207. Adam Dorrell, CEO & Co-Founder of CustomerGaige - Founder-Led Sales vs Scaling: The Hard Transition Nobody Talks About

Summary

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The SaaSiest Podcast — Episode 207

Guest: Adam Dorrell, CEO & Co-Founder, CustomerGauge
Hosts: Daniel Nackovski & Thomas Sjöberg
Date: March 5, 2026
Episode Title: Founder-Led Sales vs Scaling: The Hard Transition Nobody Talks About

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Episode Overview

This episode features an insightful and candid discussion with Adam Dorrell, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomerGauge, on the complex journey founders face when transitioning from founder-led sales to building a scalable sales organization within a SaaS business. Adam draws on his 16+ years of bootstrapped founder experience, offering honest stories, practical advice, and reflections on founder psychology, scaling sales leadership, and the deeply human aspects of B2B relationships.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Adam's Background and CustomerGauge

• Brief intro: Adam Dorrell co-founded CustomerGauge, a SaaS platform focused on improving B2B customer relationships, especially with manufacturing and enterprise clients ([04:21]–[08:00]).
• Bootstrapped journey: Adam and his co-founder (and wife) Camilla grew the business with minimal outside funding (€2.5M) and high capital efficiency. They now have a global client base, about €10M ARR, and 50-60 employees ([09:24]–[10:23]).
• CustomerGauge edge: Unlike generic survey tools, they focus on helping organizations systematically improve relationships with critical feedback and action as a lever for growth.

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2. Founder-Led Sales — When & Why Founders Step Out

“How long should a founder stay in the sales seat?” ([12:19])

• Founders’ sales dynamic: Adam and Camilla played complementary roles—she brought warmth and connection; he brought metrics and business rationale ([12:56]–[13:52]).

• Repeated attempts to scale: They tried various heads of sales and VPs, but not everyone “worked out.” Adam later realized he needed to define process, ICP, and value proposition better before sales could be delegated ([14:01]–[19:44]).

• Core insight:

  “You've got to define your story—you've got to get your ICP, your value prop before you can bring other people in. That seems so obvious, but it took a lot of scar tissue to get to.”
  — Adam Dorrell [18:21]

• Trigger to delegate sales:
  Confidence and objectivity. Initially, Adam and Camilla lacked confidence and assumed sales experts would be better, but soon realized they still had to underpin narrative and ICP ([17:10]–[18:21]).

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3. Hiring Sales Leaders: Pitfalls & Turning Points

• The challenge:
  New sales leaders sometimes took over too much or “tanked the business for a couple of quarters” because of poor alignment with founders and misunderstanding of ICP ([21:59]–[24:09]).
• What worked:
  Finding a sales leader, Adam Clay, who harmonized founder inputs and process, creating structure, integrating the founders at key points for maximum impact ([15:13]–[16:35]).
• Best practice:
  “Work out where in the sales process you add value as a founder.”
  — Adam Dorrell [24:09]

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4. Transitioning the Founder Role: From Closing Deals to Strategic Touchpoints

• Modern founder role: Founders now focus on pre-sales (thought leadership, content, story), occasional late-stage deal support, and customer success [20:03]–[21:13].

• Founder as deal accelerant:

  “I'm now used like a kind of a surgical knife… I have to say that process has worked brilliantly—it's quite difficult for my ego... but it's really useful.”
  — Adam Dorrell [15:27]

• Escalating deals: Inviting the founder for high-level buy-in or “future vision” storytelling is extremely effective in moving deals forward or engaging the decision-maker level ([26:46], [28:47]).

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5. Common Founder Sales Mistakes

• Chasing the wrong deals: Pursuing customers that aren’t a fit, building unwanted features [31:45]–[32:13].

  “We won some stupid business… ended up building functionality that only got used once… sometimes underpriced, sometimes overpriced because you want to be loved.”
  — Adam Dorrell [32:08]

• Emotional pricing and promises: Founders too close emotionally may wrongly price or overpromise, conflicting with product roadmaps and team execution ([32:13]–[33:30]).

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6. The Human Side: Relationships as a Business Superpower

• Key theme: Businesses often neglect the “human aspect” of B2B relationships. Regular “date nights”—showing appreciation, checking in, understanding needs—is essential for customer longevity ([33:57]–[36:33]).

• Relationship analogy:
  “You need to do a few things to keep a relationship running… that involves check-ins—how was today, how did you feel about that? Not just ignoring the answer, but really showing empathy.”
  — Adam Dorrell [33:57]

• Applying customer feedback tools: Turn these relationship-level insights into systematic quality assurance, just like product quality control ([36:33]–[39:03]).

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7. The Impact of AI and Organizational Evolution

• AI disruption:

  “AI has come in and completely destroyed [organic search]… So our traffic fell off a cliff about a year ago.”
  — Adam Dorrell [24:12]

• Adapting go-to-market: More outbound/buyer experience, personalized demos, AI-filled web interactions.
• Future outlook: Will use AI to enhance (not replace) human relationship building; sees potential for a European “Airbus” of CX as a counter to U.S. giants ([41:03]–[43:02]).
• Favorite AI hack:
  Auto-generating personalized “thank you” letters to customers, summarizing feedback ([43:28]–[44:01]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the flexibility needed as a founder:
  “As a founder, you never stop selling. You're always in the sales seat. But it shifts… I'm shifting up much more towards the early part of the sale, the thought leadership.”
  — Adam Dorrell [20:03]

• On sales transition pain:
  “That boundary point between scaling is so difficult to get right… When do you let go?”
  — Adam Dorrell [21:59]

• On human connectivity in B2B:
  “Businesses forget about the interpersonal relationships, or they just assume that it happens if you get the right people in.”
  — Adam Dorrell [33:57]

