Texting with Your CRM | Dan Reich at Troops

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Dan Reich 0:00
The reality is when it comes to software, software consumption and usage at work, or in general, we’re still in the like first inning of this whole thing called Software.

Alexander Ferguson 0:18
Over the past few years, there’s been a change in how information flows between people gone to the days where we log into computer terminals and draft emails. Now we text tweet and instant message and post. That’s at least how it is person to person. When it comes to person to computer, we still will have our chairs and poker keyboards the old way. That’s what Dan Reich noticed when he started this company troops, a startup veteran, he envisioned a system where an AI system could bridge information between employees and computers, with the same ease and fluidity of two buddies texting about a baseball game. On this episode of UpTech Report, Dan explains how it works. Then I’m excited to chat with you today learning more about troops to begin, can you share what is troops in five seconds? Very brief, what is it?

Dan Reich 1:05
Sure, so troops connects your most important businesses from business information and workflow from your entire technology stack like your CRM and Salesforce to where the humans are living, which we believe to be, are the enterprise messaging systems like Slack and Microsoft Teams?

Alexander Ferguson 1:23
Connecting where to where the humans are all your systems? And on your site? I’ll actually like you say the nervous system. Interesting. analogy. Where did you see Originally, the problem that existed, you’re like, alright, we need to solve this.

Dan Reich 1:37
So you know, my whole life, I’ve been doing this startup thing and having many conversations with prospects, customers, recruits and so forth. And in general, any and every company on Earth needs a way to manage all this, they need a way to manage information on their customers, their revenue, their pipeline. We’ve known that category to be CRM, we know companies like Salesforce to be the leader. But we also know all of these products have been built with software paradigms. Over the past 1020 years. Basically, the software looks like a bunch of fields, forms, buttons, and boxes. And in all of the instances where I’ve done my job, and that of my partners, you always get into a situation where the people on the frontlines the sales are up to the account managers, their job should be having conversations with customers yet 50%, if not more of the time, there’s this administrative pain that happens behind the scenes, which is a manager complaining, Hey, mister missus, rep, go update Salesforce, or go do an XY and Z in this database. And so on one hand, you hire incredible humans to do very high quality, complicated work. And at the same time, you’re asking them to do this very robotic, mundane administrative work that sets up all their time. And by the way, if they don’t do that piece of work, then the rest of the organization doesn’t know what they’re up to. It doesn’t know what’s happening with the deals for the customers, if they don’t know that information, and they can’t understand how much money they’ll make, then they can’t do hiring, they can’t do budgeting, they can’t have shareholder meetings or investor meetings or board calls, like the business literally grinds to a halt. And there’s incredible tension that ensues on happy people, people leave, and the thing just becomes incredibly messy. And so that’s a problem. And so, in short, we felt like that could be fixed that needed to be fixed. And when we started the company in 2015, around that time, six of the top 10 most use apps in the world were messaging apps. Think Snapchat, Instagram, and we’re like, man, here we are, where we spend a third of our lives sleeping. Third, working a third probably watching TV, and yet, it’s so delightful in terms of how we interact with our friends, you know, hey, texting, how is your day? Or what are you doing tomorrow, and yet we go to work like, that same ease of use doesn’t exist. And so we felt like That was inevitable, it would change. And we felt like messaging would invade the work environment in a very different way than we’ve seen before. And so the question we asked is, What if we could solve that problem by building what felt like an intelligent assistant that that helped you with your job. So instead of having to log in this painful database, you would get a message or series of messages that alerted you, and provided you with the right signals on important actions to take. So let me give you an example. If I just had a meeting with Coca Cola as a prospective customer, and that meeting was at two o’clock, once that meeting was over at three o’clock trips would send a message to me saying, Hey, Dan, how did your meeting without some Coca Cola go? Are there any notes or next steps that you want to log? Or maybe things like who’s the decision maker, where what’s the budget or anything criteria that’s important for me in my business, I’d be able to get a notification on update, and then propagate that information back into the system. And that’s broadly applicable to anybody, whether you’re a sales person, whether you are customer success person or account manager, whether you’re in service or support, the idea of telling the human that something important is happening or is not happening, acting like a central nervous system for the business and letting them quickly act on it, especially in this environment, and especially in a remote work from home environment is just absolutely necessary, we believe today. So if you think about what we’re doing, we live on top of these pretty massive business systems and datasets, whether it’s products like Salesforce, or your ticketing service systems like Zendesk or your business analytics systems, like Looker would have you. These are massive, underlying datasets that are the systems of truth for an organization. And so by seeing this data, that gives us the ability to send signals off of things that are happening or not happening. And so for example, we can send signals that are predictive in nature. So if we see, for example, that a $5 million deal is in the contracting stage, but no one’s spoken to them, or email them or had any contact with him in 245 days, unlikely that deal is going to close, something’s wrong. And so we will be able to notify, or sends a signal to that account manager or manager or CEO, letting them know that this is happening, or in this case, not happening, and let them quickly take action. And so in that regard, yes, we are building and supporting very smart and intelligent signals so that people can do their jobs more effectively,

