Doug Camplejohn
(00:01)
Hey everyone, welcome to Revenue Renegades. This week, I’m very excited to welcome Alexa Grabell, the CEO and founder of Pocus. Welcome to the show.
Alexa
(00:13)
Thank you so much for having me. I’m ready to chat with my coffee.
Doug Camplejohn
(00:17)
Fantastic. As a founder myself, I always love starting with your founding story. What was the aha moment that unlocked Pocus for you?
Alexa
(00:30)
Prior to founding Pocus, I was in sales ops as an early employee at a company called Dataminr. I struggled with cobbling together different tools to help sales reps get full intelligence on their accounts and contacts. I was pulling data from Salesforce, Looker, ZoomInfo, Sixsense, and others, trying to make it all work. It was complicated. Later, I went back to Stanford, met my co-founder, and we founded Pocus to supercharge sales teams by building something that helps sellers sell-without constantly switching between tools.
We started as a product-led sales platform, focusing on helping PLG businesses access product usage data as an intent signal. Our customers then asked for more types of signals and information, which expanded our offering to help with all types of research and prospecting. That’s the journey in a nutshell.
Doug Camplejohn
(02:02)
I love it. I read that in the early days of Pocus, you and your co-founder conducted around 350 interviews. Did I get that right? Tell me about the customer discovery process-what worked, what didn’t, and what surprised you?
Alexa
(02:12)
Yes, we’re a bit nuts.
Alexa
(02:27)
We took a class at Stanford called Lean Launchpad, similar to YC or other incubators, where you test hypotheses over a short time. The goal is to come out with a business idea validated by customers and the market. We followed the Lean Startup methodology, testing ideas in the broader sales ops space. One key lesson was to avoid “happy ears”-if you’re excited about an idea, you might ask leading questions and get biased answers. Instead, we tried to find every gap in our business by asking open-ended questions, like, “What are the top three things that keep you up at night?” If our focus wasn’t one of those, that was valuable information.
Doug Camplejohn
(04:01)
I love the idea of starting with pain points. If one of their top three pain points overlapped with your hypothesis, where did you go from there?
Alexa
(04:19)
We’d ask more questions: How do you solve this today? What tools are you using? What’s the impact of this pain? Why haven’t you solved it already? Who’s focused on it? We wanted to determine if it was a burning problem needing immediate attention, or just a minor issue. We pushed to understand if they were trying to solve it, and if not, why not, or if yes, how it could be done better with an external solution.
Doug Camplejohn
(05:17)
Were you testing pricing at that time too?
Alexa
(05:20)
We tested willingness to pay, not exact pricing models. We wanted to ensure that if we solved the problem, people would pay significant dollars. We didn’t test usage-based versus seat-based pricing, because pricing changes constantly as your product matures.
Doug Camplejohn
(06:00)
I was just at a Salesforce Ventures event, and one of the most attended breakout sessions was about pricing. There are so many variables, and it’s very different from traditional SaaS pricing.
Doug Camplejohn
(06:27)
There’s unrest with sales teams about how pricing translates to commissions. There were also discussions about AI-driven SDRs and different pricing approaches, which are very different from traditional models.
Alexa
(07:00)
Once you throw AI in, there are even more possibilities for pricing. It’s always evolving.
Doug Camplejohn
(07:13)
When Pocus launched, you did a brilliant job around the product-led sales category, and your team built a strong community. Can you share how you approached building that community?
Alexa
(07:37)
In the beginning, product-led sales was noisy and confusing, much like AI in sales now. We wanted to help people answer questions about product-led sales, not just give them access to Pocus. We started with a 20-person Slack community of early partners, investors, and people in my network. It grew organically as people invited friends and colleagues. Now, we have around 4,000 people in Slack and thousands more in our LinkedIn community. We focus on education and dialogue around confusing topics, not pushing our product.
Doug Camplejohn
(09:01)
But I assume some of those folks become curious about Pocus’s offering, so it serves as top of funnel as well?
Alexa
(09:11)
Yes, it’s more about awareness. We never prospect in our community, but people know about us, which helps with brand recognition during evaluations.
Doug Camplejohn
(09:28)
How far into the product-led sales journey were you when you realized there was a bigger opportunity?
Alexa
(09:48)
The bigger vision was always there. Even at our seed round, we talked about the need for a smart system of intelligence on top of siloed systems of record. It started with product-led sales, but customers pulled us to add more data points and intent signals. That expanded our market beyond PLG businesses to all B2B companies. We always knew the vision; the details evolved over time.
Doug Camplejohn
(10:54)
How do you see yourselves fitting into the landscape, given all the noise and established players like Clari, Gong, and Outreach?
