SaaS Backwards - Reverse Engineering SaaS Success

Ep. 156 - Why Traditional Sales Prospecting is Broken (And What to Do Instead)

Ken Lempit Season 4 Episode 9

Guest: Zach Wright, Co-Founder & CRO of Syft AI

Most sales teams are still stuck in outdated prospecting tactics—mass email sequencing, generic outreach, and hoping something sticks. The reality? These methods are failing fast, and sellers who rely on them are drowning in low response rates and missed pipeline goals.

Zach Wright, co-founder and CRO of Syft AI, breaks down why traditional sales prospecting is broken and what today’s B2B SaaS sellers must do differently to cut through the noise, engage decision-makers, and win more deals.

The biggest mistake? Relying on volume instead of relevance. Buyers are overwhelmed with hundreds of templated emails daily, and most outreach feels impersonal, irrelevant, and easy to ignore. Instead of spamming prospects, Zach shares how AI-driven prospecting helps sales teams pinpoint the right accounts, at the right time, with the right message.

He explains how top sales teams are:

✅ Ditching “spray and pray” prospecting in favor of targeted, intent-driven outreach.
✅ Using AI to surface active buying signals
—so reps only reach out when there’s a real need.
✅ Personalizing at scale
without relying on ineffective AI-generated fluff.
✅ Bringing cold calling back
—and why it’s working better than ever.

If your outbound efforts aren’t converting like they used to, this episode will change the way you think about prospecting—and show you how to start winning more meetings with high-value prospects.

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Ken Lempit:  Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS revenue leaders to accelerate growth and maximize profitability. Our guest today is Zach Wright, co founder and CRO at SyftAI, an AI automated account research, targeting, and value prop creation tool that lets B2B sales target companies that have an active problem they can solve.

Hey, welcome to the podcast, Zach. 

Zach Wright: And thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah. Excited to record your episode, but before we dig in, please tell us a little bit about your background coming into Syft and the company that you co founded. 

Zach Wright: I'm an ex athlete at a Trinity university.

I spent my entire career, it's now 11 years in B2B sales at much larger organizations like Oracle and Informatica and I actually boomeranged back to Oracle as a regional sales director over there. But yeah, I, I've always been in that kind of outbound sales world and so has one of my two co- founders.

I've known that same co-founder since the fourth grade. We've been kind of best friends, which has been a, an awesome ride to kind of start a company with your best friend. But recently a new ish dad, I've got an 18 month old. So apparently you can still say new until two years, cause it's just chaos, but kind of doing all the things in one, two year span between starting a company, getting married and having a kid.

It's been wild. 

Ken Lempit: Well, that's great. Congratulations on all of those recent accomplishments. It's very exciting. I can tell you as a dad for a little bit more than 18 months, it's still chaos, man. 

Well, let's talk a little bit about Syft. So I just want to get right into this founding team. First of all, tell us just a little bit about like the other founders and their skills. And how this team works together. 

Zach Wright: Yeah, it's a, it's only three people, right?

It's a, it's a very tight group. I run sales and marketing and customer success with a lot of my, my sales background, still having to learn a lot of those things and the marketing and customer success. So that's part of the entrepreneurial journey. Lee our CEO and co founder. He has also 10 years of, of B2B sales experience, but he's also very technical.

So he's. He's very much ingrained with all of the AI best practices and part of all of the, I call it like the, the nerd discord channels and all that. But he's also kind of sales at heart. So he's got that interesting balance to connect me and our third co founder who's our CTO, Peter Katsos.

He's a much more technical and he's kind of handling the backend to make sure we can kind of scale this thing infinitely. And he comes from an interesting world. He worked at Optimizely, but he was managing some of the largest digital experiences for her, like presidential candidates and like Nike.com and all these sorts of things at Optimizely. So, really cool background between the three of us and we've done a good job at trying to eliminate things that, what we call as a time suck. So we're constantly automating things to make it where we can wear so many hats and it's been, it's been a good journey.

Ken Lempit: So that's amazing.

