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Today’s show featured an interview with Brian Shealey, Vice President of Sales at Rohirrim, a generative AI developer of RFP response technology.
Find Brian on LinkedIn.
BRIAN’S ADVICE: “Be passionate about what it is that you’re doing. Always be hungry and thirsty for more knowledge and continued improvement. That is the biggest difference in my mind of some of the greatest sales leaders and salespeople I’ve worked with, is there’s a continued curiosity. Constantly improve yourself and bring new knowledge and challenge paradigms that are out there, that are dated.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: We’re talking today with Brian Shealey. He’s from Rohirrim. One of the reasons, Brian, we got you on the show is your company is in the generative AI space. Of course, it’s one of the hottest technologies right now. You’ve had a career in sales, a successful career working with a bunch of venture-backed companies. We always like to have sales leaders on who are in the AI space, even companies that are larger, the Amazons and the Oracles of the world, to talk about what they’re doing in the AI space. We’re going to get deep into what you’re seeing out there in the marketplace.
Brian, why don’t you give us a little bit of a background about yourself? Tell us a little bit about what Rohirrim does, so we can put this in today’s context.
Brian Shealey: Fred, thank you very much for having me. It’s always a great opportunity to talk shop with folks like yourself who have been around and have a great acumen in this. Rohirrim is a generative AI company. We mainly focus on providing software that allows our customers to automate different operational processes. Our first component of our go-to-market is really around proposal automation using an AI native architecture. We used to call it domain aware. I think the common vernacular, now it’s being called organization specific. To give a little bit more context around what that means, it’s the idea of most large organizations that are doing a B2B proposal or B2G proposal. They have a fairly large corpus of information, often unstructured information. What our secret sauce is is we allow you to ingest all of that. We do some, I’ll call it massaging of the data on the back end. It’s typically unstructured data documents, content images, et cetera. That organization specific information feeds the system and we’re really enabling you to build on the fly relevant content to respond to proposals. That’s the first arc of our go-to-market.
Fred Diamond: Typically, when we talk about proposals, we think about the public sector space. I know you’ve been in public sector and commercial. Is this mainly who you’re targeting? The public sector world, or both?
Brian Shealey: Our founder is a friend of mine, named Steven Aberle. I met him in my travels in the public sector space. For context, as I give you a little bit more information here, this is my fifth startup. It’s my fourth venture-backed startup. We are fortunately backed by a great VC provider, Insight Partners, one of the largest in the world.
Steve started the company three and a half years ago. We had met on some DOD project work we were doing, and he’s an expert in unstructured data and an expert in artificial intelligence. He was doing both AI research, and very early on before what’s now called generative AI even really existed, he was working, for example, with the OpenAI Foundation at the time when they were a research organization, before they became a company focused on driving revenue. He had this idea of, “Hey, there’s this new series of modalities coming out in the AI space.” I think AI has been a buzz for the last seven to eight years maybe. Most things that are AI, you could argue that they’re really just not pure AI in the sense of a system that autonomously will give you outputs based on inputs. But with what’s now called generative AI, you have the ability and the scale to really do magical things with software.
His initial focus was understanding, because he had become a person that was often a subject matter expert responding to government RFPs. For any of us in the community have ever done this, you’re on a team, got a tight deadline, and the bigger and more complex the program, the more writing and coordination you have to do. He really wanted to disrupt the space, leveraging some of the lessons he was learning, both around what he had done with unstructured data, working in the DOD and intelligence community, but also as a practitioner subject matter expert. The initial go-to-market is really around selling our software to govcons. Systems integrators typically to service providers, selling services, often to the government, or in some cases products. That is the corpus of initial phase customers.
The way that he architected the platform, and again, we’ve been doing this for three and a half years, was really to build a horizontal AI backbone and then verticalize applications. Our first product is called RohanRFP, and that is a product really geared for automating proposals, leveraging your corpus of information that your organization has. The future phasing of what we will do is potential verticalization into other markets. There’s lots of applicability. I’ve listened to some of your podcasts and lots of people in the technology space were talking about the opportunity to leverage text-based AI, which is what we are, to disrupt different operational constraints that exist within companies. But the reality of it is, there’s a whole market that we believe also of selling software, providing solutions to the government side as well.