• On authentic connection in the age of AI:
  “More important than ever is authenticity and building trust… Nobody wants [AI slop]… What really matters is vulnerability, getting to the truth, sharing inner thoughts and trust.”
  — Adam Dorrell [46:21]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:21] CustomerGauge’s beginnings and B2B focus
• [09:24] Bootstrapping, funding, and company stats
• [12:56] Founder roles in early sales
• [15:13] Finding and onboarding sales leadership (Adam Clay)
• [17:10] When and why founders should delegate sales
• [18:21] Importance of defining ICP and narrative
• [21:59] Pitfalls in hiring sales leaders
• [24:09] Best practices for founder integration in sales
• [26:46]/[28:47] Founders’ impact on deal progression
• [31:45] Common founder sales mistakes
• [33:57] Relationship lessons and “date nights” in B2B
• [41:03] AI’s disruption of marketing & sales
• [43:28] Adam’s favorite AI hack
• [46:21] Authenticity, trust, and the future of relationships

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Takeaways for SaaS Founders & Leaders

• Prepare for sales delegation: Clearly define ICP, value proposition, and sales process before onboarding sales leaders.
• Founders remain crucial: Their involvement is most valuable at specific touchpoints (vision, trust-building, or executive engagement), not micromanaging entire cycles.
• Avoid common traps: Don’t let passion lead to poor-fit customers or irrational pricing; value external perspective.
• Treat relationships as assets: Regular “check-ins” and intentional nurturing of customer relationships yield compounding returns.
• Embrace AI, but stay human: Use AI to clear the busywork and make space for real human connection, feedback, and authenticity in customer dealings.

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Suggested Next Guest/Topic

When asked who or what should be discussed next, Adam didn't name a person but reinforced the need to keep exploring founder transitions and the relational side of SaaS scaling.

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For full context and stories, listen to the episode—this summary highlights the rich lessons and candid moments essential for SaaS founders navigating the pivotal shift from selling alone to building a winning, scalable go-to-market team.

Transcript

[Adam Durell]

You are listening to the Sassiest podcast in the world. Born in the Nordics. Democratizing B2B SaaS knowledge everywhere.

[Daniel]

Hi, I'm Daniel.

[Thomas]

And I'm Thomas. And we are experienced SaaS professionals that are curious about how other successful SaaS companies go to market scale, build winning teams and great products.

[Daniel]

Join us on our journey as we speak to SaaS leaders trying to get hold of their secret sauce.

[Thomas]

And today's guest is Adam Durell, the CEO at CustomerG.

[Adam Durell]

Businesses forget about. They forget about the interpersonal relationships or they just assume that it happens if you get the right people in.

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[Thomas]

Hello there and welcome to another episode of the Sassiest podcast. Today I have a little bit of a cold. I don't know how that's gonna sound like in the podcast, but if I'm a little bit deeper in my voice today, you know why.

[Daniel]

You and Barry White. All right, that's a sound actually Barry White would never do, but happy to have you here, Thomas. Thank you for fighting the man cold. We have a lot of exciting stuff ahead of us. We have as probably everybody that listens to us and hangs out in our forums, you must know that May 5th and 6th we have our 5th anniversary of the one and only Sassyas conference here in Malm, Sweden. And we're gonna go, I was about to say crazy. We're not gonna go crazy. We're gonna go all out. You know, five year anniversary. We never thought that we would be here when we started this, so this requires some celebration. So we're gonna have like always, great speakers, great content, great opportunity to network, greater opportunity to discuss with each other, with partners, with peers, roundtable discussion. Focus on that interaction as always. And this year we're going to throw in a couple of more things. Some fun elements, some educational elements. So you don't want to Miss this out. I hope this is going to be the best event that we ever delivered. That's what we're working towards, right, Thomas?

[Thomas]

Absolutely. So 20 speakers announced so far, and expect up to 40, 50 speakers in the end to be there. So there's a lot to look forward to and something to look forward to now is a discussion that we have with the founder that's been around for quite some time and will share his learnings with us. Today. We are super excited to have no other than Adam Durrell here as a guest in the Sassiest podcast. Warm welcome, Adam.

[Adam Durell]

Hey, it's good to speak to you, Thomas and Daniel, how are you doing?

[Daniel]

We're doing great. How are you? And I love your setup. Now, not everybody is watching this. Most people are just listening to this, but you have a foxy microphone, like, really, really great headsets. This is not your first podcast, right?

[Adam Durell]

No. In fact, I started out in hospital radio decades ago, so I've always had this interest in sound and music, so it's a bit of a geeky thing. But to be honest, even when I'm doing communications with customers, I think it's really good to have a good sound setup. So I've got a headset here and a mic, and, yeah, it doubles as a podcast studio.

[Thomas]

Yeah, it's on our side. This is our regular setup as well, but I sense that you do something extra on your side that makes it sound even better, but that's another topic. So great having you here. Besides being a podcast veteran and a radio personality, what more can you tell about yourself?

[Adam Durell]

Well, thanks for asking. I am the CEO and co founder of CustomerGage, which is a company that helps B2B organizations, especially manufacturing organizations, have better business relationships with their customers. So we make sure that we get their feedback, bring it into an organization, and then ensure that they can combine that with other metrics and act on it to help them grow their business. And we've been doing it now for getting it for 16 years and growing quite nicely.

[Thomas]

All right, and what do you do when you're not working?

[Adam Durell]

Well, I've just come back from a winter sport holiday, Thomas.

[Thomas]

Okay.

[Adam Durell]

I'm a snowboarder, so I was able to have a great week on the slopes and do that. I like cycling, walking, hiking, music, played the bass in a band, things like that. So, yeah, I try to keep a full life.

[Daniel]

Yeah. And where are you based right now? Like. Like geographically, where in the world are you situated?

[Adam Durell]

Well, Daniel, I'm in Amsterdam. Yeah, it's a city I moved to 20 years ago, actually almost through the week. So I was born and brought up in London in the UK and roamed around the world for a bit and ended up in Amsterdam. And that's where I. I met the romantic heart of my life and started the business.