So there's just three people in this company now, or are there more folks? 

Zach Wright: There's just three people that's full time. We've got some advisors that we meet with monthly, but kind of boots on the ground. It's just three folks. 

Ken Lempit: And I think people are probably if they're thinking about that are going to be a little shocked that you can build a product and go to market with three people.

So, 

Zach Wright: And we've kept all of the tech, the software development in house as well. It's been, it's just the three of us. 

Ken Lempit: So what is it that's different than how applications were built just a couple of years ago that's allowed you to do that? 

Zach Wright: Well, it's interesting and we go against these. behemoths of competitors that have, there's both existed and they had mountains of technical debt and tried to pivot and incorporate AI into their products, which is much harder said than done.

And then there's those that are kind of born. It's funny back when I was at Oracle, we talked about born in the cloud, but now it's kind of the new term, I guess, is AI native. Those AI native companies are, since we're so small, we're able to be very agile and we've been driving our roadmap. We've got our North star of where we want to be, but then we've also incorporated our customer feedback and that fine balance between the two has helped us really develop a experience that is truly game changing from an outbound B2B sales perspective.

A lot of our competition is trying to automate the sales role, which we don't think is the case. What we're trying to do is essentially create an AI sales application that does all the things a sales rep should do, but doesn't have the time for, right? So what we're doing is we're gathering and automating all of the research about your accounts.

But since we've trained our models on what you care about each week, we're showing them prospects that have active problems they can solve, summarizing why they're a good fit recommending contacts and even creating AI personalized messaging that doesn't sound like AI. It sounds like the tribal knowledge of a seller at their company.

So it's been really interesting. 

Ken Lempit: That's just amazing. Now, is this a full UI experience? That the users have. 

Zach Wright: Yeah, we have, it is, it, there is an app with a UI that you log into, it's actually been our differentiator that it's simple, right? Like, and it sounds silly, but like you think of all of the, all of our competitors, they're you've got a prompt engineer and you've got to learn how to use AI and our end users are sellers, right?

They want to sell, they don't want to prompt engineer. Lee calls it,we don't outsource our development to our users and in the form of making them prompt engineer, we do it for them, right? So the goal is we're presenting you the answer of where you should spend your time, you review those and you click a button and it will kick off a process to kind of create that value based interaction and then you review it and send it, 

Ken Lempit: That sounds wonderful.

We want one for us, but my, my other question on the kind of experience, maybe the differentiation between you and competitors is this idea of the co pilot versus AI native, right? So my, my interpretation of co pilot is you're bolting on something to this larger UI that exists. What's the problem with that solution for your competitors?

Zach Wright: Well, they've got mountains of technical debt that it's tough for them to kind of get outside of that original use case. you think of the largest player in our space. I won't call them out, even though I did a viral post and I, I showed their UI, which is pretty obvious, but they came out with this AI co pilot, right?

And they're,they're a $5 billion company. it's incredible. And it was this big AI release. And they talked about how it writes AI emails and it was like, Hey, you click this evidence and create the email. And it was, it spit out the email and it was like, I hope this finds you well, pitch the product.

Like they basically just plugged in ChatGPT. And I'm looking at what they're demoing. So they had, they were in full control of this experience and it was not an email that you could send. It was another one of the 200 emails our executives receive on a daily basis and it's just noise, right?

So the only way to stand out is to add value and have that context, not just your pitch, but what happened. What challenges are they facing? How do you solve that? And with which customer have you solved that with and the impact. So if we're able to bridge that end to end we're actually creating contextually valuable and personalized messaging.

So, it's gotta have that contextual rich background or you're just like, you think of the other side of the coin, there's AI agents out there that are just doing spray and pray better, right? Because they don't sleep, they don't get tired, but without that contextually rich evidence of, Hey, here's what happened and here's what challenges they're facing

and here's how we solve it. It feels like it's one to many messaging and the reader will pick up on that. Whereas we're trying to create interactions that are personalized and the end user knows that it's one to one. And they feel that real engagement in the email.

