Salesloft MCP Demo Server

# Sales Interview Transcript: Scott Harris, VP Sales ## Architecture & Engineering Software Company ($65M ARR) **Date:** January 8, 2025 **Duration:** 28 minutes **Participants:** - Scott Harris, VP Sales (Prospect) - James Mitchell, Account Executive, Salesloft + Clari (Sales Rep) - Location: Zoom (Video) --- ## Opening & Context Setting **James:** Hey Scott, really appreciate you taking the time today. I know you're busy ramping up Q1 planning, so I'll be respectful of your time. Before we dive in, I was doing some research on your product—it looks like you're solving a pretty specific problem in the architecture and engineering space. Can you give me the 30-second version of what you do? **Scott:** Yeah, happy to. We build cloud-based modeling and collaboration software for architecture and engineering firms. Think of it as—we're not trying to replace Revit or AutoCAD. We're the layer on top that helps teams coordinate across disciplines when you're designing buildings. So you've got structural, MEP, civil all working simultaneously. We help them not step on each other's toes, flag conflicts early, manage versions. **James:** Got it. So you're kind of the collaboration and conflict detection engine on top of the modeling tools. **Scott:** Exactly. And we've built it specifically for project-based workflows, which is different from a lot of the SaaS companies that assume continuous product development cycles. **James:** That's actually one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you. I was doing some research on your sales motion, and I'm curious about how you're thinking about the pipeline and forecasting in this environment. But before I go down that path, help me understand your current setup. Who are you selling to right now? Are you going after the big ENR firms—the CBPOs, Genslers of the world—or are you targeting smaller owner-operators? **Scott:** That's actually a really good question because it's become a point of strategic debate for us this year. Our initial go-to-market was definitely bottom-up. We started landing owner-operators and mid-market structural firms who were hungry for innovation, frustrated with Revit's collaboration limitations. Those guys convert fast, they have pain, they're willing to try new tools. **James:** What's the sales cycle on those deals? **Scott:** Typically 4 to 6 weeks from first conversation to signature. They've usually got one or two projects they're actively concerned about, so the urgency is real. **James:** And what does a typical ACV look like? **Scott:** For that segment, we're looking at $18K to $45K annually. Sometimes higher if they're a larger operator with multiple offices, but that's the range. **James:** Okay, and then the big ENR firms? **Scott:** That's where things get interesting—and frankly, complicated. We've been trying to crack into the tier-one firms for about a year. The upside is obvious: you're talking about $200K, $300K ACV, ten-year relationships, standardization across their entire firm. But the sales cycle is a different animal. **James:** How different are we talking? **Scott:** 12 to 18 months is more realistic. And it's not just the sales cycle—it's the evaluation process. You've got to work with the technology team, the practice leads, sometimes the individual office directors, definitely the Autodesk account manager— **James:** Wait, why are you dealing with the Autodesk account manager? **Scott:** Because Revit is their religion. And I mean that literally—it's embedded in everything. Their training curriculum, their CAD standards, their project templates, their firm data structure. Autodesk has such a stronghold in design that anytime you're trying to introduce something new, especially something that touches the design workflow, you're going up against their ecosystem lock-in. **James:** So Autodesk isn't a partner opportunity, it's more of a... competitor-to-navigate? **Scott:** It's both, which makes it complicated. We've had conversations with Autodesk about deeper integration. The reality is they've got the workflow—they're not going anywhere. But our competitive advantage is that we understand project-based work at a deeper level than they do. They're building for Enterprise Software workflows. We're building for construction. So we've tried to position ourselves as a complementary layer—not replacing Revit, but making Revit teams more efficient. **James:** Has that worked? **Scott:** Partially. We got an integration partnership with them about nine months ago. But it's governance-heavy, they move slowly, and honestly, their Revit cloud collaboration tools keep improving. So the integration helps us in the sales conversation—we can show that Autodesk has blessed us—but it's not a huge accelerator. It's more of a checkbox. **James:** Interesting. So it's table stakes but not a differentiator? **Scott:** Exactly. And frankly, the bigger blockers we're seeing with large firms aren't technical. It's cultural. These firms have had the same Revit workflows for 15 years. Their people are trained on it. Their quality control processes are built around it. Introducing something new, even something better, is organizationally difficult. --- ## Pipeline Challenges & Project-Based Dynamics **James:** So let's talk about the pipeline reality. I know you hit $65M ARR this year. What's your breakdown right now? How much of that revenue is locked into these long-cycle large firm deals versus the quick-convert small firm business? **Scott:** Right now, it's about 60/40. 