Alexa
(12:22)
Sales intelligence tools like ZoomInfo or Sixth Sense aimed to unlock data for sellers. AI has unlocked a new wave of possibilities. We focus on AI sales intelligence that’s actually intelligent-constantly learning and making its own recommendations. Traditional tools are like throwing a phone book at reps; with AI, you can give actionable guidance. We focus on research and prospecting, generating pipeline, and believe the go-to-market tech stack will be rebuilt by new players.
Doug Camplejohn
(14:09)
We often talk about “BC”-before ChatGPT. The go-to-market stack is too complex and expensive. Many tools were built before LLMs existed, so design decisions were different. Do you focus more on reps or rev ops?
Alexa
(15:13)
Reps are the users; rev ops are the admins, up to the CRO. Is it similar for you?
Doug Camplejohn
(15:22)
Yes, we’re still early, onboarding design partners. We have capabilities that excite rev ops, like our revenue GPT (though Clari has that trademark). The idea is to let managers ask questions that they’d traditionally go to rev ops for, freeing rev ops for more strategic work.
Alexa
(15:45)
Go for it-who cares about the trademark!
Doug Camplejohn
(15:48)
Andy and I discussed that. This podcast was almost called Revenue GPT, but Revenue Renegades is better. The point is to let people ask questions easily. Rev ops will have more time for strategic work as AI takes over busywork.
Alexa
(17:38)
For sure.
Doug Camplejohn
(17:40)
You were a first-time founder. You didn’t have experience raising money or building a cross-functional team. What lessons and obstacles have you encountered?
Alexa
(18:02)
Being a first-time founder, CEO, and manager is a huge learning curve. The biggest challenge was hiring-getting it right took several tries. You can read books and listen to podcasts, but you only learn by doing and making mistakes. Hiring a few great people who are still with us was key. But figuring out when and who to hire, and how to evaluate talent, is tough.
Doug Camplejohn
(19:09)
Someone told me the CEO’s job is MVP-money, vision, and people. For me, people come first. The most important thing is having the right people on the bus, and getting the wrong ones off quickly. No one bats a thousand.
Alexa
(19:34)
Yes.
Doug Camplejohn
(19:39)
We do a hack: every new employee gets a meeting scheduled 90 days out to check if it’s working for both sides. Usually, you know within the first 90 days if it’s a fit.
Alexa
(20:11)
Sometimes you know in the first week. The hard part is with B players-do they have the potential to become A players? In a startup, you often don’t have time for that coaching.
Doug Camplejohn
(20:38)
Patty McCord from Netflix has the “keeper test”-if someone said they were leaving, how hard would you fight to keep them? If you wouldn’t fight hard, you should be managing them out.
Alexa
(21:12)
Yes, that’s a learning curve. Every founder says “fire fast,” but you don’t get it until you’ve done it. You’re doing it for the people who stay-A players don’t want to work with B players.
Doug Camplejohn
(21:36)
Besides people, if you could go back to 2021 when you started Pocus, what advice would you give yourself about building a category-defining company?
Alexa
(21:50)
Two things: First, mentally, I spent too much time worrying about competition and feeling imposter syndrome. There were 20+ competitors with more funding and experience, and I was intimidated. That mental drain was unnecessary. One of our values is being delusionally optimistic-I wish I’d learned that earlier. Once we raised money and won big logos, the imposter syndrome faded.
Second, I didn’t know how to run product, sales, or marketing. I wish I’d brought in advisors earlier to help set up functions before hiring leaders. Building with first principles is good, but I could have skipped some steps by learning from experts.
Doug Camplejohn
(23:43)
Thank you for being vulnerable. The imposter syndrome never fully goes away. After decades, I know what I’m good at and what I’m not, and I focus on my strengths. The challenge is getting outside your comfort zone-like posting on LinkedIn or building a brand.
Alexa
(24:50)
Company building is much more fun without imposter syndrome or worrying. I used to be cringy about LinkedIn, but now I just post and don’t worry.
Doug Camplejohn
(25:11)
For me, it’s about moving the ball forward each day. Founders have roller-coaster days-10 a.m. might be great, 1 p.m. not so much, 4 p.m. different again.
Alexa
(25:37)
The founder roller coaster.
Doug Camplejohn
(25:40)
Not everyone is cut out for that. My first company went through a crazy M&A process, and not everyone could handle the whiplash. You have to know how much to share.
Alexa
(26:17)
I’ve accepted that I over-communicate and overshare. My leadership team needs to handle that, and I’ve hired people who thrive in that environment. You have to find people who work well with your style.
Doug Camplejohn
(26:48)
You spend most of your waking hours working as an entrepreneur. Life is too short not to have fun doing it. Startups are fun for me, even if not every moment is.
Alexa
(27:14)
If you’re crazy enough to be a founder, you’re having fun-even if it’s a different definition of fun.
