Ep. 179 - The Smart SaaS Funding Path No One Talks About

Guest: Melanie Nabar, Vice President at Volition Capital 

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SaaS founders often see only two funding paths—venture or private equity—but there’s a smarter middle lane that keeps control where it belongs: with the founder.

In this episode, Melanie Nabar, Vice President on the Software Team at Volition Capital, joins host Ken Lempit to unpack how growth equity works, when it’s the right fit, and the scale-up mistakes that stall promising SaaS companies.

Key insights from this episode:

• Why growth equity can fuel SaaS scale without losing control
• The biggest post-funding hiring mistake founders make
• How AI is reshaping go-to-market efficiency in SaaS

If you’re a B2B SaaS CMO, CRO, or founder navigating scale-up challenges, funding strategy, or go-to-market transformation, this episode will help you see where real growth capital fits—and how to make it work for you.

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Transcript

Ken Lempit: Welcome to SaaS backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS and AI company CEOs and go to market leaders accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Melanie Nabar,

Vice President on the software team at Volition Capital, a growth equity firm that takes a concentrated approach to investing in high potential founder owned companies.

Welcome to the podcast. 

[00:00:34] Melanie Nabar: Thanks for having me, Ken. Excited to be here. 

[00:00:36] Ken Lempit: Yeah, we're, we're thrilled to dig deep on this topic, you know, funding is so important to the growth of SaaS and AI software companies. But, before we dig into our episode, could you please tell us a little bit about yourself that I might not get from LinkedIn?

And about your company, Volition Capital. 

[00:00:54] Melanie Nabar: Yeah, absolutely. So, myself, I'm a Massachusetts native. My, my Dad actually grew up a street over from where I grew up. So, I am born and bred through and through here. I now live in Boston. I've been here for about 10 years with my husband and my golden retriever.

Probably, find me on the weekend running along the Southie Beach with her and letting her kind of frolic around in the water. I am currently vice president, as you mentioned, at Volition Capital. We are a growth equity firm based in Boston. We essentially come in when companies are past product market fit and looking to have a partner to help

accelerate their growth, or sometimes take some chips off the table, just to make life a little easier as a founder, and we take a concentrated approach to investing. So it's not the, Hey, we just need 1 company out of 50 to succeed in a fund. We only invest in 15 to 20. So we need all of them to succeed.

And with that, it tends to, to mimic our, risk profile on the downside while also making sure that we're investing in people with really big visions because you only have 15 to 20 shots on goal.

[00:02:08] Ken Lempit: Well, thanks for that. I do have a question for you. You said you're Boston native born and bred, but how'd you shed the accent?

[00:02:16] Melanie Nabar: My dad does have an accent. My mom actually doesn't. Uh, I'm not sure. I guess she must have taken efforts when I was young to make sure I didn't have the drawl. Maybe if you give me a beer, it'll come out.

[00:02:30] Ken Lempit: Fair enough. Well, I want to dig into the topic at hand. So, why don't we get going? So the first question really is when is growth equity the right fit for a B2B SaaS company versus venture or traditional PE? You know, for a 25 to 25 million dollar in ARR founder, you know, what, what signals should they be looking for to say they're ready?

You know, what do they need to be ready? And what a first time founders misunderstand most about the model. That's like a five part question, sorry.

[00:03:03] Melanie Nabar: I will, I will start with the last one in terms of what sometimes folks misunderstand, because I think it leads into when growth equity is a good fit. Overall, I find half of founders know about growth equity and are super educated on that front. And the other half have heard of venture capital and have heard of private equity buyout models but aren't really aware that there is

another option that's somewhere in the middle. Venture capital tends to be earlier stage. So companies that, hey, maybe it's an idea, or maybe you have a few customers that really like it, and with it, there's a really high risk in terms of the business. So that means from an investor incentive perspective, you need to invest in a ton of companies.

Your portfolio needs to be incredibly diversified because the risk profile is high. And with that, it also means that the incentives of venture capital firms, you know, when there are investors is to focus on the winners, because that is where. The power law would tell you that most of the returns are going to come from.