60% is still coming from the smaller operators and mid-market segments. 40% is what we've been able to land with larger accounts. But our forecast for next year is more aggressive on the large firm side—we've got some deals moving through the system. **James:** And those deals—are they in committed stages? Like, are you really counting them, or are they more "could close" scenarios? **Scott:** *laughs* Okay, so this is actually the biggest challenge we're facing right now as a sales leader. The traditional SaaS sales motion that most tools are built for assumes a fairly predictable sales cycle, right? Month one, discovery. Month two, evaluation. Month three, negotiation, close. In our world, a lot of these large deals have a decision point that's tied to something external—a project start date, a budget cycle, a major renovation initiative. **James:** So your close date isn't really up to you. **Scott:** Exactly. We had a $150K deal last year that we had been working for eight months. We thought it was solid in the forecast, all stakeholders aligned, and then they delayed their major facility modernization project by six months. So now our deal is tentatively set for next summer. Is it still in our forecast? Technically yes, but the certainty is lower. **James:** How often is that happening? Are you seeing that pattern with multiple deals? **Scott:** Yeah, it's becoming more common. I'd say 40% of our large-account pipeline is project-contingent in some way. And that creates a management problem because your board wants pipeline visibility, your investors want clean revenue forecasts, and you're essentially trying to predict project timelines in an industry you're selling into, not running. **James:** That's a classic SaaS problem trying to sell into project-based industries. I'm curious—how are you managing the forecasting internally? Are you using traditional revenue forecasting methods, or have you modified your approach? **Scott:** We've been trying to layer in some custom logic. We've got a separate pipeline view that accounts for project dependencies. We also do quarterly business reviews with our biggest accounts to understand project momentum. But honestly, the tools we're using—Salesforce, some custom dashboards—they're not really designed for this. They want to put a deal in weighted forecast or not. They don't have a good way to say, "This deal is 90% likely to close, but it's contingent on this external event." **James:** What tools would actually help you here? **Scott:** *pauses* Forecasting tools that understand project economics. Something that can say, "You have $X in pipeline, but Y% of it is project-contingent, and here are the trigger events that would move it." Instead of trying to force everything into a 90-day close window. Also, relationship intelligence. Knowing who influences what at each account, how they actually think about tools like ours, where the real friction is. With large firms especially, you're dealing with five, six, sometimes ten stakeholders, and half of them you've never actually talked to. **James:** That's actually where I wanted to go. You've got relationship fragmentation across large accounts. How are you currently trying to solve for that? **Scott:** Poorly. *laughs* We've got our AE map out stakeholders in a spreadsheet. We do account mapping, we try to build relationships. But a lot of the feedback we get is through the account champion—maybe the head of IT or the practice lead we're working with. What we don't know is whether the guy in Chicago doesn't like our solution, or the woman running the LA office thinks we're solving the wrong problem. You kind of find out at the end of a nine-month cycle when they tell you they're not ready. **James:** Do you have any visibility into their evaluation of you versus your competition? Like, if you're in a deal with Autodesk alternatives, are you seeing whether they're comparing you to Tandem, or Touchplan, or anyone else? **Scott:** Sometimes. Our champion will tell us, "Yeah, we looked at Touchplan, it didn't work for us." But you never know if that's the real technical reason or if it's political—like, someone already had a relationship with that company, and they just want to use that. It's a black box. **James:** Okay, so let me reflect