If you think about automating a proposal, all of this constraints and challenges that go with getting to a first draft there, it’s not much different when you invert that and look at what procurement executives are trying to do with generative AI at government agencies. There’s a future state there. We do have some early phase customers that, again, we’ve been doing this for quite a bit longer than most of the people that are pure competitors in our space. We see the market a little bit more broadly than just selling to the govcons. Again, at the end of the day, it’s all about creating really, really high value text and outputs that are operationally beneficial to these organizations.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk a little bit about this. Is what’s getting you the meetings that you’re using AI to produce more better ways of doing things? Or are companies struggling with how to do proposals?
Brian Shealey: In the government space, the reason we chose that is for a couple reasons. To answer your question, in short, I would make the argument that I don’t think companies that are viable, like for example, right now we’re really focused in the govcon space, but we do have customers and I would say fair demand in the global B2B space. Our hypothesis is that the things that will matter if you’re going to really build an enterprise class platform would be things like security. Which obviously anybody in the govcon space providing software or services or whatever to the government, with all of the changes in the acquisition rules and the way that data needs to be handled, particularly controlled unclassified information, you have a lot of consideration around making sure that your accreditation stay there as a company, all of your certifications and whatnot.
With that being said, leaning into that, it’s more expensive to build software that will address those needs as a commercial off the shelf product. But we believe we’ll have a much better enterprise product long term because of that focus. That’s really what we’re doing today. I would say this, organizations I work in, we tend to embrace pragmatism as a way that we communicate and think. To say that people are struggling with proposals in the govcon space, I don’t think is accurate. I think what it is is that it’s only going to get more competitive as people adopt AI. What you typically want to do if you’re a chief growth officer or somebody who’s going to market with your wares or your services you sell to the government, is you want to maximize your ability to win. They think about this metric of PWin, probability of win, is one factor.
But really, Fred, to get down to it, what you’re looking at is you’re looking at scenarios where how do you do more with either the same team or potentially less to hit those growth metrics. Particularly when you look at the top 30% or 40% of those that sell software services products to the government, and you look at by say revenue size, companies that are about 50 to 100 million and up in terms of baseline revenue of say B2G sales, to grow, often that’s a labor thing. Hire more people, hire more proposal writers, outsource it to third parties that are proposal shops. But the reality of it is, if you can eliminate the bulk of the overhead to get to a viable first draft faster of the proposal or the series of proposals that you want, you can lower that overhead and create more throughput and also create a much better work-life balance for your people so they’re not working nights and weekends. That’s our focus and hypothesis. It’s really about optimization of growth, is really what it comes down for us, and making sure that the business of our customers is at the forefront of what we’re doing and what we’re providing from a feature function and software perspective.
Fred Diamond: For people who are listening to today’s show, Brian, we have people all over the world who are listening, and not everybody understands the government marketplace. You’re talking about government contractors, and for people listening, there are government contractors that are worth over $100 billion. The companies of the Lockheeds, and Leidos, and Northrop Grummans of the world that do massive government-related programs and usually in the military and intelligence areas. They all have a similar process where they have to submit proposals and then the proposals get accepted, and then the work gets contracted, and you manage the contracts through the life of the process. There’s got to be over 10,000 government contractors, probably even more, when you get into some of the local type of servicing that needs to happen. Maybe there’s a military base somewhere in the middle of America and they have certain types of services that need to be contracted out as well.
For you, are you going after the top tier, the Lockheeds, Leidos? And you don’t need to tell us all of your sales strategy, but is this only something that’s of value for them, or is this something that’s going to help everybody down to the guy who manages landscaping services across the street from an army base in the middle of America?
Brian Shealey: You hit on something key. It’s a fast-moving space, and we want to be judicious about what we share from a strategy standpoint. When we do have some sort of natural competitors, let me give you a more robust answer that the listeners may find interesting. Most places where artificial intelligence is coming into play, including ours, in the govcon proposal automation space for our first phase, there’s always been ways of doing this. Embracing pragmatism as a philosophy. Look, people are going to make this happen. They’re going to respond to proposals one way or the other. If you’ve lived in the market, which I have for 20 years, and what many of my friends that have become close work colleagues and personal friends have, it’s a painful process because it’s really underpinned in the United States by the FAR, the Federal Acquisition Regulation set.
