Salesloft MCP Demo Server

# Customer Interview Transcript: Rachel Green, VP Sales **Date:** January 15, 2026 **Duration:** 32 minutes **Participants:** - Rachel Green, VP Sales, Streaming/OTT Technology (StreamVerse Inc., $50M ARR) - Michael Torres, Enterprise Account Executive, Salesloft - Jennifer Park, Sales Engineer, Clari **Format:** Exploratory discovery call following warm introduction from industry contact --- ## OPENING (0:00-2:30) **Michael:** Rachel, thanks so much for making time this morning. I know you're juggling a lot right now—this is peak budget cycle season for streaming platforms, right? **Rachel:** (laughs) You have no idea. We literally just wrapped our board presentation yesterday on Q1 planning. It's honestly one of the most intense periods we have. We're coming off a strong 2025, so there's definitely pressure to show growth, but also... let's just say the economics have gotten a lot tighter. **Michael:** That's actually perfect context for this conversation. Before we dive into anything, I'm curious—when you think about your sales organization right now, what's keeping you up at night the most? **Rachel:** Okay, so short answer? Budget allocation. Long answer? Everything connects to budget allocation. (pauses) We've got this weird position where we're growing, our subscriber base is up, but our per-acquisition cost is getting squeezed. So my team keeps asking me, "Rachel, where do we focus? Do we go harder on enterprise deals? Do we invest in mid-market? Do we finally kill some of the legacy broadcast content that's bleeding money?" And I don't have a great way to answer those questions right now. **Michael:** That's the qualification problem, right? You've got limited resources and more targets than you can realistically pursue. **Rachel:** Exactly. And it's not that we don't have targets. We've got a massive TAM. It's that we can't score them all. Jennifer—Mike mentioned you're the sales engineering side of this—do you see this in other OTT companies? **Jennifer:** All the time. The streaming space is unique because you have these compressed decision-making cycles around sports rights drops, seasonal content releases, and advertising upfronts. Everyone's being super calculated about where they deploy sales resources. **Rachel:** Yes! That's the other piece. We just locked in some exclusive sports content for Q3, and that completely changed our sales strategy. We had to decide which segments are even viable with that content. Some of our traditional broadcast deals just don't make sense anymore. --- ## BUDGET CONSTRAINTS & QUALIFICATION (2:30-8:45) **Michael:** Let me dig into that sports rights piece in a second, but first, when you say budget constraints are forcing you to be more selective—is that internal budgets for your sales ops, or is it impacting how you qualify prospects? **Rachel:** Both. (sighs) On the internal side, my team went from 8 AEs to 7 during the restructure last spring. We didn't hire aggressively like everyone else did in 2024. So we're covering more territory with fewer people. That means we're burning out on low-probability deals. **Michael:** What does low-probability look like for you guys? **Rachel:** Small regional broadcasters without a digital strategy. They're decision-making cycles are 6-9 months. They've got legacy technology stacks that would require us to do custom integrations. And frankly, half of them aren't convinced they need a digital product yet. Meanwhile, our board wants us to focus on the $10M+ accounts that already understand streaming economics. **Jennifer:** So you've got this fork in the road—the legacy broadcast folks who might eventually get it but are slow-moving, versus the digital-native companies that get it immediately but are maybe tougher competitors. **Rachel:** Exactly. And that's the thing—the digital-native companies, they're not even buying from people like us anymore. They're building in-house. Or they're using pure-play SaaS platforms that are way more specialized than what we offer. So the real opportunity is the folks in the middle. The companies that have broadcast heritage but are desperate to figure out digital. **Michael:** How are you currently segmenting that middle market? **Rachel:** (laughs) Honestly? It's messy. We've got like five different segmentation models right now. My ops team has one view, my AEs are using another based on what's working in their territories, and finance just sees it by ARR. There's definitely confusion about what qualifies as a real opportunity versus what we should pass on. **Jennifer:** That's super common in the first year of a restructure. What would actually help you? Is it a better qualification framework, or is it more about