Doug Camplejohn
(27:19)
Back to Pocus: you have major brands like Asana, Monday, and Miro using your product. Can you share some anecdotes about the value they’ve unlocked?
Alexa
(27:39)
The two big levers are high-quality pipeline and efficiency. For example, at Asana, we power all their AEs, BDRs, and AMs, generating up to 70% of their outbound pipeline through Pocus by surfacing the right leads at the right time. At Canva, we help reps save an average of 10 hours per week through more efficient workflows.
Doug Camplejohn
(28:23)
Can you elaborate? What signals are most relevant for Asana?
Alexa
(28:30)
We group signals into three categories: cold outbound, warm outbound, and expansion. For expansion, we look at how existing users engage with the product-executive activity, multiple workspaces under one domain, usage spikes, team invitations. Warm outbound includes website visitors, job switchers, content engagement, webinar attendance. Cold outbound uses information from news, filings, and publications. The relevant signals depend on the customer’s focus.
Doug Camplejohn
(30:00)
And for efficiency, like in Canva’s case, are those the same types of signals?
Alexa
(30:06)
Different signals for each customer, based on what’s relevant. We focus on surfacing only the most relevant signals with our relevance agent, which learns about each customer to highlight what matters most. This reduces time spent searching for leads and information.
Doug Camplejohn
(31:01)
What does your onboarding process look like for tailoring Pocus to each customer?
Alexa
(31:17)
We start by telling Pocus’s agent to learn everything about the customer and their target accounts-10Ks, blog posts, websites, etc. We connect to their CRM and data warehouse for deal and usage data. Our AI then surfaces relevant insights and gets smarter with human feedback. Our go-to-market engineers help set up and refine the AI, and we train rev ops teams to edit playbooks and prompts.
Doug Camplejohn
(32:28)
The AI piece is fascinating. I’m still breaking old habits. I love the idea of starting with an agent that learns about the company, so there’s no need for manual data entry.
Alexa
(33:04)
Exactly. Onboarding can be much more streamlined and efficient now with AI.
Doug Camplejohn
(33:12)
If you were advising a sales rep today, what skills should they focus on as AI takes over repetitive tasks?
Alexa
(33:31)
Sales reps should focus on being more strategic and consultative. AI will replace manual and transactional tasks, but skills like understanding prospects’ needs, mapping solutions, being a thought partner, and guiding evaluations will remain essential-especially in enterprise and mid-market sales.
Doug Camplejohn
(34:21)
Everyone’s talking about agents. What are your thoughts on agents and how does that fit into the Pocus roadmap?
Alexa
(34:42)
We believe in augmenting, not replacing, sellers. Our product is built with agents-knowledge agents scrape information from various sources, and a relevance agent customizes insights for each customer. These agents make their own recommendations about relevant insights and actions.
Doug Camplejohn
(35:28)
Some people call simple automations “agents,” but real agents have autonomy. I like the definition where agents have degrees of freedom in executing tasks.
Alexa
(36:06)
Exactly. Our agents do first-level thinking and reasoning to set up sales reps for success, not just follow if-then rules.
Doug Camplejohn
(36:17)
What technologies or products have you encountered recently that excite you?
Alexa
(36:31)
I’ve started using ChatGPT as an executive coach. It knows me well from all the things I ask it, and I use it for decision-making and brainstorming. I haven’t used voice AI yet, but my husband does.
Doug Camplejohn
(37:21)
I often start typing in Perplexity or ChatGPT, then realize I should just use voice. Voice is becoming big in sales.
Alexa
(37:36)
Yes, sellers love voice.
Doug Camplejohn
(37:44)
What’s something you’re passionate about that might surprise people?
Alexa
(37:51)
Honestly, I work on Pocus and watch reality TV.
Doug Camplejohn
(37:57)
What’s your favorite show?
Alexa
(38:00)
I watch them all. The Traitors recently-highly recommend.
Doug Camplejohn
(38:07)
I have friends who never miss Survivor. I’d be terrible on Amazing Race-I’d get lost immediately. What’s one thing you can’t live without in your daily routine?
Alexa
(38:58)
My coffee.
Doug Camplejohn
(38:59)
Same here.
Alexa
(39:02)
Best investment I made was a good coffee machine.
Doug Camplejohn
(39:13)
We’re having fun with coffee at the company. We even have a coffee shop on the website for swag-hats, mugs, t-shirts. I’ll send you one. Finally, how can listeners keep in touch with you and help with Pocus’s mission?
Alexa
(39:39)
I’m on LinkedIn a lot, so feel free to DM or follow me there. Happy to chat.
Doug Camplejohn
(39:46)
Fantastic. Alexa, I’ve loved chatting with you. Thank you for sharing your time and have a great week.
Alexa
(39:52)
Thank you, Doug. You too.