back what I'm hearing. You've got two very different sales motions. Small operators: short cycle, clear ROI, predictable close. Large firms: long cycle, external dependencies, multiple stakeholders you can't see, unclear competitive landscape. That's actually two different businesses. **Scott:** *nods* It absolutely is. And it's creating resource strain. Our AE team is great at the quick-turnaround small-account business. But selling to a CBPO? That's a different skill set. It requires patience, relationship management, long-term strategy conversations, not just tactical pain point conversations. --- ## Segmentation Strategy & Sales Motion **James:** So what's the strategic call here? Are you doubling down on the segment that's working, or are you trying to become a player in the large firm space? **Scott:** That's literally a board conversation we're having right now. The case for large firms is obvious: better margins, longer contracts, account expansion potential, references. The case for staying with operators and mid-market is: we own that market, we convert faster, we can hit our revenue targets more reliably. **James:** What's the revenue potential in each? **Scott:** If we nailed the operator market, we could probably get to $200M ARR with a lean, efficient sales machine. We've got maybe 15% market penetration. Large firms? Upside could be bigger—there are only a few hundred tier-one ENR firms globally, but they're massive. But the go-to-market is way more expensive, and the close rate is lower. **James:** How are you currently thinking about messaging and positioning for each segment? **Scott:** Right now, we're trying to do a one-size-fits-all positioning around "coordination" and "efficiency." But it doesn't land the same with both audiences. With small operators, they care about speed and cost savings—will your tool help me deliver a project two weeks faster? With large firms, it's more about standardization, governance, and intellectual capital—can you help us operate consistently across our 50 offices? **James:** Those are almost opposite value propositions. **Scott:** Exactly! And our website, our messaging, our sales training—it's all still fairly generic. We talk about conflict detection and version management. But that's table stakes. For the operator, the real value is, "I can make my team 20% more productive on this project." For the CBPO, it's "I can standardize our modeling approach across all of our markets, which makes us faster at bids and more profitable on delivery." **James:** Have you tested going after just one segment for the next year to optimize? **Scott:** Not formally. But I've had the conversation internally. The hard part is we already have customer relationships and contracts in both spaces. So it's not like we can just flip a switch and say, "We're going upmarket." We'd have to keep the current base happy, which takes resources. **James:** What would you need to make that decision? Like, what's the forcing function? **Scott:** *thinks for a moment* Honestly? Better data on which segment has the best expansion potential. Like, if I knew that small operators stick with us for four years at 40% NRR and large firms stick for eight years at 120% NRR, that would change how I allocate resources. Right now, I'm making that decision mostly on pattern observation and intuition. And in a 15-billion-dollar addressable market, intuition is probably not enough. --- ## Technical Integration & CAD Complexity **James:** Let's talk about the technical side for a second. You mentioned that CAD integration is pretty critical. Walk me through how you think about that. **Scott:** So the reality is that most of our value happens within our platform. We ingest Revit models, we run conflict detection, we have version management, collaboration features. But at some point, the architect or engineer needs to go back into Revit to make changes. So there's this constant round-trip between our system and Revit. **James:** How seamless is that? **Scott:** For basic workflows, pretty seamless. We've got a Revit plugin that can export, import, manage versions. But here's the issue: Revit is a monolith. It's been designed for 20 years as a single-discipline tool, and now you're trying to use it for multi-discipline coordination. It wasn't meant for that. So when you've got structural, MEP, and civil all working on the same model, the performance degrades, the file gets huge, people are waiting for things to open. **James:** So your platform is paper over some of Revit's limitations? **Scott:** In a way, yes. But we can only go so far. If Revit can't handle the file size, our collaboration features don't fix that. So we've been experimenting with some alternative approaches—like cloud-based Revit integration, or pulling data from Revit without keeping the full model in memory. But that requires a deeper technical partnership with Autodesk. **James:** How's