[Daniel]

How did you end up in Amsterdam? What brought you to Amsterdam?

[Adam Durell]

It was romance, to be honest. Romance.

[Daniel]

Okay.

[Adam Durell]

Yeah, I always loved the city and, you know, used to come here for business and trips. Never thought I would end up here, but I fell in love with somebody from Amsterdam, or rather I should say a Dutch Danish person. And so I've got that Scandi influence going on. And we ended up settling in Amsterdam and I. I love it here. So it's a great place for business, very international and yeah, it's a very nice standard living. So I'm very happy here.

[Daniel]

Yeah. You and I have something in common then, because. Well, I guess you and my wife have something in common. You both moved for love, change countries for love. I appreciate that. I have the greatest respect for people that I don't want to say, leave everything behind because London is not that far out.

[Thomas]

And I have a great respect for your wife, Dan, because she moved from like California to a small village here in Sweden.

[Daniel]

The you do for love, love and family?

[Adam Durell]

Well, I think it's a good initiator. But, you know, I did then what every good immigrant does and I started hustling and started a business. So I guess that's the other end of the story.

[Daniel]

Yeah. Tell us more about the customer gauge. Like, if people are not aware of who you guys are, like, so what do you exactly do and for whom do you do it?

[Adam Durell]

That's a great question. So it's probably a better way of describing the sort of companies we work for. And then I'll back into doing what we're doing. So businesses all around the world have the challenge of understanding what's really going on with their customers. And for many years they started doing that with surveys. Be completely aware of this. So there are plenty of people out there, from SurveyMonkey to Qualtrics, both of them, which we sort of compete with at some level. But the issue is that many companies do not do anything formally with that feedback. They say they do, they pay lip service, but they don't do anything with it. But there are companies out there, especially in the manufacturing space, that spend a lot of money on the quality processes around making their product or solutions. And then they have no quality process in the customer domain. So they've got the science going on with the product and solution, everything else is an art. However, there are organizations out there that really think about the whole process. How can they tune up that customer relationship, which is a business relationship, but it's also, excuse me, a person to person relationship, whether It's a big B2B organization. And that's what we help with science around. And if I give you a few examples of some of the clients we work with, one of the largest ones is parts of the Coca Cola organization. You think about as being a consumer product company. They sell fizzy drinks. But behind that, of course, is the network of millions of B2B relationships that they have with all of the outlets, the restaurants, the shops. So that's another one. Heineken is another one of the customers we're proud to work with. And then there are other organizations, H and R Block. We just won a. The other end of that. We just won a business last week with a company called Waldinger, who make sidings for buildings. Billion. Billion dollar business. But it's almost like a commodity product. But what do they want to do? They want to have better relationships with their customers. So we help them, we measure that relationship, bring the feedback in, and then we turn it hopefully into dollars that they can use to grow their business.

[Daniel]

Amazing. I love that. I love.

[Adam Durell]

Let's.

[Daniel]

Let's speak a little bit about dollars or euros or whatever currency you prefer here. Like, just for the listeners, before we dig into the main topic of the day, what can you share about your own operations in terms of size? Whatever number will take, I'll try and do this.

[Adam Durell]

So we, Camilla Scholten and myself, we bootstrapped the business, As I said 16 years ago, without really much of a clue, I have to be honest. We sort of started out in consulting and then we grew by thinking about, hey, we should be a SaaS business. And then we added on, we had no idea really about how to grow the business, so we just bootstrapped it. And then of course we ran into a recession, so we had to really double down with this stuff. So we were like a ramen company doing that stuff. And we just added people. And then we, over time we took a little bit of financing. I think it's something like two and a half million in total, which is nothing really these days. And we've used that to be very capital efficient to grow where we are today. So now we're growing really nicely and let's just say we're around the 10 million euro mark to give you some Sense of this with about 50, 60 people in the organization spread around the world.

[Daniel]

Gotcha. And do you have customers everywhere in the world or are there certain GEOs or markets that are more key markets for you?

[Adam Durell]

Well, it's fair to say that we operate in areas where customer experience is important and that tends to be the northern part of Europe, which is where it's taken really seriously, and also North America. But of course, actually one of our specialties is dealing with complex global organizations, enterprises. So you end up starting a project all around the place. So we just want a business in South Africa. We have the entire of the Latin American continent for a few large companies. We've got clients in Japan and I think that's the thing, we've been able to do that. All from mostly the base in Amsterdam with a bit of help from Australia and also another base in Boston. So that gives us some geospread.

[Daniel]

Gotcha.

[Adam Durell]

Yeah.

[Thomas]

You mentioned that you started the company here with Camilla. I happen to know that it's your wife, which also is an interesting topic to go deeper into. We're not going to do that today, but maybe another time.

[Adam Durell]

Well, to be honest, what Camilla and I have been thinking about over this time is literally about how relationships work in business and in personal life. So I'm really happy to talk about that because over the time, how do you make your business work with any founder? I would imagine a lot of the successful founders out there have some sort of therapy or coaching, let's put it that way. And no surprise, Camilla and I have had that and I think it's really worked. It's benefited our business life, our personal life, and actually shaped how we now go to market with some of our clients. I'm really happy to dig into that, Thomas. And Daniel, if you want some juicy

[Daniel]

stuff, my wife has already told me she would never start a business with me like this. Like it doesn't matter what the idea is, what the opportunity is. She's like, nope, not happening. Sorry, Thomas, I interrupted you.

[Thomas]

No, we are not married, you and me, Daniel. But I mean we work really close, probably the ones that we talk with the most here many days. But for another time, Adam, we would love to dig into that deeper. It's a super interesting topic as well. But today we're going to focus on something that I think many founders maybe struggle with. There is both examples of people that have done this in a good way, in a bad way and so on. But it's really about how long should a founder stay in the sales seat. And maybe to start with, what was this like for you?