Ken Lempit: Now the three of you are all, all have sales backgrounds, right? Two of the three of us have 

Zach Wright: sales background. Butour third is, I would say he's highly versed in the business world. He's got an MBA. He's he's got a strong background. 

Ken Lempit: Cause I was having a conversation with a couple of our advisors and we talked about it's maybe it's a lot easier for salespeople to sell to other salespeople.

Do you think that helps you guys being sort of in the trenches previously relating to your prospects? is that helping Syft? 

Zach Wright: Absolutely. I feel likewe really speak the language and the pain points of our buyers and understand the problem that they're trying to solve and what's been kind of a key differentiator for us and why we've had the best five months we've ever had month over month is we're creating these custom demos.

Because sales, the hardest part about selling to sales is they'll say, Hey, this is cool, but our use case is unique, right? So we're like, all right, well, we're just going to get rid of that. And for every qualified buyer, we're going to do a custom demo. And you think about the big competitors, like they don't have the bandwidth to do these custom type demos,

right? But we're showing up with prospects that have active problems they can solve and they can leave our demo going and engaging what we showed them, right? So the value is kind of given away there. And then once we've done a custom demo, it's been part of our sales cycle to if they're kind of dragging their feet on the evaluation, because we've had extremely short sales cycles, like 23 days has been our sales cycle.

It's incredible. But if someone's dragging their feet or they're having a hard time. Getting it approved. We'll just drip them a new value match each week and say, Hey, here's another active company that has an active problem that you can solve. By the way, we found 31 of these this week. What type of pipeline are you guys missing out on?

Right? So it's like kind of creating this, this compelling event for them to start sooner. 

Ken Lempit: They're getting the sugar high and the FOMO. 

Zach Wright: Yeah, exactly. And then all of our competitors have been trying to just do annual lock ins. And you think of the AISDR type companies, I, this is, I don't have the stats to back this up, but I heard it's like in the high 80 percent churn rate.

Which is terrible. And that's why they're kind of doing these lock ins cause they need so much time to implement and maintain and get their customers happy. We're doing the exact opposite. We've done the custom demo. We've shown you the value. You're seeing exactly what you would get with Syft.

And then we're doing, Hey, if you want to try it on a monthly basis if you don't like it, fire us in a month. But we're going to earn your business each month. And after a certain amount of months, it's going to be obvious, Hey, is Syft a long term partner for you? And if that's the case. Let's reward you in the form of a discount.

 So we've been turning those monthly customers into annual commitments, but proving it first without kind of locking them in. 

Ken Lempit: So I love a lot about this sales process here. I love the qualifying. I mean, you said it quickly, but it's for qualified prospects, right? So you must have A solid qualification, you're putting people through and then tailoring the demo to them and their initial expected outcome, right?

Because it would get better over time, right? As you get smarter, as everybody gets smarter with the tool. What kind of demo to close rate are you experiencing as a result? 

Zach Wright: It depends how I guess the level of engagement of the buyer, right? if they're feeling that, that pain point and we've got an obvious fit, we're seeing pretty high close ratesand pretty quickly, right? So, I would say about half of these conversations are converting to opportunities, which is incredibly high. But the hard part about sales is they might be distracted on closing their quarter, or they might be waiting on funding or they need to get these people involved. So it's difficult to quantify that close rate at this point.

Ken Lempit: Fair enough. Let's talk a little bit about the actual way that the AI works. And you know what, so what is it that it's doing, you know, how is it finding the opportunities that, you know, we might not otherwise be aware of and what are the benefits of this approach compared to traditional sales prospecting methods?

Zach Wright: Yeah. So what we're doing is we first train our models on what are your products? What are your value props? What are your customer win stories? So we train our AI model on what good looks like. Then we're going and scraping every single night on job posts, news articles, LinkedIn posts, press releases, all these sorts of things.

Yeah. And we're looking for projects that are related to what you sell, right? So then you are easily able to log in and see a one liner. Hey, this company is going through this project. Here's the evidence of where we found that job posting is my personal favorite. It's always been my secret to prospecting because people hire people to solve really fricking hard problems.

And they'll talk about those problems and who they're hiring and what technologies they're using and the titles involved and all those different things. So we can gather all this Intel and present it to you. A quick story. I have, a new customer and it's funny, like I would say 8 out of 10

really bought in. And they're like, yes, we love this. This is amazing. But there was one person that was super skeptical. , I would just say maybe he thought of AI and sales is just the AI SDR type things right? And it's trying to replace his job or whatever. So I was like, Hey, I understand your skepticism.

Let's first, I've already implemented this with your profile. Let me pull up something I found and give me a chance to show you. What's going on here. So the value match that I presented to him, he's like, wait, pause. I already do $2 million with this account every year. So what are you going to tell me about this account that I don't already know?

So I was like, all right, well, let's look into this. We found this company. They had a particular use case and we presented the use case that we found within the account. I was like, Hey, are you actively running this project since they're already your customer? He's like, no, we're not. Like, okay, well, you already have an MSA in place with them.

You have champions at the account. You could probably get a introduction there. And your boss lives in the same city as the hiring manager of this role. So let's see if we can set up a quick win. And we quickly changed his tune. And he was like, all right, this is here to help me. This is not here to replace me.

And I thought that was a really cool experience. For that aha moment to happen so quickly. And that company, they started with a smaller subset of users and they quickly saw the value and expanded it across the North American team.

Ken Lempit: It's really interesting in hearing you describe it. First of all, it's very empowering, right?

So you're empowering the sales teams, but also, it's really hard to do the same prospecting work over and over again consistently, you know, like you talked very early about, you know, the machine doesn't get tired, right? So here, we're using the ability of the machine to do the same hard work over and over, but really in service to the seller as opposed to, you know, becoming this robotic email machine.

Zach Wright: And it's not, I would say, like, I focus heavily on emails, but we just worked through our first case study with a customer of ours called Instabug. And it's really interesting because they've, I would say. Their SDR leader, Chase, is one of the best that I've seen. He is using Syft to find active reasons to reach out to companies.

They're a mobile application performance monitoring solution to do like debugging and everything to do with the mobile world, right? So, what we do is we go find companies that are either launching a new mobile app or having challenges or negative reviews or whatever it might be.

And then we're generating the email that they then send through their email service, right? They then pull up this product called Nooks. And Nooks is basically is a cold calling platform that allows you to connect with hundreds of peoplein a day. So it's constantly getting you in live conversations.

The challenge with those dialers is you get on the phone and you have to give the same pitch because you didn't do a lot of research, right? But what Nooks does is it pulls up the previous email so they have context. And since those emails driven by Syft, it's, it starts with, Hey, I noticed this happen that typically comes with this challenge.

Here's how we solve it. Here's a customer that we solved it with. They're able to reference that email and reference the reason that they reached out with in the first place. And cold calling is actually, it's funny that you're seeing a pendulum swing back to cold calling. Just cause emails become so oversaturated.

As a result, they were setting 20 meetings a month as a team. Now they're setting 50 meetings a month. And he also mentioned there's six to seven hours worth of time savings per week per SDR because they don't have to go and do all the research and the email creation.

They can re allocate that time to what's working for them, which is cold calling. if they can trust that, that email is value driven, it can really drive some strong cold calling activities. There was a big aha moment for them. They do a blind email contest every single month.

And when our AI email service came out, the SDR manager, what they do is they all anonymously submit an email that worked that month, right? And then as a team, they vote, which are the best ones. So the SDR manager contributed the Syft generated email and the team chose the Syft email over everybody else's.

And this was a huge aha moment for not just the SDRs, but the reps. It showed it's not Syft versus the rep, but it's Syft helping the rep get their activities done so that they can focus on higher value activities. like the cold calling or whatever it might be to set high qualified messaging.

Ken Lempit: So that aha moment was a big one for them because it wasn't us versus them. It was us and them solving a problem, which was awesome. 

I think it's a great case study showing sort of the, transformation of the team performance using a tool like this, which I think is sort of the next question after, Hey, that's cool.

Ken Lempit: Right. It's like, what's in it for me. So, yeah. I mean, the more of those proof points you have, the better. 

Zach Wright: Yeah, it's funny like, I'm a co founder. I've never created case studies before, right? Like I've always been a B2B salesperson, like an AE or an RSD. So you think about, okay, I have to wear the marketing hat.

You would typically maybe outsource this to a customer advocacy team or whatever it might be. But with AI, you can. Like this isn't Syft application, but with AI, I can take the transcript of my interview that I had. That was 45 minutes, pop it into AI and say, Hey, I take the role of a customer advocacy person or expert and help me create this case study and include these quotes.

And then you're going through it and you're like, Hey, I don't like this quote, replace it with a better quote and make sure it's word for word. Don't make anything up. Cause you have the transcript, but it's just so cool. Some of the things that you can do with AI. And that's,the kind of activities that,

as a three person company, like you've got to, get creative and tell a good story because all these sales AI companies, they all sound the same with buzzwords and all of that. What do people actually care about is telling real stories with real customers that worked, right? So that's been, I would say a challenge and a learning curve of mine, cause I don't have a marketing background.

I've got a marketing degree from college, but what, like, what does that mean when marketing changes so much? So that kind of learning curve has been a fun entrepreneurial journey as well. And I would say my. My team has done a great job. You'd think of my CTO who we started this company. And I remember him saying like, not having a lot of respect for sales people in his previous role to now understanding that sales people aren't lazy, they just have so much data that's thrown at them,

how could they possibly digest all of this information and make sense of it. So the kind of that narrative has changed completely and having a new respect for salespeople and helping them solve a very hard problem. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah. I've never understood the tension versus sales in these organizations.

Cause it's like, Hey, if we don't sell stuff, none of us get to work. So there should be a different relationship between sales and the other parts of the company. Yeah. Maybe you can solve that.

Zach Wright: The products so good though. Why doesn't it sell itself? You know? But like on the other end of that coin, it's confusing out there, like the buyers hearing the same thing from all these different vendors.

So, and like with these AI SDRs. You might write the perfect message, but they're drowning in messaging all day long. So I don't know, there's a little bit of buyer fatigue that you have to get through. So in order to do that, we're trying to lead with a perspective. That's how we always tell our customers.

You have to start with a perspective on how you can help them solve a real problem, right? Because if you're coming in with a perspective, then you're a trusted advisor and you're consultative selling versus kind of the old way of prospecting, which may have worked really well in 2015 was. I'm going to take 10, 000 people, throw them in the sequence and shake the tree and see what falls out.

But that's not the case anymore because you're not going to get people. People are so overwhelmed because everyone's doing that. So you're not gonna get that same outcome that you did six, seven years ago. 

Ken Lempit: So that's where combining the prospecting tools, right, really comes in.

So it's, you've got to do the email, but really calling people up and trying to get their attention has to come into play for most sellers, right? 

Zach Wright: Yeah, exactly. 

Ken Lempit: Could you dig in a little bit more on, you know, training your AI on the customer value prop? You know, what does that look like? And what are the outcomes of doing that tailoring?

Zach Wright: Yeah. I mean, there's a, there's like their customer stories that they might give us from the website or things that are internal to them that they can still use publicly. And the obvious value props of their different products from the website, if their website isn't like some of our customers or startups or precede, they might not have a great website

that's got clear value props. We've built our own kind of internal mechanisms to help them. articulate those value props. So we're training our models on, okay, what problem do you solve? And then go find where does that exist?

Ken Lempit: how does the training on the value prop And, you know, the case studies, how does that help you to differentiate the outreach that your AI generates versus what's been, you know, sort of the standard practice?

Zach Wright: I would say the email is like a small part of it, right? It's, gaining the tribal knowledge of your company of what does good look like. And then since AI can scale and take a massive amount of data, like what rep is going to go read every job posting of their hundreds of clients or find news about their hundreds of potential prospects, right?

Maybe even thousands for some of our smaller companies who have a smaller sales force. So it's first identifying companies that have an active problem they can solve. And then extrapolating challenges that are related to what this, our customers solve for, and then pulling value props and pulling the appropriate wind story.

You can imagine when we find a perfect problem with a perfect value prop, we then go look at the customer wind stories and say, Hey, which of these 15 that we've collected is the most relevant that solved this exact same problem and then insert a, like a, some sort of impact statement. So, it's following a really logical process.

And then we're making, we're getting too, like, tactical into the email, but like, it doesn't sound like AI wrote it and it's mobile friendly, so it's not these long marketing paragraphs. Rather it gets to the point and it makes sense and it shows that you did your homework because we're able to quote where we found these things like, Hey, I, I saw in your job posting for a VP of transformation that you guys are going through a three year migration off of PeopleSoft.

Typically that comes with these challenges around archiving your data and data compliance and all sorts of things for reporting. Here's how we've solved it with this customer and they saw this impact, right? You can feel like that email right there is that customer knows it's one to one because you quoted their job post, right?

Like you didn't send that to 100 other customers. 

Ken Lempit: Yeah. So I think it's an important point. First of all, amazing tailoring of the outbound, but also just finding the opportunity that's so very consistent with what you can deliver. 

Zach Wright: Yeah. And I would say that second part, finding the opportunity, I would say that's the hardest part about prospecting.

And that's what, if you were to say, Syft does this one thing, Syft finds companies that have an active problem that you can solve, right? Then you can spend your time, instead of being lost and falling back on bad habits of spray and pray, or the reality is a lot of these sellers are not prospecting because they're so overwhelmed.

We're giving you a clear list of companies to target that week that have an active problem that you can solve. And let's say you create 30 personalized messages to five people at each of those companies. I would say you are going to have a much stronger week's performance of pipeline generation than if you spray and pray to 

5, 000 and hope someone responds, right?

if you're not coming with a perspective, like you're not going to land the meeting, right? So we've got to be focused on value selling. And the only way to do that is to find these active challenges that these companies are facing. And that's really hard to do. You think of the old ways of doing it was you create a Google alert for every single one of your accounts, right?

That, that kind of inspired us at the very beginning, because you could imagine, okay, I want to know what's happening in the news, but then the reality is you started getting 50 to 100 emails a day of Google alerts. It started just becoming noise that you had to sift through and then you ultimately ignore it, right?

So that's what we're trying to avoid is giving you all this data that you then are overwhelmed and have to sift through the sifted results, right? Like we want to say, Hey, there's not 500 that had a trigger hit like some of our competitors. It's like, here's 30 that had a trigger hit, but it's also in the context of an active project that you would care about and can help with. It's not more is more, but less is more in that scenario. It's quality over quantity. That way you can have a palatable list of companies that you can actually engage thoughtfully. 

Ken Lempit: Earlier you gave us sort of a little very micro case study with one client. Yeah. Do you have another little vignette you'd feel comfortable sharing?

Zach Wright: Yeah. We just we just signed a company. They do computer vision in third party logistics. So they're like, they create AI for inventory accuracy and all these things, and their software attaches to towers within the warehouse. One of the little things that we found with their SDR team is they're like, Hey, we're kind of just spray and pray.

We're finding out things reactively. I was like, all right, well, this company, they just talked about opening a new facility and they're embracing. Manufacturing 4.0 kind of like the new AI and IOT concepts. Wouldn't it be nice to like proactively look into these accounts and try to land a meeting.

And within his first week of using Syft, he landed six high priority account meetings. it was just one of those moments where if you can get the aha moment in the first week of working with a customer, and it's not a three to six month onboarding process. It's such a different feeling and you're like the leadership, it's not waiting to go live or whatever it might be.

Rather, it's like, Hey, we've only been using this a week and we got six meetings and it ended up yielding a high, one of the largest. Auto distributors in the world that they're forecasting a deal with, which is really exciting. 

Ken Lempit: This is not just mainstream, obvious kinds of technology sales. You're uncovering opportunities, even in deep niches. The one you just described is as deep a niche as I can imagine. 

Zach Wright: Yeah. And like, we've got all it's any B2B software services companies. The more niche, the harder it is to find what good looks like, right?

 But if you're good at articulating the problem that you solve, and we understand what those kind of pain indicators are of your prospects, like one of my customers. They implement Dynamics CRM 365. That's all they do, right? So their CEO is like, Hey, Zach, if you guys can find us four real implementations or like companies that just bought Dynamics 365,

a month, we'd be over the moon. So the first week he asked for four in a month, the first week we delivered 15 active implementations of dynamics three 65, where they were hiring consultants to help them implement this new go live. And he was blown away. It was great. So you think of something as specific as implementing one software.

 Like, where does that exist? But not just, where does it exist? Where does it exist in the context of, Hey, we're looking to implement this right now. So there's an active reason for you to reach out to me. 

Ken Lempit: That's great. Hey, I want to turn the conversation to your development as a company, sort of land the episode here.

What is the near term future look like in terms of growth and funding that growth? You guys are more or less a bootstrap, so there's only so much you can capitalize, I imagine on your own. So what are your plans for like the next 6 to 12 months to help grow the business? 

Zach Wright: We've taken some angel investment.

So I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent bootstrapped. However, we haven't taken on that big institutional VC funding at the moment. Our whole focus at the end of last year were two things. Last year's yearly goals were get to profitability, which we did. And the other was get to nine out of 10 value matches.

are like, holy shit, I need to reach out to this company. Cause they've like, the quality of value matches needed to be really high or else we were selling something that didn't solve the problem we were setting out to solve. So we got to those two marks. Now with three people, we're looking to kind of triple our business again.

And get to a point where we're above seven figures and ARR is kind of that goal. And at that point we would be, we only have three people, right? So we are growing very profitably and responsibly. At that point it gives us an opportunity to. Go raise money or expand headcount or just continue on our same path, but where it puts us in the driver's seat to have a really strong future, right?

We're not, we're not raising too early and giving away too much of the company. So that's been a, something the team's really proud of for sure. I would say if we can continue on our, since we've, these last five months have been each the strongest month we've ever had a new logo count. If we can continue this and maintain our churn at a very low rate, we will exceed that market potentially in Q3, which is very exciting.

So, I would say, stick to the plan for this calendar year, and then reassess at the beginning of next year and our whole focus this year is. How can we make things, the experience and Syft actionable as easy as possible and connect to the other go to market systems to where, what we're rolling out in uh, two weeks from now is you review your value matches.

You press a button on one value match, a second, a third. We're going to curate the message, recommend the contacts and send them wherever you want it to go. So it's kind of, you could imagine an experience where I want to prospect this week and I don't want to feel the anxiety hanging over me that I didn't prospect as a seller.

So I want to get all of that done for the week in 10 minutes in Syft. So that you're prospecting thoughtfully in 10 minutes. So you just press a button, we give you something to review, you send it downstream. So that's kind of this end state goal. And I'm really excited to release thisin two weeks.

And I'm going to come out with a really cool video demo about it. 

Ken Lempit: Nice. Well, I think that's a great place to land the episode. I imagine some of our listeners are going to want to know how to get in touch with you. So how can they find more about the company and reach out to you? 

Zach Wright: Yeah, the company is called SyftAI S Y F T, like lift with an S.

SyftAI. You can find our website at syftai.com. And please feel free to LinkedIn request me. I'm very active on LinkedIn. You'll see me on there. 

Ken Lempit: That's great. And, if people want to reach me, I'm on LinkedIn/in/kenlempit. Our demand generation agency for SaaS companies is Austin Lawrence group.

We're at austinlawrence.com. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please look for SaaS Backwards, wherever podcasts are distributed. And on YouTube, we have our own YouTube channel as well. Hey, Zach Wright, thanks so much for being on the podcast. 

Zach Wright: Ken thanks for having me. This was fun.