Because of the FAR and then all the things that go in and around the acquisition space, you have to consider that when the government’s acquiring a service or outsourcing something, and often it’s IT related or whatever. Let’s take for example, like the F-35 program, which is a much talked about program because of the cost and the extensibility of it. A lot of people think that Lockheed Martin is the primary there, and they are. But if you look at the supply chain and the ecosystem in and around that, that program permeates across many branches of the Department of Defense. There’s a lot of programs that have operational integration with the pure F-35 program. A good friend of mine happens to be the former CTO of that program. I’ve sold to them in the past, so I understand how it works.
People that were servicing that or are servicing that, that’s a massive program, billions and billions and billions of dollars. Of course, the only viable contenders to deliver for that are your probably top 10 defense and aerospace manufacturers. But there is a subset ecosystem, and a lot of it’s subcontract based. You have all these governing rules around that. Going back to your question, which is like, who we’re targeting, what we’ve done is we’ve looked at the way that human beings actually work. AI or not, our opinion is that, and again, this is a philosophy that I’ve had for a long time, is like, people don’t buy software or services or products. They pay for outcomes.
Back to my customer base and who we’re targeting, it would be organizations that have a focus on either B2B or B2G proposals. They have a volume that makes sense for their business to want to look at automating things in some fashion. Then for what we’re designing our tool for, we look for a number of other attributes. Of course, we obviously want to sell, as do any of our competitors, to the largest that are out there because the potential size of the deals, that’s what will move the dial for us as venture-backed startups or whatever our business model is. But the reality of it is that, back to your point, I think when I reviewed the market, I’ve done a lot of data wrangling in and around what the market looks like. There’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 to 35,000 “contractors” that can be considered govcons.
When you start breaking it out and you look at it, I would guess that the bottom third of that are companies that are small businesses. They might be getting somewhere between a million and 10 million a year from the government, which nothing to sneeze at. But in reality, when you look at margin and overhead of a services business, it’s not that much volume. We really have designed our platform for a way that it’s all about collaboration and workflow beyond just the AI feature. You take the generative AI concept that most people know from like a ChatGPT type experience, and that’s about generating content. But where the value comes is it’s the overall process, to get it together. In these arduous govcon processes, you have teaming. It’s not just, say in the F-35 program, if you could look at the supply chain, Lockheed might be the prime there, but they’ve got dozens, if not hundreds, of partners in and around that, that all have to create their components of the response to let the government know that they’re the best respondee on that.
Coming back to it, we’re targeting organizations that have a focus on govcon or B2B proposals. There’s that volume. Then they typically have a team that is responsible for those shared service proposal effort. Even small govcons often they have a small team of people that are the subject matter experts in how to produce quality proposals, and then they’re bringing in subject matter experts. That’s really what our software enables you to do, is automate all that and make the process more simplistic.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk a little bit about the sales process. How do you sell? Again, we have a lot of people listening here and you can maybe even expand this answer into what is it like to sell for a venture-based company. You mentioned that you led the sales efforts for five of them, and now you’re with Rohirrim. What is it like to sell? If you take on a job like this, again, generative AI is hot. I like your answer about chief growth officers. These government contractors need to figure out ways to get to success more effectively and more efficiently. They want to win contracts. They don’t want to employ AI, they want to win contracts better, and they want to have the cost of creating the contract, whatever it might be, go down. Talk about selling for a venture-based company. What are some of the things that you’re constantly thinking about and how have you had success that you could share with our audience over the last five places where you’ve been?
Brian Shealey: First of all, I think companies are always either growing or dying. There’s no in between. If you’re venture-backed, you’ve been given capital to grow, often at an operational loss, as probably many of us are painfully aware. You have, in some cases, first-mover advantage in the market. But it comes down to a maniacal focus on execution. You can change your strategy, and most startups do, especially if you’re early, as you go through it, you change your strategy, your focus. But for me, it’s identifying your ideal customer profile early on when you have some success.
