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Today’s show featured an interview with David Gable of Kixie.
Find David on LinkedIn.
DAVID’S TIP: “The value is in the conversation, not just the purchase. If a prospect walks away having learned something, they’ll take your call again. Maybe not this cycle, but the next.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I want to thank Kixie for sponsoring today’s show because it’s a topic that I’ve been wanting to talk about. We’ve done over 800 shows, David, and typically I interview VPs of sales at B2B or B2G, business to government, selling enterprises. We have our AI for Selling Excellence show. At the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, we work with a lot of larger sales organizations who sometimes the sales process might be years. You may have to talk to a dozen people through the process. A lot of our customers sell to the federal government where they need to connect with procurement and the buyer and the program and contracts, etc. Really exciting.
It’s refreshing for me when we talk to a company like Kixie who brings a solution that some of our listeners may not be using or may not have thought about. We’re going to be talking about the value that you bring, and also people who are using your solution, or a competitor, hopefully, who are going to get educated on a better way of thinking about bringing this solution. We’re going to get deep into the whole concept of voice and text automation. What do you call it? Voice and SMS automation? Calling and text automation?
David Gable: Yeah, voice and text automation or sales engagement, is the broader Gartner quadrant that I think we fit into, but you’re absolutely right.
Fred Diamond: Very good. We touch on sales enablement and sales engagement, etc. I have a couple questions lined up here, but first of all, give us an intro. Give us an intro to you and give us an intro to Kixie.
David Gable: I have an interesting background, unusual, I would say, for sales, although many people don’t go into sales from a young age thinking, “I want to be a salesman when I grow up,” me especially so. I was an attorney before this. I was in-house counsel, and I was in-house counsel for software companies up in the Bay Area. I realized that the most exciting part of my job wasn’t actually the non-disclosure agreements or the master subscription agreements. The most exciting part of my job was actually being embedded in the sales teams and helping them achieve objectives that move the companies forward and grow these startup companies from infancy to acquisition or towards merger or towards sale. That was really, really fun.
At some point I decided rather than being adjacent to the function that was so exciting, I’d rather be a part of the function that was so exciting. I transitioned into sales myself. I started at Kixie as employee number five out of a tiny WeWork office. We are much larger than that now. Now I’m head of sales.
As for what we do at Kixie, we help sales professionals utilize the most advanced technology in the dialing and texting space to achieve those objectives that I said I was so excited about. We use calling and texting. We advance that whole modality of calling and texting by typically continuing to push the boundaries of what’s possible. We also challenge a lot of people’s thinking around how they approach sequences and some of the more prescriptive styles of selling by using AI to have a more dynamic utilization of the signals coming in, and then addressing our outbound calling and texting appropriately based on those signals. I know it’s a lot, but we can dive into specifics of it as well. I’m super excited to talk about it with professionals who have probably used a bunch of the tools out there.
Fred Diamond: Yeah, it’s pretty exciting. I spent a good part of my career in Apple computer, and I lived in Cupertino for a number of years. I was in the sales side and I worked with our corporate council. It’s good stuff. I mentioned we work with large B2B and B2G sales organizations, and a lot of the people who have been very, very successful in enterprise selling have not started in sales, but they came from a profession. I’m thinking of a couple right now who are attorneys, and whenever I go to their LinkedIn and I see the JD, I’m like, “That’s pretty impressive. I didn’t know.”
In the B2B and B2G world that we live, understanding the strategic nature of sales and understanding where the customer is coming from, especially in some of the markets that I deal with, contractual obligations are huge, and understanding what a company can and can’t do. Having that legal mind, I could see the benefit and I wouldn’t mind getting a little deeper into that as a sales leader. We’ll get on that through the course of it.
Tell us a little bit about the platform. It’s an all-in-one calling and engagement and texting platform. Tell us how it looks. Is it a SaaS solution? Give us a little bit of a background on what customers are typically purchasing.
David Gable: Good question. It’s a cloud-based Chrome extension. It is both a mobile app and obviously a Chrome extension that you use on your desktop. In terms of where it sits, I would say when you look at the calling and texting space, you broadly have two types of, I guess you could call them dialers, that people tend to adopt. I guess they’re the more simple, basic, easy to use dialers that typically integrate with a CRM of some kind. Then there’s the more advanced all in one solutions that are more like a Genesys or a Five9 or something that allow for some automation, power dialing, multiline dialing, that kind of a thing.