that partnership been? **Scott:** Slow. *laughs* Autodesk's not really incentivized to make it super easy for us. They want you to buy more Revit licenses, upgrade to their cloud tools. Why would they make it easy for a smaller company to build an alternative workflow on top of Revit? **James:** Fair point. So you're kind of building within constraints. **Scott:** Exactly. And that limits where we can take the product. Which is why I'm actually more interested in exploring partnerships with some of the other CAD platforms—things like Archicad, Vectorworks. They're smaller than Autodesk, but they're growing, and they might be more open to partnerships. **James:** Have you talked to them? **Scott:** We've had some initial conversations with Graphisoft. They're definitely interested in ecosystem plays. The challenge is our customer base is 80% Revit-based right now. So even if we build a killer Archicad integration, we still need to handle Revit. It's sort of a prisoner's dilemma. **James:** So you need to maintain the Revit integration to keep existing customers happy, but you also want to explore other platforms for future growth. **Scott:** Yeah. And technically, it's a resource drain. Every time Autodesk updates Revit—which they do multiple times a year—we have to update our plugin to ensure compatibility. Every time Revit Cloud releases a new feature, we're figuring out how to handle that. It's not core to our roadmap, but it's critical to our business. **James:** How many engineers do you have dedicated to integration work? **Scott:** Right now, we've got a team of about four. But we're probably understaffed. I'd say we need six to properly support all the platforms we want to cover. **James:** What's the constraint on adding two more engineers? **Scott:** Budget, honestly. We've been pretty disciplined about headcount this year given the market environment. --- ## Market Trends & Pipeline Health **James:** Speaking of market environment, I want to talk about something I've been observing in our conversations with customers in the AEC space. The infrastructure bill created this huge wave of work three years ago—projects got greenlit, budgets opened up, everyone was busy. But we're seeing some slowdown in that wave now. Are you seeing that in your pipeline? **Scott:** *sighs* Yeah, we are. So we benefited hugely from that wave. A lot of public works firms, infrastructure-focused design shops—they were frantically hiring, staffing up, trying to meet demand. We benefited as a traction play: "Hey, you're growing your team 30%, wouldn't it be great to coordinate better?" Easy conversation. **James:** And now? **Scott:** Now the demand is still there—these projects are multi-year—but it's not the same urgency. Firms aren't in hiring mode anymore. Some are even in optimization mode. The pipeline for new infrastructure projects still exists, but it's not the same hockey stick we saw in '22 and '23. **James:** How much of your new bookings are tied to that infrastructure wave? **Scott:** We don't segment our bookings quite that way, but my gut tells me it was maybe 25-30% of our net new ARR in the last two years. That's going away. **James:** So you're replacing that with what? **Scott:** Hopefully the large firm motion. And also, we're starting to see more organic demand from existing customer expansion. As firms use us more, they see the value, they want to expand across more offices, more project types. That's starting to happen, but it's slower than the infrastructure tailwind was. **James:** What does your pipeline look like now? Like, if you had to forecast 2025, what's the revenue outlook? **Scott:** *hesitates* We're forecasting about 30% growth for next year. But that's assuming our large firm deals land and our churn on the infrastructure wave doesn't accelerate. If either of those doesn't happen, we're looking at 20%, maybe lower. **James:** 30% is solid, but it's a step down from what you're probably doing now. **Scott:** Yeah. We did 35% growth this year, and I think we could have done more if the macro environment hadn't created some caution. But 30% is realistic without relying on a single wave of demand. **James:** Are you seeing churn in the infrastructure segment? **Scott:** We're starting to. Not huge numbers, but we had a few mid-market customers who expanded with us because of project work, and now that their workload is normalizing, they're questioning whether the investment makes sense. Our champion at one firm told me, "Look, we love your product, but we're managing costs right now." **James:** How are you thinking about retention for that segment? **Scott:** That's a conversion problem. Those customers got value from us at a point when they had acute pain. Now that the acute pain is gone, we're a nice-to-have instead of a must-have. We're trying to deepen the relationship, show them value beyond project efficiency—like, how does this