Alexander Ferguson 6:50
your current then marketplace, or industry that you’re focusing on, do you have any specific sectors or size of companies as well that are mainly using and you’re going after?

Dan Reich 7:01
Great question, since we primarily focused on to start working with platforms like Salesforce and slack, which is the largest in its category. And until recently, the fastest growing and its category, we felt like That was a good beachhead and, and so to the extent you use those products, and also Google, Google email and calendar, Gmail calendar, you can be a customer and survey we today we work with really small companies, startups, just several people all the way up to Fortune 500, and publicly traded companies as well. So some of our customers include customers like but not limited to, you know, Slack, Twilio, Looker envision Flexport, Andela cameo. And so these are really amazing, and fast growing companies, and it’s exciting. And the reason they use a product like troops, and our solutions are because they like we recognize that in order to scale and grow fast, you need to be incredibly agile, and, and stay on top of everything. And the way to do that is to do so with the least amount of friction. And they believe that this is the best way to solve those issues.

Alexander Ferguson 8:17
Why troops the name?

Dan Reich 8:21
So, so it’s funny when we started, like any business, you know, you always ask, what will the name of this thing be called? And so we picked troops because we felt like it was a good play on troops in the trenches are people being on the front lines. And so when you think about salespeople or customer facing, folks, they’re always on the front lines. And so because they’re on the front lines, we thought that troops is a fun play on on lingo and phrases that I feel like many sales leaders and organizations use anyway.

Alexander Ferguson 8:59
So looking forward from here, you said your beachhead, Slack and Salesforce. And that’s where you started. And that’s where you’ve built a good base so far. Looking forward from here. You already gave me a little clue. And we were chatting before what’s what’s the next step? And where are you headed?

Dan Reich 9:16
Yeah. So if you think about where the world is headed, you’ve people heard phrases like software’s eating, eating the world and, and the reality is when it comes to software, software consumption and usage at work, or in general, we’re still in the like, first inning of this whole thing called software. You know, I don’t even know what your computer screen looks like. But I got to believe you have, you know, several tabs, if not many, many more open at once, with immense context switching. And so the reality is in the future, there’s only going to be more SAS companies, more pieces of software that people will need to use Emily’s and therefore there will also need to be have a greater need for integration and automation between these pieces of software in between all this information, and perhaps most importantly, is there’s going to be a greater need to make this easier for the human beings that have to do their job. If you are a person that has to flip between 20 different tabs to do your job, whether it’s updating your pipeline in one system and updating your timesheet and another and updating your time off in another and updating your forecast in another and updating your manager, and another and so on, and so on and so on. How the hell is any company going to be able to effectively hire train? Anybody, let alone make them successful? And to exacerbate that? How are you going to do that when the markets are changing, whether it’s COVID, or the next issue that happens in your whole business needs to change and out your 10 100 1000 person organization needs to adjust on the fly and learn new processes and systems. Like it’s just just not going to happen. And so, in the future, we believe this problem only gets bigger and therefore also equally believe there will be a greater need for technology to sit between in an intelligent and elegant way, all of this really important information, and the humans and where the humans live. And so in a more literal sense in the future, you can expect your apps to integrate with and partner with more companies beyond Salesforce, as I mentioned earlier, whether it’s companies like Zendesk or intercom or HubSpot, and so on. And then on the other side, not just work with Slack, but the other mediums in which organizations are spending a disproportionate amount of their time doing work.

Alexander Ferguson 11:42
What’s a good first step for somebody to take and where should they go to learn more? Yeah,

Dan Reich 11:47
great question. best first step would be to go to our website at troops that AI and you can get a demo with, enter in your information and someone can reach out and get a demo. You can also just create an account and get going for free and sure enough, hopefully someone will reach out for a conversation as well to help you be successful yourself.

Alexander Ferguson 12:08
Be sure to check out part two of my conversation with dad, in which he talks about starting his first company in high school and offers some tips on getting funded and lending the first client