having better intelligence on which prospects are ready to move? **Rachel:** Both. But more the second one, honestly. Like, I can build the ICP myself. What I need is better visibility into when they're actually in the market. Sports rights for them, upfront seasons, when they're fundraising, when they're getting pressure from their board on subscriber growth. If I knew that stuff better, I could be way more surgical with where we spend sales resources. **Michael:** So essentially, you're looking at market timing and buying signals? **Rachel:** Yes. And right now, I'm mostly relying on industry news, LinkedIn, and conversations with our partners. It's very manual. I've got one person on my team who's basically a detective, reading through earnings calls of public companies, watching LinkedIn for hiring announcements, stuff like that. But we're flying blind on most of our target accounts. **Jennifer:** That's where Clari's intelligence layer actually gets interesting. We're ingesting a ton of data—news, earnings, hiring, fundraising activity, board composition changes—and specifically surfacing what matters to sales for streaming companies. **Rachel:** Okay, I'm listening. What does that actually look like in practice? **Jennifer:** So imagine you're tracking 50 potential enterprise deals. Instead of your team having to manually monitor each one, you get alerts when something changes that indicates buyer intent or buying urgency. Like, if one of your targets just secured new sports content, or if they're going through a refresh of their ad sales team, or if they just raised capital—those are all signals that buying conversations are about to happen. **Rachel:** That would be huge. Because right now, we're kind of working off the assumption that everyone's always in the market. That's not true at all. --- ## LEGACY BROADCAST VS. DIGITAL DIVIDE (8:45-15:20) **Michael:** I want to shift gears a bit, because I think this connects to something Rachel just said about the broadcast-to-digital divide. That seems like a positioning challenge too, not just a qualification one. **Rachel:** Oh man, it absolutely is. (pauses) So we have these two totally different customer types, and they literally speak different languages. **Michael:** Tell me more. **Rachel:** Okay, so the legacy broadcast guys—and I'm generalizing here—but they're thinking about distribution. They want to know, "How do I get my content to more screens? How do I reach cord-cutters?" They're thinking about reach and frequency and maybe churn reduction. Very traditional marketing metrics. **Jennifer:** Whereas the digital-native folks... **Rachel:** They're thinking about engagement, subscriber lifetime value, cohort economics, unit economics of content. They want to know, "What content should we greenlight based on CAC and LTV?" It's a completely different optimization problem. **Michael:** And your sales process right now—is it treating those two segments the same way? **Rachel:** (groans) Kind of, yeah. That's part of the problem. Our standard pitch is very benefits-focused around "reach more viewers with better technology," which resonates with the broadcast folks but sounds boring as hell to the digital-native companies. Those guys want to talk about the tech architecture, the data connectors, integration with their analytics stack. They want to see technical specs, they want to talk to our engineers, they want to run POCs. **Jennifer:** So you've got a messaging and positioning problem. The broadcast folks need convincing on the business case. The digital folks need convincing on the technical capability. **Rachel:** Yes! And it's making our sales process longer because we're not hitting the right angle. I had a deal last quarter—mid-size streamer out of Germany, really sophisticated technical buyer—and we sent him a traditional ROI deck. He was like, "This is nice, but can I see your data pipeline architecture? Can I talk to your infrastructure team?" We lost him because he wanted to buy based on technical merits and we were trying to sell him on business case. **Michael:** Did he go somewhere else? **Rachel:** Yeah, went with a more specialized infrastructure vendor. Ended up spending less money, got exactly what he needed. And we could have had that deal if we'd positioned ourselves differently. **Jennifer:** That's such a common pattern in enterprise tech sales—when you don't have the right buyer enablement materials, different buyer personas just don't get what they need. **Michael:** So what would fix that? Better positioning? Better content? **Rachel:** Both. But I think it's really about tailoring the sales engineering approach. We should have technical sales folks who can talk to the legacy broadcast