Expanding the Sales Engagement Platform Vision - with Kyle Porter, Founder and CEO Salesloft

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we're joined by Kyle Porter, the founder and CEO of Salesloft. We'll be covering four main topic areas with Kyle today. First, sales engagement trends in 2022 and beyond. How do you involve sales engagement at scale? The future of sales engagement possibly to the revenue cloud or even a broader category? And fourth, what are the key metrics to really measure the ROI of investing in a sales engagement platform? Kyle, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Kyle Porter** (1:13)
Yeah. Well, I'll start by saying thanks for having me on here. We're really excited to participate and looking forward to our discussion, Ray. I'm the founder and CEO of Salesloft, started the company about 10 years ago, and we've been on an incredibly fun journey, really focused deeply on creating a world where sellers are loved by the buyers they serve. I noticed through a lifelong career in selling that the things I was doing to be successful, providing our customers with an incredible experience, being relevant, adding significant value to the relationships I was building in sales, that those things were sometimes traded off for being scalable, or repeatable, or mass communications. I realized early on that I could bring these two things together to create solutions that would empower sellers around the world to be both sincere as well as scalable in their processes. Really, what we wanted to do was enable sellers to deliver their customers with an incredible experience in a way that maximizes revenue and is steeped in science and process. The journey has been great. The business has grown. We had a few products early on that we built to understand our customer environments. Then in 2014, launched Salesloft Cadence, which has become the flagship for Salesloft. Really, the beginning of the sales engagement movement. Since then, the product has evolved rapidly. The company has grown and scaled.
Excited to be here today talking with you.

**Ray Rike** (2:36)
You started the company with a pretty lofty goal, no pun intended, but to really allow sellers to be loved by the buyers they served. That's a very visionary North Star goal. Along the way, you brought in a lot of operational efficiency through your Cadence, Sequence Building, et cetera. But if we look out the next two to five years, what's your vision for how sales engagement will evolve from where we are today, Kyle?

**Kyle Porter** (3:04)
Yeah. Think about all professionals around the world, including ourselves, yourself, and any profession. People are taking on tasks within a daily basis to achieve their objectives, and they may be using calendars, they may be using task lists, they may be using email, some combination of all three of them. In the future for sellers of all types, whether it's top-of-the-funnel SDRs, BDRs, full-cycle sellers, or mid-funnel sellers, post-sales account managers, and customer success, or even the frontline managers that lead them, their executive sales, enablement sales operations. All of these different personas of sellers will log into a single system, and the use case of what they're trying to achieve in their daily basis, they will have a queue of activities for them to execute on, and that queue will be smarter than the task list as we see them today, or emails, or calendars, and that it will be populated automatically with many actions they need to take. It will assist them on executing those actions, and then it will measure and identify the analytics of success of those activities, so that it can improve by suggesting new things. I think that's really where we see the vision of this category going, is this single place to execute on all the tasks related to the function you are in within the sales organization.

**Ray Rike** (4:19)
It really becomes your intelligent revenue assistant. It kind of helps you identify what needs to be done, how to do it, how to do it efficiently, and then how to measure whether what you're doing is working or not, correct?

**Kyle Porter** (4:29)
Yeah, and helps you execute on it also. Right. If you take, I have a to-do list, and it's literally just things that I added there manually with a checkbox next to them. I go do them manually and then check the box saying that I did it, right? The future sales queue will be wildly different in that those actions will be automatically prompted there. It will help and assist you to execute on them. You won't have to check the box because it will know it's done and it will measure what's working and what's not so it can improve over time.