[Adam Durell]

That's a really good question, Thomas. Let's make sure I'm throwing this back to you so I can understand this. How long should someone, a founder, be continually in the sales process? I guess that's what you're asking, right? Because I think when we started the company, Camila and I were both in the sales seat. It would usually fall to me. I had some sales experience before. I never really thought of myself as being a salesperson. But what else you have. You have a passion. You've got to go out and start talking to customers about it. And I think the interesting thing about the way that Camilla and I would do this is that she tends to be much more of a warmer person. She's Danish, so she would think about this as Hygge. You know, there's probably some Swedish equivalent of the same sort of coziness, but it's like she has a natural warmth. People really gravitate to her. She's sort of magnetic. So she has this whole, you know, I can tell you something you're interested in. So she really gets that attention. And I'm the cooler side of that. I tend to bring in metrics, proof, roi, nerdy stats. And that actually worked quite well for some time. And I think we were quite successful, but we couldn't scale. Obviously, you need other people in the business. So we went through a succession of VP of sales, head of sales, which were really. They didn't work out. It took us a long time to do this. And then I went back into the hot seat to try and do this without really thinking about the science of it. We had bits of the tactics, but we thinking about this. So I have to say we are super lucky to have, I think, one of the most amazing commercial professionals in the business. His name is Adam Clay. And I've known Adam for some time, and I always wanted him to work with us. God, it would be the dream if we could get Adam Clay in as our CRO. And we managed to do that 18 months ago through a combination of lucky circumstances. And he came and joined us. And it has transformed us. Because what Adam talks about is the science of selling, which is, first of all, all about, we're not really trying to sell. We're doing something which is pulling to the left, which is like, I don't know, we might not even be able to help you. Tell me more about your problem and if there's any way we can do it, we'll help you. If not, we'll part as business friends. So it's a very much on the back foot way of selling, but it brings trust into it anyway to then to come forward. Where that leaves Camilla and myself is that rather than being in the sale, we have moved to the other sides of it. So for example, I'm very much used to now doing the pre sales or further up the sales funnel. So I'm doing podcasts just like this Thompson Tan, talking about what we do with clients which helps people persuade them that the customer gauge is a good company to work with. And then the sale is done usually without me having anything to do with it. So now it's sometimes, wow, I get to meet the customer further down there. And so Camilla's really good at the post sales part of it because she also runs services and so on. And I can then bring the thought leadership. But the middle part of the sale, I'm now used like a kind of a surgical knife to come in and perhaps persuade on a certain thing. And I have to say that process has worked brilliantly. It's quite difficult for my ego in a way because I want to be in control and do everything, but it's really useful in terms of having a structured sales process.

[Daniel]

So I'm curious because you did say that you went through a few rounds of VPs, of sales or sales leaders that didn't work out. And I have a question around that. But before we get there, at what point in time or what was the actual trigger point when you and Camilla felt like we've taken this as far as we can, running the sales motion here and being the ultimately responsible for the sales here. Now something has happened, now we need somebody else to take it to the next level. Like what was that trigger point that made you come to that decision?

[Adam Durell]

That is a really good question, Daniel. And do you know what it comes down to? Confidence. I don't know. If you talk to a lot of founders, do they ever talk about really being like talking about imposter syndrome, you know, but they just don't feel they're good enough. And I think to answer your question, Camilla and I wanted to get somebody into sell as soon as we could.

[Daniel]

Right.

[Adam Durell]

Because we did not feel confident about our sales skills. We thought there's bound to be people out there better than us to do this. And it took us a long time, I mean, you know, years to figure out that we were probably the best for doing this.

[Thomas]

So often what I see with founders is that they have deep understanding about the customer problem. They are very passionate about the product, but they might not be, you know, professional salespeople from the get go. So certain parts of what is sales might not really be there. So was that something that you felt that you didn't really have that sales skill, how to make the best bang of the best bang of the buck for the product?

[Adam Durell]

Yeah, it's a really good question. I think that first of all, when you start a business, you just can't help it. You just end up talking to people you do have. At least myself and Camilla had a kind of insecurity about are we the best people to do this? So there are two things from that. One is that you can lose your objectivity if you do it yourself. You can chase every stick that a client throws, you know, like a dog. You follow every bone. So it's quite good sometimes to step back and have an objectivity. That's one of the good. That's one of the reasons why it is good to have somebody else. But we thought we would just scale by hiring people and they just don't know the story. So that's the other lesson that we had. You've got to define your story. You've got to get your icp, your value prop before you can really bring other people in. That seems so obvious, but it took a lot of scar tissue to get to. And if I've got a tip for anybody, it's really to spend time in that area about figuring out what your vertical market is or what your particular thing is before you scale. And actually also that's what Adam Clay has taught us. It's like, look, we're just going to make sure that we're super sales efficient, that we have a small sales team, go back to basics almost, but just really maximize that with the best team. So that's been a really good lesson.

[Thomas]

And it can also be a bandwidth thing, right? I mean, as a founder, there's so many things that you're up to. So maybe you feel that you don't spend enough time selling because there are so many other things on your table. Was that also a thing that you thought about in the early days?

[Adam Durell]

Yeah, it's absolutely true. I mean, I'm also a real product nerd. So I want to, you know, my natural tendency is to go into the garden shed and invent things. And it's not the right thing to do. You just need to be out there talking to customers. So I sort of have to force myself to do that. But I'm just going to add A bit of color or build to what you said, because in a sense, as a founder, you never stop selling. You're always in the sales steep. But it shifts, as I said. So my time, I'm shifting up much more towards the early part of the sale, the thought leadership. But of course, if I'm out raising money or talking to possible partners or strategic investors, I'm selling. Then, you know, it's just a different sales motion with a different audience.

