 for the real economy market and there's not a lot of competition. I do tons of these podcasts. Very

28:18 few people are actually targeting. I've heard tons of people talking about it and tons of people

28:24 saying it's a huge opportunity but not actually putting together meaningful solutions for these

28:29 type of companies. Is there anything in your opinion that kind of makes this, hey a lot of

28:37 these companies share these similar workflows, share these similar processes where it feels like

28:43Horizontal products, verticalized go-to-market, and the in-person moment

28:43 one solution can serve more horizontally? Totally. One of the most exciting things is

28:51 if you think about my career, by chance really this was not intentional but by chance I've spent

28:56 my career at companies that have had horizontal products that with extremely verticalized and

29:07 sometimes functionalized go-to markets. So it's like a single product that can solve a lot of

29:13 different problems for a lot of different people depending on how you use the capabilities of that

29:19 said product and you package a subset of the capabilities into a solution that has a tangible

29:30 business benefit and ROI. In AnaPlan we served every single industry. It literally didn't matter

29:36 what industry you were in. We could serve you. We could also serve every department. It could

29:40 be sales, it could be finance, it could be supply chain, it could be marketing. My simple grandma

29:45 explanation of AnaPlan is like hey this thing is like Microsoft Excel on steroids in the cloud.

29:52 Yeah you could do a lot of things with that. You could make a shopping list, you could make a three

29:55 statement P&L, you could make supply demand balancing algorithms. You could do all kinds

30:00 of stuff right and it was just our job as a vendor and through our network of go-to-market

30:08 professionals and our partners to consult genuinely customers to figure out like what problem are you

30:15 dealing with? What impact would you like to see on your business? Now let us work with you to

30:21 take our software capabilities and create a solution that actually helps you and that was

30:27 what made that job very fun. At Carta we did the same thing which is taking a suite of capabilities

30:35 but taking them across founders, investors, asset allocators, law firms, tax firms across venture,

30:45 private equity, private credit, like different asset classes. Same suite of capabilities, same

30:50 fundamental software but just used in different ways for different people for different benefits

30:57 and in this case compounding benefits when multiple player like multiple people were on the same

31:01 system and zero to me and any kind of I guess software or or sales system that will transform

31:10 the real world will have to do the same thing because there is still more in common than not

31:15 and then there's going to be some industry specific nuance which I think these days is always going

31:19 to be last mile configurations by the customers themselves. Like I said the software will be

31:25 foundational and then there's going to be just a ton of stuff you can build on top of it.

31:29 I think of our industries it's like something has to happen in person. I know it sounds basic

31:34 but it's like are you going to build or are you going to buy a house without ever seeing it in

31:42 person? You could like but like you kind of want to go see it like you want to just get the vibe you

31:48 want to see what's around smell it see it feel it like it's a big decision it's a it's a high ticket

31:54 item that's another common thing it's a little bit high ticket big decision emotional decision

32:01 in person feels if not necessary certainly desired by the consumer it's like buy a house

32:09 okay buy a car you know get a major procedure done like medical aesthetics

32:18 make a major like luxury purchase or a I don't know just like a high ticket purchase like a

32:27 retail purchase so you go to the brick and mortar sill maybe you know some things you need to feel

32:32 them it's like try on the right pair of gloves the right pair of shoes does it fit right like

32:38 there are these use cases where it's like yeah I get it they need I would go in person too it's

32:42 worth worth my time it's better experience that's a key that's a key dimension and then the rest

32:50 is pretty pretty similar there's just like a lot of money that these all of these companies across

32:55 all these different industries will spend to generate the leads to effectively get these

33:01 people to the in-person thing and it's like whether it's the tour whether it's the into the shop into

33:08 the into the dealership so on and so or if they're coming to you as well so there's the other version

33:13 of in person like they come to you or you go to them it's like okay you need a new roof you

33:19 need new windows you need something fixed like I have to come see it I have to come maybe fix it

33:23 myself so it's it's it's the money it takes to get to the in-person and then the in-person interaction

33:29 is a pivotal moment in that sales process with a significant you know inflection on the trajectory

33:39 of that particular deal and we know that to be true there's emotional reasons there's there's

33:47 actual you know economic reasons for all the parties involved like and how can you basically

33:53 optimize that moment and that's that's the commonality across all the industries we serve

34:00 and there's a lot of pre-work that needs to be done well to get there and there's a lot of

34:03 post-work that needs to be done as well and so can we streamline all of that and make sure that we

34:10 put an in-person seller as present as prepared as possible in that moment so that they can just

34:19 focus on being human and executing the art of selling and salesmanship and that is that's kind

34:30 of like how we see the world and everything else because kind of like remember the commercial

34:35 everything else has mastercard it's like for everything else there's zero right it's like