What we do is we sit in an interesting point. We’re easy to use and deploy. If you go to our website, you can get set up in like 60 seconds and be integrated with your CRM. It’s all native of integrations. That’s more like a basic dialer, in terms of this complicity of use. But we have a lot of powerful advanced styling capability, both because of us pushing the boundaries just in terms of, our price point is not the lowest, but our feature set is the highest. Then also we use AI natively within our platform to achieve some of the more static workflow-based designs that were being employed by a Genesys or a Five9 previously. We allowed for some more fuzzy logic in there, and I can get into specifics because it’s pretty cool, but that allows us to sit into it in terms of an easy to deploy space that also has a lot of advanced functionality. We have a customer range that ranges from the small insurance agents who have one to three people to massive companies who want to deploy across multiple sales teams.
Fred Diamond: I’ve been on your site and I saw the various range of companies that could use this. I want to talk a little bit about the value of your solution per position. We’ll talk about marketing, let’s talk about business development, inside sales, and rev ops. Give us a perspective on the value that it brings and what are they looking for? Let’s first talk about marketing. Where does marketing play in this?
David Gable: I love that you bring up marketing first, because I feel like in terms of the industry, MarTech tends to lead sales tech by about like a decade, something like that. Roughly a decade. Roughly 10 years ago you saw MarTech starting to take off and you saw custom email sequences being built out. You no longer could send out just a thousand emails with one click and have them actually land in people’s inboxes and get responses. MarTech started developing there, and then you saw maybe seven years post that all of a sudden sequences of calling and texting tasks started appearing in Outreach and SalesLoft and all these different platforms. That is the place to start.
These days, since you have the basic one-to-one, you have a calling and texting activity or task engine within a Salesforce or within a HubSpot, and you have that within marketing, for pushing the boundary, what we’re thinking of now is when you look at marketing, where’s MarTech right now? Well, MarTech right now is less about sequenced emails, or even about custom fields, hello, insert name here, that kind of thing. Martech is now about intent data. It’s about surfacing intent data from all sorts of sources on the web, and then trying to enrich those leads through, whether it’s lead labs, or any of the various insight platforms that are out there, and trying to enrich that data. Then trying to have carefully crafted, almost like couture campaigns that are specifically for that buyer persona, and send out marketing that way. We’re trying to do the same thing for sales. I’ll give you a paradox I think that exists in sales right now that we solve for in a way that other platforms don’t.
Let’s take that prescriptive sequence I just mentioned. What that looks like to anyone familiar, lead comes into your funnel through marketing, and it’s got intent data and the lead’s been enriched, and you enroll this in a sales sequence that looks something like day one, send an email, make a call. Day two, send a text. Day four, make a call. Day 10, send a text. That kind of thing. But when you think about it, there’s no particular reason you’re calling that lead at 2:00 PM in the afternoon on a Wednesday at day 10, except that it’s day 10. It’s not like there’s any logic behind it more than that. It’s just a way to make sure leads don’t fall through the cracks, basically, and to ensure a minimum amount of activity per lead, per rep.
A lot of the listeners to your show aren’t a basic rep who needs a prescriptive, “Make sure you do this. Make sure you do this task.” They don’t. These are advanced sellers. They know how to do the basics. Instead, what I’d love to see is you’ve got a great CRM, you’ve got a HubSpot, a Salesforce, a Monday, anything like that. You have all this data flowing in, typically from marketing. You know if they’ve engaged with a chat bot, downloaded a white paper, visited a competitor’s pricing page, or your own. Even if you’ve sent out a request for information from another sales rep at your organization to try and get a better deal, you have all this data flowing in. What does almost every company do with that data that’s using a prescriptive sequence? They call on day 10 on Wednesday at 2:00 PM in the afternoon, because that’s within a sequence. It’s not utilizing any of that data. We call it an orchestration engine, but essentially, it’s using AI to capture all that fuzzy logic.