help you bid better? How does this help you recruit? But that's longer-term value prop work, and it takes time. **James:** So you need to move them from "project optimization" to "strategic capability." **Scott:** Exactly. Which is harder. It's a different conversation. And it requires people who can have that conversation—business-focused, not just product-focused. --- ## Owner-Operators vs. Enterprise Firms **James:** Let's dig into the segmentation question more. I want to understand the owner-operator dynamic. You mentioned they convert fast. What does that typical deal look like? **Scott:** Owner-operator is usually an architecture firm with 20 to 150 people, geographically concentrated—maybe headquartered in one city, maybe a couple of satellite offices. The principal or owner usually has a relationship with our champion, or our champion has heard about us and pushed for a trial. They try us, they like it, they buy. **James:** What's the typical ACV again? **Scott:** $22K to $35K annually for firms in that size range. And they usually commit to two-year contracts, so it's $44K to $70K TCV. **James:** How many of these deals do you have? **Scott:** In our current customer base, we've got about 340 customers. I'd estimate 280 of them are in the owner-operator to mid-market range. **James:** And they're probably 60% of your revenue? **Scott:** Yeah, roughly. Maybe a bit less now as some of our larger accounts are growing. **James:** Okay. So you've got product-market fit in that segment. The question is, how much larger can that segment get? **Scott:** That's the strategic question. The owner-operator market globally is huge—there are probably 10,000+ firms of 20 to 150 people in the design space. But reaching them is expensive. We can't do direct enterprise sales to each one. It's not efficient. We've been trying to work with integrators, CAD resellers, implementation partners who already have relationships with these firms. That's been helpful, but it's not a scaling machine yet. **James:** What would a scaling motion look like? **Scott:** Probably some combination of things. Better product-led growth—can we get them to trial and convert more of them without a sales rep? More partnerships with resellers. Some vertical consolidation—like, are there certain types of architecture firms, certain building types, where we can dominate? We've been thinking about residential design firms versus commercial, structural specialists versus generalists. **James:** Have you mapped that? **Scott:** Not rigorously. But observationally, we seem to do better with commercial architecture firms than residential specialists. Residential is more price-sensitive, less reliant on collaboration tools. Commercial firms have bigger teams, more complex workflows, higher budgets. So that might be where we double down. **James:** And pricing—are you adjusting pricing for different segments? **Scott:** Not yet, but we should be. A CBPO firm doing $500M in revenue should pay differently than a 50-person owner-operator doing $10M. Right now we have a pretty flat pricing model based on headcount. We've been thinking about whether to shift to value-based pricing or usage-based pricing. **James:** What's holding you back? **Scott:** Implementation complexity and sales friction. If I tell a new customer, "Your price is based on the economic value you'll derive from this," I have to justify that, and they're going to push back. With a flat per-seat model, it's easy to explain and easy to scale. But it might leave money on the table with large customers. **James:** Are your large customers pushing back on price? **Scott:** Not publicly, but I suspect they're thinking about it. When we sell a $150K contract to a CBPO, and they're a multibillion-dollar company, they're probably thinking, "Is this a good use of capital?" Whereas a 50-person firm paying $25K is thinking, "This is 0.25% of our revenue, will it help me run the business better?" **James:** So the large firm has more leverage. **Scott:** Exactly. And as we shift more toward large firms, pricing power becomes more of a factor. --- ## Sales Execution & Leadership Challenges **James:** Let me ask you something different. You're three years into this company probably, right? You've built a sales organization. What's the hardest part about leading sales right now? **Scott:** *pauses for a moment* Honestly? Creating clarity on what we actually do. We've been so focused on building the product and finding customers that we haven't done the work to articulate a clear, differentiated positioning. So I've got sales reps who are having different conversations with different customers. Some are talking about speed, some about governance, some about cost savings. **James:** Does your marketing support that? **Scott:** Marketing is small—two people. They're doing a great job, but they're mostly executing on what sales asks for. They're not