And there's lots of great venture capital firms out there that are, are wonderful at this and are good people. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there's private equity, which for the most part is majority where somebody is coming in and buying a majority of the business.

It could be a great option for founders who are looking to liquidate a good chunk of the business or, or hey, I built the business to XYZ stage and I want to go back and start another company. This is not, you know, now this is becoming bureaucratic and this isn't what I want to do. Often folks will recap.

Sometimes private equity gets a bad rep because founders don't want to give up control of the business. And founders also sometimes think of like, oh, you're going to put a bunch of debt onto my balance sheet. You're going to let go of a bunch of people to focus on profitability, which sometimes is true.

Sometimes it's not depends on the, the private equity firm, but I'd say like later stage, giving up control is private equity, growth equity, somewhere in between. The companies that, Growth equity firms are investing in are real businesses. They have a bunch of customers, they have some semblance of a repeatable sales motion, who actually uses the product and understanding of how they appreciate or don't appreciate the use cases.

And typically growth equity firms are also coming in as minority investors. So you're not coming in and trying to run the business. And oftentimes folks also only think you can put capital onto the balance sheet to drive growth. You actually sometimes can just take a few chips off the table.

We do that a lot as well, where if you're a first time founder and all of your net worth is tied up into this business. You've done a great job getting it to 10 million in ARR. You have a lot of theoretical net worth, but maybe you're trying to send your kid to college or maybe you want to pay off your mortgage.

So a lot of times when we come in, we'll also write a portion that is secondary to kind of de risk folks personal lives so they can think clearly about the risks and rewards of taking certain moves within the business. So that's a broad explanation of, of the different realms. And I think just the existence of growth equity as an option is something some founders don't know about.

In terms of what's the right fit for a company, I'd say one, it depends on what you're looking for in an investor. And then two, it depends on the stage of the business. So if you are a, you know, 20 million in ARR business growing nicely, you're probably not a fit for a seed stage, you know, venture firm.

You're probably too big because, venture firms are looking for 10x, 20x, 30x potential in terms of growth. And there are businesses out there that are 20 million in ARR and have that potential, but it is a lot harder to 20x when you're 20 million in ARR versus 1 million. Right. And then the other piece of the puzzle is what you are looking for as, as a person.

Do you want to give up control? If you don't, then private equity is probably not a fit. And then do you want a partner who is. going to be involved in some way, not controlling the business, but trying to help you along the way? Or do you want to be one of many in a portfolio where you're really left alone entirely?

So if you're looking for the latter, maybe venture capital is the right bet. If you're looking for the former, growth equity could be a fit. It's just important to understand and be aligned to what the fund you're working with is expecting. Because if you are one in 50 companies in a portfolio, and you only matter if you 20x, then your board member may push you to take bigger risks.

And maybe you want to take those risks. Maybe that is the model and that is totally fine, maybe it matches your ambitions. But if you, if you don't want that, you just should think about the construct of the funds you're working with so that you're aligned with the folks that are on your board, and on your cap table.

[00:08:30] Ken Lempit: Yeah, I think that kind of point of view or preference of the investor is something that isn't revealed a lot. I mean, it come, must come through at some point in the conversations you would hope before, before the check is signed.

[00:08:44] Melanie Nabar: Yeah, 

[00:08:45] Ken Lempit: Um,

But, but I think growth equity sounds like it, for some founders could really be a Goldilocks kind of solution where they, they get the capital they need to take their next steps.

you know, whether it's accelerate growth or de risk their personal lives or both. And yet they don't give up the control, right? So they still have, they still own the business and still have the ability to kind of chart the future.

[00:09:11] Melanie Nabar: Like to think so, but I am a biased source, of course.

[00:09:14] Ken Lempit: Well, we're not doing investigative journalism here. So you're going to have to make your own choices out there in, in listener land. I want to kind of move on. But I, I, I touched on it very briefly before about scale up. And I, I think that You know, scale up is, is the thing you try and do right after you have product market fit, and you're starting to build your organization.