My former CEO of my last company used to talk about the leaky bucket syndrome. Very early on, people will sell at all costs. I personally have never found that to be a great idea, because what ends up happening is it’s undeliverable at scale, and the company will die on the vine because you’re losing customers out, you’re churning them out in whatever your churn metric is, in a way where every dollar you put in the funnel, you want to return more than that dollar down the road. Maniacal focus on ideal customer profile, maniacal focus on ideal champion profile, and continue to always in short term iterate and respond accordingly with value in how you’re going to market.
Fred Diamond: Is it just you or is part of your responsibility building a team? Or when you’re a successful sales guy like you, who’s had a bunch of success, you’ve been in the industry, et cetera, is it usually like you’re the guy who’s doing all the sales, or is a big part of your challenge to go build a sales organization? What are some of the pressures about that, and what would you recommend to other sales leaders who are in venture-based companies or smaller companies, as compared to working for an Oracle or one of the big boys, where it’s a different level of process?
Brian Shealey: My charter is really building the team along with all of the motion and the function. A lot of people that haven’t done it, they’ll go to work for a larger company, and processes and procedures are in place, policies, processes, and procedures along with people. When you’re with a startup, and this is my second very early startup, none of that exists. Not only are you building the team, bringing in talent, but you’ve got to create the ability to get, number one, repeatable and then consistent. It’s crawl, walk, run, typically. A lot of it is, in my experience, is hiring people that can thrive in a high-paced environment in the chaos. They’re adaptable, they’re smart, they’re very, very ambitious and motivated. Then my philosophy is always that I try to hire really smart people and empower them and get out of their way.
I’m responsible really for go-to-market here, meaning that I collaborate heavily with our product team. We brought on recently a fantastic new marketing leader, and then I’m very fortunate in that the executive team here are all really well versed in how to scale startups. It’s team building, getting people trained, creating consistency, and then you hit phases that I think that you’ve had a lot of guests on that have talked about these different things. But the reality of it is you hit phases of consistency and maybe a certain go-to-market process. Then you worry about that less because that’s consistently created, but in our case, it’s really figuring out the right balance of what does top of funnel versus mid funnel versus closure look like, staffing positions accordingly, making those investments so that we’re getting a reasonable return on those investments of those people and those investments we’re making around how to go to market faster.
Then again, working with our customers. This market is changing so quickly. I’m happy to give you ideas here, but two years ago, I don’t think most Americans knew what generative AI was. I think now every young person I talk to… I hired a guy the first month of this year, and brilliant, brilliant guy. Man, he gets a lot of stuff done. You know how he does it? He’s using GenAI tools for things. The world is changing, but we’re trying to get constant feedback from our customers around what matters and adapt our sales motion accordingly. That’s really what we’re trying to do.
Fred Diamond: You’re in the generative AI space. Are a lot of people asking for meetings because they’re looking to get smarter on generative AI? Are you getting a lot of that? Do you recommend that, for people listening to today’s show, that you take meetings like that? Or if it’s not necessarily someone that’s in your target list, what is your advice on that? Again, you’re working in a hot topic. Like you said, a couple years ago, no one even thought about this. I’m wondering too, the companies that have invested in you, the level of pressure on success, but we can hold off on that. But back to the first question, are people interested in meeting with you just because they want to pick your brain?
Brian Shealey: We do get a fair amount of that. That’s a great question. I think being that you’re focused on sales best practices in your whole world, one of the things you always want to do, like I’m a huge believer in some of the books that have been written. Some of the concepts and lessons in those books, like Crossing the Chasm, for example. The idea of fail fast is a great idea, but the reality of it is that for us in a fast-moving market that’s evolving, we can’t discount things upfront just because somebody’s asking a question, because there is a factor, especially as an early phase company, any early phase company that’s in software certainly, or technology, there is a fair amount of evangelism that you have to do, because sometimes the entire market isn’t educated.
The thing with generative AI, to me, that became very apparent after my first month here is, the explosion of ChatGPT, being the prevalent generative AI tool set that’s out there, and there’s many more, but it really educated the world and the whole jump the shark thing in popular culture. Then obviously industry is trying to address things in all kinds of different verticals. I think we do get a fair amount of, “Hey, we want to meet with you.” In some cases, it’s great because we’re able to shape things and educate, and as long as you have the right approach, which on my team, I’ve been fortunate, I’ve got a phenomenal head of sales engineering. We’re pretty good and disciplined about not chasing things, but there’s a lot of gray areas.
