Integrity sells: The power of staying true to our strengths in sales

Seth is no stranger to the thrill of working at a start-up. He’s also very familiar with developing trustworthy sales infrastructure that is welcoming to people of different backgrounds. In this conversation he highlights how Coactive is prioritizing integrity alongside sales in a way that will ultimately benefit both the company and customers. Read on to see how, at Coactive, sales is about more than what it has been stereotyped to be.

Working in sales for a start-up is likely an exciting adventure for anyone, but Seth, I hear this isn’t your first rodeo. Tell us about what attracts you to the start-up world?  

You’re right, this is not my first rodeo. I enjoy short feedback loops and environments where everyone feels empowered to identify challenges and make changes. Start-ups tend to have less resistance to change, and I like novelty and adventure (more on that later). Not only did I come to Coactive by way of other (larger) start-ups, but I also have founded two companies of my own in the past. I enjoy solving problems and, if I see one that needs fixing, I’m willing to give it a shot.

I bet your excursions with start-ups have truly contributed to an interesting perspective on what to look for in your workplaces.

Absolutely. However, I don’t only credit my work with start-ups as contributing to my unique perspective. I’ve worked at non-profits and in politics, as well as with companies like Salesforce, so I’ve seen a pretty wide variety of work cultures, goals, customers, etc.

Sales can often be incorrectly stereotyped as “how can you get something out of someone,” but that’s such a misnomer. Sales is everything and everywhere - whether you’re trying to convince someone what movie to watch tonight or trying to get your daughter to pick up her toys.

Sales, more than anything, is about understanding the challenges that others are facing, having empathy for their experience, and figuring out how to demonstrate that your solution to their challenge will best meet their needs. I only make money if I solve their problem. They then become evangelists, facilitate more sales, and often teach me how to best explain what we do in the vernacular of our users.

Walk us through what you understand to be a sales function that operates with empathy and integrity.

I can hoodwink someone into buying what I’m selling even though the product won’t solve their problem, and I’d get a commission check in the short term. But they’d soon become unhappy, churn, and then tell their friends. Both I and the company will have to deal with the fallout later. It’s not worth it. More importantly: it’s skeezy.

People at companies have problems, but might not know how to navigate the sales and procurement process. In fact, sales is a lot like coaching:

First, it is important to diagnose the challenge.

Second, ask a lot of questions to make sure you understand the full scope. You never will truly understand, but keep asking questions to keep getting closer.

Third, be empathetic. When someone has a problem, you’re only successful if you truly help them.

Fourth, help them understand your product. Explain how your solution is their best solution. Bring the right resources and speak the right language.

Fifth, shepherd them through the process. They don’t know how to acquire your product, as you work more with procurement and talk more about money than they do, so guide them along with how to actually get this thing in their hands.

Sixth, set them up for success so the solution doesn’t turn into vaporware. Share and replicate how others have been successful going from exploring to signing to using.

I’d never really explored sales in that way before. You’ve given me a new way to think about the field.

Thanks. Sales is often misunderstood. I certainly misunderstood it, which is why I avoided it for the first 10 years of my career. The field is changing in so many ways. The best practices, tools, and methodologies have all evolved, as have the people in the associated roles. For instance, sales positions have often been filled by white guys, like me. Knowing this, I started a bootcamp for SDRs (sales development representatives, an entry level sales role) for women and people of color to assist folks traditionally excluded from these usually quite lucrative roles break into the industry.

That’s awesome! What excited you about odysseying as the first sales hire at Coactive, specifically?

I was introduced to Coactive through someone I met at a previous company. We met when he tried to recruit my best SDR bootcamp grad. He and I realized we have a lot of similar values in common - to the point where we have felt a bit more like oddballs working in sales cultures that were more stereotypical or problematic.

He had already been consulting with Coactive and recommended that I apply, because this was a place that had the “best people,” and that was more than enough for me. I trust his judgment implicitly. He wasn’t wrong. Coactive does indeed have the best people.