driving strategy. So you've got messaging fragmentation, positioning fragmentation. It makes hiring and training harder because you're trying to onboard people into something that doesn't have clear edges. **James:** How are you thinking about solving that? **Scott:** We actually hired a new VP of Marketing three months ago—someone with more B2B SaaS experience—so we're starting that work now. First few quarters are going to be about segmentation strategy, positioning clarity, and then building marketing motions around that. **James:** What do you think your positioning should be? **Scott:** *thinks* I think we need two positioning anchors. For owner-operators and mid-market: "The platform that makes your team 20% more productive by eliminating rework and coordination overhead." For large firms: "The standardization layer that lets you operate consistently across 50 offices and 100 projects." Both are true, but they emphasize different value drivers. **James:** That's good. And then what does your funnel look like to support that? **Scott:** That's where we're lacking. For the owner-operator motion, we need a better product-led funnel, better self-serve trial, better content that reaches them. For the large firm motion, we need account-based marketing, we need to be at the right conferences, we need thought leadership from our executives. Those are two different machines. **James:** Do you have the bandwidth to build both? **Scott:** Probably not, if I'm being honest. That's why we keep coming back to this decision: do we choose one motion to optimize, or do we try to build both? **James:** What would make that decision for you? **Scott:** I think it's a board conversation about target customer profile and five-year ambitions. But if I had to bet, I'd say we should nail the owner-operator and mid-market motion first, because we have product-market fit there, because it funds the company, and because we can always shift upmarket later. Shifting downmarket is harder. **James:** That's a strong hypothesis. **Scott:** But it might be the wrong call. The large firm opportunity might be bigger, and we might be leaving money on the table by not going after it aggressively. --- ## Closing & Key Friction Points **James:** Okay, I want to wrap up in a minute, but I have one more question. You've mentioned a few pain points—forecasting, relationship visibility, integration complexity. If you could wave a magic wand and solve one of those, what would it be? **Scott:** *without hesitation* Relationship mapping and intelligence at scale. The biggest difference between us and larger competitors is that we don't always understand who the decision makers are, what they actually think of us, what they're evaluating us against. With large accounts especially, that information asymmetry costs us deals. A tool that could give me visibility into the account—"Here are the seven people we need to influence, here's what each one cares about, here's how they view us relative to Touchplan or Tandem"—that would change how we sell. **James:** Would that replace your AEs? **Scott:** No, but it would make them way more effective. Instead of an AE spending time researching who to talk to and wondering about relationships behind the scenes, they could spend time building relationships and having strategic conversations. **James:** Last question: what would you want from a Salesloft + Clari perspective? Like, why did you agree to take this call? **Scott:** Honestly? We've heard good things about how Salesloft helps with pipeline management and relationship intelligence, especially in complex selling scenarios. And we know Clari does forecasting. We're at a point where we're trying to scale a complex sales machine, and we're using okay tools—Salesforce, some custom Slack integrations, a lot of manual work. If there was a platform that could give us better visibility into our pipeline, help us understand our deals better, and give us confidence in our forecast—that's valuable to us. **James:** Even given that your deals are project-contingent? **Scott:** Especially given that. Most forecasting tools assume a linear sales cycle. We need something that understands project-based dependencies, that can weight certainty differently for different deal types, that can flag when deal momentum is changing. **James:** That's helpful. I appreciate your honesty about that. **Scott:** Yeah. And look, we might not be the perfect use case today. But if you're thinking about verticals that would benefit from better forecasting and pipeline intelligence, AEC is worth paying attention to. It's becoming more software-driven every year, more teams are adopting cloud tools, and they're all going to have the same pipeline management challenges we do. **James:** I appreciate that. So what's the next step? **Scott:** Let me schedule a follow-up conversation with our finance leader and our head of sales operations. They need to be part of any evaluation. But I'm definitely interested in exploring this further. **James:** Perfect. I'll send you a follow-up email with some resources on how we've worked with other companies in complex sales environments, and we'll schedule that for next week. **Scott:** Sounds good. I appreciate the time. --- ## Key Takeaways & Themes ### Business Situation - **Revenue:** $65M ARR (35% YoY growth) - **Growth Rate:** Forecasting 30% growth for 2025 (down from 35% due to infrastructure wave fading) - **Current Customer Mix:** 80 accounts >$100K ACV; 260 accounts <$100K ACV - **Retention Challenge:** Infrastructure-driven segment may churn as demand wave subsides ### Strategic Tensions 1. **Segmentation Dilemma:** Two fundamentally different markets (owner-operators vs. large ENR firms) require different sales motions, messaging, and product strategies - Small operators: 4-6 week sales cycle, $18-45K ACV, problem-aware, quick decision-making - Large firms: 12-18 month sales cycle, $200K+ ACV, multiple stakeholders, project-dependent close timing 2. **Autodesk Integration Challenge:** CAD platform lock-in is real but not insurmountable - Current positioning: "Complementary layer" rather than "Revit replacement" - Partnership is slow and politically complex - Technology integration is resource-intensive (4 engineers dedicated, needs 6) - Need to explore other CAD platforms (Archicad, Vectorworks) but can't drop Revit support 3. **Forecasting Complexity:** Traditional SaaS forecasting doesn't work for project-based sales - 40% of large-deal pipeline is project-contingent (external close dates) - Need for forecasting tools that understand project economics vs. traditional 90-day cycles - Current tools (Salesforce) insufficient for this use case ### Sales & Go-to-Market Issues - **Positioning Gap:** No consistent, segment-specific messaging (currently trying one-size-fits-all) - **Marketing Underinvestment:** Marketing team size doesn't match growth ambitions; new VP of Marketing starting to address - **Relationship Visibility:** Black box on large accounts—don't know true sentiment, competitive landscape, hidden stakeholders - **Pricing Power:** Flat per-seat model might leave money on the table with large accounts; value-based or usage-based pricing not yet implemented ### Market Dynamics - **Infrastructure Bill Impact:** Created 25-30% revenue lift in 2022-2023; wave is fading now - **Competitive Landscape:** Main competitors are Touchplan and Tandem; Autodesk's cloud tools are becoming more competitive - **Market Size:** ~10,000 addressable firms in owner-operator segment alone; large ENR firm market is smaller but higher-value ### Critical Needs (In Order of Importance) 1. **Relationship Intelligence & Account Mapping:** Who are all the decision makers, what do they think, what are we competing against? 2. **Project-Aware Forecasting:** Pipeline management tools that understand project dependencies and external close triggers 3. **Segmentation & Positioning Strategy:** Clear go-to-market for each segment with distinct messaging 4. **CAD Integration Efficiency:** Either deeper Autodesk partnership or resources to support multiple platform integrations ### Next Steps & Interest - **Sales Development:** Willing to explore Salesloft + Clari platform for pipeline intelligence and forecasting - **Key Stakeholders:** Needs to involve CFO/Finance and Head of Sales Operations in evaluation - **Primary Use Cases:** Forecast accuracy, relationship visibility, deal momentum tracking - **Timeline:** Open to evaluation starting this quarter; decision likely needed before H2 planning --- ## Interviewer Notes **Prospect Maturity:** Mid-stage SaaS (Series B/C range, probably) - has product-market fit in one segment but strategically unclear on scaling direction **Decision-Making Style:** Data-oriented but struggling with segmentation; willing to acknowledge uncertainty; CEO-like strategic thinking despite VP Sales title **Buying Signal Strength:** Medium-to-strong. Has explicit pain points (forecasting, relationship intelligence) and is motivated to solve them. Budget probably available. Timeline aggressive but realistic. **Competitive Situation:** Salesloft is not facing direct competition from Clari here; primary conversation is about sales execution platform. Likely comparing against: - Building custom Salesforce workflows internally - Using disparate point solutions (forecasting tool + relationship intelligence tool separately) - Manual processes and tribal knowledge **Key Risk:** If Salesloft + Clari can't address project-contingent deal modeling, solution fit becomes weaker. This is an important requirement, not a nice-to-have. **Follow-Up Strategy:** Need technical conversation with Sales Ops lead about how platform handles non-linear sales cycles and project-based deals. Position as "complex enterprise selling" use case rather than traditional SaaS.