IT directors differently than they talk to a digital streamer's VP of Product. The buyer in one case cares about support and ease of integration. The buyer in the other case cares about scalability and data modeling. **Jennifer:** Right. So you need sales engineering resources, but specifically trained for different buyer personas. **Rachel:** Yeah. And honestly, we're stretched thin on sales engineering already. We have two sales engineers for my entire region covering 60+ active opportunities. So we're making choices about which deals get the technical support. And we're probably making bad choices. **Michael:** How are you deciding which deals get SalesEng support? **Rachel:** (laughs) Deal size, mostly. Plus relationship. If I know the buyer well or there's executive sponsorship, we try to get Jennifer's— I mean, we try to get our sales engineers involved earlier. But it's pretty chaotic. **Jennifer:** One thing we've seen work well is creating standardized technical content—like reference architectures, benchmark studies, technical comparison documents—that can be deployed early in the process without needing your SalesEng team to show up immediately. That buys you time to figure out which deals are real. **Rachel:** That's smart. Because right now, the technical buyer is asking questions in discovery, and either we have someone who can answer in real-time, or we're scrambling to put together custom content. **Michael:** What kinds of questions are coming up most often? **Rachel:** API design, obviously. Data latency and refresh rates. How we handle multi-region deployments. Compliance and data residency. Whether we can integrate with specific third-party tools they're already using. **Jennifer:** Those are all commoditizing anyway. The fact that those are your top questions suggests the buyer is already comparing you to 2-3 other vendors. So by the time that conversation is happening, your positioning window might already be closed. **Rachel:** God, that's depressing but probably true. (pauses) So what you're saying is, we need to get in front of these people earlier with positioning that resonates with their strategy, not just wait for them to ask technical questions? **Michael:** Exactly. And the positioning changes based on whether they're a legacy broadcaster transforming their business or a digital native optimizing their unit economics. --- ## TECHNICAL BUYERS & BUYER ENABLEMENT (15:20-21:00) **Rachel:** Okay, so let's dive deeper into the technical buyer piece. Because I think that's honestly where we're losing deals right now. **Jennifer:** I'm here for it. **Rachel:** So our technical buyers—and this is mostly the digital native side—they're typically either a VP of Product, VP of Engineering, or VP of Data/Analytics. They're incredibly sharp. They know SaaS. They've evaluated multiple vendors. And they want to understand not just what we do, but why we did it that way versus the alternative approaches. **Jennifer:** That's a sophisticated buyer conversation. **Rachel:** Exactly. And our messaging is still kind of basic. Like, we'll say, "We process 50 billion events per month" or "We have 99.9% uptime." And the technical buyer is like, "Cool, but how did you architect that? What are your tradeoffs? Did you choose eventual consistency or strong consistency? When do you rebalance data partitions?" They're asking architecture questions. **Michael:** Do you have resources who can answer those questions? **Rachel:** Our CTO can, but he's obviously not scaling to every deal. (pauses) We've got product and engineering leaders who could, but they're not really trained to do sales. And honestly, I don't want to burn them out by having them on every technical discovery. **Jennifer:** So you need this middle layer of sales engineering expertise or technical content that can stand in for your product leaders until it becomes clear we're going to win the deal and need executive conversations. **Rachel:** Yes! And right now, we have that for one product line. Our big data infrastructure offering has a sales engineer who's incredibly strong—she's a former infrastructure architect—and she's consistently winning deals because she speaks the language. But we don't have that on the revenue side of the business, which is weirdly our biggest growth lever. **Michael:** Why's that? Seems like revenue tools are where the sophistication is. **Rachel:** Budget, honestly. Our founder came from the engineering side. She's invested heavily in the infrastructure product. The revenue tools are newer, and they've kind of been treated as add-ons. But they're actually where a lot of our growth is coming from. We're seeing more demand than supply right now because we haven't