Email with buying intent is received in the last 24 hours, plus two or more buying signals from pricing pages or website visits, then surface up an action item to trigger a call to that rep or that procurement person that second to get ahold of them. They don’t pick up, drop an automatic voicemail, send an automatic text message that’s been pre-scripted to match that buyer persona. Then whenever they reply to that text message, send an option for the rep to call them that second when you know they’re on their phone. That’s the thing we’ve been working on. That really cool, you can call it automation, you can call it AI, but that really cool orchestration of taking the things that AI is good at.
There’s a lot of fear, I think, in sales that AI’s going to replace sales reps. Obviously, I think the fear is probably most founded at the very bottom of the sales hierarchy when you’re just setting appointments and probably least founded when you’re dealing with a complex sale, like a lot of our audience. But the part that AI is great at is taking huge amounts of data and finding signal within noise. When you have buying cycles that can be years long, you’ve got a huge pipeline of deals, multiple buyer personas across each deal, all engaging in activity all over the place, and you’re trying to sift through that data and figure out when to call and text somebody, that’s really difficult. That’s a great place to have an AI copilot that helps you out, and you can take that part of the decision tree away from the person.
Fred Diamond: That’s extremely powerful in that even in those types of things, it’s getting so hard to get through to people these days obviously. A large part of our audience used to meet people in-person and it’s so critical to do, so whenever you get an opportunity to communicate with a customer, we always say this too, that sales is really about the next thing that you’re going to do with a prospect. People think, “The close is contract, check clears, etc.,” be very basic. The close is the customer saying, “We’re going to be talking next Tuesday. I want to bring in my director of IT operations,” whoever it might be. You can’t afford to miss those opportunities. I love the way you’re describing your system, which is allowing people to know better what you need to do as compared to, like you just said, Wednesday at 10:00, because our prescriptive process says those things happen Wednesday at 10:00.
David Gable: You nailed it. It’s the same reason they say football is a game of three yards, because you don’t just go in and say, “Okay, we’re going to score a touchdown.” You say, “We’re going to get three yards and then we’re going to get five more yards and we’ll get three more.” Eventually, yeah, it’s going to result in a touchdown, but it’s micro victories that add up to the macro victory on that deal. You’re absolutely right. To the extent we can try and orchestrate those micro wins and make that a nice smooth transition, then great. Then the reps can really focus on the macro picture, knowing the micro is taken care of by the AI, which is fantastic.
Fred Diamond: You started talking about inside sales and the rest of the sales organization. How do sales leaders who are running teams utilize this? How do they think about it? Or even better, how should they be thinking about it?
David Gable: I think that’s a great question. It’s interesting, you mentioned earlier about all of the podcast episodes being transcribed and how important that is. I think these days, sometimes we think that’s just a throwaway line, “It’s transcribed.” But the power that gives you now with the LLMs available in terms of being able to really drive insights at scale from all the communication you have going on is really powerful. We both have transcriptions within Kixie itself, and we integrate with a lot of platforms. They’re doing amazing stuff, whether it’s AskElephant, Triple Session, Gong, all these platforms that do conversational intelligence, we integrate with them and make sure that all of our calls and texts are being transcribed.
What I really like to see these days, if anyone out here is a leader, is I look for conversation intelligence engines that cross mediums of communication. What I hate, I hate having a conversational intelligence platform that’s only calls and then having to use Zoom Revenue Accelerator for all my Zoom calls, and then having to try and surface the text insights from within the CRM. No, I want a comprehensive picture. For my internal teams, and when we talk to other customers, we recommend solutions that allow you to ask natural language questions of all of that aggregated data. That same orchestration engine, for instance, when we kick off a suggestion for a rep to call somebody, that’s not going to just be based off of the last conversation. It’ll be based off of future calendar events, it’s going to be based off of their previous text communication, email communication, website visits. We want the holistic view.
That’s so important because at a certain point, a lot of the tools that are available out there are for scaling reps efficacy, “I’m going to make my reps 50% more effective.” Who gets lost in that? It’s the managers. We’re not scaling manager efficacy. We’re scaling the reps efficacy. That’s great. But then managers, I would say middle management’s already under assault in terms of companies are reducing headcount a lot of times and trying to clear the deck a little bit. But now you’ve got more reps than ever, a higher ratio of rep to manager than ever, and you’ve got insight platforms that might give you graphs of the quality of conversations the reps are having, which is great for coaching. But I also want to be able to ask questions at scale of all of that communication data and be able to ask, “Hey, what are my win rates by competitor?” That’s a great question.
As much as I’d love to trust the reps to mark the appropriate competitors under each deal in Salesforce or HubSpot, I’m also a realist. No one’s getting bonus on accurately reflecting every competitor that they are up against in a deal, but they are getting bonus by closing the deal. I know where their energy is going to go. We get to ask the questions of the data and be able to quickly extract, “What’s our win rate against this competitor versus this competitor?” That’s so useful to have.
We used to have a lot of institutional knowledge about what our competitors were doing. We’d see a competitor, “This competitor’s offering a 50% discount now and we used to only offer a 35% discount,” or they’ve got this new feature set, or they’re actually shooting for these two giant government contracts that we’re going for, and we thought that weren’t even in the running. That would be owned by the reps that happened to find that out, any reps that were in the immediate vicinity of them finding it out when they talk about it out loud in the office. But what I really love to have happen, and what we do have happen now, is whenever those insights are gained on any calls within our reps, they get extracted and pushed to a living document that all reps have access to. They can just search for a competitor and see, “What’s the latest thing that competitor’s doing to try and beat us? Shoot, they’re doing this in this market. They’re going for that contract. They’ve been doing this.” That’s so useful and that was so difficult to do before LLM.
There’s some division around AI taking jobs and stuff, it is so useful for that function. For scaling managers, I would say that is so important. Make sure all of your communication is transcribed and captured somewhere and you can make queries of it and generate reports from it. That will make your job as a manager so much easier. That will scale your efficacy rather than just scaling the efficacy of your reps.
Fred Diamond: I want to talk about actual use case specifically per industry. You could pick one of these three. I know on your site you have some great examples of e-commerce, financial services, home improvement, healthcare, call center. Why don’t you pick one? I’ll tell you what, maybe financial services might be the best one, if you don’t mind, if you can speak to that. Give us some real world example of how it’s being utilized, what they’re looking for, what they’re telling you, and things like that.
David Gable: Financial services is an interesting industry. I would say one of the difficult things in financial services, especially if you’re in lending side, anything like that to do with businesses, is it can be difficult to differentiate yourself. The rates are the rates and the money is fungible. Really, unless they’re going for a particular brand or something like that, these leads, a lot of it is about getting ahold of lead quickly and then differentiating yourself by the quality of communication that you have. It’s interesting, if you ask sales leaders for a lot of metrics, I want CAC payback, I want LTV to CAC, I want win rate, they know these numbers off the top of their head. But if I ask those same sales leaders, what’s the average time to first contact from your reps to a lead? Most of them do not know that off the top of their head. If they’re lucky, maybe they’ve got it in a report. I would say at least 50% do not even have that in the report. Yet, for a number of industries like financial, that can be one of the most determinative variables in terms of everything else. Win rate and everything else is downstream of that.
What we try and do is we want to kick off calls and texts automatically the moment we get either intent data or we get an actual hand raise or something like that. We are able to automatically trigger calls and texts the second we get that intent data, we’re able to make it a qualitative assessment rather than just a binary assessment. It can be a hand raise plus other signal that tell us, “This isn’t just a hand raise that we’re going to actually discover out. We’re going to qualify out anyway.” It’s a hand raise that we’ll probably qualify in as a potential customer of ours. Let’s trigger a call and let’s find a rep that deals with that particular segment and attach them to that triggered call or text.
The other thing we try and do for something like that is what’s the second obstacle you’re going to encounter. You make that call or text, especially if it’s a call, it gets marked as spam. That’s increasingly difficult to deal with these days. Right now, carriers are just being very brutal. A lot of times people are using individual cell phones to sign up for this kind of stuff. You’ve got four major mobile carriers and you want to make sure your number doesn’t show up as spam across all four, and it’s very difficult, much the same way marketing had to deal with their emails suddenly not being delivered to inboxes. It’s the same way for phone calls, same technology is being used on the other end.
I’ll give you one feature that we have, and this isn’t just to plug Kixie, I’m sure there are other dialers who have similar features, but this is a pretty unique one. We have what’s called a connection boost, and it combines a number of features that are more commoditized into one platform with a neat twist. The more commoditized features that you’ll find, being able to match a local area code, being able to pick a number that has not been marked as spam by checking across all four major mobile carriers every 24 hours, and being able to rotate the number each time you call so that you can be more aggressive in your calling without them never returning your call again.
A lot of times I’m calling leaders who are in meetings all day. I want to call them four or five times to catch them when they’re free. If I did that with one number, they would never take my call again. They would be such a full pot. They would block my number on call number two. Being able to rotate numbers helps a lot. We do that by using a shared pool of numbers, almost like an Uber. Instead of taking your car to work and back every day, when you go to work, you’re renting a car from this pool, in this case, that’s phone number. That number’s being used to call that lead, that number has been checked against all the four major mobile carriers to ensure it’s not spam. If a person calls back that number, it’s a real number we own. It routes back to the agent making the call as if it were their permanent phone number, but it still rotates each time, and it prevents your number from being marked as fraud or potential fraud or spam or telemarketer across those major mobile carriers. That’s a cool example of how we help the finance industry a lot to differentiate early in the sales process when it’s so important for them to do so by using the latest and greatest technology to do it. It’s really fun.
Fred Diamond: That’s pretty impressive. This is the first out of 800 shows that we’ve done on this particular topic, but we do have a number of listeners to the Sales Game Changers Podcast who are listening to this with great intent. A lot of the insights that you just shared are pretty solid.
Before I ask you for your final action step, I got to ask you, again, you’re an attorney, so you have a JD. You were acting as the legal counsel to startups, etc., then you became a sales leader. What’s the biggest observation right now in your life? We’re doing today’s interview in October 2025. What’s the one thing you learned, and I’m also curious, as you lead your team, what is the number one thing that you try to impress upon them?
David Gable: I would say the number one thing I try to impress upon them, and I think was most exemplified in the Challenger Sales methodology, it’s the idea of challenging people’s basic presumptions when they first come into the sales funnel. I think there’s a tendency to yes people, especially in sales, but in every profession. It’s easy. You tell them what they want to hear, they get excited, and you see that on their face, and you want to keep leaning into that. I think what’s much more difficult, and I think a lot of the advanced sellers that are probably listening to your podcast, the reason you call them an advanced seller, is their capacity to do this. To say, “I totally understand. You really want a tool to help you engage in this process to attack this problem that you’re encountering.”
I just have to say, while I’m happy to support that, there is a better way to do that. I think in sales a lot of times there’s a tendency to continue to do what’s always worked in the past because that’s how we get trained. I’ll be honest, a lot of sales leaders, myself included, sometimes you find a thing that works and you have a tendency to just want to stick with it, and you don’t want to mess with it. You know that it’s always what have you done for me lately with top leadership and the CEO? It’s almost not worth taking that risk. But the thing is, for a lot of customers and for a lot of spaces, the competition is by definition also comprised of leaders unwilling to take that chance. When you do, you really stand out.
What I tell my reps is, and this is true for any of your listeners who want to call in and talk to Kixie or start up a trial. What I want is I want them to come into our funnel and I want us to talk to them, not about Kixie, but about their whole sales approach and what’s out there in terms of tooling. I want them to walk away having learned something. That’s more important to me than whether that deal moves forward a stage in our pipeline or not. Because if they’ve learned something from that conversation, they will take our call again and they will come back to us. Maybe it’s not even this sales cycle. Maybe it’s next time they want to upgrade or look for retooling, or it’s the next time they become a sales leader and they move middle manager to actual head of a department at a different company. Guess who they’re going to call when they have questions about how to set up this new team they’ve built, or how to redesign their sales process? They’re going to call us.
That’s one of the biggest things that I try to impart to my reps. It’s something that I did take with me from legal, where it’s very much about the client will tell you what they want to do and they’re going to tell you what they think the best approach is. You have to be like, “I get what you want to achieve and you’re not going to like hearing this, but with the way the legal system is set up, this is probably how you should approach it.” I’ve taken that into sales and found it to be extremely useful, not only to differentiate ourselves from our competitors who are unwilling to do that or unable to do it, but also in terms of just delivering value to the customer independent of whether they buy our platform. Again, the value is in that conversation and not in the purchase of our platform.
I think that’s so important for salespeople in general to really imbibe, is that sales is such a great profession because we are about solving people’s problems. But sometimes the solving of their problems doesn’t even have to be the sale of your product. It’s obviously great when it is, and those coincide, but like you mentioned before, it’s a bunch of micro battles to get to a macro win. Those micro battles, you win them if you deliver value in those conversations, irrespective of the purchase. I think that’s one big thing that I’d like to impart to people.
Fred Diamond: That’s great advice. You’re right. We like to say that only 3% of the population might be looking for what you sell at this given time. You’ve probably heard that before. What are you doing to continue to add value through the process? A lot of the stuff that you share with us, if your sales team can also communicate this, it’s pretty valuable stuff. As a matter of fact, we just did a conference, our Women in Sales Elevation Conference, we just completed a couple weeks ago, on utilizing AI in the sales process and how women can take the lead in that. A lot of the examples were things that people weren’t even thinking about. Maybe they’re using some tools individually, but organizationally, there hasn’t been the right level of thinking. Some of the stuff that you’ve imparted and how to utilize technology more effectively, and I like the way you made the distinction between MarTech and sales tech in the beginning of the call. I guess people can just go to kixie.com, correct?
David Gable: Yeah, absolutely. You can go to kixie.com, sign up for a free trial. We are an extremely low-pressure sales organization. My mentality that I’ve pushed down to our reps is we want to deliver value on the call in terms of insights. If you just want to know what space looks like and who the competitors are and how they differentiate, you can call and ask any of my reps and we’ll talk you through it. If you want to talk to a sales engineer on my team about how to even begin setting up automations, whether it’s with us or anyone else, I make sales engineers available to anyone who calls in for free. I think it’s something we deliver to the community that I think is extremely valuable. That’s part of the reason I like supporting podcasts like this because I also feel, to me, one of the joys of this is being able to give back and try and elevate the community as a whole. The transition from legal to sales has been one of the most impactful and joyous transitions in my whole life. I really like to be able to give back to the community that’s made that possible. It’s all a part of that. Yeah, absolutely. Go to kixie.com, sign up for a free trial, call in our sales line, and we’re happy to talk to you.
Fred Diamond: You can find David on LinkedIn. Thanks for the great ideas. Give us an action step. You’ve given us a lot of things to think about. As a matter of fact, I can think of 10 additional shows I’d like to do on some of the things that you covered. You’ve given us a lot of ideas. Give us a specific action step, and don’t say go to kixie.com. You’ve already said that. Something specific for the sales leaders or sales professionals listening to today’s show to take their sales career to the next level. Something they should do right now.
David Gable: If you’re looking at operationally, like your sales process, I would look at how much of it relies on prescriptive tasks or automations versus dynamic. Then I would challenge whether or not that’s the best approach to it. If you find yourself with a lot of prescriptive steps of your sales process, whether that’s for reps you manage or that’s for yourself as an individual contributor, I would say to yourself, there’s a lot of great large language models and attached platforms that can use fuzzy logic to help out with this stuff that doesn’t need to be so binary. You don’t need to be calling on day 10 because it’s day 10. You need to be using the intent signals of the data that’s coming into your CRM to enrich and make that outreach a little more connected to the input you’re getting from the customer, because honestly, that makes for such a better customer experience too.
If the customer’s already opening one of my emails and reading a pricing PDF, wouldn’t they much rather talk about pricing right then than at a random time three days from then when they’re focused on some other part of their work? Yes, they would, and you’d rather talk to them then too. It’s a real win on both sides. It sounds daunting because you start talking about dynamic automations and using fuzzy logic. It sounds really daunting, but a lot of these platforms are natural language based. They’re much easier and more approachable than they ever have been in the past. I would definitely look at your approach to sales and think about whether or not something could be less prescriptive and more dynamic.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank David Gable from Kixie. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo