Bridging the Conversational Intelligence Gap in B2B Sales

After nearly a decade in B2B software sales and marketing, Greg Reffner knows a thing or two about how to build an effective sales force. As manager, director and VP of sales and marketing, he’s led various teams to success and was a big believer in the power of conversational intelligence (aka recording and analyzing sales calls to provide feedback).

As much as Greg leaned into the technology, he always wondered how much more effective it would be if it was in real time rather than after the fact. That led to an idea, what if the same natural-language processing and speech-to-text used in everyday devices (i.e. phones, cars, etc.) could be applied in B2B software sales?

That question eventually materialized in the form of Abstrakt, a real-time call coaching software that helps reps ask the right questions, navigate objections and get timely feedback. Despite mixed signals on the market’s knowledge of and readiness for this type of product, Greg and his team have grown the company by approximately 3000% since its launch just two years ago.

Greg attributes their success to first and foremost his team, but also their ability to identify how to bridge that knowledge gap and gain early adopters. Now, having just closed their seed round of funding, the team at Abstrakt is working on marketing expansion and hiring.

Read on to hear about Greg’s journey to becoming a startup founder, how Abstrakt came to be and how he’s navigated the various challenges that could have stymied their growth.

What is Abstrakt?

Abstrakt is a real-time call coaching software that does three things for our customers: Make sure reps are asking the right questions, handling objections the right way and getting real-time feedback right after that call is over.

How did Abstrakt come to be?

I was a very early adopter of conversational intelligence, which is a fancy word for recording and analyzing calls. When I left Allbound I was noodling on this idea with a couple of my friends about how to use real-time, natural-language processing and speech-to-text that we have on our phones and our cars in B2B software sales. Ultimately that formed what is Abstrakt today — using the technology that already applies in our lives today in a B2B application.

How long did you spend building it prior to launching it?

We started with a proof of concept to validate that we could actually build it the way we wanted to build it. Once we had that proof of concept, we went out and raised a small angel round of funding to go get our first V1 working product ready. That took about a year or so and it took us over 200 iterations of that first product to get a live working production-ready product.

We have our challenges like everybody does, but if you throw a number to it, we’ve grown 3000% in the past year, which when you start from nothing it sounds like a lot. But our struggles now are finding product market fit and finding those perfect customers. And making sure that when we do find them, we can close them, then implement them and then they get value out of it. In a startup, your problems are consistently changing at every stage of growth.

What’s been one of the biggest challenges you’ve had to overcome in growing Abstrakt?

The biggest challenge that we’ve had to overcome is the fact that I had some assumptions about how our customers would want to use our product — and that they were ready to use our product. It turned out my assumptions were wrong. Most people did not have the resources or the knowledge that I thought they would have, which means they struggled to understand how to use our product. So we’ve had to make some changes to the product, to productize those gaps that I thought people would already have had filled prior to using Abstrakt for them to be able to use our product in the first place.

What’s been one of the biggest contributing factors to the company’s growth?

Hire the right people and get out of their way. There’s a cliche saying: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. The best thing I’ve done over the past six or seven months is trust in other people to own a portion of the business — that they’re going do a great job and just let them put their mark on it.

What’s next for Abstrakt?

We’re about to close our seed round fundraising. We’ll be at five full-time employees here by the end of this month. We’ll probably have a sixth employee starting next month. Our goal is to be close to one hundred customers by the end of this time next year.

What brought you to the StartupAZ Collective?

I found myself alone in my bedroom/office like most entrepreneurs do. You feel like you’re in this silo. Like you’re by yourself most of the time. Talk with any CEO and they’ll often say it’s the loneliest job in the company. I wanted to be part of something where I didn’t feel like I was the only one going through those struggles or those pains anymore. Just knowing that I’m surrounded by a group of 17 other folks who are all going through the same struggles, all have different ideas, and have all solved some of the challenges that I’ve solved. And I can also contribute by telling them how I’ve solved some of the challenges we have. It felt like a no-brainer.

There are a couple folks that I’ve already had really good connections with where, when they have struggles, they come and bounce those ideas off of me. And this is outside of the monthly cohorts. I’ve already formed a connection with a few founders where I know I can call them. I’m looking forward to continuing to see that and to grow and expand over the years.

What advice would you give to other startup founders in Arizona?

Arizona often feels like it gets passed by when you start thinking of the Silicon Valley, Dallas, Austin, Boston, Chicago, etc. There’s like these startup hubs that get a lot of press get a lot of excitement. And in Phoenix, we don’t get a lot of that. Oftentimes it feels like what we’re doing is not exciting compared to some of the stuff you see in these other parts of the United States. Don’t let that get to you.

We’re doing some pretty cool things. And at the end of the day, I like to think startups that come out of this struggle bus of an environment will come out stronger and better off because we had to grow and mature as companies without really getting the big fancy press releases, the big venture funding, the huge, and massive talent pool that those cities offer. We didn’t have those things. So we had to be scrappy. We had to grind. So don’t let being in the Valley of the Sun, in isolation from the startup world, discourage you from being successful and going after what you want.