invested in the sales organization to support the revenue product line. **Jennifer:** So for the revenue tools, what's the buyer conversation like? **Rachel:** It's super technical. They want to understand how we de-duplicate data from multiple sources, how we handle attribution, what our reporting latency is. And yeah, that's super specialized. You can't just send a deck for that conversation. **Michael:** Walk me through what a typical discovery looks like with a technical buyer on the revenue side. **Rachel:** Okay, so we usually start with, you know, standard qualification. "What are you using now? What's not working?" They'll tell us they're using spreadsheets or they've got some custom build, or they've cobbled together five different tools. Usually, there's a lot of pain around data quality, reporting latency, and the inability to answer strategic questions quickly. **Jennifer:** So the pain is real. **Rachel:** Oh, it's very real. But then when we get into the details, that's where we lose momentum. The technical buyer wants to understand our approach. And either our AE doesn't really understand the tech deeply enough to explain it well, or they pass it to the product team, and then there's this three-week delay in getting an answer. By that time, the buyer's already issued an RFP, we're competing against other vendors, and we're no longer having a consultative conversation. **Michael:** When does the RFP typically come in? **Rachel:** Usually after the first or second technical discovery. The buyer's figured out what they need and they want to compare multiple vendors. At that point, it's commoditized. **Jennifer:** What if you could accelerate that first technical discovery? Like, what if your AE had some lightweight technical content they could reference—nothing that requires engineering—that explains your approach? **Rachel:** That would help. But we'd also need them to understand the content well enough to explain it naturally. Because buyers can smell bullshit from a mile away. If my AE is reading off a slide deck about data architecture, the technical buyer immediately knows we don't know what we're doing. **Michael:** So the sales engineer role is really about being a proxy for your engineering team. They need to understand the tech deeply AND be able to translate it for different buyers. **Rachel:** Right. And we don't have that. Which is honestly a weakness I need to solve. We need at least one strong sales engineer on the revenue tools side, and honestly probably two to cover the different buyer personas. **Jennifer:** How would you think about finding those folks? Are you looking for engineers who can learn to sell, or sellers who can learn engineering? **Rachel:** (pauses) I've been thinking about this. I think you need engineers first. Because if you don't have the technical credibility, you can't recover from it. Engineers can learn to communicate. Sellers can't usually pick up deep technical knowledge quickly enough. **Michael:** That's smart. And honestly, that's a recruitment challenge that's separate from what we're talking about today, but it's worth flagging as a priority. **Rachel:** Oh, it's already flagged. My CEO knows we're weak here. We're actively recruiting for a senior sales engineer, but it's slow. Good infrastructure engineers don't want to do sales. **Jennifer:** They do if you frame it right. If they see it as "shape the market, influence the product direction, work with smart customers," they're often interested. Less interested if it's "hit these revenue targets and make quota." **Rachel:** That's good reframing. I'll steal that for recruiting conversations. (laughs) --- ## MARKET CONSOLIDATION & EXPANSION (21:00-26:30) **Michael:** So let's zoom out for a second. You mentioned earlier that consolidation in the streaming space is impacting how you go to market. Can you elaborate on that? **Rachel:** Yeah. So two years ago, there were like 20+ streaming services competing, all with different strategic positions. Now you're seeing consolidation. Disney+ and Hulu merged their operations. Paramount bundled their services. Warner Bros. had their whole restructuring. And you're seeing some of the smaller players either getting acquired or shutting down. **Michael:** How does that change your go-to-market? **Rachel:** Well, the prospect list gets smaller in some ways. The big consolidated players—Disney, Netflix, Amazon, Warner Bros.