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The Digital Executive
Turning Sales from Art to Science: Juan DeAngulo on Process, People, and Future of AI-Driven Growth | Ep 1126
00:19:13
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Juan d'. Angulo. Juan d' Angulo is a dynamic entrepreneur whose rare blend of investment expertise and startup agility has driven transformative growth across industries. Juan co founded and scaled a real estate investment platform to over 4 billion in assets, leading a team so inspired by his leadership, they voluntarily returned to the office during the height of the pandemic. Today he's co founding incelligence, a global tech startup that's revolutionizing how small and medium sized businesses manage sales operations across three continents. Well, good afternoon, Juan. Welcome to the show.
- [00:51]
B
Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me on. It's good to be on.
- [00:54]
A
Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it you're in Miami today. I appreciate you traversing one time zone. I'm in Kansas City, but still love to connect and have a conversation. So, Juan, I'm going to jump into your first question. You challenged the conventional wisdom that sales is an art, not a process at intelligence. How have you translated that belief into systems and tools that scale? Could you share a concrete example where replacing art with process made a measurable difference in revenue or team performance?
- [01:27]
B
Sure. I mean, that's a deep question and I think we can unpack it. But you know, essentially the way that I like to talk about it, Brian, is there is a lot of that goes into the activity of selling, right? So anybody that has led a sales organization or has been a part of sales naturally understands that the one on one interaction between a seller and a buyer contains a lot of activities that we could classify as an art.
- [01:53]
A
Right?
- [01:53]
B
I mean, you have to be, you have to be a good listener. You have to know your product or your service. You have to be a good communicator. You have to understand how to identify the pain points. And those are all things that are absolutely critical. But as you're transitioning from maybe a founder led organization or founder led sales to actually being able to structure a team that can scale. Right? Because one of the challenges that most organizations deal with in scaling is how do I multiply the results that maybe a founder had or maybe a sales leader had or a top producer had into 10, 20, 30, 40 or even 50 salespeople, right? I mean, that process of scaling is a challenge and we are big proponents that a lot of the answers are found in the process of selling, not in the activity of selling. Most organizations are what I call very people dependent. They are fully dependent on hiring superstars or reproducing superstars, but they don't have an ability to really gain insights based on their data that they're accruing almost always in some form of a CRM to be able to understand what's really happening. Right. Where in my process am I losing deals, which are the stages where I'm leaking in my pipeline? What are the causes of that? How long is my sales cycle really? What are my deal sizes? Right. What are the different types of deals that I'm putting through my pipeline? All of these things that we could unpack further are variables or components of what we would call the overall process and structure of a go to market effort or a sales and marketing effort. And so when you do have a well defined sales process, when you do have a platform, an intelligent platform that can actually help you understand what's going on with all these variables, then you can actually scale, then you can actually become reliable in, in attaining the revenue goals. And instead of just feeling like all I can do is just work as hard as I can, get more leads, hire more people, and somehow see if that leads to hitting my number, you can actually navigate with certainty and with visibility of what's happening so that you can try to hit that number more reliably. So that's all very descriptive. I think what you asked me is, could I give you an example and I think one that comes to mind from one of the companies that we've dealt with. Very large company. Right. And this holds true to any size company, but this is just the example that comes to mind. Very large company, global company, revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And when we first connected with them, we looked at their data and they had everything in one pipeline. They pretty much had one style of service. Okay. And when we looked at their data, they had a massive gap between their average deal size and their median deal size. So I'll move numbers a little bit for confidentiality, but let's just say generically, their average deal size was around $300,000 and their median was about 15,000. That immediately told me that there is a massive difference in a lot of the deals that they were putting through their pipeline. So we were very quickly able to identify different service lines that they had fundamentally the same service, but they had different customer types that they catered to. And so very in literally in a matter of minutes, we segmented their pipeline. And by understanding those different line business, they were much better able to understand where they stood in their overall revenue. By understanding this different customer type, the deal flow we need versus A smaller customer, it's that the behavior is very different. Right. Sales cycles were different, average deal sizes were different, and even the salespeople that they had around the world were better at some than the other. So that's what I'm talking about. By the process of selling, it all lands in the flow of deals going through the pipeline.
