Founder’sVision
What was the “AHA” moment that drove you to start the company in the first place?
So I started looking at technologies like predictive dialers and realized the mathematical problem that “X number of sellers, Y number of phone lines and Z amount of leads or contacts answering the phone” are never equal.
Hence the latency or dead air that was specific to predictive dialers. And despite research I was doing, I realized no one had solved the mathematical latency of XY never being equal. And that’s how we started: to design a system that allowed me to make more outbound phone sales calls and reach more live conversations without telling the person that answered it’s a predictive dialer with that latency of two to five seconds before you would hear me on the call.
What was the “AHA” moment that drove you to start the company in the first place?
So I started looking at technologies like predictive dialers and realized the mathematical problem that “X number of sellers, Y number of phone lines and Z amount of leads or contacts answering the phone” are never equal.
Hence the latency or dead air that was specific to predictive dialers. And despite research I was doing, I realized no one had solved the mathematical latency of XY never being equal. And that’s how we started: to design a system that allowed me to make more outbound phone sales calls and reach more live conversations without telling the person that answered it’s a predictive dialer with that latency of two to five seconds before you would hear me on the call.
Was that the original idea for what you wanted the company to become?
It was a command line interface. So I had to initiate the database. Then I would take the phone numbers from the excel file loaded into the database, connect to my cell phone, make outbound phone calls in order of the excel spreadsheet. I’d have to track the call and make the connection to the paper. That was the prototype.
Then we basically created a user interface in the prototype. I could then see the person’s name and his contact information. I could put his email in there. I can have a phone number and I could click to call it out of the predictive dialer engine: multi line dialing. That became a prototype for what we called Refractive Dialer.
And what happened after you finished college?
It was a command line interface. So I had to initiate the database. Then I would take the phone numbers from the excel file loaded into the database, connect to my cell phone, make outbound phone calls in order of the excel spreadsheet. I’d have to track the call and make the connection to the paper. That was the prototype.
Then we basically created a user interface in the prototype. I could then see the person’s name and his contact information. I could put his email in there. I can have a phone number and I could click to call it out of the predictive dialer engine: multi line dialing. That became a prototype for what we called Refractive Dialer.
What did you then do?
As the visionary then for DialSource (now Conquer), you’ve worn all the hats along the way. Is there a particular hat that you like wearing more than others?
Would you say the company was in the right place at the right time, probably twice?
Refractive Dialer was too early to the market. DialSource was too early to the market. There was no real such thing as native applications in Salesforce and no real big enterprises needing it. They were looking at adopting third-party applications because the cloud wasn’t really defined to be a secure and compliant area for the biggest, slowest moving enterprises. Now, being native and secure and compliant matters to large enterprises. So, I think for the first time with Conquer, we are at the right time in the market.
Can you describe these pivots into creating a Sales Engagement Platform? Did you see it coming, or did you just guess right?
We are on this Venn-like diagram of covering so many pieces of technology securely and compliantly that it goes beyond just sales enablement or engagement. Other solutions don’t do that because the telephony systems cannot, in real time, look up fields inside of Salesforce and outside of Salesforce to make intelligent inbound routing decisions like our new Call Flows engine.
At what point of building the company did you have success with Fortune 500 companies?
I told him that we would improve his output per user by 30x because that was the number I knew. He told me I was full of it. Well, he later wrote in our AppExchange review that “the crazy numbers you hear Josh talk about are not only believable, but they’re actually conservative.”
When did you realize that you needed some help to take things to another level and start to build a more experienced team?
And what type of personal challenges did that create for you?
The problem was my level of experience. I started this company out of school. I was an undergrad rewriting the research paper and then prototypes and then boom, I was out of the gates doing this stuff. So I was constantly in the deep end, and perhaps my own worst enemy by going into the deepest and to the biggest problems and then starting there. Despite my best efforts to try and do the opposite, I still don’t after 20 years.
Why do you think that your large enterprise customers see Conquer as the best solution for them?
I think what our existing customer base is looking to do and understanding who we are, is a more sophisticated and more mature approach. That’s way different from what they may have experienced with our competitors previously, where they may have used Outreach that basically relegates itself to be an SDR sales engagement tool but does not have the capacity to bleed into other departments elegantly, securely and easily like ours.
Is this because of Conquer being truly native inside the CRM?
So here’s the Conquer package. And then I have my voice package, my SMS package, my social package, and so we can mix and match. Instead of saying “You have to do this linearly,” you can choose any which way you want to do it. Because we knew from our existing installed base, talking to ADP and Paychex and Toast and Lower…they all wanted to do different things but they were also all using voice. So we needed to be able to give it all to them instead of saying, “No, you have to do it in single file order along this methodology.”
You mentioned that you started the company with five grand and within six months you had 150 grand. At a young age, you navigated what most would see as a huge long shot and succeeded. What do you attribute this to?
As the company gets bigger, what’s your hope for our customers, and your team and yourself?
How important is the adoption and use of Cadence by your customers?
How well does Conquer translate to other vertical industries you’ve yet to reach?
He gets up on stage and asks his team inside Madison Square Garden, “what do you think we sell?” Everybody starts saying “tickets… tickets… tickets.” Jonathan says, “No, no, no, we sell experiences!”
“When a client and his wife show up, we want to know that it’s his birthday or what his favorite cocktail is. We want to be able to go down and have a conversation. We track all those things in our CRM but all the communication methods we use to communicate with that client now are because of Conquer.” He’s telling the whole stage how they’re using automation intelligence to do that.
What does that have to do with financial services? Everything. Because everybody needs to have a relationship. That has nothing to do with any vertical. In order to have a relationship, you need to be creating an experience and driving value one way or another. That’s what we helped, and still help them do. They believed in me, my vision and my execution way back when.
Does any particular “I helped the customer” moment from the early days stand out?
I went in there and said, “I can, and I will.” I showed up with the team and we spent several weeks getting it ready and deploying it. They became one of our largest customers.
How important is keeping customers satisfied?
It should always be 100 percent. And I’d say since Conquer is such a force multiplier, customer satisfaction is even more powerful and important now with Conquer than it was with DialSource then.
What are some of Conquer’s large enterprise customer’s views of you being visionary?
Today, we represent nearly all communications globally for ADP.