34:38 you focus on being the human being in person executing the art of selling for all the for

34:44 everything else there's zero so that's kind of how we see it i think so at a high level

34:51How Siro supports sellers before, during and after the meeting

34:51 i think it makes a ton of sense and i also agree there's a lot of those products everything you

34:57 mentioned i'm not going to want to buy online i know there's some some people might want to buy

35:02 a car online i still want to go test drive it especially if it's a car i haven't seen before

35:07 i practically how how does ai come into that equation so sounds like there's some pre-work

35:15 that might be some prep but maybe what would be like a good bread and butter example of how it

35:20 supports before how it supports after and then how it makes sure that salesperson does their best

35:27 job in that in-person moment yeah totally uh good question so the way that i would describe

35:34 zero to somebody is kind of two i would say two levels right it's like first is like okay

35:40 you don't know anything about anything and you're just talking to someone's like look

35:44 sales is an art and a science we kind of all generally get that okay so zero brings a science

35:58 so that you can focus on the art okay kind of get that what does it really do it's like

36:04 basically we are an end-to-end sales performance system and we record every conversation

36:13 period whether it's with your prospects it could be internal it can be

36:17 record every single conversation and then we use ai on top of that to help you run

36:26 evaluate and improve your business and we manifest that in a multitude of different ways so

36:34 classic bread and butter use case right everything leading up to an appointment let's use use for

36:41 example we'll use one of the ones that's top of mind for me because i just met this customer one

36:45 of our medical aesthetics customers right basically people go in like the core of the issue is you go

36:51 into a clinic and you want to have a procedure done um whether it's liposuction or laser hair

36:58 removal or maybe you need uh hair put in like like any medical aesthetic procedure as you can

37:05 appreciate these things you're gonna go in person you're gonna want a consultation you're gonna want

37:08 to figure out what's going on zero will take care of the end end for the business so when you think

37:15 about the before it is prepping you for what's about to happen um any context that you have from

37:24 the forms i filled out online maybe there was an intake call that happened with your receptionist

37:29 beforehand so we've we've captured all of that we've pumped it in we've given you great preps

37:33 like hey anthony bob is coming in today he found us through the website these are the things he said

37:37 all like full briefing right in the moment record the conversation right so it's like hey need to

37:45 record this conversation for training quality purposes uh yes okay great get your consent

37:50 record now we're recording so i don't have to worry about remembering every single thing you

37:54 said i've got my note taker first of all second i'm in the moment i'm talking to you and zero is

38:01 real time listening and coaching me in the moment and and it's kind of coming up and we can manifest

38:07 this in different ways but it could be on your phone your desktop you can text you it can do a

38:10 lot of different things say hey because you know as a salesperson there's a million things you're

38:14 supposed to do you're supposed to build rapport you're supposed to do some discovery you're supposed

38:18 to understand my needs you're supposed to map it to your value proposition you're and you know

38:22 ultimately at the end you got to ask for the sale every company will have a sales process that they

38:27 they want you to execute because they know that it's serves the customer well so zero will basically

38:32 be real time listening and saying hey she you know anthony mentioned something about his dog earlier

38:39 like you know follow up on that or hey you know he mentioned this earlier but then he just said

38:44 something that doesn't line up ask a question to clarify so you understand what he's looking for

38:48 so it's like this real time almost like an earpiece you know just helping you be the best that you

38:55 can in this pivotal moment before you leave the room and i haven't had the interactions haven't

39:00 shared the information that i'm meant to share haven't discovered some of the things that i want

39:05 to about you and as soon as you leave the room it'll do you know two things for me one it'll have

39:12 it'll be waiting my follow-up to you presumably i'll have a follow-up hey thanks for coming in

39:16 blah blah blah here's what we discussed here's the my action items it's like one one button click

39:20 again because it recorded everything transcribed and analyzed it's like one button click i followed

39:24 up with you and then once i've executed my follow-ups like i've done my job it will also call me or it

39:29 can call me for a debrief and say okay hey not bad um here's what you did well here's what you could

39:35 have done better which is like that thing that every sales manager is supposed to do with every rep

39:40 and it's like real-time coaching it's still fresh in my head i'm like oh yeah dude i forgot to

39:45 mention that new product we had or you know he said this thing and i didn't do this thing or maybe

39:49 sometimes in certain industries like hey from a compliance perspective you were supposed to

39:53 mention this you didn't make sure you put it in your email now make sure you like get that right

39:57 so there's so many use cases for that so you get the debrief call and last piece is like okay all

40:02 this has happened normally a sales rep like okay now i gotta go fill out my crm right because like

40:06 the rest of the world needs to know what just happened right now and in this case you don't you

40:10 don't lift a finger zero has already done it for you it's like because we we know everything that

40:14 happened we know exactly all the custom objects and fields in your sales force or hub spa whatever

40:20 you're using and we've extracted all of that from the conversations like you wanted these products

40:25 this is the next step this is the closed day whatever totally configurable so that's like the

40:30 running the business we have said run evaluate and improve right that is all just the running of the

40:35 business and then there are like a million more things we do on the evaluate and improve side

40:41 when it comes to analytics scorecards reporting on the improved side it's coaching personalized

40:48 coaching plans you know role plays training and certification so you can just kind of start to

40:53 imagine like oh shit if all of this was happening i'm pretty sure my sales team would be operating

40:58 like as close to you know optimal performance as i could imagine and then the the million dollar

41:05 moment is like great all of that happening it's happening at scale it's happening every time

41:10 and now it's happening in a way that's proactive and personalized so it's like hey anthony you're

41:15 good at certain things and you're not so good at others i'm good at certain things and i'm not so

41:19 good at others and it's actually developing both of us both are developing our strengths but also

41:25 our weaknesses in a way that resonates with us because it has user level memory and context

41:32 but it also has organizational context and instruction and so it's bringing all of that

41:37Will every in-person conversation be recorded?

41:37 together in a way that frankly which is impossible pre-ai should we expect in the near future that

41:44 in-person sales meetings consultations will be recorded i think you should i i'm betting on that

41:53 i think that it is pretty much inevitable at this point that every aspect of our lives is recorded

41:58 and i know that sounds quite 1984 but like it's kind of true it's like when facebook came out

42:05 right and it was like oh you know be careful what you put on the facebook because you know they have

42:09 your data and then they'll sell it to advertisers and it's like we all gave up it's like the shit is

42:13 useful and so we're all on facebook and we're on instagram and we're on youtube and the algorithms

42:18 tiktok and the algorithms are going nuts and they know so much even our ai chat gpt knows so much

42:23 about us so yes i do believe that the value that these tools can bring will naturally in a free

42:33 market capitalism kind of way lead us all to forgoing some level of like risk or privacy

42:43 type consideration because we'll say well the values far outweigh the cons and we see this in

42:49 the data like every single one of our customers obviously goes through this process ask customers

42:54 to record get the consent and we've looked at it because we have all the recordings literally 99%

43:01 of the time consent is obtained less than one percent of the time it's almost like wait pause

43:06 never mind i don't want that like turn it off and obviously we will it's fine like it's it's just

43:11 like okay great well then now you're relying on my memory to try to serve you and it won't do all

43:15 this other stuff but fine you know so yeah i think we're going to move to a world where everything is

43:20 recorded and you seeing this left and right like it's not just us obviously you see like granola is

43:24 very popular with companies now everyone's granolaing everything now there are some new

43:29 like wearables that are coming out that people are can record with and those scare me even a little

43:35 bit more because in the consumer context people are not as good about getting consent like you

43:39 would just not know like people are just recording all over and in the u.s it's fine i think 39 states

43:44 are 38 or 39 states there's just single party consent so you actually don't have to tell

43:48 someone you're recording them which i find quite strange um we tell all of our customers to tell

43:53 their customer like tell their customers that they'll you know get the consent i think it's

43:57 best practice but yeah if it's going there from a consumer perspective obviously businesses who have

44:02 like real value real gdp creation possibilities are going to adopt that technology that's my belief

44:09 and where we're seeing it play out in our go-to-market our numbers well there was even a moment where

44:16 i would get on sales calls before and it was like oh this is a serious one everybody kick

44:21 out the recorders right we need we need we need to have an off-the-record conversation yeah now i'm

44:25 like i know you're running some transcriber behind the scenes anyway so who cares just keep it in i'm

44:31 just gonna walk in every conversation assuming i'm going to be recorded totally but it will it will

44:37 be interesting i'm even thinking like you go to a restaurant does your server have a little recorder

44:42 so they never get your order wrong or they have receipts when you ask for it medium rare and then

44:47 you complained about it after i don't know but yeah yeah i do think it's going to be a weird

44:52 world i i agree the utility is just going to be so tempting tantalizing like how do you give that

44:59 up but i think there's if we thought our privacy was gone before it's going to be a whole new level

45:07 agreed yeah and like i said i i genuinely like i don't know truly how i feel about it right

45:15 i i like that is a whole different can of worms of what the world is going to look like from for

45:21 my kids and will just every single piece of data and context be stored forever in somebody's

45:29 ai memory and this kind of gets like black memory but i will say i think we're heading in that

45:36In-person sales as a path to financial freedom

45:36 direction and i think it's kind of inevitable and so what i as i said earlier what i wanted to do

45:43 is find a way to participate in it that feels a like genuinely useful and genuinely um ideally

45:52 like purposeful like if you think about at least for us what we aim to do we want to make in person

45:59 sales the most accessible path to financial freedom is actually remarkable what percentage of the world

46:06 still operates in in-person sales it's one of the oldest industries in humanity to sell something

46:14 to someone else barter face to face like this is like deeply core and primal as a species for us

46:22 and it continues to be this very accessible path you don't need a formal education

46:26 you don't need some fancy degree this is something that anyone can do if they put in the work

46:31 they get the right support they get the right coaching and they can be successful and our

46:37 product we genuinely believe just gives is just empowering it gives more people access to the

46:44 tools and the support that they need to be successful in this capacity and what that translates to for

46:50 the individual users of our platform is like not being in credit card debt like paying off their

46:56 mortgage like or maybe just being able to work less hours and spend more time with their family

47:01 because all this admin is like the benefits for the individual users of our platform these

47:06 in-person sellers across predominantly america right now and hopefully someday the world

47:12 are are just so are so real and so tangible and frankly heartwarming when you meet someone like

47:19 man i freaking love this thing like this thing like has made my life so much better it's like

47:24 i i can get out of bed and be like all right this thing is happening it's inevitable well at least

47:28 like we're participating in a way that feels really good yeah you can't avoid the wave so

47:35 you know do find a way to find the noble thing and you're right it is very accessible i mean

47:42 i know if people can also build up their skills then they can start to stack whatever their

47:48 industry in and start to move into higher end products within their industry and make

47:52 a serious career out of it i mean i know servers that pull in over 200k

47:57 because they're working at some of the finest restaurants but if you had some time to build

48:02 your skills through that and and you get the coaching that you need then it does make it

48:06 accessible to anybody and i think that's that's an incredible thing when we have and the other

48:11 thing you know anytime you join a startup uh like this the exciting thing is as i alluded to before

48:16 is like not only is like what we do today which i just described but it's what we can and should

48:23 do going forward like hopefully we're at the forefront of defining what the use cases and

48:28 potential benefits of this type of technology look like in these industries specifically

48:33 working closely with our customers and just learning from them be like oh what else would

48:36 be super helpful oh okay that's really interesting like you know we've got great stuff it's like hey

48:41 you it would be great if you could just build the quote for me it's like because they we already

48:44 discussed everything they wanted the measurements of the blinds and this is like yeah sure we could

48:48 do that and it's like the thing you mentioned is like hey i you know the rep turnover in these

48:53 industries is really high um one because there's this huge standard deviation between top performers

48:59 and bad performers but also just because of the nature of the industry people move around it's

49:03 like well now all of a sudden even at the consumer like at the individual level zero becomes like

49:09 almost this canonical like source of truth of who you are as a seller like what are your strengths

49:16 what are your weaknesses what's the proof of the stuff you've done it's almost like this living

49:19 breathing resume artifact in a way that you know like a linkedin is like what you write about

49:24 yourself but zero's got everything for you and so there's just like there's like an infinite

49:29 number of possibilities and exciting things that this could do to hopefully benefit a lot of people

49:34 which is what makes it so exciting to work on it is exactly the kind of stuff that wouldn't be able

49:39 to work on um at a singapore at least not to the extent that um the opportunities are available

49:46Wrap-up

49:46 here in the u.s at the moment well i think you're absolutely right you're in the right place at the

49:51 right time to make the most of the moment and i love how you're approaching it and helping people

49:57 better their skills especially through through the art of sales and i just think it's so cool i

50:03 really appreciate everything that you've shared everything about okay how do you go to market an

50:07 a-pack what are the things to consider you know it's really difficult i appreciate the offer

50:12 sounds like if anyone's going to market a-pack give bob a good call he probably knows someone

50:15 who can help you or join your team um but really seeing the moment and taking that brave step to

50:23 come out of something where you had such a reputation but knowing that this is a special

50:28 point in time in history that you wanted to be part of i really respect what you're doing and

50:33 spending the time in new york so i really appreciate everything you share today thank

50:37 you for being on the podcast and i can't wait to see what you and zero do next yeah thank you so

50:44 much for having me it's been a blast to a little bit you know lockdown memory road a little bit

50:50 with you and then also just um yeah i guess rehash some of the reasons why i'm pretty excited about

50:56 what we're building here and how excited i am to be here in new york now yes anybody who needs

51:02 anything related to a-pack feel free to message me on linkedin i'll try to be as helpful as i can

51:08 and also if anybody found any of my my zero stuff super interesting encouraging you to reach out as

51:13 well we're hiring pretty much across all functions so if it's really exciting to you you could join

51:18 the join the party as well incredible thank you buffett thank you so much thanks for having me