—they're not buying point solutions from companies like us. They're building in-house or they're doing huge, multi-year platform deals. We're not going to win a $50M infrastructure platform deal against someone like AWS or Google. **Jennifer:** So where does that leave you? **Rachel:** In the middle. Mid-to-large independent streamers. International streamers. Niche streamers focused on specific content types or regions. Those are our targets. But there are fewer of them now. **Michael:** Which means you have to be smarter about: - Which of those remaining companies are actually in-market - Which problems you solve that resonate with them - How you differentiate against whatever they're considering **Rachel:** Exactly. It's like the TAM hasn't shrunk, but the addressable TAM—the companies that are actually going to buy—has gotten smaller and more selective. **Michael:** So where do you expand from there? **Rachel:** That's the real question. (pauses) We've been talking internally about adjacent use cases. Like, we built this product for streaming entertainment companies. But the technology—the revenue intelligence, the subscription analytics—that's actually valuable for any subscription business, right? SaaS companies, dating apps, fitness platforms, gaming. **Jennifer:** You're thinking about horizontal expansion instead of vertical deepening. **Rachel:** Yeah. Because going deeper in streaming means fighting for a shrinking pie. But expanding into adjacent verticals... that's where the growth is. **Michael:** What's holding you back from that move? **Rachel:** Positioning, partly. We're known as the streaming company tool. To sell into SaaS, we need to reposition as the subscription revenue intelligence company. That's a pretty big shift. **Jennifer:** It also means your sales team is probably not trained to sell to that buyer. **Rachel:** Right. An AE who knows streaming knows how to talk about subscriber acquisition costs and churn and content strategy. That's not the same conversation as a SaaS CFO or VP of Finance who cares about ARR and unit economics and expansion revenue. **Michael:** So you're looking at retraining, repositioning, maybe hiring new sales leadership who understands those verticals. **Rachel:** Yeah. And I'm not even sure if expansion into those verticals is the right move. I mean, strategically it makes sense. But operationally, it's a huge lift. I'd have to rebuild sales collateral, retrain my team, figure out go-to-market... versus just getting better at the streaming vertical where we're already known. **Michael:** That's a real tension. **Rachel:** It is. My board is pushing expansion. My team is pushing for deepening what we're good at. **Jennifer:** What does your customer feedback tell you? **Rachel:** Customers love us in streaming. Like, we have really strong NPS. But we're not getting requests for non-streaming use cases. So the demand signal isn't there yet. **Michael:** Interesting. So you're being pulled to expand but the market isn't pulling you there yet. **Rachel:** Right. Which makes me think we should wait. But also, if consolidation continues, waiting might mean we're giving up potential growth. --- ## SPORTS RIGHTS & BUYING CYCLES (26:30-32:00) **Michael:** Okay, this brings me back to something you mentioned at the top of the call. You said sports rights completely changed your sales strategy. I want to understand that better because I think that's probably unique to your space. **Rachel:** (laughs) Yeah, it's wild. So sports rights are incredibly expensive and they're tied to specific events and seasons. We just locked in exclusive rights to a major soccer league for Q3 and Q4 this year. And that's going to drive subscriber growth, which is going to create opportunities for us to sell around that. **Michael:** Walk me through the implications. **Rachel:** So first, from a content strategy perspective, that content needs to be distributed across all our platforms and integrated with our advertising system. That's a big technical lift on our side. But from a sales perspective, it changes everything. **Jennifer:** How so? **Rachel:** Well, the companies that might license that content from us, or that want to build OTT products to compete around that same content—they're suddenly viable targets. The sports rights create a focal point for the entire category. Everyone wants to be in the sports streaming game right now. So even companies that were previously focused on scripted content are spinning up sports strategies. **Michael:** So the sports rights create a wave of new customers all at once. **Rachel:** Exactly. It's like this unnatural buying cycle. Normally, your sales cycle is kind of spread throughout the year. Budgets come in at different times. Procurement moves at different speeds. But when everyone knows that major sports rights are dropping on a specific date, everyone wants to be ready for that date. **Jennifer:** So the buying cycle synchronizes around the sports event. **Rachel:** Yes! And we haven't