- [06:15]
A
Thank you, I appreciate that. That's really interesting. Obviously I'm not in sales, but you can certainly. This would probably resonate with sales folks in my audience, but the interaction between buyer and seller is complex. I know that much. And as you said, it is an art. And you talked about that scaling piece and really the answer is in the process of selling. And I thought that was interesting and I liked how you highlighted an example of a client there that had a lot of complexities and different price variables that are in their business. So thank you. And Juan, having co founded a real estate investment platform that scaled to over 4 billion in assets, what lessons from that industry carry over into building a global tech startup like intelligence? What habit structures or pitfalls did you bring forward or maybe leave behind?
- [07:05]
B
Yeah, you know what's interesting is that believe it or not, people tend to maybe look at my LinkedIn bio or talk to me and they think that there's like this huge difference in the two industries. And obviously there are some differences, right? I mean, building a commercial real estate investment platform and building a tech company have some significant differences. But what's not different is our approach in the real estate investment platform was very data driven, very analytics driven. Obviously that carries over to intelligence tremendously and also very process driven. When you're, when you've got three or four people making investment decisions and executing on investments, it's very easy to know that you're on the same page. It's very easy to cover the portfolio to make sure that all decisions are being made from the same playbook, let's say. But when you grow and you have 75 people and you have a lot of different departments executing across a very large portfolio and you're increasing the volume of deals that you're analyzing, what protects you to make sure that you're being consistent in your execution is your process. Right. Being methodical in your process, being methodical in your investment committee write ups, being methodical in how you review deals and sticking to your fundamentals. And that's the same thing in sales. Right. When you approach sales with a very process driven mindset, and as you're building a tech startup that ultimately is delivering a solution in the World of sales, you have to have those processes in place, right? All the way from identifying user feature requirements to putting them into a product roadmap that you are prioritizing to running a disciplined agile programming platform so that you are delivering a product that ultimately reflects what customers really need. There are a lot of consistencies, but I would say that at the end of the day, Brian, both in investing and in tech, the number one resource of any company is the people. And then that includes your internal people as well as your external stakeholders, be IT partners or be it customers. And building a culture that is customer centric, that understands what is it that makes us unique and different. And ultimately what's going to lead to success is something that I'm really, I don't know what the right word is, but let's say passionate about and committed to, because ultimately I think that's the biggest variable that leads to consistent and reliable success.
- [09:39]
A
Awesome. Thank you for sharing that. And I do, I did like how you teased apart a little bit of the differences between real estate investing and having a tech company there. But at the end of the day, the analytics and the processes are very similar. As you mentioned, you got to be methodical in your work and your processes. But the number one, I'd say ingredient to this, and you mentioned that, is people. Of course, that's the center of your business. And to build that customer centric business, you got to have some great people in there. So I appreciate that. And Juan, in startups there's often tension between speed and structure. When is it worth investing heavily in process, documentation, dashboards, formal systems, versus when it's better to move fast with minimal process? How have you found that balance across your ventures?
- [10:26]
B
Wow, that's another great question. I mean, there's a couple of things that come to mind and I'm going to start with an analogy. I tend to be an analogy guy. And when I think about building an organization, you have to know up front that if your goal is to build a significant size company, which is usually what founders are after in the idea stage, you have to look at it as building a building. Right? And if you're, if you've ever been in a big city like New York or Chicago and you're seeing a skyscraper being built for the first year, all you see is a big hole and, and you don't see anything going above the ground. And I've always seen that very, as a very good analogy to what building a company is like, if what you want is to build something of scale because you got to take the time to build that foundation. You've got to take the time to build a foundation because if not, as you start to go vertical, maybe when you're in floor three, four and five, you think you're okay. But when you start to get to building just the floors 20, 30 and 40, if you skipped steps, if you skimped on your foundation, it's going to start to show. And usually the implosion is not slow, right? It happens seemingly quickly, but the cracks began to erode from inside. And some of those cracks are culture, right? Not taking the time to really understand what are the kinds of people that I want to bring in, what's going to really define my team, what's going to make people work well together. But a lot of it is process. A lot of it is process. And when it comes to tech, I'll tell you, we, when we first started intelligence and we were sort of trying it out and building out a prototype, we worked with a third party software development firm at first, and then once we decided, okay, we're going to go to market, this is working, this is something that people want, and we brought in, we started to build out our internal software development team. The number one pain point we had in that transition was process, specifically documentation, right? The third party development company, understandably so because they're basically providing a service to a third party, did not take the time to really document everything that was being put in the code, all of the formulas. And so probably the first six months in that transition before we could start to build new features or continue to develop the product, what we really had to do was spend the time to go back and really shore up everything that had been done originally. And so it's really important to basically build the plane as you fly it. And it's an art. I don't think there's a perfect answer. I think leaders have to have the ability to juggle this. But as you're building in that urgency of results, right, you're surviving, you're trying to get revenue, you're trying to just get those initial sales and figure out a way to build momentum. And you want to just prioritize everything that has to do with generating deals and customer requirements. You'll know that if you don't decide to make those hard decisions of right now, we're going to focus on infrastructure right now. We're going to make sure that the product is available or that the documentation is done, right, it's going to come to hunt you later. So it's really kind of walking and chewing gum at the same time. It's something that you have to learn along the way, but at the end of the day, be committed to it. You got to know that process matters.
- [14:07]
A
Thank you. Appreciate that. You certainly highlighted some great things in there. But that tension between speed and structure, the analogy that you use is that skyscraper and the foundation absolutely is the most important when you're building something and you want to scale this business into something much larger. Obviously a culture plays a piece into that, as you mentioned, but process is the number one thing that I took away. So thank you. And one last question of the day. Looking ahead, what do you see as the biggest shifts in how small and medium sized businesses will manage sales operations over the next five to 10 years? Whether it's AI, automation, data privacy, how is intelligence positioning itself to lead or not following those shifts?
- [14:53]
B
So, you know, historically companies didn't have a choice but to be people dependent and be activity based driven like we talked about in the beginning, because the systems were not there to be able to have the visibility of what was going on with their process. I've always challenged sales leaders. If you think about your top producers and you set and you put them next to your bottom producers, not the bottom producers that are just very far from being top producers. But there's always those people that you kind of scratch your head and you say, how could these not be top producers? Right? Because they know the product, they speak well, they, they're nice people or they connect with people at a personal level, but they just don't hit their number. The difference is always process. Right? The top producers just know how to work on the right deals, prioritize their time. Well, that's all process. So now with the advent of machine learning and AI and very sophisticated words to basically talk about algorithms and numbers and computing power, companies are going to have the ability to see that. What I'll tell you though is where intelligence is uniquely positioned is that all of the solutions that are out there, that I wouldn't even call them competitors because they're going about it in a very different way, are using AI and this computing power to address the activity of selling. I think a lot of your listeners maybe have heard it used as conversational AI, right? Like there's all these AI platforms that are doing a really good job with things like capturing phone calls and turning them into text and feeding it into the CRM or providing coaching for reps, real time to overcome objections. There's a lot that can be done around the realm of engagement and conversational AI. And that's all great, but there is nobody out there that is addressing the process of selling the way that we are. The what we call a deterministic AI platform where actually utilizes sophisticated formulas and a sophisticated methodology that's tried and true to provide that process driven intelligence so people really know where they stand and what they have to do to hit their number reliably. So we are uniquely positioned to be the ones that actually provide that information and that intelligence and then combine or complement some of what these other conversational AI players are doing so that at the end of the day, companies get a complete solution, right? I think we have seen some consolidation in the industry. I think we're going to see more because if I'm a CEO today, I would have a very hard time understanding how many tech tools should I be implementing in my company, right? I bought this CRM and then I get bombarded with all these other specialized tools. At the end of the day, how complicated can my tech stack be? And I think that the people that are able to come to them with a simplified solution, which is what we're doing, where we can come in and say, hey, listen, you just need one compliment to your CRM and you'll get everything from your conversational AI all the way to your process driven intelligence. Those are going to be the ones that win.
- [18:02]
A
Thank you. Really appreciate that. And again, Juan, I love your analogies. You know, you talked about, you know, business in the past, really relied on people, right? And the analogy used was those salespeople as an example here, you know, you compared some of the top salespeople versus the lower level salespeople, and you compared them and saying, you know, they've got just about everything as far as the traits and the experience and the relationships, but that maybe that process isn't there. And I think that's important and that ties into how we move into this next really few years of AI automation and artificial intelligence. AI is definitely going to bring in some more productivity and efficiencies to assist in these processes for sure. And I can't wait to see what your platform does as well. Juan, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [18:54]
B
All right, Brian, thank you for having me on and hope this was of value to your listeners and we're certainly excited about what Incelligence is doing and hopefully connecting with some of them.
- [19:04]
A
Bye for now.