[Daniel]

Right.

[Adam Durell]

You never stop selling, really.

[Daniel]

It's part of the job. I had a CEO that I worked for many, many years ago, and he used to say, in early stage companies, there's two functions. Either you're in sales or you're in indirect sales. Those are the two jobs.

[Adam Durell]

Yes, that's true. You sell. We have the same thing in our company. You sell or you help sell.

[Daniel]

Yeah, exactly. So I wanted to come back to a little bit what you said. So you and Camilla went through this personal journey where you started the business. You had to land the first customers, and it took you some time to build up that confidence and realize that we are pretty good at this. And at some point you felt like, okay, maybe we need to have this external person for objectivity and other reasons. And then you did hire some sales leaders. It sounded like, and you alluded to that maybe it wasn't a slam dunk right away with any of the initial members that joined the team. Was it because you guys hadn't sorted out the ICP and some of the value props on your end? Or was it too early? Or where was the mismatch that we could teach other people here to avoid that mismatch if they're on a similar journey?

[Adam Durell]

Okay, that's a really good point. It can be very difficult for the two parts of those relationships to work. Sales leaders have an ego of their own. They have something to prove. They know what can be done. They bring something in from other companies, and that's why you hire them. But as a founder, you sometimes just don't know exactly what you need. And with the best one in the world, we hired carefully. We use the board to vet these sales folks, to even do recommendations. Recommendations. So we thought we did everything the right thing, but sometimes when they come in, they just go in the wrong direction. And one of the examples was what didn't work is that they completely took the sales process away from Camilla and myself, which is like, no, I know what I'm doing is best. I'm going to do this. And it tanked the business for A couple of quarters because we'd not either done a good enough transfer of knowledge or they had a different idea about our ICP and our company culture than we did. And so that boundary point between scaling is so difficult to get right. Daniel, it's such a good question. When do you let go? And I think that the way that we've done it at the moment is about the best thing. It's about understanding that we should be part of the sales process, but we're in certain parts of it. So Camilla and I feel integrated in that. And we know we have a value to add and that the sales marketing team know exactly when to bring us in. And I think that has been a real game changer because it means that we can still use our skills to help the companies grow with us or to build trust with what we do because we've been around in business a long time and we've won amazingly large clients. So we bring this, but we need to be brought in at a specific time. And I think that's the best lesson between us we can pass on to other people, try and work out where in the sales process you add value as a founder.

[Thomas]

So what does your sales organization look like today?

[Adam Durell]

Well, as I said, we got a new CRO for Adam Clay. He's based in the US and it's. We're all European on this call, but I think we will probably all agree that some of the best sales and marketing talent are from the U.S. there's something about the communication and the skills. So our marketing and sales is based in Boston. We've been doing that for quite a few years and that's worked really well. Global sales comes out of that, but we speak every day as a CXO team. We are experimenting at the moment with how to use BDRs. I don't know how nerdy you want to get on this, but I can tell you about a real life problem that's happened to us in the last year has been the switch of the way that we used to get leads. We used to do organic search to get most of our traffic. So we're publishing a lot of content. And you know what's happened? Of course AI has come in and completely destroyed that model. So our traffic fell off a cliff about a year ago. So we had to compensate by doing other things. So we're doing more advertising, more outbound stuff, actually more video, more content like this. But that really changed. So our traditional BDR model of sort of inbound outbound had to change. So We've been experimenting with using AI on our website to help field the first interactions that come in, setting up demos. We find that doing a demonstration of what we do and telling a story about how we help companies is the way that we can sell best. And then maybe using a pilot program to help convince our customers to go ahead, but to really try to think about having an enterprise sale from day one. So really putting our pre sales and account executives to manage the sale all the way through before we pass it over.

[Thomas]

All right. And you mentioned that they bring you in in certain parts of the sales process, but I guess it's your account executive that is driving the sales and maybe then gathering the necessary skill and competence and so that they need to land the deal with the pre sales and then bringing you guys in also in certain parts. Where do you come in? When do they bring you in?

[Adam Durell]

Well, it's a really good point. So first of all, they're normally directed to the work that Camilla and I do as pre sale stuff. So we've got a lot of videos out there, stuff where we talk about this or articles we've written. You'll be familiar with that. And then I think there's a couple of ways that we can help the sale. So first of all, it helps the salesperson ratchet up in the business to go at one level higher, you know, so I'm the CEO, Camilla's the coo. We can talk to a C suite. So that helps somebody go up and make the decision. So that's a really good way to do it. And then I'm normally brought in to talk about war stories, you know, so this is how a company like you was successful. And it's normally, to be honest, it's less around the technology. It's about culture change. How did that company change as a result of using a technology like ours to become more customer centric? So that's what I talk about. And then I'm out. The deal's done. I don't have anything to do with pricing or negotiation. Thanks very much. To the relief of my team. And then at the end I'm like, welcome as a customer. Let's talk about how we can help you grow.

[Daniel]

Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a special place for the founders to support a buying motion. And I've had the pleasure to work with for some founders and two of them particularly stand out. And it was, if you're listening to this, Jimmy and Henrik, I am thinking of you guys. So they had a skill set that added an edge into every sales process or buying process. Where Jimmy was and Henrik was. They had this, both of them really an ability to cement a future view of where the world was going in this space that we were operating in.

[Adam Durell]

Yeah.

[Daniel]

In a way that very few could do it. So that they could give you a look into what this world will look in five years in a very convincing and comprehensive way. And when it comes from a founder that has a lot of domain knowledge, is respected in industry, that story carries a lot more water than if an AE does that or even if a CRO does that because the buying people are always a little bit suspicious is like salespeople want to sell here.

[Adam Durell]

Yeah.

[Daniel]

But about a founder, he or she started this business with a true belief about where the future is going and if they can present that vision, I think that is really, really impactful. And then the way we use the founders was a little bit like you said as well to escalate and to find another reason to move the discussion forward. Like if the AES has had the discussion multiple times with people on her his level to bring in the founders, then they also need to commit some other decision makers on their end. Which was a nice accelerator for the deal.

[Adam Durell]

Yeah, I think I can. I've also got the ability, Camilla also is that we can cut through the bullshit.

[Daniel]

Yeah.

[Adam Durell]

It's like, come on, what do you. Do you really need this or are you. You know, we can really ask the difficult questions. Which would typically be something like are you sure you really want to do this? This looks like a lot of hard work. Really try to cut through what the motivation is. I have to say just to sort of finish up on this, that I am not involved in every sale.

[Daniel]

Right.

[Adam Durell]

We've scaled beyond that point. But as you get towards a sort of, you know, above 100k or something like that for ARR, then I'm a useful tool to help move this along.

[Daniel]

Yeah.

[Adam Durell]

But again, just what I have to say. I mean my guys have been working on a multi hundred thousand dollar deal and I've had barely one conversation with the client. I think it was brought in once wheeled in as sort of like, you know, some show pony to talk about some stuff and then the deal gets done.

[Daniel]

Right. Right.

[Adam Durell]

I am so proud of my team for doing this because it just shows that they've. That they've absorbed stuff, you know, that we've been doing. And yeah, that's in a way that is so satisfying. I imagine it is the sort of satisfaction a teacher has.

[Daniel]

Yeah.

[Adam Durell]

When they Go on. And they see their. Their pupils winning exams or something like that.

[Daniel]

Right. You're the. You're part of the heavy artillery. So I have seen personally a lot of success stories where the founder can support the sales journey, but I've also seen exercises where some founders, they can actually halt the deal or make. Or make life difficult after the fact. So from your perspective, if you look at your own journey here, are there some founder sales mistakes that you feel like, oh, gosh, here's some things that cost us time and money and energy.

[Adam Durell]

Yes. But less so recently. I think in the last five years, I've got a lot better at that. But in the early days, pursuing crazy deals that I thought we could win, sometimes we did win them. That's the worst thing. We won some stupid business. And I mean, it was like business that didn't fit where we should be going.

[Daniel]

Right.

[Adam Durell]

So we ended up building. We ended up building some functionality that only got used once.

[Thomas]

Yeah.

[Adam Durell]

Oh, I think I've got quite. I think that's a. That's a story that we could devote a whole podcast to, stuff I felt passionate about that we built. And, you know, I don't know how many, probably my team rolled their eyes. They're too polite to say that, but. And then other things were either overpriced or underpriced. Generally underpriced, I would say. And again, coming back to why a founder should not be in the deal, sometimes when to let go is because of that passion that you feel. This is the baby you built. So there are two things. One is you want to keep the price high because, oh, no, we put all this stuff into it when you should just be consistent and let the stuff go. You can't always capture every greedy dollar that you need. And then the other one is that this desperate need to be loved so you'll go in a low price because you want somebody to buy it. You undervalue and I think so in essence, everybody needs a kind of a manager or an agent to allow the true artist to get the right value, if you know what I mean. Every artist needs a good agent to help market them. I think, in a sense, a founder needs that as well. It's a really hard tightrope to walk.

[Daniel]

Adam, that's a very nice way and profound way of putting this. And. But I also wanted to come back to what you said here in the beginning about relationships and interpersonal relationships and your view on what that means in a business setting, like in the call coming up to this, you Mentioned a little bit, something along the lines every now and then you have to take your customer for a date night. What does that mean?

[Adam Durell]

Yeah, this is a really good point. First of all, B2B companies sometimes forget about the human aspect of the relationship that they have. I'm talking companies that have got hundreds of thousands or million dollars worth of business riding on a relationship. And they think, the accountants look at that as one module that we must not lose. But underneath that there's a web of interpersonal relationships. You got your decision making unit, you guys know about this. And then you'll have a team on your side of the fence, the client side, who interacts with that. So there's already multiple ways of interacting with people in a software company. There are the users below that, there are other functions that are influencing IT compliance and things like that. So there should be many, many people that you talk to in the business. And then what happens? Over time you establish relationship with your client and that relationship starts to rot away. And by that I mean people move on to other things or they forget about stuff. They have other things that bother them. And then they maybe go, I'm just not being taken seriously by this company. I asked for help and I'm not getting what I want. What does that look like? It looks like your average romantic relationship, doesn't it? I guess. I don't know if you guys are in romantic relationships. I'm assuming you are. Daniel, you said you were married. You know. Yes, you need to work in a relationship. So here's the thing. You need to do a few things to keep a relationship running. You need to take the other person seriously. You need to give that space. And that involves check ins. How was it today? How did you feel about that? Not just ignoring the answer, it's just really feeling empathy. That must have been rough for you. If you know anything about the way that we're all older guys on here, you might have read that old book called Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Typically guys go, I never read it, but yeah, I don't think you need to. What happened to you today? And normally the female partner will say, I had a really bad interaction with somebody in the office. And then the man's reaction is to go and try and solve it. Where is he? I must try, you know, oh, you've got to do this. You ought to do this. Typical, right? How bad are we at doing this?

[Daniel]

I feel guilty for this.

[Adam Durell]

No, it's true. It's a partly a thing, you know, we go, we Go into solutions mode. What is. There's a better way of doing this normally, which is to go, huh? How did that make you feel? What would you like? You know, is there anything I can do to help you? It's just reflecting and just interacting, and it's a small illustration. And then the other thing you should try and do is every so often is trying to shut everything off and go for a date night with your significant other to sort of remind yourselves about what was special before you had kids or you worked together, in my case, you know, or you know, or they had the pressures of life. And I think that that is something that businesses forget about. They forget about the interpersonal relationships, or they just assume that it happens if you get the right people in. But it turns out that there is a framework you can put around this, such as asking for feedback regularly. And then when you get the feedback in, you can say, hey, this is what we learned about that. Can you tell me more about this? You know, it's that and, and using that as a basis for a relationship to nurture and care and make something special. Essentially, this is what we do. And I have to say, so we've got great software to do this. It only works if the clients that we work with, the businesses think that's important as part of their business. And newsflash, not every company does. A lot of companies just don't give a. They don't care about that because maybe they're growing fast enough. I don't think about this, but many organizations, and I think in particular sort of like European organizations, we'd be very familiar with those. Think about what can we do to put some science around our relationships. Because if we think about having quality, quality control in our relationships that we have and business relationships, the same way that we make our products, that's got to be better for everybody, right? And it tends to be those companies that we work best with. So we try to actively seek out those companies and find that they work best with us. And I think that the analogy of thinking about business relationships like romantic relationships is really powerful, and it tends to go quite a long way in success.

[Thomas]

What was your best date night with a customer?

[Adam Durell]

It's different to taking somebody to a romantic restaurant with candles. Thomas?

[Thomas]

Yeah.

[Adam Durell]

I don't know what your revision of a romantic date night is with your significant other, but I think what works really well is showing up to a customer prepared so you've understood what the assignment is and you've been able to ask some deep questions about this. So you've gone in prepared and. And you've also really shopped around inside your organization what the thing is, and then so telling them what's going to happen, making sure you've got the right audience in there and making your customers, either your significant other champion, or the whole group, feel special, feel that they really benefited from that interaction. And usually I think it's best if you can do it face to face with some personal time. But the way that we're able to do things with Zoom and teams these days is pretty good. So you can really make a big impact. So I think that's it.

[Thomas]

Basically, you made an effort, right? You come prepared, you have the customer,

[Adam Durell]

you've dressed up metaphorically, you've prepared the stuff, you've brought some things that is going to give the other person value, and then you might have had a difficult conversation. I think that's also quite good, a provoking conversation. Okay, now we've got through the nice stuff. Let's talk about what really matters.

[Thomas]

Yeah. So sorry, Adam, for showing up in our regular Sassys merch, but it is the uniform, Thomas.

[Daniel]

You got to start presenting it as a uniform. Like, you know, like, we're like firefighters.

[Adam Durell]

I've got my customer gauge wall up behind me.

[Thomas]

Yeah, that's true. So this has been great. We live in exciting times. So what is in the future for your company now? The upcoming. I would say six to 12 months, because I don't want to go any further in time.

[Adam Durell]

Hey, well, listen, you know, we're in another war now, so anything's off. We know what that means. That's, you know, the stock market's going to go down and things like that. It's going to be more difficult for founders like myself to raise finance, I think. Okay, hey, I've been through these cycles before, so we know how to get through it. I'm not panicking. I think a couple of things are happening. Look, there's consolidation in almost every market, and that's partly due to this sort of AI compression that we see. There's been a lot of our biggest competitors, like Qualtrics and Medallion have done a lot of work in consolidating the market. So there's two giants in our space at the moment. There's no clear third, I would say, and that's an interesting space to be. The other two giants are American. I'm going to say something that might be slightly politically incorrect here for a global audience, but I think that there is some room for a more European focused consolidation There are some values that we have in Europe which are to do with privacy, care of work and maybe ethics that we've got that can the Microsoft come through in the next few years. And I think that will be an interesting vibe to have in my business. I'm really trying. I'm thinking about how we can form the airbus of customer experience. All right, if you know that that's a good metaphor, you know, to think about what a European giant could be. So that's what I'm busy engaged in. And then of course we've got AI, which we've adopted enthusiastically. We've. We've also even changed the spelling of customer gauge to have an AI in it.

[Thomas]

Did you change the how you pronounce it as well or is it the same?

[Adam Durell]

No, luckily everyone, nobody could pronounce it anyway.

[Thomas]

So what's it?

[Adam Durell]

Gauche customer? Yeah, it's not. It's custom engage.

[Thomas]

Okay, that's good.

[Adam Durell]

But doesn't matter how you spell it. In the end nobody cares. So AI has really helped us to do an amazing amount more for our clients than we ever could before. So we were always a really good source of data, but maybe you needed a good interpreter to make sense of it. And AI has really changed the game on that. It's almost brought the cost to zero. So that's really exciting.

[Thomas]

Definitely. What's your best AI hack?

[Adam Durell]

The best AI hack, actually one of the things we built was tell us there's something that we do in our program. We talk about feedback. It's very hard for people to say, to summarize what goes on. So the best AI hack we built into a product which is to say, okay, tell me, write me a thank you letter to my customers to tell them what we learned in the last three months. And it goes through and summarizes what we learned from the customers and it comes out as a ready to send email for people to say, hey, this is what we learned.

[Thomas]

Yeah, that's amazing. And on your personal side, on a daily basis or a weekly basis or

[Adam Durell]

whatever, I think it helps me. I use AI as a companion to dictate stuff into. So like kind of walking. Sometimes I walk to work and I talk into an AI GPT or Claude almost as a dictating machine and then it will make sense of it will organize my thoughts and then help me be productive. So I think I probably saved a half an hour, an hour a day just doing that stuff at least. Yeah, that's great. That's a big win for everything that we do.

[Thomas]

If you could hire one person right now, what kind of person would that be?

[Adam Durell]

I would take on somebody in pre sales.

[Thomas]

Okay.

[Adam Durell]

You know, we spoke about to try to sort of bring us back to the beginning.

[Thomas]

Yeah.

[Adam Durell]

Which is the. As a founder, when can you step out of the sale?

[Daniel]

Yeah.

[Adam Durell]

And in some ways the best value I have is as a sort of a pre sales engineer.