historically done a great job capitalizing on that. Like, we locked in these rights, but we didn't have a coordinated sales push around them. There was no "sports rights are available, which of our target accounts would benefit?" It was kind of chaotic. **Michael:** How could you do that better? **Rachel:** We'd need to identify target accounts that care about sports. Build a timeline of when they need to make decisions. And then have a coordinated, multi-touch campaign that launches 60, 90 days before the content drop. By the time they're making budget decisions, we're already top-of-mind. **Jennifer:** That's a classic account-based marketing play. **Rachel:** Exactly. But it requires knowing which accounts care about sports, understanding their decision cycles, and having messaging that connects our product to their sports strategy. **Michael:** And you don't have that right now? **Rachel:** Not in an organized way. Like, I know intuitively that our top 20 accounts would benefit from sports content. But I don't have a formal process for identifying which of our 200+ prospects should care about sports, or what their decision timeline is. **Michael:** So building that motion—that could be a real accelerant for sales? **Rachel:** It could be huge. Because if we time it right, we're talking to prospects exactly when they're budgeting, exactly when they're thinking about sports, exactly when they're ready to buy. **Michael:** And you could do that multiple times a year? **Rachel:** Yeah. There are other sports rights coming up. Major content drops happening. Advertising upfronts in the spring. Those are all buying moments that we could potentially leverage. **Michael:** That seems like where Salesloft's motion-based prospecting could be really valuable. Like, you could build a timeline of upcoming content drops, flag which accounts are likely to care, and trigger a coordinated campaign. **Rachel:** That's interesting. So instead of my team trying to manually identify buying signals, Salesloft could help us see those patterns and orchestrate the timing? **Michael:** Exactly. And you could test it with your top accounts first. Like, the sports rights you just locked in—you could immediately run a campaign to your top 20 prospects, see what converts, and then scale that playbook. **Rachel:** I like that. It's less risky than overhauling our entire go-to-market, and it could actually generate some quick wins. **Jennifer:** Plus, once you nail that playbook around sports rights, you could apply the same motion to other buying signals. Funding announcements, new executive hires, product launches from competitors, upfront seasons. **Rachel:** (pauses) Yeah, I think I see the value now. It's not just about having better data. It's about coordinating the timing of your sales motion with when prospects are actually ready to buy. **Michael:** Right. And in a market like streaming, where buying cycles are driven by external events like sports drops and upfronts, that's actually a massive advantage. **Rachel:** Okay, so here's my actual challenge though. Even if we identify the right accounts and the right timing, we still have the bandwidth problem. I've got 7 AEs. If they're all running coordinated campaigns, how do they also manage their existing pipeline? How do we not just burn them out? **Michael:** That's real. But it's also an argument for better tools. If you're using email, phone, and CRM manually, coordinating a campaign across 7 people is a nightmare. But if you've got something like Salesloft that sequences outreach, automates reminders, surfaces which accounts are engaging, you can actually orchestrate complex campaigns without it being a manual burden. **Rachel:** That makes sense. We're definitely not leveraging our CRM the way we could. It's kind of a dumping ground for notes and activity logs, but we're not using it strategically. **Jennifer:** And Clari's piece—the insights layer—that's where you actually identify and prioritize which accounts to target with these campaigns. Salesloft is the execution engine. **Rachel:** Okay, so the combination of both tools... **Michael:** ...gives you visibility into market timing, helps you prioritize which accounts to target, and then executes the campaign in a way that doesn't kill your team. **Rachel:** (pauses) I think I need to at least explore this more deeply. Because the problem is real, and I can see how your approach maps to the problem. **Michael:** That makes sense. What would that deeper exploration look like? --- ## CLOSING (32:00-32:45) **Rachel:** I think I'd want to do a working session with my ops team. We could walk through one of your existing customers in streaming and understand exactly how they use Salesloft and Clari together. Like, show me concretely what the workflow looks like. **Michael:** Absolutely. We could set that up. I'm thinking we'd want Jennifer there, plus someone from our implementation side who knows how this integrates with your existing tech stack. **Rachel:** Yeah. And I'd want to see how the intelligence—the buying signals—actually show up in your tool. Because I can imagine it, but I want to see it. **Jennifer:** We could do a custom demo where we load a sample of your account list and show you what the intelligence would look like for your business. **Rachel:** Perfect. And I want to understand pricing. Because if this is going to work, it has to make financial sense relative to what we'd save by being more efficient. **Michael:** Fair. I'll have our pricing person send over some scenarios based on your team size and account list. **Rachel:** Great. And Michael, I appreciate you framing this the way you did. You didn't come in with a pitch. You asked questions, listened, and showed me how your tools map to actual problems we have. That's refreshing. **Michael:** That's what we should all be doing. Rachel, thanks for being so candid. This is super helpful context for us. You're working through challenges that a lot of streaming companies are facing, so this is going to help us understand the market better. **Rachel:** Cool. Yeah, let's do it. I'll have my office send over a calendar invite for the working session. And in the meantime, I'll loop in my CEO and see if she has any input on the expansion question we talked about. **Michael:** Perfect. We'll follow up by end of week with the demo and pricing scenarios. --- ## KEY TAKEAWAYS & OPPORTUNITIES ### Confirmed Challenges 1. **Budget Constraint Qualification**: Rachel's team has shrunk but territory has expanded. They need better tools to qualify prospects and prioritize which deals to pursue. - *Opportunity*: Clari's intelligence layer to surface buying signals and help prioritize target accounts 2. **Legacy-to-Digital Divide**: Different buyer personas (broadcast directors vs. VP Product) require different positioning and buyer enablement. Current approach is one-size-fits-all. - *Opportunity*: Custom content and sales engineering resources tailored to different buyer personas 3. **Sales Engineering Gap**: Only 2 sales engineers for 60+ active opportunities. Missing technical content for early-stage conversations with sophisticated buyers. - *Opportunity*: Help build lightweight technical content library that doesn't require SalesEng presence 4. **Sports Rights Buying Cycles**: Upcoming sports content drops create synchronized buying moments, but they're not coordinating sales motion around them. - *Opportunity*: Salesloft motion-based campaigns tied to content calendars and upfront seasons 5. **Market Consolidation**: Smaller prospect list means fewer shots on goal. Considering vertical expansion into SaaS/adjacent verticals but demand signal isn't there yet. - *Opportunity*: Help validate expansion strategy through data before committing resources ### Deal Signals - **Urgency**: High. Rachel has board pressure on growth and is actively looking to improve sales efficiency. - **Budget**: Likely allocated. Company is $50M ARR and growing. Budget constraint is about allocation, not availability. - **Decision Timeline**: 4-6 weeks. Wants to explore deeper with ops team, then make decision. - **Champion**: Rachel is champion. CEO is aware. Will need buy-in from ops and possibly sales enablement. - **Competition**: None mentioned. If anything, they're exploring Salesloft + Clari as a combination. ### Next Steps 1. Set up working session with Rachel's ops team 2. Custom demo showing sample account list with buying signals 3. Pricing scenarios for team size and account scope 4. Connect on product roadmap alignment (especially around sports/seasonal buying cycles) 5. Explore partnership with Clari to ensure seamless integration into their workflow ### Win Strategy - Lead with intelligence/buying signals (Clari) - Emphasize motion orchestration without adding workload (Salesloft) - Position as "scale your limited sales resources" not "hire more salespeople" - Use sports rights as concrete test case for the playbook - Build in ops team early to reduce change management friction --- ## CONVERSATION STYLE NOTES - Rachel is direct and conversational, not formal - She's transparent about challenges and gaps in her org - She thinks systemically (everything connects to budget constraint) - She's pragmatic about expansion (good idea strategically, but execution is hard) - She values vendors who listen and ask questions (vs. pitching) - She moves fast on decisions but wants to validate with ops team first