Thank you, we will keep working to be deserving of such a compliment! Has there been anything that’s surprised you since you decided to travel along this path with us?

Inbound interest from large enterprises. Typically, if you’re working at a small company that no one has ever heard of, you’re working hard to sell to other small companies, because they’re more willing to take a chance on an unknown. This results in you scraping by with a lot of small deals at companies where your friends may work, because they are the only ones willing to talk to you. Enterprises ignore you.

That is by far not the case at Coactive. We’ve got big companies that are very interested in our product and what it can do to unlock the value hidden in their vast stores of unstructured visual data. In part, this is due to the general excitement around AI. Beyond that, Coactive has something that very clearly and quickly is understood to be valuable. Companies have a lot of photos and videos that are expensive to store and hard to use. Coactive makes all that data usable - thus valuable. Whether screening out problematic content, using visual data to extract insights, or improving search, enterprises are quite interested in moving beyond the limits of metadata, manual tagging, and inflexible automated tagging tools. Typically, I need to do a bit more evangelizing to get larger companies to take a product seriously - not here. I have found that Fortune 500 companies are happy to chat, with less need on our end to duke it out in the minor leagues.

Those kinds of levels of interest are certainly exciting. How do you think Coactive has shouldered the attention without getting swept up by the hype?

Actually, our navigation of all of this interest is one of the things that made me feel most confident in my decision to join Coactive. It’s not something that I would have been able to tell from the outside in, but now that I’m on the inside - the integrity level with which we’ve handled working with other companies, regardless of their size, has been so high.

I would assume that there’s a lot of room for misadventure when a company is in the position that Coactive is in?

Right. A lot of companies at our stage, especially with a large enterprise expressing interest in their solution, would always say yes to product direction changes, endless custom work, etc. Start-ups that make promises they can’t keep or choose to shift their solution to build one-off things to land a deal tread in dangerous waters. That’s not the case at Coactive.

One of the things I’m very proud of is that we told a name-brand fashion retailer, “sorry, we don’t think that what you’re seeking is a fit for what we’re offering right now.” This company was very excited to work with us, and we were just as excited to close a deal with them, but ultimately we decided that we wanted to be thoughtful and only take on customers we are certain we can wow. We want to do what’s best for us and our customers.

How do you think this positioned Coactive to journey towards success?

I can’t predict the future, but I can say that Coactive has a novel way to solve a big problem in an easily verifiable way. Because of our solution and our commitment to our values, we’ve established a strong foundation that will allow us to benefit all of our customers, investors, and employees. Remaining committed to our scope and delivering the best product possible has us hiking towards success in a way that everyone wins.  

Having integrity every step of the way certainly is important, but before I let you go, you mentioned earlier that we’d come back to your love of adventure and thrill seeking. Tell us more!

Well, I hitch-hiked halfway across the country a few times (but only once dressed as Elvis), stood for 30 hours with my hand on a sandwich to earn a free year of pizza, biked 400 miles down the coast of Washington and Oregon, rode in the third class of an Indian train for 51 straight hours, and climbed a lot of rocks. More recently, I became a dad to two wonderful girls - which is most definitely an adventure.

Working at a category-defining start-up, where I’ve got the opportunity to sell a product that has never before been seen or scaled, feels like a similarly wild and memorable ride.

[Seth standing with his hand on a sandwich during his successful 30 hour quest to earn free pizza for a year.]

We’re just glad you chose to travel this path with us, Seth. It’s going to be a lot of fun for sure.

Coactive AI is an industry-leading machine learning platform that enables businesses of all sizes to analyze their unstructured image data in minutes. Our interface is clean, intuitive, and user-friendly, and our platform is blisteringly fast. Engineers, if you want to help us build the future, check out our job openings. Businesses, if you want to harness the power of machine learning like never before, request a product demo today.