Does More Competition Mean MORE Growth Opportunity? ft. Alexa Grabell

We know how to kill competition. I don't know if that's PC to say. And we really know our customers. And if there's so many competitors, to me, that just tells me that's a huge market in a real need. So if anything, it gets me excited.

Welcome back to another episode of the Reimagine podcast. I am stoked to have someone on the show that I have wanted to catch up with for a long time: Alexa Grael, the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, who is Mission Control for your pipeline. What do they do? They bring together your product usage and other intent signals, customer community, marketing data that lets you surface those top leads and ultimately enable your reps to act fast. Alexa's passion for democratizing data for go-to-market teams began when she led sales strategy and operations at data Miner, where she built the internal solutions to power sales teams with what Dale and I talk about all the time—the only thing that matters: data. Alexa, thanks for joining the show.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Yes, thank you for joining. And I guess Adam's been wanting to catch up with you. We just met, so it was awesome to meet you. What we'd like to talk about a little bit when we start with our founders is, what was the origin story like? We talked a little bit about data Miner, but what's the origin story of Pocus and like, why are you so passionate about it?

Yeah. So when I was at data Miner, I was building out something like Pocus today. I had data everywhere and I was thinking through ways on how can I use this data to help sales and CS teams and non-technical teams actually unlock that data to drive pipeline both in pre-sales and expansion. Fast forward, I went back to school where I actually met my co-founder. And while we were there, we had this grand vision of how do you unlock data for go-to-market teams? We then spent three months ideating on different ways to make that vision come true and different wedges into that world. And we actually took a class at Stanford called Lean LaunchPad, where our professors helped us incubate this idea. And so we left the class three months later validating A, the idea and the market, as well as B, that we wanted to continue working together as co-founders.

I love that. Very cool. So, Stanford? Yes, in a way, correct? Okay. So I'm going to go a little off script. But a lot of founders have started this founder journey and can't really articulate why, other than, "Oh, I thought I had this really cool idea and it fascinates me." I was never one who wanted to be a founder, right? I always thought I would work for someone else, be it in a startup or be it in a larger company. And he still works for someone else. He works for me. So it's all good. I mean that too.

But I have always been fascinated by, like, why did you want to go from—I don't want to say a cushy job, but a guaranteed W2 job, you have money, you probably had benefits, life was probably good—to, "I'm going to go try to build something in a hyper-competitive space and deal with VCs and all of this?" Like, what made you say, "Holy shit, I want to do this?"

Great question. So the passion for the idea of building in this sales ops space is different than the passion for wanting to build a company in general. So I am not someone who just woke up and wanted to be a founder one day. It was never something that ever came to my mind. It wasn't even an option. And then when I went back to Stanford for business school, not knowing what I wanted to do, but just knowing that I wanted to see more women in executive positions—and that's what drew me there. You know, how can I grow my network? How can I help future generations of women? Because in the past, I really was not surrounded by any. And at Stanford, like everyone else in my class, I said, "You know, I'm going to be a venture capitalist and I am going to invest in female founders and I'm going to change the game this way."

Fast forward, I actually started a small VC fund with my classmates where we invested in—we raised capital from our classmates and then deployed that capital in our classmate startups. When I was doing that as well as doing some internships in VC, I learned that I hate being a VC and I love building. And that's really where I came to terms with, "We, my classmates, are doing this. I have good ideas. I have operating experience. Why can't I give it a try?" And I really saw also by taking this leap how much I can also influence other women that are maybe earlier in their founder journey to say, "Hey, I can do that too." Because I do that with other women who are much further along than me.

I love that. Super interesting. So what would be—and I'm going to go off script now because I'm super interested—you've been in the VC world where you're kind of deploying a bit of capital. What would you recommend founders do when they're having conversations with VCs or PE firms or someone that's looking to invest? What's like two or three things that they should have—that they must have—when they're having those conversations? Because it's super hard to raise capital right now.

I'm definitely not an expert in VC, so you should ask a real VC this question. But I will tell you it from a founder's lens. So I think a mistake that I saw in a lot of my classmates was that the goal for founders was to raise VC funding, whereas I thought about the goal as being to build a multi-billion dollar company and VC funding is just a means to get there. And so I saw a lot of folks kind of building companies around VC feedback—pitching ideas, taking the feedback, iterating, going back to that same VC. And when they see that that is not a positive signal to them, they want someone who has high conviction in the idea, has done the research, knows the market better than anyone, put in the hours, put in the hustle. So my advice is always, focus on your idea, focus on the market, become smarter than anyone on this very specific idea, do as much homework as you can, build initial prototypes, become—get in the brain of your customers. And then you can start to build relationships with VCs. So that would be my first piece of advice: focus on your company until you feel the need that you have to raise. Once you feel the need that you have to raise, I would say focus on building relationships. I actually built a lot of relationships for my Series A, not my seed, but for my Series A. I built a lot of relationships ahead of time with VCs. And so I do that now—like, once a quarter, I'll block off a day and you know, take some VC meetings with folks that I continue to build the relationship with. So that when it's time to fundraise, it doesn't feel like you're getting to know the person for the first time. It's more a conversation: "Here's an update on where the business is today. Would you like to chat further?"

Wow. Like, any other sales process, crazy, right? You can't just say, "Hi, nice to meet you. Please give me money." Go figure. I love that, and I love a lot of what you said—you know, both the different approaches that you tried, doing something and realizing, "Hey, this isn't what I want to do," and like, let's go build something. I'm super curious, Alexa. You came in to build in a space that is super crowded, right? Like, it's not an easy space. It's not like, "Wow, we're the only ones who do this." You might be the ones who do it best or do it a different way, but the whole—like, signal-based playbook, predictable revenue—like, what made you say, "I'm going to not only start a startup and not only be a founder, but I'm going to do it in the single most competitive spot of sales tech out there?"

One of our values is delusional optimism. So I think I'm a little delusional and a little optimistic is my real answer. I mean, if you rewind three years, we started Pocus in the product-led sales category where there must have been thirty other players at that time. And for us, I remember thinking, "Shit, there's a lot of companies that have raised a lot more money than us, have much bigger teams, founders that have done this before." And you know what? We think we have a unique insight and different skill sets that we can just take this delusional, optimistic mindset and keep pushing forward. And the reality is, when you have a competitive market, that means there's a real need and likely a big market. And so right now we're kind of expanding from product-led sales to signal-based selling. To me, if anything, it's exciting. We already know how to be extremely—I always say be very customer focused, competitor aware. We know how to kill competition. I don't know if that's PC to say. And we really know our customers. And if there's so many competitors, to me, that just tells me that's a huge market in a real need. So if anything, it gets me excited.

I'm super happy you said that. Like, so many people fray away from competitors—"Oh, no, got a competitor." And as we talk to our founders, we're like, "No, competition is actually good. It means you're validating the market people."

Really need what you want, so super excited that you go on that path. So you've kind of went back to school and then you started a company, and now you have a decent sized company, raised a Series A. How was your leadership style like from, let's say, from when you were going into Stanford to where you are today? How has that evolved?

It's totally different. When I was starting Pocus, I was learning how to be a founder, a CEO, a manager, and run every function—head of sales, marketing, CS, whatever that is. So I didn't know how to do any of this. It was trial by fire. It was a lot of mistakes. It was a lot of patience for my early hires as I learned what my leadership style is. I got an executive coach early on, which was a game changer for me to quickly find the blind spots and understand where I need to grow. He did kind of feedback sessions with my direct reports and funneled that feedback to me, and I had a lot to work on. I still have a ton to work on. And I think, you know, it's only been three years of kind of leading a company. I'm sure in six years I'll feel different, in nine years I'll feel different. But it has changed a lot.

I think I mean, I don't know—you can talk to my team to figure out the specifics—but I do think some of it is going from driving urgency around everything to figuring out where to focus. This is still work in progress for me, but early on I wanted to do everything, and now I'm trying to remain focused. It doesn't always work, but that is where I'm trying to lean more into.

I love that. What's loud versus what's important, right? Like, as the CEO, everyone wants like, "I need you to do this and I need you to do that, and this is important." But what's really going to drive the business forward? What's going to drive the product or the revenue forward?

One of the things that I found fascinating from just looking at Pocus early on and having worked with and for folks that thought they were competitors that I don't think are competitors is there's this whole like product-led growth, right? And what is product-led growth? And I think there's a lot of misnomers out there of like, "Oh, we're going to go be a PLG company or we're going to go use signal-based playbooks." Can you tell me from your point of view and Pocus's point of view like, what the hell is product-led growth? What should product-led growth be and look like versus this mindset of, "Oh, we're just going to go put some trial on our website and we're going to let the product grow our company"?

It's a great question. PLG has become such a buzzword. And so maybe trying to speak without using buzzwords, which is going to be hard. PLG is a spectrum. And we say this with product-led sales too. You can have super self-served product-led growth startups or companies like Slack or Cantly or Zapier where end users can get a ton of value from the product without talking to a human. And then on the other side, you have very sales-led companies like Oracle and Salesforce where you couldn't get any value until talking to a human.

To me, I wouldn't obsess over "are we PLG or not?" or "are we product-led sales or not?" It's "what is the best motion or channels or playbooks for our business?" And you're going to be somewhere likely on that spectrum between the Slacks and the Oracles of the world. And how you figure this out is a lot of experimentation, but it's also a lot based on who are your buyers.

So for dev tool companies, you almost have to be PLG or have some sort of self-serve element because developers don't want to talk to anyone. Whereas if you're selling HR tech, I think of Vates of the world—HR professionals want to talk to humans. So self-serve doesn't always work. And so you can also think about deal size. Are you selling, you know, $50 per user per month, or are you selling hundreds of K of enterprise licenses?

So to me, if you take out everything on buzzwords, it's really: you're going to be somewhere on that spectrum. And it's figuring out based on your sales cycle, your deal size, your buyers, how senior you're selling to—are you selling to a junior IC or are you selling to the CTO? That is what should dictate your playbooks.

With signal-based selling, if we also talk about that—that's a newer buzzword out there, but one that we have really started leaning into because it does really excite me. If you simplify it at its core, it's "how can you use signals or data in order to inform your go-to-market motion?" So how can we look at all of this data—whether it's first party or third party, whether it's users on your product, on your pricing page, somewhere on LinkedIn or Twitter interacting with you—how can you use that to be very data-driven and timely and personalized with your outreach?

So buzzwords aside, it's coming back to being kind of thinking critically in first principles about your business, and then doing the playbooks and motions that work best for you. People buy from people. That's why companies that invest in meaningful connections win.

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Oh, foundations and fundamentals. Wow, we're getting back to the basics. I love it. So I see you as someone that challenges assumptions a lot. Going from where you were at Stanford through like starting—I'm going to be a VC, and then no, I want to run a company. So as you've gone through that journey, I'm sure you've gotten tons of advice from people that said, "Do it this way" or "Do it that way." Give the audience a couple of things that you were like, "I know that you think this is the right way, but I'm going to go a completely different way."

I do this a lot. I remember at Stanford Business School, what they told us a lot is feedback is a gift. And I take feedback or advice as a gift. I appreciate all feedback I get. I lead with feedback to my team. I think about that with advice as well. If I'm seeking advice from someone in a specific domain or a founder that's ahead of me, but I always remember: gifts can be returned or kept. And you can remember that the advice that you receive or the feedback you get—if it doesn't sit well with you, or if your gut, if you don't believe in it completely—it can be returned.

So when I think about that, I had to get better over time with trusting my gut and going against the common kind of advice I would get from folks. Great example of that: early on, we were serving product-led growth companies, and we built a whole brand and community around product-led sales. We ourselves were not product-led growth. We did not have a self-served model, whereas all of our competitors did. So on LinkedIn and on Twitter, we would get hate: "This is ridiculous. You're selling to PLG, and you're not PLG yourselves." But we went back and said, "Should we be PLG? Should we have a self-served model?" And where we answered was no. We are selling all the way to the CRO. We want to be selling 100K plus deals. We have to do security reviews, connecting to the data warehouse. So we were one of the only competitors in our space who did not become PLG, and that was advice that I heard from everyone that I went against. But it ended up saving the company because we then entered a down market where all of the PLG SMB customers churned.

So I think sometimes you just need to think first principles before listening to the advice from others.

I love that. Yeah, it's so easy to get caught in that echo chamber, right? Of like, everyone's saying this or everyone's doing that. And I think staying true to those principles is certainly important.

One of the things that I think fascinates me, especially with y'all being, you know, about three years old, is kind of that balance of growth versus sustainability, right? And I think you, based on your timeline, it's almost like you started at the downturn of like, "Spend all this money as quick as you can and hire as many people as you can to hold that money" and, you know, scale responsibly but still fast. When you look at that balance, how have you and, you know, Pocus managed that growth versus sustainability? And like, talk the audience through some of those difficult choices you've had to make. Is it grow, or is it hold on to the cash in the bank?

We were fortunate that at the time that we were ready to grow, it was past the hype of over-hiring. I'll be transparent—I don't know what I would have done if we had to grow in 2021 or 2020. So we have always kept an extremely lean and efficient team. We have kind of a perspective of "don't hire until you desperately feel the pain," which feels very painful. But then it really matters in the end because you know that everyone you bring on is going to add huge impact to the team.

Yeah, so I mean, people are shocked that we're only 25 people, and we only plan to go to 35 by end of year. So really, to me, it's sometimes: more people, more problems. And stay...

# Transcript

**Speaker 1:** As lean and small and efficient for as long as we can. Yeah, more Dale, more Dale, more problems. I totally agree. And you know, it's funny—when I used to run sales teams, people would always say, "Oh, you got to grow faster." I'd have investors talking about growing faster, and I said, "Look, until we get to a point where the reps cannot take any more meetings, they can't take any more deals, and things are starting to flow over to me as the head of the sales group, then we can start talking about bringing on more people." Because then the deals that I'm working on, I can actually give to the new sales hires. Who wants to come into a new sales opportunity or job without any leads coming in? So I love that perspective. Very good.

So one of the things that we look at is the go-to-market dynamic. You've gone all the way through your go-to-market dynamics—from marketing, you have sales, you're doing a bunch of things. How do you balance? Because you said you're very lean in what you do. How do you balance not growing so fast that you're bringing on a bunch of customers? How do you balance "I need to spend more money" versus "let's grow sustainably" versus "I only have a window of opportunity and I feel like I need to jump through that window of opportunity now"? Like, how do you balance that in your head?

**Alexa:** Yeah, I will say this looks very different than a later-stage company. So I'm talking as just a seed or Series A company. If we were Series B, C, or D, I think we would feel the pressure to more aggressively hire and grow. But at the Series A stage, one of the hacks is having a lot of generalist, wear-all-hats type of people, so everyone can step in. My head of product does a lot of customer success. My head of marketing will step in and do some sales. And my co-founder and I—which I think is different—can both sell and do customer success. I think usually there's one technical, one non-technical co-founder. He is technical and he's the CTO, but he's extremely strategic and consultative and great with customers. So I think what has been good for us to date has been the ability for all of us to flex in different roles as needed. But that looks different when you scale. Like, now we're starting to get to the point of, "All right, how do we get my co-founder and I out of some of these conversations and how do we make this repeatable?" So we're in a different stage than, you know, us in six months when it's—we have a repeatable motion now, we need to multiply that by two or by four. Now we're kind of in the phase of all-hands-on-deck, just get things done.

**Speaker 1:** Yeah, I think that is a great early hack, right? Like, there's a lot of things that Dale's great at, that I'm great at, that Jake's great at, but we can overlap. A lot of our clients, for example, need RevOps help. And rather than going out and hiring someone RevOps—little fun fact, I happen to be an admin in Salesforce and HubSpot. It's not my day-to-day that I want to do, but like, if a client needs it, I'd much rather be able to provide that resource versus telling them to go spend money and hire someone else. It's a great value-add. I love the fact that you talk about Sandy—she's your head of marketing, right?

**Alexa:** Yeah.

**Speaker 1:** I love it. And I love hearing about marketers selling. We're big believers that everyone should be tied to revenue one way or another. We all sell. We just don't realize it. And if your marketer, who is building your messaging and your verbiage and like your product, can't sell the product, there's probably bigger conversations that need to be had. Kudos to Sandy for closing some deals. I'll even tell you a funny story. Whenever we launch a new product, we actually send her in. So we just launched Job Switchers, which is a feature in Pocus that's competitive with User Gems or Tamper. We just sent her out and said, "Sandy, can you figure out how to sell this thing?" And that was more efficient than me doing it.

And another hack is hiring a really good BizOps team. So we have a three-person BizOps team that basically does anything that's not sales, marketing, customer success, or engineering. I literally mean anything, and they can just jump into anything and figure it out. So that BizOps is really helpful.

**Dale:** People grossly underestimate the power of BizOps. RevOps—sorry, Dale. It looked like you wanted to say something.

**Speaker 3:** No, it's really hard to hire those people. I think that's the challenge that a lot of people have. These people that really—I just ran the stats this morning because we're hiring someone else. We had in a matter of days 1,500 applicants, of which right now we're down to 30 extremely qualified applicants that we can't decide between. I think it is the easiest role to hire from. For not not BizOps—not BizOps in general, I'm talking about people that can go across multiple functions. That is hard in a business. So yeah, BizOps—I think there's a lot of really good BizOps people. People that have either been technical but want to get more in business, or business people that want to really focus on some of the technical pieces. I do think that's becoming a thing. I just think it's very difficult to find A-players at the stage that you're at because they have to have as much passion as you do, that origin story, that thing that you're building out. But also, you know, once they do, I think once they do it a couple of times, like they don't want to go back to it. So then you've got to find people that can do it again.

**Alexa:** That is very fair.

**Speaker 1:** Go ahead, Adam.

**Adam:** Another balance question. And this one I think fascinates me more, especially when you're talking about a lean team and working cross-functionally. It's that balance versus innovation and execution. And what I think we've certainly seen with a lot of founders is they struggle on like, how do you ship product really effing fast versus how do you make sure you're shipping good product? How do you guys balance the need for "we got to get this out" but also make sure that "it's great and our customers love it?"

**Alexa:** One of our values is—I'm talking a lot about my values, but—one of our values is "ship rate," which means ship and iterate. And we say this every single day. We are much in the mindset of get something out there and learn and experiment versus having it perfect. So when we build V1 of any product, it is a pretty janky version. It could even be Figma mockups. I remember back in the day, actually, when Isaac and I, my co-founder and I, were figuring out the idea of what we wanted to do for Pocus, we actually pretended to be AEs at one of our competitor companies and tried to go sell their product. This was in a different space. And when we were trying to sell their product, we were like, "This is enough information for us. We don't want to do this. It doesn't seem like a good market." So finding ways to test it could be making websites, fake websites, and wait lists and Figma mockups, just doing the very MVP of understanding, "How can you validate this without putting a lot of engineering hours towards it?" Once you feel the pull, that's when you have to start dedicating engineering time.

And we have conversations every quarter when we're doing roadmapping of what percent should go to existing customers and what percent should go to new business. And it does shift based on the market and the quarter.

**Speaker 1:** I love that. Super cool. So it's now that time of the show. We believe in giving more than receiving. And you've been generous to give back to the audience. I'm dying to find out—because we've talked about three or four different things—what are you going to give back to the audience, Alexa?

**Alexa:** I am going to give back. I'd love to. I will nominate Sandy, our amazing head of marketing, to do a consulting session on either product-led sales or signal-based selling. She's truly the queen of both of those things, and anyone would be lucky to steal some of her time. So we will give back thirty minutes of Sandy's time.

**Speaker 1:** I love that. Don't feel bad, Dale. Dale nominates me for stuff all the time, and I get this on my calendar.

**Dale:** Oh yeah, I told someone that you were going to spend some time with them. Like, thanks Dale, appreciate that.

**Speaker 1:** I think that's a super valuable give, given all of the misnomers about both of those categories, to really hear it from someone who lives it every day and is defining that market. We'll have to think of something cool for that giveaway.

All right, as we wrap down—or wind up—I'd love to do some rapid fire. The rules here are simple: five words or less. Otherwise, Dale gets in trouble, and I don't know, something happens to Dale. All right, let's rock and roll.

Alexa, you can't be in tech, and I'm going to put another caveat on this: you can't be in VC either. What profession are you going to do tomorrow morning? You got to start over.

**Alexa:** That's a tough one. I always joke I would love to...

To go back and just be a barista and chat with customers all day and really get into a good craft of coffee—I always try to make good coffee and it's really bad. So that would be not, I don't know if I would do that, but one idea I joke about that's funny. My daughter was a barista this summer for Starbucks and she loved it.

There you go. I need to talk to your daughter.

Yeah, exactly. She loved talking to all the people.

First app you check when you wake up in the morning?

I try not to, but it is Slack.

Slack. I knew it was going to be Slack.

Alexa, are you an early bird or a night owl?

Early bird. I woke up at 5:30 this morning and probably panicked my team with a million Slacks.

They go hand in hand.

I'm interested in this. I think I know the answer to this one. What's the most used emoji in your work chats?

The Focus Magic Ball.

Yeah, I thought that was going to be the answer.

What's the one thing you do to unwind after a long day?

I don't unwind. No, I really do have to work out, if it's at night or in the morning to unwind.

Awesome. Last one as we wrap this thing up: dream vacation destination?

A beach. Anywhere a beach. Love it.

Well, where are you in New York?

Alexa, I am. Yeah, I was going to say that the buildings and the sirens in the background, this does not look like a beach.

When you guys want to hold an offsite in Florida, we have both coasts covered for you. Dale is in Tampa. I'm over in the West Palm area, plenty of beach. I will also be sending you some really good coffee following this call because I share a love of coffee with you. So we will do that.

Alexa, thank you so much for joining us for chatting about Focus. Where can people find you and where can people find Focus?

Yes, you can find me on LinkedIn—Alexa Grael. Focus: popus.com. You can also join our community. It's pocus.docomomo. Once you're in, she checks it every morning.

I'm always, yeah, I'm with you.

Alexa, thank you so much for joining. It was great to have you. Have an awesome rest of the day.

Thank you. Thank you.