[Thomas]

Yeah. I knew a great pre sales engineer before, but he's running a B2B SaaS community right now, so it's not available anymore.

[Adam Durell]

Okay, well, that's. I think it would do that because it's another step to take the founder out of the loop. But it's a really tough thing to fill. There's one other thing I just wanted to add about AI, if it's okay just for sure on this is that we're in the relationship business. And of course there's a lot of things you can do with AI. Some people go, hey, customer experience is dead. Or surveys are dead because we can just use AI to synthesize all the data. Why do you need to do that stuff? I think paradoxically, using AI in our lives with customers really helps things. I mean, it just. You can deliver the information. It basically helps with that date night thing we've been talking about. And yet what it does, it helps us focus on what makes sense for us as humans, which is this authentic connection that we get. This is an example that the three of us had just been nattering for, I don't know, an hour. I feel, I know you guys, you know, we've deepened our sense of trust, we've smiled at each other, we've shared some things. You've been curious. I really appreciate that. Thank you for asking difficult questions that made me think so.

[Daniel]

This is as close as you can get. The podcast version of a romantic dinner.

[Adam Durell]

The point is that, that more important than ever is authenticity and building trust. Because there is. We've already seen. I know on social media there's so much AI slop around. Nobody wants that stuff. What I think really cares about is vulnerability, getting to the truth, sharing inner thoughts and trust. And that's, I think, the future. And then, you know, if we can spend time doing that, the world is going to be a better place.

[Thomas]

Do you have a suggestion of who we going to bring to date night next time and have here on the podcast a person or a topic that you should think we should cover another time?

[Adam Durell]

Oh, let me think about that, Thomas.

[Thomas]

Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. But it's been great. Having you here, and I'm happy to getting to know you for a bit. Interesting to hear about your story. And of course, yeah, both Brown sales, but also especially here that we talked about, you know, the. The relationship and. And how we should treat our customers and so on.

[Adam Durell]

No, it's been a pleasure, guys. Thanks for having me.

[Daniel]

Thank you. Thank you so much for joining the show, Adam, and take care of all of your relationships now.

[Adam Durell]

Thank you.

[Daniel]

All right, Thomas, what did you pick up today?

[Thomas]

I mean, it was a lot of good stuff. One thing. Thing that I'm thinking about was sort of when he talked about what kind of mistakes you can do as a founder in a sales situation, sometimes you overprice because you know, it's your baby, you think it's worth more, much more than maybe it is. And sometimes you underprice because you want to be liked. And also, what I've seen also in real life is that maybe you, as a founder, you want the product to be in a certain way. You want it to solve the customer's problems, so you might, you know, run away and promise a little bit too much. And then you have the product department that have their roadmap, they have the technical debt and so on, and maybe that's not in sync, so it can be a little bit dangerous. There are some mistakes that you might do as a. As a founder, but then again, also, there are skills that really good sales professionals and sales leaders has that at one point they can make you a better team.

[Daniel]

Yeah. And building on that, I think Adam alluded to that here. Again, we've heard it before, that it's not enough that you feel that, ooh, we need to have an external expert come in here, in this case a sales leader to take us to the next. Next level and so on. You also have to be honest with yourself and look at yourself and your own company. Are we equipped? Are we ready? Do we have enough documentation and process support here? So if we bring in somebody from the outside that she or he has something to build on, otherwise you end up in the risk where he. He mentioned here that maybe in the beginning there was a misalignment on who we're going after, how the process should. Should look. And instead of, like, having an uptick in speed, you might end up in maybe decreased efficiencies. And sometimes it's not just because of the sales leader you brought in was not the right person. It's maybe you weren't ready or equipped enough to give that external person an honest chance to succeed. So we all have to be mindful of that and think of that when we expand our teams, are we ready to give people an honest chance to be successful here? Absolutely. On that note, we try to help all of you guys be more successful at what you do. And we do that in different ways. And this week we've had one of the things that I think is a lot of fun. We have our executives and our CEOs meeting in our masterminds. And Thomas, we're going to give you the credit for bringing us all together and orchestrating the schedules for those. So we have some, what is it, 20, 25, 26, 26. There we go. So if people think like, okay, what is this? I want to, I want to be part of that. So who is this for? How do you qualify to join this if you haven't never heard of this, where do you apply to join this and what can they expect from the sessions?

[Thomas]

All right, so you should represent a company that has an error above 2 million euros, should be European headquarter company and a B2B SaaS company. Of course we have our CEO network that is a paid for network. And then we have our executive network in 10 to 12 different roles. Actually. They are free to join, but we require you to be active in the network in order to stay. Of course we don't have any competition within the group, so it might be so that you come on a wait list because there might be another one within your category already as a member. But right now I think we have somewhere around 6 to 700 members in these groups. And I know yesterday you moderated six one hour sessions. We follow a structured format. Today I think we have a mix of things. We've been running partner a few CEO groups. I just did a product group and I'm heading into the CTO group now. So it's fun days. And they are very appreciated as a way to really be able to talk to peers without having anyone there having a stake in what you do. You don't need to think about your team, your board, whoever that can have, have an opinion on what you do.

[Daniel]

Exactly. So if you're like Thomas said, you're a VP or a C level, so you own the function in your company for that specific discipline, then you're welcome to apply and join the network. So you go to, let's see if I get this right. Sass.com Any one of the drop down menus at networks.

[Thomas]

Yeah, it says community and then you can find both the CEO network and executive network.

[Adam Durell]

There.

[Thomas]

So you'll find it. You'll find it.

[Daniel]

You'll find it. Hopefully, we'll see you there. And it's a perfect opportunity. You know, you'll. You'll have your cohort of 10 to 12 pairs that you meet once a month. And like some people describe it, it's therapy hours for executives to learn and help each other.

[Thomas]

Absolutely.

[Daniel]

All right.

[Thomas]

All right. See you next time.

[Daniel]

See you.