For my competitors, I say, go chase everything, but the reality of it is, for anybody who’s a sales leader, it’s expensive to chase the wrong things, for many reasons. Then back to your subsequent thought here, is there is pressure. Anytime you’re venture-backed, somebody gives you a lump of money, it’s, “When am I getting it back?” They want to know you’re making progress. I think our investors are fantastic, our board is fantastic, but we are very disciplined in our sales process to the point where we have it documented out how we’re doing it, and we will sort of eject kindly and amicably in scenarios where we don’t feel like we can help somebody. If we think there’s something there to learn, we will chase it, but we’ll chase it as a partner rather than a vendor.
Fred Diamond: I’ve worked for large companies, I worked for Apple, I worked for a company called Compaq, a large software company called Compuware, and my phone calls were always returned for the most part. By the way, I do need to say, Crossing the Chasm is one of the greatest technology books I’ve ever read in my life. I’m still a big fan. His next book, Inside the Tornado, I was a big fan when I worked at Apple, understanding how to branch into new markets.
You’ve worked in five venture-based companies. We talked before about the government contractors, brand name companies like the Lockheeds, et cetera. They’re going to take the phone calls from the Microsofts and Oracles in the technology world, and the Salesforces, most likely. You’re working with a brand-new company. It has an interesting name that I asked you to phonetically sound out, but how easy or hard is it to get a meeting with Lockheed, because they’ve never heard of you? They heard of generative AI, and that’s why I asked before, are you trying to get in there to have conversations about generative AI as compared to what we can do to help you increase and improve your RFP, your proposal process?
Give some insights for people listening to today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast on how do you get past the challenges of being a company that they’ve probably never heard of, but that you have what you believe to be a solution in the leading edge for what they might need?
Brian Shealey: It is challenging. I think that in every large company, what you’re seeing these days is there are people that their focus is innovation, because they have to be. At the end of the day, what we are selling, our technology, it helps these companies grow and sell more. It’s a top-line revenue opportunity for them of adapting innovative technologies into their operational processes. There is a benefit there. I think a lot of it, again, going back to my earlier statement, your ideal champion profile, somebody that would champion this, we know who they are, and we’re finding that those people are leaning into this space, which is good.
It’s not as hard to get meetings as you would think, although it is becoming a more noisy market. There are some startups that are emulating what we’re doing. There’s three or four that popped up in the last six months. We’re just very diligent about that. Again, we speak real about what the expected outcomes could be, and we try to engage people with, I always talk about this concept of a path to partnership. If it’s a vendor-client relationship, that’s one thing. But if you’re truly in it together, these companies will invest in innovation and understanding the sharp edges that come with it, but also leaning in as a partnership to know that if they continue to work with you, you will give them a better product and a better experience longer term. That’s how we do it.
Fred Diamond: You got to deploy really smart, effective sales processes to get to those people. I liked the way you gave the answer there, Brian Shealey, where you said that there are people at these companies who are tasked with bringing innovative solutions in. You got to find those people, and you’ll probably see them at events and conferences. Hopefully by being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast, if you’re communicating to those people, you have a very good job in describing what the solution is and the value and how it achieves what it needs to achieve. I wish you well.
Brian, you’ve given us a lot of great ideas, which I appreciate. Give us one final thought that people can put into play, an action step people can put into play right now after listening to today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast, or after reading the transcripts.
Brian Shealey: I think the big thing for everybody, it doesn’t matter your level in sales, I think you have to be passionate about what it is that you’re doing. Always be hungry and thirsty for more knowledge and continued improvement. That is the biggest difference in my mind of some of the greatest sales leaders and salespeople I’ve worked with, is there’s a continued curiosity. There’s a passion for what they do, they’re not just punching a clock. The best salespeople don’t punch a clock. It’s a lifestyle. You are going to take calls afterhours, you’re going to work on weekends as you have to, and you have to be maniacal about driving outcomes and value for customers. That’s all a given. But again, to constantly improve yourself and bring new knowledge and challenge paradigms that are out there, that are dated, I think is one of the things that we have to constantly do.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank Brian Shealey from Rohirrim for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo