As a former SDR Manager and Individual Contributor, maintaining an accurate and up-to-date ICP target list was a significant challenge. It required coordination across multiple departments and tools, often leading to SDRs manually qualifying their target accounts to identify bad fit accounts. This had to be done before determining the right individuals within these organizations to target and the appropriate messaging to use, so a very time consuming task. However, with new emerging tools like Scalestack, trusting your account data could become much easier.
For the next installment of this series, we sat down with Elio Narciso, Co-Founder and CEO of Scalestack. Scalestack is an AI-powered, enterprise-grade GTM orchestration and activation platform.
Before founding Scalestack, Elio spent more than four years at AWS as a senior BD leader, but he is also a 3X founder with 2 successful exits, and a startup advisor.
How do you see the future of sales technology evolving, and where does your product fit into that vision?
As someone else (Chris Paik) aptly said “LLMs have proven themselves to be remarkably efficient at [coding] and will drive the cost of creating software to zero”. Which in turn means that in the future, there will be lots of different apps built with AI by non-developers to satisfy a multitude of use cases. All of these apps and agents and AI copilots will require good, unique data. And to get to good data, you need to orchestrate it across all of these different sources, systems and tools – hence the current status quo where the data on your CRM is poor, and we just have to live with it, won’t be acceptable anymore. AI means that “Salesforce will not be replaced by another monolithic CRM. It will be replaced by a constellation of things that dynamically serve the same intent and pain points”, and all those “things” will require great data.
Scalestack acts as a data-agnostic middleware layer that enables customers to create workflows at scale to either generate LLM-friendly data to feed to the business application or run LLMs directly inside their GTM workflows.
What problem are you solving and what inspired you to develop this particular sales tool?
At AWS I was in charge of BD for mid-to-late stage startups (B2B and enterprise tech mostly). It was there, in this great “lab” of hundreds of startups that were in my program (the AWS Global Startup Program) that I saw the inefficiency that still plagues the sales process. All these well-founded and well-run companies were all struggling in the same, very first step of the go-to-market: targeting. Deciding who you sell to; deciding where you go sell first; deciding who are your key targets; how do you distribute the equitable book of business to your reps; or what Leads to prioritize so that you can pursue them efficiently and try to convert them starting from those that show a higher propensity to possibly buy.
These are all things that companies struggle with the most, and the reason for that is that the understanding of the targeting requires the understanding of a lot of data that exists in many many different places, systems, third-party data sources…and there is no technology that allows you to make sense of all data today. Indeed, a lot of these workflows in GTM are managed by software consulting or engineers working for sales teams.
We want to enable GTM teams to create that software on their own without coding, customize products around the edges, using LLMs, and unique data sets.
How does your technology solve this problem?
In its simplest version, Scalestack is a workflow company that creates unique data for a wide range of use cases thanks to AI and automation. We aggregate data across multiple GTM systems (CRM, GTM data lakes, third party data sources), enrich it with automated workflows, and then "activate" the data with AI for GTM teams by recommending what targets to prioritize and when, and to speed up sales plays execution. Hence, we help with both the issue of having “bad data”, as well as we make the GTM teams more productive, since they can focus their attention on best targets that convert more.
How does your technology differentiate itself from existing solutions in the market?
First off we only work with enterprises - we are SOC2 compliant, and don't work with smaller companies, who have very different needs. That is why we have been so successful with companies like MongoDB (see joint case study with them). The second big differentiation with other solutions is that we do org-level, data agnostic enrichment workflows. One of the biggest issues in sales today is that reps spend less than 30% of their time actually selling, and that's why we think that asking them to orchestrate data on their own to do enrichment is a bad proposition that makes the problem worse. Scalestack works with revops, salesops and marketing ops teams to orchestrate the data efficiently at the org level and nothing is asked of the reps or SDRs: they just “magically” get good data everywhere - Salesforce, Salesloft, the territory management platform, go-to-market datalakes etc.
We believe data is commodity, tons of proprietary datasets and lots of data on the internet–problem now is twofold: 1) Choose the right data sources to optimize quality and cost; 2) Make data LLM ready.
Finally, what advice would you give to sales teams or businesses considering adopting new technologies like yours to enhance their sales processes?
My first advice would be: prepare your org, and your data, for the AI revolution.
The second advice is around finding the right partners. I’d say there is a lot of hype right now around certain tools and solutions and especially those of us that have been around longer have learned to look beyond the hype. So my suggestion is to understand what are the solutions that are adding value, with the least cost (not just price-tag, but implementation costs, or managing costs in terms of person-hours) and solutions that solve meaningful problems. Lastly, and maybe this is my Amazonian DNA, I would say you should evaluate if the products, platforms or solutions that you are considering adopting are customer-first or customers obsessed vs. maybe companies chasing other goals like fundraising, or hype or press coverage.
To learn more about Scalestack, check out the website or schedule time with Elio.
Thank you to Elio and the Scalestack team!
An example of a Scalestack workflow that enables customers to create LLM-friendly data to feed to the business applications. Courtesy Scalestack.