You're, you're looking to do different things than what you might've been doing three or six months earlier. And I'm wondering what the handful of scale up mistakes you guys see kind of repeatedly, especially around go to market. And I think when we did our prep session, you mentioned one of them was promoting the top performing sales rep to head of sales.

So, what are, what are the mistakes you see? And how do you diagnose those things?

[00:10:05] Melanie Nabar: Yeah, it's a great question. There are patterns that happen over and over again. And there are always exceptions to the rule. So I will give you what I, what I've seen as mistakes, but hey, if you're a founder and you have conviction, it's still the right choice that is, that is something you should do. The first mistake you mentioned is, you know, taking your best sales rep and making them your head of sales. It can work. It is just a bigger risk because typically when you are finding product market fit and heading towards the scale up phase, you often have one rep that is producing a vast majority of your new business every year. It's very common at that phase. And if you take that person and you make them a manager, two things can happen.

One, They may not be a good manager. They're a great sales rep, but they may not be a good manager. Two, if they aren't able to scale the team, like you're hoping, you not only are having new reps that aren't productive, you're also not booking new business. because that rep is busy, right? Managing. It takes a lot of effort to manage folks.

So, it can work. There are exceptions. Of course, every head of sales out there was at one point a sales rep, right? So, it works sometimes, but it tends to be a bigger risk than bringing in a head of sales who's kind of already done that role. The second thing I see people do quite a bit is experiment too much all at once.

In my opinion, part of the reason you raise capital is because you have theories on if I could take this capital and I could do X, Y, Z, I could grow the business to an outsized place. Of course, that's why you take it. And so experimenting is a big part of the use of capital. However, if you do it all at once, a few things happen.

One, you burn too much cash and you cannot get cash back once you've burned it. And two, you end up in a place where you actually don't know which of the experiments. work and you end up with a bloated organization around those experiments. So maybe you're letting folks down because you overhired and now you have to let folks go.

And two, you didn't actually get what you wanted out of the experiment in terms of learning, what should I double down on? So that's something I think people often do once they've raised capital is they double down on too many things at once. And then they can't tell where to, where to focus. And then the other thing that I would say on the flip side, sometimes people do is you've raised capital.

Maybe you were a bootstrap founder. And it's not in your DNA to burn. It's not in your DNA to spend the capital. There's no reason to, to give away a piece of your pie. If you're not going to use that capital to drive a heck of a lot bigger pie. And so I think sometimes founders are afraid of kind of dipping into the burn and I would say it's really, I view it as, you know, part of my job when I'm on a board to

essentially, push on whichever side is happening, right? If, if somebody is hesitant to burn I'm making sure I'm asking questions around like, what is working? Like, why wouldn't it work to double down? Like, let's play out the scenarios. If somebody's ready to do too much at once, I'll say, you know, hey, why don't we think about doing this first?

If it works, then absolutely, let's double down, but let's, let's get some information along the way so that you get to play all nine innings of the game. That's the goal. You want to play all nine innings. And if you burn everything in the first, then you don't get to. So, I think those are three of the biggest areas where I see folks trip when they're scaling up and none of those mistakes can't be righted along the way.

But they're fairly common. 

[00:13:58] Ken Lempit: Yeah, I think the, the promoting the best sales rep to manager, you know, I think also comes from maybe a misunderstanding about what that rep might want to do with his or her career. You know, if they're a great salesperson and they're making serious dough, they want to keep on that track and you might push someone into a role they really don't want, nevermind.

Not their strong suit. And I think missing, you're missing the opportunity to recruit someone who's a star at the manager role, right? The head of sales role, which is if you have someone that's got a demonstrated track record of being able to build and motivate a team to the goals that person would be a big add to your team.

So you're not adding where the most transform is possible, I think. So that's, that's a really important one in my mind, that it's easy It's easy to do that.

[00:14:49] Melanie Nabar: Yeah. If you're doing it right, then the highest paid person at your company is your best sales rep. More than the founder, CEO, et cetera. That is critical. Of course, hopefully the founder owns majority of the business, but in terms of, you know, typical operational compensation, that's what you want.

[00:15:09] Ken Lempit: Yeah. You want people making better part of a million dollars for you because they're making it eight or 10. Right. So they're, they're really hitting, they're really hitting it hard. I think the thing I've noticed from my own experience and I've, like, you've seen a lot of these young companies is, you know, I, I sort of do my own pattern recognition.

You know, I can see, I can see things. That are clear to me, hopefully I'm seeing reality, but I'm wondering, you know, like, what are the things that, you know, you can see quickly that might not be apparent to a founder that either, you know, really encourage you or,

you know, have you seen, you know, maybe there's a motion or a people issue and it could be people issue might be just not enough staff or like, you know, the wrong person in the wrong seat.

So is there stuff that you start with, you know, like your rules of thumb? 

[00:16:07] Melanie Nabar: As I connect this to kind of the scaling question, I think there are definitely rules of thumb for thinking about when you should turn the switch on in different segments or adjust accordingly. One of the big ones is around like sales and marketing spend. So I often look at sales.

And if I say, you know, this is for a SaaS business with, you know, good recurring revenue. If a sales reps comp if they're booking three times, their total comp. Income and commissions. Then that tells me anything above that, and I'm saying we need, we need more reps. We're leaving money on the table.

I also tend to look at more qualitatively, like, how much time is your rep spending on a demo, on a call every day? If they're spending, you know, less than 75 percent of their time, then a BDR could potentially be a good option to make sure you're filling their schedule. Like, that would be a trigger point where that person's schedule is not full enough.

Or you need to invest more heavily in sales and marketing. You always want to be investing in lead generation a few months ahead of expecting a new rep to be productive, so you kind of can hire them or think about investing in tandem. The other trigger point I think about is, Next year, what do you need to do in order to double your new bookings?

Because anything you do within a calendar year doesn't make a difference to that calendar year. Not, not substantially, right? So you always want to be thinking a full year ahead in terms of kind of scaling those organizations. It's. It's fairly common for capital efficient founders who, you know, abolition, we love capital efficiency.

We don't believe in the burn at all costs and risk it all model. It's fairly common to think like, all right, we're going to hit our numbers next quarter and the quarter after. So I feel good. We don't need to hire any new sales reps.

But you have to think about your ramp time, you have to think about your lead generation time and kind of back into that math because in a growing company every single quarter needs to be the best quarter you've ever had, right?

And that gets harder and harder as you get bigger and bigger, especially if you're behind the eight ball and kind of hitting those trigger points.

[00:18:33] Ken Lempit: Yeah, I think that that's probably the hardest thing across support for the founders that I've worked with. They're not looking a year out or 18 months out.

Certainly not it's not their comfortable place, right? Their, their comfortable place is usually operational and focused on this quarter, next quarter, even before they have investors, they often, they just can't see that far or think they can't see that far.

into the future. Speaking of those kinds of investments can you tell us, tell our listeners what, from your perspective, a repeatable motion looks like? So, you know, we've talked about growing the sales team, but before we do that, like, what do we have to be sure we have? Like, what has to be in place before we go higher, you know, double the size or triple the size of our sales team?

[00:19:22] Melanie Nabar: I wouldn't recommend tripling the size of the sales team before you understand what an ideal rep is. I think that's one piece of the repeatable motion that's important. Often there's one or two reps, as we discussed, that are producing most of your new bookings when you're a young business.

And so first you have to figure out, can you replicate those people? And so I wouldn't suggest going out and doubling your sales team if, if you only have one in five people that are producing, because you probably haven't figured out how to hire the right people. And most likely maybe you get one more winner.

But you're probably going to have the same results if you don't change the inputs. So that's one piece of kind of the repeatable motion I'd think about. I would also think about the types of customers you're selling into. So, to me, it's not a repeatable motion if you've won one enterprise contract that's driving your growth.

But your SMB motion is still most of your revenue and that motion has not been capital efficient to date. I think one mistake a lot of founders fall into, or sales leaders fall into, is you have some success with the enterprise, and you let all of your reps do both. Because then what happens is people are chasing whales and you actually don't have a good sense of within the period of time or what are you going to book.

I think you really need to kind of bifurcate that. So understanding your ideal customer. is really important to building that repeatable motion. And then of course there's just logical consistency, right? You've had a few quarters in a row where you've added more revenue than the last quarter, like that's a great signal that, that probably means it's working and you need to double down.

There's typical KPIs, like, how fast are you being paid back on your sales and marketing spend? If customers are sticking around for five years, typically, and you're getting paid back in one, all right, let's double down on that because we're going to be quite profitable going forward and, and there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to continue to grow at that pace or more quickly.

[00:21:34] Ken Lempit: Yeah. Like the capitalizing revenue part. is one of the things I think founders don't often appreciate. You know, they, they understand how long it takes them to pay back, but they don't understand how much money they're going to need to fund the growth, right? If we're waiting a year, we got to fund a whole year of whatever that cost was. so you have a limit, you have a gate limiter right there. When we talked before we talked about sort of like the first 90 days after funding, right. And could you sort of share like what the outline of a 90 day plan after funding looks like to you?

[00:22:10] Melanie Nabar: Yeah, absolutely. I will say um, At Volition, we're not big like playbook style investors. So I don't think that there is like, here's the magic playbook. It worked for one of my companies. So it has to work for you. So the, the plan varies based on the company and the business model and the folks and their preferences for how they want to run their business.

But if I think about a good first 90 days of investment, it's really, if we've done it right, most of our diligence. period was spent on understanding the levers of the business. We want to make sure that as board members, we understand what's driving the business, what are the risks in our motion, so that once we're on the board and involved, we can actually be helpful because we don't have to be educated along the way.

So hopefully I'm starting that 90 days and I, we have a really good sense of, of those levers. And then I think it's really about agreeing on, what are the few things we need to do in the next year for us to be successful in the following year and beyond? There's probably a list of 30 things you could be doing that would hopefully help you grow but agreeing on like which ones will be the most impactful and keeping that to a very limited number is really important.

The other piece of having a board, which about half of the companies we invest in are bootstrapped. So they've never had a board meeting before. I think a big piece of the value in those board meetings and in having a board is that when you're running day to day to make things happen, you're not always taking the time to think about the strategic moments and whether or not

a company or a founder ever decides to raise capital, I think it's good practice to, whether it's once a month or once a quarter, sit down and like, think about what are those strategic initiatives you've decided on and how are you measuring up against those strategic initiatives. Maybe one of them is not relevant anymore.

Great, let's decide that and move on. But I think, Making sure that in the first 90 days, we have a really good plan of what's important. And again, we're not my majority investors. So we're not going to say this has to be the plan. We just need there to be a plan and thoughtful discussion around like, what are those strategic initiatives?

[00:24:30] Ken Lempit: Yeah, I, I think that it's, it's important. Maybe to just take a moment here and talk about the relationship between an investor and a founder, right? I mean, this is a,

[00:24:40] Melanie Nabar: Yeah,

[00:24:40] Ken Lempit: in the, the healthy relationship is one where they're really mutually supportive, right? And founders drawing on your experience, perspective, resources to, improve their odds of getting where they want to go.

Can you just little bit of color to that? because in our prep, you talked pretty eloquently about that.

[00:25:00] Melanie Nabar: Yeah, I mean, taking an investor is not a small decision. A lot of times folks will ask me, founders will ask, you know, what's the differentiation between Volition and XYZ, the other growth equity firm? And there's, lots of things I could list, or approach, you know, value added resources, etc. But at the end of the day, it really matters, like, people you are deciding to bring into your cap table and onto your board.

Because once a person is on there, they are on there. It is just as important as a marriage, in order to get out, you'd need to recap the business or sell it, and that may not be the right time at any given moment. So, I think it's a really important relationship, which may seem obvious, but just underlining that and I think it has to be one where, , You need to understand each other's incentives you need to understand what a win is for your investors, you need to understand where you sit within their portfolio, small things, or what might seem like a small thing of, hey, are you the last investment in a fund that's not doing very well?

Because that's a lot of pressure. You're a kick save portfolio company. And that is a lot of pressure. And there might be risks that your board member is pushing you to take that otherwise you wouldn't. These are things that founders don't always ask about that are really important.

So understanding incentives. And then you want to feel like there is respect enough that you can disagree. Again, my practice has been with minority investing, so I may not agree with something and that may still be how the founder decides to do it. And that's fine, because I am hoping that the founders that I'm backing, that's who I believe has the best decision making for a company.

And it's really more about pressure testing. For me, I think about the role of a board member as pressure testing your conviction and making sure that you're seeing the forest within the trees. So it's really about asking questions and kind of, enabling the founder to ultimately make those decisions for themselves, but make sure that you're seeing around the corner

and if one of my portfolio companies decides they want to hire their best sales rep as their head of sales, I'm just going to ask questions around that, you know, hey, how are we going to backfill their quota? Do we feel good about the existing reps? How quickly are we going to make that decision? Making sure we're really thinking it through, because ultimately, it is the founder's call.

And I think that's, that is the benefit of working with that board members who are pretty much always minority investors, right? Like that's the muscle memory.

[00:27:41] Ken Lempit: You know, you mentioned earlier that like many of these firms they've never had a board before.

It might be good to touch very briefly on like, how do you kick off that relationship? You know, what is the start of a, board of directors relationship with an investor look like and, you know, what, what makes you guys feel comfortable in those early days?

[00:28:03] Melanie Nabar: Yeah, it starts before the investment. You can read a lot into how your board will interact with you from the diligence period. I am very big on sharing back all of the analyses we do during diligence and getting live feedback from founders on, okay, we're in this little black box looking at all of your information.

Is this qualitatively actually what's happening? And how do you think about it? So I think you're going to get a good sense of how open your investors will be during diligence. And you should talk about some of how they view the strategic initiatives and you should ask to talk to their other portfolio companies to make sure you're getting a first hand view.

It's not a one way diligence street. The founders should be diligencing the, the investors as well. And then once, once we made it official, you know, wired the money, et cetera, A lot of times if a team has never done a board meeting before, we'll kind of put together, here's like a high level outline of what we typically see during board meetings and we'll sit down with the founders and talk through, like, how would you measure sales momentum?

How would you measure marketing momentum? How would you measure your product initiatives to make sure that you're not trying to fit a, You know, square peg through a round hole, essentially. So we try to be pretty collaborative on giving some education on like, what is usually in a, in a board meeting.

And I think agreeing on KPIs is, is a big piece of, of what, needs to be prepped to figure out what is important for a board meeting. Like, how do you want to measure your success and how do you measure your business? And then board meetings sound very official and scary and yes, you take minutes, which also sounds very official, but At the end of the day, in most of our board meetings, yes, there's a deck and there's data shared, but it ends up being a strategic conversation on, like, what's working, what's not working, where could we help where do you have conviction, where are you not so sure about your decisions, and really ends up being a little bit more of a, a broader forum than I think people expect it to be. 

[00:30:15] Ken Lempit: That's great for people that haven't had that experience. I appreciate that perspective. So I want to ask you the one bonus question, you know, AI is it's like peak AI, right? I mean, everything is AI.

You know, my refrigerator is AI. So, um, but, but I want to know what you think is truly investable in B2B, where it goes beyond, you know, wrapping prompts in a user interface.

You know, what are you guys looking for? That separates like a real product from, kind of a toy. if you have ideas for people that are looking for go to market tech, like where you think go to market is going to be most influenced, that's a of what we cover on the podcast. So if you have any perspective there, that would be, that would be very valuable. 

[00:31:01] Melanie Nabar: I think as we are trying to navigate this new world of AI it is not dissimilar from other refresh cycles historically. Every time there's a big technology boom, which I would, I would say that we are in, it is because there's been a massive advancement in what is capable from a hardware perspective, a processing perspective, an infrastructure perspective.

So the last one was really cloud computing, right? And now we're, now we're in kind of the AI world. I do believe that this shift is, is that big. I think as we are trying to navigate investing in AI companies, there are companies out there that are exploding from zero to 10 in three months. And normally we come in when folks are about that scale.

So, it's a little bit different because there's no history. It's three months of, you know, this product being launched. So I think as we're trying to figure out product market fit, it's no longer just revenue. It's also repeatable customers and customers seeing ROI from the platform and that measurement has, has changed a little bit from just a line in the sand of, of scale.

Technologies that are the most interesting to me are truly platforms where they're providing a value in and of themselves by integrating different systems, by completing a certain workflow and helping folks to complete those workflows. And the most interesting companies from an AI perspective to me are, are using AI to make that experience better, to make the value they were providing stronger.

I think that tools, when it comes to like, oh, this tool is doing this one small thing, we're struggling with those a bit more, just because you can develop so quickly with AI and if you are not ingrained into somebody's workflow or in the background of a business's operations, then it's very easy to rip and replace.

And the reality is open AI is, moving really quickly, you know, perplexity, et cetera, where there are certain tools out there that might be growing really quickly that you can almost solve with, you know, the, the open platform. And that is a threat that, that we think about. There is so much you can do now and go to market with AI, whether you're, you know, paying for a platform or using even just enterprise ChatGPT.

I think that go to market leaders need to be. Forcing their team to learn how to like, how do you build your own agent? Like, alright, use Clay, connect your data sources, like, what is a painful part of your job? Like, all of that should be solved via AI and whether you're using an off the shelf platform or kind of cobbling together your specific workflow.

If go to market leaders are doing it right, sales reps are doing the job of people, sales reps are on the phone selling the whole time, logging in a CRM sending follow up emails, all of these other components can really be handled by AI in the background. So I think the future of go to market is let people do what people do best, connect you know, really be able to, to sell and explain the value.

I think people are still very important for that, but get rid of all the parts of the job that are monotonous and, and boring. And I think AI can take that over just in terms of go to market efficiency. I think it's going to have a huge impact and should hopefully make people like their jobs more.

I don't know a sales rep that likes updating their CRM.

[00:34:40] Ken Lempit: I've never met one. They're not good at selling if that's what they like to do. 

[00:34:43] Melanie Nabar: Yes, yeah. in the wrong field, if that's true.

[00:34:46] Ken Lempit: yeah, totally. You know, the, the, the vision you have of, you know, create your own agent, I think is a really cool idea that brought up in my mind, you know, the possible career of sort of the agent builder within these organizations, you know, we have these rev ops and marketing ops people.

Oh yeah,

You know, maybe a skill for those folks to build for themselves is the AI agent builder, because a lot of that stuff that they do, you know, they could make agents for themselves and then make agents for the sales reps and BDRs as well.

[00:35:19] Melanie Nabar: absolutely.

[00:35:20] Ken Lempit: Hey, I think this is a great place to land our episode. Thanks so very much, Melanie.

If folks want to learn more about Volition or Be in touch. What's the best way for them to do that?

[00:35:32] Melanie Nabar: Yeah if they'd like to learn more about Volition, they can send me an email. My email is on our website, but it's also melanien@volitioncapital.com. 

[00:35:46] Ken Lempit: Great. And the website is a fantastic resource to learn about your firm. And I think have some engagement opportunities on there as well for founders. If people want to learn more about my advertising and demand generation firm for software as a service and AI companies, we are Austin Lawrence group, austinlawrence.com. I'm on linkedin/in/kenlempit. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet. You may do so almost wherever podcasts are distributed. This might be the episode that pushes you over the top. Melanie Nabar, thank you so much for joining us on SaaS Backwards.

[00:36:21] Melanie Nabar: Thank you for having me, Ken.